The Drydock - Episode 134
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 6 авг 2024
- 00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:43 - Given the typically ferocious attrition pre-war and early war escorts typically suffered, what circumstances saved the Bathurst class from such losses?
00:03:20 - 12-inch gun limit in London Naval Treaty?
00:07:18 - Could ship weaponry overheat in a manner similar to machine guns? If so what effects could it have, and did it vary based on caliber?
00:11:45 - Have you ever been to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and would you be interested in having a look?
00:13:10 - Why didn't the Japanese try to cheat the London Naval Treaty terms that closed off the loophole that allowed Ryujo to be built by making Merchant Aircraft Carriers?
00:17:47 - What could the US have done to prevent the naval invasion of the Philippines, and how could the locals have helped? (You can tell I'm filipino)
00:24:28 - What would the Lion class have done in RN service?
00:32:20 - What is your opinion on the carrier Aquila? Could it have been a valid ship despite the inherent limitations of an ocean liner conversion?
00:37:12 - During WW2 allied aircraft had a massive advantage of having access to far higher octane fuel. Was there any equivilent to this in naval fuel?
00:43:02 - The logistical implications of early steam-powered warships
00:48:34 - Why were masts on pre-dreadnoughts and dreadnoughts so tall?
00:50:37 - Turret locking clips on battleships
00:55:27 - What do you consider to be the end of the battleship era specifically in its ship to ship role?
01:03:47 - Why did Germany not share radar technology with Italy?
01:08:07 - Channel Admin
An archive of Drydock Questions and free naval photos - www.drachinifel.co.uk
Model ships of many periods - store.warlordgames.com?aff=21
Want to support the channel? - / drachinifel
Shirt/mug/hoodie - shop.spreadshirt.com/drachini...
Poster? - www.etsy.com/uk/shop/Drachinifel
Want to talk about ships? / discord
Want to get some books? www.amazon.co.uk/shop/drachinifelDrydock
Pinned post for Q&A :)
Naval war in the Black Sea. Why the Soviet did not win?
Will you do video HMS Tricomalee? With ship walkthrough?
Could you walk about the super super firing secondaries like on the Yamato? Were they a good idea/bad idea? What were the pros and cons of that layout?
What are the black cones (daymarks) of the kriegsmarine ships? Port point down and starboard point up.
H-Class Battleship Vs Lion class? Who'd win in a one on one duel?
"Vanguard did have some issues with weight later in life"
Me too HMS Vanguard, me too.
Doubt Vanguard had a thing for Bangers and Beer, or its moral equivalent, as some of us do...
@@scottgiles7546 As a British ship, I'm sure she probably did as well.
“Vanguard did have a few issues with weight later in life”. Bit harsh Drach, it comes to us all.
Vanguard moved from second row to prop....
Anyone else get an immediate serotonin boost when they see that black-and-white thumbnail? Then a second from that banger intro music? Thanks Drach :)
Song is "Wat Dat Dee" by TeknoAxe by the way. Would not recommend going to the artist's home page, it's got malware on it.
Yes, great spot, I love the intros, too
Setting: Australia 2021
Scene 1 - Drach attempts to walk across the Australian Outback. On the horizon he sees dust clouds.
Scene 2 - Drach is captured by a post Apocalyptic gang in search of gasoline. Drach tells them a story about a WWII Battleship.
Scene 3 - Drach awakens to find himself tied to the front of a dunebuggy.
“Mad Drach”??
Councidentally, it was 100 years ago this week that a man walked out of his newspaper office in Bunbury and 3 months later arrived in Sydney; becoming the first man to walk solo across Australia; so nice timing, Drach.
Unfortunately, he was apparently writing a serial thriller and quit before handing in the final chapter.
Somewhere in Bunbury there is a very old and very angry newspaper subscriber.
Scene 3 - Drach awakens to find himself tied to the prinz eugen at bikini atoll
@@hermatred572 *oh no*
The locals did help in the Philippines, and were very good at it. Marines even mentioned how great of a shot the Filipinos Scouts are - that is very high praise- , they also suffered way worse retribution because of it.
Indeed. From a naval perspective, there wasn't terribly much they could do other than what he mentioned. Excellent marksmanship with a rifle is not very useful given the power disparity between a .30 caliber rifle and a 14-inch naval gun.
At the time of the invasion, the Philippine Navy wasn't really much of a thing besides a few torpedo boats under the Offshore Patrol. The Offshore Patrol (technically part of US Army Forces in the Far East, but functionally part of the US Asiatic Fleet, with vessels commanded and crewed by Filipinos) did fight regardless of the odds and with distinction, but there's only so much five torpedo boats can do.
There are quite a few Filipinos in the US navy today!
@@chain3519 Yea we call it the Filipino Mafia, and most of them are supply department.
"Vanguard had a few issues with weight later in life" , don't we all. Drachinifel fat shaming Vanguard.
She was just big framed thats all.
lol only on this channel would we hear a ship being fat shamed.
Im still waiting for you to do a Wednesday special about the black pearl vs interceptor fight lol
For that matter, I'd like to hear more about the match up between the brethren court and the East India Company
I’m still waiting on The battle of Trafalgar
The Battleship New Jersey channel had a video where the curator climbed into the turret ring and found the turret clips. So the Iowas have a turret hold down clip.
At least you realize how big some foreign countries are. It is quite common for Europeans to come to Canada with big plans only to realize that their plans for each day involved like 12 hours of travel. The scale of human geography in Western Europe is just so different than North America or Australia.
Conversely Canadians often overestimate how far apart European locations are, but that is much less awkward and creates fewer issues than the other way around.
Interestingly this also works for Canadians ( & Russians) going to Africa - because of the map projection Africa is much bigger than you might think.
There was variation in the bunker fuels used .
The British boiler burners were optimised for Middle East oil, and the wartime switch to using more Caribbean oil, resulted in an increase of smoke.
The Japanese actually used unrefined crude oil from the Dutch East Indies late in the year, which increased the danger of fire and vapor explosion in battle. It wouldn't do the boilers much good either I imagine.
I always like waking up early Sundays and getting my naval history lesson over coffee. :)
31:07 "Vanguard did have a few issues with weight later in life."
Don't we all?
13:02 "I'm not dumb enough to think I can drive across the Australian outback."
Just walk away!
Just walk away and there will be an end to the horror.
Your British sense of what constitutes a long drive.... Thank you for giving this Canadian a good chuckle.
Would you please do a Metallurgy and armor part 2?
Q&A: re: 0:07:18 During the Battle of the "Taffy's" in Samar (Drachinifel's Battle of Samar, Odds? What are those? video) one of the USN's Destroyer Escort's 5" gun of the fantail blew up, probably due to overheating. Killing most of the gun crew.
>For shells getting stuck in the barrel the US ship's I've toured that used cased (.vs. bagged) propellent you'll see a much shorter powder case inside of the gunmount for (hopefully) blowing the stuck round clear. You'll also see a short bore brush there, which you could use to remove fouling during battle by actually using a reduced charge case to shoot it out of the barrel!
>>As for gun explosions, an armored turret would probably be the worse place to be since the turret would basically prevent the rapidly expanding gasses from escaping fast enough to protect "the squishy things" inside it, resulting in the death of the entire gun crew (except for the French BC's & BB's which had an armored bulkhead separating the pairs of the quads inside of the turret. (Hence the unusual looking spacing of the gun tubes...)
>>>Speaking of armor, this is probably why the USS Shaw got only her bow blown off during the Attack on Pearl Harbor, whereas the USS Arizona (and the earlier "Emotional Event" happening on the HMS Hood) the armor, both deck and belt armor, held in the explosion to destroy more things causing both ships to sink rapidly...
Visiting Australia, do consider taking a train over the dead heart. Sydney to Perth takes about 4 days, some of the stops are quite eye opening!
That's not a flight deck its a sunshade for the promenade.
I like how you illustrate answers with pictures, but could you add some caption for each picture so that viewers have some more info on what is shown in each case (and/or what point a picture illustrates)?
HMS Vanguard. A rather ironic name for a ship that's the last of her line. But better than HMS Finis
Thank you, Drachinifel.
the last operational 5" mount on the USS Sammy B exploded due repeated firing. the breach and barrel were so hot that it set off the round once it was loaded. killing most of the gun crew, the gun chief was still asking for assistance to load the next round before he died from his wounds.
That wan't because of overheated barrels. The gun exploded because there where burning fragments in the breech that set off powder charges. The reason for the burning bits is that there was no compressed air to clean the breach due to power failure
Looking forward to Vasa. My brothers been and apparently it's great.
It is great , and funny that the normally sensible Swedes thought it'd float
It’s fantastic. As is Stockholm
@@mathewkelly9968Technically floating was not the problem, she did that just fine. Staying upright was another matter... A case of the builder pushing his knowledge too far while no one was willing to take responsibility for halting the project without Royal consent and the King was busy fighting the Poles. My suspicion is that they decide to sail on a wing and a prayer hoping that she would make the trip from Stockholm to the main naval anchorage safely despite her known problems.
There was a lot of pressure to get Wasa into active service as 3 years earlier no less that 10 ships had been lost when a squadron was caught in a storm and wrecked on the shore. And just a year before the Poles had defeated the squadron blockading Danzig with the Swedes losing another two ships.
Been there many times. It is a magnificent view. I wish I could have seen it in its original paint and gilding.
But make sure to visit it with a like minded person otherwise one will be either bored or feel pushed to hurry.
Looking forward to your Vasa special.
I’m also looking forward to visiting Maritime Museums once again. I was on a roll before Covid. Hope to get to USS Lexington next.
If your barrels have overheated to the point the paint comes off, I suspect you might have bigger problems to worry about.
Hopefully the enemy has bigger problems by then.
HMS Vanguard: The dad bod years
Your name comes up more and more often when RUclipsrs discuss good sources of info on ships and history thereof :)
In the '20s Italy was at the forefront of aviation, it's strange that they never led in naval aviation during the war
It doesn't matter if you are innovative if you lack the industrial power to back it up.
The Italians had great air frames and designer but without the engines, facilities and fuel they couldn't reach their full potential.
The re.2001OR had stats better than MANY allied carrier planes. A payload of 1 250kg and 2 160kg bombs or one 500kg or 1 torpedo and as a fighter compare it to the skua etc
Thank you for addressing my question about the turret locking rings.
I recognize that compared to the ship turning turtle, losing (or keeping) the turret is a minor thing, it was simply an extreme example of the difference I was noticing. As for sea states doing bad things to turrets - I was part of a NATO force in 1993 that got clobbered by a storm in the North Atlantic (and then Central Atlantic) where most of the ships in the force were clobbered to one degree or another, between losing tens of square meters of non-skid from the weather decks, to staving in the roller doors for the helo hangar, to one ship having it's main armament knocked off the mounting ring.
It's scary to imagine the sea state that could do that to a several hundred, or even thousand, ton turret.
Come to Canada! We have a nice destroyer Tribal-class Haida near where I live!
Drach,
"Ba" in "Bathurst" is pronounced as "Ba" in "cricket Bat",
not as in "Bah.. humbug".
I know, I was born there
keep up the fabulous work, you are exceptional
As an American that has lived in both the UK and Australia...the UK think the 8 hour drive from Aberdeen to London is 'inconceivable' and both the US and Aus think it is a short trip.
@Pro Tengu When I was a kid, I used to have to walk 25 miles, barefoot over broken glass everyday to get to school. And carry me two younger brothers on me back.
You try telling the young people today that. They won't believe you!
A higher Octane rating does not mean more energetic fuel (actually often the contrary), it's a measure of knock resistance for internal combustion (piston) engines.
Essentially as you increase the compression of the fuel-air mixture, the likelihood that it will auto-ignite (not by the spark plug, just the heat and pressure), when this happens before the piston is in the correct position then you lose efficiency and power (and risk doing damage to the engine too) so all-around just bad. This limits the compression and power that is achievable for a given displacement.
When anti-knock agents are added (like tetra-ethyl-lead) the resistance to auto-ignition increases so the engine can run at a higher pressure (both from cylinder compression and a big old supercharger/turbocharger) which means you can burn more fuel (producing more power) and burn it more efficiently too.
Knock olby occurs in combustion cylinders so gas turbine engines, as well as naval boilers, are completely immune as they are constant burning systems.
Video suggestion: you keep mentioning how ships are taken to the breakers, I'd be interested in learning more about that process.
Re the Philippines item: the notion of trying to use the local manpower to provide for a kind of forward defence of likely beaches was what MacArthur was promoting. Previously US planning was to have a bastion at Bataan and hunker down for the fleet to come and rescue them. The revised plan was based on the assumption of air power enabling a more aggressive style of defence, but the day 1 SNAFU of losing the bulk of the aircraft on the ground DESPITE having the warning that the Pearl Harbor attack provided scampered that and they had to revert to the Bataan plan without all the preparations that should have been present but many of which had been dismantled or not carried through.
Totally agree with the comment re MacArthur by the way. Losing the air strength was on his watch, if Short and Kimmel deserved to be carpeted for Pearl, MacArthur deserved the same or worse for his failings the next day. (8th Dec in Philippines).
1. Air Command was not his responsibility. That was the Commander of the Far East Air Force; Lewis Hyde Brereton. 2. Air Units were on the ground refueling. They were up for hours after the alert came.They planning a raid on bases on Formosa, but it got delayed. The claim they were not prepared is false. 3. They had no radar and few working P-40's to counter a attack even if they wanted to.
@@WALTERBROADDUS - MacArthur expressly prohibited General Brereton from either dispersing the aircraft or striking the Japanese airbases in Formosa. In fact, they were in the middle of a heated argument when the Japanese arrived. The Japanese were shocked we didn’t attack their airbases as they were taking off and they didn’t see our aircraft heading on the reciprocals as they were bound for Clark Field, and we tracked them on Radar in route. The strike on the Japanese airbases in Formosa was delayed by orders issued by MacArthur himself. There are rules for operating a cap which had been developed years before & was known by almost every air force in the world - MacArthur overruled Lewis & ordered them all up at once. Almost every B-17 in the Pacific Theatre had been concentrated, not at Pearl Harbor, but at Clark Field in the Philippines - Those were the aircraft that would’ve struck the Japanese bases in Formosa.
The War Department had concluded that the Philippines couldn’t be held against a concerted Japanese assault - MacArthur asserted otherwise & insisted he could hold them. He was tragically wrong & compounded his error by refusing to the do modernize or maintain the materials he had & then by freezing in the hours after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, something he repeated at the start of the Korean War. If we didn’t have enough P-40’s in flying condition, it was due to the same problem we had with ordinance of all kinds in the Philippines - MacArthur refused to update the equipment or do the maintenance.
According to those who were there & survived Bataan & Corregidor, The fault lies solely with MacArthur. I knew several people who were there when the Japanese hit, and who lived through months of 1/2, 1/4 & then 1/8 rations before the infamous Bataan Death March. They forgave the Japanese a long time before they even considered forgiving “Dougout Doug”, and many of them NEVER forgave MacArthur.
@@TraditionalAnglican The strike was delayed by weather. And less than 60 operational planes. Not mention outnumbered 3 to1.
@@WALTERBROADDUS - They put fighters up as cap for nearly 4 hours, and the Japanese were able to launch air strikes against Clark Field & other targets in the Philippines, so weather wasn’t an issue. While the B-17’s they had in the Philippines were definitely not enough for anything remotely resembling a strategic bombing mission, they were enough to do some damage to an airfield or its flight line.
I’m not to sure any of this would have done any good with most of the weapons & ammunition in the Philippines dating from WW1 & the early 1920’s, the troops being untrained & things being as disorganized & unprepared as they were - All that is on MacArthur. Between the Filipinos & Americans, we outnumbered the Japanese 3 to 2. Properly trained, equipped, organized & led, they’d have made life quite miserable for the Japanese.
Almost everything I’ve said is from people who were at Clark Field and other USAAC bases (American air forces in the Philippines were still under the Army Air Corps when the war started) when the Japanese struck on December 8. They fought in Bataan & survived the Death March. One of them actually heard Brereton swear as he shot down a Japanese aircraft with his hunting rifle. Japanese sources talk about how flabbergasted the Japanese pilots were that their bases weren’t bombed & they didn’t see contrails heading in the opposite direction.
@@TraditionalAnglican After hours in the air the CAP came down. They were caught refueling, And the weather delay was there. Sending 30 B-17's vs. Zeros would have done Little.
Again, the pile on of MacArthur is popular yet unfair.
'Vanguard had a few issues with weight, later in life.' Don't we all?
once again , great video!
Despite the popular narrative that Kurita turned tail and ran from a massively inferior opponent at Samar there is evidence that he knew the was war was lost and refused to participate in the slaughter of his men. In no way does this diminish the heroics of Taffy 3. Johnston, Hoel, Herrmann, Sammie B and Gambier Bay along with the rest of the Taffys made a massively superior forces position untenable at the cost their lives. It has been a moment in time that has inspired me since I was a child. Trying to understand the perspective of the "enemy" is something I have tried do. Seems like knowing what the other persons perspective is is a good thing...either it confirms what you are thinking or makes you think.
At Midway the Japanese knew without the carriers taking Midway was pointless. They could not hold or supply it. Withdrawal made strategic sense despite short-term tactical success being a possibility. Mikawa at Savo...while he could have devastated the landing force "in theory" as Drach is won't to say...yes that was a blatant use of a Drachism...would have had to take a probably scattered force low on ammo home in broad daylight. Both these situations are early in the war when the Japanese were confident of winning the war and didn't need to take unnecessary risks. Kurita at Samar is well aware that the war is lost. He had misgivings about the entire mission. After Sibuyan Sea it was more than misgivings. I can not attribute motive as to why he turned and went through San Bernadino. Honor or pressure from other officers who did not agree with him possibly. But once he did his duty and ran into " Halsey's fleet" as he thought he did he retreated.
wrt the 12" gun proposal at First London, I would say this was aimed directly at Italy, and, secondarily, at France. While First London overrode the replacement schedule in the WNT, and extended the battleship construction holiday through 1936, Italy and France each had two good until used licenses to build battleships that took effect in 1927 and 1929. At that point in time, the largest guns the RM had in service were 12", and the largest France had were 13.4". Even with the 12" proposal failing, I have read that the UK brought a great deal of pressure to bear on France to build the Dunkerques well below the treaty limits. This is clearly intended as a means to keep the Nelsons, QEs and Rs relevant, by leveraging the treaty to, as Drac correctly says, force Italy and France to build hilariously undersized and underarmed battleships. Meanwhile, the Versailles Treaty kept Germany down to the Deutschlands, with their 11" guns.
Thank you.
On the fuel question what came to mind was a somewhat analogous situation from WWI; Welsh Admiralty coal. You've mentioned in other videos how the generally inferior German coal (being both lower caloric content and dirtier burning) impacted the High Seas Fleet relative to the RN with it's high quality and cleaner burning coal. (Though I think at least some of the US coal fields produced coal near par with the RN stuff)
Good luck getting into Australia at the moment! Canberra and Sydney are close enough for a day trip :) Of course having time left to do anything once you are there is a different matter, if you intent the return trip on the same day.
As for ships the only one I have been on is the HMAS Castlemaine. I used to be a volunteer restorer back in the 1980s, but alas have not visited her since.
on the matter of overheating naval artillery, I am reading "the last stand of the tin can sailors" where it is said that one of the USN escorts of Taffy 3 that were charging Kuritas center force managed to get one of their 5"/38 guns that hot that it indeed cooked of a shell in the open gun breech. The barrel was glowing red hot.
In the late-20th Century, the US Navy began to use gas turbines for ship propulsion and eventually, by the year1990, they decided to completely do away with steam engines other than those in nuclear-powered warships, eliminating whole classes of US warships at the stroke of a pen (I was working for the TERRIER anti-aircraft guided missile program as a major part of in-service software update, software pre-delivery test, and reported-error troubleshooting/debugging at NSMSES in Port Hueneme, California, at the time and this sudden surprise -- to us -- decision caused a lot of personnel problems; I was lucky since I worked on software and there was of course an ever-growing need for people like me in other projects). Gas turbine engines used a form of "JP"-type jet aircraft fuel and a lower-grade form of that called, I believe, "Petroleum Distillate" had been adopted for steam engine warships several years earlier, which allowed the conversion to full-quality gas turbine fuel easy enough to allow the decision to eliminate the non-nuke steamships. The many Aegis-equipped destroyers all used gas turbines and the superiority of Aegis over the older "3T" anti-aircraft guided missile systems (TALOS, TERRIER, and TARTAR, all of which were decommissioned as Aegis took over) was another reason for deciding that the Navy could survive without anything but Aegis and aircraft-carrier aircraft as the major non-nuclear weapon projection platforms. So, during the time period before the 1990 non-steamship decision, alternative, higher-energy ship bunker fuels -- your "high-octane" equivalent -- were "in the loop" in the US Navy.
Drach contending that battleships are useful for something besides targets, BK Jeong is going to have an aneurysm
Let me get the popcorn
Just because a battleship CAN be used in a WWII setting (either by using it at night or by giving it air support) doesn't mean you SHOULD, especially if the support can do the battleship's job better than the battleship itself can.
@@bkjeong4302 what if your in position of having a battleship, sat there, and you need some shore bombardment, and needing to enter a threat environment which is a little over-matched for a cruiser options that are available?
bingo- a situation where if you have a battleship it makes sense to use it instead of teh something else. will admit its hyper specific...but.. its a situation wher using battleship makes sense.
(see also.... two enemy cruisers in extreme northern or southern climes where weather bad and air power less use cos of it... the examples exist, just you choose to ignore them.)
The Drydock is out ? finally I can enjoy working again while listening
~45:00 the hull of boats are designed with a specific "hull speed" so the discussion of propulsion from sail or steam probably makes less of a difference in speed than a landlubber would expect. It would help extend range significantly... The rigging will make a significant difference even if there are no sails set, also a hull designed to beat (sail against the wind) typically is designed with a deeper keel (to prevent slip and so less ballast weight gives more balance). As a rough estimate on smaller boats in longer distance typical sailing conditions we usually gain about one knot of speed when motor-sailing, clearly if there's little or no wind then the motor makes a bigger difference but at sea this is probably less likely.
The aft 5" gun on Samuel B. Roberts blew up at Samar because it got too hot and a shell exploded in the breech.
A cruise ship may be light in build, but a liner is a ship that keeps to a timetable and so has to go in any weathers. Might not have the sub-division as a military design but to say they are not robust is wrong. (If we look today I would say QM2 is a 'stronger' ship than the QE class carriers.)
Claim Based on?
@@WALTERBROADDUS pure conjecture.
Drydock 134 - earplugs, supermarket, people nervous ;)
Would you consider doing a presentation on British submarines actions in the Marmora in WW1?
Second this, I did have a book on this subject but have lost it, really interesting stuff
@@tonygibson6806 Dardanelles Patrol - the story of E11? Still got mine somewhere. I'd like "Horton's private lake" story of RN subs in WWI Baltic, too!
@@iansadler4309 "A damned un English weapon" by Edwin Grey, I since commenting have managed to find the book online second hand alas it is sadly out of print so far as I can tell, remember it being a good read.
in reference to naval guns over heating I believe it was in "Last Stand of the Tin Cans" where one of the DDs guns blew when a round cooked off in the chamber.
Brilliant job,thanks Drach, as usual.
I really do enjoy that b&w intro.
You have given me hours of entertaining and learning, but for me, it seems that sadly, you have nearly completed the full circle. Q. When does a 'Problem'' devolve into an 'Issue'? haha.
I nearly died in Cebu, suffering from the Bends, without Decompression Chamber facilities.
From first hand experience, Phillipinas are inventive and hard working people, besides many being brilliant Musicians.
I recently received a wooden kit of HMS Victory. I look forward to building and painting. I will probably have to make my own Cannons to fill the gun ports! Thanks for the inspiration.
Hopefully no long term issues from that experience at sea!
Thx
I may have missed it scanning through the other comments but Canberra is only about a three hour drive from Sydney.
I’ve visited the AWM a few times; it’s a good day out for a Sydneysider.
11 minutes after post... to figure how early I am. Nelson was playing with a toyboat in the bath.
You can drive in Australia around the East coast somewhat ok. 3 hour drive between canberra and sydney. 7 hours from Sydney to Melbourne. The others such as Brisbane and Perth it's definitely worthwhile to fly
Got here faster than it took the Hood to explode.
WRT the end of the battleship era. I think that US experience has shown that a role remains for the battleship even today.
First they are enormously powerful surface combatants and that still has value. Their protection and staying power remains unique especially today.
Second even an all weather capable carrier groups isn’t truly all weather capable. You need some measure of visibility when attacking a heavily defended target so that you can avoid enemy fire. The main battery of a battleship has no such considerations.
In the modern context the BB is also still extremely useful in a show the flag type of mission. The US found in the 80’s that a SAG based around an Iowa could perform this mission every bit as well as a CVBG at a fraction of the cost.
Speaking of cost while a large combatant like a battleship is very expensive to build and maintain it’s a fraction of what a carrier and its air group cost. And the cost of a large shell is similarly much less than a guided missile.
Perhaps the better question as to when the battleship era ended is when the carrier replaced the battleship as a Navy’s preeminent expression of sea power. I would date that to the combination of Pearl Harbor and the loss of Renown and Prince of Wales. The battleship still had a vital role to play in the battles to come. But it was no longer the element of decision if you will.
Look at photos of USS SALT LAKE CITY after the Kormandorski's Battle. The paint on her 8 inch barrels were blistered, even in the far North Pacific.
In the End of the Battleship Era. I consider that the Battleship Era ended when Aircraft carriers showed how much more flexible they were compared to a Battleship.
Thing about big battleship guns is that they take a long time to make. I understand that the rifling is made by forming a steel bar into a spiral, so some battleships were given guns from existing stocks - HMS Vanguard (obvs.)
The Canberra war memorial is on my list to visit as i live in sa
As a note on the 12" limit proposal, the US got across to the British delegates their attitude on it by suggesting a counterproposal: the US would accept the 12" gun limit, if *all* capital ships currently in existence had to be regunned to 12" guns on a one-to-one gun basis, which would have eight-gun British battleships (originally with 15" guns) facing twelve-gun US battleships (originally with 14" guns). As Norman Friedman put it in "US Battleships: An Illustrated Design History": "It was argued that 16-inch guns could be replaced by larger numbers of 12-inch guns, three for every two U.S. 16-inch. Quadruple turrets were considered impractical, so there was the delicious possibility of Nelsons armed with nine 12-inch facing Colorados armed with twelve such guns."
My understanding about the Fall of the Philippines is that there were 2 defense plans: 1) protect critical cities and other locals with what's already in the Philippines, & 2) defend the islands with reinforcements from the US.
>>MacAuthor decided to enact Plan 2 with the troops of Plan 1. This is why Battalions were defending an area that a Regiment (and sometimes a Brigade) were supposed to defend!!!
Meanwhile MacAuthor was screaming for those ships and men from the US! ("All of our prewar plans are now sunk in the mud of Pearl Harbor...) He took credit for any minor victory and let his subordinates take the blame for any defeats.
Amazing voice
How about this? Just build more Fort Drums! they can even jokingly call it the Fort Drum class naval fortification.
Post WWII we shifted Naval Fuel from Bunker Fuel to DFM (effectively #2 Diesel) which improved fuel efficiency without stupidly high risk of fire.
A 1945 North Carolina class definitely gets through Essex’s air wing. With the weight of AAA fire, radar guided, and VT fuses it probably shoots down/damages a decent chunk of the wing as well.
Sydney to Canberra is only 3 hours, expressway the whole way. Once this whole pandemic mess is over, let us know when you can come out and we can arrange the trip.
Hears canada... immediately becomes excited
Also will add my ship request. Japanese destroyer Shigure. Not sure of the class. Nicknamed "Lucky Shigure" by Samuel Eliot Morrison it survived multiple Japanese defeats...including being the only survivor of the first part of Southern force at Surigao Straight. Only to be at last sunk by a US sub.
WRT to the question on Naval fuel I haven't been able to locate a source yet but I'm certain that I've read in the past that when the Japanese Fleet was forced late in the war to base itself in Lingga in order to be near a source of fuel the quality of that fuel was less than desired and led to issues with the boilers on IJN fleet units.
So I found a source and was able to confirm it. The IJN late war began to use unrefined crude from Tarakan which damaged the boilers as a result of the high sulfur content. Their were also issues with using this oil in the event of battle damage which one source cited as contributing to the loss of several ships.
I would say that Carriers did not obsolete Battleships in the sense that they can sink battleships in an air attack like Pearl Harbor etc. Especially since battleships are still used and still effective at engaging other ships and ground support, and anti-aircraft added to the battleship will defend it. But the fact that Carriers strike groups can strike so much further, being able to hit enemies while minimizing the risk to the carrier itself, and are much more versatile, is what made battleships obsolete. But given the hit or miss effectiveness shown by strike groups in WW2, I would probably say the battleships were not completely obsolete until aircraft gained more accurate, reliable, and powerful ordinance.
So propellant charges in naval guns could, practically speaking, cook off. Damn. I can't even imagine an oob on a gun that big
Great as always
You could also have mentioned that 4 of the Bathurst class also had mutiny's, due to a multitude of reasons. Actually sit down fail to work stoppages. Part of the RAN's long and proud history of more mutiny's than any other navy. Possibly the subject for another video.
The Japanese fleet was base in SE Asia before Operation Sho-GO for access to fuel, among other reasons. I recall reading in a WWII history that the engineers went to the extent of adjusting boilers to accept NEI light crude directly. Is this true?
0:55:00 But when would you consider the economic end of the Battleship? A lot of the main functionality of Battleships are achieved by very specialized industry, not really capable to be utilized in the civilian economy, whereby CV construction, even to this day, isn't that far removed from common civilian maritime production. And, just like in WW2, quite a lot of aircraft types could conceivably still be manufactured after retooling civilian assets. Maybe not the uber-tier Gen5 fighters, but the generation that has to bear the grunt of a prolonged engagement could conceivably do.
Or am I just fooling myself by not taking into account that the fast BBs in '44 still had role's that airpower still could not achieve.
In retrospect, as long as one side was going to build battleships the other needing to build to counter them, but I would roughly say that any battleship not complete and in service by around late '42 / early '43 was probably not worth the investment as they wouldn't have much of anything left to do before the CV took over as the main capital ship, which means that basically for a good return on investment you need to stop building battleships after what you lay down in 1939.
@@Drachinifel And postwar, the western powers, didn't really run the risk of facing enemy surface ships, that couldn't be handled by modern heavy cruisers. So I would argue, that perhaps the UK and France (being short on modern heavy cruisers) would have more utility of retaining their remaining fast battleships, than the US did (having plenty of Baltimores, Oregon Citys and Des Moines to handle everything the post-war Soviet navy could bring), until the introduction of good enough carrier-based AEW and all-wheather naval strike aircrafts.
@@oloflarsson407 unless Stalin doesn’t kick the bucket in 1953.
@@RG-fc7ht Very good point. On the other hand, by the time the Stalingrad-class would be able to enter servive, the US Navy would have AD-3/4/5W's and E-1 Tracers, allowing them to (most likely) stay out of harms way during nighttime, even if a Stalingrad would come out to play. Furthermore SSN's would be on their way into service, with all-wheather naval strike aircrafts, around the corner. The Chapayev's and Sverdlov's on the other hand, was earlier and would be far more numerous.
@@oloflarsson407 Assuming Stalin doesn’t demand the engineers add some early SSMs to level the playing field for it and what ever ship he demands in the future.
For the 12" limit , might it have been easier to just build the KGVs or NCs as historical, but just initially fit smaller guns? Or even use their intended guns but with thicker barrel liners?
@Drachinifel, do you know what year the photo of the Newport News shipyard you used in the question on 12" gun limits in London Naval Treaty was taken? I'm curious as I currently work at that shipyard and It is interesting to see how much has changed , and yet many of the buildings from that era are still standing and in use.
At NAWS China Lake there are a couple of old (WW2) target towers and associated engines and winches that are on the national register of historic places.
The Lions of Menin Gate live in the Australian War Memorial.
Someone might have built some really long tube 12 inch guns. 12 inch 80s would be interesting.
No if you come to Australia you've got to go to Holbrook "The submarine town" where there is a decommissioned Oberon class submarine and a 1/5th scale model of HMS B 11 from 1941 . How far inland it is and how far it is from any body of water you could actually float something in is hilarious
For those who were looking for the intro song for the longest of time, here you go,
ruclips.net/video/1Zzqio6jPRQ/видео.html
Hearing accounts of naval gun battles often we hear of direct hits to gun turrets .
We also are told of the somewhat rarity of large caliber guns scoring hits.
How are these hits accounted for
Good aiming or random luck?
Re: Defence of the Phillipines. Drach, you touched on something at the end of your comment. IRL the Phillipine Army was very poorly equipped and even worse trained, way worse. It was mobilized in the late summer of 1941 and that left no time to train. Literally, see link. The army should have fallen apart at the first contact with the enemy, instead it managed to fight the initial invasion force to exhaustion. Had the army been better, the attackers would have reached the points of exhaustion sooner. Unless the initial invasion force is matchingly more powerful but I have no idea what the IJA wanted and could commit.
Anyway, the sorry state of the Phillipine Army could have very easily been improved. By mobilizing it in the summer of 1940 when the USA mobilized its regular army, national guard and even introduced the first peacetime draft in US history. That would have given Mac Arthur more than a year to train the troops and at least somewhat mitigate the shortage of heavy weapons and equipment.
As to what more the Filipinos could have done. Nothing because they already went beyond the call of duty. They enlisted, fought well despite horrible odds and after their defeat, capture and release very many rejoned the fight as guerrillas.
www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-P-PI/USA-P-PI-2.html#2-4
No experience of artillery. But on things like rifles, heat is very, very, very bad for precision. As soon as a rifle start to overheat, the bullets tend to drop and disperse. And the hotter the barrel, the worse it goes. You can even damage the barrel permanent, the precision never comming back entirely.
That is why they replace barrels on ships.
@@WALTERBROADDUS That and the rifling wears out.
If the gun barrels overheating became a "thing", would they add cooling fins or water jackets as both were established responses for smaller caliber guns?
If such cooling were to be used, I think it pretty safe to say that water cooling would be the most effective system, cooling fins just wouldn't cut it, I don't think.
I'm unsure if water jackets would be used or not, though you could probably get some pretty interesting forced-flow refrigerated coolant systems, or, perhaps surprisingly, high-pressure steam cooling, but the idea of blast-cooling the bore with a either liquid or air spray would be appealing as well, perhaps.
@Niek Vels Well, most of those solutions would involve some sort of "jacket" system of one type or another, be they a literal full external jacket or a refrigerant coil wrap, or what, be they integral and "internal" to the barrel construction or not.
However, blast-cooling could be introduced as a step within loading, after extraction, having an apparatus inserted while the breech is open before the next shell and charge load is rammed, or perhaps integrated into the breech mechanism itself and done while closed, depending on the exact composition of the rounds being used;, cased, caseless, separate charge, with extracted portions, or not. This might slow the theoretical rate of fire, or perhaps not, depending.
As for the specific methods and materials used and the particular science behind them, well, I'm not a specialist in the particulars of exactly what all they had going on, but they were well into the rocket age by then, and I'm going to go with the thought that they could have probably come up with some pretty nifty ideas and exotic materials in a full development cycle. Maybe a combination of heat shielding "trapping" heat and then a more conductive layer to remove it elsewhere, or what, I couldn't say. But I could probably come up with some decent theoretical ideas, and I'm certainly no genius or expert in such matters.
I mean, that was arguably the pinnacle of aerospace development, and getting into some of the highest levels of material development for larger scale applications, and that'd be where I'd imagine most of the technology would ultimately come from. Though, certainly, there's been further substantial advancement in the computer sciences development for materials that might well come in handy.
@Niek Vels in the case of water jacket, the same way as maxim gun?
Re turret clips - I thought the Nelsons had them fitted to stop the turrets jumping when the guns were fired at maximum depression
Pearl Harbor moved to the Philippines, all other things being equal, would have been a bigger disaster - no oil tank farm, no drydoocks, no salvage of 5 BBs. Counter-offensive based on Pacific coast of U.S. This may well have killed "Germant First."
Germany
I don't think anything could have killed "Germany first". A bigger Pacific disaster at the start of the war with the subsequent counteroffensive based out of San Diego, San Francisco, and Bremerton? I'm sure King's personality would keep the Navy and Marines busy in the Pacific, but I'm also sure it would be slower overall.
Higer the octane, higher the knock resistance....aka less prone to pre-detonate....so maybe fear LOW octane more.
Drach: Regarding the defense of the Philippines, what if the commander had been George S Patton instead of Dugout Doug?
I imagine that treaty battleships with 12 inch guns cant hurt each other anymore.
One thing of note is everyone always asks why didn't germany share blank with italy. Italy was a very nationalist nation that only reluctantly accepted things like stukas when they felt they had no choice In comparison to native designs like the Breda 201. Italy had actually developed radar to the point of being usable they just found it to be unnecessary. once it became clear they needed it they quickly equipped gufo to ships. Heck Marconi has a claim to have invented radar. The main reason was italy already knew about radar and had developed comparable sets to the Germans in the prewar era. For comparison look at the capitani romani class vs pt boats at night.
While many parts of Italian industry were quite stubborn in regards to accepting German aid or resisted military efforts to adopt German equipment, radar isn't quite one of these things. Aircraft is certainly an excellent example of this trend, though I'd note that the decision to adopt the Ju.87 came quite early in the war (summer 1940) after the abject failure of the SM.85 as a dive-bomber - the Ba.201 is a later aircraft that came from a different procurement program, first flew in July 1941, and was dropped as the Re.2001, which used the same engine (DB-601A-1, could basically do everything the Ba.201 could do and more, and the Re.2001 was already competing with the MC.202 for engines.
When it comes to radar, the RM had sought aid from the Kriegsmarine, and obtained a deal for aid in 1939 (negotiations between Raeder and Cavagnari at Friedrichshaften on 20 & 21 July 1939), one which Raeder had ordered a sharing of on June 1940. However, that order apparently fell on deaf ears, as all Italian efforts were essentially stonewalled - requests first for radars, and then following the inconclusive response to that, for an example to duplicate and produce domestically. It wasn't until April 1941 that the ball got rolling to a slightly more serious degree, and even then the Germans were making obscene demands in return for sharing, such as 25% of expected Italian radar production being sent to Germany and potential German takeover of firms manufacturing radar - and that no German radars would arrive until 1943 anyways. Ultimately, delays because so severe - despite frequently following up by the RM - that German radars largely only started arriving once the more usable versions of Gufo (EC-3/ter) that were actually competitive with German sets were becoming available, and those were a fifth of the cost of German sets, which were older types anyways.
However, Italian radar was certainly not competitive early on, as the national electronics industry struggled to provide many key components, especially since they had to do it with no aid from Germany and its generally more advanced electronics industry. In particular, it was not possible to get the EC-3 type radars to a power output over 1 kW (EC-3/bis) until the advent of the FIVRE model 1628 triodes, which occurred only later in the war (late 1941/early 1942), while the Germans were still dawdling over their promised deliveries of radars. Thus, finally fifty EC-3/ter with a 10 kW output were ordered on 11 February 1942, with the first being installed on Littorio in September 1942, with installations on other ships starting in January 1943. Meanwhile, aside from a single set that ended up on the destroyers Legionario in March 1942, by the time more German sets were arriving for installation it was 1943 and effectively too late, only supplementing the installation of EC-3/ter's. The key role German radars could have played - a stop-gap in late 1940, through 1941, while giving an extremely helpful boost to Italian radar development, never manifested despite express agreements and the word of the KM's OKM that dated back to 1939. This would have not only provided radar for some ships earlier in the war, but also would have allowed Italian radars with performance matching German sets to arrive even earlier than historically.
Naval Battle of Campeche? Please! 🥺
For the hypothetical service of the Lions I think you make a wrong assumption. If Lions were completed(or, in fact if they were not put on hold, even if the construction would just slow down to almost a halt), there would be no Vanguard.
One of these days we gotta do a, 'Epic Rap Battles of Naval History'. Nelson VS Yi Sun Shin, or Cunningham vs King, Yamamoto vs Doenitz... That would be kewl.
Nagumo vs Yamaguchi, Halsey vs Ozawa (I doubt if Yi Sun-sin and Nelson would debate much but shave a mutual admiration society)
Re: Aquila - I think, beyond anything else, it just has TARGET written all over it. For the allies to start with and then for a Fritz-X post 43.
The only reason fritz x worked so well is lack of fighters really bergamini wasn't allowed to fire until fired upon basically due to the armistice. They only managed to launch one fighter from italia before the roma sank
Yes my first thought too, if the Aquila could have done the RM any good, the RN would have just prioritized this large target. Probably would not have been around long enough for a Fritz-X episode.