Last edited by NJS (2011-11-05 09:55:27)

^Well, some of my best friends really are German and Austrian but I think that some Germans and Austrians, when they are not chuckling about farting after a few Steins of Lager Beer (as evidenced above, where farting is mentioned by Fritzl), seem to lack a sense of humour. Fritzl - if you want my first-hand experience of the bespoke process, you can get hold of my books and read it all there. Shortly, there will be a total of nearly 600 pages of Storey on This, That and The Other, which should be enough to keep even you out of trouble for a while. As usual, I note that Gerry starts a fight, which he cannot hope to win. You ought to be lucky that we just make a joke of it all.

However, just to show that it is not all snark: I think that one of the greatest naval heroes of WWII was Captain Hans Lansdorf, commander of the pocket battleship the Admiral Graf Spee. Despite the many allied merchant ships that he sank, not a single allied merchant seaman's life was lost as a result of his actions. He always gave the merchant captains the option (frequently accepted) of allowing the men to be transferred to the Graf Spee; those merchant captains who initially refused were easily persuaded by warning shots. In the heat of the battle of the River Plate, HMS Exeter drew most of the fire and was disabled. It has often been wondered why he  did not finish her off and the explanation, from Langsdorf's daughter, was that he would have considered it repugnant to kill the surviving crew of an enemy ship that was not battle-worthy. Then, of course, holed-up in Monte Video, and wrongly believing that British reinforcements were imminent and his only order from Berlin being to avoid the ship falling into British hands, he decided to save his remaining crew from what he believed to be certain destruction and took the Graf Spee out, with a skeleton crew, and scuttled her at sunset. The poor fellow then felt that, in honour, he should kill himself, which he did but he was a certain hero.
NJS

Last edited by NJS (2011-11-05 13:56:52)

Last edited by Maximilien de Robespierre (2011-11-06 00:15:15)

I executed a big audit campaign in Russia a couple of years ago around Astrakhan, and for the first time I gleaned a glimpse of the scale of the collapse of the Soviet Union: gigantic factories empty and idle, already crumbling into strange industrial gothic cathedrals.

And in the factories that were working, like most companies whose industrial heritage has not been raped for a quick easy buck, there were well oiled and running lathes and machines manufactured by British companies in the 1930's. The men who worked them had a respect for the British ingenuity that had built the machines and was once a stoic part of our psyche.