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The Olite Castle disaster, the sinking of the Spanish fleet in Cuba, the Wilhelm Gustloff catastrophe or the Struma disaster show the extreme cruelty of war at sea. But the violence is equally terrible on land: Europe is rearming now, a process with echoes of 90 years ago.
Civil War, last blows. In the last days of the Civil War, and when the Republic no longer had any chance of victory, the national army sent a powerful force to take control of the Cartagena naval base. Strategic and communication errors ended with the sinking of the Olite Castle in which 1,500 rebellious soldiers died. It is the deadliest shipwreck in the history of Spain.
What was lost in Cuba. A disaster of other characteristics was that of the fleet in Cuba sunk on July 3, 1898 by some technically very superior American ships. Teo Rubio has dived in the remains of the Spanish ships. “Admiral Cervera (head of the force) knew that he was going to disaster and dressed up,” he says. However, the soldier survived although the war ended up falling on the side of the United States.
Tragedy in the Black Sea. If large shipwrecks with military victims are already terrible, the tragedy is even greater when the victims are civilians. This is the case of the Struma, the ship that was sunk in the Black Sea by a Soviet torpedo in 1942 with 800 Jewish refugees on board. The responsibility was not only on the submarine, but also on the Turks and British who had prevented them from disembarking. It is another story of the Holocaust, of which there are fewer and fewer direct witnesses.
The mother of all shipwrecks. Just as happened with the Olite Castle, the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff took place in the last days of the Second World War and when the conflagration was already being considered for sentencing. And as with the Struma, the disaster was a consequence of Soviet torpedoes. 9,000 German refugees perished in the greatest maritime tragedy in history, much greater than other famous catastrophes such as the Titanic.
Around the world in 1896. New York, Paris, London, Jerusalem… are cities that were filmed in the early days of moving images, in 1896. Lost in time has digitized and colored those films that constitute a mosaic of life in the world almost 130 years ago.
In the footsteps of Alexander. That of Alexander the Great was an empire as large as it was ephemeral. This complete entry on the Desperta Ferro blog delves into the mystery of the last frontier that the Macedonian sovereign reached in his expansion. The news is confusing and the evidence is almost non-existent, but the investigation does not throw in the towel on the possibility of finding traces of his passage.
Rearms. There are parallels that make your hair stand on end. The context is this: Russia appears to be winning the Ukrainian war with an increasingly well-oiled army; a possible Trump victory in November would probably lead to the withdrawal of US military support to the Old Continent; and European countries have suffered decades of inattention to their defense. Consequently, now the word rearmament is making its rounds in the EU chancelleries, as Lluís Uría explains in his new Europe newsletter. Germany, for example, has announced the investment of 100 billion euros in the coming years to provide itself with a highly capable army. “Germany once again armed to the teeth,” Enric Juliana noted last week. Again, like 90 years ago.
The word rearmament brings disturbing memories to Europe, from the interwar times after the trauma of the first great conflagration of the 20th century. After the Great War, the European powers decreased their military investment, some due to financial needs – the victors – and others also due to the restrictions of Versailles – Germany. But already at the beginning of the 1930s, the United Kingdom resumed the arms path in the face of Japanese expansionism, with industrial defense programs that accelerated from 1934.
That date is not coincidental. The arrival of Nazism to power and its separation from the Versailles status quo resulted in a huge increase in investment in weapons and the reintroduction of compulsory military service in Germany. Although in Weimar times the country had already begun a process of shadow remilitarization, at the beginning of the 1930s its capabilities were limited. But by the end of the decade, German military strength had grown so large that it was in a position to overwhelm its neighbors. France had not been left behind either, especially after 1936.
It is obvious that the increase in military capabilities increases the possibility that they will be used and hence the concern caused by any arms race. But history is not mathematics. Also after the Second World War, a similar competition began between the United States and the USSR, which fortunately remained in the Cold War.
