HMS Royal Oak was one of five British Revenge-class battleships built for the Royal Navy during the First World War. Launched on 17 November 1914, the ship first saw combat at the Battle of Jutland. On 14 October 1939, she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-47 while anchored at Scapa Flow in Orkney, Scotland; 835 were killed that night or died later of their wounds. The loss of the outdated ship—the first of the five Royal Navy battleships and battlecruisers sunk in the Second World War—did little to affect the numerical superiority enjoyed by the British navy and its allies, but the sinking had a considerable effect on wartime morale. Günther Prien, the U-boat commander, became the first German submarine officer to be awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. Demonstrating that the German navy was capable of bringing the war to British home waters, the raid resulted in rapid changes to dockland security and the construction of the Churchill Barriers around Scapa Flow.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Royal_Oak_%2808%29> _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 1894: H. H. Holmes, one of the first modern serial killers, was arrested in Boston after having killed at least nine people. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Holmes> 1978: The television show Star Wars Holiday Special was broadcast in the United States and became notorious for its extremely negative reception. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Holiday_Special> 2009: Administrators at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit discovered that their servers had been hacked and thousands of emails and files on climate change had been stolen. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy> _____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day: ulp: 1. The sound of a person gulping in fear. [...] 2. (computer science, mathematics) The value that the least significant digit of a floating-point number represents, used as a measure of accuracy in numeric calculations. <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ulp> ___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day: Workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal — to say nothing of their share of the other social benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as education and artistic gratification. --Voltairine de Cleyre <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltairine_de_Cleyre> _______________________________________________ Wikipedia Daily Article mailing list. To unsubscribe, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/daily-article-l Questions or comments? Contact [email protected]
