meditations in time of war.

Evening at the Chateau de Healy.
I have been banished to the outer darkness.
That is to say, I'm stuck in the television room.
Paddy Pup is at my feet and MC Hamster is up my sleeve sleeping off her madeira cake.
Why am I here?
The Mammy has just returned from a two week holiday at Naas hospital and has commandeered the house for a celebratory Bridge night she's holding with some of her pals.
Apparently their Bridge game requires the use of the entire house except for the room I'm now wedged in.
I'm sitting flicking somewhat wearily through the documentary channels on the TV.
You know folks, at this stage I could nearly teach a university course on the lesser known battles of World War Two.
My eye alights on a programme entitled Sink The Bismarck.
I perk up.
Here's larks, thinks I, sitting back to enjoy yet another hour of derring do.
The hour passes.
I flick the channels again.
And lo!
A programme entitled Sink The Graf Spee.
I kid you not.
I sit back and watch.
No surprises at the end.
The Brits sink it.
I flick the channels again.
Now this is beyond the beyonds.
A programme entitled Sink The Tirpitz.
What the hell...
Are the documentary channels running a tad short on ideas?
Did Churchill really go about defeating the Nazis one warship at a time?
Is that why World War Two lasted six years?
The Tirpitz documentary features the rummest thing I've seen in a war programme.
The Brits accomplished the most remarkable feat of courage in infiltrating a group of four mini submarines across the arctic ocean, each with a crew of underwater commandos trained to mine the German battleship Tirpitz which was sheltering in a Norwegian fjord.
(For any of my readers from the Johnston Press, a fjord is a type of sheltered coastal inlet. - Heelers note.)
One of the subs sank in transit with the loss of its crew.
The others tricked their way past German anti submarine nets by following a small boat through a security gate.
The commando crews managed to set a string of high explosive mines below the hull of the Tirpitz.
Then the whole bunch of remaining commandos were captured.
The Germans brought em on board the Tirpitz.
They were sitting there waiting for the thing to go sky high.
A surviving commando, now in old age, recalled for the cameras: "We told some of the German sailors what was about to happen. The ship was our target. Not the crew. It was a very British thing to do."
Well bold readers.
I don't think it was a very British thing to do.
I think the commandos just decided they wanted to live.
Let anyone with one hundredth of their courage presume to judge them.
I'd say if Churchill had got his hands on them though, he'd have hacked their bawls off.
The Germans managed to move the Tirpitz a few degrees to the left as the mines went off.
The ship was not destroyed.
Until very late in the war.
After forty more attacks.
Then she finally she went to the bottom.
During another remarkable Brit feat of arms.
A precision air raid which blew the Tirpitz to smithereens.
Memo to the Jihadis.
The Brits only ever win one battle.
The last one.