One of the major improvements to the Soviet armed forces that came out of the Winter War was the replacement of Kliment Voroshilov by Semyon Timoshenko as People’s Commissar for Defence. Voroshilov had helped Stalin carry out the Great Purge by denouncing some of his military colleagues, and (as I recall) he reversed some of the army reforms that his predecessors had carried out. He also bungled the opening phases of the Winter War, and was eventually turfed out in favour of the more competent Timoshenko. After the Soviets won in Finland, Timoshenko set about modernizing the Red Army.
HMS Hood's Bell On Display
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Here’s something interesting which happened last month (but which I hadn’t heard about until today) that’s connected to two historic naval events that happened 75 and 100 years ago respectively (the sinking of HMS Hood on May 24, 1941 and the Battle of Jutland on May 31, 1916): the National Museum Royal Navy unveiled the ship’s bell from the battlecruiser HMS Hood. The Jutland connection is that the Hood was (in what prove to be a tragicaly ironic twist of fate) named after Rear Admiral Sir Horace Hood, whose battlecruiser HMS Invincible blew up at Jutland almost identically to the way in which HMS Hood would be destroyed in WWII. Hood’s bell was recoved in 2015 with help of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allan, whose diversified interests include marine archaeology; earlier that same year, he located the wreck of the Japanese superbattleship Musashi. (With a net worth of around 18 billion dollars, he has a somewhat greater capacity than the average person to pursue his chosen hobbies. One can only imagine what kind of an A&A gaming room he could build for himself if he were so inclined.)
http://www.nmrn.org.uk/news-events/nmrn-blog/hood-bell-unveiling
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Thanks for an interesting reference. I have to small corrections to offer:
- it’s “Paul Allen”, not “Paul Allan”
- in spite of the inscription on the bell, HMS Hood was not named after Sir Horace Hood, but after his ancestor Sir Samuel Hood
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Thanks for the corrected information. It’s odd how many H-names are connected to this story: the Samuel Hood you mentioned (who served with Nelson, whose first name was Horatio), plus Horace Hood (killed at Jutland), plus the namesake battlecruiser Hood (sunk in 1941) under the command of Vice-Admiral Holland.
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Thank you both for the story and adjustment. Missed it, when first posted.
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