hlg wrote:

"The Sentinel" <wes5502446@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1116409446.101141.310920@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

rem460@aol.com wrote:

SECRET PURPOSE OF 1982 FALKLANDS WAR; [includes IN-VISIBILITY
     Technology and the DETONATION of a Russian NEUTRON BOMB.]

Dr. Beter AUDIO LETTER #74 of 80

Digitized into ASCII by Jon Volkoff, mail address

eidetics@cerf.net

The original Spanish Armada 400
years ago was renowned as a seemingly invincible fighting force,
but it came to grief in a naval disaster so complete that it
changed the course of history

No, it didn't.  The Armada of 1588 (which was never called

"invincible"

by the Spaniards-- this was a later invention of English

historians)

I believe it was sometimes referred to as the "Most Happy" (or

perhaps "Most

fortunate") Armada, before the event, but by priests and almoners in

their

oxymoronic role as "morale officers".

Yes.  "Most fortunate Armada" is the designation I've read most often,
though the exact term-- "fortunate," "happy," "blessed" (though never
"invincible") may depend on one's choice of translation.

met English ships in what turned out to be just an early battle in

a

long war between England and Spain, and the Spanish defeated the
English in naval battles in 1589, 1591, 1595, and 1597 after the
Armada.  An English Armada sent to invade Spain and Spanish-ruled
Portugal in 1589 was crushed as badly as the Spanish Armada had

been,

without the help of an Atlantic storm

It lost no ships, but lost between 8000 and 11000 men through

sickness, and

failed assaults on the citadel of Coruna and on Lisbon.

Exactly.  The losses among the English sailors (combined with damage to
quite a few ships in a smaller confrontation and storm off Portugal,
though without any ships sunk) was extremely expensive to the
Anglo-Dutch backers of the expedition and hindered all manner of
further operations.  Mainly, though, poor Drake was scorned by an
English spy who'd surveyed Santander and noted that the Spanish ships
were almost unguarded.  I don't recall the exact quote of the spy, but
it was something along the lines of "Had Drake merely arrived at the
intended port, he could have set fire to the King of Spain's entire
navy, without a hint of resistance."

RB Wernham also indicated that the English were so poorly supplied (and
exhausted) that, upon arriving at Coruna, they helped themselves to the
casks of excellent Iberian wine stored throughout the city, so much so
that they were too drunk (or hung over) to do much fighting the next
day, and dropped like flies in the Mediterranean heat.  Now *that's* a
stylish way to defeat an enemy (even if the Spaniards obviously hadn't
exactly planned on that particular strategy)-- get them totally
plastered on your fine spirits.  Hey, at least a good fraction of the
English soldiers must have died happy.

The only notable English victory after 1588 was a second raid on

Cadiz in

1596, commanded by Howard. For once, loot wasn't the objective, and

as a

result, Howard achieved a spectacular success.

Right.  This was really the one instance when Essex, also, was able to
shine (prior to his disastrous expedition against O'Neill in Ireland.)
Although again, according to Wernham, the English were supposed to
seize the Spanish treasure and tow it back to England (in part to pay
the expenses of the Anglo-Irish War), and the Spaniards then did to the
English something like what Kutuzov did to Napoleon-- burning the
treasure fleet so that their enemies would not be able to seize any of
the goods.

(BTW-- that Anglo-Irish Nine Years' War was a *nasty* conflict.  Cyril
Falls and Richard Berleth have written good books on it.  The English
burned down so many fields in Ireland, under Mountjoy, that perhaps 1/3
to 1/2 of the Irish population perished.  That's worse than the Potato
Famine, and as much as the British are criticized for the Potato
Famine, they never deliberately burned or cut down Irish fields as in
the late 1500s.)

, and Spain (under Don Carlos de

Amesquita) even successfully invaded western England in 1595,

burning

down many villages in Cornwall before escaping.

With the greatest respect, a rather inadequate result for the

resources used

to prepare de Amesquita's expedition.

No-- remember, Amesquita's expedition was not one of the full-fledged
Armadas that Philip dispatched after 1588 (which were scattered by
storms and, in any case, were focused more on the Continent and Ireland
than on England itself).  Amesquita's expedition was an unexpected
bonus for Philip; Don Carlos de Amesquita had a force of a few hundred
soldiers and sailors and was basically doing reconnaissance off the
English coast, when Amesquita took advantage of surprisingly favorable
winds to hit a portion of England that he recognized as being poorly
defended.  Amesquita's troops were trained and well-armed, and his
rampage through Cornwall (including Penzance) hit quite a few targets
there very hard, in a broader sweep than e.g. what Drake had done in
Cadiz.  From a psy-ops perspective his invasion had the added advantage
of really terrorizing the English population enough that Elizabeth had
to devote more scarce resources to constant coastal defenses.  (This
was also a reason for the inflammation of hostilities in Ireland.)

England remained weak

and Spain remained dominant well into the 1600s; the Armada had

little

effect.

 The Armada was an invasion
fleet carrying thousands of crack fighting men to invade England.

No, that's totally wrong; where is this guy getting his

information?

The Armada was merely an escort.  It was designed to ferry the land
army of the Duke of Parma in the Netherlands; the Armada itself did

not

carry such a fighting force.

It carried just under 19000 soldiers. However, these were an integral

part

of the fighting strength of the warships and could not have been used

on

land, unless the Armada's vessels were safely anchored in port and

not

required for further service at sea.

Yes, precisely.  Parma's forces in the barges outside of the
Netherlands were the crack troops intended for the land fighting.
Philip's plans for a rendezvous with Parma were just too unworkable to
really work without quite a few things going right-- without a port to
meet with Parma, they had to anchor offshore and thus make themselves
vulnerable.  If anything, Philip may have made the whole scheme more
feasible by sending a smaller Armada (which may have encountered less
difficulty finding an accommodating port) to escort Parma.  They would
have only had to provide a shield against the Dutch Sea Beggars to
provide the escort.

They were met by the daring sea dogs of Sir Francis Drake.  Drake
and his small, fast ships turned the tables on the Spanish Armada
by changing the rules of battle.  The English fleet was equipped
with new longer-range guns, and it stayed upwind and out of
reach.  From there the English pounded, smashed, and shattered
the big ships of the mighty Armada.

Um, no, they absolutely did not.  Drake and his forces did damage a

few

of Spain's weaker ships but did not sink a single one.  Drake's
fireships did lead Medina Sidonia to cut anchor (no port in France

or

the Netherlands was large enough for the Armada to dock), and the
long-range guns of Drake and Howard of Effingham did manage to

cause

some damage at Gravelines, but the Armada as a fighting force was

still

quite intact, with all its ships, even after the confrontation.  In
fact, there really was very little battle between the English and
Spanish at all, even at Gravelines.

Some slight quibbles here. During the course of the fighting the

Spanish

lost:

<snip useful information on specific vessels>

This is a total of six ships lost in action, though only two (three

if the

San Lorenzo is counted) as a result of hostile fire.

Thanks for the detailed info-- IIRC from the Fernandez-Armesto book,
those ships were mostly lost prior to Gravelines in the skirmishes and,
as you say, were generally lost for reasons outside of any exchange of
fire itself.  It's interesting that the Armada is sometimes erroneously
presented as being involved in a major sea battle, a "16th-century
Midway," when in fact all the confrontations together (even Gravelines)
barely constituted a skirmish, nowhere near the level of intensity of
e.g. Lepanto in 1571.  Little exchange of fire overall and not much
fighting whatsoever, owing in no small part to the fact that Medina
Sidonia knew he wouldn't be able to rendezvous with Parma once the
anchors were cut.

There was some naval historian who was discussing the most intense
naval battles going all the way back to Salamis and Actium, and he
didn't even put the Armada in the top 25.  (He did, IIRC, put Lepanto
way up there in the top 10 somewhere-- imagine if the Turks had taken
control of the Mediterranean there!)  He basically said the Armada
battle itself wasn't even as impressive as the Battle of Lake Erie in
the War of 1812, just a minor exchange of fire without much effect on
either side.  (Even many of the English sailors were grousing after
Gravelines about the wasted effort.)

With regard to your comment about long-range-guns at Gravelines: the

English

squadron most heavily engaged on that day was the Straits squadron

under

noble amateur Sir Edward Seymour, and experienced seaman William

Wynter.

This squadron had been keeping an (unnecessary) eye on Parma and had

not yet

been engaged. As a result, they were keen to get stuck in, had plenty

of

ammunition and had not learned the caution which even Drake and

Frobisher

had been forced to adopt after July 21st. In addition, many of the

Spanish

and Portuguese fighting ships (as opposed to the crowd of converted
merchies, which spent most of the day at Gravelines far to leeward)

were

very low on ammunition for their guns and unable to beat the enemy

off.

Seymour's ships seem to have got in close, certainly within arquebus-

or

even pistol-shot, and did a lot of damage before Armada could regain

its

formation.

That's interesting.  I'd known a few of the English ships had engaged
Medina Sidonia's fleet in close, but I didn't know about Seymour in
particular, or the circumstances in which he clashed with the fleet.

When it was all over, barely
half the Spanish fleet was left to limp back to port.

This has to be the most ridiculously inaccurate description of the
Armada confrontation on record.  Drake and Howard's forces did very
little to the Spanish fleet; all of the Spanish ships that were

lost in

the Armada (less than half the force), were sunken in the September
Atlantic storm that came as Medina Sidonia guided the Spanish fleet
around the coasts of Scotland and Ireland after he realized it was

too

logistically difficult to rendezvous with the Duke of Parma.  That

this

guy fails to even mention the storm displays an abysmal ignorance

of

the event.

Drake's
defeat of the Spanish Armada was a shock to the world.  It opened
the door for England under Queen Elizabeth I to start its
expansion into a truly global empire.

No, it didn't-- see above.  Spain defeated England in all the naval
battles of the Anglo-Spanish War following the Armada, even

managing to

kill both Drake and Sir John Hawkins in a disastrous English naval
expedition against Central America in 1595.

Drake actually died of dysentery, but yes, the expedition was a

complete

failure.

As did Hawkins, IIRC.  Ugh, dysentery-- what a crummy way to go,
especially for two fighting sailors with such distinction.  In fact,
Fernandez-Armesto remarked with consternation at how the English
managed to lose so many good soldiers and sailors to infectious
diseases.  Something like 7,000 of the English troops fighting the
Armada died of typhus and dysentery, while at least half of the English
soldiers in the 1589 Drake-Norris expedition to Spain and Portugal also
died of illness.  Thousands of soldiers in Essex's 1599 attack on
O'Neill perished from disease, while the English attack force on the
Azores in 1597 was also hard-hit by some epidemic.

Fernandez-Armesto suggested that the heavy English mortality from
disease was due to inadequate supplies, although to be fair, I think
that if anything this pattern was more the exception than the rule for
wars before, say, the 19th century, with more troops being killed by
disease than hostile fire.  (In fact, part of the Spanish strategy in
1595 was to isolate Drake and Hawkins from their supplies and
victuals.)  Some other examples, with *enormous* historical
consequences:  The Cortez and Pizarro invasions of the Aztec and Inca
empires, obviously.  Also, the death of the Mongal khan Mongke in 1259,
from dysentery, while fighting the Chinese.  Because of Mongke's
premature death, Hulegu Khan (who'd sacked Baghdad to the West, and was
moving on the Mamluks in Egypt) was trapped in a succession dispute
with his Muslim cousin Berke of the Golden Horde, which provided Qutuz,
Baybars, and the Mamluks with an opening to utterly demolish the
Mongols at Ayn-Jalut and take back Syria.  (The Mongols may well have
crushed Islam as a political force otherwise, maybe even moved on to
Europe after taking Cairo.)

Also, even after 1800 we see disease having a big impact.  Napoleon's
failure to take Haiti from Toussaint L'Ouverture in 1802 in large part
convinced him to sell the Louisiana Territory to Thomas Jefferson, and
the French failed in Haiti in part because of massive epidemic disease
outbreaks (e.g. yellow fever).  Napoleon didn't see the point in
maintaining the Louisiana Territory as a breadbasket without the
Haitian sugar plantations to supply.  (Though Napoleon may have been
rather short-sighted here.)  Thus the Louisiana Purchase-- with massive
world historical consequences-- resulted in no small part from an
epidemic among invading French.  In World War I, too, the vast majority
of American soldiers in Europe lost their lives due to the Spanish
influenza pandemic, not from hostile fire itself.

 In fact it was precisely

because of English failure in the war that England was totally

*unable*

to start colonization until the 1600s.  Remember, the first

permanent

English overseas colony was Jamestown, founded by the Stuart

monarchy

in 1607-- *after* peace had been made with Spain, by the Treaty of
London in 1604.  The war with Spain even expanded to Ireland in

1594

with the bloody rebellions of O'Donnell and O'Neill, leading to a

messy

and financially disastrous guerrilla war that practically

bankrupted

the English treasury.  (This is where the phrase "sink of the

treasure

of England"-- referring to Ireland-- derives from.)  There was
absolutely no English colonial expansion during the Elizabethan

period,

in large part because of Spanish victories after 1588 and the

expensive

Irish War.  Read e.g. the books on the period by Edward Cheyney and

RB

Wernham for more information.

English naval strategy was completely warped after 1588 by the dream

of

capturing a Spanish flota (the annual fleet carrying treasure and

precious

metal from the New World.) Success in this venture would have made

the

English captains and admirals fabulously rich, but would not have

ended the

war or seriously affected Spanish fighting power.

Yes, a classic problem-- the promise of short-term riches and plunder
blinding the generals to grand strategy.  Certainly not the only
instance in which this occurred.!

   Today, 400 years later, history seems to have come full
circle.  Queen Elizabeth II is witnessing the dismantling of the
world empire whose heyday began under Queen Elizabeth I,

Another laughably ridiculous statement, as noted above.  The heyday

of

the British Empire was during the Victorian period in the 1800s;

the

empire had not even begun during the Elizabethan period.  Following
Henry VII's sponsorship of the John Cabot expedition in 1496-7

(which

initated a fishing settlement and claimed Newfoundland and the

North

American fishing waters for the king), there were no more English
colonies whatsoever until 1607.

The defeat of
the Spanish Armada four centuries ago broke the back of Spain's
naval supremacy

No, it did not.  Spain was unquestionably the world's leading naval
power, and in control of the Atlantic sea lanes, well into the
mid-1600's, while England remained quite weak as a naval power.

When

Spain lost that distinction (due primarily to the Hapsburgs'

blundering

reliance on inflationary precious metal shipments from the

Americans,

which ruined Spain's economy), it was the Dutch who became the

leading

naval power and defeated the English in two naval Anglo-Dutch Wars

in

the late 1600's.  (The Dutch Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, like Don

Carlos

de Amesquita, even succeeded in invading England-- he sailed up the
Medway and basically torched the English ships and surrounding

towns.)

It's only with British victory in the French and Indian War, in

1763,

that the British truly come to rule the waves, and that the Royal

navy

truly becomes a formidable fighting force.  Prior to this, the
English/British Navy (England unified with Scotland at the start of

the

18th century) suffered quite a few defeats against foreign navies.

I would argue that the Royal Navy became a formidable fighting force

from

the early 1700's onwards. It nevertheless suffered  notable defeats

as late

as 1781, (Chesapeake Bay, which led to Lord Cornwallis's surrender at
Yorktown and the loss of the American colonies.)

That's probably true.  After de Ruyter's smackdown on the English
fleet, there was a major restructuring, with the organization and
technology in the early 1700s really making the Royal Navy into a
reliable military arm for both defense and attack.  I guess this really
became clear after the Seven Years' War, but I concur that the Royal
Navy was turned into a powerhouse in the decades before that.

Also, in addition to your example of Chesapeake Bay in 1781, another
British naval setback around the same time was in 1783, with the French
fleet under Captain Pierre Andre de Suffren de St. Tropez (allied with
Hyder Ali) at least stalemating British Admiral Edward Hughes, and at
least in some places getting the better of the Royal Navy.  The
practical result of this was that the French retook their colonies in
southern India (Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry) from the British, and held
them until the 1950s.  Thus a part of south India became a
French-dominated rather than British-dominated zone.  This is playing
out in an interesting way today, since India is expanding its
call-center outsourcing to the Francophone in addition to the
Anglophone world (as well as other languages-- many Indians are now
mastering German, Spanish, and Japanese), and Francophone Pondicherry
is basically the center of this.

There is some decently interesting information in the rest of the
article, but the details on the Spanish Armada are so ridiculously
inaccurate as to cast doubt on the whole article.