Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/November 2018/Articles


 * SMS Wettin : Continuing Parsecboy's series on German pre-dreadnought battleships, this article covers a ship that entered service in 1902. Wettin had a short career as a front-line unit, and was relegated to training duties by the start of World War I. She was mobilised during the early period of the war, and used in the Baltic Sea. She was reduced to a training and depot ship in early 1916, and  scrapped in 1921.


 * John Glenn ( & ) : Another collaboration between Kees and Hawkeye on a famous astronaut. To say that Glenn had a distinguished career is to put things mildly: as well as being the first American to orbit the Earth and the oldest man to fly in the Space Shuttle, he was a United States Marine Corps aviator, an engineer, and a United States Senator. As a fighter pilot, he saw combat during World War II and the Korean War, claiming several victories.


 * Siege of Thessalonica (1422–1430) (Constantine) : Contantine's latest FA covers a lengthy siege that ended with the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Murad II capturing the city of Thessalonica from the Byzantine Empire and its Venetian allies. The siege revealed the limitations of Venice's maritime power when pitted against a strong land empire, and heralded the fall of Constantinople itself a generation later. Thessalonica remained in Ottoman hands for the next five centuries, until it became part of the Kingdom of Greece in 1912.


 * Petropavlovsk-class battleship : These three Russian pre-dreadnoughts served during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. All three were lightly damaged during the Battle of Port Arthur and several months later one became the first major Russian warship lost to a mine. The other two fought in the Battle of the Yellow Sea and endured the Japanese bombardment of Port Arthur that sank one of the sisters in shallow water and led to the other being scuttled. The Japanese salvaged the one ship that they could access and incorporated it into their navy as a training ship. The survivor was sold back to the Russians during World War I, captured and then disabled by the British during the Russian Civil War, and finally sold for scrap by the victorious Soviets.


 * Territorial Force : This article looks at a British part-time auxiliary formed in 1908. It was ridiculed in peacetime, and Lord Kitchener ignored it in favour of his New Army as a means of reinforcing the regular army on the outbreak of the First World War. Despite this indignity, the territorials volunteered for service overseas, filled the gap between the effective destruction of the regular army in France in 1914 and the arrival of the New Army in 1915, and carried the majority of the British effort in the Middle Eastern theatre.


 * 4th Army (Kingdom of Yugoslavia) ) : The latest in Peacemaker's series on Yugoslavia in World War II, this article describes the role that the Yugoslav 4th Army played in the defence of the country in April 1941.


 * List of ironclad warships of the Ottoman Empire (Parsecboy) : This list includes all of the ironclads that the Ottoman Empire ordered or built, including those that were purchased by other countries before completion and those which were never completed. Despite their limited finances, the Ottomans were able to amass a fairly respectable ironclad fleet in the 1860s, though decades of neglect and little to no training rendered it effectively useless when war with Greece came in 1897. Parsecboy developed the list to FA-class after bringing the articles on all of the Ottoman ironclads and the individual ships GA status.


 * Battle of Neville's Cross (Gog the Mild) : This article covers what Gog modestly called "a moderately important event in the history of both Scotland and England". The Battle of Neville's Cross formed part of the Second War of Scottish Independence, and was the main engagement in a Scottish invasion of England which had been launched in response to an English invasion of France, Scotland's ally. Despite being greatly outnumbered, the English forces were victorious and captured the Scottish king.


 * Kediri campaign (1678) (HaEr48) : The Kediri campaign was a colonial-era conflict in which Mataram Sultanate and Dutch East India Company forces on Java attempted to suppress a rebellion. The campaign took Dutch troops into regions not previously visited by Europeans, and ended in a defeat for the rebels.


 * Lion-class battleship (Sturmvogel 66) : The Lion-class was the second-last class of battleships designed for the Royal Navy, though none were completed. The design called for huge warships, with only the modern Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers being larger. Construction of a pair began right before Word II, but more urgent priorities caused their eventual cancellation. Work began late in the war on new designs that would incorporate war experience, but a combination of ever more powerful weapons and post-war economic reality made them unaffordable and they were never ordered.


 * Emanuel Moravec (Chetsford) : Emanuel Moravec was an interwar Czechoslovak infantry commander and staff college instructor who called for the country to declare war against Germany in 1938. When that failed, he cast his lot with the Germans and was appointed Minister of Education of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during the German occupation of his country. He committed suicide in the final days of World War II, and has been widely derided as a "Czech Quisling".