Re: Q-ships Was: Re: Naming this child (little Audi content)

[Robert Myers <rmyers@inetone.net>]

Agreed, Geoff, the term has been around for a long time and has been used
in many instances and many different flavors since it was first coined.
I'm not sure of its first recorded use but it has been around for at least
200 to perhaps 300 years.  Q-ships were used against those pesky rebel
privateers back during the 1770's when the colonists were revolting.  :-)  

What's that?  Some say we are still revolting?  :-)  I guess some things
never change.  :-)

At 09:46 AM 6/17/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Geoff Jenkins wrote:
>
>> I may be wrong (happens frequently), but as far as I recall, it was
>> during World War I, not "the high rolling days of piracy" that the
>> term
>> Q-ship (if not the concept) came into fashion.
>>
>> German submarines of that vintage preferred to deal with merchant
>> ships
>> on the surface, with gunfire (saved scarce torpedoes), but dealt with
>> armed ships from beneath the waves. The Q-ships were thus aimed to be
>> externally innocuous, but able to deal with a sub. The first effective
>>
>> one was, as I recall, a converted trawler named the Lyon, circa 1915.
>> They were later used quite extensively, but only until Germany engaged
>>
>> in unrestricted submarine warfare, at which point they retained very
>> little value.
>>
>> The term Q-ship, unfortunately for those of us who use it to refer to
>> our cars, was almost never used for the infinitely more glamorous
>> merchant raiders modified from fast commercial vessels. The actual
>> Q-ships were more of a defensive decoy than an aggressive hunter.
>>
>> Briefly, the US Army Air Force experimented with a similar idea (and
>> the
>> same name) in WWII, using extremely heavily armed B17s. The idea never
>>
>> took off. No pun intended. :-)
>>
>> Geoff
>

___
   Bob
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