Monday, 25th June, 1945

This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.

From the Times:

Comments

[Erik Lund]

Unfortunately, David Brown is dead, so he can't pop up here to explain that, somehow, it really didn't happen that way. Maybe some random internitwit will carry on the tradition. http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-030.htm

(Note that it is much easier to prove claims if you're allowed to make things up.)

[Alan Allport]

Is this the David Brown you're referring to, Erik?

Can you explain the backstory here? I'm not familiar with it.

[Erik Lund]

Uhm, probably not. Pardon my haste in scrounging up linkage, but more like this: http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=983647
Brown was a great naval architect at the peak of the Cold War who, in retirement, turned to naval history of the design kind. He's widely published, authoritative, but, unfortunately, a little bit of an advocate at the expense of the facts, notably of his notion that naval armour was a waste of displacement.
The rather silly article I linked to uses Brown at his most disingenuous, and comes up rather often in these discussions.

And for what small measure of relevance I can bring to all of this, my own sense of the demobilisation period, perhaps seen through hindsight, is a new deployment of a political meme: that British ought to have a national inferiority complex vis-a-vis the United States in politics. Carrier operations in the Pacific, because they seem to impeach the Royal Navy, are a key aspect of the argument.
Gotta go to work, at the expense of all coherence.