Masters of the Channel Night: The 10th Destroyer Flotilla’s Victory Off Ile De Batz, 9 June 1944

It was a dark and somewhat stormy night. In the western English Channel, off the Ile de Batz, twelve destroyers, eight Allied (including two Canadian) and four German, hurtled towards each other at a combined speed of 47 knots. Radar, penetrating the black murk ahead of the Allied ships, detected hostile contacts at ten miles range and the force deployed for action. Minutes later they opened devastating fire upon a startled enemy. The battle that ensued on the night of 9 June 1944 was the raison d’etre of the 10th Destroyer Flotilla, a destroyer strike force based on Plymouth. When planning the Normandy invasion Allied naval commanders recognized that although Kriegsmarine surface forces represented only a limited threat to the beachhead, powerful destroyers based in Bay of Biscay ports could wreak havoc on vulnerable build-up convoys crossing the Channel. But, because of the dominance of Allied air power, enemy destroyers came out only in the hours of darkness. Therefore, to win control of the western Channel, the 10th DF had to master the difficult art of night fighting

The Case of the Phantom MTB and the Loss of HMCS \u3cem\u3eAthabaskan\u3c/em\u3e

In the early dawn hours of 29 April 1944, the destroyer HMCS Athabaskan plunged to the depths of the English Channel, her hull wracked by two powerful explosions. One hundred and twenty-eight young Canadians died with her. Fifty-two years later, in the article “I Will Never Forget the Sound of Those Engines Going Away: A Re-examination into the Sinking of HMCS Athabaskan” that appeared in this journal, Peter Dixon advanced the theory—which was presented as fact—that the second explosion, the one that sealed the destroyer’s fate, was caused by a torpedo fired by a British motor torpedo boat (MTB).2 The most significant warship loss in Canadian naval history, the theory goes, was caused by friendly fire.3 That is not so. When primary evidence overlooked by Dixon is considered and the recollections of witnesses recorded decades after the event are scrutinized, it becomes abundantly clear that Athabaskan could not have been the victim of a British torpedo

A “New Look” at Cold War Maritime Defense—The Royal Canadian Navy’s Seaward Defence Report and the Threat of the Missile-Firing Submarine, 1955

The Soviets’ development in the mid-1950s of the capability to launch nuclear-armed missiles from conventional submarines constituted a significant challenge to Allied antisubmarine forces during the Cold War, impacting the U.S. Navy and Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) most. The RCN’s 1955 Seaward Defence Report reveals how a midsize navy with comparatively limited resources charged with defending a long coastline and valuable strategic targets proposed to cope with dramatically changing circumstances

Theodore Syncellus and the 626 siege of Constantinople

The homily on the Avar siege of Constantinople in 626 attributed to Theodore Syncellus shares numerous linguistic features both with Theodore’s homily of 623 on the Virgin’s Robe and with George of Pisidia’s poem of 626/7 on the siege. Theodore and George both celebrate the combined efforts of Patriarch Sergius and the Virgin Mary in saving the city, but Theodore also highlights the involvement of other agents, in particular the patrician Bonus and the young Heraclius Constantine, who were jointly in charge of the city while Emperor Heraclius was campaigning against the Persians. The homily is structured around the exegesis of three Old Testament passages: the promise in Isaiah 7 to King Ahaz about the salvation of Jerusalem; the analysis of numbers in Zachariah 8.19; and God’s destruction of Gog and Magog in Ezekiel 38–39

Denis Feissel, Chroniques d’épigraphie byzantine 1987-2004

This volume collects, in a revised, corrected and expanded form, about 1,200 annual notices of publications of Christian inscriptions from the territories of the Byzantine empire that were originally published in the Bulletin épigraphique of the Revues des Études grecques between 1987 and 2004, a period when greater and better-informed attention was paid to this material than previously. Denis Feissel was responsible for the majority of the notices, as, continuing in the footsteps of Louis Ro..

Optimizing Spatiotemporal Analysis Using Multidimensional Indexing with GeoWave

The open source software GeoWave bridges the gap between geographic information systems and distributed computing. This is done by preserving locality of multidimensional data when indexing it into a single-dimensional key-value store, using space filling curves. This means that like values in each dimension are stored physically close together in the datastore. We demonstrate the efficiencies and benefits of the GeoWave indexing algorithm to store and query billions of spatiotemporal data points. We show how this indexing strategy can be used to reduce query and processing times by multiple orders of magnitude using publicly available taxi trip data published by the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this efficiency lends itself to analysis that would otherwise be unfeasible

A Defence of the Traditional Chronology of 542–545, Again

The chronology of the campaigns of the years 542–545 has been the subject of debate, with Michael Whitby defending the traditional interpretation that Procopius’ long account of the bubonic plague concealed the end of the year 542, whereas Geoffrey Greatrex has championed the chronology of Kislinger and Stathakopoulos, which locates Khusro’s march to Adarbiganon and the Roman defeat at Anglon in late 542 and the siege of Edessa in 543, with Procopius failing to note the end of a year during peace negotiations in 544–545. Considerations of the progress of Khusro I’s invasion in 542 in light of his probable speed of march, and the distances he had to cover, coupled with the relatively slow advance of bubonic plague over large land masses and Procopius’ practice in arranging his material, point to the missing year-end, being that of 542/543. While the new chronology cannot absolutely be ruled out, the assumptions on which it is based are shaky