The last of it's kind

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22726671

The link above to a news story taking place off the southern shore of Great Britain, raising the last intact Dornier 17 from its current resting place in 50 ft of English channel to the surface.

"Any old Iron?" :P

I was surprised to learn that this is the only surviving Do. 17 in the world, and that it was in as good condition as it is (surprising because, as some of the non-British readers may not realise, the channel can be quite rough! :P)

They have a deadline to meet though, the salvage team is currently working frantically to raise it within the week before the immensely unpredictable Channel weather forces them to delay again. Best of Luck!

God that would have been a great night!

Newly declassified files from the National Archives at Kew have revealed a number of interesting things today; apparently the Allies had a hit-list of high ranking Nazis in France they considered eliminating prior to the D-Day landings on 6th June 1944; chief among them General Erwin Rommel and Field Marshall Gerd Von Rundstedt. It wouldn't have been the first time the British Government sanctioned an official hit during World War II; in 1942 a British trained group of Czech resistance members who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in Prague.

The Heydrich assassination also helps to explain why they didn't go through with the plan, the Nazis enacted brutal reprisals and wiped out the Czech village of Lidice in revenge for his death. The assassination of Rommel, commander of the German forces in Normandy, may have had some effect but the British feared that reprisals against French civilians and POW's would negate it's potential value to the war effort.

Stalin never struck me as a cocktail guy...

As well as the hitlist, there were files that revealed the home office and MI5 were bugging King Edward VIII during the events leading up to his abdication in 1936. Spying on the King? He was a Nazi sympathiser after all!

But for me the most interesting story to come out of the new files was that during Churchill's state visit to Moscow in 1942, he and Stalin got a little drunk and emptied "innumerable bottles". According to Permanent Undersecretary of the Foreign Office Alexander Cadogan:

"what Stalin made me drink was pretty savage. Winston, who by that point was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine"

Stalin the party boy huh? That would have been a hell of a good night to be a part of! 

You can't help but love the underdog, even when he's a Crim!

A quick tribute to one of my personal heroes: Frank Abagnale Jr; one of the ballsiest, smartest and most enduring con-men in the history of fraud and criminality. His impressive list of legal accomplishments is a footnote to a rather sad childhood, which he regrettably missed out on from the age of 16; as Abagnale himself puts it "I never went to a senior prom or a high school football game".

You forgot Thief!

He's often asked to be a keynote speaker given his more recent legitimate work with the FBI and the U.S. Federal Government in general; rather than butcher his life story in paraphrasing I always find it's better to hear it from the horses mouth. Watch the video below ( in two parts ) if you have some time to kill, and hear the story of how one 16 year old boy from a Catholic boys school ran from a New York Courtroom in tears and ended up in a French prison 5 years and a couple of million dollars later.

Well this was unexpected... IT'S OVER 1000!!

Thanks for all the views to get Musings past 1000! Especially to that one bloke from Kazakhstan last week, had images of a man using his laptop while sitting in a Yurt with it plugged into a potato or something. Regardless, thank you all and keep checking back on the blog and on the History Circle!

In Memory of: Ray Harryhausen

Probably Harryhausen's best known work, the fight between the skeletons and Jason in Jason and the Argonauts. A great and groundbreaking bit of cinema that we all remember from when we were kids. Still impressively good effects today, no shakycam here!