• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Cont: The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-opened Part IV

Status
Not open for further replies.
Vixen said:
What did he do, others didn't do? Y69 also fell in the water. Was he any less heroic?

JAIC 7.5.5


Isn't recovering bodies also an act of deep compassion?
Click to expand...

The very section you quote answers that question.

Read the sub-section about Y 74. What does it describe the Y 64 rescue man as doing that the Y 69 rescue man does not? That might clear things up for you.
 
Vixen said:
Those are your words not mine.
Click to expand...
Now I'm confused.

Are you or are you not speculating that Svensson was given his medal as compensation for keeping quiet about the people he rescued?

If the answer is yes, then the question stands - why weren't his colleagues similarly compensated for keeping quiet?

If the answer is no, then what exactly are you saying about the reason Svensson was given his medal?
 
JesseCuster said:
Now I'm confused.

Are you or are you not speculating that Svensson was given his medal as compensation for keeping quiet about the people he rescued?

If the answer is yes, then the question stands - why weren't his colleagues similarly compensated for keeping quiet?

If the answer is no, then what exactly are you saying about the reason Svensson was given his medal?
Click to expand...

For crying out loud. If a military person carries out a mission that is 'Top Secret' he or she can still be given a medal for that secret mission. What is hard to understand?
 
Vixen said:
For crying out loud. If a military person carries out a mission that is 'Top Secret' he or she can still be given a medal for that secret mission. What is hard to understand?
Click to expand...
But you're not claiming that he was merely given a medal for a mission that was classified.

You're claiming that he, and he alone, was given a medal as compensation for keeping quiet about the classified mission and that the authorities lied about the reason for giving him the medal. That's a very different scenario than giving someone a medal for heroics performed during classified military work.

But no-one else involved in the same secret mission was given medals as compensation for keeping quiet about the same secret mission. Why?
 
Vixen said:
Ask yourself why that has been given so much space.
Click to expand...

I suspect it is because the actions of Y 74 were particularly involved.

Since you are obviously familiar with the contents, why don't you tell me how many people it credits the Y 64 rescue man as having rescued while aboard Y 74.

Does it describe the Y 69 rescue man as doing something similar?
 
JesseCuster said:
But you're not claiming that he was merely given a medal for a mission that was classified.

You're claiming that he, and he alone, was given a medal as compensation for keeping quiet about the classified mission and that the authorities lied about the reason for giving him the medal. That's a very different scenario than giving someone a medal for heroics performed during classified military work.

But no-one else involved in the same secret mission was given medals as compensation for keeping quiet about the same secret mission. Why?
Click to expand...

Just one of the many bits of silliness at play here (and I think "at play" may be more appropriate in this case than "in play") is the idea that Swedish military officers need to be bribed to keep their nation's secrets. I keep thinking of a scenario where "they" end up having to have Svensson die in a tragic accident because he kept coming back for more medals to keep quiet.
 
Last edited:
Reformed Offlian said:
I keep thinking of a scenario where "they" end up having to have Svensson die in a tragic accident because he kept coming back for more medals to keep quiet.
Click to expand...
No problem. Vixen has told us that if the other crew members stuck their faces in superior's faces and screamed for medals (her scenario, not mine!) they'd just be court martialled. Problem solved.

Doesn't answer the actual question being levelled at Vixen though, why compensate only one person on the mission, who apparently did nothing above and beyond what anyone else did, with a medal for keeping quiet while others required threatening with court martials?
 
Vixen said:
If everybody gets a distinction it is no longer a distinction.
Click to expand...

But why give him a distinction and not the others?
If I had been the pilot in charge and got passed over for the sweetener I wouldn't have been very happy .
 
Vixen said:
The Rockwater guys - who went in two months after the Navy - managed to describe a guy in a red jacket and a guy with a tattoo on his hand which did not match any of the senior officers.
Click to expand...

How do you know they didn't match? Neither you or the divers know what the officers looked like.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
But the point is they worked from a winch they didn't just jump in to the water. They had a second rescue man aboard to speed operations.

Also consider that OH-HVG along with OH-HVD it were dedicated SAR helicopters with a crews trained in recovery from the sea.
Similarly the Swedish 'Q' helicopters were dedicated SAR helicopters whereas the 'Y' helicopters were Anti Submarine helicopters pressed in to service with crews specialising in AS warfare, not SAR.

Only two landings were made aboard ships, one each by OH-HVG and OH-HVD but it proved too rough to continue with this and survivors had to be taken directly ashore.

OH-HVG was the first helicopter there, it was from Finland. Alerted at 01:35, it took off at 02:30 and arrived at the scene at 03:05. It was on one hour standby.

It did not save 44 survivors in one hour. That was the total number saved in three flights between the first at 03:05 and the end of the final flight at 12:30. Most were saved on the second flight between 0515 hrs to 0915 when there was enough light to see survivors in the water.

It made a fourth flight with a new crew between 16:00 and 19:15 only bodies were recovered.
Click to expand...


Wait?!!! You mean the Finns were not as heroic, super-human, and vastly superior & better trained than their Swedish counterparts..... as Vixen would have had us believe?!!!!

Well cover me in eggs and flour and bake me for 40 minutes! I'm shocked!
 
Mojo said:
I’ve had a look at several of those, both from during the battle of Stalingrad and the rather later one you posted an image of. They all seem to be round-ups of what the German media were saying, with no sign of material coming from eavesdropping on German soldiers, or indeed any individual Germans.

They don’t support your claim.
Click to expand...


Exactly. They were almost certainly from people with an affinity to the allies (whether those people were German nationals or were third-country nationals living in Germany), who were channelling back to the UK what the German media were telling the German people - then contrasting this with what we knew to be closer to the truth.

Vixen's fairytale of derring-do, involving British secret agents embedded within German front-line forces, is arrant nonsense in so many ways. But it's sadly (and yet comically, at the same time) emblematic of Vixen's overall approach to research and honesty in this thread.
 
Vixen said:
The answer is obvious, or does it need twelve feet flashing lights?

What Svensson did in supposed collaboration with Y64, Y74 and Y69, was not the reason for the highest honour.
Click to expand...


Edited by Agatha: 
Edited to remove breach of rule 0


ETA: You still appear - hilariously - unable to comprehend that Y64, Y74 and Y69 were not people. They were helicopters (or, more accurately, helicopter identifiers).
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Reformed Offlian said:
I'm not sure I know what you mean by that. You made that comment before when I mentioned this Wiki page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_of_record

which has nothing to do with Eriksson at all. I comment on the Aftonbladet extract to point out that even your own sources contradict your timeline. It reports that there were eight survivors and one dead body in the helicopter that left Svensson in the water, and that it took those to Huddinge. This contradicts the official timeline as well as your own; in your timeline those survivors were taken to Huddinge on an earlier trip. You don't even pay attention to your own preferred sources.

None of this addresses the main issue: You don't actually know anything about Aftonbadet's reporting other than the snippets that Bjorkman -a crank with an obvious axe to grind, a beef with the shipping industry that never granted him the success he felt he deserved, and a track record of misrepresenting what others have said -has chosen to show you. You don't know what context or qualification those ellipses hide, nor do you know whether there were errata or updates published on subsequent days. And you don't know what other, more prestigious newspapers, reported on the same event. And it hasn't occurred to you that this is a problem.
Click to expand...


Actually, this particular piece of dissembling from Vixen does cause me problems. It's one thing for her to be so hopelessly inept at any of the required scientific (and other) disciplines that her attempts at analysis and deduction are beyond-laughable in their wrongness. I don't even mind when she doubles down on wrong in a pitiful attempt to avoid admitting any form of mistake.

But.... when comes to this whole business, I start to get a little annoyed. When someone vehemently insists that she's totally decoupled from a nutter conspiracy theorist, and when that same someone posts what purport to be her own presentation of contemporaneous newspaper articles.... but then it turns out that this person has actually been supping at the table of this nutter conspiracy theorist all along, and presenting that CTer's massaged versions of newspaper reports as her own....

....well that smacks to me of conspicuous intellectual dishonesty of a particularly invidious kind, over a pretty sustained period. Frankly, Vixen's "opinions" (and I use inverted commas because they're not really her opinions - they're that nutter Bjorkman's) have no place in a reasonable debate among reasonable people.
 
Vixen said:
If you have ever researched history you will have discovered they are an excellent source. When researching WWII, I found no shortage of books on the topic. Unfortunately, despite having attractive covers and five-star write ups, I found it impossible to get beyond page 18 of most of them as they all had the same turgid style of listing events like a school textbook. So I visited the British Newspaper library. The daily on-the-spot TIMES newspaper report on the Battle of Stalingrad, together with maps and charts brought it to life for me. They even had reporters on the German front line, who must have been British secret agents to have infiltrated it in the first place.
Click to expand...

Vixen said:
I still have the news clippings, actually.
Click to expand...

Vixen said:
I don't want to go off topic, but I certainly do have one piece where the TIMES reporter reports back on what the ordinary German soldiers are saying about the British, as per eavesdropping.
Click to expand...

Vixen said:
I will not be going through my archives to satisfy your frivolous request.
Click to expand...

Vixen said:
There was a regular column called 'through German eyes'. One example is as attached.

As you can glean, newspapers then were excellent sources of research.
Click to expand...


OK, I’ve now gone through all the ‘Through German Eyes’ columns contemporary with the battle of Stalingrad (and up to about a month after the surrender), and all the later ones that mention Stalingrad. All are round-ups of the German (and sometimes other countries) media, reports of speeches by the German leadership, etc.

None of them contains comment from “ordinary German soldiers”, or supports your claim of Times reporters going undercover as spies embedded in the German army.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom