On the night of December 7,1942 ten British commandos set off in five wood and canvas canoes from a British submarine in the Bay of Biscay off the coast of occupied France. Their intent was to paddle 75 miles up the Gironde estuary and attack and sink German ships with limpet mines in the harbor of Bordeaux. Only two of the ten commandos survived but they succeeded in sinking one ship and severely damaging four others, as well as disrupting port operations for months. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill believed the mission shortened the Second World War by six months.
Much has been written about the commandos who would become known as the “Cockleshell Heroes,” but apparently there are gaps inthe information about those who died in the raid. Quentin Rees has recently written Cockleshell Heroes – The Final Witness to answer the remaining questions about their fate. The book is available from Amazon UK. It has not yet been released in the US but can be pre-ordered from Amazon in the US. Thanks to Alaric Bond for passing the article along.
Rather than pressuring the Japanese to stop whaling, the vigilante violence of the 
As Shakespeare noted, “the course of true love never did run smooth.” That was literally the case when, in early October, Tokelaun teenager Filo Filo, with two of his friends, set off to visit a young lady on the neighboring Fakaofo atoll, some sixty miles away. The skiff ran out of fuel and the boys drifted for fifty days across nearly 1,000 miles of the Pacific ocean in the small aluminum dinghy before being rescued by a passing fishing vessel. Now the young lady whose face launched the stolen skiff has been revealed. She has been communicating with her young suitor by Facebook. Thanks to
An interesting if odd news item today:
The 
Several news agencies are reporting that more than 600 crewmembers are aboard ten vessels trapped in the ice in the Sea of Okhotsk.
A weird dissonance between two cruise stories struck me recently. On one hand, 