Comments by "Gregory Wright" (@gregorywright4918) on "The Drydock - Episode 164" video.

Re: German use of Narvik, my understanding was that the northern Swedish ports were ice-blocked in the winter season, so Narvik was the main port for shipments then (the best-quality Swedish iron mines were in the north). It was one of the primary reasons Germany moved to secure Norway when she felt it was threatened by the UK. Norway has a very jagged but deep coastline, so ships can hug the coast when moving south from Narvik, and German air cover would keep raiders away from the coast (heck, it reached out to hit the Arctic convoys badly), so they could not loiter offshore.
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@jefferyindorf699 Another use of the CVE's was in close air support of landing operations, freeing the fleet carriers to defend the landing operation and strike at nearby locations that might interfere or send aircraft to attack the landing ships. I believe the Taffys 1, 2, & 3 were tasked with this during the Battle off Samar.
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Try Drydock #109...
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The Democratic congressmen was either speaking metaphorically or attempting to make a poor, uninformed joke. Guam is a good-sized island, about 200 square miles. There was a large B-29 base there in 1945, plus a fleet base. We bombed the heck out of Iwo Jima (about 8 square miles) for months before invading, and we still had to dig most of those defenders out face-to-face. Congressmen (or women) who have not served themselves should not be appointed to military affairs committees, IMHO.
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For a similar action (although a lot more ships were involved), read a good account of the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (Nov. 13) when a couple destroyers were in so close to the Hiei that she could not use her main battery on them (especially Laffey). They peppered her bridge and superstructure with 5" shells, effectively blinding her, and knocked out some secondary weapons, but did little serious damage to her hull, engines, or steering (the key steering hit was from a heavy cruiser 8" shell). The night was dark and squally and both formations discovered each other at relatively close range, but the commanders hesitated to open fire so it was point-blank before the first shot.
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"Armored concrete"?
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The problem there would be if Beatty does not get some prestige out of commanding at Jutland, would he still be elevated to First Sea Lord and help preserve the RN from budget cuts in the 1920s?
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Higher-pressure boilers and turbines were leading to engineering spaces that took up less room, so you could have a faster ship in the same space, or enough extra armor to upgrade a battlecruiser to a fast battleship.
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Usually the ship would not go to full speed and turn into the wind until flight operations are about to commence. But it would be a known amount of time, so the engineering crew would be making preparations - lighting off extra boilers, rerouting steam lines, etc. This was particularly important when the fleet direction was not into the prevailing wind, like during Midway. You are correct that American carriers had an advantage that they could warm up planes in the hangar deck, but they would then have to launch fairly soon after being spotted on the flight deck or they would cool down again. Both British and Japanese carriers had to spot on the flight deck first, then warm up, then launch. Warm-ups were usually done by deck crews, not the pilots. And yes, all the navies used the tactic of having the fighters take off first, because they did not have bomb loads and had more powerful engines so they could take off in less deck length. Lundstrom covers a lot of this in his good series The First Team.
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Fighters formed the Combat Air Patrol over the carriers, as well as strike escort. They would launch first because they required less deck length for takeoff. Heavier dive and torpedo bombers would be spotted behind them in the deck launch so they would have a longer deck run for takeoff. You can read about this in Shattered Sword and The First Team, among others.
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Good news, Drach! The US is opening up to vaccinated UK and EU visitors..."from November"...
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With hindsight, one damaged watertight section would have been far better than the half-dozen that did happen. But that probably would not have occurred to the OOD, they were trying to avoid the iceberg completely. Scraping the side open was the inevitable result of not succeeding.
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@535phobos True - I was thinking of the "sections" that were divided by watertight bulkheads, which encompassed multiple compartments. But you are probably right, inertia would cause massive internal disruptions. I was thinking of the forwardmost section as a "crumple zone", causing most damage to the bow up to the first or second bulkhead, but preventing water from getting into further sections abaft that. Probably why they tried to turn rather than hitting head-on.
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I don't think there were that many. In Hara's book, on the light cruiser Yahagi, there were only only 22 cadets and 15 sick out of a crew of about 800. No married men went ashore, they all wanted to stay and fight. Plus, the sick were not doing anything, and cadets would not be trained and probably only used as messenger boys. What Yamato really needed was air cover and better AA guns, not weak or untrained crew.
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At the beginning of the war in the US there were four squadrons as you say, with two squadrons of dive bombers, one called Scouting and the other Bombing. As the war went on they added more planes to the fighter squadron. Later they began experimenting with converting one of the dive bomber squadrons to a fighter-bomber squadron. On ships that were less than full-size fleet carriers, they often left off the bomber squadrons and just had Hellcats and Avengers in a composite squadron.
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Floatplanes were primarily added to battleships in the 1920's for long-range main-battery fire spotting. They were added to cruisers around the same time to extend the scouting range of the ship. In the 1930's both the British and the Japanese discovered their usefulness in assisting night battle operations. Later during the war they found another use for air/sea rescue operations. The liability of keeping floatplanes on ships during surface action was anticipated between the wars, so plans were made to fly them off when battle was expected, but several engagements were surprises or happened earlier than expected. Hits to the area the planes usually occupied, even if they were gone, often caused difficult fires. Some later-30's ships had their floatplane areas moved to the stern due to these concerns. But Drach is right in that most times that refits of ships left off the floatplanes were because new equipment was being added (mostly radar and AA) above the main deck and something had to compensate for the additional weight. During the war in the Pacific aerial scouting from land and carrier was much better than anticipated pre-war, so floatplanes were not needed for that role, and radar was doing an improving role in controlling fire, so it was an even trade.
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What non-essential spaces are you talking about on a battleship? On a Q-ship, it is usually a converted freighter, so you are not using the holds to carry cargo.
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@hughfisher9820 I'm still puzzled by the reference to concrete. As far as I've read, the "core" of WTC was steel beams protected by sprayed-on fireproofing and drywall boards. The outer skin was interlocked steel girders with an aluminum sheathing. Only the floors were thin layers of concrete, but that did not protect the inner or outer beams from the heat of the fire, nor did it protect the horizontal truss beams from wilting due to the fires. The force of the impact would have blown through the sheathing and stripped a lot of the spray-on fireproofing. I am actually surprised it lasted as long as it did.
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@tominiowa2513 Not sure how marshmallow is a good analogy to the aluminum and kerosene, but 150 tons of it going at 550 mph is going to have a lot of impact force, and the combination is going to make for a very hot fire.
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@tominiowa2513 The fuel fire did not "melt" the steel, it ignited the office contents (paper, plastics, wood, etc) which with the fuel fire weakened the structure enough to cause the trusses to sag, pulling the weakened outer beams inward. The force of the impact blew much of the spray-on fireproofing off the beams and trusses, and the large hole the plane created weakened the overall outer structure.
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@tominiowa2513 I had seen a bit on the "reinforced" internal core, but above a certain floor level it sounded like they did not continue the rebarred concrete. At the level of the hits (70s upward) I gathered they were using spray-on fireproofing and drywall board to "protect" the core from fire. Do you have any better sources on that?
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@tominiowa2513 The "destruction of the civilian and economic infrastructure of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria" has been going on for a lot longer than the War on Terror, mostly due to internal forces like Sunni-Shiite conflict. Even the Russian-British "Great Game" was late to conflict in those areas. The Persians, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols, the Mughals... take your pick.
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@Trek001 Interesting. Source?
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@tominiowa2513 True, but that is something that we have learned over time due to the problems that we saw in the 10's and 20's. And still, most of the lift is coming from the gas. My point, though, is that at the time there was a significant distinction in the USN, and the V and Z were chosen to encode that.
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@Joe-Dead Your sarcasm is not appreciated. Nevertheless, I understand what you are saying about a CURVE, but my understanding of the term ARCH is completely different.
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The USN experimented with an 18" gun design, but found it only had 10-15% better ballistics than their best 16" gun with heavy shells, so they dropped it (with Washington Treaty encouragement). As shells got bigger, the rate of fire gets slower, so the smaller guns can get more total shell weight downrange with faster salvoes.
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@Joe-Dead An arch is not exactly the shape I would compare a ship's deck to. An arch must stand on firm ground, and the weight of the arch adds to it's stability as the forces are transferred around the arch to the ground.
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The V came into use in the 20's when it was being used to differentiate two different kinds of "aviation" - heaVier-than-air craft which used wing surfaces for lift, and Zeppelin-type lighter-than-air craft that used gas to create lift. Since they are both "aviation", I don't think it was for the V in that word. There were some great hopes in the lighter-than-air craft for long-range scouting, such that they tried it out in a couple Fleet Problems at the end of the 20's or the early 30's, but the airship's vulnerability to sudden wind changes at scouting altitudes made that less attractive, and we did not have that much helium-generating capacity at the time. Plus winged aircraft were getting much better much quicker.
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