title: Vito Corleone

text: Michael returns home to become Vito's heir apparent. Michael marries his girlfriend Kay Adams, and Vito retires, making Michael the operating head of the family—something Vito had never wanted for his favorite son. Vito becomes his informal "consigliere", replacing Hagen. Michael persuades Vito that it is time to remove the family from organized crime. At the same time, Michael and Vito secretly plan to eliminate the other New York dons, while allowing them to whittle away at Corleone family interests to lull them into inaction.


title: Vito Corleone

text: Vito warns Michael that Barzini will set Michael up to be killed under the guise of a meeting; Barzini will use one of the Corleone Family's most trusted members as an intermediary. Shortly afterwards, on July 29, 1955, Vito dies of a heart attack in his garden while playing with his grandson, Michael's son Anthony. In the novel, his last words are, "Life is so beautiful."


title: Vito Corleone

text: At Vito's funeral, Tessio inadvertently reveals that he is the traitor when he tells Michael that Barzini wants a meeting and that he can set it up on his territory in Brooklyn, where Michael would be safe. Days later, Michael eliminates the other New York dons in a wave of assassinations. Michael also orders Tessio and Rizzi murdered for conspiring with Barzini, along with Las Vegas mobster Moe Greene, who has been stonewalling Michael's efforts to buy casinos. In one stroke, the Corleone family regains its status as the most powerful criminal organization in the country.


title: Vito Corleone

text: Vito appears in both "The Godfather Returns", Mark Winegardner's 2004 sequel to Puzo's novel, and "The Family Corleone", a 2012 novel by Ed Falco. These novels explore his rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s and his early relationships with his wife and children. He also appears in ""|The Sicilian", acting as a guide for Michael while he is in Sicily.


title: Vito Corleone

text: In "The Godfather", Don Vito Corleone was portrayed by Marlon Brando. He was portrayed as a boy by Oreste Baldini and as a younger man in "The Godfather Part II" by Robert De Niro. Brando and De Niro’s performances won Academy Awards — Best Actor for Brando, Best Supporting Actor for De Niro. Brando declined his Oscar. He sent Sacheen Littlefeather to accept the award on his behalf, who said Brando declined it because of "the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry ... and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee."


title: Vito Corleone

text: Marlon Brando envisaged the character to have bulldog-like jowls (hanging cheeks). In his auditions, he stuffed Kleenex tissues between his lower lips and teeth to create this appearance, which were replaced by a custom-made "plumper" oral prosthetic during filming.


title: Vito Corleone

text: For 48 years, Vito Corleone was the only role in history to have two Academy Awards won for playing it. This record was finally matched by Joaquin Phoenix winning the 2019 Best Actor Award for the role of The Joker in the film "Joker", following Heath Ledger's win for Best Supporting Actor of 2008 for "The Dark Knight".


title: Vito Corleone

text: "Premiere Magazine" listed Vito Corleone as the greatest film character in history. He was also selected as the 53rd greatest film character by "Empire".


title: Vito Corleone

text: "Star Wars" character Marlo the Hutt was inspired by Marlon Brando's portrayal of Vito Corleone, appearing among the Hutt Council in "".


title: Internet Archive

text: The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating a free and open Internet. , the Internet Archive holds over 35 million books and texts, 8.5 million movies, videos and TV shows, 894 thousand software programs, 14 million audio files, 4.4 million images, 2.4 million TV clips, 241 thousand concerts, and over 734 billion web pages in the Wayback Machine.


title: Internet Archive

text: The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, but the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its web crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains hundreds of billions of web captures. The Archive also oversees one of the world's largest book digitization projects.


title: Internet Archive

text: Brewster Kahle founded the Archive in May 1996 around the same time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet. In October of that year, the Internet Archive had begun to archive and preserve the World Wide Web in large quantities, though it saved the earliest known page on May 10, 1996, at 2:42 PM. The archived content first became available to the general public in 2001, when it developed the Wayback Machine.


title: Internet Archive

text: In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the web archive, beginning with the Prelinger Archives. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software. It hosts a number of other projects: the NASA Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It, and the wiki-editable library catalog and book information site Open Library. Soon after that, the Archive began working to provide specialized services relating to the information access needs of the print-disabled; publicly accessible books were made available in a protected Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) format.


title: Internet Archive

text: In August 2012, the Archive announced that it has added BitTorrent to its file download options for more than 1.3 million existing files, and all newly uploaded files. This method is the fastest means of downloading media from the Archive, as files are served from two Archive data centers, in addition to other torrent clients which have downloaded and continue to serve the files. On November 6, 2013, the Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco's Richmond District caught fire, destroying equipment and damaging some nearby apartments. According to the Archive, it lost a side-building housing one of 30 of its scanning centers; cameras, lights, and scanning equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; and "maybe 20 boxes of books and film, some irreplaceable, most already digitized, and some replaceable". The nonprofit Archive sought donations to cover the estimated $600,000 in damage.


title: Internet Archive

text: An overhaul of the site was launched as beta in November 2014, and the legacy layout was removed in March 2016.


title: Internet Archive

text: In November 2016, Kahle announced that the Internet Archive was building the Internet Archive of Canada, a copy of the Archive to be based somewhere in Canada. The announcement received widespread coverage due to the implication that the decision to build a backup archive in a foreign country was because of the upcoming presidency of Donald Trump. Kahle was quoted as saying:


title: Internet Archive

text: On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change. It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change. For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible. It means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions. It means serving patrons in a world in which government surveillance is not going away; indeed it looks like it will increase. Throughout history, libraries have fought against terrible violations of privacy—where people have been rounded up simply for what they read. At the Internet Archive, we are fighting to protect our readers' privacy in the digital world.


title: Internet Archive

text: Beginning in 2017, OCLC and the Internet Archive have collaborated to make the Archive's records of digitized books available in WorldCat.


title: Internet Archive

text: Since 2018, the Internet Archive visual arts residency, which is organized by Amir Saber Esfahani and Andrew McClintock, helps connect artists with the Archive's over 48 petabytes of digitized materials. Over the course of the yearlong residency, visual artists create a body of work which culminates in an exhibition. The hope is to connect digital history with the arts and create something for future generations to appreciate online or off. Previous artists in residence include Taravat Talepasand, Whitney Lynn, and Jenny Odell.


title: Internet Archive

text: In 2019, its headquarters in San Francisco received a bomb threat which forced a temporary evacuation of the building.


title: Internet Archive

text: The Internet Archive acquires most materials from donations, such as hundreds of thousands of 78 rpm discs from Boston Public Library in 2017, a donation of 250,000 books from Trent University in 2018, and the entire collection of Marygrove College's library in 2020 after it closed. All material is then digitized and retained in digital storage, while a digital copy is returned to the original holder and the Internet Archive's copy, if not in the public domain, is lent to patrons worldwide one at a time under the controlled digital lending (CDL) theory of the first-sale doctrine.


title: Internet Archive

text: The Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit operating in the United States. In 2019, it had an annual budget of $36 million, derived from revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations, and the Kahle-Austin Foundation. The Internet Archive also manages periodic funding campaigns. For instance, a December 2019 campaign had a goal of reaching $6 million in donations.


title: Internet Archive

text: The Archive is headquartered in San Francisco, California. From 1996 to 2009, its headquarters were in the Presidio of San Francisco, a former U.S. military base. Since 2009, its headquarters have been at 300 Funston Avenue in San Francisco, a former Christian Science Church. At one time, most of its staff worked in its book-scanning centers; as of 2019, scanning is performed by 100 paid operators worldwide. The Archive also has data centers in three Californian cities: San Francisco, Redwood City, and Richmond. To reduce the risk of data loss, the Archive creates copies of parts of its collection at more distant locations, including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt and a facility in Amsterdam.


title: Internet Archive

text: The Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium and was officially designated as a library by the state of California in 2007.


title: Internet Archive

text: The Internet Archive capitalized on the popular use of the term "WABAC Machine" from a segment of "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoon (specifically, "Peabody's Improbable History"), and uses the name "Wayback Machine" for its service that allows archives of the World Wide Web to be searched and accessed. This service allows users to view some of the archived web pages. The Wayback Machine was created as a joint effort between Alexa Internet (owned by Amazon.com) and the Internet Archive when a three-dimensional index was built to allow for the browsing of archived web content. Millions of web sites and their associated data (images, source code, documents, etc.) are saved in a database. The service can be used to see what previous versions of web sites used to look like, to grab original source code from web sites that may no longer be directly available, or to visit web sites that no longer even exist. Not all web sites are available because many web site owners choose to exclude their sites. As with all sites based on data from web crawlers, the Internet Archive misses large areas of the web for a variety of other reasons. A 2004 paper found international biases in the coverage, but deemed them "not intentional".


title: Internet Archive

text: A "Save Page Now" archiving feature was made available in October 2013, accessible on the lower right of the Wayback Machine's main page. Once a target URL is entered and saved, the web page will become part of the Wayback Machine.


title: Internet Archive

text: Through the Internet address <nowiki>web.archive.org</nowiki>, users can upload to the Wayback Machine a large variety of contents, including PDF and data compression file formats. The Wayback Machine creates a permanent local URL of the upload content, that is accessible in the web, even if not listed while searching in the <nowiki>https://archive.org</nowiki> official website.


title: Internet Archive

text: In October 2016, it was announced that the way web pages are counted would be changed, resulting in the decrease of the archived pages counts shown. Embedded objects such as pictures, videos, style sheets, JavaScripts are no longer counted as a "web page", whereas HTML, PDF, and plain text documents remain counted.


title: StG 44

text: The StG 44 (abbreviation of Sturmgewehr 44, "assault rifle 44") is a German assault rifle developed during World War II by Hugo Schmeisser. It is also known by its early designations as the MP 43 and MP 44 ("Maschinenpistole 43" and "44"). The StG 44 was an improvement of an earlier design, the Maschinenkarabiner 42(H).


title: StG 44

text: The StG 44 was the first successful assault rifle, with features including an intermediate cartridge, controllable automatic fire, a more compact design than a battle rifle with a higher rate of fire, and being designed primarily for hitting targets within a few hundred metres. Other rifles at the time were designed to hit targets of over a thousand meters, but this was found to be in excess of the range in which most enemy engagements actually took place.


title: StG 44

text: The StG 44 fulfilled its role effectively, particularly on the Eastern Front, offering a greatly increased volume of fire compared to standard infantry rifles. The StG largely influenced the Soviet AK-47, introduced two years after the war concluded. The StG's influence can still be seen in modern assault rifles, which, after World War II, became the global standard for infantry rifles.


title: StG 44

text: MP 43, MP 44, and StG 44 were different designations for what was essentially the same rifle with minor updates in production. The variety in nomenclatures resulted from the complicated bureaucracy in Nazi Germany. Developed from the Mkb 42(H) "machine carbine", the StG 44 combined the characteristics of a carbine, submachine gun, and automatic rifle. StG is an abbreviation of "". According to one account, the name was chosen personally by Adolf Hitler for propaganda reasons and means "assault rifle" as in "to assault an enemy position", although some sources dispute that Hitler had much to do with coining the new name besides signing the order. After the adoption of the StG 44, the English translation "assault rifle" became the accepted designation for this type of infantry small arm. Over the course of its production, there were minor changes to the butt end, muzzle nut, shape of the front sight base and stepping of the barrel.


title: StG 44

text: The rifle was chambered for the 7.92×33mm Kurz cartridge. This shorter version of the German standard (7.92×57mm) rifle round, in combination with the weapon's selective-fire design, provided a compromise between the controllable firepower of a submachine gun at close quarters with the accuracy and power of a Karabiner 98k bolt-action rifle at intermediate ranges. While the StG 44 had less range and power than the more powerful infantry rifles of the day, Army studies had shown that few combat engagements occurred at more than and the majority within . Full-power rifle cartridges were excessive for most uses for the average soldier. Only a trained specialist, such as a sniper, or soldiers equipped with machine guns, which fired multiple rounds at a known or suspected target, could make full use of the standard rifle round's range and power.


title: StG 44

text: The British were critical of the weapon, saying that the receiver could be bent and the bolt locked up by the mere act of knocking a leaning rifle onto a hard floor. A late-war U.S. assessment derided the StG-44 as "mediocre", "bulky" and "unhandy", declaring it incapable of sustained automatic fire and prone to jamming, though the report accepted that its accuracy was "excellent for a weapon of its type".


title: StG 44

text: In the late 19th century, small-arms cartridges had become able to fire accurately at long distances. Jacketed bullets propelled by smokeless powder were lethal out to . This was beyond the range a shooter could engage a target with open sights, as at that range a man-sized target would be completely blocked by the front sight blade. Only units of riflemen firing by volley could hit grouped targets at those ranges. That fighting style was taken over by the widespread introduction of machine guns, which made use of these powerful cartridges to suppress the enemy at long range. Rifles remained the primary infantry weapon, but in some forces were seen as a secondary or support weapon, backing up the machine guns.


title: StG 44

text: This left a large gap in performance; the rifle was not effective at the ranges it could theoretically reach while being much larger and more powerful than needed for close combat. Weapons for short-range use existed, initially semi-automatic pistols and, later, automatic submachine guns. These fired pistol rounds which lacked power, accuracy, and range. They were only useful at very short ranges of no more than . This led to extensive research into creating an intermediate round to fill this gap. This type of ammunition was being considered as early as 1892, but militaries at the time were still fixated on increasing the maximum range and velocity of bullets from their rifles.


title: StG 44

text: In early 1918, Hauptmann (Captain) Piderit, part of the "Gewehrprüfungskommission" ("Small Arms Examination Committee") of the German General Staff in Berlin, submitted a paper arguing for the introduction of an intermediate round in the German Army with a suitable firearm. He pointed out that firefights rarely took place beyond , about half the sight line range of the 7.92×57mm round from a Mauser Gewehr 98 rifle or less for MG 08 machine gun. A smaller, shorter, and less powerful round would save materials, allow soldiers to carry more ammunition, and increase firepower. Less recoil would allow semi-automatic or even fully automatic select-fire rifles, although in his paper he called it a "Maschinenpistole" (submachine gun). The German Army showed no interest, as it already had the MP 18 submachine gun firing 9 mm pistol rounds and did not want to create a new cartridge.


title: StG 44

text: In 1923, the German Army set out requirements for a Gewehr 98 replacement. It had to be smaller and lighter than the Mauser, have similar performance out to , and have a magazine with a 20- or 30-round capacity. The Bavarian company Rheinisch-Westfälische Sprengstoff (RWS) experimented with rounds in the 1920s, and German companies developing intermediate ammunition for aerial machine guns showed interest. Development of the future infantry rifle did not start until the 1930s. RWS offered two rounds, one with a 7 mm bullet and one with an 8 mm bullet, both in a 46 mm case. The German company Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken had the 7×39.1mm round, and Gustav Genschow & Co (Geco) proposed a 7.75×39.5mm round. Geco's automatic carbine was the Model A35, a further development of the SG29 semi-automatic rifle. The weapon was complicated and unsafe to handle.


title: StG 44

text: The German government started its own intermediate round and weapon program soon after. German ammunition maker Polte of Magdeburg was commissioned to develop the rounds in April 1938 and signed a contract with the Heereswaffenamt (HWA). At the same time, the HWA contracted C. G. Haenel of Suhl to create a weapon for the round. HWA requirements were for a rifle that was shorter and with equal or less weight to the Kar 98k and as accurate out to ; and be select-fire with a rate of fire under 450 rounds per minute. It should be rifle grenade compatible, reliable, maintainable, and have a "straightforward design". Fifty rifles were to be delivered for field testing in early 1942.


title: StG 44

text: At the start of World War II, German infantry were equipped with weapons comparable to those of most other military forces. A typical infantry unit was equipped with a mix of bolt-action rifles and some form of light, medium or general-purpose machine gun. A problem with this mix was that the standard rifles were too large to be effectively used by mechanized and armored forces, where they were difficult to maneuver in the cramped spaces of an armored vehicle. Submachine guns, such as the MP 28, MP 38, and MP 40 were issued to augment infantry rifle use and increase individual soldiers' firepower, but lacked range and accuracy beyond .


title: StG 44

text: During the invasion of the Soviet Union, increasing numbers of semi-automatic Tokarev SVT-38 and SVT-40s were used by the Red Army – mostly elite units and non-commissioned officers – while some Soviet rifle companies were completely equipped with PPSh-41 submachine guns.


title: StG 44

text: After experiencing high volumes of automatic fire from these weapons, German commanders re-thought their small arms requirements. The German army had been attempting to introduce semi-automatic weapons such as the Gewehr 41, but these proved troublesome in service, and production was insufficient to meet requirements. Several attempts had been made to introduce lightweight machine guns or automatic rifles, but recoil from the powerful 7.92×57mm Mauser round was too difficult to control in automatic fire.


title: StG 44

text: By 1941, it was becoming clear that action needed to be taken. Although various experimental rounds had been developed to one degree or another by this point, the Army instead decided to select yet a new design, the Polte 8×33mm "" ("short cartridge"). This used a spitzer bullet and basic cartridge design of the standard 7.92×57mm Mauser rifle cartridge, cutting down the cartridge from the original 7.92×57mm Mauser to 7.92×33mm Kurz. It was understood that this was not ideal, but it would minimize logistical problems.


title: StG 44

text: The German 7.92×57mm Mauser chambered FG 42 battle rifle/automatic rifle was one of the first inline firearms incorporating a "straight-line" recoil configuration and an elevated sight line over the bore axis. The inline design helps reduce muzzle rise during automatic fire.


title: StG 44

text: Contracts for rifles firing the 7.92×33mm Kurz round were issued to both Walther and Haenel (whose design group was headed by Hugo Schmeisser), were asked to submit prototype weapons under the name ' 1942 ("machine carbine") or MKb 42"'. Both designs were similar, using a gas-operated action, with selective fire. Since both rifles shared the title of Maschinenkarabiner 42 the letters (H) and (W) were added to differentiate the two. In this case (H) and (W) were the first initial of each guns manufacturer "Haenel Waffen und Fahrradfabrik" and "Walther Waffenfabrik AG". The MKb 42(H) along with the less successful MKb 42(W) were predecessors of the later MP 43, MP 44, StG 44. The majority of the MP 43's features came from the MKb 42(H), with the hammer firing system and closed bolt coming from the MKb 42(W).


title: StG 44

text: With time, Hitler became aware of the troop trials and ordered that all work on this new weapon be stopped immediately because of the new ammunition. Nonetheless, production was allowed to continue, since the Gustloff company had been developing a machine carbine for normal rifle cartridges as a cover since July 1942.


title: StG 44

text: As work moved forward to incorporate this new firing system, development halted when Hitler suspended all new rifle programs due to administrative infighting within the Third Reich. Hitler ordered that newer submachine guns were to be built, and he strongly disagreed with the use of the "Kurz" ammunition. To keep the MKb 42(H) development program alive, the "Waffenamt" (Armament Office) re-designated the weapon as the Maschinenpistole 43 (MP 43) and, making a few improvements, billed the weapon as an upgrade to existing submachine guns.


title: StG 44

text: Much time was wasted trying to make the MP 43 a replacement for the Karabiner 98k rifle. This goal was eventually realized to be impossible; the MP 43 cartridge was too weak to fire rifle grenades, too inaccurate for sniping, and the weapon was too short for bayonet fighting. In September 1943, it was decided that the MP 43 would supplement rather than replace the Kar 98k. As a result, the optical sight base, grenade-launching extended muzzle thread, and bayonet lug were removed.


title: StG 44

text: Adolf Hitler eventually discovered the designation deception and halted the program again. In March 1943, he permitted it to recommence for evaluation purposes only. Running for six months until September 1943, the evaluation produced positive results, and Hitler allowed the MP 43 program to continue in order to make mass production possible. The weapon made extensive use of (for the 1940s) advanced cost-saving pressed and stamped steel components rather than machined parts. The first MP 43s were distributed to the Waffen-SS; in October 1943, some were issued to the 93rd Infantry Division on the Eastern Front. Production and distribution continued to different units. In April 1944, Hitler took some interest in the weapon tests and ordered the weapon (with some minor updates) to be re-designated as the MP 44. In July 1944, at a meeting of the various army heads about the Eastern Front, when Hitler asked what they needed, a general exclaimed, "More of these new rifles!". The exclamation caused some confusion (Hitler's response is reputed to have been "What new rifle?"), but once Hitler saw the MP 44 being demonstrated, he was impressed and gave it the title "Sturmgewehr". Seeing the possibility of a propaganda gain, the rifle was again renamed as the Sturmgewehr 44 (StG 44), to highlight the new class of weapon it represented. The designation translates to "Assault rifle, model 1944", thereby introducing the term "assault rifle".


title: StG 44

text: A common belief of Hitler's influence over the Sturmgewehr was that he was against an intermediate rifle round. In reality, he could have ordered the project to be canceled entirely if he wanted to, especially if it had been hidden from him. Numerous reports and company correspondence reveal frequent presentation of the rifle's stages of development to Hitler. Rather than being opposed to the entire idea, his apprehension seemed to be from reluctance to send a new weapon to the front in too small numbers. Industry would not be able to replace some 12 million Kar 98k rifles in a short time, and the already strained logistics structure would have to support another cartridge. While the Sturmgewehr required specialized tooling to manufacture it, it consumed less materials and was faster and easier to make than a Kar 98k. Without suppliers to quickly produce components, companies could not manufacture sufficient numbers to replace the Kar 98k quickly. Introducing the new assault rifle in quantities that would not make an impression on the front would be counter-productive. Hitler instead wanted to introduce it on the largest scale possible, which has been misinterpreted as his resistance to new technology.


title: StG 44

text: Production soon began with the first batches of the new rifle being shipped to troops on the Eastern Front. By the end of the war, a total of 425,977 StG 44 variants of all types were produced and work had commenced on a follow-on rifle, the StG 45. The assault rifle proved a valuable weapon, especially on the Eastern front, where it was first deployed. A properly trained soldier with a StG 44 had an improved tactical repertoire, in that he could effectively engage targets at longer ranges than with an MP 40, but be much more useful than the Kar 98k in close combat, as well as provide covering fire like a light machine gun. It was also found to be exceptionally reliable in extreme cold. The StG 44's rate of fire was 540 rpm.


title: StG 44

text: A primary use of the MP 44/StG 44 was to counter the Soviet PPS and PPSh-41 submachine guns, which used the 7.62×25mm Tokarev round. These cheap, mass-produced weapons used a 71-round drum magazine or 35-round box magazine and though shorter-ranged than the Kar 98k rifle, were more effective weapons in close-quarter engagements. The StG 44, while lacking the range of the Kar 98k, had a considerably longer range than the PPS/PPSh submachine guns, more power, an ability to switch between a fully automatic and a default semi-automatic fire mode and surprising accuracy. The StG 44 was an intermediate weapon for the period; the muzzle velocity from its barrel was , compared to of the Karabiner 98k, of the British Bren, of the M1 carbine, and achieved by the MP40. Furthermore, the StG 44's inline design gave it controllability even on full-auto.


title: StG 44

text: The 1st Infantry Division of Army Group South and 32nd Infantry Division of Army Group North were selected to be issued the rifle, both being refitted from heavy losses on the Eastern Front; ammunition shortages meant the 1st ID was the only division fully equipped with it. The Kar 98k was retained as a specialist weapon for sniping and launching rifle grenades, while MP 40s were used by vehicle and artillery crews and officers. The StG 44 was issued to all infantry soldiers and employed for accurate short-range rapid-fire shooting (similar to how the MP 18 was used when it went into service). The assault rifles in a squad added firepower when the machine gun had to cease fire or move. When attacking a position, Kar 98k riflemen would use grenades against it at close-range, while StG 44 riflemen would fire in rapid semi-automatic or automatic bursts to keep the defenders suppressed. The magazine follower spring had a short service life, so soldiers were ordered to load no more than 25 rounds to reduce wear of the spring. In January 1945, a magazine was introduced fitted with a fixed plug to restrict its capacity to 25 rounds. While the StG 44 was capable of fully automatic fire, German soldiers were directed to use it primarily in semi-automatic mode. Fully automatic mode was to be used only in emergencies, for short bursts of two or three rounds.


title: StG 44

text: Germany had ammunition logistics problems, thus Hitler's calculations came true in part: for the initially planned 200 million rounds per month, 86,000 additional workers were necessary, but it was not available. The 400 million rounds per month planned from February 1944 onwards were completely utopian; from February 1945 the number was then reduced to a realistic 110 million.


title: StG 44

text: One unusual addition to the design was the "Krummlauf"; a bent barrel attachment for rifles with a periscope sighting device for shooting around corners from a safe position. It was produced in several variants: an "I" version for infantry use, a "P" version for use in tanks (to cover the dead areas in the close range around the tank, to defend against assaulting infantry), versions with 30°, 45°, 60° and 90° bends, a version for the StG 44 and one for the MG 42. Only the 30° "I" version for the StG 44 was produced in any numbers. The bent barrel attachments had very short lifespans – approx. 300 rounds for the 30° version, and 160 rounds for the 45° variant. The 30° model was able to achieve a 35×35 cm grouping at 100 m.


title: StG 44

text: Some StG 44s were fitted with the Zielgerät 1229 infra-red aiming device, also known by its codename "Vampir" ("vampire"). This device consisted of a large scope, rather like modern starlight scopes, and a large infra-red lamp on top, the scope being able to pick up the infra-red that would be invisible to the naked eye. The user had to carry a transformer backpack powered by a battery fitted inside the gas mask canister. Electric cables connected the power unit with the IR reflector, with the cathode ray tube mounted on the rifle imaging IR from the spotlight. The "Vampir" had only 15 minutes of battery life, but was able to sight within 200 meters in total darkness. A conical flash hider was added to the barrel to keep the muzzle flash from blinding the shooter.


title: StG 44

text: At the end of the war, Hugo Schmeisser claimed that 424,000 MP 43/MP 44/StG 44 rifles were built between June 1943 and April 1945 in four plants: 185,000 by C.G. Haenel in Suhl; 55,000 by J.P. Sauer & Sohn in Suhl; 104,000 in Erfurt; and 80,000 by Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG in Steyr, Austria. This was fewer than the 1.5 million ordered, and far fewer than the 4 million planned.


title: StG 44

text: Some 822 million rounds of 7.92×33mm Kurz ammunition were produced from 1942 to 1945. At the beginning of March 1945, the troops had 273.9 million rounds, with a replenishment reserve of 69.6 million rounds on standby.


title: StG 44

text: In a somewhat unrelated development, Mauser continued design work on a series of experimental weapons in an effort to produce an acceptable service-wide rifle for the short cartridge system. One of these prototypes, a product of the engineers at the Light Weapon Development Group ("Abteilung 37") at Oberndorf, was the MKb "Gerät 06 ("Maschinenkarabiner Gerät 06" or "machine carbine device 06") first appearing in 1942. This gun used a unique gas piston-delayed roller-locked action derived from the short recoil operation of the MG 42 machine gun but with a fixed barrel and gas system. It was realized that with careful attention to the mechanical ratios, the gas system could be omitted. The resultant weapon, the Gerät 06(H)", was supposedly slated for adoption by the Wehrmacht as the StG 45(M). The operating principle lived on in postwar designs from CEAM/AME, CETME, and most famously, Heckler & Koch.


title: StG 44

text: Towards the end of the war, there were last-ditch efforts to develop cheap so-called "Volksgewehr" rifles in the 7.92×33mm caliber. One of these, the Gustloff Volkssturmgewehr, used a gas-delayed blowback action based on the Barnitzke system, whereby gas bled from the barrel near the chamber created resistance to the rearward impulse of the operating parts, which ceases when the projectile leaves the muzzle, allowing the operating parts to be forced rearward by the residual pressure of the cartridge case. This principle has been used most successfully in the P7 pistol.


title: StG 44

text: The Sturmgewehr remained in use with the East German Nationale Volksarmee with the designation "MPi.44" until it was eventually replaced with domestic variants of the AK-47 assault rifle. The "Volkspolizei" used it until approximately 1962 when it was replaced by the PPSh-41. It was still used by other public security formations thereafter. The ammunition was manufactured there at least until 1961. Other countries to use the StG 44 after World War II included Czechoslovakia (although it was not officially adopted) and Yugoslavia, where units such as the 63rd Paratroop Battalion were equipped with it until the 1980s, when the rifles were ultimately transferred to Territorial Defense reserves or sold to friendly regimes in the Middle East and Africa. France adopted captured StG 44 for colonial Foreign Legion units.


title: StG 44

text: Argentina manufactured their own trial versions of the StG 44 made by CITEFA in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but instead adopted the FN FAL in 1955, because it used the then more common and powerful 7.62×51mm NATO round, which also lacked connections with the Third Reich.


title: StG 44

text: New semi-automatic civilian reproductions of the MKb 42(H), MP 43/1, and StG 44 are being manufactured in Germany today by SSD (Sport Systeme Dittrich) and distributed by HZA Kulmbach GmbH in the original 7.92×33mm Kurz chambering and accepting the standard magazines. The PTR-44 by PTR Industries was produced for a short while, but was soon discontinued due to high prices and lack of demand. A .22 rimfire copy of the StG 44 by GSG (German Sports Guns) has also been manufactured in great quantity for a lower price, but it is the only widely available reproduction of the StG. Talks have been made by HMG (Hill & Mac Gunworks) to mass-produce a StG-44 replica in different calibers, including the original 7.92×33mm Kurz, but also more modern calibers, like 7.62×39mm, 5.56×45mm NATO and .300 AAC Blackout, but these have yet to be released.


title: StG 44

text: The StG 44 was the first assault rifle to be accepted into widespread service and put into mass production. "The principle of this weapon — the reduction of muzzle impulse to get useful automatic fire within actual ranges of combat — was probably the most important advance in small arms since the invention of smokeless powder." The StG 44's effect on post-war arms design was wide-ranging, as made evident by Mikhail Kalashnikov's AK-47, and later Eugene Stoner's M16 and its variants. The Soviet Union was quick to adopt the assault rifle concept. The AK-47 used a similar-sized intermediate round and followed the design concept, but utilized a rotating bolt as a part of its firing action. In 1944 the US added an automatic fire capability to the M1 carbine, and issued it as the M2 carbine with 30 round magazines, fulfilling much the same function. Kits were distributed to convert M1 carbines to M2s.


title: StG 44

text: The extent to which the Sturmgewehr influenced the development of the AK-47 is not clearly known. Apart from external layout similarity and the gas-operation principle, the AK-47 was not a copy of the German gun because the AK-47 used a very different mechanism. However, tens of thousands of Sturmgewehrs were captured by the Soviets and were more than likely provided to Kalashnikov and his team. In addition, Hugo Schmeisser was put to work by the Soviets at the Izhmash factory (factory number 74) in Izhevsk until 1952. The 7.62×39mm cartridge, however, was verifiably influenced by the 7.92×33mm cartridge used in the StG 44. In July 1943, the Soviet Technical Council of the People's Commissariat for Armament (NKV) met to consider new foreign weapons firing lower-powered rounds. Two rounds that were studied were the American .30 Carbine and German 7.92 Kurz, captured from MKb 42(H) rifles undergoing troop trials. The meeting concluded that the 7.92 mm cartridge was an important development and that the Soviets needed to design a reduced-power round. The first prototype 7.62 mm M1943 round was created a month later and used the 7.92 Kurz design method of using the same caliber bullet as their standard rifle round (7.62×54mmR) in a shorter case.


title: StG 44

text: After World War II, many Western countries continued using their existing full-caliber rifles. Although the 7.62×51mm NATO round adopted post-war was still a full-power cartridge, the trend towards the adoption of less powerful rounds was already under way in the West. For example, the M1 Garand had initially been developed for the .276 Pedersen (7 mm) round, a cartridge less powerful than the standard .30-06 Springfield. The U.S. Army's adoption of the M1 carbine in 1941 proved the utility of a small, handy, low-powered rifle that required little training to use effectively. Franchi of Italy-based the actions of both the LF-58 carbine and the LF-59 battle rifle on the StG-44.


title: StG 44

text: United States and, later, NATO developed assault rifles along a roughly similar path by at first adding selective-fire capability in a reduced power, full-caliber cartridge. The Soviet Union lightened the AK-47 and introduced the AKM. The U.S. developed the concept of small-caliber, high-velocity (SCHV) bullets and further reduced the weight of their firearms with the introduction of the M16 (5.56 mm). The Soviet armed forces followed suit with the introduction of the SCHV AK-74 rifle (5.45 mm).


title: StG 44

text: Captured StG 44 were used by Polish partisan groups during World War II, including during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, although they were not a commonly captured weapon. Relatively large numbers of StG 44 were used post-war by Polish anti-communist resistance groups until the 1950s.


title: StG 44

text: After World War II, the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc states supplied allied regimes and guerrilla movements with captured German arms, such as the StG 44, along with newly manufactured or repackaged 7.92×33mm ammunition. French forces discovered many in Algeria and determined the origin to be from Czechoslovakia. Examples also found their way into the hands of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, and the PLO. It is still used in very limited numbers by militia and insurgent forces in the Middle East as well as some countries in the Horn of Africa. StG 44s have been confiscated from militia groups by U.S. forces in Iraq.


title: StG 44

text: In August 2012, the Syrian Al-Tawhid Brigade posted a video clip on their YouTube channel showing a cache of StG 44s in their possession. They claimed to have captured 5,000 StG 44 rifles and ammunition from a weapons depot in the city of Aleppo. Photos later surfaced of the rebels using them in combat. In September 2013, a photo showed a Syrian rebel with a Sturmgewehr 44 connected to a makeshift remote weapon station. The gun was controlled by a wired joystick, vision was provided by a video camera mounted behind a scope, and the picture was displayed on an LCD screen.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: "Britannic" was launched just before the start of the First World War. She was designed to be the safest of the three ships with design changes made during construction due to lessons learned from the sinking of the "Titanic". She was laid up at her builders, Harland and Wolff, in Belfast for many months before being requisitioned as a hospital ship. In 1915 and 1916 she served between the United Kingdom and the Dardanelles. On the morning of 21 November 1916 she was shaken by an explosion caused by a naval mine of the Imperial German Navy near the Greek island of Kea and sank 55 minutes later, killing 30 people.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: There were 1,066 people on board; the 1,036 survivors were rescued from the water and lifeboats. "Britannic" was the largest ship lost in the First World War.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: After the First World War the White Star Line was compensated for the loss of "Britannic" by the award of as part of postwar reparations; she entered service as RMS "Majestic".


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The wreck was located and explored by Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1975. The vessel is the largest intact passenger ship on the seabed in the world.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The original dimensions of "Britannic" were similar to those of her older sisters, but her dimensions were altered whilst still on the building stocks after the loss of "Titanic". With a gross tonnage of 48,158, she surpassed her older sisters in terms of internal volume, but this did not make her the largest passenger ship in service at that time; the German SS "Vaterland" held this title with a significantly higher tonnage.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The "Olympic"-class ships were propelled by a combined system of two triple-expansion steam engines which powered the three-bladed outboard wing propellers whilst a low-pressure steam turbine used steam exhausted from the two reciprocating engines to power the central four-bladed propeller giving a maximum speed of 23 knots.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: "Britannic" had a similar layout to her sister ships; however, following the "Titanic" disaster and the subsequent inquiries, several design changes were made to the remaining "Olympic"-class liners. With "Britannic", these changes made before launch included increasing the ship's beam to to allow for a double hull along the engine and boiler rooms, and raising six out of the 15 watertight bulkheads up to B Deck. Additionally, a larger turbine was added instead of the units installed on the earlier vessels to make up for the increase in hull width. The central watertight compartments were enhanced, allowing the ship to stay afloat with six compartments flooded.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Externally the largest visual change was the fitting of large crane-like davits, each powered by an electric motor and capable of launching six lifeboats which were stored on gantries; the ship was designed to have eight sets of gantry davits but only five were installed before "Britannic" entered war service, with the difference being made up with boats launched by manually operated Welin-type davits as on "Titanic" and "Olympic".


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Additional lifeboats could be stored within reach of the davits on the deckhouse roof, and the gantry davits could reach lifeboats on the other side of the ship, providing that none of the funnels was obstructing the way. This design enabled all the lifeboats to be launched, even if the ship developed a list that would normally prevent lifeboats from being launched on the side opposite to the list. Several of these davits were placed abreast of funnels, defeating that purpose. The Elevators which previously stopped at A deck now could reach the boat deck. The ship carried 48 lifeboats, capable of carrying at least 75 people each. Thus, at least 3,600 people could be carried by the lifeboats, which was well above the ship's maximum capacity of 3,309.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: In 1907, J. Bruce Ismay, director general of the White Star Line, and Lord Pirrie, chairman of the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast had decided to build a trio of ocean liners of unmatched size to compete with the Cunard Line's "Lusitania" and "Mauretania" not in terms of speed but in terms of luxury and safety. The names of the three vessels were decided at a later date and they showed the intention of the designer regarding their size: "Olympic", "Titanic" and "Britannic".


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Construction of the "Olympic" and the "Titanic" began in 1908 and 1909 respectively. Their sizes were so large that it was necessary to build the Arrol Gantry to shelter them, wide enough to span the two new building slips and allow two ships to be built at a time. The three ships were designed to be 270 metres long and to have a gross tonnage of 48,000. Their designed speed was approximately 22 knots, well below that of the "Lusitania" and "Mauretania", but still allowing for a transatlantic crossing of less than one week.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Although the White Star Line and the Harland and Wolff shipyard always denied it, some sources claim that the ship was to be named "Gigantic". One source is a poster of the ship with the name "Gigantic" at the top. Other sources are November 1911 American newspapers stating the White Star order for "Gigantic" being placed, as well as other newspapers from around the world both during construction and immediately after the sinking of the "Titanic".


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Tom McCluskie stated that in his capacity as archive manager and historian at Harland and Wolff, he "never saw any official reference to the name "Gigantic" being used or proposed for the third of the "Olympic"-class vessels". Some hand-written changes were added to the order book and dated January 1912. These only dealt with the ship's moulded width, not her name.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: "Britannic"s keel was laid on 30 November 1911 at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, on the gantry slip previously occupied by , 13 months after the launch of that ship, and , launched seven days before. The acquisition of the ship was planned to be at the beginning of 1914. Due to improvements introduced as a consequence of the "Titanic"s disaster, "Britannic" was not launched until 26 February 1914, which was filmed along with the fitting of a funnel. Several speeches were given in front of the press, and a dinner was organised in honour of the launching. Fitting out began subsequently. The ship entered dry dock in September and her propellers were installed.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Reusing "Olympic"s space saved the shipyard time and money by not clearing out a third slip similar in size to those used for the two previous vessels. In August 1914, before "Britannic" could commence transatlantic service between New York and Southampton, the First World War began. Immediately, all shipyards with Admiralty contracts were given priority to use available raw materials. All civil contracts including "Britannic" were slowed.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The naval authorities requisitioned a large number of ships as armed merchant cruisers or for troop transport. The Admiralty paid the companies for the use of their ships but the risk of losing a ship in naval operations was high. The big ocean liners were not initially taken for naval use, because smaller ships were easier to operate. "Olympic" returned to Belfast on 3 November 1914, while work on "Britannic" continued slowly.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The need for increased tonnage grew critical as naval operations extended to the Eastern Mediterranean. In May 1915, "Britannic" completed mooring trials of her engines, and was prepared for emergency entrance into service with as little as four weeks' notice. The same month also saw the first major loss of a civilian ocean liner when Cunard's was torpedoed near the Irish coast by .


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The following month, the Admiralty decided to use recently requisitioned passenger liners as troop transports in the Gallipoli Campaign (also called the Dardanelles service). The first to sail were Cunard's and . As the Gallipoli landings proved to be disastrous and the casualties mounted, the need for large hospital ships for treatment and evacuation of wounded became evident. "Aquitania" was diverted to hospital ship duties in August (her place as a troop transport would be taken by "Olympic" in September). Then on 13 November 1915, "Britannic" was requisitioned as a hospital ship from her storage location at Belfast.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Repainted white with large red crosses and a horizontal green stripe, she was renamed HMHS (His Majesty's Hospital Ship) "Britannic" and placed under the command of Captain Charles Alfred Bartlett. In the interior, 3,309 beds and several operating rooms were installed. The common areas of the upper decks were transformed into rooms for the wounded. The cabins of B Deck were used to house doctors. The first-class dining room and the first-class reception room on D Deck were transformed into operating rooms. The lower bridge was used to accommodate the lightly wounded. The medical equipment was installed on 12 December 1915.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: When declared fit for service on 12 December 1915 at Liverpool, "Britannic" was assigned a medical team consisting of 101 nurses, 336 non-commissioned officers and 52 commissioned officers as well as a crew of 675 persons. On 23 December, she left Liverpool to join the port of Mudros on the island of Lemnos on the Aegean Sea to bring back sick and wounded soldiers. She joined with several ships on the same route, including "Mauretania", "Aquitania", and her sister ship "Olympic". The four ships were joined a little later by . She made a stopover at Naples before continuing to Mudros, in order for her stock of coal to be replenished. After she returned, she spent four weeks as a floating hospital off the Isle of Wight.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The third voyage was from 20 March 1916 to 4 April. The Dardanelles was evacuated in January. At the end of her military service on 6 June 1916, "Britannic" returned to Belfast to undergo the necessary modifications for transforming her into a transatlantic passenger liner. The British government paid the White Star Line £75,000 to compensate for the conversion. The transformation took place for several months before being interrupted by a recall of the ship back into military service.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The Admiralty recalled "Britannic" back into service as a hospital ship on 26 August 1916, and the ship returned to the Mediterranean Sea for a fourth voyage on 24 September of that year. On 29 September on her way to Naples, she encountered a violent storm from which she emerged unscathed. She left on 9 October for Southampton. Then, she made a fifth trip, which was marked by a quarantining of the crew when the ship arrived at Mudros because of food-borne illness.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Life aboard the ship followed a routine. At six o'clock, the patients were awakened and the premises were cleaned up. Breakfast was served at 6:30 AM, then the captain toured the ship for an inspection. Lunch was served at 12:30 PM and tea at 4:30 PM. Patients were treated between meals and those who wished to go for a walk could do so. At 8:30 PM, the patients went to bed and the captain made another inspection tour. There were medical classes available for training the nurses.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: After completing five successful voyages to the Middle Eastern theatre and back to the United Kingdom transporting the sick and wounded, "Britannic" departed Southampton for Lemnos at 14:23 on 12 November 1916, her sixth voyage to the Mediterranean Sea. The ship passed Gibraltar around midnight on 15 November and arrived at Naples on the morning of 17 November, for her usual coaling and water-refuelling stop, completing the first stage of her mission.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: A storm kept the ship at Naples until Sunday afternoon when Captain Bartlett decided to take advantage of a brief break in the weather and continue. The seas rose once again as "Britannic" left the port. By the next morning, the storms died and the ship passed the Strait of Messina without problems. Cape Matapan was rounded in the first hours of 21 November. By morning, "Britannic" was steaming at full speed into the Kea Channel, between Cape Sounion (the southernmost point of Attica, the prefecture that includes Athens) and the island of Kea.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: There were 1,065 people on board: 673 crew, 315 Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), 77 nurses and the captain.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: At 08:12 on 21 November 1916, a loud explosion shook the ship. The cause, whether it was a torpedo from an enemy submarine or a mine, was not apparent. It was later revealed that the mines were planted in the Kea Channel on 21 October 1916 by under the command of .


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The reaction in the dining room was immediate; doctors and nurses left instantly for their posts but not everybody reacted the same way, as further aft, the power of the explosion was less felt and many thought the ship had hit a smaller boat. Captain Bartlett and Chief Officer Hume were on the bridge at the time and the gravity of the situation was soon evident. The explosion was on the starboard side, between holds two and three. The force of the explosion damaged the watertight bulkhead between hold one and the forepeak. The first four watertight compartments were filling rapidly with water, the boiler-man's tunnel connecting the firemen's quarters in the bow with boiler room six was seriously damaged, and water was flowing into that boiler room.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Bartlett ordered the watertight doors closed, sent a distress signal, and ordered the crew to prepare the lifeboats. An SOS signal was immediately sent out and was received by several other ships in the area, among them and HMS "Heroic", but "Britannic" heard nothing in reply. Unknown to either Bartlett or the ship's wireless operator, the force of the first explosion had caused the antenna wires slung between the ship's masts to snap. This meant that although the ship could still send out transmissions by radio, she could no longer receive them.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Along with the damaged watertight door of the firemen's tunnel, the watertight door between boiler rooms six and five failed to close properly. Water was flowing further aft into boiler room five. "Britannic" had reached her flooding limit. She could stay afloat (motionless) with her first six watertight compartments flooded. There were five watertight bulkheads rising all the way up to B Deck. Those measures had been taken after the "Titanic" disaster ("Titanic" could float with only her first four compartments flooded).


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The next crucial bulkhead between boiler rooms five and four and its door were undamaged and should have guaranteed the ship's survival. However, there were open portholes along the front lower decks, which tilted underwater within minutes of the explosion. The nurses had opened most of those portholes to ventilate the wards, against standing orders. As the ship's angle of list increased, water reached this level and began entering aft from the bulkhead between boiler rooms five and four. With more than six compartments flooded, "Britannic" could not stay afloat.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: On the bridge, Captain Bartlett was already considering efforts to save the ship. Only two minutes after the blast, boiler rooms five and six had to be evacuated. In about ten minutes, "Britannic" was roughly in the same condition "Titanic" had been in one hour after the collision with the iceberg. Fifteen minutes after the ship was struck, the open portholes on E Deck were underwater. With water also entering the ship's aft section from the bulkhead between boiler rooms four and five, "Britannic" quickly developed a serious list to starboard due to the weight of the water flooding into the starboard side.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: With the shores of the Greek island Kea to the right, Bartlett gave the order to navigate the ship towards the island in an attempt to beach the vessel. The effect of the ship's starboard list and the weight of the rudder made attempts to navigate the ship under its own power difficult, and the steering gear was knocked out by the explosion, which eliminated steering by the rudder. The captain ordered the port shaft driven at a higher speed than the starboard side, which helped the ship move towards the island.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: At the same time, the hospital staff prepared to evacuate. Bartlett had given the order to prepare the lifeboats, but he did not allow them to be lowered into the water. Everyone took their most valuable belongings with them before they evacuated. The chaplain of the ship recovered his Bible. The few patients and nurses on board were assembled. Major Harold Priestley gathered his detachments from the Royal Army Medical Corps to the back of the A deck and inspected the cabins to ensure no one was left behind.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: While Bartlett continued his desperate manoeuvre, the ship listed more and more. The other crew members began to fear that the list would become too large, so they decided to put the first lifeboat onto the water without waiting for the order to do so. Bartlett then decided to stop the ship and her engine. Before he could do so, two lifeboats were put onto the water on the port side. The still-turning, partly surfaced propeller sucked the two lifeboats into it, mincing them, along with their passengers. Bartlett was then finally able to stop the propellers before they could suck in any more lifeboats.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: By 08:50, most of those on board had escaped in the 35 successfully launched lifeboats. At this point, Bartlett concluded that the rate at which "Britannic" was sinking had slowed so he called a halt to the evacuation and ordered the engines restarted in the hope that he might still be able to beach the ship. At 09:00 Bartlett was informed that the rate of flooding had increased due to the ship's forward motion and that the flooding had reached D-deck. Realising that there was now no hope of reaching land in time, Bartlett gave the final order to stop the engines and sounded two final long blasts of the whistle, the signal to abandon ship. As water had already reached the bridge, he and Assistant Commander Dyke walked off onto the deck and entered the water, swimming to a collapsible boat from which they continued to coordinate the rescue operations.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: "Britannic" gradually capsized to starboard, and the funnels collapsed one after the other as the ship rapidly sank. By the time the stern was out of the water, the bow had already slammed into the seabed. As "Britannic"'s length was greater than the depth of the water, the impact caused major structural damage to the bow before she slipped completely beneath the waves at 09:07, 55 minutes after the explosion. Violet Jessop (who was one of the survivors of "Britannic"s sister-ship "Titanic", and had also been on the "Olympic", when she collided with ) described the last seconds;


title: HMHS Britannic

text: When the "Britannic" came to rest, she gained her title as the largest ship lost in the First World War and the world's largest sunken passenger ship.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Compared to "Titanic", the rescue of "Britannic" was facilitated by three factors: the temperature was higher ( compared to for "Titanic"), more lifeboats were available (35 were launched and stayed afloat compared to "Titanic"s 20) and help was closer (arrived less than two hours after first distress call compared to three and a half hours for "Titanic".)


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The first to arrive on the scene were fishermen from Kea on their caïque, who picked many men from the water. At 10:00, sighted the first lifeboats and 10 minutes later stopped and picked up 339 survivors. Armed boarding steamer HMS "Heroic" had arrived some minutes earlier and picked up 494. Some 150 had made it to Korissia, Kea, where surviving doctors and nurses from "Britannic" were trying to save the injured, using aprons and pieces of lifebelts to make dressings. A little barren quayside served as their operating room.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: "Scourge" and "Heroic" had no deck space for more survivors, and they left for Piraeus signalling the presence of those remaining at Korissia. arrived at 11:45 and, after sweeping the area, anchored in the small port at 13:00 to offer medical assistance and take on board the remaining survivors. At 14:00 the light cruiser arrived. "Foxhound" departed for Piraeus at 14:15 while "Foresight" remained to arrange the burial on Kea of RAMC Sergeant William Sharpe, who had died of his injuries. Another two men died on the "Heroic" and one on the French tug "Goliath". The three were buried with military honours in the Piraeus Naval and Consular Cemetery. The last fatality was G. Honeycott, who died at the Russian Hospital at Piraeus shortly after the funerals.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: In total, out of the 1,066 people onboard, 1,036 people survived the sinking. Thirty men lost their lives in the disaster but only five were buried; others were not recovered and are honoured on memorials in Thessaloniki (the Mikra Memorial) and London. Another 38 men were injured (18 crew, 20 RAMC). Survivors were accommodated in the warships that were anchored at the port of Piraeus while nurses and officers were hosted in separate hotels at Phaleron. Many Greek citizens and officials attended the funerals. Survivors were sent home and few arrived in the United Kingdom before Christmas.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: In November 2006, "Britannic" researcher Michail Michailakis discovered that one of the 45 unidentified graves in the New British Cemetery in the town of Hermoupolis on the island of Syros contained the remains of a soldier collected from the church of Ag. Trias at Livadi (the former name of Korissia). Maritime historian Simon Mills contacted the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Further research established that this soldier was a "Britannic" casualty and his remains had been registered in October 1919 as belonging to a certain "Corporal Stevens".


title: HMHS Britannic

text: When the remains were moved to the new cemetery at Syros in June 1921, it was found that there was no record relating this name with the loss of the ship, and the grave was registered as unidentified. Mills provided evidence that this man could be Sergeant Sharpe and the case was considered by the Service Personnel and Veterans Agency. A new headstone for Sharpe was erected and the CWGC has updated its database.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The plan of "Britannic" showed that she was intended to be more luxurious than her sister ships in order to compete with , and . Enough cabins were provided for passengers divided into three classes. The White Star Line anticipated a considerable change in its customer base. Thus, the quality of the Third Class (intended for migrants) was lowered when compared to that of her sisters, while the quality of the Second Class increased. In addition, the number of crew planned was increased from about 860 – 880 onboard "Olympic" and "Titanic" to 950 aboard "Britannic".


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The quality of the First Class was also improved. Children began to appear as part of the clientele that needed to be satisfied, and thus a playroom for them was built on the boat deck. Similar to her two sister ships, the first class amenities included the Grand Staircase, but "Britannic"s amenities were more sumptuous, with worked balustrades, decorative panels and a pipe organ. The A Deck of the ship was devoted in its entirety to the First Class, being fitted with a salon, two veranda cafes, a smoking room and a reading room. The B Deck included a hair salon, post office, and redesigned deluxe Parlour Suites, dubbed Saloons in the Builder's Plans. The most important addition was that of individual bathrooms in almost every First Class cabin, which would have been a first on an ocean liner. Aboard the "Olympic" and "Titanic", most passengers had to use public bathrooms.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: These facilities were installed but were soon removed because the ship was converted to a hospital ship and were never re-installed because the ship sank before she could enter transatlantic service, so the planned facilities were either cancelled, destroyed, reused on other vessels, like the "Olympic" or "Majestic", or just never used. Of these accessories, only a large staircase and a children's playroom remained installed. Under the glass dome was a white wall above the first-class staircase instead of a clock and a large painting.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: A Welte philharmonic organ was planned to be installed on board "Britannic" but because of the outbreak of war, the instrument never made its way to Belfast from Germany. After the War, it wasn't claimed by Harland and Wolff since "Britannic" sank before she could have ever entered transatlantic service. It also wasn't installed on "Olympic" or "Majestic" since White Star Line didn't want it. For a long time, it was thought that the organ was lost or destroyed.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: In April 2007, the restorers of a Welte organ, now in the "" in Seewen, Switzerland, detected that the main parts of the instrument were signed by the German organ builders with ""Britanik"". A photograph of a drawing in a company prospectus, found in the Welte-legacy in the Augustiner Museum in Freiburg, proved that this was the organ intended for "Britannic". The organ's history and owners from the 20th century is currently unknown.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The wreck of HMHS "Britannic" is at in about of water. It was discovered on 3 December 1975 by Jacques Cousteau, who explored it. In filming the expedition, Cousteau also held conference on camera with several surviving personnel from the ship including Sheila MacBeth Mitchell, a survivor of the sinking. In 1976, Cousteau entered the wreck with his divers for the first time. He expressed the opinion that the ship had been sunk by a single torpedo, basing this opinion on the damage to her plates.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The giant liner lies on her starboard side hiding the zone of impact with the mine. There is a huge hole just beneath the forward well deck. The bow is heavily deformed and attached to the rest of the hull only by some pieces of C-Deck. The crew's quarters in the forecastle were found to be in good shape with many details still visible. The holds were found empty.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The forecastle machinery and the two cargo cranes in the forward well deck are well preserved. The foremast is bent and lies on the seabed near the wreck with the crow's nest still attached. The bell, thought to be lost, was found in a dive in 2019, having fallen from the mast and is now lying directly below the crow's nest on the seabed. Funnel number 1 was found a few metres from the Boat Deck. Funnel numbers two, three, and four were found in the debris field (located off the stern). Pieces of coal lie beside the wreck.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: In mid-1995, in an expedition filmed by "NOVA", Dr Robert Ballard, best known for having discovered the wrecks of in 1985, and the in 1989, visited the wreck, using advanced side-scan sonar. Images were obtained from remotely controlled vehicles, but the wreck was not penetrated. Ballard found all the ship's funnels in surprisingly good condition. Attempts to find mine anchors failed.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: In August 1996, the wreck was bought by Simon Mills, who has written two books about the ship: "Britannic – The Last Titan" and "Hostage To Fortune".


title: HMHS Britannic

text: In November 1997, an international team of divers led by Kevin Gurr used open-circuit trimix diving techniques to visit and film the wreck in the newly available DV digital video format.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: In September 1998, another team of divers made an expedition to the wreck. Using diver propulsion vehicles, the team made more man-dives to the wreck and produced more images than ever before, including video of four telegraphs, a helm and a telemotor on the captain's bridge.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: In 1999 GUE divers acclimated to cave diving and ocean discovery led the first dive expedition to include extensive penetration into "Britannic". Video of the expedition was broadcast by National Geographic, BBC, the History Channel and the Discovery Channel.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: In September 2003, an expedition led by Carl Spencer dived into the wreck. This was the first expedition to dive "Britannic" where all the bottom divers were using closed circuit rebreathers (CCR). Diver Leigh Bishop brought back some of the first photographs from inside the wreck and his diver partner Rich Stevenson found that several watertight doors were open. It has been suggested that this was because the mine strike coincided with the change of watches. Alternatively, the explosion may have distorted the doorframes. A number of mine anchors were located off the wreck by sonar expert Bill Smith, confirming the German records of that "Britannic" was sunk by a single mine and the damage was compounded by open portholes and watertight doors. Spencer's expedition was broadcast extensively across the world for many years by National Geographic and the UK's Channel 5.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: In 2006, an expedition, funded and filmed by the History Channel, brought together fourteen skilled divers to help determine what caused the quick sinking of "Britannic". After preparation the crew dived on the wreck site on 17 September. Time was cut short when silt was kicked up, causing zero visibility conditions, and the two divers narrowly escaped with their lives. One last dive was to be attempted on "Britannic"s boiler room, but it was discovered that photographing this far inside the wreck would lead to violating a permit issued by the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, a department within the Greek Ministry of Culture.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Partly because of a barrier in languages, a last-minute plea was turned down by the department. The expedition was unable to determine the cause of the rapid sinking, but hours of footage were filmed and important data was documented. The Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities later recognised the importance of this mission and extended an invitation to revisit the wreck under less stringent rules.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: On 24 May 2009, Carl Spencer, drawn back to his third underwater filming mission of "Britannic", died in Greece due to equipment difficulties while filming the wreck for National Geographic.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: In 2012, on an expedition organised by Alexander Sotiriou and Paul Lijnen, divers using rebreathers installed and recovered scientific equipment used for environmental purposes, to determine how fast bacteria are eating "Britannic"s iron compared to "Titanic".


title: HMHS Britannic

text: On 29 September 2019, a British technical diver, Tim Saville, died during a 120 m / 393 ft dive on "Britannic"s wreck.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Having her career cut short in wartime, never having entered commercial service, and having had few victims, "Britannic" did not experience the same notoriety as her sister ship "Titanic". After being largely forgotten by the public, she finally gained fame when her wreck was discovered. Her name was reused by the White Star Line when it put into service in 1930. That ship was the last to fly the flag of the company when it retired in 1960.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: After Germany surrendered at the end of the First World War followed by the Treaty of Versailles, Germany handed over some of its ocean liners as war reparations, two of which were given to the company. The first, the "Bismarck", renamed "Majestic", replaced the "Britannic". The second, the "Columbus", renamed the "Homeric", compensated for other ships lost in the conflict.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The sinking of the ship was dramatised in a 2000 television film called "Britannic" that featured Edward Atterton, Amanda Ryan, Jacqueline Bisset and John Rhys-Davies. The film was a fictional account featuring a German agent sabotaging the ship, because the "Britannic" was secretly carrying munitions.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: A BBC2 documentary, "Titanic's Tragic Twin – the Britannic Disaster", was broadcast on 5 December 2016; presented by Kate Humble and Andy Torbet, it used up-to-date underwater film of the wreck and spoke to relatives of survivors.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: Alma Katsu's 2020 novel "The Deep" was set partly on the "Britannic", and on its sister ship the "Titanic", and centred around the sinking of both ships.


title: HMHS Britannic

text: The "Gigantic" is the apparent setting of the 2009 escape-room game "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors".


title: Case Closed

text: Case Closed, <onlyinclude>also known as , is a Japanese detective manga series written and illustrated by Gosho Aoyama. It has been serialized in Shogakukan's "shōnen" manga magazine "Weekly Shōnen Sunday" since January 1994, with its chapters collected in 102 "tankōbon" volumes as of September 2022. Due to legal problems with the name "Detective Conan", the English language releases from Funimation and Viz were renamed to "Case Closed". The story follows the high school detective Shinichi Kudo (renamed as Jimmy Kudo in several English translations) who was transformed into a child while investigating a mysterious organization and generally solved a multitude of cases by impersonating his childhood best friend's father and various other characters.


title: Case Closed

text: The manga was adapted into an anime television series by Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation and TMS Entertainment, which premiered in January 1996. The anime resulted in animated feature films, original video animations, video games, audio disc releases and live action episodes. Funimation licensed the anime series for North American broadcast in 2003 under the name "Case Closed" with the characters given Americanized names. The anime premiered on Adult Swim but was discontinued due to low ratings. In March 2013, Funimation began streaming their licensed episodes of "Case Closed"; Crunchyroll simulcast them in 2014.</onlyinclude> Funimation also localized the first six "Case Closed" films, while Discotek Media localized the "Lupin III" crossover special, its , and select recent films, starting with . Meanwhile, the manga was localized by Viz Media, which used Funimation's changed title and character names. Shogakukan Asia made its own localized English version of the manga, which used the original title and Japanese names.


title: Case Closed

text: The "tankōbon" volumes of the manga had over 250 million copies in circulation worldwide as of 2021, making it one of the best-selling manga series. In 2001, the manga was awarded the 46th Shogakukan Manga Award in the "shōnen" category. The anime adaptation has been well received and ranked in the top twenty in "Animage"s polls between 1996 and 2001. In the Japanese anime television ranking, "Case Closed" episodes ranked in the top six weekly. Both the manga and the anime have had a positive response from critics for their plot and cases. The manga has been sold in 25 countries, while the anime has been broadcast in 40 countries.


title: Case Closed

text: Jimmy Kudo (Japanese name: Shinichi Kudo) is a high school detective who sometimes works with the police to solve cases. During an investigation, he is ambushed and incapacitated by a member of a crime syndicate known as the Black Organization. In an attempt to murder the young detective, they force-fed him a dangerous experimental drug. However, instead of killing him, it turns him into a kid. Adopting the pseudonym Conan Edogawa and keeping his true identity a secret, Kudo lives with his childhood friend Rachel Moore (Ran Mori) and her father Richard (Kogoro Mori), who is a private detective. Throughout the series, he tags along on Richard's cases. Nonetheless, after Kudo solves one, he will use Dr. Agasa's hidden tranquilizer to sedate Richard and then uses a voice changer to simulate his voice to reveal the solution. He also enrolls in Teitan Elementary School where he makes friends with a group of classmates who form their own Junior Detective Club (Detective Boys). While he continues to dig deeper into the Black Organization, he frequently interacts with other characters, including his neighbor, Dr. Agasa, Ran's friend Serena Sebastian (Sonoko Suzuki), a fellow teenage detective Harley Hartwell (Heiji Hattori), assorted police detectives from different regions, and a phantom thief called the Kaito Kid.


title: Case Closed

text: Kudo later encounters an elementary school transfer student, Anita Hailey (Ai Haibara), who reveals herself to be a former member of the Black Organization under the code name "Sherry" and the creator of the experimental drug that shrunk him. She too had ingested it to evade the pursuit of the organization. She soon joins the Junior Detectives. During a rare encounter with the Black Organization, Conan helps the FBI plant a CIA agent, Kir, inside the Black Organization as a spy.


title: Case Closed

text: "Case Closed" was conceived in 1994, during the rise of mystery genre manga due to the publishing of the series "The Kindaichi Case Files"; the first chapter appeared in Shogakukan's "Weekly Shōnen Sunday" on January 19. Aoyama cites the stories of Arsène Lupin, Sherlock Holmes and the samurai films by Akira Kurosawa as influences on his work. When scripting each chapter, he ensures the dialogue remains simple and spends an average of four hours for each new case and twelve for more complicated ones. Aoyama's older brother is a scientist who helps him out with the "gimmicks" in the series. Each case spans several chapters (except for a handful of shorter cases that only span one), and is resolved at the end where characters explain the details of their solutions in simple terms; an online database consisting of all the cases from the manga was launched in 2007. In 2007, Aoyama hinted he had an ending planned out but does not intend to end the series yet. Aoyama and his staff decided to computerize their manga creation process in early 2011, although he still draws with a pen and paper. The change began with the final page of chapter 760.


title: Case Closed

text: "Case Closed", written and illustrated by Gosho Aoyama, has been serialized in Shogakukan's "shōnen" manga magazine "Weekly Shōnen Sunday" since January 19, 1994. "Case Closed" became the 24th longest running manga series, with over 1000 chapters released in Japan, and the first series with over 1000 chapters published in "Weekly Shōnen Sunday". Shogakukan has collected its chapters into individual "tankōbon" volumes. The first volume was released on June 18, 1994. On October 18, 2021, the series reached one hundred volumes; "One Piece" author, Eiichiro Oda, whose series achieved the same feat a month before, sent congratulations to Aoyama. As of September 15, 2022, 102 volumes have been published.


title: Case Closed

text: Viz Media announced its acquisition of the series for North America on June 1, 2004. Following Funimation's localization, Viz released the series as "Case Closed" and took their character names to keep consistency between the two media. Viz Media released the first volume in September 2004 and began releasing digital editions in 2013. Gollancz licensed and distributed 15 of Viz Media's volumes in the United Kingdom before ceasing publication of manga. (Viz Media has since re-released them). In 2014 Shogakukan Asia began its own English localization of the series for Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries as "Detective Conan". Laura Thornton of CBR.com, citing the common Japanese ownership in both Shogakukan Asia and Viz, described the Singapore version as, compared to the Viz one, "completely identical, word-for-word, even -- save for the names and the "Detective Conan" logo".


title: Case Closed

text: The manga has also been localized in other regions such as China, France, Germany and Indonesia. (Localizations in Scandinavia ceased one by one, Finland being the last in 2013, when the publisher shut down the entire manga division).


title: Case Closed

text: Gosho Aoyama's assistants have written an anthology series of "Case Closed" which are released irregularly.


title: Case Closed

text: A spin-off manga series, titled "Detective Conan: The Culprit Hanzawa", by Mayuko Kanba, began in the July 2017 issue of Shogakukan's "Shōnen Sunday S", released on May 25, 2017.


title: Case Closed

text: Another spin-off manga series, illustrated by Takahiro Arai with supervision by Aoyama, titled "Case Closed: Zero's Tea Time" started in issue #24 of "Weekly Shōnen Sunday" on May 9, 2018. The story centers on the agent Toru Amuro/Rei Furuya. New chapters of the manga are only published when "Case Closed" is on hiatus.


title: Case Closed

text: Another spin-off manga series by Arai, titled "Detective Conan: Police Academy Arc – Wild Police Story", was serialized in "Weekly Shōnen Sunday" from October 2, 2019 to November 18, 2020. Spanning 13 chapters, it again focuses on Amuro/Furuya during his years in the police academy with his colleagues.


title: Case Closed

text: The anime version of "Case Closed" is produced by Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation and TMS Entertainment. Over 1000 episodes have aired in Japan since the anime's premiere on January 8, 1996, making it the fifteenth longest anime series to date. Initially, Shogakukan collected and released the episodes on VHS video cassettes from June 1996 to October 2006. Four hundred and twenty-six episodes were released on VHS until Shogakukan abandoned the format and switched over to DVDs, starting over from the first episode. For the fifteenth anniversary of the anime series, the series was made available for video on demand. The series celebrated its 25th anniversary in January 2021, and the "Moonlight Sonata Murder Case" episode (11th episode of the series) was given the remake treatment as the first part of its celebration, which featured the latest staff and production techniques, and classical pianist Aimi Kobayashi performed Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 for the episode. It aired on March 6, 2021.


title: Case Closed

text: In 2003, the first 104 episodes, as well as the first six movies were licensed by Funimation for distribution in North America, under the title "Case Closed" because of legal considerations. The "Case Closed" anime has also been released in other languages such as French, German and Italian. "Case Closed" debuted on Cartoon Network as part of their Adult Swim programming block on May 24, 2004; no more than 50 episodes were licensed from Funimation due to low ratings. The Canadian channel YTV picked up the "Case Closed" series and broadcast 22 episodes between April 7, 2006, and September 2, 2006, before taking it off the air. Funimation made the series available with the launch of the Funimation Channel in November 2005; it was temporary available on Colours TV during its syndication with the Funimation Channel. "Case Closed" was later broadcast in North America on NHK's cable network TV Japan. Funimation lost the rights to the series in 2018. Crunchyroll began simulcasting the series in October 2014, starting with episode 754. In September 2020, Crunchyroll began streaming the first 43 episodes (the two-part episodes 11-12 considered as a single episode).


title: Case Closed

text: A separate English adaptation of the series was made by Voiceovers Unlimited Pte Ltd. in Singapore. Another one by Animax Asia premiered in the Philippines on January 18, 2006, under the name "Detective Conan". Because Animax were unable to obtain further TV broadcast rights, their version comprised only 52 episodes. The series continued with reruns until August 7, 2006, when it was removed from the station. Both the Singapore and Philippines versions used Japanese character names. The California-based channel United Television Broadcasting (UTB) aired it with English subtitles from 2011 to 2014, until episode 421.


title: Case Closed

text: Funimation also released DVDs of their dubbed series beginning August 24, 2004. Initially, the releases were done in single DVDs and future episodes were released in seasonal boxes; 130 episodes have been released in total. The seasonal boxes were later re-released in redesigned boxes called Viridian edition. Funimation began streaming "Case Closed" episodes in March 2013. Hanabee Entertainment licensed the series for distribution in Australia.


title: Case Closed

text: In January 2016, 52 episodes of the anime appeared on Netflix, initially under its original title "Detective Conan" before changing to its English moniker "Case Closed". The episodes were listed as "season one", although in reality they are episodes #748 to #799. The episodes were only available in Japanese, but were subtitled. The availability was likely part of Netflix's efforts to expand its anime catalog. In January 2021, Netflix removed the episodes. As of 2018, the "Detective Conan" anime has been broadcast in 40 countries around the world.


title: Case Closed

text: Twenty-five feature films based on the "Case Closed" series have been released. They are animated by TMS Entertainment and produced by Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation, Nippon Television, ShoPro, and Toho. The first seven were directed by Kenji Kodama, films 8–14 were directed by Yasuichiro Yamamoto, films 15-21 were directed by Kobun Shizuno, film 22 was directed by Yuzuru Tachikawa, films 23 and 24 were directed by Chika Nagaoka, and film 25 was directed by Susumu Mitsunaka. The films have been released in April of each year, starting in 1997 with the first film, "". The 25th film, "" was released on April 15, 2022. The and onwards were the top twenty grossing anime films in Japan. The revenue earned from the films funded Toho's other film projects. Each film was adapted into two film comics which were released in the fourth quarter of the same year. Funimation released English dubbed versions of the first six films on Region 1 DVDs between October 3, 2006, and February 16, 2010. Bang Zoom! Entertainment has begun to release English dubs of "Case Closed" films through Discotek Media, starting with the "Episode One" TV special on July 28, 2020.


title: Case Closed

text: Two original video animations (OVA) series were produced by TMS Entertainment, Nippon Television, and Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation. The OVA series "Shōnen Sunday Original Animation" are yearly mail order episodes available to subscribers of "Weekly Shōnen Sunday". The first "Shōnen Sunday Original Animation" was available in "Weekly Shōnen Sunday"s 26th issue in 2000, with eleven OVAs released as of 2011. The first nine episodes of the OVA series were later encapsulated into four DVD volumes titled "Secret Files" and were released between March 24, 2006, and April 9, 2010. The second OVA series, entitled "Magic File", consists of yearly direct-to-DVD releases. The first "Magic File" was released on April 11, 2007, and contained four episodes from the anime series. The subsequent "Magic File" OVAs contained an original plot with background ties related to their respective "Case Closed" theatrical films, beginning with the twelfth film "".


title: Case Closed

text: A two-hour television special titled was produced by TMS Entertainment, Nippon Television, and Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation and aired on March 27, 2009. It was first announced in the 9th issue of "Weekly Shōnen Sunday" in 2009. The plot follows Kudo as he investigates the death of the Queen of Vespania while Arsène Lupin III from the "Lupin III" series attempts to steal the Queen's crown. The special earned a household record rating of 19.5 in Japan. VAP released the special on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on July 24, 2009. The special is followed by "" which takes place after the television special.


title: Case Closed

text: "Case Closed"s expansion into the video games industry followed behind its foray into animation. On December 27, 1996, "Detective Conan: Chika Yuuenchi Satsujin Jiken" was released for the Game Boy. Since then, 20 games have been released with "Detective Conan: Kako Kara no Zensōkyoku Prelude" set for Spring of 2012 for the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable. Currently, the majority of the games have only been released in Japan, though Nobilis has localized "" for the PAL region. All dedicated "Detective Conan" games released for the Game Boy, Sony's consoles, the WonderSwan, and the Nintendo DS have been developed by Bandai. Banpresto developed the "Case Closed" titles on the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance while Marvelous Entertainment developed "Case Closed: The Mirapolis Investigation".


title: Case Closed

text: Katsuo Ono composed and arranged the music in the "Case Closed" animation; his works have been released on several CDs. Two image albums, comprising several songs sung by Japanese voice actors of the characters in the animation, were also released. Several theme music were performed by pop musicians such as B'z, Zard, and Garnet Crow. The first four theme music were released by Universal Music Group and all releases thereafter were by Being Inc.


title: Case Closed

text: "The Best of Detective Conan" and "The Best of Detective Conan 2" albums collectively sold over 2.2million copies, while singles from "The Best of Detective Conan 3" collectively sold over 1.6million copies. On July 25, 2017, the singer Mai Kuraki was awarded a Guinness World Record for singing the most theme songs in a single anime series, having sung 21 songs for "Detective Conan", starting with her hit song "Secret of My Heart" (2000).


title: Case Closed

text: Four live action drama TV specials and a TV series were created by Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation and TMS entertainment based on the series. The first two specials aired in 2006 and 2007 featuring Shun Oguri portraying the teenage Jimmy Kudo and Tomoka Kurokawa as Rachel Moore. The third and fourth TV specials aired in 2011 and 2012 featuring Junpei Mizobata as Jimmy and Shioli Kutsuna as Rachel. The cast used for those TV specials were used for the television series which aired between July 7, 2011 and September 29, 2011.


title: Case Closed

text: In celebration of the 50th anniversary of "Weekly Shōnen Sunday" and "Weekly Shōnen Magazine", the two companies collaborated to publish twelve biweekly magazines consisting of chapters from "Weekly Shōnen Sunday"s "Case Closed" and "Weekly Shōnen Magazine"s "Kindaichi Case Files". The magazine ran between April 10, 2008, and September 25, 2008.


title: Case Closed

text: Shogakukan have also produced many books spun off from the series. Fifty volumes of a film comic series were published in Japan between June 1996 and August 2000, covering the first 143 episodes of the anime, though some episodes were skipped. Five additional film comics entitled were published between July 2001 and January 2002 and covered selected episodes between 162–219. Thirteen official guide books were published between June 1997 and April 2009. Shogakukan has also published novels, digest books, educational books, and puzzle books.


title: Case Closed

text: In North America, Score Entertainment published the "Case Closed Trading Card Game" on June 29, 2005. The game entails the use of three customized decks of cards, which players buy and collect. Representing characters, events, and objects in Case Closed, these cards are used by players to fulfill certain conditions to solve a case and win the game. Certain cards are used to foil the progress of the player's opponents. An English unofficial guidebook to the series titled "The Case Closed Casebook: An Essential Guide" was published by DH Publishing Inc. on March 25, 2008.


title: Case Closed

text: A collaborative themed event by Universal Studios Japan with the series, for the Universal Cool Japan 2018 attractions, ran from January 19 to June 24, 2018.


title: Case Closed

text: Characters from the series were featured in a crossover event for the survival horror video game "Identity V" for the game's China server in 2020, and released globally in 2021.


title: Case Closed

text: The series has ranked on the "Book of the Year" list from Media Factory's "Da Vinci" magazine, where professional book reviewers, bookstore employees, and "Da Vinci" readers participate; it ranked 5th in 2012; 11th in 2014; 4th in 2015; 6th in 2016; 5th in 2017; 1st in 2018; 5th in 2019; 6th in 2020; 10th in 2021; and 5th in 2022. On TV Asahi's Manga Sōsenkyo 2021 poll, in which 150.000 people voted for their top 100 manga series, "Case Closed" ranked #4, behind "One Piece", "" and "Slam Dunk".


title: Case Closed

text: The animated adaptation of the series was also popular in Japan, appearing in the top six of Japanese TV Rankings at various times. The television series ranked among the top twenty in polls conducted by anime magazine "Animage" from 1996 to 2001. It also placed better than twenty-third in polls for the Top 100 anime conducted by Japanese television network TV Asahi in 2005–06. The series received considerable airtime in China; it was the second most broadcast animation there in 2004.


title: Case Closed

text: In 2006, the Japanese government used Conan in campaigns to help promote crime awareness among children. Targeting the same audience, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs used Conan and his friends in two pamphlets: one to promote the ministry's mission, the other to introduce the 34th G8 summit held in the country in 2010. Several characters in the series featured in the sixth installment of the Anime, Heroes and Heroines commemorative stamp series issued by Japan Post in 2006. Aoyama and his creations are celebrated in his hometown Hokuei, Tottori; a museum with exhibits of his work is located there, and several bronze statues of Jimmy Kudo, Conan Edogawa, and Rachel Moore are installed in various locations throughout the town. It also has other tourist attractions related to "Detective Conan", including a "Detective Conan" themed airport and train station, and it is promoted as "Conan Town".


title: Case Closed

text: In 2018, "Case Closed" caught the attention of American late night talk show host Conan O'Brien, who discussed the character Conan Edogawa as well as Conan Town in his talk show "Conan", and visited the town in September 2018.


title: Case Closed

text: As of 2021, the "Case Closed" manga had over 250 million copies in circulation worldwide, making it the fourth best-selling manga series, having been sold in 25 countries. In Japan, individual volumes frequently appear on the lists of best-selling manga. "Case Closed" was the 19th best selling manga in 2011, with 2,120,091 copies sold. "Nikkei Entertainment" magazine published a list of top 50 manga creators by sales since January 2010, in its September 2011 issue; Gosho Aoyama, the author of "Case Closed" was ranked 16th, with 3,320,000 copies sold. It was the 17th best selling manga in 2012, with 2,430,572 copies sold. In 2013 "Case Closed" became the 24th best selling manga, with 1,966,206 copies sold.


title: Case Closed

text: Licensed merchandise based on "Detective Conan" are sold in Asia. In Japan, "Detective Conan" licensed merchandise sold in 2003, during 20052008, and during 20102012, adding up to at least () sold in Japan between 2003 and 2012.


title: Case Closed

text: The first volume of "Case Closed" appeared thrice in the top ten selling lists, right after its premiere, the same volume has also appeared in the Diamond Comic Distributors's ranking list. Later-published volumes have appeared on the New York Times Manga Best Sellers lists.


title: Case Closed

text: "Case Closed" is one of the best-selling manga in Vietnam, with volumes 93–96, surpassing the 1.5 million digital copies each as of 2020.