The Court Martial for the Denmark Strait

[Antonio Bonomi]

Hello everybody,

@ Wadinga,

you wrote :

" The reports I read in the National Archives signed by Wake-Walker, Ellis and Tovey give no indication they are falsified. "

This only means that you are not using the tons of post's you have here in since many years with the many Official document examples we have provided demonstrating the intentional falsification.

I suggest you to use our Storia Militare article of February 2017, the number 281, and you will have a good summary to refer to.

Bye Antonio

[dunmunro]

Wadinga wrote:"The reports I read in the National Archives signed by Wake-Walker, Ellis and Tovey give no indication they are falsified."

Hi Sean,
we can agree to disagree about this point. For me the intentional manipulation of facts in Tovey's despatches point 17 and 19, in the Pinchin's Plot used by Wake-Walker, and all the changes in the declarations are in no way attributable to "innocent" errors.
However, if you prefer to think so, be it.....

you wrote: "1) There is insufficient detail in Leach's and Wake-Walker's signalled reports of PoW's damage for Pound to make any realistic assessment....2) There is no mention of the numerous breakdowns affecting PoW's output..... 3) It should have been Pound's responsibility to shield his officers from uninformed criticism... "

1) I would say that "superficial damage" is MORE than enough to have doubts about the correctness of the decision to break off an engagement......

2) Which output efficiency are you speaking about ? The already discussed PoW 75% (with 10 guns --> 7 shells/minute) versus the BS 86% (on 8 guns --> 6,4 shells/minute) ? I was hoping this analysis was accepted and this old "tale" popularized by "ignorant" historians to justify Leach's decision was over forever by now.... The output loss (similar to the one of all the KGV class battleships....) was in no way the reason for the disengagement. It became a problem ONLY when "Y" turret jammed.....due to the already taken decision to turn away with the violent turn to port....

3) Yes, it should have been Pound's responsibility to defend his men, if he believed they did their duty. Apparently, he did not, both in case of Leach and Wake-Walker (see the Admiralty message re. intentions to re-engage sent on May 24).


Bye, Alberto

2) PoW had one gun fail after the first salvo. She suffered repeated problems during 18 salvos causing guns to miss multiple salvos despite the presence and assistance of civilian specialists from Vickers. KGV's 14in guns, OTOH went the first ~30 minutes and nearly 50 salvos with almost no reported problems of any kind [ see this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6834 ]. PoW's radar systems all failed before opening fire while her 5.25in guns only fired 3 ranging salvos before their FC systems were knocked out. The failure of radar FC and the loss of 5.25in output severely handicapped PoW, which is something that you and Antonio barely even mention and you never want to acknowledge the handicapp that this imposed on PoW. The most common output % given for Bismarck is 93 rnds fired versus 104 rnds ordered to fire for an 89.4% output from her 38cm guns while her FC radar functioned throughout the battle as did her 15cm and 10.5cm secondary armament.

If we replace PoW with KGV then 14in output is much higher and 14in accuracy is also much higher and the net result is that KGV would have been 2 or 3 times more effective in terms of 14in hit rate. Finally, if PoW's 5.25in FC had remained operational, along with accurate radar ranging then Bismarck would probably have suffered multiple 5.25in hits as well.

[Alberto Virtuani]

Hi Duncan,
BS ordered shots estimation vary from 104 to 112 according to the count of well known fired salvos. I have already published my proposed salvo plot for BS and I took the corresponding 108 value.

In any case (104, 108 or 112), PoW was landing more shells per minute against BS than viceversa (the calculation is simple, please take the time to do it BEFORE posting, or simply ask me to post it again ), the loss of radar was not a huge problem at 14 km distance (with range already acquired) and the secondary armament was still totally ineffective in this battle.....


Please, if you want to re-open this closed discussion (ONLY in case you have some new element, I would strongly suggest....), use the appropriate already existing thread. I understand you and Sean are annoyed by this data (as well as by too many others evidences.....), but I'm a bit tired to discuss again and again the same points without any new element just because you try to divert the discussion

As you are back on this topic, have you finally found out which was the KGV output on May 27 ? If I remember correctly, I have left you without any conclusion in the existing appropriate thread....


Bye, Alberto

[dunmunro]

Hi Duncan,
BS ordered shots estimation vary from 104 to 112 according to the count of well known salvos.I have already published my proposed salvo plot for BS and I took the 108 value.

In any case (104, 108 or 112), PoW was landing more shells per minute on BS than viceversa (the calculation is simple, please take the time to do it BEFORE posting, or simply ask me to post it again ), the loss of radar was not a huge problem at 14 km distance (with range already acquired) and the secondary armament was still totally ineffective in this battle.....

Please, if you want to re-open this closed discussion (ONLY in case you have some new element, I suggest....), use the appropriate already existing thread. I understand you and Sean are annoyed by this data (as well as by too many others evidences.....), but I'm a bit tired to discuss again and again the same points without any new element..... As you are back on this topic, have you finally found out which was the KGV output on May 27 ? I have left you without any conclusion in the existing appropriate thread....


Bye, Alberto

You brought this up.

The critical time for PoW's 14in fire was the period from 0553 to when Hood was destroyed, and greater output combined with radar ranging would have allowed PoW to have scored more hits during this time frame with a consequently greater probability of degrading Bismarck's FC and 38cm output and thus saving Hood from destruction, and then the battle results in the almost certain destruction of Bismarck and PE.

After Hood was destroyed and the range declined then the loss of 5.25in output was a very major problem for PoW as those guns could have destroyed or degraded Bismarck's FC or been used to place PE under fire but as it was, after Hood was destroyed, PoW was engaging Bismarck with 9-7 effective 14in guns while being engaged by 8 x 38cm, 8 x 20.3cm, 6 x 15cm and 12 x 10.5cm guns and PE was unengaged. Yet there is the suggestion that Leach was a coward for opening the range.

[wadinga]

Hello All,

I had forgotten that everything reported, including the need for technicians to work on PoW's armament, was based on lies and falsehood.

Can we keep this in the real world? Of whether there was a move for Court Martial in 1941?

Thanks Duncan for moving the gunnery argument where it belongs.

All the best

wadinga

[Antonio Bonomi]

Hello everybody,

@ Wadinga,

you wrote :

Can we keep this in the real world ? Of whether there was a move for Court Martial in 1941 ?

Great suggestion !

On this subject we have Sir L. Kennedy letter about the Court Martial request from Adm Pound To Adm Tovey being confirmed by Adm Tovey in person to Adm Blake/Colin McMullen as we can directly listen on Colin McMullen interview on the BBC available at the Imperial War Museum Archives.

Here you can listen to it again on the REEL 3 from minute 1 to minute 4 :

http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80010751

Unless you or anybody will find something NEW that will prove those being intentionally incorrect released declarations showing us the related evidence : those are the facts !

Until something NEW will be hopefully found, ... that is the available truth.
I suggest you and everybody else just to accept it and not to try to change back the reality as it shows now by using phrases like the one I had to correct you above.

As I told you Sean, ... enough is enough, ... we have published a properly researched work supported by the available evidence, ... properly listed and documented.
If you like to try to demonstrate the opposite you just have to do a similar work supported by available NEW evidence on the opposite direction.

The same exact concept apply for the intentional evident document falsification as well as for the bearings and so on ...

Please NO MORE phrases like the one above, or " deniers " activities and threads based on nothing, ... but written with the evident intention to still confuse everything and obviously never accept and only overwrite what as been demonstrated several times already.

Now to try to prove your case, you and everybody else must use NEW evidences, like documents, maps, bearings, ... etc, etc, ... just like we did.

No more intentional " deniers " activities to try to keep confused everything because " everything is better than the truth " ... and in case of confusion, ... sooner or later everybody obviously will still refer to the old invented a long published story, ... please no more of that, ... as I will not accept it from you or anybody else as you can read, ... now I am sick and tired about it.

I give but pretend respect, ... as I wrote you above : Enough is enough !

Always available to share and compare NEW data, maps, evidence and facts, ..... respectfully, ...

Bye Antonio

[dunmunro]

Hello everybody,

@ Wadinga,

you wrote :

Can we keep this in the real world ? Of whether there was a move for Court Martial in 1941 ?

Great suggestion !

On this subject we have Sir L. Kennedy letter about the Court Martial request from Adm Pound To Adm Tovey being confirmed by Adm Tovey in person to Adm Blake/Colin McMullen as we can directly listen on Colin McMullen interview on the BBC available at the Imperial War Museum Archives.

Here you can listen to it again on the REEL 3 from minute 1 to minute 4 :

http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80010751

Unless you or anybody will find something NEW that will prove those being intentionally incorrect released declarations showing us the related evidence : those are the facts !

Until something NEW will be hopefully found, ... that is the available truth.
I suggest you and everybody else just to accept it and not to try to change back the reality as it shows now by using phrases like the one I had to correct you above.

As I told you Sean, ... enough is enough, ... we have published a properly researched work supported by the available evidence, ... properly listed and documented.
If you like to try to demonstrate the opposite you just have to do a similar work supported by available NEW evidence on the opposite direction.

The same exact concept apply for the intentional evident document falsification as well as for the bearings and so on ...

Please NO MORE phrases like the one above, or " deniers " activities and threads based on nothing, ... but written with the evident intention to still confuse everything and obviously never accept and only overwrite what as been demonstrated several times already.

Now to try to prove your case, you and everybody else must use NEW evidences, like documents, maps, bearings, ... etc, etc, ... just like we did.

No more intentional " deniers " activities to try to keep confused everything because " everything is better than the truth " ... and in case of confusion, ... sooner or later everybody obviously will still refer to the old invented a long published story, ... please no more of that, ... as I will not accept it from you or anybody else as you can read, ... now I am sick and tired about it.

I give but pretend respect, ... as I wrote you above : Enough is enough !

Always available to share and compare NEW data, maps, evidence and facts, ..... respectfully, ...

Bye Antonio

In fairness to Pound, it should be said that in later life Tovey’s
memory let him down, and he was apt to exaggerate. The
occasion of his having forgotten that he had asked the Admiralty
not to send their own interpretation of D/F bearings has already
been related in note 2 of Chapter 7 (pp. 149 to 174). Again in
1954 he was under the impression he had received the signal
about the King George V being towed home before Ark R0yal’s last
attack and decided that ‘if Ark Royal failed to damage the Bzkmarck
. . . to disobey the signal and turn back while we still had
enough oil to get back to an English port’. In another letter in
the same year he imagined that the signal had ordered him to
continue the chase ‘up to the shores of France’. (Tovey to
Roskill, ll Nov. 1954, and 20 Nov. 1954.) I
His secretary of the time, now Rear-Admiral R. W. Paffard,
writes of these events as follows:
‘. . . I think his memory only began to play tricks after he had
suddenly retired from all public life and virtually became a
hermit. With no current interests and nobody to talk to other
than his wife, it was understandable that he brooded more
and more on the "past, and particularly on the controversial
aspects of his command of the Home Fleet; and Lady Tovey, (
in constant pain from arthritis, and always by nature inclined ’
to put the worst construction on everything, undoubtedly.
nurtured his resentment and encouraged him to magnify the
disagreements he had had with Churchill and Pound.’ '(Letter to the author, 5 May 1973.)

Pursuit, Epilogue note 2, p284. '
a

Tovey was quite elderly when he brought forward the court martial allegations and those around him knew that his mind was failing.

[Alberto Virtuani]

Hi all,
again the argument of the "poor old sailor" (as well as the brain tumors, the angry personality, etc.) to avoid accepting the existing evidences !

McMullen was not an idiot when he referred Toveys's words (apparently he did not notice that his mind was failing) and for sure he said he was furious about the disengagement because "the guns were ok".
The son of Leach (Sir Henry, First Sea Lord) seemed to believe these words, when he reviewed (word by word) T.Wills book about his father.....


Bye, Alberto

[wadinga]

Hello All,

Thanks Duncan for reminding us once again through a comprehensive quote from Kennedy that Tovey had the ability, in later life, to remember things that never happened and to promulgate them as if they had. McMullen's recollection is from a "time before he [Tovey] died". At least the "evidence" against W-W and Leach doesn't come from an Ouija Board! This is therefore the same story he told Kennedy at much the same time.

I have recently pointed out that in Roskill's 1977 book Churchill and the Admirals he gives Kennedy as the reference for the story of the Court Martial threat, not the letters he himself received from the late-life Tovey. Roskill, though happy to recount stories of WSC's cruel and unjust treatment of various naval officers, obviously did not believe this story was worth investigating further, even though Tovey had written to him mentioning it.

I would like a copy of the English translation of the Storia article, to save ploughing through tons of "proofs".

All the best

wadinga

[Cag]

Hi All

I think the comparison of Troutbridge and Leach is, with my usual understatement, a little unfair.

Troughtbridge did not engage the German battlecruisers (thanks to various urgings by his gunnery officer etc) and then allowed them to escape undamaged. IIRC a certain WSC had ordered that in the Mediterranean no engagement of superior forces was to be undertaken, although his intention was that this would be Austro-hungarian ships, he did not communicate this. Troughtbridge took this to include the German battlecruisers.

Leach was already engaging and in the middle of a battle when he broke off the action. We seem to forget that Leach was not just facing just eight fifteen inch guns, there were a number of eight inch, five point nine and if I'm right a number of four point ones?

I think we have discussed many times McMullen and his opinion that the 'guns were ok' the fact is that with 3 guns out of action and the distinct possibility of having to make repairs whilst in battle with further losses, the guns were not ok. We constantly say that PoW had a theoretical output of 10 x14 inch guns, however we fail to mention that output was never achieved.

PoW post the loss of Hood did not hit either German ship, her gunnery was seen to be falling off and had gun losses (the turret ring of Y turret jammed whilst on the return journey to Rosyth) so despite McMullens enthusiasm at the point of disengagement neither his guns nor their performance were necessarily 'good'.

Post Hood the German ships Bismarck and Prinz Eugen hit PoW seven times.

Leach also re engaged Bismarck two more times. Whatever Pounds opinion at the cabinet meeting he did not have the full facts, which once known would show any comparison by anyone to Troughtbridge was unfair.

In reality I agree with Wadinga and Antonio this discussion is about evidence of court martial proceedings but we still seem to be having the same old re hashed arguments that have already been round and round more times than a jumper in a washing machine.

Best wishes
Cag

[Alberto Virtuani]

Wadinga wrote: "I would like a copy of the English translation of the Storia article"

Hi Sean,
I have just sent you the translation of the Article. Mail sent to the last address you had sent me for the map.

Cag wrote: " We constantly say that PoW had a theoretical output of 10 x14 inch guns, however we fail to mention that output was never achieved. "

Hi Mr.Cag,
again, there are other threads where PoW and KGV output and PoW guns in action were already discussed. The fact is that neither BS nor PoW achieved a full 100% output as logical, and Bismarck was only slightly better. Also, the guns in action were 8 (Y3 just fired again in local control) and the 9th (Y2) was just loosing some salvos, the battery had only 1 gun (A1) out of actions for a long time (thanks to Duncan's salvo plot that I will NOT re-post here ).


Bye, Alberto

[wadinga]

Hello Cag,

You are quite right about the "jumper" of proofs, and every time we take it out it has shrunk a little smaller

Alberto thanks for the article

All the best

wadinga

[Antonio Bonomi]

Hello everybody,

@ all,

and here we go again with the " brain tumor " and Adm Tovey " heremit " lifestyle, ... etc etc ... to try to remove the validity of his indisputable statement in front of persons surely in condition to understand that he was credible or not, ... drunk or not, ... reliable or not, ... and lately use Adm Tovey statements to bring forward what he told them during an Official BBC interview about hsi life, as a confirmation.

As I told you above : enough is enough now, ... and to assume Sir Ludovic Kennedy being the one telling precise things is surely at risk for you, ... since you are using a book writer that was able to write that PoW disengaged at 06:13 after 21 minutes engagement, ... ... a statement he wrote on his book demonstrated being wrong even by the Royal Navy Admiralty in writing.

So, ... as you can read, ... totally unreliable, ... even worst than F.O. Busch on the other side.

You can have the copy in English of our article, ... and finally find the shame I have already found on those Official documents in the archives.

At least those are still there, ... they do not suffer for " brain tumor" and " heremit " lifestyle, ... no " dementia " there, ... they are not " old sailors " hand written stuffs and ... they were not written for " propaganda "reasons using NID controls, ... at lunch time, ... a most " inconvenient time " of course, ...

If you list all the Official evidences your are still trying to refute with those above listed pathetic reasons, ... hopefully you will realize how desperate and ridiculous your " deniers " defense line is as of today, ...

@ Wadinga,

please do NOT write anymore :

... never happened ...

because it is a FALSE statement, ... you are intentionally writing to try to confuse and refute the evidence we have at hand.

You can use Kennedy note and agree with him about that being a possibility you like to believe on, ... but you cannot write that it did not happen, ... simply because you cannot prove it, ... while we have the evidence of it.

Lucky us many, ... way too many other BAD things really happened about this shameful story, ... and you have NO chance there to refute anything, ... and they prove what happened and this being the real reason of them to be.

Bye Antonio

[wadinga]

Hello Antonio,

I will continue to write "never happened" because:

The
occasion of his having forgotten that he had asked the Admiralty
not to send their own interpretation of D/F bearings has already
been related in note 2 of Chapter 7 (pp. 149 to 174).

Again in
1954 he was under the impression he had received the signal
about the King George V being towed home before Ark R0yal’s last
attack and decided that ‘if Ark Royal failed to damage the Bzkmarck
. . . to disobey the signal and turn back while we still had
enough oil to get back to an English port’.

These are recollections of things that never happened Do you think they really happened as Tovey described and the accepted version of these events are a result of distortion and falsification?

These examples are:

Sir Ludovic Kennedy being the one telling precise things

You can't decide you like the story of the Court Martial and don't like these instances reported at the same time by Kennedy. We know Tovey asked for bearings only and we know from signal timings that the "tow home" signal was after Ark Royal's attack. Therefore Tovey's memory was faulty by then and this, to an open mind, puts a question over the existence of the Court Martial threat.

That you and Alberto believe W-W and Leach's crimes were heinous and they should have hung from the highest yardarm has been plain for some years, but I am interested in whether there was really ever a threat that can be detected from material created at the time. I will be interested to read your article- thank you for sending it.

All the best

wadinga

[Alberto Virtuani]

Wadinga wrote: "That you and Alberto believe W-W and Leach's crimes were heinous and they should have hung from the highest yardarm has been plain for some years"

Hi Sean,
in the same way I must say that it has been plain for some years that you would defend these officers against any accusation, even against any evidence and their own declarations..... and I must say I have an admiration for your "sense of duty"....

Again, if you refuse to get to the logical conclusion that a Court Martial was at least initially requested by WSC/Pound, please explain why the son of Leach, Henry, a former First Sea Lord, approved (after going through it "page by page" see pag.8) the book of M.Wills (In the highest traditions of the R.N.) that states in clear (pag. 89/90) that Pound tried to Court Martial both Leach and Wake-Walker.
Also, Sir Henry never reacted nor complained about Tarrant book (KGV class battleships , pag.61) where this is written in clear:

Tarrant_page_61_Leach_photo_caption.jpg (100.04 KiB) Viewed 715 times

Don't you think that, having been such a high officer, and having reviewed page by page Wills book, Sir Henry Leach would have at least complained and said loud and clear what you are trying to sustain here.......
Apparently he was well convinced that the Court Martial for his father had been actually asked at a certain point in time, and that this was considered an established "fact" in the Royal Navy.


Only you seem to refuse this fact..... Are you going to say that also Sir Henry was suffering "dementia" ?


Bye, Alberto