From war in the ice to the Israeli Navy via a lot of vile crap

After meeting Bob from Brockley I resolved to finish off at long last the tale of the larger than life character Red Cushing by dealing with his time as a prospective German spy. It didn't last and he ended up in Sachsenhausen where he was a witness to the last days of the life of Yakov Stalin. Alas and Alack, I cannot put my hands on the books I need, Hiho....

That said it's interesting what you can come across on the internet. Starting off with Archibald Maule Ramsay, a ferocious anti semite who held the dubious distinction of being the only MP to be interned during WWII, proceeding through a number of Holocaust revisionist scumbags I end up at the piece of human shit that goes by the name of Ernst Zundel. I was not aware that he started his odious "literary"career peddling crap about Nazi saucers and Antarctic bases.

It's amazing how the German Neuschwabenland expedition just before the war, an American exercise (Operation High Jump) just after the war, a tiny British military expedition to Antarctica during in 1943 and the tardy surrender of a few U boats can form the bedrock of such nonsense as the existence of Nazi bases on that (almost but not completely) icy continent.

However, let me digress onto something truly fascinating and move from the South Pole and Holocaust denying vermin to the North and there was a real little war fought on the ice and on the icy seas. I didn't know until today that the vessel you see below was the first American warship (of sorts) to capture a (soon to be) enemy vessel in WWII



The Northland was a coastguard cutter, launched in 1927 designed specifically for arctic operation. In 1941 the US took over Greenland. The same month the Northland set out on a two month cruise to assist in the South Greenland Survey Expedition. It was then transferred to the newly formed Northeast Greenland Patrol.

On 12 September the Northland sighted the Norwegian sealer Buskoe 12 September and sent a boarding party to investigate. Buskoe, which was suspected of sending weather reports and information on Allied shipping to the Germans, was taken to MacKenzie Bay in Greenland, becoming the first American naval capture of WWII(although of course before it formally entered the war).

The Buskoe's capture led to the discovery of a German radio station further up Greenland coast from Mackenzie Bay. The Northland sent a raiding party captured three Germans, with equipment and code, as well as plans for other radio stations in the far north. The Germans were treated as illegal immigrants....

Although built for colder conditions, the Northland ended its life in much further waters. After being sold for scrap in 1947 the Northland was renamed Medinat-HaYehudim and was used to transport Jewish refugees to Palestine (but that is a different subject and one that does not reflect on Britain with any credit at all). In 1948 she was renamed Eilat and along with two former Royal Canadian Navy corvettes and a passenger ship formed the nucleus of the infant Israeli Navy under its first commander, Paul Shulman.

I know I dwelt a little on some utter scumbags at the start but it is tuly amazing what you can come across starting in one place on the internet and seeing where takes you... In this case the destination was fascinating evn if the journey featured some real pieces of slime at the start...

Green Land

800 years or so ago Greenland was rather more temperate than it is now. For over 400 years there were Viking settlements which only died out with the onset of a mini ice age during the 15^th Century. It seems, however, that it was rather warmer in even earlier times. If it had not been warmer then it would not have been possible to retrieve the world's oldest existing DNA samples from under a mile-deep icecap.

In a report in today’s Independent, sediments from the bottom of a 2km (1.2 mile) ice core provided direct evidence that Greenland was covered in a dense forest less than a million years ago. Scientists have extracted fragments of DNA estimated at 450,000-900,000 years old from a rich variety of organisms. "We have shown for the first time that southern Greenland, which is hidden under 2km of ice, was once very different to the Greenland we see today. Back then, it was inhabited by a diverse array of conifer trees and insects," said Professor Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, who led the research team. "We have found grain, pine, yew and alder. These correspond to the landscapes we find in eastern Canada and in Swedish forests today... we can also ascertain the climate since each species has its own temperature requirements. The yew trees reveal that the temperature during the winter could not have been lower than minus 17C and the presence of other trees shows that summer temperatures were at least 10C," he said.

The study shows that the Greenland ice cap has existed continuously, in some form or other, for longer than previously supposed. Given that the last organisms to live there have been shown to be so ancient. This appears to. The study suggests the ice cap has been in place for at least 450,000 years.

Professor Willerslev said the findings indicate the ice sheet may be more stable than was thought; disproving the theory that Greenland had been ice-free around 125,000 years ago when the global climate was about 5C warmer than it is today. "This may have implications for how the ice sheets respond to global warming. We know that, in the last interglacial, sea levels rose by 5-6m, but this must have come from other sources, such as the Antarctic ice. I would anticipate that, as the earth warms from man-made climate change, these sources would still contribute to a rise in sea levels,"

Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta gave this view:”These findings allow us to make a more accurate environmental reconstruction of the time period from which these samples were taken. We've learnt that this part of the world was significantly warmer than most people thought... It could mean our current warming is the result of natural processes and human influences. We may be heading for bigger temperature increases than we thought."

Again fascinating stuff which appears to turn previous theories about Greenland on its head but as the scientists indicate, it does not provide ammunition for those who believe global warming is either a myth or simply a natural process.