My late Dad served on the Vanguard between 1947 to 1953. He always recalled that he missed out on the Royal Tour of South Africa on the Vanguard by King George VI in 1952 due to the Kings sudden death. Great ship tragic to be scrapped after just 14 years’ service.
Thanks for another great video. Vanguard was launched by Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen said later that she would always remember that her first official engagement had been a naval one. First and only Battleship to have a transom stern that helped with increased speed and damage control. She was the only British battleship not to go to war.
HMS Vanguard was alongside in Portsmouth dockyard in 1959, and was open to visitors during a Navy Day when I holidayed in Southsea that year as a lad. A memorable moment, and the sheer size of those gun barrels has stayed with me. A most impressive ship!
I remember alighting from the train at Portsmouth Harbour and seeing her there, impressively lit up in the sunshine. It was Navy Day. (I missed what my father remembered there, a decade before...the place jam-packed with D-Day ships of every type).
When looking at HMS Vanguard, that ship was very well designed and an excellent ship for a battleship era that unfortunately had come and gone, if only it and a couple more had been produced earlier... From an esthetical aspect, she was an elegant ship, thanks to the pronounced sheer compared to the HMS King George V class to improve seakeeping.
It took until the 1960s for the London bomb sites to go. We were broke and ships such as the Warspite and KGV were just broken up, same with Vanguard. In 1956 the RAF's last maritime rec. Lancaster flew away to be broken up at Wroughton MU.
Very interesting! A few thoughts: • Given that the very reliable WW1-era 15” main guns were improved and became ballistically superior to the much newer 14” design, you have to ask why the latter had so many problems in action. The travails of the Prince of Wales against the Bismarck in 1941 are well known with nearly all ten guns suffering malfunctions and being inoperable. But even by late 1943 the Duke of York was suffering similar malfunctions against the Scharnhorst. All in all that design has to be judged pretty much a failure, and a considerable waste of scarce resources, i.e. time and money. • All previous RN capital ships had been cursed with a ridiculously low bow and forecastle, which rendered them very poor sea-boats, large amounts of spray being thrown over the bows in even moderate seas and huge quantities of green water coming over in heavier weather (in a trip across the Atlantic in one of these ships, Lord Beaverbrook caustically remarked that he might just as well have been in a submarine.) Apart from being undesirable in many other ways this played havoc with the rangefinders, as was shown in the action with Bismarck. Finally, with Vanguard their Lordships of the Admiralty saw sense and gave it a proper bow, which considerably enhanced its sea-keeping abilities.
You ignore the fact that the PoW was only just completed and still had shipyard people aboard when she engaged Bismarck. She was certainly not fully 'worked up'. Duke of York was in action for a very prolonged period and fired 52 broadsides, there are few battleship actions that used that amount of main armament ammunition. It is not surprising that exhausted gun crews , late in the action, made drill errors that caused some loss of firepower. The 14in guns of DoY wrecked Scharnhorst, knocking out A and B turrets very quickly and a shell penetrated a boiler room causing the loss of speed that doomed the German ship. The BL 14in gun was the only battleship main armament that was instrumental in destroying two modern battleships in WWII. The 14in guns proved very effective.
@@urseliusurgel4365 There is a difference between working up the crew to fighting efficiency and doing the same for the mechanicals of a ship. But it quickly became clear that the 14” guns of the Prince of Wales didn’t work properly, being prone to frequent malfunctions. And up in the Denmark Strait she would have been quickly overwhelmed and finished off by the Bismarck, being quite unable to defend herself due to those malfunctioning guns. So very wisely she turned and fled the scene. Amazingly the Germans did not pursue, allowing her to escape. However, over two years later the Duke of York was still suffering similar malfunctions, which clearly show faults in the design. But you ignored my original point. Given that the very reliable WW1-era 15” guns for Vanguard were upgraded and became ballistically superior to the new 14” design, you have to ask why they didn’t adapt that well-proven design rather than start with a blank sheet and a much more complicated set-up. Every designer knows a brand-new design, let alone a very complicated one, will have plenty of teething problems to be ironed out. But if the design is faulty and they can’t be eliminated, that makes it much worse. So I don’t agree they were ‘very effective.’ More like ‘very defective.’
@@lawrieflowers8314 The London Naval Treaty of 1935 restricted the calibre of the main armament of new battleships to 14 inches. The British were eager to bring the KGVs into service in order to replace the outdated R class, and reluctantly accepted this limitation.
Hi. May I please ask on your source that has the 15in 42 cal on the Vanguard having better penetration at 32,100 yards than the Nelson class 16in 45 cal guns? I just checked the two sources I have easy access too and they both gave me the Nelsons having better penetration at that range. Of course the Nelson's guns had much better penetration at closer ranges but both my sources list that they still had the advantage up to the max range of the Vanguards guns. Thank you very much.
Certainly. I used research compiled by William Garzke, Robert Dullin, and Thomas Webb in 'Allied battleships of WW2." According to them, at 30,000 yards, the 15/42 penetrates 9in side and 5.7in deck. The 16 mk.1 penetrates 8.8in side and 5.1in deck. There are a few parameters behind the numbers supplied: -shell diameter, mass, striking velocity, angle of fall, projectile strength, and projectile shape. -armor characteristics/quality. This is the difficult parameter due to different armor types and production quality. -live firing tests. The supplied numbers for the guns in question were supplied by official sources (ministry of defense and/or the Royal Navy). The data was then applied to the USN empirical equation and the stated numbers were given. The difference is minor on the grand scale, but present.
@@centralcrossing4732 Thank you so much for the reply. The Okun Resource World War II Naval Gun Armor Penetration Tables have different numbers and also use the USN empirical equation. Just focusing on the belt penetration, they have the; 15/42 @ 30K yards, shell 1,938-lb Angle of Descent at 33.3, Velocity at 1471 fps Giving 12in of penetration (EFF, British Cemented Armor) 16/45 @ 30K yards, 2,048-lb Angle of Descent at 30.9 (so lower angle helping penetration) Velocity at 1479 fps (slight speed boost helping penetration) giving 12.5in of penetration (EFF, British Cemented Armor) Its frustrating how different sources have different numbers. Just venting my frustration below. The only thing the 15/42 has going for it is its smaller shell diameter while still being only 110 pounds less weight giving it more weight per square inch 10.967Ib (the weight of the shell divided by the area of a 15in diameter circle) vs only 10.186lb for the shell the 16/45 was firing. The 16in shell had every other advantage, being angle of descent and velocity. I know it doesn't really matter, but my hobby is battle ships and its so hard to get sources that agree. Thank you for making a very good video however. Have a nice day.
The 16" shells for the Nelsons was not that great, one of the reasons was the poor aerodynamics that made it loose velocity faster than the shells from most, if not all other Battleships ! The RN wanted to develop a new 16" shell for the "NelRods" in the mid/late 30s but there was no fundings for it.
Shame it didn’t get completed in time for the end of the Pacific war, although there was no meaningful opposition at that point. Postwar trials indicated that the design had delivered a highly capable battleship albeit in a world where their time had passed
Had to laugh . several short comings on British capital ships as a result of Bismarck engagement. (1) don't send a ship that's in need of mechanical refurbishment. (2) Don't send a ship straight out of the dockyards. (3) Ensure the admiral has some good luck. Otherwise fine🙂 RIP all
@@dovetonsturdee7033 Depends, hind sight is a wonderful thing and not available to those who take decisions. That has to be borne in mind- but strategically would it have mattered that much. Perhaps the orders could have been couched more in the frame of monitor until Force H arrives etc. We know that Lutjens was ordered not to take on enemy units- his doing so rendered "Rhineuebung" useless and he had to detach PE to deflect the enemy- not what the operation was about. Merchantmen sunk nil. Effect on supply nil. But he had little option. Certainly the propaganda effect was important. So on reflection both sides failed didn't they?🙂
@@leoroverman4541 Force H was only involved after Hood was sunk. Until then, it was more likely that it would be sent to the eastern Mediterranean to support the Mediterranean Fleet with the evacuation of Crete. The only hindsight is on the part of those who argue that Hood's fate was inevitable. At the time, the belief was that Hood & Prince of Wales were capable of combatting Bismarck, just as it was believed that, had Lutjens used the Iceland-Faroes Gap instead, KGV & Repulse would have done the same. Why do you think the British failed? Hood & PoW prevented Lutjens from reaching the wider Atlantic, and Bismarck's damage forced the abandonment of her operation. She made for St. Nazaire, but was sunk by the Royal Navy on the way. It rather appears that the British succeeded in their aim.
@@dovetonsturdee7033 Force H was already at sea in the event that B and PE slipped past them. In fact Holland thought they had done so until Norfolk and Suffolk corrected that misapprehension. They were not sent to sea to avenge Hood, that happened as a result of Lutjens having to abort RhineUebung which took him in their course.
There is also the asinine decision by Winston Churchill to pause all capital ship and carrier construction for six months, in favour of escorts. This delay has massive knock-on effects to all programmes. Workers had been moved and retrained etc. It was more like a full year delay (one third of the build time for a Battleship). Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, (political head) twice, both times almost ruined the Royal Navy.
@@dovetonsturdee7033 Escort construction had been underway since irrc 1938. Yards and workers were up to speed and efficient. The Flower class had been designed for this scenario. Any yard that could built a commercial fishing hull could build Flowers. Escorts would be ready when we needed them. The moving of men and material from the cap ships, meant that those men had to learn how to build an escort. The changing of long lead items like engines and turbine orders, halted work on the cap ship ones. Case in point. It takes as long to construct a 15 or 16 inch gun barrel, as it does to build the ship. Roughly 2-3 years. So, just as all the men had be retrained to escorts, and material started to arrive for the extra ships. The workers had to travel back to the cap ships, blow the rust off those skills etc. Then factories have to find or move workers to restart the cap ship equipment. If you look into cap ship construction. You will often find that orders for guns, turbines and armour are orders before the first steel I cut for the ship. That stuff takes so long to make. Logistics and economy planning is both interesting and numbing boring to read. It is how wars are won. Dislocating a carefully constructed after work plan and schedule always has knock on effects without a lot of planning, ahead of time.
@@Yandarval Please explain what the later British capital ships, Anson & Howe, for example, actually did in WW2. 'Case in point. It takes as long to construct a 15 or 16 inch gun barrel, as it does to build the ship. Roughly 2-3 years.' Which is irrelevant where Vanguard is concerned, as she utilised the guns & barbettes held in stock when Glorious & Courageous were converted into aircraft carriers.
Why? Carriers were far less important in the war against Germany & Italy than they became in the Pacific. Moreover, the British commissioned six battleships between 1949 & 1946. They commissioned almost three times as many carriers during that same period, by the way.
Would have been a great museum for Great Britain.
Great images of the ship being constructed, and great diagrams, as well.
Incredible, and learning much from you.
Take care, and all the best.
My late Dad served on the Vanguard between 1947 to 1953. He always recalled that he missed out on the Royal Tour of South Africa on the Vanguard by King George VI in 1952 due to the Kings sudden death. Great ship tragic to be scrapped after just 14 years’ service.
The ship did not have a role. There was no need for it.
Thanks for another great video. Vanguard was launched by Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen said later that she would always remember that her first official engagement had been a naval one. First and only Battleship to have a transom stern that helped with increased speed and damage control. She was the only British battleship not to go to war.
What a great shame they couldn't save Vanguard or Warspite as a museum ship.
You’re so right,Warspite in particular had an astonishing history!
Without doubt the most beautiful battleship ever constructed.
HMS Vanguard was alongside in Portsmouth dockyard in 1959, and was open to visitors during a Navy Day when I holidayed in Southsea that year as a lad.
A memorable moment, and the sheer size of those gun barrels has stayed with me. A most impressive ship!
I remember alighting from the train at Portsmouth Harbour and seeing her there, impressively lit up in the sunshine. It was Navy Day. (I missed what my father remembered there, a decade before...the place jam-packed with D-Day ships of every type).
Very good video of HMS vanguard
That was excellent. Every image was new to me.
Vanguard was a handsome looking vessel.
Many thanks.
When looking at HMS Vanguard, that ship was very well designed and an excellent ship for a battleship era that unfortunately had come and gone, if only it and a couple more had been produced earlier...
From an esthetical aspect, she was an elegant ship, thanks to the pronounced sheer compared to the HMS King George V class to improve seakeeping.
Good video on Vanguard. A very good looking Battleship.
A beautiful looking ship and a shame that she wasn’t preserved.a great video,cheers.
Beautiful Ship !!!
A very informative video on a ship about which very little is known because she was not completed until after the war was over. Good job!
Very good video. Excellent images.
Perfect timing for a new video
A very good video thank you. As completed her tertiary aramament was all 40mm Bofors.
Very interesting video, some very good information I had no idea about beforehand.
It took until the 1960s for the London bomb sites to go. We were broke and ships such as the Warspite and KGV were just broken up, same with Vanguard. In 1956 the RAF's last maritime rec. Lancaster flew away to be broken up at Wroughton MU.
Love your stuff centralcrossing, keep it up!
Another informative video.
Fascinating story. A waste of effort, several fleet carriers could have been built. A passé weapon system.
Well done. Thanks
Obsolete when entering service perhaps, but one of the best looking battleships to ever sail the seas !
A truly good looking ship although that should not count for a great deal.
Very interesting!
A few thoughts:
• Given that the very reliable WW1-era 15” main guns were improved and became ballistically superior to the much newer 14” design, you have to ask why the latter had so many problems in action. The travails of the Prince of Wales against the Bismarck in 1941 are well known with nearly all ten guns suffering malfunctions and being inoperable. But even by late 1943 the Duke of York was suffering similar malfunctions against the Scharnhorst. All in all that design has to be judged pretty much a failure, and a considerable waste of scarce resources, i.e. time and money.
• All previous RN capital ships had been cursed with a ridiculously low bow and forecastle, which rendered them very poor sea-boats, large amounts of spray being thrown over the bows in even moderate seas and huge quantities of green water coming over in heavier weather (in a trip across the Atlantic in one of these ships, Lord Beaverbrook caustically remarked that he might just as well have been in a submarine.) Apart from being undesirable in many other ways this played havoc with the rangefinders, as was shown in the action with Bismarck. Finally, with Vanguard their Lordships of the Admiralty saw sense and gave it a proper bow, which considerably enhanced its sea-keeping abilities.
You ignore the fact that the PoW was only just completed and still had shipyard people aboard when she engaged Bismarck. She was certainly not fully 'worked up'. Duke of York was in action for a very prolonged period and fired 52 broadsides, there are few battleship actions that used that amount of main armament ammunition. It is not surprising that exhausted gun crews , late in the action, made drill errors that caused some loss of firepower. The 14in guns of DoY wrecked Scharnhorst, knocking out A and B turrets very quickly and a shell penetrated a boiler room causing the loss of speed that doomed the German ship. The BL 14in gun was the only battleship main armament that was instrumental in destroying two modern battleships in WWII. The 14in guns proved very effective.
@@urseliusurgel4365
There is a difference between working up the crew to fighting efficiency and doing the same for the mechanicals of a ship. But it quickly became clear that the 14” guns of the Prince of Wales didn’t work properly, being prone to frequent malfunctions.
And up in the Denmark Strait she would have been quickly overwhelmed and finished off by the Bismarck, being quite unable to defend herself due to those malfunctioning guns. So very wisely she turned and fled the scene. Amazingly the Germans did not pursue, allowing her to escape. However, over two years later the Duke of York was still suffering similar malfunctions, which clearly show faults in the design.
But you ignored my original point. Given that the very reliable WW1-era 15” guns for Vanguard were upgraded and became ballistically superior to the new 14” design, you have to ask why they didn’t adapt that well-proven design rather than start with a blank sheet and a much more complicated set-up. Every designer knows a brand-new design, let alone a very complicated one, will have plenty of teething problems to be ironed out. But if the design is faulty and they can’t be eliminated, that makes it much worse.
So I don’t agree they were ‘very effective.’
More like ‘very defective.’
@@lawrieflowers8314 The London Naval Treaty of 1935 restricted the calibre of the main armament of new battleships to 14 inches. The British were eager to bring the KGVs into service in order to replace the outdated R class, and reluctantly accepted this limitation.
D K Brown wrote he thought Vanguard would have a good chance of successfully engaging the Yamato.
Hi. May I please ask on your source that has the 15in 42 cal on the Vanguard having better penetration at 32,100 yards than the Nelson class 16in 45 cal guns? I just checked the two sources I have easy access too and they both gave me the Nelsons having better penetration at that range. Of course the Nelson's guns had much better penetration at closer ranges but both my sources list that they still had the advantage up to the max range of the Vanguards guns. Thank you very much.
Certainly.
I used research compiled by William Garzke, Robert Dullin, and Thomas Webb in 'Allied battleships of WW2." According to them, at 30,000 yards, the 15/42 penetrates 9in side and 5.7in deck. The 16 mk.1 penetrates 8.8in side and 5.1in deck. There are a few parameters behind the numbers supplied:
-shell diameter, mass, striking velocity, angle of fall, projectile strength, and projectile shape.
-armor characteristics/quality. This is the difficult parameter due to different armor types and production quality.
-live firing tests.
The supplied numbers for the guns in question were supplied by official sources (ministry of defense and/or the Royal Navy). The data was then applied to the USN empirical equation and the stated numbers were given. The difference is minor on the grand scale, but present.
@@centralcrossing4732 Thank you so much for the reply. The Okun Resource World War II Naval Gun Armor Penetration Tables have different numbers and also use the USN empirical equation. Just focusing on the belt penetration, they have the;
15/42 @ 30K yards, shell 1,938-lb
Angle of Descent at 33.3,
Velocity at 1471 fps
Giving 12in of penetration (EFF, British Cemented Armor)
16/45 @ 30K yards, 2,048-lb
Angle of Descent at 30.9 (so lower angle helping penetration)
Velocity at 1479 fps (slight speed boost helping penetration)
giving 12.5in of penetration (EFF, British Cemented Armor)
Its frustrating how different sources have different numbers. Just venting my frustration below.
The only thing the 15/42 has going for it is its smaller shell diameter while still being only 110 pounds less weight giving it more weight per square inch 10.967Ib (the weight of the shell divided by the area of a 15in diameter circle) vs only 10.186lb for the shell the 16/45 was firing.
The 16in shell had every other advantage, being angle of descent and velocity. I know it doesn't really matter, but my hobby is battle ships and its so hard to get sources that agree. Thank you for making a very good video however. Have a nice day.
I would put he Nelson and Rodney as our most powerful battleships
The 16" shells for the Nelsons was not that great, one of the reasons was the poor aerodynamics that made it loose velocity faster than the shells from most, if not all other Battleships ! The RN wanted to develop a new 16" shell for the "NelRods" in the mid/late 30s but there was no fundings for it.
@@bigwerve The Vanguard was a superiour ship anyway you look at it.
They should have taken the 15 inch guns off the R class ships & built more Vanguards.
The most graceful English battleship in my opinion- pity about the cut off stern .
108 ft to fit through the Panama Canal.
Shame it didn’t get completed in time for the end of the Pacific war, although there was no meaningful opposition at that point. Postwar trials indicated that the design had delivered a highly capable battleship albeit in a world where their time had passed
Developing a ship that should never have been built.
nothing pertinent to add.
other than feeding the maws of the algo-deities.
Had to laugh . several short comings on British capital ships as a result of Bismarck engagement.
(1) don't send a ship that's in need of mechanical refurbishment.
(2) Don't send a ship straight out of the dockyards.
(3) Ensure the admiral has some good luck. Otherwise fine🙂
RIP all
1). & 2). Would you suggest, as an alternative, that Bismarck & Prinz Eugen should have been allowed unchallenged access to the Atlantic, instead?
@@dovetonsturdee7033 Depends, hind sight is a wonderful thing and not available to those who take decisions. That has to be borne in mind- but strategically would it have mattered that much.
Perhaps the orders could have been couched more in the frame of monitor until Force H arrives etc. We know that Lutjens was ordered not to take on enemy units- his doing so rendered "Rhineuebung" useless and he had to detach PE to deflect the enemy- not what the operation was about. Merchantmen sunk nil. Effect on supply nil. But he had little option.
Certainly the propaganda effect was important. So on reflection both sides failed didn't they?🙂
@@leoroverman4541 Force H was only involved after Hood was sunk. Until then, it was more likely that it would be sent to the eastern Mediterranean to support the Mediterranean Fleet with the evacuation of Crete.
The only hindsight is on the part of those who argue that Hood's fate was inevitable. At the time, the belief was that Hood & Prince of Wales were capable of combatting Bismarck, just as it was believed that, had Lutjens used the Iceland-Faroes Gap instead, KGV & Repulse would have done the same.
Why do you think the British failed? Hood & PoW prevented Lutjens from reaching the wider Atlantic, and Bismarck's damage forced the abandonment of her operation. She made for St. Nazaire, but was sunk by the Royal Navy on the way. It rather appears that the British succeeded in their aim.
@@dovetonsturdee7033 Force H was already at sea in the event that B and PE slipped past them. In fact Holland thought they had done so until Norfolk and Suffolk corrected that misapprehension. They were not sent to sea to avenge Hood, that happened as a result of Lutjens having to abort RhineUebung which took him in their course.
You have a valid point re Hood at the time of her engagement with Bismarck she was effectively worn out.
There is also the asinine decision by Winston Churchill to pause all capital ship and carrier construction for six months, in favour of escorts.
This delay has massive knock-on effects to all programmes. Workers had been moved and retrained etc.
It was more like a full year delay (one third of the build time for a Battleship).
Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, (political head) twice, both times almost ruined the Royal Navy.
Why was construction of escorts an 'asinine' decision?
@@dovetonsturdee7033 Escort construction had been underway since irrc 1938. Yards and workers were up to speed and efficient. The Flower class had been designed for this scenario. Any yard that could built a commercial fishing hull could build Flowers. Escorts would be ready when we needed them. The moving of men and material from the cap ships, meant that those men had to learn how to build an escort. The changing of long lead items like engines and turbine orders, halted work on the cap ship ones.
Case in point. It takes as long to construct a 15 or 16 inch gun barrel, as it does to build the ship. Roughly 2-3 years.
So, just as all the men had be retrained to escorts, and material started to arrive for the extra ships. The workers had to travel back to the cap ships, blow the rust off those skills etc. Then factories have to find or move workers to restart the cap ship equipment.
If you look into cap ship construction. You will often find that orders for guns, turbines and armour are orders before the first steel I cut for the ship. That stuff takes so long to make.
Logistics and economy planning is both interesting and numbing boring to read.
It is how wars are won.
Dislocating a carefully constructed after work plan and schedule always has knock on effects without a lot of planning, ahead of time.
@@Yandarval Please explain what the later British capital ships, Anson & Howe, for example, actually did in WW2.
'Case in point. It takes as long to construct a 15 or 16 inch gun barrel, as it does to build the ship. Roughly 2-3 years.' Which is irrelevant where Vanguard is concerned, as she utilised the guns & barbettes held in stock when Glorious & Courageous were converted into aircraft carriers.
Waste of time and energy, Should have built more carrier's.
Why? Carriers were far less important in the war against Germany & Italy than they became in the Pacific. Moreover, the British commissioned six battleships between 1949 & 1946. They commissioned almost three times as many carriers during that same period, by the way.