New book about Admiral Byng’s execution
In Candide, Voltaire famously wrote that from time to time, the British shoot an admiral “pour encourager les autres.” This quip referenced the court-martial and execution of Admiral John Byng, who was executed by a firing squad at Portsmouth harbor in 1757. He was court-martialed and condemned for abandoning Minorca to the French.
A new book has been published called Admiral Byng: His Rise and Execution, available from Amazon here. The author, Chris Ware, is a former curator of Britain’s National Maritime Museum.
The odds of me making Santa’s “nice” list this year seem quite long, so I just ordered a copy for myself.
And well he should have been executed for abandoning anything to the French. Zut alors! And the Admiral’s last words: “Crikey!”
Didn’t know the chap. After my time, I’m afraid.
The joke so common in the American vernacular, especially prevalent in the U.S. military, about the purported French ease of surrender, should be challenged.
Were U.S. forces similarly situated in France at various times in European history, surrender would have been equally likely. The Atlantic Ocean creates a decent distance for us to affect our air of superiority.
In World War I, France lost 1,397,800 soldiers and 300,000 civilians. In World War II, France lost 217,600 soldiers and 267,000 civilians. These are staggering numbers.
Now that the U.S. military has banished the term “victory” from our national discourse, perhaps the joke is on us.
Socrates, I tried looking up french vitcories and I got this:
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/victories.html
The joke of “the purported French ease of surrender” is based off the fact that the French surrender all the time. They are losers, and only have a handful of notable military victories:
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/france.html
Cossio,
Does Yorktown count as a French victory? I hope they at least get credit for a “half-sack,” in NFL terminology.
Also, Napoleon revolutionized warfare and dominated Europe.
OK, I’m not trying to raise the Tri-Color and sing “La Marseillaise.” All I am posing is this hypothetical. Think of Pearl Harbor and then imagine American troops stationed in France at the outset of WWII. Surrender would have been very probable.
Well, Socrates, to be fair, Cossio really does seem to have done his research here. I read that Doris Kearns Goodwin lists albinoblacksheep.com as the most authoritative source on history.
I find it interesting that we Americans so easily forget the French assist in the revolutionary war.
We reveal ourselves to be the insecure little brothers that we are, when we consistently challenge them in this very facile and intellectually vapid manner. It smacks of cultural inferiority complex.
In any event – have you been to Minorca? It’s also vapid, lacking in anything worth holding onto anyhow.
“cultural inferiority complex” ?
Nah. It’s just funny.
Funny. Not the first time an Anon chided me on my authoritive sources, a logical fallacy to be sure.
Because 2 + 2 = 4 no matter who says it. Whether it is in a Math Book or whether a four-year old tells you, it’s the same thing.
So if whatever.com tells you that the French lost so many wars, then are commiting a logical fallacy by not refuting those loses by making Ad hom attacks on the .com website?
But if a four-year-old writes down his version of history, it doesn’t necessarily=4.
The French have been victorious. They won the French Revolution did they not?
On a serious note, France was a major imperialist power throughout most of the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries. Much of Western Africa still speaks French. The colonization of French Indochina was no small feat either. So, while there may not be much for Francophiles to cheer about in the twentieth century, we should not forget that she was once a formidable and mighty empire, much like Spain, much like Britain, much like Portugal, much like us?