Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters 17 - Gallipoli

The attack on Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula by Britain and France in 1915 was conceived as a way of getting round the bloody stalemate of the Western Front, which was devouring soldiers’ lives at an almost unimaginable rate.

The initial idea was for warships to breeze through the Dardanelles straits into the Sea of Marmara, threaten Constantinople and force Germany’s Turkish allies to pull out of the war, but as the navy failed to make progress, it was decided that a major land invasion would also be needed.

Suffering uninspired leadership and handicapped by extremely difficult terrain, this quickly degenerated into a murderous deadlock that looked disconcertingly similar to what was happening in Flanders.

After 11 months, with 38,000 British and British Empire troops killed, the invasion was abandoned.  It was feared that the withdrawal would entail heavy losses, but, in fact, this proved the most successful part of the operation.   A brilliant campaign of deception involving rifles firing automatically from deserted trenches, and noisy empty supply trucks running back and forth at night, enabled the pull-out to be made without any significant casualties.

Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters 13 - the Charge of the Light Brigade

It was probably the most famous blunder in British military history.   In 1854, Britain, France and Turkey were fighting the Russians in the Crimean War.   Early on October 25, the Russians began the Battle of Balaclava to try and break the allies’ fragile supply chain.

 ‘Two such fools could hardly be picked out of the British army,’ was one soldier’s verdict on the cavalry commanders, Lords Lucan and Cardigan, but it was a confused order by the commander-in-chief, Lord Raglan, that sent the Light Brigade, considered by many to be the finest light cavalry in the world, on a suicidal charge against Russian guns along the 'Valley of Death'. 

Not only did the brigade have to endure fire from the guns they were attacking, there was also enemy artillery on either side of them.    Thanks to their courage, they managed to capture a few of the guns, but they were soon driven off by the Russians’ superior numbers, and then all that was left was a painful retreat back through enemy gunfire.

Out of the 600 men who set off, 300 were killed, wounded or captured.    After the charge, the battle petered out, but it had an important consequence – the British lost control of their main supply route, condemning them to a winter of shortage, sickness and death.

France and Rwanda - an apology

President Sarkozy has apologised for the behaviour of France and other countries during the Rwanda genocide of 1994. It is the first official visit to the country by a French president since the killings.

France had been heavily criticised for appearing to side with the Hutu government, who were carrying out the killings, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by the current president Paul Kagame, started to wrest control of the country from them.

In 2006, Rwanda and France broke off diplomatic relations when a French judge accused President Kagame of being involved in shooting down a plane carrying the Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana – the incident that sparked off the genocide. Kagame argues that the aircraft was shot down by Hutu extremists, who had certainly been enraged at what they regarded as Habyarimana’s over-conciliatory policy to Tutsis, and extremist Hutu media had been predicting the president’s death.

The Rwandan genocide was the fastest mass murder in history, with about 800,000 people killed in just 100 days. See also my blogs of 23 Jan, 1 and 4 March, 9 April, 16 July, 23 Sept, 8 and 30 Oct, 15 Dec - all 2009.

Lebanon air crash - aircraft and bad weather

In the first major air crash of 2010, an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 has gone into the sea soon after taking off from Beirut airport bound for Addis Ababa. There were 82 passengers on board and 8 crew. No survivors have so far been found.

The weather had been stormy, and eye witnesses spoke of seeing a ball of fire in the sky before the aircraft crashed. The Lebanese President has said it is unlikely that foul play was involved. Ethiopian Airlines is considered to have a good safety record, but a similar 737 from Kenya Airways crashed in Cameroon at the cost of 114 lives after also taking off in heavy rain and thunderstorms in 2007.

Last year’s worst air accident, the loss of an Air France Airbus A330 over the Atlantic en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, also happened in poor weather. (See my blog of June 20, 2009). It was the deadliest air crash in eight years, as all 228 people on board were killed.

The cause of the accident remains a mystery, not helped by the fact that it has proved impossible so far to find the aircraft’s flight recorders. The search will resume next month.

Swine flu v bird flu

Swine flu has now overtaken bird flu. We have had 262 deaths from bird flu (H5N1) against 382 from swine flu (H1N1). Bird flu remains far more virulent, with its 262 deaths coming from just 436 confirmed cases, while there have been nearly 90,000 cases of bird flu.

The World Health Organisation says that most people who catch swine flu can expect a mild infection from which they make a full recovery within a week, and that the main risk is to pregnant women or people with other health problems.

The virus has now spread to 100 countries, and there are some peculiarities in the figures. Argentina has had 26 deaths at a rate of about 1 for every 60 cases – the highest in the world. Mexico, where the disease first appeared, has suffered 119 deaths at about 1 in every 85 cases. The United States has the highest number of deaths – 170 – but the rate is only about 1 in 200 of those infected.

Europe has suffered much less so far. The UK has been worst hit with nearly 7,500 cases, but only four deaths – a rate of 1 in 1,875. However, the government is warning that by the end of next month, Britain could be seeing 100,000 new cases every day. Could that produce the same kind of devastating effect on public services that we saw in the great flu pandemic of 1918, when schools closed, fire stations had no firemen, buses stopped?

That epidemic was dubbed “Spanish flu”, because it was there that the world first became aware of the virus. This time around, Spain has had 760 cases and just one death. Even so, yesterday, the Spanish newspaper El Pais decided to publish the section on flu from my book A Disastrous History of the World. This is the link to the story:- http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/Fue/gripe/espanola/elpepusoc/20090704elpepusoc_2/Tes

Ocean air disaster + ocean liners fire anniversary

An Airbus operated by the Yemeni state carrier, Yemenia Air, with 153 people on board has crashed into the Indian Ocean near the Comoros islands. A desperate search for survivors is now under way, with France taking a leading role. There are a thought to be a large number of French passengers on the flight.

It was en route from the Yemeni capital Sanaa to Moroni, capital of the Comoros. There are reports that the aircraft had made a failed attempt to land before it disappeared. If there are no survivors, this would be the second worst air crash this year after the loss of the Air France Airbus off Brazil. (see my blog of June 20)

On this day…..109 years ago, fire engulfed the ocean liner terminal at Hoboken, New Jersey, destroying one ship and severely damaging two others, and killing up to 400 people.

The blaze appears to have started on one of the piers which was piled high with cotton bales and barrels of oil and turpentine. It happened at a time when local people were allowed to come and look around the liners, and many of them were among the dead. The cause remains a mystery.

Air disaster mystery

As the French government starts to pay out compensation to the families of those killed in the Air France flight lost off Brazil on June 1st, we are no nearer discovering the causes of the disaster – the worst in Air France’s history.

The “black box” flight recorders have not yet been found, and the sonar signal that they give out to help those searching run for only 30 days at most, so investigators are now in a race against time. We do know that there was bad weather at the time of the crash, that the Airbus A330’s monitoring systems had sent out 24 automated error messages, and that the auto-pilot had been switched off.

Last year, Air France began to notice problems with speed monitors icing over on this aircraft, and started to replace them in April. This was recommended by Airbus, though it is not a requirement of the European Aviation Safety Agency. Air France has now said it is accelerating the replacement programme.

If the aircraft’s systems are receiving conflicting information on speed, it can cause the autopilot to shut down, and in extreme cases, the aeroplane may stall or go dangerously fast, so that there is a danger of it breaking up. Without the flight recorders, though, all of this remains conjecture, and there is a possibility that we may never know what caused the deaths of the 228 passengers and crew.