Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/October 2020/Articles




 * Operation Boomerang (Nick-D) : This was an air raid by the United States Army Air Forces's XX Bomber Command during the night of 10/11 August 1944 and involved attempts to bomb an oil refinery at Japanese-occupied Palembang and lay mines to interdict the Musi River. A total of 54 B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers were dispatched from British Ceylon. Attempts to bomb the oil refinery were largely unsuccessful; mines dropped in the river connecting Palembang to the sea sank three ships and damaged two others. The Japanese failed to destroy any of the aircraft, but one B-29 ditched when it ran out of fuel.


 * First Punic War (Gog the Mild) : An epic 23 years (264–241 BC) of war and bloodshed marked the first of three wars between Carthage and Rome, the two main powers of the western Mediterranean in the 3rd century BC. They struggled for supremacy, primarily on the island of Sicily and its surrounding waters, and also in North Africa. After immense losses on both sides the Carthaginians were defeated.


 * Arthur Blackburn (Peacemaker67) : Blackburn was an Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross. He fought throughout the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, during which he was commissioned. In France in July 1916, during the Battle of Pozières, he led four sorties to drive Germans from a strong point using hand grenades for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross. In World War II, Blackburn led the 2/3rd Machine Gun Battalion during the Syria–Lebanon campaign in 1941, personally accepting the surrender of Damascus. In early 1942, his battalion was deployed to Java and Blackburn was captured by the Japanese, spending the rest of the war as a prisoner of war.


 * Yusuf I of Granada (HaEr48) : Yusuf I was the seventh Nasrid ruler of the Emirate of Granada on the Iberian peninsula, between 1333 and 1354. His army was decisively defeated by a Christian force at the Battle of Río Salado in 1340. In 1350 a siege of Gibraltar was lifted when the Castillian King Alfonso XI died of the Black Death. During Yusuf's reign, the emirate flourished in the fields of literature, medicine, and the law. Yusuf was responsible for many new buildings, and major cultural figures served in his court. His reign is considered the golden era of the emirate.


 * History of the Jews in Dęblin and Irena during World War II (Buidhe) : During World War II, the Jews of Dęblin and Irena were persecuted and murdered as part of the Holocaust in the Lublin District of Poland. This persecution included a Nazi ghetto, several forced-labor camps and deportation to extermination camps. Unusually, a labor camp was allowed to exist until July 1944; one of the last Jewish labor camps in the Lublin District, it enabled hundreds of Jews to survive the Holocaust.


 * Spanish battleship Alfonso XIII (Parsecboy) : This Spanish battleship was built in the early 1910s. In the 1920s, she took part in the Rif War in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. In 1931, Alfonso XIII was renamed España. At the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the crew murdered the ship's officers and attempted to resist the Nationalist rebels in Ferrol, but then surrendered. España became the core of the Nationalist fleet, and was used to enforce a blockade of the north coast of Spain. On 30 April 1937, she struck a mine laid by a Nationalist minelayer, capsized and sank.


 * Fatimid conquest of Egypt (Cplakidas) : This conquest took place in 969, as the troops of the Fatimid Caliphate under the general Jawhar captured Egypt, then ruled by the autonomous Ikhshidid dynasty, in the name of the Abbasid Caliphate. By the 960s the Abbasid Caliphate had collapsed and open infighting broke out among the various factions in Egypt. The Fatimid caliph al-Mu'izz organized a large expedition to conquer Egypt and the Ikhshidid elites negotiated a peaceful surrender. Jawhar served as viceroy of Egypt and began the construction of a new capital, Cairo, which became the seat of the Fatimid Caliphate.


 * Battle of Dunbar (1650) (Gog the Mild & Girth Summit) : The first major battle of the Third English Civil War, it was decisively won by the English under Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell attempted to draw the Scots, commanded by David Leslie, into a set piece battle, but they resisted and Cromwell withdrew to Dunbar. The Scottish army followed, and the English launched a surprise dawn attack. Lesley was unable to reinforce the fighting, while Cromwell used his last reserve in a flanking manoeuvre. The Scots made a fighting retreat but suffered heavy casualties: between 300 and 500 were killed, with approximately 1,000 wounded and at least 6,000 taken prisoner from an army of 12,500 or fewer.

Note: All but two of the above articles underwent a MilHist A-class review before achieving featured status.


 * American logistics in the Northern France campaign (Hawkeye7) : Hawkeye split this article out of that covering American logistics in the Normandy campaign (which they have also developed to A-class). It covers the logistical effort which enabled, and eventually constrained, the rapid breakout of American forces across France from July 1944 to the end of autumn.


 * Battle of Fakhkh (Cplakidas) : The Battle of Fakhkh was the result of a failed Alid/Shia uprising against the Abbasid Caliphate in 786. Its most notable effect was that some of the Alid participants dispersed in its aftermath to the far corners of the Islamic world, where the Abbasid writ did not run; the first Shi'a dynasty, the Idrisids of Morocco, was the chief result of this. Nevertheless, the events of the revolt give a vivid picture of the rivalries and competing concepts of political authority in early Islam.


 * Manned Orbiting Laboratory (Hawkeye7) : The Manned Orbiting Laboratory was part of the United States Air Force human spaceflight program. The project was developed from early USAF concepts of crewed space stations to be used for satellite reconnaissance purposes, and was a successor to the canceled Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar military reconnaissance space plane. Announced in 1962, MOL evolved into a single-use laboratory, for which crews would be launched on 30-day missions, and return to Earth using a Gemini B spacecraft derived from NASA's Gemini spacecraft. A single uncrewed test flight of the Gemini B spacecraft was conducted on 3 November 1966, but MOL was canceled in June 1969 without any crewed missions being flown.


 * Leyla Express and Johnny Express incidents (Vanamonde93) : This article covers a December 1971 incident in which Cuban forces seized two nominally Panamanian freighters which were owned by opponents of the Cuban regime. Cuba claimed that the vessels were being used by the Central Intelligence Agency, and threatened to try one of the captains as a spy. He was released after the Panamanian government intervened, and a later Panamanian investigation found that the vessels had been used to transport insurgents to Cuba.


 * HSwMS Oscar II (Simongraham) : HSwMS Oscar II was a Swedish coastal defence ship. Commissioned in 1907, she served as the flagship of the Swedish Navy, with duties including transporting Swedish King Gustav V and his consort Queen Victoria to summits with Emperors Wilhelm II of Germany and Nicholas II of Russia. During the First World War, the ship supported the Swedish invasion of Åland from February to April 1918. At the end of the conflict, the vessel was decommissioned and only returned to service in September 1929. She was modernised and served during the Second World War. Decommissioned on 24 February 1950, Oscar II was a training hulk until September 1974.


 * Spanish battleship España (Parsecboy) : España was one of three ships of the small and ill-fated Spanish España-class of battleships. She was the first member of her class to be completed and the only one finished before the start of World War I - this made her the only European dreadnought battleship to avoid the conflict. The ship's luck did not hold out for long, and in 1923, she ran aground off the coast of Spanish Morocco and could not be freed. Some of the ship's guns were salvaged and employed as coastal artillery until the 1990s, and one is still on display.