Comments by "Frank DeMaris" (@kemarisite) on "The Drydock - Episode 205" video.

  1. Drach, I'm afraid you left something huge out of the answer about intelligence during the Guadalcanal campaign. On May 28, 1942, too late to do any good for the Midway operation because the Americans already knew and were deploying their forces, the Japanese Navy finally switched their codes, from JN-25b to JN-25c. It would be six months before the US was able to crack JN-25c and begin reading the Japanese mail again, and this time period encompasses essentially all the significant actions of the campaign outside of the Japanese withdrawal at the end of January, 1943. Local considerations like you mentioned would have hampered the ability to utilize intelligence from radio intercepts, but the change in codes made it physically impossible until the new code was cracked.
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  2. This is a question that pops up every few videos, at least as far as translating antitank munitions into anti-ship concepts. The basic issue with that is how big ships are. With a tank, all kinds of important stuff like ammo and crew are right behind the armor, so just the shot itself and resultant spall can be enough. With a ship, outside of the turrets and armored conning tower, there is a lot of room behind the armor for reserve buoyancy to keep a damaged ship afloat, so once you get through the armor you need a significant behind armor effect. You'll never sink a ship by putting fist sized holes through the top above the waterline, outside of catastrophically bad ammunition safety in the turrets like the British battlecruisers at Jutland. That said, there were a few interesting projectile variants put out during the war. The French and Japanese developed non-standard AP shells that were optimized for underwater travel with the intention they would land short and punch into the target under the belt (see USS Boise for the one know example of this working). You mentioned the Japanese heavy AA shells, but the Germans developed something similar for the 15" guns on Tirpitz. Both the US and Japan developed small-ish caliber anti-submarine projectiles with flattened noses for shooting at diving or just submerged submarines at to a few thousand yards, although the US developed theirs in the 50s for the 5"/38. The US also had chaff and white phosphorus projectiles available for the 5"/38 as variants on the standard illumination round or "star shell".
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  3. My condolences on your grandfather's passing as well. I did, in fact, grow up with only one set of grandparents because, on dad's side, one died the year my parents married and the other flaked out on the family several years before that.
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