The Biber (“Beaver”) midget submarine was not Germany’s most successful weapon in WW2. Designed hastily in Feb 1944 in a bid to compensate for the horrendous losses in the U-boat fleet, and in anticipation of an imminent Allied invasion, the Biber was a cheap, one-man submarine, capable...
The Naval and Maritime Museum at Patriots Point is pretty spectacular and definitely worth a visit if you are in the neighbourhood. By ‘neighbourhood’ I mean pretty much anywhere on the central east coast of the continent! The largest exhibit by far is the aircraft carrier, USS...
The Royal Navy Submarine Museum is one of the two satellite sites of the National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) on the other side of Portsmouth harbour. For that reason, it maybe doesn’t get as much attention as the ships and other museum attractions in the...
The Mary Rose is one of Britain’s most important historic artefacts and should be on everyone’s ‘Must See’ list. When she sank into the silt of the Solent almost five centuries ago (474 yrs), she became a Tudor time capsule containing the personal effects, weapons, tools, clothing,...
The operational history of HMS Warrior 1860¹, the world’s first iron-hulled, armoured warship was both dull and brief, and that’s what makes her so interesting, because when launched she was, without question, the most powerful warship afloat. So how come she never distinguished herself in action? Well,...
HMS M33 is the smallest of the National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN)’s museum ships and you’ll find her in her dry dock next to HMS Victory. She is significant because she is the last remaining ship from the Gallipoli campaign in WW1. History HMS M33...
I finally paid a long overdue visit to Portsmouth last month and caught up on the key ‘attractions’ on both sides of the harbour. I’m going to address the main attractions – HMS Warrior, HMS Victory, HMS M33, The Mary Rose museum, The Royal Navy Submarine Museum...
The thing with ‘icons’ is that you know what to expect when you finally see them. Sometimes the scale is unexpected – eg. “Oh, the Mt Rushmore heads are smaller than I thought!” (they were) – but the detail is exactly as anticipated. I have seen HMS...
The TASS news agency is reporting comments made today by Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Colonel-General Andrei Kartapolov about the 19th-century armored gunboat The Strelets. The Strelets was a 200ft (61m) Uragan class, armoured monitor. She joined the Baltic Fleet in 1865, and was taken out of active...
The city of Jacksonville on the NE Florida coast has been working for almost 10 years on a project to bring the former cold-war guided-missile destroyer, USS Charles F. Adams to the city’s waterfront as a museum ship attraction, and the finishing line is almost in sight....
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
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