Design 1047 was a series of plans for a class of Dutch battlecruisers prior to the Second World War. The ships were intended to counter a perceived threat posed by Imperial Japanese aggression to the Dutch colonies in the East Indies. The 1047s were shaped by the need to be able to fight their way though a fleet composed of heavy and light cruisers, and smaller destroyers. It was hoped that this capability would allow the battlecruisers to act as a fleet in being. A preliminary plan was drawn up without foreign assistance, but as the Royal Netherlands Navy had not previously designed a modern capital ship, and the only information available on modern designs came from public literature and editions of Jane's Fighting Ships, it was missing many of the post-First World War advances in warship technology. With assistance from Germany, a new design was formulated by February 1940. A visit to Italy prompted a rethink of the internal subdivision, which led to a set of drawings dated 19 April 1940. This is the last known design produced prior to Germany's invasion and occupation of the Netherlands. The ships were never constructed.

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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1012:

After refusing to allow himself to be ransomed for his freedom by his Viking captors, Alphege was beaten to death by a mob in Greenwich, now a suburb of London, the first Archbishop of Canterbury to die a violent death. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86lfheah_of_Canterbury

1782:

The States-General of the Dutch Republic received John Adams, and the house he had purchased in the Hague became the first United States embassy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diplomatic_missions_of_the_United_States

1943:

The Holocaust: Nazi troops entered the Warsaw Ghetto to round up the remaining Jews, sparking the first mass uprising in Poland against the Nazi occupation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising

1984:

Scottish-born composer Peter Dodds McCormick's "Advance Australia Fair", a patriotic song that was first performed in 1878, officially replaced "God Save the Queen" as Australia's national anthem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Australia_Fair

1995:

A car bomb destroyed much of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, US, killing 168 people and injuring over 800 others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

skerry (n): A small rocky island which is covered by the sea at high tide http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skerry

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation. --Albert Hofmann‎ http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann%E2%80%8E