‘We shall defend our island' - investigating a forgotten militarised landscape

Discussion in 'Research Material' started by CL1, Oct 24, 2020.

  1. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

    Download
    British Library EThOS: 'We shall defend our island' : investigating a forgotten militarised landscape

    Abstract
    The outmanoeuvring of Allied forces in May 1940 led to the eventual evacuation of the BEF from the continent in June 1940. Fearing an invasion, GHQ Home Forces set about the rapid re-militarisation of the UK to oppose, arguably, the first very real threat to this country’s sovereignty since the Norman conquest of 1066 AD. Constructing a series of anti-invasion defences throughout the countryside, a network of defensive fieldworks and concrete gun emplacements were erected, with linear stop lines forming part of the overall stratagem for a countrywide defence in depth. Examining one particular linear stop line, GHQ Line Green, despite previous research into its archaeological route through the landscape several questions still remain unanswered - Did the proposed wartime route for the stop line match the documented archaeology? Did the defensive fieldworks conform to 1940 WO specifications, or were they similar in design to the linear fieldworks of the First World War? Did GHQ Line Green dismiss the defensive ‘folly’ notion of the Maginot Line by being strategically sited in the Bristol hinterland? A prepared battlefield that never faced the unpredictable test of conflict, evidence offered by original cartographic, archaeological and GIS ‘Fields-of- Fire’ analysis concluded that the GHQ Line Green was strategically placed in the landscape. In ideal conditions GHQ Line Green could have had limited success in slowing down an invasion force. This dismisses the notion that the stop line was a defensive ‘folly’. With its origins found to lay in First World War fortifications, the research undertaken for this thesis will further our understanding of an often forgotten Second World War landscape
     
  2. davidbfpo

    davidbfpo Patron Patron

    The Southampton University website shows this PhD thesis is 858Mb to download!
     
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  3. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

    Yes that is correct downloads in a few seconds
     
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  4. Red Goblin

    Red Goblin Senior Member

    On what planet ?
    • IT pedantry:
      It's actually 818.42MB but still bloatware as even too big for CD-ROM !
      858 is what you get by incompetently dividing by the wrong type of million:
      * Decimal (10^6) = 1,000,000
      * Binary (2^20) = 1,048,576
      And do please note the 8-fold difference
      between Mb (megabit) and MB (megabyte).
    • Megabaud BT copper-wire download reality
      I gave up after an hour of trying 2 different ways
      * My browser gave me no choice - declaring the source unreadable
      * Orbit's log showed it having to repeatedly reconnect ad infinitum
      * Both made it about half-way before quitting/sticking
      * WW2Talk citation stampede overloading server ? :lol:
    Anywho, the thesis is most likely pumped to the gills with hi-res graphics and just needs someone to generate a vastly more web-friendly lo-res PDF version of it for general use by those of us mainly only initially interested in its text content. Alternatively - or maybe even do both for good measure - split it into more manageable sections after this Natural England example. Fans of monster PDF files can always glue bits back together with something like PDFSaM ... if they really must.
     
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  5. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

    just downloaded it 2mins 25 secs
     
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  6. Richelieu

    Richelieu Well-Known Member

    Nice find Clive.

    I have a basic fibre set-up and it only took a minute or so to download.

    It is full of hi-res images, including modern site photos/maps and copies taken from Home Forces War Diaries, so well worth persevering.
     
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  7. JimHerriot

    JimHerriot Ready for Anything

    Seconded!

    An excellent find Clive.

    544 Pages, 273 photos/illustrations ("figures" as listed in contents pages).

    And yes, 818.42 mb, took four minutes and nine seconds to download via a 4G wifi dongle here in the back of beyond, and worth every second of the wait (a few photos from within said thesis by way of example of it's mighty content below)

    Again Clive, thanks for digging this work out.

    Kind regards, always,

    Jim.

    Figure 31.jpg

    Figures 33 & 34.jpg

    Figure 36.jpg
     
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  8. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

    JimHerriot likes this.
  9. Guy Hudson

    Guy Hudson Looker-upper

    Screenshot 2020-10-26 at 12.02.10.png
    Screenshot 2020-10-26 at 12.03.37.png
    Cheriton, Kent
     
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  10. Red Goblin

    Red Goblin Senior Member

    Apparently so as OK today - FTR taking:
    * Browser 12' 35"
    * Orbit 13' 03" (still slowed by reconnects)
    Or maybe the poor thing just needed a post-weekend reboot ?

    But now regret bothering - it's that bad on the topic of Blacker Bombard mounts alone as incidentally suggested to me by those conical block tops [long explanation deleted] !

    As for uni students in general, recall Wizard of Oz telling scarecrow;
    "Back where I come from we have universities, seats of great learning -- where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts -- and with no more brains than you have.... But! They have one thing you haven't got! A diploma!"
    And of course, as you may remember, he was himself a great charlatan so go figure my disdain having worked with professors of many sciences at NPL.
     
  11. snailer

    snailer Country Member

    [​IMG]
    Sounded to me like your 16K RAM was loose, but well done for sorting it by switching it off and then back on again.:)
     
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  12. Red Goblin

    Red Goblin Senior Member

    DANGER - waffle mode triggered !

    Thanks but no, I was just suggesting a routine housekeeping event had maybe optimised the server's performance as a predictable side-effect. Re antiquated hardware, though, I'm wary of providing my abacus with soft-coated (bounce-resistant) Teflon-cored 'go faster' beads as I suspect its fingers may have gotten too arthritic to justify the expense and I haven't the heart to make the poor little fella redundant !
    abacus½.jpg
    Did you, BTW, maybe pick a ZX81 image for its association with another Clive?

    The need to reseat components has, of course, largely been eliminated through better connector design and routine gold-plating of mating contact surfaces but, having always avoided both Sinclair and Amstrad junk, I'll bow to your analysis as my experience of non-PC desktops lies severally elsewhere. Amstrad was simply too non-standard and Sinclair just mechanically unsound - particularly with self-assembly kit mouldings that never quite behaved as intended (i.e. fine in theory until clumsy customers disagree).

    Incidentally, as for fresh starts, an erstwhile corporate IT help-desk colleague of mine once snipped and pinned a Computer Weekly cartoon strip to our notice board - running roughly as follows:
    * Help-desk phone rings
    * Call-handler picks up and automatically replies, "Reboot !"
    * "But I haven't told you ..."
    * "Reboot !"
    * Compliance pause
    * "Wow - thanks - how did you know !?"
    * (smugly/nonchalently) "Oh, we just do ..."
    It is, of course, pretty standard practice to take servers off-line for backup purposes at regular intervals.

    But, enfin now my disappointment has marginally subsided overnight, I can better summarise my beef with this thesis - I found a demonstrably-false assumption which immediately casts doubt on the veracity of everything else and I despise untrustworthy reference books as worthless hokum. I found 2 errors - an ambiguous typo and a classic "ex pede Herculem" false extrapolation - Hercules' foot being Fig. 85. Assuming he managed to wangle a doctorate out of that thesis, it might be amusing to see how his later peer-reviewed papers are shaping up but I've better things to occupy me in another historical sphere ...
     
  13. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

  14. Red Goblin

    Red Goblin Senior Member

    So you want pretty pictures, eh? Well OK then - the last paragraph of 2.6.4 on p109 states, "the Spigot Mortar was a fixed permanent defensive fieldwork mounted on a sunken concrete pedestal".
    These are only 2 of the many exceptions to PRR's gross generalisation implying none - see my earlier link for plenty more if open-minded. He need only to have added a word like 'often', 'typically' or 'usually' to avoid misleading absolutism.

    "Seems like people only see what they expect to see, hmmm?"
    (Gaspode the Wonderdog)
     
  15. JimHerriot

    JimHerriot Ready for Anything

    "It's the man with the stick!"

    Kind regards, always,

    Jim.

    Figure 66.jpg
     
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  16. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

  17. Red Goblin

    Red Goblin Senior Member

    Jogging memories, now, am I ?

    2 more of Rowe's failings:
    • Fig. 66 caption as posted by Jim - "demonstrating" (implying Winnie teaching brickie his own trade) may better read "learning" in line with IWM's blurb essentially stating, "Churchill helps to build a pillbox". The whole shot was obviously 'staged' as propaganda even so though I doubt its ability to convince anyone that Winnie was a master mason. I'm too much of a political dunce, though, to know whether it was more a metaphor for Teddy Roosevelt's Big Stick ideology (of which WW2Talk policy thankfully forbids discussion BTW).
    • Ignoring Dad's Army as well as Wikipedia - no mention of diversionary anti-tank tactic as presented by John Laurie in s2e4 - this from its subtitles tagged Mainwaring & Frazer:
      M: In the absence of the crossbow, let's see Frazer's anti-tank device.
      F: Aye !
      -- Well, sir, this is the road.
      -- I place a row of plates, upside down, in a line, right along it, so.
      M: It's an anti-tank device ?
      F: Aye.
      M: Dinner plates ?
      F: Dinner plates.
      M: Please continue.
      F: The enemy tank comes along.
      -- He sees the line of plates in his path.
      -- He disnae know what they are.
      -- He stops and gets out to have a look.
      -- Meantime, we are hiding behind cover.
      -- As soon as he gets out his tank, we let him have it - bam !
      -- What do you think ?
      M: Not bad at all.
      My dad, who was an HG instructor, verbally confirmed the veracity of this comically-daft theory to me with these elaborations:
      1. Dirt-disguising plates just enough to warrant closer inspection
      2. Sticky-bombing track to cripple tank manoeuvres under HG attack
      But Perry & Croft sadly bent the truth for laughs frequently enough for their younger audience members to dismiss it all as fantasy. I seem to remember earlier episodes including WW2 footage to underline its veracity but such monochrome content was presumably ditched as too jarring when series 3 switched to colour - OK for documentaries but not mainstream light entertainment.
    And, finally back to Blacker bombards, guess what else I found that seems to have escaped Rowe's attention at IWM - "Blacker bombard" portability outnumbering his sole figure 6:1 vs. "spigot mortar" returning a contrary balance to suggest his mistake there was to limit his search to the more generic term. Nor does the lack of above-ground pedestal results for either search speak well for the comprehensiveness of their WW2 photo collection.
     
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