Posted on 12/14/2014 6:32:50 AM PST by the scotsman
'A bank of fog was sitting a couple of miles out at sea and a heavy mist lay over the East Coast resort of Scarborough as postman Alfred Beal climbed the wide front steps of Dunollie, a porticoed mansion high on the town’s South Cliff.
He never reached the door that fateful morning on December 16, 1914, almost exactly a century ago.
Three German warships had burst out of the fog bank and were now steaming past the headland, firing volley after volley of shells.
One caught poor Beal and blasted his shattered body back down the drive. A second smashed into the house and killed the maid, Margaret Briggs, as she hurried from the library to the front door to collect the post Beal had been about to deliver.
The Great War had suddenly and violently arrived on the home front — and in staid Scarborough of all unlikely places, with its medieval castle, Victorian promenade and high proportion of elderly gentlefolk and hoteliers.
Over in Belgium and France, men in khaki were dying in the rapidly established stalemate of the trenches. Now civilians were being slaughtered in England too.'
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Wait, whut?
They're being shelled by German warships, and she goes to collect the morning mail?
There's something quintessentially British about that...
Interesting article, and yet another example of how the deliberate targeting of civilians never achieves the intended result (to destroy morale).
Seems to be working in Iraq.
Excellent point. I suppose it depends on to what length one is willing (and able) to go to harm civilians.
Keep calm and carry on.
After all, whats the point in panicking. And if you stop living your life as you do, they win.
I have a British background. We “carry on” I’m told.
Uh, ask the people of Hamburg, Cologne, Bremen, Berlin and Dresden about that.
Eventually it does work....
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Well played!
What were the names of those German ships: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme?
;-)
Appears to be a nursing home today.
http://www.google.com/images?q=scarborough+Dunollie&sa=X&oi=image_result_group
Based on your posts on this thread, you're a bit of a slow learner.
It has to do with other factors far more. Think WWII.
We're damn lucky we killed those hundreds of thousands of civilians. Damn lucky.
Real men made the decision to do that, and it's worrisome that we have very few of them anymore.
No clear answer there. The actual effects are being debated to this day, particularly in the case of Dresden.
You mentioned “other factors” in your post. I'm curious what you meant by that.
And in my previous post, let me be a bit more clear. Deliberate attacks on civilians, for the purpose of breaking morale, have a mixed success rate. That's the very best that can be said, whether the attacks were from the air or from the ground.
Now if you're talking about targeting civilian industrial areas, that's a different story. And if you're talking about destroying entire populations (Hiroshima, etc), again that's a different story.
Consider the London Blitz of 1940. Initially the Germans targeted British military and industrial bases, particularly the RAF airfields. This put the RAF on the ropes.
Then Hitler ordered a change: bomb British cities to break morale (this was also done as a reprisal for the RAF bombing of a German city, which might have been accidental).
That was huge error on Hitler's part. The Blitz, and the later V1’s and V2’s, did nothing to break British morale. It was a waste of resources, and lives.
I have always seen the German defeat as them losing militarily in a fight to the bitter end, not because of internal civilian pressure on them to surrender.
It was. But civilian morale collapsed in the last year of the war. If Germany had not been ruled by a fanatical dictatorship, they would have thrown in the he towel.
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