What would have happened if the USofA Army Air Forces figured out what an effective antiship weapon air dropped torpedoes could be and develop their own torpedo that worked and configured the B-17 to drop them?
What happens if an eccentric American multi millionaire had succeeded in secretly building two functionally identical to Essex class except for having an armored flight deck ready for sea trials by December 1941?
One big issue with the Iowa incident was the age of the powder. I personally knew and served with one of the men killed, and he had mentioned prior to the incident that the powder bags being used were also WWII surplus. After 50 years, gunpowder starts to do some chemical breakdown, and it, to quote him, 'Just didn't feel right'. It's quite possible that the ram didn't fail- but rather the powder began the 'smolder process' due to chemical degradation of the powder.
also there had been a push on to save battleships by show an increase gun range. An reports of preheating the powder bags to achieve this. Many many times in an unknown system failure the default sadly is to blame human error.
@Bill Cunningham I think I remember reading that the powder charges had been improperly stored on barges in very hot weather instead of in climate controlled facilities, which helped cause the chemical breakdown. I think I have also read that the explosion on the Iowa may have been enhanced by enough powder charges for several salvos being stacked inside the turret, with the crew thinking it would not be a safety issue since it was just an exercise. Have you heard anything about this?
Terry Shank I believe I heard that one of the officers had actually been forcing the crew to experiment with using a lesser or greater amount of powder instead of the standard loadings (I think it was using the HE powder load for AP, or vice versa). One of the gunnery supervisors-perhaps the one who was scapegoated-had objected based on safety concerns but was ordered to continue. It’s been a while though,, so I would have to research it again to be sure.
@@bluemarlin8138 No, there was no stacking of powder in the turrets. The 16" 50Cal gun mount has chain feed for all components of the shot (round plus 4 bags of powder). There's really no way to manually load the powder from the turret with any efficiency so staging powder in the turret makes no sense. As far as storage goes, the powder was, for the most part, kept in a warehouse at the Seal Beach Weapons Depot in California. However, you are right in that the warehouse was not climate controlled.
Reports of lack of maintenance, lack of training, and superior officers insisting on performance over safety, claims of sailors in illicit sexual relationships - reads just like the accident reports for the USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain www.military.com/daily-news/2019/04/19/uss-iowa-first-came-explosion-then-cover.html
On the USS Long Beach we had a 45-man Marine detachment; 2 officers and 43 Marines. They had seperate berthing, but meesed with the rest of the crew. At general quarters they manned the mounts and Mk 56 FCS of the two 5/38s. The ran the brig and served as sentries. They also did security in the Talos magazines due to carrying "special" warheads (i.e. nukes). They practiced marksmanship fairly regularly, and went ashore fo training pretty regularly.
Concerning generational connections, I was a career officer in the US Army from the end of Vietnam thru the Gulf War. My dad was an infantryman in WWII. His father was in Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt in 1898. My great grandfather was a young trooper in the Union cavalry in the US civil war. Two generations before that, several family members served on both sides of the American Revolution. We are not that far removed from history if only we look at it.
My grandfather served in the First World War. Both my parents served in the Second World War. They only ever told the funny stories but, for me, Remembrance Day was always something to take seriously.
As to riverine battles between fleets, you forgot a major one, the battle of Riachuelo, between the Brazilian Navy and the Paraguayan Navy in the war of the triple Aliance, that was pretty decently sized, complete with the Brazilian flagship defeating multiple enemies by ramming them.
This is a little late, but the discussion of all forward armament versus front/rear armament is something I directly contributed to in my job -- Computer Engineer, Systems Engineer, Mark 152 TERRIER fire-control computer programmer, Wrap-Around Simulation Program management, maintenance, and update, and data analyst with the TERRIER shipboard anti-aircraft guided missile system Mark 76 with the digital versions being MODs 6, 7, 8, and 9 (the last one having the much more powerful SM-2ER missile and support equipment suite). TERRIER Mark 76, the most advanced system eventually using the Standard Missile Type 1 (Homing All the Way) and, in MOD 9, the SM-2 missile (uplink, and downlink, and much better control using the more powerful shipboard radars and computers to tell the missile its best path to the target) was put on a number of destroyer, destroyer leader (later cruisers by feat), the cruiser LONG BEACH (where they were a secondary battery after TALOS), and three aircraft carriers (the carrier versions turned out to be useless simply because they and aircraft operations interfered somewhat with each other and the carrier personnel essentially turned them into storage lockers). There were basically two forms of TERRIER on the destroyers/"cruisers": Single-ender twin-radar batteries (either bow or stern with a 5"/54 gun on the other end of the ship) or double-enders with a twin battery on both ends and a pair of two-gun 3" batteries, one per side amidships for all other surface and, close-in AA targets). Note that the TERRIER AA GMFCS was also capable of shooting at ship targets and could be very deadly due to its large (12" diameter) missile moving at hypersonic speed. All TALOS, TERRIER, TARTAR, FFG-7, and later Aegis systems (though the last now has fully active SM-6 missiles) were all semi-active (had a radar receive-only homing "eye" in the missile nose), requiring the ship to light up the target with an X-band illuminator attached to the larger searchlight-shaped (TERRIER and TALOS) or dish-shaped (TARTAR, Aegis, and other smaller US Navy radar-controlled missile systems) tracking radars, one radar required per target for the entire flight of the missile. While the ship superstructure only blinds each tracking radar for about 30 degree in the direction toward the opposite end of the ship due to their position rather high up on the superstructure., for the missile launchers of the older single-/twin-arm rotating type (all but Aegis, which mostly -- now only -- used vertical launch) the deck mounting position of the launcher made then blind to a very wide, usually circa-120 degrees, when firing with the missile at below 35 degrees or so elevation. The problem was that back then people were firing a guided missile with the ability to maneuver at high-G values once the missile was no longer tied to the launch acceleration of the missile booster (very large in TERRIER and TALOS giving a significant minimum range, but a much smaller, shorter-acting internal booster in TARTAR, Aegis, and FFG-7) AS IF THE MISSILE WERE AN INERT GUN PROJECTILE!!!! I am not joking here. Until I came along, ALL of the missiles mentioned here using rail launchers were aimed at the target just like a gun was, with no variation allowed, though the actual elevation angle of the missile at launch was usually somewhat higher than with a regular gun for optimum flight ballistics. Kind of crazy, is it not? But the missile design agents and manufacturers were so used to firing guns with fixed elevations against each target, only going to higher elevations against farther targets that they automatically thought of firing missiles the exact same way. The only alternative in a single-ender was turning the ship enough to clear the radar's or launcher's horizontal arc so the launcher or radar was not blocked. When I was working on the original MOD 6 digital version of TERRIER (it was the first one to allow the X-band illuminator to also be used as a Doppler target tracker in addition to the regular pulse-radar tracker to make the system almost jam-proof), one of my jobs was tediously entering by hand into the program a long table giving the various angles of bearing and elevation that defined the blind regions where the launcher and radar had to be prevented from operating (the radar turned off and the launcher stopped from even going into the blind zone to keep it from damaging itself). When the program caused the launcher to go into the blind region, instead the mechanical stops automatically elevated the launcher rails upward to allow the launcher to rotate in that region but the firing ability was disabled because the launcher had "LOST SYNC". The part of the firing program in the computer ignored the blind zones and only the table of number that I had to enter, matching the mechanical cutout stops, prevented the system from trying to blow the ship superstructure apart with its own missile. I had been doing this for each ship separately (all ships varied somewhat in these values, so a lot of entries had to be made when creating tapes for an all-ship program upgrade). Suddenly, just about the time that the first MOD 9 SM-2-equipped ships were being introduced (several years after the first digital systems had been replacing all of the older electro-mechanical calculator versions of TERRIER, showing how long I and others had been making these blind zone entries for all ships), I was in the middle of entering the blind zone values for a ship when, like a lightening bolt, the idea hit me: WHAT WAS I DOING?!! These missiles are high-G maneuvering weapons! Why don't we just aim AROUND the launcher blind zone in bearing or elevation and shoot at the target at a cocked-off angle and allow the guidance system in the missile to correct the flight?! I felt like a fool for not thinking of this before (how dumb can one be?). I went to my boss and told him. He said that nobody else had ever suggested such a thing, as far as he knew, but it should be investigated by the TERRIER Design Agent, the Applied Physics Laboratory or of John Hopkins University (who also controlled the nuclear ballistic missile program for the Navy, so they were a BIG DEAL). He talked to his boss and they decided that the easiest way to get it done was using the regular BENEFICIAL SUGGESTION program and send it to APL/JHU through that -- it would also get me some money if it were adopted (I eventually got only $400, since it did not save any money doing my changes). So I wrote up a "Benny Sug" stating that my idea was to elevate the launcher above the level of the superstructure in the blind zone region, no matter at what range the target was, adjust the orders to the missile to compensate (easy to do once the launch angle was created), and shoot anyway. Outside the blind zone, use the regular calculations. I called it "TERRIER Fire Around The Blind Zone Capability" -- later changed by others to "Curved Fire Capability". Off it went, after some arguments by various people who thought that it couldn't possibly be that simple (but it was!!). I was later informed that when APL/JHU got the Benny Sug, they were skeptical that it would work against close-in targets at low elevation where the missile would have to do a high-G dive to counteract the high firing angle if aimed directly opposite in bearing at the other end of the ship from the end that the launcher was on. But as they ran it through their Six-Degrees-of-Freedom computer simulators, they found that it ALWAYS WORKED, even at minimum range (where the booster had just separated from the missile, allowing the missile to maneuver). In fact, I was told that this was considered a whole new concept for such large-size missiles and I was given the job of using our simulators at work to test the new code written for this by Vitro Industries, the TERRIER main computer program contractors -- my work for the Navy in-house, with a couple of other guys, was post-introduction maintenance of new TERRIER software, such as adding those blind zone angles and creating patches to fix old and new problems reported from ships or testing new programs before final sending to the ships. I did this check of the code for my idea and the code they had developed to up the firing angle worked just fine. Suddenly, single-enders had a 50% larger horizontal firing arc against all low-angle targets (only that 30-degree radar blind zone was left), including the major threat of on-the-deck cruise missiles. All it took was only a few lines of computer code. I later realized that I had created the basis for Aegis vertical launch capability, since it was the final version of this extra elevation change: Always fire straight up and forever to Hell with the superstructure! My small contribution to the Navy's missile capabilities.
Love your videos, and no such thing as too long. It’s hilarious watching some of the German names get close captions, like the “Deathwing uh”. Very fun
When you were talking about your Grandfather and the history that he had lived through, it reminded me of all the history that my own Grandfather had lived through. He was born in 1898. He would have been 5 years old when the Wright brothers first flew. He was 71 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Realizing this just blew my mind.
2:38:05 Drach, I don't say this to be nitpicky (I mean, no more than this channel is), but the literal _definition_ (or, at least one of them, as there are many various accepted versions, as it _can_ get a bit fuzzy but in this its clear) of major surgery is if it requires general anesthetic (even if they normally would anesthetize you, but can't, and must go with another form of anesthetic, such as a nerve block and work on you while conscious) and if they are cutting into a body cavity. Doctors will _never_ use general anesthesia for minor surgery. I know what you meant, I think, that it's not a serious operation, but there is a strict difference between "minor surgery" and "major surgery", and it's more or less like referring to a battleship as a torpedo boat. Minor surgery is essentially a procedure a doctor can do in their office, pretty much the most cutting involved in minor surgery might be the removal of a mole or something, as you can't cut into a body cavity. Probably doesn't bother 99% of the viewers, but to those of us who have some medical knowledge/background, it kinda makes your ears burn just a little. You'll be fine. If you're nervous, tell them, and they'll give you something to calm you down before the procedure. I personally look forward to an opiate-fueled drydock! :)
I'm guessing that related to his love of Irn-Bru, and only being able to drink coffee as "weaponized caramel" they are simply lopping off lower extremities that he can't feel anymore anyway.. That being said a Drydock on Versed would be remarkable.
Sorry, but I must disagree with your comments about when doctors use general anesthesia. I recently needed surgery on my foot. The doctor advised he would be using general anesthesia for the procedure. This caused a delay in the surgery being scheduled because I had experienced a major heart attack about one month prior. After consulting my cardiologist, it was decided that a local anesthesia would be used instead of the general. The surgery that I had was considered minor surgery.
@@kirkstickney7394 This was a year ago mate. Why reply now? I'm not going to argue with you over something that is pretty well defined in the industry. Look it up yourself. Just because you _can_ be put under general anesthesia (and even then, it may not have been proper general anesthesia, and only sedation, many surgeons will call that GA when it's not. Were you going to be intubated? If not, it's not general anesthesia.) for a surgical procedure doesn't mean it is a major surgery. Let's be clear about that. The risks from General Anesthesia are fairly large, so doctors wouldn't use them for *actual* minor surgery unless the patient literally could not handle it, and generally then they use sedation (like dentistry, you're not intubated, but there's an anesthesiologist in the room monitoring you. It's not GA, they're using medicine to sedate you and prevent the formation of memories), so your surgery was almost certainly either not minor surgery, or else it was not actually general anesthesia. "There two main classes of surgery • Major - Major surgeries are usually extensive and warrant an overnight or extended stay in a hospital. These surgeries include extensive work such as entering a body cavity, removing an organ or altering the body’s anatomy. Patients undergoing major surgeries usually require anesthesia or respiratory assistance and sometimes even both. Examples of major surgery include cardiac operations, any bowel cavity operations, reconstructive surgery, deep tissue procedures, any transplant procedures, as well as any surgeries in the abdomen, chest or cranium. • Minor - Minor surgeries are generally superficial and do not require penetration of a body cavity. They do not involve assisted breathing or anesthesia and are usually performed by a single doctor. Examples of minor surgeries include biopsies, repairs of cuts or small wounds, and the removal of warts, benign skin lesions, hemorrhoids or abscesses." I will say that many major surgeries can be carried out outpatient, i.e. you go in, have the surgery performed, then go home. Some surgical procedures don't cleanly fall within either category, either. Some are on the borders, which are fuzzy. But literally no doctor is going to use GA for a biopsy or removing a mole. Sedation, maybe, if the patient is scared or unstable. So perhaps you had "moderate" surgery. Lol.
Your story about tea dependence reminded me about my own similar experience. It was year 4 of my chemical engineering studies, end of september. We've finished apparatus design course two months ago and thought that we were done with it. As it turned out, there was one more coursework due in october (calculating the rectification unit and making technical drawings of some part of it) and professor was, to use the correct terminology, a propper arsehole. I spent a week making my calculations of the unit and drawings of condenser (thank FSM I wasn't required to produce complete drawings package for a rectification unit) and went to prof's office to hand it all in. What followed was two weeks of daily meetings where he'd find errors, I'd fix them and come back to a new portion of corrections. Sometimes those mistakes were made in calculations, couple times in the drawings, but more often than not errors were him not liking how the work looked, later he'd change his mind and I had to reverse the changes. During these two weeks my average sleep time was somewhere around 4 hours/day and my caffeine consumption was through the roof. At the end of it all I was unable to operate unless I drank 2 cups of strong coffee and, as I later found out, not only had I screwed up my sleep patterns and increased tolerance to caffeine, but I also formed a dependence on damn alcaloid.
@@harvesterofsorrow4930 Not completely true. The thirty-aught-six Chauchat did. They all were venerable to dust and the magazines were too fragile and the witness holes needed covered with plastic but kept clean they were reliable and they were the first fielded light machine gun.
Navy/Marine ... interactions tend to be "Me against my brother, my brother and I against the world." Just don't mess with the medics. It's not worth the pain. FYI...A "lead lined 2x4" is called a Clue Bat. As in, "you Get The Clue, Or You Get The Bat." Marine "Gator Navy" ships are still USN.
All the US services tend to be that way, in my experience, excluding the medics, which are a special and completely understandable situation/relationship. When I’m in a room with anyone but Army, I’m ripping into them with some dysfunctional family love, especially if they’re mud pirates, the orange headed stepchild of the services. I don’t remember the specific reg, but I’m pretty sure that’s what’s required by the UCMJ.
My grandfather served in the Air Force during WWII (as a clerk). He's still with us, but at almost 95 every day is a gift. He meets with a couple other vets on Fridays for a beer, but they're numbers are thinning rapidly.
On the subject of quad turrets on cruisers; the Belfast class of light cruisers were supposed to have 4 quad 6" gun turrets to one up the new Japanese 15 gun light cruisers and the Brooklyns. To test the idea they built a full size quad mount on land. The mount had a host of issues including excessive dispersion. There were reports of shells colliding in flight. Rather than continue development on what looked increasingly like a bad idea, they just gave the Belfasts the same 6" mount as the Southhamptons.
The USN was is a somewhat similar situation with the _South Carolina_ class. When placed in service in 1910, it was the first dreadnought with all the 12" guns in super firing service on the centerline. If the building pace for the class wasn't quite so leisurely. the class would have been in the role now given to _Dreadnought_ . Like _Dreadnought_ , the _South Carolina_ didn't see much action in WWI and had only a little over ten years useful service before falling victim to the Washington treaty.
In my opinion, It needs to be remembered Nelson's column commemorates the death of a hero more than the battle. The armada, well, the sailors who I believe were to die at anchor after the battle are possibly the main famous casualties after the battle.
Speaking of ships designed by committee. One of RUclips's suggested videos on the right is... yep, "French Pre-Dreadnoughts: When Hotels Go To War". Who says the algorithm doesn't have a sense of humor?
I watch aviation documentaries when I go to bed, and some how ALWAYS wake up to your channel. Who at youtube are you paying off? Haha, good stuff sir! I do enjoy the videos too ;)
In the 16th, 17th and a bit of the 18th centuries ships of the line particular were painted up like Peacocks. Take a look at the Sovereign of the Seas as launched for a fine example - gold leaf all over the place on her. Ships of the Line were status symbols of the Kings and decorated to show it...
That is true. During the American Civil War there was Americans old enough to recall the Revolutionary War, and some high ranking officers had begun their careers during the War of 1812. During WWII there was still Civil War veterans alive to feature in parades. Another example is that Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō was born in 1848 Edo Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate and died in 1934 in the Showa Era under the Emperor Hirohito. Like a "Yankee in King Arthur's Court" Togo went from Samurai to almost the Attack on Pearl Harbor during WWII.
My paternal grandfather was in the AEF in France during WWI (US 2nd Infantry), his grandfather along as several great uncles served in the in Union Army in the US Civil War. When I was growing up, many kids my age had fathers who served in WWII and few fathers who served in the Korean War.
@@AbeBSea Or Great Britain... must be I have a think for plucky island nations. As a passenger rail advocate in the USA my go to foreign intercity passenger rail examples are the UK and Japan, with France coming in third. I wish I could get more info nation about rail modernization in Sweden, South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia. Do have a bit on China.
Re: right before the 2nd Interlude, my grandfather knew a man who was at the battle of Solferino. He led a bayonet charge to victory because he gave the command to fix bayonets in piedmontaise dialect which the other side couldn't understand. I can speak the command, but I can't spell it. My mother and I know this, perhaps alone.
The British fleet in the Med was there to fight surface actions with the Italian fleet. Let's face it, compared to Germany, Italy was always considered a second rate navy, and the RN was confident it could fight in the Med with some of its older but still powerful ships. What the RN didn't appreciate initially was the role of air power and how poorly equipped the fleet was to fight off air attacks. The found to their consternation that a couple of 3" guns and some quad Vickers machine guns just weren't a sufficient AA armament by 1940.
They also found that their High Altitude Control System (HACS) was designed including some assumptions that turned out not to be the case when the war happened. In particular, HACS assumed the target was a level bomber at constant course, speed, and altitude, so it was completely inadequate against a target that is rapidly changing altitude, such as a dive bomber.
@Tom Sanders Bismark and Tirpitz vs Littorio and Vittorio Veneto, Roma wasn't commissioned until June 1942 and never really had fuel for anything except the trip to Malta when she got sunk. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau vs Conte di Cavoyr, Gulio Cesare, Andrea Doria, and Caio Dulio. Three heavy cruisers and three panzerschiff (although the Germans never had all six of these in service at once) vs seven heavy cruisers. Six light cruisers vs ten for the Italians, although all of those light cruisers are lightly built and/or lightly armored except the last two Italian ones. And then by the time the Italians joined the war the Germans had lost a number of these ships invading Norway (and had not commissioned Bismark yet), so they never had all of them available at the same time, unlike the Italian fleet in being.
2:03 I had a physical chemistry professor back in the eighties. Dr. Richardson worked on the A-Bomb project. He referred to his old boss as Oppie. I am sure he is no longer with us. Great instructor! Time goes on, and we lose great people.
I would not say the Armada is particularly overlooked in British education... certainly it was THE major naval battle we studied in primary/junior, long before we did anything about Trafalgar or Jutland... talking of witnesses, I actually knew a person (in passing) who actually met the Russian survivors of Tsushima during their time held in Matsuyama Castle (as a small boy, part of his chores would be to carry up the shops Tofu for the guards)... he used bits of the language he caught on then, when working in the jointly held territories on Manchuria.
My understanding is that the point of the gap between the forward turrets in Richelieu's layout was that one heavy calibre hit would not be able to disable both turrets (at least to make it much less likely)
Iowa turret explosion. From my recollection, from reading accounts of experiments and data, three factors were involved. 1. The powder was older and stored on floating storage barges, baking in the sun. Fluctuations in temperature over time. 2. The powder was in pellet form and "trueing pellets" were added on the end of the charges to bring the total powder weight into specifications. 3. An over ramming of the chargs that compressed one of the trueing pellets too much caused ignition.
1:22:08 Not just any submarine but U-29, commanded by Otto Weddigen who had previously sunk HMS Aboukir, HMS Hogue and HMS Cressy. In my hometown, there's still a street named after him.
I have an example of how the past isn't quite as much in the past as one might think. When I was in college in the late 80s I actually got to meet a fellow who had met Brahms (who died in 1897). Yes, this fellow met Brahms when the former was a just a few years old, but he did meet him. Another example I also like to use is that there are still people alive (if just barely) who were born when the very same Japanese Emperor (Meiji) who was around to see the last Shogun was still alive.
wrt the question about Marine detachments on USN ships, the Marines were long gone when I was on the Lex, but I did notice one head that was tagged for Marines, so there was some separation of facilities. With the Marines gone from the ship, "G-Division" had custody of all the small arms, as well as the line throwing guns.
Further to the decoration of ships - At the battle of the Yalu River between Japan and China, the Chinese ships (ironclads, and modern for the time) were so loaded with decorations and carvings they caught fire every time they were hit, and they were hit often. A truly strange battle.
To put the position of Colonel in the British Army into some context you must really understand the British Regimental system, as it does not work like the regimental system of most other nations. At least until recently. The Regiment was NOT a combat formation, it was an administrative formation. Most Regiments in the British Army comprised, in peace time at least, of 3 Battalions. At least in theory, essentially however they could be split into four, the three Service Battalions, and what was essentially a Training/Administrative Battalion that would be permanently based at the Regiments home barracks in the UK. The three Service Battalions would be the ones sent to wherever the Army required them Battalions would be formed into Brigades, usually of 2 or 3 Battalions, however, it is important to note that the British Army almost never formed Brigades using multiple Battalions of the same Regiment. The only exceptions to this rule occurred during the two World Wars. Essentially the British Brigade forms the same Combat Role as the Three Battalion Regiments of other Nations such as Germany or the USA. This habit of splitting the three Service battalions into different Brigades is why you often have rather confusing situations where a single British Regiment is on three continents at the same time. It is also the root behind the naming conventions. 1st Royal Welch Fusiliers does NOT mean it is the First Regiment of Royal Welch Fusiliers, but the 1st BATTALION of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Numbered Regiments have their own nomenclature, so 1/11th Hussars is the 1st Battalion of the 11th Hussars. Another thing to be aware of, is while the usual regiment size during peace time is 3 Battalions (plus their adminstrative/training cadre), a Regimment is not LIMITED to 3 Battalions. There were 1 and 2 battalion Regiments in the Army (usually Cavalry and especially Yeoman Cavalry, which were essentially an early National Guard). They can also go higher, much, much higher. The aforementioned Royal Welch Fusiliers had some 24 Service Battalions in action by 1918 for example (and this is not including the training battalions and Home Defence Battalions), during WWII the Royal Tank Regiment had some 29 Battalions in service by 1945. The Battalion was generally led by a Lieutenant Colonel, the most senior of whom would be the Colonel of the Regiment, usually (but not always) the commander of the 1st battalion, and usually (but not always) holding the actual rank of Colonel rather than Lt Colonel. To muddy the waters further there are also ceremonial Colonels, who hold the title but no real authority, the Reigning Monarch is the Colonel of several Regiments for example. As a result Colonel in the British Army, even today, is both a rank and a position, and not neccesarily both at the same time.... NOTE: The c in Royal Welch Fusiliers is not a spelling error, Welch is an archaic spelling of Welsh. The Regiment kept that spelling until it was amalgamated with the Royal Welch Regiment in 2006 to become the Royal Welsh, RWF becoming 1st battalion Royal Welsh, RRW 2nd Battalion.
It's odd, when my RUclips algorithm breaks, all I get is all of your videos. I'm not mad, but thought you'd be interested to hear it. Happens all the time, last 6 months ish. Almost started when I subscribed.
List of Ships that had Turret Explosions USS Iowa (BB-61) (1989): Over ram + Possible Heavily Aged Powder Charges that began to crystallize USS Samuel B. Roberts (DE-413) (1944): According to Jack Yusen during the Battle Off Samar the Barrel Evacuator on the Aft turret was destroyed due to battle damage causing cordite residue to build up eventually causing a Breech Explosion. IJN Mutsu (1943): Fire in 3rd turret that destroyed the entire ship. Cause Unknown: Believed to be caused by a bad Type 3 Shell that ignited. IJN Hyuga (1942): Suffered a Turret Explosion during gunnery exercises with Nagato and Mutsu IJN Haruna (1920): Faulty Fuses ignited the cordite bags prematurely in her Number 1 turret. Anyone who wants to add more please go ahead
USS Saint Paul (CA-73) suffered an explosion in the left gun of main battery turret #1, caused by an attempt to ram a projectile into a gun that was already loaded because the gun captain mistakenly thought the gun had fired. 21 April, 1952.
USS Mississippi had explosions in number 2 turret twice. First during a gunnery practice in 1924 & again in 1943 while engaged in shore bombardment. 48 killed the first time, 42 killed in the 43 incident.
I am not sure if it counts but during and just after the Battle of Dakar the French Battleship Richelieu suffered detonations in two of her main gun barrels damaging 3 of them.
USS Quincy (CA-39) (1942) Barrel explosion in turret #2 during the Battle of Savo Island, possibly caused by the crew rushing to get the gun ready to return fire at the attacking Japanese forces.
The US has recently made considerable effort to homogenize the uniforms of its military services. I dunno what purpose that would serve, other than to disrupt service rivalry. When I was in the USN we honored the marines serving aboard ships. We were warrior/technicians. Efficient team players using technology and well oiled habit to strike at unseen foes. They were warriors. Highly motivated shock troops. How can you not respect that? I would not want to trade jobs with a marine, but they were just as important to the overall picture as we gobs were.
The Royal Australian Navy has done the same. Sailors usually wear blue/grey disruptive pattern uniforms. These look pretty bloody silly when they also have high-vis reflective tape sewn onto the sleeves; even assuming an actual need for camoflaged uniform on board a ship. 😆
Eh, not so much. The Army and Marines have separate camo patterns for their fatigues, and the Navy is moving away from shipboard camo to an all-blue or all-khaki uniform. The Air Force wears the same camo pattern fatigues that the Army does. The Marines actually patented their camo pattern just so the Army wouldn't use it. MARPAT is exclusive to the Marine Corps, the Army had to spend their own boatload (6 billion iirc, enough to buy a carrier) of money on UCP and then OCP in order to get digital camo of their own.
@@ashesofempires04 Spending 6 billion on a camo pattern when what the Germans used in WW II actually worked very well suggests the people doing this should have been run through a wood chipper to improve the service. Okay just drop kicked out of the military but this sort of stupidity is staggering.
@@dwightehowell8179 The concept behind digital camo is solid, and there was a fair amount of interesting and innovative new technology in the material and uniform design. There were also some really shitty design elements. And to be fair, that $6 billion figure is total program cost, which includes the purchase of uniforms for literally millions of soldiers. Where the UCP camo fielding process came unglued was the process of picking colors for the pattern, and the possible introduction of bias from generals who "liked" particular schemes that performed objectively worse than others in actual field testing. And the field testing was dubious, with no actual testing in either of the two warzones where it would actually see combat. That's the travesty of $6 billion spent on a camo pattern that was worse than what they previously fielded, or that rather than just pay a few million for Multicam (designed by the same company that made MARPAT for the marines) they spent even more money to not have to use a patented pattern.
@@ashesofempires04 Solid or not I've seen people wearing the WW II German patterns stand up at a location where I and maybe nobody saw anything. Cameo works. That the new high tech stuff is more effective than older stuff....?
Throughout the Commonwealth armed forces, the pronunciation of Lieutenant - as in Lieutenant-Commander, Lieutenant-Colonel and Flight Lieutenant - is definitely "Leftenant". Don't ask me why, as the American "Lootenant" is much closer to the French original sound of "Leeootenong". It's been a British tradition since the year dot.
iv never watched an episode of this show but i use old forgotten weapons vids to help me fall asleep and despite the fact i click the "only from forgotten weapons" button on the thing above the queue or related videos or whatever its called every morining i wake up and this channel is on, seems like a decent channel and im happy im giving you veiws but yeah iv never seen a single video despite probably 5 or 6 hours a night they are playing in my bedroom
About monuments to naval victories; in Naples, Italy there is an obelisk dedicated to the victory of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. But there are also several columns in Naples dedicated or in celebration of the end of the plague. Those columns are ornately decorated while the Lepanto obelisk is rather plain looking.
It should be noted that the HMS Dreadnought's only wartime kill was captained by Otto Weddigen, who put down the cruisers Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue in one action.
How about some videos on Soviet submarines of WWII? That would be quite interesting to see. And I have a question: How quickly, on average, could you lay down, launch, fit out, and commission a battleship? I guess this can vary due to displacement, etc., but still, it's a question that's bothering me!
Don't know about wooden warships or early ironclads, but for Dreadnought era battleships it's always years. HMS Dreadnought herself was laid down 2 Oct 1905 and steamed out of harbour 3 Oct 1906, being officially commissioned into service in Dec 1906. So 14 months, but in reality she needed a few more months of testing and fixing. That's very fast but some "cheating" took place: the main guns and turrets had actually been started earlier for different ships, but were diverted to Dreadnought instead. A good reference book like "Conway's Battleships" will have the dates for laid down, launched, and completed. Most 1930s/1940s battleships seem to be around three years, a few up to five.
With regard to Trafalgar, reminds me of a recent Question you answered about non English sailors in the Royal Navy. There is a Black sailor on the frieze at the base of Nelson's Column
There is also the matter that when most of the historic buildings of London were built in the mid to late 19th century, the Napoleonic Wars were still in living memory, so commemorating those battles was an easier sell than battles while equally important, most people had no significant emotional attachment to such as the Armada.
The French APC shell defects that blew up a RICHELIEU gun was not a jamming problem. It was a base plug manufacturing defect. The shells had deep holes drilled into the base plugs for inserting poison gas "cans", that were never actually used, to my knowledge. However, in drilling those holes (two per base plug), the manufacturer for some reason -- misreading a spec perhaps -- made them too deep so that when the guns fired, some of the holes blew out their inner ends and allowed the propellant blast into the main explosive cavity and KABOOM before the shell moved very far down the barrel. JEAN BART seems to have found out about the problem and welded thick steel coin-shaped inserts onto the inner surface of the base plug over the holes, fixing it, since none of its shells ever exploded, to my knowledge. As for the US battleship turret explosion, whatever caused it was a major fluke since too-fast ramming of powder bags had happened many times before over decades of such ship loading --from well before WWI to the turret explosion on a large number of US battleships with NO problems like that ever happening before and with no more problem than crushed bags that had to be replaced. Something happened that was completely unexected, no matter what the situation was. A strange fluke by any measure.
57:29 the USS Kidd, a Fletcher-class destroyer, has a painting of Captain Kidd on one of its funnels. At one point a captain of the ship had it taken down and morale suffered until his eventual replacement had it restored. (If I'm remembering the history of why they have a pirate painted on the funnel of the ship right).
Dave Rawlings? Aka London Longsword? Small world. I think for once, a person outside of Perth has been Perth'ed. Note, to be Perth'ed is to be asked if you know someone, purely based on your location, such as Perth, Australia, and you've encountered them or know them.
Actually yes Drach, nothing reminds me of college like X101 in the fall, follow by X102 in the winter and X103 in the spring. Mix in generous amount of the cheapest beer/rum/vodka and you have yourself a perfectly healthy university student.
@@kemarisite LOL holy crap you're right! But as far as I can tell (not that I know him personally) he's not college level alcoholic. I think it's a safe to say that based on the fact that he doesn't bleed caffeine.
Marines at Sea. In the Royal Navy a marine acts as a Seaman Gunner when in a ship on detachment. Hence manning B turret being a standard action station in WW2 cruisers.
In the Royal Canadian Navy, although the RN "letenant" pronunciation was used in the past, in the last 40-50 years "leftenant" has been almost universally adopted. This may stem from the Unification of the Canadian Forces into a single service in 1968. In fact, for a few short years in the early 70s, naval ranks were not even permitted to be used. Speaking to current RN officers, "leftenant" has almost completely superseded the older pronunciation there as well.
Which El Alemain battle? There were actually two battles. The 1st was won by Auchinleck, when the Afrika Corps were stopped. He was then replaced by Montgomery who then started the final retreat of the Afrika Corps, back to Tunisia
2:13 Lieutenant... I first became aware of the British verses American pronunciation as a kid when watching the action movie, Assault on a Queen, starring Frank Sinatra. The difference in the pronunciation alerted the crew of the Queen that something was amiss. U boat, ocean liner, scuba diving, and treasure. Modern day pirates! A fun movie.
wrt the question about guns being the longest lead item for a BB, what was the lead time for a gun around WWI? I started looking into the history of the Italian Caracciolo class BBs a while back. The Caracciolo was launched in May of 20, and Ansaldo had built up about 12% of the hull of Columbo, but, if Italy had wanted to continue with their construction, they would not have had guns for them as most of the guns that had been ordered for them had been redirected during WWI as shore batteries, mounted on railroad carriages or mounted on monitors.
William III living towards the late 17th and early 18th century had a lot of commemorative medals struck with regards to the Glorious invasion and the fighting against France. Many of them read something to the effect of 'hail our perpetual governor, the deliverer of England, the preserver of Scotland, the pacifier of Ireland'. I reckon the latter two might disagree with how that is commemorated though. Cheers
If you are looking for various naval tactics in fiction try David Weber's safehold series. Multiple different periods in our timeline covered with transitions between eras and some of the changes
My Grampa was onboard USS Arkansas as a Marine in WW2. He was like a personal aide to the Captain like a bodyguard sort of and would drive him around whenever they were in port. He liked this better than when he served on Guadalcanal in the 1st Marines lol though he did tell me they did take a torpedo hit while on convoy duty in the Atlantic but i can never find any record of it.
58:00... WW2 ships did have artwork on them, just like B17's / B24's. It depended on ships and crew. U-boats almost all had a ship emblem painted on them. Some ship gun emplacements painted their own art on the armour protecting their guns (German especially).
my grandpa was in the marines and was in the pacific during WW2. he never said anything about separation while on ships, cant remember(prob never told me) he was on a real warship of some kind being transported either to an island or back to the state from an island but mostly transports/liberty ships. only issue was sleeping arrangements, they had a mixture of cots, hammocks and sheets/padding everywhere there was space. not that covering were needed, the pacific was not known for its mild climate. also more bodies meant more tasks getting done during down time. dont need training to push a mop. he was also trained for anti air, which was one of his jobs defending the random islands he was on. interesting stories, some of which ended up in a book somewhere, i think. i dont know if the book was released.
The fact that you prefer neither coffee or tea is funny. I myself grew up in the "Southern States" & thanks to dear ol' Mom drinking nothing but tea, I also developed a taste for it & NOW, WHAT I LIKE IS considered "SWEET TEA"!!! NO LEMON but enough sugar that there is no way it can get any sweeeter!! The Arizona Sweet Tea is OK. Better by the gallon, the can not as good. But 7-11 has a really good Sweet tea but occasionally you will get the taste of something different as though they didn't rinse tanks before starting the run. But that has gotten more rare, thank goodness! However, when it comes to coffee I totally agree with you. WHEN I ORDER coffee I do it to warm up cuz I'm cold! And I order my sugar "ON THE SIDE" cuz the people never put enough in. When I say "20 sugars on the side" they look at me weird but Starbucks is charging $3.50 for a large coffee if they can't give me 20 sugar packs & a cup of half-n-half then I'll tell 'em to keep it. McDonald's is a little less expensive at $2.50 for a large coffee but you basically have to get mean with them to get enough sugar! There have been times that I've had to demand my money back b4 some would give me sugar. Some of them act as though the sugar is coming from their very own pantry or something. Or like I'm asking them to sale me some strange exotic drug. And I've grown to a point in my life that if they can't give me what I'm paying for then there is no point in me paying for something that I'M NOT GOING TO ENJOY! Same thing with syrup on the hotcakes at McDonald's. Bitch wanted to charge me a dollar for an extra syrup after making a big deal about the sugar for my coffee. I promptly said "Go get the manager". When the manager came I made her give me my $ back. Shoot, for what McD's charges for sausage & hotcakes & then extra syrup too, hell I can go to Dennys and get pancakes that are fresh off the griddle. Rather than McD's microwave hotcakes that turn hard if you take even a moment to eat some eggs, precious. So I've sworn off on ordering pancakes from McD's ever again, & when I have them at Denny's I am much more satisfied, especially considering I don't have someone standing nearby trying to charge me extra for something, although Dennys is guilty of this when doing "take out".
01:38:42 On Texas Marine Counry was the area where the Front Two(if I remember correctly) Port & Starboard Casemate 5"/50's were removed during the 1920's refits were originally located at. Once the Casemate opening was plated over it was "Mostly" Dry. After the 1920's refit that removed most of the New York class secondaries, those gun positions were converted to either storage or birthing spaces & the Marines were assigned some of them.
SHIP REQUEST: just found out my great uncle served from 21 Sept 43 to 12 Dec 1945. Discharged as a Seaman First Class and Served aboard the USS La Vallette (DD448). Would love a review of her service history.
Pinned post for Q&A :)
In honor of July 4th can you do a brief rundown on the naval side of the US Revolutionary War?
What would have happened if the USofA Army Air Forces figured out what an effective antiship weapon air dropped torpedoes could be and develop their own torpedo that worked and configured the B-17 to drop them?
Can anyone tell me what the ship in drydock is? The one used for the thumbnail.
What happens if an eccentric American multi millionaire had succeeded in secretly building two functionally identical to Essex class except for having an armored flight deck ready for sea trials by December 1941?
Do you dislike Admiral Yi? You discount his accomplishments, skills, weapons, etc whenever he comes up. Its feeling a bit racist.
I like to listen to these at bed time as Im falling asleep, its like naval bedtime stories
Sleeping during class!?
Same
I tried that. I'd either fall asleep less that 15 min in and it taking a good week to get through one. Or I'd lie awake listening to it.
I take naps to them all the time.
Me too, he has a very soothing voice.
One big issue with the Iowa incident was the age of the powder. I personally knew and served with one of the men killed, and he had mentioned prior to the incident that the powder bags being used were also WWII surplus. After 50 years, gunpowder starts to do some chemical breakdown, and it, to quote him, 'Just didn't feel right'. It's quite possible that the ram didn't fail- but rather the powder began the 'smolder process' due to chemical degradation of the powder.
also there had been a push on to save battleships by show an increase gun range. An reports of preheating the powder bags to achieve this. Many many times in an unknown system failure the default sadly is to blame human error.
@Bill Cunningham I think I remember reading that the powder charges had been improperly stored on barges in very hot weather instead of in climate controlled facilities, which helped cause the chemical breakdown. I think I have also read that the explosion on the Iowa may have been enhanced by enough powder charges for several salvos being stacked inside the turret, with the crew thinking it would not be a safety issue since it was just an exercise. Have you heard anything about this?
Terry Shank I believe I heard that one of the officers had actually been forcing the crew to experiment with using a lesser or greater amount of powder instead of the standard loadings (I think it was using the HE powder load for AP, or vice versa). One of the gunnery supervisors-perhaps the one who was scapegoated-had objected based on safety concerns but was ordered to continue. It’s been a while though,, so I would have to research it again to be sure.
@@bluemarlin8138 No, there was no stacking of powder in the turrets. The 16" 50Cal gun mount has chain feed for all components of the shot (round plus 4 bags of powder). There's really no way to manually load the powder from the turret with any efficiency so staging powder in the turret makes no sense. As far as storage goes, the powder was, for the most part, kept in a warehouse at the Seal Beach Weapons Depot in California. However, you are right in that the warehouse was not climate controlled.
Reports of lack of maintenance, lack of training, and superior officers insisting on performance over safety, claims of sailors in illicit sexual relationships - reads just like the accident reports for the USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain
www.military.com/daily-news/2019/04/19/uss-iowa-first-came-explosion-then-cover.html
Tremendous admiration for this channel, Drachifel is the Issac Newton of naval knowledge. Much appreciation for the precise scholarship.
I'm always happy when there are destroyers or Polish navy in the episode. Cheers!
On the USS Long Beach we had a 45-man Marine detachment; 2 officers and 43 Marines. They had seperate berthing, but meesed with the rest of the crew. At general quarters they manned the mounts and Mk 56 FCS of the two 5/38s. The ran the brig and served as sentries. They also did security in the Talos magazines due to carrying "special" warheads (i.e. nukes). They practiced marksmanship fairly regularly, and went ashore fo training pretty regularly.
Congrats, you've managed to both get me hooked on ships and created content good enough to warrant disabling the ol' adblock. Keep up the good work.
Concerning generational connections, I was a career officer in the US Army from the end of Vietnam thru the Gulf War. My dad was an infantryman in WWII. His father was in Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt in 1898. My great grandfather was a young trooper in the Union cavalry in the US civil war. Two generations before that, several family members served on both sides of the American Revolution. We are not that far removed from history if only we look at it.
I love that you include the chapters in the time bar.
My grandfather served in the First World War. Both my parents served in the Second World War. They only ever told the funny stories but, for me, Remembrance Day was always something to take seriously.
As to riverine battles between fleets, you forgot a major one, the battle of Riachuelo, between the Brazilian Navy and the Paraguayan Navy in the war of the triple Aliance, that was pretty decently sized, complete with the Brazilian flagship defeating multiple enemies by ramming them.
Brilliant. Love every cast. Excellent natural voice quality.
This is a little late, but the discussion of all forward armament versus front/rear armament is something I directly contributed to in my job -- Computer Engineer, Systems Engineer, Mark 152 TERRIER fire-control computer programmer, Wrap-Around Simulation Program management, maintenance, and update, and data analyst with the TERRIER shipboard anti-aircraft guided missile system Mark 76 with the digital versions being MODs 6, 7, 8, and 9 (the last one having the much more powerful SM-2ER missile and support equipment suite).
TERRIER Mark 76, the most advanced system eventually using the Standard Missile Type 1 (Homing All the Way) and, in MOD 9, the SM-2 missile (uplink, and downlink, and much better control using the more powerful shipboard radars and computers to tell the missile its best path to the target) was put on a number of destroyer, destroyer leader (later cruisers by feat), the cruiser LONG BEACH (where they were a secondary battery after TALOS), and three aircraft carriers (the carrier versions turned out to be useless simply because they and aircraft operations interfered somewhat with each other and the carrier personnel essentially turned them into storage lockers). There were basically two forms of TERRIER on the destroyers/"cruisers": Single-ender twin-radar batteries (either bow or stern with a 5"/54 gun on the other end of the ship) or double-enders with a twin battery on both ends and a pair of two-gun 3" batteries, one per side amidships for all other surface and, close-in AA targets). Note that the TERRIER AA GMFCS was also capable of shooting at ship targets and could be very deadly due to its large (12" diameter) missile moving at hypersonic speed.
All TALOS, TERRIER, TARTAR, FFG-7, and later Aegis systems (though the last now has fully active SM-6 missiles) were all semi-active (had a radar receive-only homing "eye" in the missile nose), requiring the ship to light up the target with an X-band illuminator attached to the larger searchlight-shaped (TERRIER and TALOS) or dish-shaped (TARTAR, Aegis, and other smaller US Navy radar-controlled missile systems) tracking radars, one radar required per target for the entire flight of the missile. While the ship superstructure only blinds each tracking radar for about 30 degree in the direction toward the opposite end of the ship due to their position rather high up on the superstructure., for the missile launchers of the older single-/twin-arm rotating type (all but Aegis, which mostly -- now only -- used vertical launch) the deck mounting position of the launcher made then blind to a very wide, usually circa-120 degrees, when firing with the missile at below 35 degrees or so elevation. The problem was that back then people were firing a guided missile with the ability to maneuver at high-G values once the missile was no longer tied to the launch acceleration of the missile booster (very large in TERRIER and TALOS giving a significant minimum range, but a much smaller, shorter-acting internal booster in TARTAR, Aegis, and FFG-7) AS IF THE MISSILE WERE AN INERT GUN PROJECTILE!!!! I am not joking here. Until I came along, ALL of the missiles mentioned here using rail launchers were aimed at the target just like a gun was, with no variation allowed, though the actual elevation angle of the missile at launch was usually somewhat higher than with a regular gun for optimum flight ballistics. Kind of crazy, is it not? But the missile design agents and manufacturers were so used to firing guns with fixed elevations against each target, only going to higher elevations against farther targets that they automatically thought of firing missiles the exact same way. The only alternative in a single-ender was turning the ship enough to clear the radar's or launcher's horizontal arc so the launcher or radar was not blocked.
When I was working on the original MOD 6 digital version of TERRIER (it was the first one to allow the X-band illuminator to also be used as a Doppler target tracker in addition to the regular pulse-radar tracker to make the system almost jam-proof), one of my jobs was tediously entering by hand into the program a long table giving the various angles of bearing and elevation that defined the blind regions where the launcher and radar had to be prevented from operating (the radar turned off and the launcher stopped from even going into the blind zone to keep it from damaging itself). When the program caused the launcher to go into the blind region, instead the mechanical stops automatically elevated the launcher rails upward to allow the launcher to rotate in that region but the firing ability was disabled because the launcher had "LOST SYNC". The part of the firing program in the computer ignored the blind zones and only the table of number that I had to enter, matching the mechanical cutout stops, prevented the system from trying to blow the ship superstructure apart with its own missile. I had been doing this for each ship separately (all ships varied somewhat in these values, so a lot of entries had to be made when creating tapes for an all-ship program upgrade).
Suddenly, just about the time that the first MOD 9 SM-2-equipped ships were being introduced (several years after the first digital systems had been replacing all of the older electro-mechanical calculator versions of TERRIER, showing how long I and others had been making these blind zone entries for all ships), I was in the middle of entering the blind zone values for a ship when, like a lightening bolt, the idea hit me: WHAT WAS I DOING?!! These missiles are high-G maneuvering weapons! Why don't we just aim AROUND the launcher blind zone in bearing or elevation and shoot at the target at a cocked-off angle and allow the guidance system in the missile to correct the flight?! I felt like a fool for not thinking of this before (how dumb can one be?). I went to my boss and told him. He said that nobody else had ever suggested such a thing, as far as he knew, but it should be investigated by the TERRIER Design Agent, the Applied Physics Laboratory or of John Hopkins University (who also controlled the nuclear ballistic missile program for the Navy, so they were a BIG DEAL). He talked to his boss and they decided that the easiest way to get it done was using the regular BENEFICIAL SUGGESTION program and send it to APL/JHU through that -- it would also get me some money if it were adopted (I eventually got only $400, since it did not save any money doing my changes). So I wrote up a "Benny Sug" stating that my idea was to elevate the launcher above the level of the superstructure in the blind zone region, no matter at what range the target was, adjust the orders to the missile to compensate (easy to do once the launch angle was created), and shoot anyway. Outside the blind zone, use the regular calculations. I called it "TERRIER Fire Around The Blind Zone Capability" -- later changed by others to "Curved Fire Capability". Off it went, after some arguments by various people who thought that it couldn't possibly be that simple (but it was!!).
I was later informed that when APL/JHU got the Benny Sug, they were skeptical that it would work against close-in targets at low elevation where the missile would have to do a high-G dive to counteract the high firing angle if aimed directly opposite in bearing at the other end of the ship from the end that the launcher was on. But as they ran it through their Six-Degrees-of-Freedom computer simulators, they found that it ALWAYS WORKED, even at minimum range (where the booster had just separated from the missile, allowing the missile to maneuver). In fact, I was told that this was considered a whole new concept for such large-size missiles and I was given the job of using our simulators at work to test the new code written for this by Vitro Industries, the TERRIER main computer program contractors -- my work for the Navy in-house, with a couple of other guys, was post-introduction maintenance of new TERRIER software, such as adding those blind zone angles and creating patches to fix old and new problems reported from ships or testing new programs before final sending to the ships. I did this check of the code for my idea and the code they had developed to up the firing angle worked just fine. Suddenly, single-enders had a 50% larger horizontal firing arc against all low-angle targets (only that 30-degree radar blind zone was left), including the major threat of on-the-deck cruise missiles. All it took was only a few lines of computer code.
I later realized that I had created the basis for Aegis vertical launch capability, since it was the final version of this extra elevation change: Always fire straight up and forever to Hell with the superstructure! My small contribution to the Navy's missile capabilities.
Love your videos, and no such thing as too long.
It’s hilarious watching some of the German names get close captions, like the “Deathwing uh”. Very fun
When you were talking about your Grandfather and the history that he had lived through, it reminded me of all the history that my own Grandfather had lived through. He was born in 1898. He would have been 5 years old when the Wright brothers first flew. He was 71 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Realizing this just blew my mind.
2:38:05 Drach, I don't say this to be nitpicky (I mean, no more than this channel is), but the literal _definition_ (or, at least one of them, as there are many various accepted versions, as it _can_ get a bit fuzzy but in this its clear) of major surgery is if it requires general anesthetic (even if they normally would anesthetize you, but can't, and must go with another form of anesthetic, such as a nerve block and work on you while conscious) and if they are cutting into a body cavity. Doctors will _never_ use general anesthesia for minor surgery. I know what you meant, I think, that it's not a serious operation, but there is a strict difference between "minor surgery" and "major surgery", and it's more or less like referring to a battleship as a torpedo boat. Minor surgery is essentially a procedure a doctor can do in their office, pretty much the most cutting involved in minor surgery might be the removal of a mole or something, as you can't cut into a body cavity.
Probably doesn't bother 99% of the viewers, but to those of us who have some medical knowledge/background, it kinda makes your ears burn just a little.
You'll be fine. If you're nervous, tell them, and they'll give you something to calm you down before the procedure. I personally look forward to an opiate-fueled drydock! :)
I'm guessing that related to his love of Irn-Bru, and only being able to drink coffee as "weaponized caramel" they are simply lopping off lower extremities that he can't feel anymore anyway.. That being said a Drydock on Versed would be remarkable.
Sorry, but I must disagree with your comments about when doctors use general anesthesia. I recently needed surgery on my foot. The doctor advised he would be using general anesthesia for the procedure. This caused a delay in the surgery being scheduled because I had experienced a major heart attack about one month prior. After consulting my cardiologist, it was decided that a local anesthesia would be used instead of the general. The surgery that I had was considered minor surgery.
@@kirkstickney7394 This was a year ago mate. Why reply now?
I'm not going to argue with you over something that is pretty well defined in the industry. Look it up yourself.
Just because you _can_ be put under general anesthesia (and even then, it may not have been proper general anesthesia, and only sedation, many surgeons will call that GA when it's not. Were you going to be intubated? If not, it's not general anesthesia.) for a surgical procedure doesn't mean it is a major surgery. Let's be clear about that. The risks from General Anesthesia are fairly large, so doctors wouldn't use them for *actual* minor surgery unless the patient literally could not handle it, and generally then they use sedation (like dentistry, you're not intubated, but there's an anesthesiologist in the room monitoring you. It's not GA, they're using medicine to sedate you and prevent the formation of memories), so your surgery was almost certainly either not minor surgery, or else it was not actually general anesthesia.
"There two main classes of surgery
• Major - Major surgeries are usually extensive and warrant an overnight or extended stay in a hospital. These surgeries include extensive work such as entering a body cavity, removing an organ or altering the body’s anatomy. Patients undergoing major surgeries usually require anesthesia or respiratory assistance and sometimes even both. Examples of major surgery include cardiac operations, any bowel cavity operations, reconstructive surgery, deep tissue procedures, any transplant procedures, as well as any surgeries in the abdomen, chest or cranium.
• Minor - Minor surgeries are generally superficial and do not require penetration of a body cavity. They do not involve assisted breathing or anesthesia and are usually performed by a single doctor. Examples of minor surgeries include biopsies, repairs of cuts or small wounds, and the removal of warts, benign skin lesions, hemorrhoids or abscesses."
I will say that many major surgeries can be carried out outpatient, i.e. you go in, have the surgery performed, then go home.
Some surgical procedures don't cleanly fall within either category, either. Some are on the borders, which are fuzzy. But literally no doctor is going to use GA for a biopsy or removing a mole. Sedation, maybe, if the patient is scared or unstable.
So perhaps you had "moderate" surgery. Lol.
Your story about tea dependence reminded me about my own similar experience. It was year 4 of my chemical engineering studies, end of september. We've finished apparatus design course two months ago and thought that we were done with it. As it turned out, there was one more coursework due in october (calculating the rectification unit and making technical drawings of some part of it) and professor was, to use the correct terminology, a propper arsehole.
I spent a week making my calculations of the unit and drawings of condenser (thank FSM I wasn't required to produce complete drawings package for a rectification unit) and went to prof's office to hand it all in. What followed was two weeks of daily meetings where he'd find errors, I'd fix them and come back to a new portion of corrections. Sometimes those mistakes were made in calculations, couple times in the drawings, but more often than not errors were him not liking how the work looked, later he'd change his mind and I had to reverse the changes.
During these two weeks my average sleep time was somewhere around 4 hours/day and my caffeine consumption was through the roof. At the end of it all I was unable to operate unless I drank 2 cups of strong coffee and, as I later found out, not only had I screwed up my sleep patterns and increased tolerance to caffeine, but I also formed a dependence on damn alcaloid.
Gotta go to work in 5 minutes, but the day will be better knowing I can look forward to seeing this when I get back.
"Why did the French not copy this design..." As Ian McCollum says, 'The French copy no one, and no one copies the French'
Well the Japanese Navy did twice. Both times turned out to be a mistake. Particularly the 25mm.
French small arms are good, though. They can be sometimes obsolescent, like the Lebel 1886 being the worst case, but usable.
@@vaclav_fejt Ahem. Chauchat. That one stunk to high heavens.
All praise Gun Jesus...
@@harvesterofsorrow4930
Not completely true. The thirty-aught-six Chauchat did. They all were venerable to dust and the magazines were too fragile and the witness holes needed covered with plastic but kept clean they were reliable and they were the first fielded light machine gun.
Navy/Marine ... interactions tend to be "Me against my brother, my brother and I against the world." Just don't mess with the medics. It's not worth the pain.
FYI...A "lead lined 2x4" is called a Clue Bat. As in, "you Get The Clue, Or You Get The Bat."
Marine "Gator Navy" ships are still USN.
Absolutely
“The greatest amount of respect I can bestow on a sailor is to call them Doc”!
All the US services tend to be that way, in my experience, excluding the medics, which are a special and completely understandable situation/relationship. When I’m in a room with anyone but Army, I’m ripping into them with some dysfunctional family love, especially if they’re mud pirates, the orange headed stepchild of the services. I don’t remember the specific reg, but I’m pretty sure that’s what’s required by the UCMJ.
@@bartsutra "Mud Pirates." ....I have not heard the Knee Deep Navy called this before.
@@dropdead234 Ah yes, the puddle pirates!
I love the phrase "riverine fights" for a battle on a river in my head it evokes the spirit of two wolverines duking it out while walking on water lol
My grandfather served in the Air Force during WWII (as a clerk). He's still with us, but at almost 95 every day is a gift. He meets with a couple other vets on Fridays for a beer, but they're numbers are thinning rapidly.
I'm glad he still has friends of that time period he stays in contact with. I realize this is an earlier post & I hope he's still with you.
Fantastic explanation on why quad all forward turrets were not a great idea for cruisers.
On the subject of quad turrets on cruisers; the Belfast class of light cruisers were supposed to have 4 quad 6" gun turrets to one up the new Japanese 15 gun light cruisers and the Brooklyns. To test the idea they built a full size quad mount on land. The mount had a host of issues including excessive dispersion. There were reports of shells colliding in flight. Rather than continue development on what looked increasingly like a bad idea, they just gave the Belfasts the same 6" mount as the Southhamptons.
The USN was is a somewhat similar situation with the _South Carolina_ class. When placed in service in 1910, it was the first dreadnought with all the 12" guns in super firing service on the centerline. If the building pace for the class wasn't quite so leisurely. the class would have been in the role now given to _Dreadnought_ . Like _Dreadnought_ , the _South Carolina_ didn't see much action in WWI and had only a little over ten years useful service before falling victim to the Washington treaty.
In my opinion, It needs to be remembered Nelson's column commemorates the death of a hero more than the battle. The armada, well, the sailors who I believe were to die at anchor after the battle are possibly the main famous casualties after the battle.
Speaking of ships designed by committee. One of RUclips's suggested videos on the right is... yep, "French Pre-Dreadnoughts: When Hotels Go To War". Who says the algorithm doesn't have a sense of humor?
I watch aviation documentaries when I go to bed, and some how ALWAYS wake up to your channel. Who at youtube are you paying off? Haha, good stuff sir!
I do enjoy the videos too ;)
Woo Drydock 101! I am now edumacatified!
In the 16th, 17th and a bit of the 18th centuries ships of the line particular were painted up like Peacocks. Take a look at the Sovereign of the Seas as launched for a fine example - gold leaf all over the place on her. Ships of the Line were status symbols of the Kings and decorated to show it...
This is my favorite part of Sundays
Don’t worry, when you said Grom I thought the same thing. Might be because I’m in the middle of an LOTR rewatch this weekend.
My favorite movies. They never get old.
They're taking the hobbits to isenguard
The World of Warcraft players among us have a different reference in mind. :)
@@Wolfeson28 Rocket artillery nerds also have another reference in mind, namely the Russian Grom MLRS.
Speaking of living memory, my paternal grandparents grew up around many veterans of the American Civil War. I wish I could ask them about it.
That is true. During the American Civil War there was Americans old enough to recall the Revolutionary War, and some high ranking officers had begun their careers during the War of 1812. During WWII there was still Civil War veterans alive to feature in parades. Another example is that Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō was born in 1848 Edo Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate and died in 1934 in the Showa Era under the Emperor Hirohito. Like a "Yankee in King Arthur's Court" Togo went from Samurai to almost the Attack on Pearl Harbor during WWII.
@@bjturon That's a biographical story I'd love to read!
@@bjturon I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you will shoehorn Japan into any conversation :)
My paternal grandfather was in the AEF in France during WWI (US 2nd Infantry), his grandfather along as several great uncles served in the in Union Army in the US Civil War. When I was growing up, many kids my age had fathers who served in WWII and few fathers who served in the Korean War.
@@AbeBSea Or Great Britain... must be I have a think for plucky island nations. As a passenger rail advocate in the USA my go to foreign intercity passenger rail examples are the UK and Japan, with France coming in third. I wish I could get more info nation about rail modernization in Sweden, South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia. Do have a bit on China.
Re: right before the 2nd Interlude, my grandfather knew a man who was at the battle of Solferino. He led a bayonet charge to victory because he gave the command to fix bayonets in piedmontaise dialect which the other side couldn't understand. I can speak the command, but I can't spell it. My mother and I know this, perhaps alone.
Come up with the spelling, then get the story told.
The British fleet in the Med was there to fight surface actions with the Italian fleet. Let's face it, compared to Germany, Italy was always considered a second rate navy, and the RN was confident it could fight in the Med with some of its older but still powerful ships. What the RN didn't appreciate initially was the role of air power and how poorly equipped the fleet was to fight off air attacks. The found to their consternation that a couple of 3" guns and some quad Vickers machine guns just weren't a sufficient AA armament by 1940.
They also found that their High Altitude Control System (HACS) was designed including some assumptions that turned out not to be the case when the war happened. In particular, HACS assumed the target was a level bomber at constant course, speed, and altitude, so it was completely inadequate against a target that is rapidly changing altitude, such as a dive bomber.
@Tom Sanders It was, but the performance of the Italians was poor, and ships and ammunition had numerous faults.
@Tom Sanders Bismark and Tirpitz vs Littorio and Vittorio Veneto, Roma wasn't commissioned until June 1942 and never really had fuel for anything except the trip to Malta when she got sunk. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau vs Conte di Cavoyr, Gulio Cesare, Andrea Doria, and Caio Dulio. Three heavy cruisers and three panzerschiff (although the Germans never had all six of these in service at once) vs seven heavy cruisers. Six light cruisers vs ten for the Italians, although all of those light cruisers are lightly built and/or lightly armored except the last two Italian ones. And then by the time the Italians joined the war the Germans had lost a number of these ships invading Norway (and had not commissioned Bismark yet), so they never had all of them available at the same time, unlike the Italian fleet in being.
Without your videos and a few other channels I wouldn't be able to sleep I use your videos to fall asleep every single night I call it sleep learning
Happy ungrateful colonist day Drach! I'm a day early, I know.
Can you stop trying to make people angry? Or are you just trying to push buttons to try and gauge how cucked your "allies" are?
@@tommeakin1732 Its a joke
LiveErrors lmao fr🤦♂️
@@LiveErrors Ever hear of Schrodinger's asshole? Somebody is both joking and completely serious, based upon the reception
@@w021wjs Generally we call it shrodingers douchebag, but yeah.
2:03 I had a physical chemistry professor back in the eighties. Dr. Richardson worked on the A-Bomb project. He referred to his old boss as Oppie. I am sure he is no longer with us. Great instructor! Time goes on, and we lose great people.
I would not say the Armada is particularly overlooked in British education...
certainly it was THE major naval battle we studied in primary/junior, long before we did anything about Trafalgar or Jutland...
talking of witnesses, I actually knew a person (in passing) who actually met the Russian survivors of Tsushima during their time held in Matsuyama Castle (as a small boy, part of his chores would be to carry up the shops Tofu for the guards)... he used bits of the language he caught on then, when working in the jointly held territories on Manchuria.
My understanding is that the point of the gap between the forward turrets in Richelieu's layout was that one heavy calibre hit would not be able to disable both turrets (at least to make it much less likely)
Iowa turret explosion. From my recollection, from reading accounts of experiments and data, three factors were involved. 1. The powder was older and stored on floating storage barges, baking in the sun. Fluctuations in temperature over time. 2. The powder was in pellet form and "trueing pellets" were added on the end of the charges to bring the total powder weight into specifications. 3. An over ramming of the chargs that compressed one of the trueing pellets too much caused ignition.
1:22:08 Not just any submarine but U-29, commanded by Otto Weddigen who had previously sunk HMS Aboukir, HMS Hogue and HMS Cressy. In my hometown, there's still a street named after him.
I have an example of how the past isn't quite as much in the past as one might think. When I was in college in the late 80s I actually got to meet a fellow who had met Brahms (who died in 1897). Yes, this fellow met Brahms when the former was a just a few years old, but he did meet him.
Another example I also like to use is that there are still people alive (if just barely) who were born when the very same Japanese Emperor (Meiji) who was around to see the last Shogun was still alive.
Great show Drach.... Thanks
It must have been so frustrating to be an Italian sailor. Your battleships look like Ferraris but fire like Ford Pintos.
wrt the question about Marine detachments on USN ships, the Marines were long gone when I was on the Lex, but I did notice one head that was tagged for Marines, so there was some separation of facilities. With the Marines gone from the ship, "G-Division" had custody of all the small arms, as well as the line throwing guns.
Further to the decoration of ships - At the battle of the Yalu River between Japan and China, the Chinese ships (ironclads, and modern for the time) were so loaded with decorations and carvings they caught fire every time they were hit, and they were hit often. A truly strange battle.
To put the position of Colonel in the British Army into some context you must really understand the British Regimental system, as it does not work like the regimental system of most other nations. At least until recently.
The Regiment was NOT a combat formation, it was an administrative formation. Most Regiments in the British Army comprised, in peace time at least, of 3 Battalions. At least in theory, essentially however they could be split into four, the three Service Battalions, and what was essentially a Training/Administrative Battalion that would be permanently based at the Regiments home barracks in the UK. The three Service Battalions would be the ones sent to wherever the Army required them Battalions would be formed into Brigades, usually of 2 or 3 Battalions, however, it is important to note that the British Army almost never formed Brigades using multiple Battalions of the same Regiment. The only exceptions to this rule occurred during the two World Wars. Essentially the British Brigade forms the same Combat Role as the Three Battalion Regiments of other Nations such as Germany or the USA.
This habit of splitting the three Service battalions into different Brigades is why you often have rather confusing situations where a single British Regiment is on three continents at the same time. It is also the root behind the naming conventions. 1st Royal Welch Fusiliers does NOT mean it is the First Regiment of Royal Welch Fusiliers, but the 1st BATTALION of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Numbered Regiments have their own nomenclature, so 1/11th Hussars is the 1st Battalion of the 11th Hussars.
Another thing to be aware of, is while the usual regiment size during peace time is 3 Battalions (plus their adminstrative/training cadre), a Regimment is not LIMITED to 3 Battalions. There were 1 and 2 battalion Regiments in the Army (usually Cavalry and especially Yeoman Cavalry, which were essentially an early National Guard). They can also go higher, much, much higher. The aforementioned Royal Welch Fusiliers had some 24 Service Battalions in action by 1918 for example (and this is not including the training battalions and Home Defence Battalions), during WWII the Royal Tank Regiment had some 29 Battalions in service by 1945.
The Battalion was generally led by a Lieutenant Colonel, the most senior of whom would be the Colonel of the Regiment, usually (but not always) the commander of the 1st battalion, and usually (but not always) holding the actual rank of Colonel rather than Lt Colonel. To muddy the waters further there are also ceremonial Colonels, who hold the title but no real authority, the Reigning Monarch is the Colonel of several Regiments for example. As a result Colonel in the British Army, even today, is both a rank and a position, and not neccesarily both at the same time....
NOTE: The c in Royal Welch Fusiliers is not a spelling error, Welch is an archaic spelling of Welsh. The Regiment kept that spelling until it was amalgamated with the Royal Welch Regiment in 2006 to become the Royal Welsh, RWF becoming 1st battalion Royal Welsh, RRW 2nd Battalion.
Jesus Christ, what maniac came up with that?!
I am in California, so these are part of my Sunday morning coffee routine :) Thanks Drac!
Adding the segments on youtube is amazing
It's odd, when my RUclips algorithm breaks, all I get is all of your videos. I'm not mad, but thought you'd be interested to hear it.
Happens all the time, last 6 months ish. Almost started when I subscribed.
Happens to me as well. I’m not complaining, it’s great.
I wish you a smooth operation and a speedy recovery.
The War of Jenkins' Ear - *1741 The Battle of Cartagena intensifies*
Yes, somebody really did a song on it. They're called Alestorm.
Of course they did. They also did a song called “Fucked with an anchor”, so draw your own conclusions.
Hope that your surgery goes well and that you are back up to regular operations soon
As a member of the us navy I find that the us marines and the us navy get along pretty well each other
Loved the scary Fisher, needs to be a T shirt!
"Any device manufactured by humankind...."
I honestly thought you were going to say Italians there! 😁😁😁
U-864 is a great documentary, I watched it the other day.
List of Ships that had Turret Explosions
USS Iowa (BB-61) (1989): Over ram + Possible Heavily Aged Powder Charges that began to crystallize
USS Samuel B. Roberts (DE-413) (1944): According to Jack Yusen during the Battle Off Samar the Barrel Evacuator on the Aft turret was destroyed due to battle damage causing cordite residue to build up eventually causing a Breech Explosion.
IJN Mutsu (1943): Fire in 3rd turret that destroyed the entire ship. Cause Unknown: Believed to be caused by a bad Type 3 Shell that ignited.
IJN Hyuga (1942): Suffered a Turret Explosion during gunnery exercises with Nagato and Mutsu
IJN Haruna (1920): Faulty Fuses ignited the cordite bags prematurely in her Number 1 turret.
Anyone who wants to add more please go ahead
USS Saint Paul (CA-73) suffered an explosion in the left gun of main battery turret #1, caused by an attempt to ram a projectile into a gun that was already loaded because the gun captain mistakenly thought the gun had fired. 21 April, 1952.
Didn't Mikasa also had one?
USS Mississippi had explosions in number 2 turret twice. First during a gunnery practice in 1924 & again in 1943 while engaged in shore bombardment. 48 killed the first time, 42 killed in the 43 incident.
I am not sure if it counts but during and just after the Battle of Dakar the French Battleship Richelieu suffered detonations in two of her main gun barrels damaging 3 of them.
USS Quincy (CA-39) (1942) Barrel explosion in turret #2 during the Battle of Savo Island, possibly caused by the crew rushing to get the gun ready to return fire at the attacking Japanese forces.
The Dry dock jingle!
Its ship learning time !
*Awesome. Thanks for sharing!*
The US has recently made considerable effort to homogenize the uniforms of its military services. I dunno what purpose that would serve, other than to disrupt service rivalry. When I was in the USN we honored the marines serving aboard ships. We were warrior/technicians. Efficient team players using technology and well oiled habit to strike at unseen foes. They were warriors. Highly motivated shock troops. How can you not respect that?
I would not want to trade jobs with a marine, but they were just as important to the overall picture as we gobs were.
The Royal Australian Navy has done the same. Sailors usually wear blue/grey disruptive pattern uniforms. These look pretty bloody silly when they also have high-vis reflective tape sewn onto the sleeves; even assuming an actual need for camoflaged uniform on board a ship. 😆
Eh, not so much. The Army and Marines have separate camo patterns for their fatigues, and the Navy is moving away from shipboard camo to an all-blue or all-khaki uniform. The Air Force wears the same camo pattern fatigues that the Army does. The Marines actually patented their camo pattern just so the Army wouldn't use it. MARPAT is exclusive to the Marine Corps, the Army had to spend their own boatload (6 billion iirc, enough to buy a carrier) of money on UCP and then OCP in order to get digital camo of their own.
@@ashesofempires04 Spending 6 billion on a camo pattern when what the Germans used in WW II actually worked very well suggests the people doing this should have been run through a wood chipper to improve the service. Okay just drop kicked out of the military but this sort of stupidity is staggering.
@@dwightehowell8179 The concept behind digital camo is solid, and there was a fair amount of interesting and innovative new technology in the material and uniform design. There were also some really shitty design elements. And to be fair, that $6 billion figure is total program cost, which includes the purchase of uniforms for literally millions of soldiers.
Where the UCP camo fielding process came unglued was the process of picking colors for the pattern, and the possible introduction of bias from generals who "liked" particular schemes that performed objectively worse than others in actual field testing. And the field testing was dubious, with no actual testing in either of the two warzones where it would actually see combat.
That's the travesty of $6 billion spent on a camo pattern that was worse than what they previously fielded, or that rather than just pay a few million for Multicam (designed by the same company that made MARPAT for the marines) they spent even more money to not have to use a patented pattern.
@@ashesofempires04 Solid or not I've seen people wearing the WW II German patterns stand up at a location where I and maybe nobody saw anything. Cameo works. That the new high tech stuff is more effective than older stuff....?
Throughout the Commonwealth armed forces, the pronunciation of Lieutenant - as in Lieutenant-Commander, Lieutenant-Colonel and Flight Lieutenant - is definitely "Leftenant". Don't ask me why, as the American "Lootenant" is much closer to the French original sound of "Leeootenong". It's been a British tradition since the year dot.
iv never watched an episode of this show but i use old forgotten weapons vids to help me fall asleep and despite the fact i click the "only from forgotten weapons" button on the thing above the queue or related videos or whatever its called every morining i wake up and this channel is on, seems like a decent channel and im happy im giving you veiws but yeah iv never seen a single video despite probably 5 or 6 hours a night they are playing in my bedroom
About monuments to naval victories; in Naples, Italy there is an obelisk dedicated to the victory of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. But there are also several columns in Naples dedicated or in celebration of the end of the plague. Those columns are ornately decorated while the Lepanto obelisk is rather plain looking.
It should be noted that the HMS Dreadnought's only wartime kill was captained by Otto Weddigen, who put down the cruisers Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue in one action.
Only dreadnought to kill a sub.
How about some videos on Soviet submarines of WWII? That would be quite interesting to see.
And I have a question: How quickly, on average, could you lay down, launch, fit out, and commission a battleship? I guess this can vary due to displacement, etc., but still, it's a question that's bothering me!
Don't know about wooden warships or early ironclads, but for Dreadnought era battleships it's always years.
HMS Dreadnought herself was laid down 2 Oct 1905 and steamed out of harbour 3 Oct 1906, being officially commissioned into service in Dec 1906. So 14 months, but in reality she needed a few more months of testing and fixing. That's very fast but some "cheating" took place: the main guns and turrets had actually been started earlier for different ships, but were diverted to Dreadnought instead.
A good reference book like "Conway's Battleships" will have the dates for laid down, launched, and completed. Most 1930s/1940s battleships seem to be around three years, a few up to five.
That armor is so amazing! Wow.
With regard to Trafalgar, reminds me of a recent Question you answered about non English sailors in the Royal Navy. There is a Black sailor on the frieze at the base of Nelson's Column
2:12:00 thanks for providing clarity, I have had this discussion with my gaming friends and we were all a bit confused.
I've had the exact same thought in regards to the generational degrees of separation. It is an interesting one.
There is also the matter that when most of the historic buildings of London were built in the mid to late 19th century, the Napoleonic Wars were still in living memory, so commemorating those battles was an easier sell than battles while equally important, most people had no significant emotional attachment to such as the Armada.
The French APC shell defects that blew up a RICHELIEU gun was not a jamming problem. It was a base plug manufacturing defect. The shells had deep holes drilled into the base plugs for inserting poison gas "cans", that were never actually used, to my knowledge. However, in drilling those holes (two per base plug), the manufacturer for some reason -- misreading a spec perhaps -- made them too deep so that when the guns fired, some of the holes blew out their inner ends and allowed the propellant blast into the main explosive cavity and KABOOM before the shell moved very far down the barrel. JEAN BART seems to have found out about the problem and welded thick steel coin-shaped inserts onto the inner surface of the base plug over the holes, fixing it, since none of its shells ever exploded, to my knowledge.
As for the US battleship turret explosion, whatever caused it was a major fluke since too-fast ramming of powder bags had happened many times before over decades of such ship loading --from well before WWI to the turret explosion on a large number of US battleships with NO problems like that ever happening before and with no more problem than crushed bags that had to be replaced. Something happened that was completely unexected, no matter what the situation was. A strange fluke by any measure.
Good luck with your surgery and recovery Drach.
57:29 the USS Kidd, a Fletcher-class destroyer, has a painting of Captain Kidd on one of its funnels. At one point a captain of the ship had it taken down and morale suffered until his eventual replacement had it restored. (If I'm remembering the history of why they have a pirate painted on the funnel of the ship right).
It was named after Admiral Kidd
@@benwilson6145 Never said it wasn't, but thanks for putting it here.... forgot to do that...
Brilliant video thank you 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
We should all be given T-Shirt which says 'I Survived The Patreon Drydock' 😀
I dread the day Drach puts out a video longer than Erich von Stroheim's legendary film Greed, which was supposed to be 9 hours long.
@@vaclav_fejt You know he's going to take that as a challenge, don't you.
@@vaclav_fejt Well, there are Drydocks that are nearly 6 hours long. So he's not that far Off ^_^
@@vaclav_fejt Yes, because you know lose lose either 1 or 2 days sleep. There's no way you won't be able to Not watch it 😁👍
Proud to be petition signer 9,995!
Let's get some more signatures!
Dave Rawlings? Aka London Longsword?
Small world. I think for once, a person outside of Perth has been Perth'ed.
Note, to be Perth'ed is to be asked if you know someone, purely based on your location, such as Perth, Australia, and you've encountered them or know them.
Indeed :)
My grandfather definitely served as a Lef - ten - Ant in the RNAS of World War 1
Loo-tenant: The guy who didn't wash his mess kit and got dysentery.
Actually yes Drach, nothing reminds me of college like X101 in the fall, follow by X102 in the winter and X103 in the spring. Mix in generous amount of the cheapest beer/rum/vodka and you have yourself a perfectly healthy university student.
If he delays Drydock 102 until January he's going to have a mutiny on his hands.
@@kemarisite LOL holy crap you're right! But as far as I can tell (not that I know him personally) he's not college level alcoholic. I think it's a safe to say that based on the fact that he doesn't bleed caffeine.
Marines at Sea. In the Royal Navy a marine acts as a Seaman Gunner when in a ship on detachment. Hence manning B turret being a standard action station in WW2 cruisers.
In the Royal Canadian Navy, although the RN "letenant" pronunciation was used in the past, in the last 40-50 years "leftenant" has been almost universally adopted. This may stem from the Unification of the Canadian Forces into a single service in 1968. In fact, for a few short years in the early 70s, naval ranks were not even permitted to be used. Speaking to current RN officers, "leftenant" has almost completely superseded the older pronunciation there as well.
Which El Alemain battle? There were actually two battles. The 1st was won by Auchinleck, when the Afrika Corps were stopped. He was then replaced by Montgomery who then started the final retreat of the Afrika Corps, back to Tunisia
Godspeed for Your surgery, Drach :)
2:13 Lieutenant... I first became aware of the British verses American pronunciation as a kid when watching the action movie, Assault on a Queen, starring Frank Sinatra. The difference in the pronunciation alerted the crew of the Queen that something was amiss.
U boat, ocean liner, scuba diving, and treasure. Modern day pirates! A fun movie.
wrt the question about guns being the longest lead item for a BB, what was the lead time for a gun around WWI? I started looking into the history of the Italian Caracciolo class BBs a while back. The Caracciolo was launched in May of 20, and Ansaldo had built up about 12% of the hull of Columbo, but, if Italy had wanted to continue with their construction, they would not have had guns for them as most of the guns that had been ordered for them had been redirected during WWI as shore batteries, mounted on railroad carriages or mounted on monitors.
William III living towards the late 17th and early 18th century had a lot of commemorative medals struck with regards to the Glorious invasion and the fighting against France.
Many of them read something to the effect of 'hail our perpetual governor, the deliverer of England,
the preserver of Scotland, the pacifier of Ireland'. I reckon the latter two might disagree with how that is commemorated though.
Cheers
If you are looking for various naval tactics in fiction try David Weber's safehold series. Multiple different periods in our timeline covered with transitions between eras and some of the changes
Honor Harrington is a class act and deadly warrior!
@tankgirl2074 she is. Nimue Alban is too, in all her/his guises
My Grampa was onboard USS Arkansas as a Marine in WW2. He was like a personal aide to the Captain like a bodyguard sort of and would drive him around whenever they were in port. He liked this better than when he served on Guadalcanal in the 1st Marines lol though he did tell me they did take a torpedo hit while on convoy duty in the Atlantic but i can never find any record of it.
58:00... WW2 ships did have artwork on them, just like B17's / B24's. It depended on ships and crew. U-boats almost all had a ship emblem painted on them. Some ship gun emplacements painted their own art on the armour protecting their guns (German especially).
"It just has trouble with the "touching you" part"..... I lol'd.
Woke up and delighted by your preference of caffeine and then quite an amazing Interlude song. Do you discuss that at all?
my grandpa was in the marines and was in the pacific during WW2. he never said anything about separation while on ships, cant remember(prob never told me) he was on a real warship of some kind being transported either to an island or back to the state from an island but mostly transports/liberty ships. only issue was sleeping arrangements, they had a mixture of cots, hammocks and sheets/padding everywhere there was space. not that covering were needed, the pacific was not known for its mild climate. also more bodies meant more tasks getting done during down time. dont need training to push a mop. he was also trained for anti air, which was one of his jobs defending the random islands he was on. interesting stories, some of which ended up in a book somewhere, i think. i dont know if the book was released.
The fact that you prefer neither coffee or tea is funny. I myself grew up in the "Southern States" & thanks to dear ol' Mom drinking nothing but tea, I also developed a taste for it & NOW, WHAT I LIKE IS considered "SWEET TEA"!!! NO LEMON but enough sugar that there is no way it can get any sweeeter!! The Arizona Sweet Tea is OK. Better by the gallon, the can not as good. But 7-11 has a really good Sweet tea but occasionally you will get the taste of something different as though they didn't rinse tanks before starting the run. But that has gotten more rare, thank goodness!
However, when it comes to coffee I totally agree with you. WHEN I ORDER coffee I do it to warm up cuz I'm cold! And I order my sugar "ON THE SIDE" cuz the people never put enough in. When I say "20 sugars on the side" they look at me weird but Starbucks is charging $3.50 for a large coffee if they can't give me 20 sugar packs & a cup of half-n-half then I'll tell 'em to keep it. McDonald's is a little less expensive at $2.50 for a large coffee but you basically have to get mean with them to get enough sugar! There have been times that I've had to demand my money back b4 some would give me sugar. Some of them act as though the sugar is coming from their very own pantry or something. Or like I'm asking them to sale me some strange exotic drug. And I've grown to a point in my life that if they can't give me what I'm paying for then there is no point in me paying for something that I'M NOT GOING TO ENJOY! Same thing with syrup on the hotcakes at McDonald's. Bitch wanted to charge me a dollar for an extra syrup after making a big deal about the sugar for my coffee. I promptly said "Go get the manager". When the manager came I made her give me my $ back. Shoot, for what McD's charges for sausage & hotcakes & then extra syrup too, hell I can go to Dennys and get pancakes that are fresh off the griddle. Rather than McD's microwave hotcakes that turn hard if you take even a moment to eat some eggs, precious. So I've sworn off on ordering pancakes from McD's ever again, & when I have them at Denny's I am much more satisfied, especially considering I don't have someone standing nearby trying to charge me extra for something, although Dennys is guilty of this when doing "take out".
01:38:42 On Texas Marine Counry was the area where the Front Two(if I remember correctly) Port & Starboard Casemate 5"/50's were removed during the 1920's refits were originally located at. Once the Casemate opening was plated over it was "Mostly" Dry. After the 1920's refit that removed most of the New York class secondaries, those gun positions were converted to either storage or birthing spaces & the Marines were assigned some of them.
That armor looks like a good battle dress uniform for the bridge crew on a battleship, or other ships.
SHIP REQUEST: just found out my great uncle served from 21 Sept 43 to 12 Dec 1945. Discharged as a Seaman First Class and Served aboard the USS La Vallette (DD448). Would love a review of her service history.
Regarding the Armada question: El-Alamein and the Battle of Britain also had movies. That helps a lot :P.