68 years ago today off Norway’s North Cape, the German battleship Scharnhorst was sunk by a British force led by the battleship HMS Duke of York accompanied by the cruiser HMS Jamaica and other Royal Navy ships.

My father Capt. B.P. Sinha, then a young engineer officer on the Jamaica, told of gun flashes in the pitch darkness of a force 8 gale, the express train roar of shells passing overhead and the singing of men dying in icy water. This is to remember them all.

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Belfast and Jamaica went in with torpedoes around 19:28 after which four destroyers, Musketeer, Matchless, Virago and Opportune rushed in but Scharnhorst was probably already going down. At 19:48 Belfast fired a star shell and saw oil soaked German sailors in the water. They heard them cheering their ship and singing ‘On A Sailors Grave No Roses Grow’, ‘Auf Ein Seemannsgrab Blühen Keine Rosen’.

PETE DANKO, EARTH TECHLING & TOBY PRICE, RENEWABLE ENERGY MAGAZINE

PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN PAPINEAU

Kosrae, one of the four Federated States of Micronesia out in the western Pacific, is aiming to get nearly all of its electricity from the ocean. That sounds pretty daunting, but luckily, it doesn’t need much electricity. The 8,000 people who inhabit Kosrae’s 42 square miles now get by with five Caterpillar engine generators that have a combined capacity of 4,580 kilowatts, according to the Kosrae Utilities Authority. And reports say the state will soon have a new 1.5-megawatt wave energy system, offering it a good start toward its marine-power goal.

Details are a little sketchy on the project, which we first learned about on the Renewable Energy Magazine website. That pointed us to Ocean Energy Kosrae, a joint venture between the utilities authority and Ocean Energy Industries, a New Jersey-based company that is supplying the wave device, called the WaveSurfer.

The company describes the WaveSurfer as a “point absorber” whose “main power conversion and generation parts are completely submerged at the depth of between 27 and 80 feet.” The company says this protects the device against damage from extreme storms.

According to Ocean Energy Industries: “Due to its unique design (patent pending) each WaveSurfer can be cost-effectively transported anywhere in the world and easily assembled at the installation site.” The company also says the device “does not contain expensive and complex parts, high precision hydraulics or air pumps … everything that makes other competing systems extremely expensive.”

Micronesia’s 2010 energy plan [PDF], envisages Kosrae getting 85 percent of its energy from wave power by 2015, with solar and hydro perhaps contributing the remaining 15 percent. It’s not the only island looking to go all-green: Earlier this year, the government of the Cook Islands, in the South Pacific, vowed to generate all its electricity from renewable sources use by 2020.

The Missa Luba is a Latin Mass from the Congo sung by a boys choir, Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin, trained by Father Guido Haazen, a Franciscan Friar. The original performance was recorded in 1958 in Kamina, Congo. It was released as an LP in 1963. When we were living in India in the mid sixties my family had a copy and we listened over and over to its rhythms, harmonies and birdlike vocal calls.

The Sanctus from Missa Luba featured in Lindsey Anderson’s film If, and some of the music was recorded by other performers, but the original has never been surpassed, nor reissued in its original form.

I’ve found several of the songs from Missa Luba, and you can listen to them here.