Unarmed, unequipped and untrained: Citizen spies outwit occupying armies

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

On March 22, 2022, Russian forces captured Kherson in southern Ukraine, giving rise to a spontaneous and loosely organized citizen spy ring that would play a crucial role in ending the port city’s brutal occupation in just eight months.

Rooted out of a café at the centre of the city, partisans gathered grassroots intelligence from rooftops, roadsides, security cameras and farm fields, the latter where they pretended to tend livestock while recording the movements of Russian formations.

Battle of the St. Lawrence: U-boats Attack

Wikipedia

Port Arthur earns its U-boat bounty

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

Winston Churchill decided the Royal Navy’s Second World War corvettes should be named after flowers. The idea that a notorious U-boat would be drowned by a vessel with a plant moniker was appealing to him.

The Royal Canadian Navy took a different tack, choosing to name its corvettes after towns and cities, symbolically linking Canadians across the country to the war effort.