Comments by "Dave Sisson" (@Dave_Sisson) on "Drachinifel" channel.

  1. After the war the Australians built their own Daring class destroyers and named them Vendetta, Vampire and Voyager. Another vessel was named Stuart and a shore installation was named Waterhen. So the names of those ships were carried on.
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  2. The 19 year old daughter of a postman and a seamstress. That has to be the most unlikely background for someone who changed the war so profoundly, but I guess in wartime, talent is often recognised regardless of someones age, class and gender. In later life she went on to be a gardening historian and lived to the age of 92.
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  3. Hopefully we will get a history of the First Rates built at the same time which included HMVS Nelson, which was sold to the cashed up Colony of Victoria and thus became the only First Rate ever to be owned by a colonial navy.
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  4. Having a group of navy ships named "Cabbage Class" is almost as amusing as having a ship named HMS Pansy.
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  5.  @stamasd8500  But Bismark and Tirpitz were just the equal of British and American battleships, not really superior to them. And of course both those countries had dozens of battleships while the Germans only had two. At least the two Japanese megaships were superior to any thing else in the world and they were backed up by other conventionally sized battleships in the IJN.
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  6. That would make a great opening scene for a film about the subject. While "Sir" is drinking his cuppa, he can relate the history of the Glowworm to his offsider and the whole story could be told in flashbacks, interspersed with the life of the offsider which would break up the naval action into 15 minute chunks, making a film more palatable to people other than dedicated navy buffs.
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  7. I was confused. At first I thought it was another channel that does quality naval history like Historiograph.
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  8. I suspect the Boer War name Drach was struggling with is Colquhoun, which is usually pronounced car-hoon.
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  9. It's amazing how many ships the British built for foreign powers that were then used against them, including Mesudiye, Kongo and a few Argentinian ships.
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  10. There was a battle cruiser in the Royal Navy called HMS New Zealand, but the Kiwis themselves never had an HMNZS New Zealand.
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  11.  @davieturner339  The V class destroyers included HMS Violent, Vendetta, Vesper, Vampire, Vehement, Vanquisher, Venonous and a bunch of other over the top names.
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  12. When Drach began reciting the ships names, Lion... Tiger... I was guessing which other big cat the third ship would be, perhaps Leopard? or Jaguar? or Puma? ... then he said Blake of all things. I realized just how inconsistent and unpredictable Royal Navy ship naming actually is.
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  13. I and five million other people live in a city founded by a topsail schooner named Enterprize (with a Z). So we have an especial fondness for ships with that name in Melbourne.
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  14.  @sarjim4381  No American colonies at the time? What about Guam, Hawaii, Alaska, Philippines, Puerto Rico, plus the client states of Panama and Liberia. That's a respectable colonial empire by any standard.
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  15. Nice to see you there Drach. As someone born in Castlemaine, I was astonished to discover this well preserved ship named after my home town, when I moved to Melbourne.
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  16. The British also had the Insect class sporting names such as HMS Gnat and HMS Moth, but it could have been worse, they could have copied the Yanks and started naming their ships after the lowest of all creatures... politicians.
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  17. It's sad that many other countries, especially the Yanks, name them after politicians when their ships could have far less divisive and more inspirational names.
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  18.  @theawickward2255  British carriers had armored decks, so the kamikazes barely hurt them. Sadly US carriers did not have armored decks. 😞
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  19.  @jermainerace4156  I thought "upsetting the French" was a prime objective of British armed forces for the past 1,000 years?
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  20.  @richardm3023  Belgrano is also the only ship in action to be sunk by a nuclear submarine.
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  21. When someone announces Good News in a tone like that, I always expect to hear something about the Dacia Sandero. . . (I sort of assume James May has the copyright on that phrase?}
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  22.  @sarjim4381  I suspect your definition of what constitutes a colony or client state comes down to branding, or what a country chooses to call an extra territorial chunk of land they control. But if something looks like a duck, acts like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck. If America annexed former independent countries like Hawaii, won colonies in war from Spain and Germany (their quarter of Samoa) or bought them from Denmark or Russia, and they administered them the same way as other countries administered their colonies then the Yanks definitely had colonies. That's why Rudyard Kipling addressed the Poem "White mans burden" to the US after they became the colonial power administering the Philippines.
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  23.  @Warmaker01  I more or less agree with that. When the war started in 1939 either the Americans or the British could have beaten the Japanese navy in a few years. They both had carriers and a lot of old battleships and a few new ones as well. Likewise either ally could have beaten the combined German and Italian fleets (and the Italians did have good battleships). The way it turned out it was an overwhelmingly British force that beat the German and Italian navies and when the Americans entered the war, they were mostly responsible for taking on the Japanese (except in the Indian Ocean) until the European theatre was won when the British sent a lot of ships over to help out in the Pacific.
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  24. Two contrasting approaches to improving crew morale. The Royal Navy gave their sailors a booze ration, the U.S. Navy gave theirs ice cream. I wonder which approach most sailors would prefer?
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  25. I usually call it "The American Mutiny", but perhaps I'm just being grumpy?
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  26. Oars for when they run out of coal.
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  27. The fourth allied power, albeit smaller than Britain France and the Ottomans, was Piedmont-Sardinia. Did they send any war ships to Crimea?
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  28. I think the problem is that Americans name their carriers after politicians, who are not the most respected people in any country, while the Brits usually give their carriers and capital ships inspirational names. What America needs to do is agree to not name anything after politicians or cities ever again and then go through the Big Book of Names for long retired Royal Navy ships and recycle some of them.
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  29. The wonderful 2 minute sketch can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM&t=2s
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  30. Thanks for the tips on scanning century old photos. I write Australian mountain history and I often get photos sent to me of ski scenes, mountain huts, mines, etc. to identify. I use much the same technique of identifying the time period and then eliminating possibilities that Drach uses.
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  31. Just what I was thinking. That flying boat looks like something from a Hayao Miyazaki film.
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  32. Australia has a couple of slightly enlarged versions of that design, complete with ski jumps. But they're not allowed to call them "aircraft carriers" because that would upset a certain huge country that they never actually name. But if a war ever broke out, absolutely no one would be surprised if the Australians admitted they were really carriers.
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  33. I suspect the term 'Destroyer' for a naval vessel was in use long before 1860. There is a biography of Matthew Flinders, a Napoleonic era Royal Navy captain and explorer called 'My own destroyer', which is allegedly a quote from him when he got his first command. Were ships of circa 1800 ever called destroyers? https://www.amazon.com/MY-OWN-DESTROYER-Biography-Navigator/dp/B0010ZID80
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  34.  @MyVanir  Not really, the only carrier that ALL destroyers feared was HMAS Melbourne. It developed quite a taste for snacking on destroyers.
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  35. As someone who writes (non naval) history that reflects my experience. You order a file of documents that has a title that sounds potentially useful and when you visit the massive archive building to go through the file, it reveals very little. But after you publish the article or book someone points out that valuable info is contained in a file that you never considered inspecting.
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  36. Based on the absurd American classification that the Alaska's are just really, really big cruisers with enormous guns, then so are the Kongos.
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  37. Thanks for that information. In one of the first Drycocks I asked Drach why almost all carriers were right handed and he gave a similar answer to you, but with less detail on the aeroplanes and didn't mention the wind tunnel. But that was in the days of 30 minute Drydocks and the detailed answers we now get in 260 minute Drycocks were a luxury I never dared to dream of.
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  38. I saw Drach in Melbourne filming on board HMAS Castlemaine today. I thought it best not to interrupt him and his extensive entourage, so I chatted to the very informative crew instead. 🙂
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  39. Especially as they those men and boys were sailing around in HMCS Rainbow.
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  40. He / she will be devastated when Drach eventually gives up and just calls him Fletcher no matter what he calls himself.
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  41.  @GoranXII  Okay, I thought it was the British were bankrupt after 6 years of war, so they trashed most of their carriers to save money when the war ended?
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  42. Nice work. Is there any chance of adding HMS Upholder and the U Class subs to your long list of projects to do in the distant future?
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  43.  @camenbert5837  Thomas would be a corvette, or a frigate at most. Gordon would be the battleship. But I do like the idea of "The Fat Admiral".
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  44. Back around 1899? the Boers had besieged a city (Ladysmith I think?) and the only way the British could lift the siege was by dismounting large naval guns from ships, transporting them inland and firing them at the fortified Boer positions.
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  45. The battlecruisers Australia and New Zealand as well as the battleship Malaya had active lives in t he First World War with barely a scratch.
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  46. Or the Americans could have learned from British practice and armoured their carrier decks. Then cleaning up after a kamikaze hit involved nothing more than sweeping the wreckage over the side.
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  47.  @SZKARLUPIEN  Thanks for that link, the last view of the explosion shows just how devastating the Tall Boy was, 75 years after it was dropped.
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  48.  @Tepid24  He is known amongst viewers of naval channels for his fanatical dislike of battleships and his enthusiasm to take down anyone who thinks they have some redeeming qualities.
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  49. If you look at the Falklands 40 years ago the people were entirely of British and Chilean descent and there is no way to justify their invasion by an especially brutal military dictatorship. Today the population is much larger and more diverse, they are fully self governing and have started to call themselves a nation. The average income is 1.6 times higher than the British and the place is absolutely booming. Stats show the Falklands is one of the richest and happiest countries on earth. None of that would have happened if the Argentiian junta had got away with the invasion.
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  50. Some of his ship profiles are unnumbered like HMAS Sydney (published Dec 12, 2018 ). They should probably be on the list too.
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  51. Not to mention the Australian ships complete with ski jumps up the front that are slightly bigger than the Japanese ships. They are definitely not aircraft carriers either, the ski jumps are just there for aesthetic effect and they honestly weren't added to the ships to assist planes to take off.
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  52. I was sure Drach would have included John Byng and Ernest King in his list of worst Admirals. After a court martial Byng was executed by a firing squad for incompetence and King should have been.
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  53.  @kkkkkkkkggggggg5934  The destroyer HMS Glowworm actually rammed the German heavy cruiser Hipper, causing a lot of damage. Most of Glowworm's crew went down with the ship, but the Hipper's captain wrote to the British Navy recommending that they get medals for bravery.
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  54. The world was very different back then, people lived differently and had different values. As a writer of popular histories, I keep coming up against people who are outraged that historic characters did not think or act as people do in the 21st century. I find it very frustrating.
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  55. The tradition of a monarch knighting people on the battlefield definitely lasted into the 20th century. I heard somewhere that King George V knighting General Monash on the Western Front circa 1917 was the last time this happened, but I later heard that there might have been a later instance.
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  56. The entire empire of a dozen nationalities was split into two kingdoms, one run from Vienna and the other run from Budapest. So Hungary had territory on the Adriatic coast, although it wasn't populated by ethnic Hungarians.
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  57. The Australians have just commissioned a new HMAS Sydney. It's a 6,300 ton destroyer that is the size of a small cruiser. I wonder if the new Emden and Sydney will want to have a rematch?
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  58.  @michaelkovacic2608  I know a lot of Australian skiers who head to Canada for the northern hemisphere winter, far more than people who go to Europe or the USA. I'm not sure why, but the safe and friendly atmosphere may be one reason?
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  59. Very interesting. I was going to give this post a thumbs up, but it is in all bold so I had to down vote it.
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  60. At least that one was spared a nukeing.
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  61. You may not believe it, but Icelandic patrol boats won the Cod Wars against the might of the Royal Navy.
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  62. In Drach's video on HMAS Sydney, he tells us that when the cruiser was in the Mediterranean Sea, it fired a lot of AA at the planet Venus in the mistaken belief it was a German plane. So if a ship can attack a planet, I see no reason why a typhoon should not be fair game.
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  63. Agreed, but perhaps a splash of colour to indicate which country each model represents. So obviously a red dot (or even a red hull) for British Empire forces, blue for French, etc.
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  64. Did one of your ancestors serve on HMS Gloworm?
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  65. It's a story nearly as strange as the CSS Shenandoah. Not that it had as many owners, but when it docked in Melbourne for repairs and resupply, the Victorian government did the work in a government owned dock, hosted a huge reception for the officers and the crew got free train trips and accommodation in nice country hotels. Meanwhile the ship was repaired to a high standard and the skeleton crew not on vacation made a tidy profit providing guided tours of their warship. They also recruited extra crew from adventurous locals. Shenandoah then went on to sink about 16(?) Union ships and was the last Confederate unit to surrender, in Liverpool, England of all places. The USA then sued the British government on the basis that their ships would not have been sunk if not for all the work done in Melbourne. The British pointed out that Victoria had "responsible government" was quasi-independent and that they had no control over what their so called colony actually did. However an international tribunal forced Britain to pay compensation for the lost ships, so they sent the bill to Melbourne and asked for a refund. Needless to say, the Victorian government never paid up.
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  66. Gosh, Drach narrated this one at lightning speed compared to usual and I had to pause a few times to absorb what he said. I wonder if he was in a hurry to do something else?
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  67. There are a few good videos on the Emden's wild adventures already. HistoryMarche did an excellent 17 minute one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlcRnS-lXhU The Great War also did a pretty good 10 minute one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51FXgQOoppw
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  68. Somehow I feel that a ship named "Eskimo" would be naturally better suited to Arctic convoys rather than sweating it out in the tropics
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  69. I have trouble believing that an American admiral of the time would take orders from a superior officer of any other nationality. On the Western Front US generals were infamous for their unwillingness to be directed by UK or French field marshals, so in this battle I can imagine the Americans are more likely to wander around doing their own thing rather than being integrated into a British squadron like the Australians were.
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  70. One of the most deadly German merchant raiders was originally a banana boat called Pongo.
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  71. They also made a series called Tugs and Thomas has occasional guest appearances from Tugs characters in port scenes. That is the nearest you will get.
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  72. I see that Drach has her predecessor, the Cerberus scheduled in a couple of months. That monitor was a year or two older but lasted even longer until about 1920 as a store ship.
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  73. 🎵 Soon may the Drach-man come, to bring us Sugar and Tea and Rum ♫ ... well perhaps not tea with the rations he's issuing us.
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  74. He started in the navy early. Prince Phillip of Greece escaped from his homeland during one of its many revolutions as an infant hidden in a fruit box before being taken to safety in a Royal Navy ship.
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  75. You have to see things through French eyes. The English and later the British had been regularly sinking their navies for a thousand years. These ships were designed when some old people could still remember the Battle of Trafalgar. So the French decided to "think outside the box". Ironically they were on the same side as the Brits in the First World War, but they still kept well away from the Royal Navy in case the Brits destroyed their ships out of habit. Then the Second World War comes around and... the Royal Navy sinks most of the French navy in one action. You have to wonder why the French persist, because when another war comes around we all know who will use the French Navy as target practice. No matter what side the two countries are on, the Royal Navy won't be able to stop themselves fulfilling their traditional role.
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  76. The British also used place names as seen in two Town classes, the County class heavy cruisers and the Crown Colony light cruisers. They also had royal themes and distinguished admirals for their ship names. The USA named a lot of ships after politicians, which would be shocking in other countries, but the US has far more respect for politicians than other countries have.
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  77. Hollywood likes to make films about American subjects, so while they could recast the corvettes as American, maybe the USA didn't have such small ships?
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  78. To be fair, in 1917 no one knew what a carrier should be as they were just inventing them.
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  79. To be fair the navy pronounces it slightly differently to the army, it's more like a slightly muffled lert-tenant, but still a long way from the Yankee 'lootenant'. On the first day of recruit course in all Commonwealth armed forces, the newbies are informed "There is no Looting in our armed forces, we are too civilised to loot".
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  80. But remember the Americans never completed any battlecruisers. That's right, officially the Alaska Class were just very, very big cruisers with very very big guns. That sounds silly to me, but for some reason they had a phobia for the word battlecruiser and absolutely refused to use it.
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  81.  @Drachinifel  I think it's a Scottish name. I've also heard it pronounced col-hoon which is slightly closer to the spelling.
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  82.  @stephenconnolly3018  Mate, there is a time and place for partisan politics and it is NOT here. I dislike Trump and everything he stands for too, but I come here to hear Drach's wisdom and I don't like people looking to start a fight.
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  83. The biggest modern cruise liners are larger than any warship, but photos like the one of HMS Hood being built convey a sense of awe and power that no cruise liner will ever get close to.
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  84. They had the best optical range/target finder thingys in the war. But luckily for the British, they also had the worst shells and did not have radar.
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  85. After the war Australia had a desperate shortage of shipping, but they were keen to establish bases in Antarctica and nearby islands. So they used a LST left over from the war to establish a base on ice covered Heard Island. The journey from Melbourne through the stormy Southern Ocean almost broke the flat bottomed LST's back a few times, but they arrived and set up a base near Antarctica in December 1947. However after the LST made it back to Australia, it was a write off.
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  86.  @philvanderlaan5942  and (bad Australian accent) the front did NOT fall off.
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  87. Excellent vid, more on hard working little corvettes please. Perhaps you could do the Bathurst Class soon? There's a preserved one named after my home town, I'm happy to take photos for you if you want them.
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  88. Nearly every post of his is slagging off battleships. He seems to be obsessed, so he wouldn't be happy with any response except for all battleships are bad and none should have been built ever,
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  89. The Olympics were not such a big deal around 1920, they became better known in the 1930s, but they only became ultra popular in the 1950s with the mass adoption of television.
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  90. Perhaps you should look at the large fast catamarans invented in 1990. The biggest ones are 400 feet long, can go over 50 knots, carry 1200 passengers and 400 cars and trucks, although there are smaller models too. They have been successful all over the world except in North America. The only problem is the companies that make them, Incat and Austal are both Australian, so the Jones Act may prohibit their import?
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  91. 25th of April is Liberation Day on South Georgia. It's a public holiday for the few dozen people that live there. ... But it is also ANZAC day in Aust & NZ.
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  92.  @nurgle11  To be fair, the United States is a fairly insular country they don't have the tradition of travelling all over the world in their youth like Australians do. So you can't expect an American to be used to understanding even the accents of other English speaking countries. In Europe, the Australians usally cope fairly well without help but the Americans tend to have difficulty. So don't be too hard on "Seppoes" as Australians call them, dealing with unusuual accents is not something they are used to.
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  93.  @RippPryde  From memory she lived in a rather nice manor house, complete with a retinue of servants, etc. I'm unsure if her movements were restricted, but even IF they were, that's a very posh form of home detention, certainly not prison.
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  94. Tyranny? Wow. Britain was the most liberal country in the world at the time. I'm not British, but I've always been shocked at the propaganda the Yanks put out about the United Kingdom in defence of their outrageous mutiny against their rightful king
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  95.  @chrissouthgate4554  Don't tell him that. I enjoy telling people that they oars to be used if the inefficient ships ran out of coal.
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  96. Great work on profiling the two best theatre commander admirals of the war in the past few weeks; Cunningham and Nimitz
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  97. You have cruisers and destroyers from four different countries quickly thrown together to form a fleet and only two of those navies had limited experience of working together. It's not a great surprise that things got rather confused.
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  98. In the late 1990s during the Timor Emergency, the Australian navy found themselves short of fast transport ships. So they looked around and found a Hobart shipyard called INCAT had a spare catamaran passenger and truck ferry that operated at up to 50 knots. They hired it, dubbed it HMAS Jervis Bay and the big catamaran was far more successful than purpose built naval transports on the run to Timor. After a couple of years the lease expired and INCAT sold the ferry to a company in Europe where I think it is still running.
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  99. I guess that's because you make rum in Queensland? Down in Tasmania they grow a lot of hops and barley, so they produce beer and whisky.
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  100. I thought he was King of Hungary and Emperor of Austria? ???
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  101.  @sarjim4381  Not the massive British Empire, rather I think of the scale of U.S. colonialism it as being more equivalent to something like the Dutch.
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  102. There's no need to joke about it, decent sized ships in the form of high speed catamaran ferrys of over 10,000 Gross Tons can go over 50 knots if they're in a hurry. Incat is building a few more at the moment.
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  103.  @SuperchargedSupercharged  Well that and they are on two different continents. I thought the audio was fine except for two 10 second bursts where it sounds like someone had fired up a vacuum cleaner.... and if someone is too precious to put up with that very brief minor inconvenience, then they're not really interested anyway.
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  104. That's why Drach would need to be camouflaged, I doubt the notoriously Anglo-phobic King would tolerate an Englishman in his presence unless he received a firm order from above.
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  105. I thought the Americans valued their ice cream because it could be traded for booze with British and Australian ships, although I can't believe that American ships were totally dry. Surely they must have had something to drink?
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  106. Uploaded at 11.00 pm Melbourne time. So just right for some relaxed viewing before I go to bed. 🙂
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  107. I suspect The front fell off is the funniest two minutes of satire on YouTube. I dare you to disagree. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
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  108. Bear in mind that the French and British had been mortal enemies for most of the previous 1,000 years. It would have been very, very hard for a French crew to put their ship under the command of their ancestral enemy.
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  109. Those things were incredibly versatile. After the war Australia was short of ships, but they were keen to assert their claim on part of Antarctica and nearby islands. The only spare cargo ship their government had lying around was an LST. So in 1947 it got a quick renovation, was painted bright yellow and was sent off to establish a base on Heard Island. The ship was not designed for the huge seas of the Southern Ocean, but despite a multitude of creaks and bangs, LST 3501 managed to get to the Heard Island and off load the expeditioners and materials to build a base. It did a few more similar voyages but the beating it received in the mountainous seas became too much for it, as it eventually broke down and had to be towed back to Australia where it was later scrapped. Not a bad performance for a ship designed for single use in calm waters.
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  110. Sadly Drach only covers the time up to 1950. he says that is because his expertise only goes up to that date and that he doesn't know much about missile warships. But I expect it is also because covering anything within living memory might cause disagreement and shouting between supporters of different nations. So he won't do coverage of the Korean War, Falklands War, all of the dozens(?) of spats between India and Pakistan and certainly not HMAS Melbourne, even if it wasn't a combat carrier in the Vietnam War.
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  111. To be fair, the British were somewhat distracted by things like The Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic, plus the fall of France and Norway. So they had a lot of equipment, planes and ships to patch up before they could launch new ships.
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  112. I think it just shows that a forgiving parent will allow a rebellious child back into the family when it grows up and realises the error of its ways. So when the United States realises how wrong it was to leave the Empire, the UK will forgive them and allow them to join the Commonwealth of Nations. (... and no I'm not British.)
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  113. My father was a medical student who was "strongly encouraged", (so not technically conscripted,) to join the Royal Australian Air Force. As he had two years of a medical degree, he ended up being designated a medic and was transferred to an island base in the Pacific. When the RAAF were transferred elsewhere, the American Navy was short of medics, so he stayed behind. At one stage he was both the only air force person and the only Australian on a base that was entirely US Navy.
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  114.  @micnorton9487  The Belgica was the first expedition to try and reach the magnetic pole, so no one knew when the sea would ice over. By the time they gave up and tried to turn north, they were a week too late and ran into impenetrable ice flows. They did not know any better, but subsequent expeditions were based on what was learnt from the Belgica's experience.
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  115. By the time of the Belgica Antarctic expedition in 1898, scurvy was so rare that the ships doctor did not not recognise it when half the crew were suffering from the disease. After a few months when he realised that it was scurvy, the only thing they had with vitamin C in it was raw penguin meat. His prescribed scurvy cure was not popular.
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  116. I think he avoids ships of the last 75 years as they may stir up nationalist politics... and Hermes has a service record that would certainly do that. But it's a fascinating ship, I certainly hope Drach covers it.
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  117. You didn't mention Singapore, probably more important than many of the others.
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  118. That was one of the early scares, but they grew over the next two decades, there were huge marches demanding that more battleships be built and an "Invasion literature" genre of emerged about how Britain would be under foreign occupation (usually German, but occasionally French).
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  119. As a small child I went on a tour of HMAS Vendetta, I didn't remember that much about it, but I thought the name was rather cool and appropriately aggressive for a warship. So it stuck in my mind.
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  120. Exactly. In World War 2 the local foundry in my home town in Victoria, Australia happily churned out triple expansion engines that were used in merchant ships and corvettes, but there is no way they would have been able to build turbines.
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  121. Well there are big car ferries that cruise at 50 knots these days (made by a company called Incat), but 42 knots is an incredible speed for a warship of any time.
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  122.  @petesheppard1709  I don't think the US cats were too successful, I know their trimarans were definitely not. But that Australian commercial catamaran ferry actually won battle honors.
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  123.  @steveamsp  Exactly, how many admirals made such a huge impact that they are still widely talked about over a century after their deaths? Not many, there's Nelson, Fisher and Byng, although he was executed for cowardice, so not the best epitaph.
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  124. That was fascinating to me as I write mountain history at the other end of the world. The connection is that in remote locations, away from the main ski resorts in Australia and New Zealand, they have still have arcane ski lifts called "nutcracker tows" and these things require natural fibre rope, wire rope or even nylon rope can't be used. Anyway the clubs that run nutcracker tows often have a lot of trouble finding 500+ metre lengths of hemp rope in this modern world. So I was curious how it was made, I wonder if they get their ropes from Chatham?
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  125. But as a Greek he would have been Orthodox, which is even more different from Anglicanism than the Catholics are. But perhaps the law may have been more about fending off 'Popish Plots' than ensuring religious conformity?
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  126. I suspect most of the blame for that should go to the American Admiral King. He disliked the British so much that if they thought something was good, he tended to do the opposite. That especially applied to convoys. The British had protected convoys, so King seemed to like the idea of unprotected ships sailing on their own.
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  127. There were lots of convoys that didn't go to Canada or the U.S. In the early years of the war Malta convoys were being constantly shot up, later after the Soviets and then Americans joined the war, there were the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and lots of long distance convoys to places like Australia and India.
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  128. There were lots of convoys that didn't go to Canada or the U.S. In the early years of the war Malta convoys were being constantly shot up, later after the Soviets and then Americans joined the war, there were the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and lots of long distance convoys to places like Australia and India.
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  129. Boing is the sound that French cannon balls made when they bounced off the ships walls of oak.
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  130. Many years ago the British made a lot of naval warfare films, The Battle of the River Plate was a good one, The Cruel Sea was another and there were plenty of submarine films as well. But withe the exception of the one about sinking the Bismark, they didn't do well in America, (although the German Das Boot did okay there as well). Today the market for movies is even more international, so anyone providing money to make big budget films is more likely to pay for one that will appeal to American audiences. The United States is more inward looking than most other countries so they tend to be more interested in films that cover their own nation. Look at the film where they changed the story of how the Britsih captured a naval enigma machine from a sinking submarine to make it look like that was done by Americans. So my thoughts are that appealing to the American market is essential to getting finance for a big budget film and as the Americans were not at Jutland, no one will provide the money for a film about it. However I hope my thoughts are wrong and we do get a film about Jutland in the future.
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  131. I'm Australian and I call it The American Mutiny Britain has always been prepared to give self government to its more economically advanced colonies, if they ask nicely. But the Americans love firing their guns and being polite to others or asking nicely has never been their strong point. So instead they launched a mutiny against their rightful king. 😞
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  132. Perhaps a series of short vids on the smaller navies and what they did in WWII? The Canadians with their convoy escort speciality, Australians with their Scrap Iron Flotilla in the Mediterranean and then fighting in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Dutch, mostly in the East Indies, but also in the Atlantic, whatever the Soviets did, etc. But whatever you do it will be great. Thanks for both entertaining and educating us.
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  133.  @DanielsPolitics1  HMS Gay Bruiser would be the bouncer at your nightclub.
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  134. Almost all the paddle boats used on inland waterways in Australia like the Murray-Darling system and Gippsland Lakes used old railway locomotive boilers with fireboxes adapted to burn wood. The riverboats were all under 150 feet long, so railway boilers had sufficient capacity to power them.
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  135. So... nothing to do with HMVS Cerberus? I'm not surprised as almost nothing has happened to that monitor in 150 years. But even though it wasn't what I was expecting, it was a great video anyway. :)
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  136.  @Maddog3060  I also like what the British did with their letter classes where they went through a dictionary and chose appropriate names. So they had five R class battleships and even the V class destroyers had Vanquish, Vendetta, Voyager, Virago, Vampire, Vixen, etc. All great names for warships.
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  137. As I am just a commoner who lives in Australia where we don't have any nobility, I tend to be impressed when I see a title like Freiherr.
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  138. In the late 1940s the Australians were keen to set up Antarctic bases, but they were short of ships, so they got a war surplus flatish bottomed LST (Landing Ship Tanks) and sailed it through the stormy seas of the Southern Ocean to establish a station on Heard Island. The LST flexed and bent so much that it had to be written off on its return to Melbourne, but it was due to be scrapped anyway. They used ice strengthened ships on later voyages.
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  139. That would be an interesting topic. The destroyer HMS Glowworm famously rammed a German cruiser on purpose, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne sliced two allied destroyers in half during its career and there have been plenty of American collisions as well.
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  140.  @MakeMeThinkAgain  Because the Belgica was the first ship to winter in the Antarctic ice and many of the crew wrote reports and books, subsequent expeditions took very close notice of their experience. Two things that were especially different were scurvy and psychology, several otherwise sane people went mad when confined in such a small place for such a long time in extreme conditions. So people like Shackleton, Scott, Mawson and Amundsen took precautions, although as you noted, they didn't always work.
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  141. That is a couple of years older than the monitor HMVS Cerberus. I wonder if it's in better condition than the Cerberus which has spent a century as a breakwater in Melbourne?
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  142. It is claimed that the water jet was refined and made practical in the 1960s by a New Zealand engineer called Bill Hamilton who had previously built lifts for ski resorts in Australia and NZ. Not sure how true that claim is, but Bill got knighted and as Sir William Hamilton he ran a successful company that produced water jet engines and boats powered by them.
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  143. I visited the HMAS Castlemaine in Melbourne on the same day Drach did. It was balmy 12 degrees, so the sweat box that is Brisbane weather must have been quite a shock to him.
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  144. I can't understand the strange American superstition about the number 13. A friend tells me it even extends to cruise ships where the decks are numbered... 11, 12, 14. It's doubly strange that the western country with the highest percentage of practicing Christians has this pagan superstition. I wonder where it came from?
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  145. I love that American hyperbole. A particularly exuberant Brit, Canadian or Australian MIGHT give a score of 11 out of 10 to something they really liked, but a Yank goes completely over the top with 100 million out of 10. :-)
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  146.  @spikespa5208  I tend to be more interested in post 1900 history, although the 1868 monitor HMVS Cerberus is rusting away 15 km from my house, so I may pay more attention to this era.
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  147. I'm not complaining. I usually don't follow American stuff, so I probably wouldn't have clicked on it if I had known who was fighting the battle... but wow... I've never learnt so much in half an hour or had so much fun learning it.
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  148. As someone who writes non military history, I see that comment as the highest praise. It's hard enough to track down relevant information, arrange it in a sensible way, write it up and present it. But to make it highly readable, to make it a "page turner" is the goal of most writers who aim to produce popular histories rather than dull "dry read" academic papers.
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  149. You must be from the north eastern states where they play rugby. Down here we play Australian football, so we have no trouble with NZ and wish them the best. :)
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  150. Looking at the list of upcoming ships I see a few of my favourites, the raider Pinguin and the oldest partially intact ironclad monitor HMVS Cerberus of 1868, although it's more of a rusty breakwater than a proper ship these days
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  151. As a quick and easy solution, Wikipedia has entries for almost every ship ever built, so I type in the name of a ship and a 'disambiguation' page appears listing all ships of that name and the years each of them was operational. Then click the link to the particular ship that is of interest. Wikipedia is far from perfect, but it does give a useful basic background to a subject.
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  152. Trimarans turn well, but they are not as stable as big catamarans. Have a look at the big 110 to 130 metre cat ferries built by companies like Incat. Scale them up a bit and put on guns wherever you like as stability is not an issue on a large cat. They travel at 40 to 55 knots and are powered by water jets which are not as vulnerable to being shorn off in shallow water as azapods.
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  153. In English, the correct pronunciation is your second one. Drach is not quite perfect, he pronounced it incorrectly.
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  154. I know you're Australian (I'm subbed to your channel), but no American would ever say that bigger is not better!
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  155. The South American countries were more or less broke by then and Commonwealth countries like Australia and Canada had their ships included in Britain's naval treaty quotas. That doesn't leave many potential buyers.
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  156. Excellent video, but shorter than I was hoping for. Fortunately Big Car and Count Binface have uploaded new videos, so I can watch them as well in the time I allocated to watch Drach.
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  157. I'm watching this in a city of 5 million people which was founded by settlers disembarked from a small schooner named Enterprize (with a z). Melbourne has grown a lot since then.
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  158. Most of those quick and cheap wartime propaganda films were so awful that no one ever watched them after the war ended. That must be one of the few that was actually a good film if it was released on DVD.
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  159. Well tens of thousands of Royal Navy sailors who survived service in the Mediterranean theatre were very grateful that Italian ammunition was dodgy.
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  160. Thanks for that, I have a fairly fuzzy recall of Scott's expeditions, I've read more about Shackleton and Mawson, so your post helped me fit Evans into the larger scheme of things.
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  161. A country that has spent all its money on a war and is in danger of running out of cash. That describes the UK in 1917, they were Broke.
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  162. That sounds like a wonderful legend. But these men did not speak the language and were penniless without any possessions. They were also fugitives wanted by the government. So what family would want a penniless fugitive who can't communicate, marrying their daughter? Almost any other man in the country would be a better marriage prospect.
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  163. Oh yes it was. Actually it was worse.
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  164. Before WW2 they were all foreign (mostly British) designs. In the war smaller ships were locally designed like the Bathurst class corvettes. For the past 60 years they have adapted and changed foreign designs to their own purposes like the Colllins class submarines, ANZAC class frigates, air warfare destroyers and the two ships that they are not allowed to call aircraft carriers because they don't want to upset the Chinese.
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  165. I agree that the conflict has an inappropriate name. Personally I call it "The American Mutiny".
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  166. How does the song go? ... "I like big bulges and I cannot lie."
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  167. Well the Australians were exporting chilled meat for the last few decades of the 19th century, so refrigerated ships were not exactly a new thing. But they were expensive to build and operate until well into the first part of the 20th century, thus the fast banana boats like Pongo that were converted into semi-naval vessels.
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  168. It would be nice if you could cover the tradition of submarines flying the Jolly Rodger on their return to port after sinking a ship. When did this begin and was it restricted to the Royal Navy or did other navies do it too? What did the various markings on the flags mean? Thanks.
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  169. No, they'd remake his stuff to entirely feature 'Murican ships and they'd redub it with an All American accent.
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  170. I suspect that Drach rather admires Jacky Fisher, but Matthew Wright leaves us in no doubt that he is NOT a fan.
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  171. They were just too big, even mounted on very heavy railway wagons, it would be difficult to move them with a restricted loading gauge. Perhaps they could be moved to coastal defence forts?
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  172. Battle cruisers were a proven deterrent for small navies. The mere existence of HMAS Australia in 1914 caused the German Pacific squadron to avoid that part of the world and instead they tried to get home the long way via Cape Horn where it was destroyed off the Falkland Islands. As Drach said, the Dutch knew they couldn't defeat the Japanese, but the presence of a couple of battle cruisers might make them look elsewhere for oil and rubber.
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  173. Oars so the crew can row when they run out of coal... or perhaps not. Actually they are poles that fold out to hold torpedo nets away from ships at anchor. However they didn't stop all torpedoes and as torpedoes got bigger and more powerful they stopped even less of them, so later on they were removed.
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  174.  @briancox2721  The poor thing would starve, it would be better to get a White Breasted Sea Eagle as they have a diet of mostly fish.
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  175. Fair point, but you have to remember that the Swordfish, one of the "garbage" carrier aircraft sunk more Axis tonnage than any other type of plane. So a very solid and sturdy aircraft was more effective than the fast and flash aircraft that the Brits and the Yanks built to succeed it.
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  176. It would be nice if you told us about the astonishing story of HMS Diamond Rock please.
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  177. For obvious reasons, they usually selected smaller people to go into machines with confined spaces like fighter planes, tanks and even submarines.
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  178. Even on small ships it made a difference, vetran destoyer commanders v. someone who had only been in the navy for a couple of years and found themself in charge of a ship. Then there's the motivation to be fierce. The British executed Admiral Byng for cowardice nearly 200 years before the Second World War and while that sort of punishment was no longer applied, it still motivated ship captains like the famous case of the captain of the destroyer HMS Gloworm when he rammed a much bigger German cruiser.
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  179. It's closest to the British title of Baron, so perhaps he should be called Lord?
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  180. In addition to medals awarded to members of all armed services such as the Victoria Cross, DSO, etc., the British Army and RAF had medals specific to their service such as Military Cross, Military Medal, Air Force Cross, Distinguished Flying Cross, etc. Were there any navy specific awards and if not, was it because bravery was usually attributed to a whole ship or unit, rather than individual crew members or did sailors miss out on medals when they would have been awarded for equivalent actions in the army of RAF?
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  181. So in 1940, Britain had 17 battleships and 3 battlecruisers either commissioned or nearly finished building, for a total of 20 capital ships. At that time Germany had 1 battleship and 2 battlecruisers for a total of 3. Yep, I can see Germany winning that fight... or perhaps not.
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  182. Is Admiral King one of your ancestors? I'm not British, but wow, it appears you really don't like them.
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  183. With an even more colourful background than Lord Cochrane, the Abney-Hastings are the Plantagenet pretenders to the English throne. The head of the family, Simon Abney-Hastings, 15th Earl of Loudoun lives on a modest farm in Victoria, Australia.
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  184. That is my favourite political comedy sketch. So the front falls off Australian oil tankers, but the back falls off German heavy cruisers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
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  185.  @bkjeong4302  It seems that all of the many, many comments you make are devoted to putting down battleships. They are long extinct, so the pros and cons are largely irrelevant. Perhaps you could take up a new hobby or just go for a walk somewhere to get your mind off the subject?
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  186. And of course the Hedgehog was an English invention that they gave to the Americans. Which makes the ship appropriately named.
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  187. There is also a Diamantina River down in Victoria that flows from the snow clad Mt Feathertop and Mt Hotham, so a rather non Queensland environment. No one is quite sure how it got its name.
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  188. If you go to the northernmost part of the Baltic Sea and taste the water, it is just a bit brackish. There's probably more fresh water from rivers than salt water from the sea in the mix.
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  189. They did explore having the nukes delivered by RAF Avro Lancasters based in Burma if the B-29s weren't ready in time. The distance would be further, but the Brits had developed in air refuelling,. Lancasters and B-29s were the only long range aircraft big enough to carry a nuke, so if the Americans hadn't island hoped close enough to Japan, there was an alternative.
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  190. I think it was Drach who discussed the exchange of American ice cream for British rum and beer in the Pacific Theatre.
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  191. You are a very nasty person to insult him at a time like this. Of course you have the right to be a Bolshevik or a republican or whatever. BUT it's only decent to allow a little time for mourning before attacking someone who has recently died.
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  192. Well the French had an empire even bigger than the Americans, the Portuguese had one almost as big as the Americans, the Dutch had most of the East Indies and some of the West Indies and, in addition to Libya, the Italians had Somalia, Eritrea and briefly Ethiopia.
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  193. You're in luck, The History Guy released a video on USS England yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCLPtSMTXug
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  194. Much the same applies to me, but I saw him on HMAS Castlemaine.
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  195.  @RippPryde  Umm... Catherine of Aragon was never executed, she died of entirely natural causes.
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  196. The Cruel Sea is another excellent film on that subject.
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  197. They are oars for when a ship runs out of coal.
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  198. It depends where you are in Australia. In Queensland aircon is very common, in Tasmania or the mountains in the south east of the mainland, it's hardly ever going to be used.
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  199. Tersichore means enjoying dancing, in English it is pronounced Terp-sick-or-ee.
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  200. Two different eras had V class destroyers, there were a lot of great names: Vendetta, Vengeance, Vampire, Vigilant, Vixen, Valkyrie, etc.
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  201. Powell and Pressburger seem to have had a mission to make every genre of films, from rom-coms to thrillers and everything in between, unlike contemporizes such as Hitchcock who churned out endless films in the same genre. And it worked for them, 80% of Powell and Pressburger films still hold up as good films today.
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  202. For 30 years the Blue Riband has been held by fast catamaran ferries made by companies like Incat and Austal that can travel at over 40 knots for sustained periods. While they're not traditional liners, they are passenger ships and some of them are quite large, they be up to 12,000 Gross Tons. So nuclear subs are not the fastest ships.
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  203.  @milamber319  That is due to the slow evolution of "independence" amongst the colonies, starting with "Responsible Government" in the 1850s. I think I recall a constitutional law professor saying that a separate Crown of Australia only came into existence as late as the 1940s
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  204. HMS Hood was many times the size of HMAS Sydney, with much better armour and its guns were 15 inch rather than 6 inch. Kormoran's co-destruction with Sydney was a fluke, but against the Hood, Kormoran would have been blasted into a million bits while barely scratching Hood's paint.
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  205.  @Ross665  Thanks for that. It makes sense now.
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  206.  @hajoos.8360  Executing Admiral Byng for cowardice influenced the thinking of British naval commanders for at least 200 years.
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  207.  @154Kilroy  Well I was just pointing out an instance where naval guns were used against the landlocked Boer army. This was only 15 years earlier, so any middle aged military officer would remember it. But I agree, the chance of it ever happening again was tiny. I think @Emdiggydawg 's suggestion is far more likely.
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  208. Very badly.
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  209.  @chrislong3938  I specialise in mountain history, I've even won a few awards, but I can't write fiction or any dialogue, I don't have the imagination or flair for that sort of thing. So if anyone wants to use that idea, they are free to do so.
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  210. There wer several major engagements in the eastern Indian Ocean. As far as I know, that was an exclusively British area and the Americans never ventured there after the ABDA era.
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  211. Same here, but be careful when listening to Preußens Gloria, it sometimes has the side effect of making people want to annex the place next door. I've also been listening to a fairly modern composition "Scrap Iron Flotilla March" and it's not bad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_iMWladNE
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  212.  @Johnnycdrums  But didn't King cause huge numbers of American merchant ships to be sunk (and thousands of sailors killed) because he refused to implement convoys escorted by destroyers and frigates?
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  213.  @neilforbes416  You could be more tolerant of diverse people. No doubt you have a hobby or interest that other people would regard as a waste of time? Non religious people like us should remember that most religious people (except for a few Wahabi Moslems and a minority of Pentecostal Christians) do a lot of unpaid charity work to help people down on their luck and ask for nothing in return. So religious people actually make the world a better place. 🙂
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  214. ... and the capital ships Malaya, Australia and New Zealand.
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  215. That makes sense, a Shinto blessing can give a child a divinely sanctioned advantage in life, the Christians do the best weddings and the Buddhists believe in reincarnation in this world as opposed to a somewhat vague promise of going to heaven or hell. So the Japanese pragmatically picked the best aspects of the three faiths.
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  216. These days, no one will fund a big budget war movie unless "Murica is involved. So I doubt it would ever be made unless they change the facts and have a large component of the U.S. Navy present.
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  217. Yeah, that persons enthusiasm is also unfettered by things such as the facts, if he needs something to fit in with a scenario, he will occasionally make things up. So he's a pretty unreliable source. But Drach also covered that occasion in his videos on Western Approaches Command, (or something similar, I forget its precise name).
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  218. Some countries have a sort of combined online archives with all important museums, libraries, galleries and archives contributing. For example https://trove.nla.gov.au does that for Australia and most photos, newspaper articles, etc. that they hold can be found on the one site.If the UK has something similar, it shouldn't be hard to find a library or museum that will upload Drach's photos. Alternately if he wants a dedicated website, I run a website for historical articles called australianmountains.com and I'd be happy to set up a new ultra simple to use website for Drach's pics which would allow him to upload and easily arrange galleries of photos at no charge ever, or he could do it himself for about 100 quid annually using a website builder like Squarespace, Wix or Godaddy, etc.
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  219. A gunboat aimed at Amsterdam should suffice for that era.
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  220. It's at the end of Drach's comments, just below the main video. Most video producers on YouTube put their music credits there, but for some reason, viewers keep asking rather than looking in the obvious place.
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  221. If the straits had been forced, I rather like the idea of sending the Australians to fight against the Austro-Hungarians in Ukraine. Unlike the stalemated Western Front, that area had a fast moving front line and the Australian light cavalry would have been much more useful than they were dismounted at Gallipoli.
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  222. Mongolia, Bolivia and Lichtenstein.
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  223. Yeah, but all the measurements were in metric and the Yanks have proven they can't cope with metric many, many times.
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  224. After 1000 years of war between the English and the French, when this book was published in 1898 there was an understandable suspicion of the French amongst English people of the time.
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  225. Historograph has an excellent video on the battle with great maps that makes what happened where much clearer. It is a great compliment to Drach's video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV4lZJGsMm4
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  226. Well the British did conquer territory in France and India, but many other countries were involved as well, it was fought on four continents, so the American name isn't really accurate, a better name might be the Real first world war,
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  227. I think it was British revenge for what the Danes did to their ancestors 1,000 years earlier.
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  228. I blocked Lindybeige years ago. I was already concerned about his disregard for accuracy and when someone else very politely pointed out he had given three widely varying figures for the same thing in one video, he replied that it didn't matter and that checking the facts would just get in the way of the story he was telling. That was the final straw for me, I blocked his videos and haven't viewed them for many years.
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  229. The new Zealand navy currently conisits of two elderly frigates that the Australians built for them at a discount in the 1990s and there is a ban on visits by any nuclear powered or armed ships to anywhere in the country. Essentially NZ has totally given up on their navy.
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  230. I think "whilst" is very slightly archaic, it's only rarely used these days. But it would have been more commonly used a century ago, so it's probably a good word to use when talking about a historic period.
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  231.  @ccalthrop6347  Where there has only been one monarch of that name, they don't get a number. e.g. Queen Victoria and Anne, King Stephen and John. If we get another monarch of that name, they retrospectively get "the first" added to their name. So the Tudor monarch was just known as Queen Elizabeth until 1952 when another Queen Elizabeth came to the throne. Then she was 'renamed'' Elizabeth I.
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  232. Drach doesn't go beyond 1950. Partly because he's not an expert in ships of the last 70 years, but mostly because he wants to avoid people getting upset over political controversies and nationalism.
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  233. There was a British Flower Class corvette in the Second World War named HMS Tulip. They built hundreds of the things, so almost every flower name was utilized... except for pansy.
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  234. Interesting, but move forward a couple of decades and the U.S. was much more reluctant to offload its colonies than the U.K. was. The Brits put a lot of effort into preparing their colonies ready for independence and once they had a competent local bureaucratic and political class, they granted them independence as fast as possible. They were visibly unhappy when Bermuda voted against independence twice. By contrast the Yanks held onto everything for as long as possible. With the notable exception of the Philippines they have kept almost all their colonies to this day except for a few places in Micronesia which got quasi-independence and Hawaii which was annexed into USA proper. So if America had got all the British possessions in the West Indies, I wonder if even the bigger islands like Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago would be independent or if they would all remain American colonies like Guam, American Samoa, etc. That would make the Caribbean an American lake and Cuba would be even more nervous.
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  235. Wonderful news! I do hope they have the obsessive historic detail that Peter Weir put into the original and that they avoid tacky populist add ons like romances and umm... ethnic issue sub plots. I would be devastated if it was similar to Pirates of the Caribbean.
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  236. HMS Belfast is moored right in the middle of London, okay it only has 6 inch guns, but all sorts of interesting places such as the headquarters of some very large banks and the Houses of Parliament are well within range.
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  237. I suspect it's really economic protectionism masquerading as bureaucracy. Making it more expensive to mail things to the United States than any other first world country is effectively restricting imports to the USA.
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  238. The CSS Shenandoah was repaired and resupplied in the friendly port of Melbourne in 1865 and proceded to sink about 19 Union merchant ships in the Pacific Ocean before one of their victims showed them a newspaper saying that the US Civil War was over. They were too scared to surrender to Union forces, so they sailed all the way to Liverpool in England and surrendered to the U.S. consul there.
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  239. I've watched every Drach video EXCEPT the live streams. After I watched a few, I concluded they were for dreamers, lots of unlikely "what if" scenarios, even a fair few space ship fantasies. They are good if you like that sort of thing, but I prefer factual stuff over fantasy, so the live streams are definitely not for me. Still, that is the place where people donate decent amounts of money, so they probably fund the whole channel.
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  240. Agreed, I always think of the Alaska Class as battlecruisers, although pedants point out that they only fulfill 4 of the 5 categories to be a battlecruiser and maintain that the Alaskas were extra super-dooper ultra heavy cruisers. So I like the description of the Deutschlands as "budget battlecruisers".
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  241. To be fair, while it can be argued that the Falklands are a self governing and semi-independent country today, 40 years ago they were a much poorer crown colony with no self government. So Argentina invaded a colony, not an "independent country".
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  242. No Flower class were built anywhere in Australia. However the Australians did build 60 Bathurst class corvettes to their own design in 8 different shipyards all around the country.
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  243. I had always thought *too much Drach is never enough*, but when confronted with 260 minutes I changed my mind. This is going to take me a few days to get through.
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  244. The American respect for their former presidents amazes me, but perhaps the United States is the only western country where many people still think politics is an honourable profession. Other countries view politicians as dodgy characters and they would never name a ship, a school or anything else after one of them.
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  245.  @richardvernon317  Also known as 'The Black Gang', because they were usually covered in coal dust.
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  246. I recall that when CSS Shenandoah docked in Melbourne for a refit, there were a few desertions, but they were overwhelmed by volunteers. From memory they accepted about 40 of the best qualified ones. Impressive for the big city farthest from Confederate territory.
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  247. I have this image of them choosing the crew they would most like to get rid of, if the ship sinks, So the captain would be an irritating smart arse, the officers would be an idiot who somehow fluked their way through naval college and a bully who persecuted people at naval college but never got caught in the act. The CPO would be a formerly capable man, who appears to be going senile, etc.
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  248. Perhaps delegate the conquest of the Phillipines to the Japanese, while Australia and New Zealand could take Hawa.... , sorry, the Sandwich Islands?
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  249. S.Y. Endurance that sank in 1915 was not a naval ship, it was just a ice strengthened civilian steam yacht. However the British did name two navy ships in its honour. The first HMS Endurance was an ice patrol ship that saw action in the Falklands War, the second was a 1990s ice breaker.
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  250.  @matthewrobinson4323  Personally I have trouble with the anthropomorphisation of things that are not alive, especially assigning them genders. But if we assume ships are actually living creatures, just yesterday I was chatting to a nice little frigate and it assured me that it was not a girl.
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  251.  @hanzzel6086  My understanding is that the Azores were discovered by Portugal and remained their property except for the few decades when Spain owned Portugal.
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  252. Yes and visiting the Vasa is a brilliant experience, it is largely intact and the museum built around it is also very good. By contrast the Mary Rose in Portsmouth only survives in fragments and the experience was nowhere as good as seeing Vasa in Stockholm.
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  253.  @RCAvhstape  Yep, if you want to create a feeling of contempt rather than respect, name a ship after a politician. But I guess the British have already used most of the cool names and the Americans don't want to name their ships after British ones.
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  254.  @nimbusshadow-wings  I'm not that religious, but it reminds me of the story of the Prodigal Son; a kid leaves home, takes his inheritance and leads a wild and profligate lifestyle. When the misbehavior catches up with him and he apologizes to his parent, he is forgiven and welcomed back into the family. That analogy works if you see "Murica as the prodigal child, Britain as the parent of the family and countries like Australia and Canada as siblings.
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  255. The Australians have a couple of 30,000 ton carriers complete with ski jumps that they cutely call "helicopter docks". Of course if China gets nasty, they need very few changes to host F-35s. Japan had a similar approach, it's just that they are more honest and don't pretend their carriers are anything else.
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  256. The Nelson class battleships had very large torpedoes. HMS Rodney hit Bismarck with at least one.
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  257. I write "popular" histories about mountain areas and I've noticed that it is rare for academic historians to be able to cross over into popular history that is accessible to a mainstream audience. However Dr Deveraux with his flippant use of popular terminology and ability to make generalised summaries, appears to be one of those few people.
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  258. As Drach said these things vary by country. Australian government copyright lasts 50 years, corporate copyright lasts 70 years and personal copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years.
    3
  259. Gross Tonnage refers to the enclosed volume of a ship and is mostly used for passenger ships and ferries. Displacement is used for cargo ships and warships. A ship's Gross Tonnage is usually a much higher number than its Displacement tonnage.
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  260. Nostalgia?
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  261. I had no trouble understanding every word. If your hearing is not good, there is the option of turning on subtitles.
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  262. In the early 1990s, Incat, an Australian company that makes large, fast car ferries decided to have a try for the Blue Riband. They carefully studied the rules for the Hales Trophy which was awarded to the holders of the Blue Riband and decided to try and win it. So they diverted a ship on a delivery run to Europe to go via New York, took on a token number of passengers and proceded to break the record. But the custodians of the Hales Trophy were patriotic 'Muricans and would not give it to them. So Incat broke the record again with another ferry. But they still had to go to court to extract the trophy from those who thought the United States should hold it forever. After all this, those who thought that a mere car ferry should not hold the prestigious Blue Riband started a campaign to change the rules so that only "dignified" ships could hold it and claimed that the Hales Trophy didn't represent the Blue Riband. It's all amazingly silly really, but for nearly 30 years the Hales Trophy has been proudly displayed at Incat's Hobart shipyard.
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  263. I wonder what the British did with their monitors after D-Day? I know they moved a lot of carriers and battleships to the Indian and Pacific oceans, so perhaps the monitors went with them and bombarded places like Burma or Borneo?
    3
  264. SMS Möve. It was a banana boat named Pongo before the Imperial German Navy took it over. It became one of the most successful merchant raiders ever, sinking 40 ships and laying the mines that sunk the battleship HMS Edward VII. It survived the First World War and the Brits finally managed to sink it in 1945. Honourable mention to the raider SMS Wolf which sunk 27 ships in an epic 427 day voyage. (I'm Australian.)
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  265. All the Australian Tribal Class destroyers in the Second World War were locally built. The same applies to Canadian Tribals, they also built their own.
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  266. I suspect the house Lowery was in was vacuumed at least 8 times over during that interview. It must be the cleanest house on the planet.
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  267.  @genericpersonx333  I generally agree, but even without Japan, the Australians owned a full sized battlecruiser plus several cruisers, so combined with British units based in Ceylon and Singapore, it's likely they could have eliminated any German presence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
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  268.  @bluemarlin8115  Yeah, I picked three "territories" with full democratic self government and the wealth to be rich independent countries if they had to be. But one of them refused independence and It's impossible for the other two to be independent, even if they wanted to be. But of course small isolated places with less wealth like Tristan da Cunha (population 270) and Pitcairn (pop 43) are heavily subsidised by the UK and their officials are mostly appointed rather than elected.
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  269.  @bluemarlin8138  Places like Bermuda, Falklands, Gibraltar, etc all have their own elected governments and the UK has no power over them. So not really imperial territory. Actually the UK tried to bribe Bermuda to go for full independence but that lost in a referendum. The Falklands are one of the richest places in the world, so they could easily afford independence, but they can't go that way "because of the obvious military threat" as one of their politicians put it. Gibraltar can't become an independent mini state like Monaco or Andorra because the treaty where Spain ceded it to Britain over 300 years ago states that if Britain surrenders sovereignty, then Gibraltar goes to Spain.
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  270. No chance in the real world, unless there is a repeat of the Falklands War where they did use three cruise ships with heli pads built over the swimming pools and AA guns bolted on. But if there is access to a friendly airport, a couple of Airbus A380s could carry the same number of personnel and they would have a vastly smaller chance of being shot down than a cruise ship would have of being sunk. Cruise ships and passenger aircraft don't have the capacity to carry much freight, so supplies would need to be dispatched in container ships either way, if the troops and support staff travelled by ship or plane.
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  271. Research on hydrofoils (and hovercraft) was halted by the invention of large fast catamarans by a company called Incat in 1990. Those ships are bigger, faster, more maneuverable and use less fuel, so there was the end of commercial and military hydrofoils.
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  272. What would be the point of inviting a French officer to observe the British fleet? Everyone knew that the Royal Navy was the strongest in the world AND they were not far from the major base at Gibraltar. So if the British said they had three battleships, a carrier and a squillion cruisers and destroyers waiting near the port, no one would doubt them. All it would do is give the French time to get up steam in their ships. get their weapons ready and possibly allow a Vichy mole to contact the Germans and tell them that there was a heap of stationary, easily hit British ships for them to bomb or torpedo.
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  273.  @John.0z  Well the only other maker of really big cat ferries, Austal, has a more pure SWATH configuration for their hulls, while Incat combines SWATH with several other measures for their wave piercing bows especially on their ships around 110 metres long.
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  274.  @benlaskowski357  The Scots, Irish and Welsh would disagree with you. They were also part of the British Kingdom and they are definitely not English.
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  275. There is the small problem of the United States mutiny against their rightful King 250 years ago. But our current king is a forgiving man, so if the USA apologized for the behavior of their ancestors, I'm sure our King would allow you to rejoin the Empire and permit you to name a ship after our late Queen.
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  276. There's a great short video where a big cruise ship plays 'Seven Nation Army' on its foghorn.
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  277. Q&A #1. Is there are a reason why (all?) aircraft carriers are "right handed", or did some carriers have the island superstructure on the port side? #2. Did the island superstructure on carriers inhibit what could be seen from the bridge and is this the reason an Australian carrier (I think it was the Melbourne) developed a habit of slicing destroyers in two. Did that sort of thing happen often? I see the new British carriers have two islands, presumably the bridge being further forward helps them see what is in front of them? Thanks for your great work with these videos.
    2
  278. Perhaps that is why the British sent a particularly large and dangerous battleship to observe things? There is no way the Americans could intimidate a ship like that into leaving.
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  279. I always thought that in the Second World War the Americans were guilty of freindly fire because they were not well trained and didn't recognise British ships, planes and other equipment. But it seems the problem dated from a decade earlier, even with their own ships.
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  280.  @glenchapman3899  It is appropriate that Hawkins and Frobisher were "knighted in the field". This tradition of successful admirals and generals being knighted while combat still raged around them, continued until 1917. I think General Sir John Monash may have been the last one?
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  281. These days they do build 40 to 55 knot, 300 to 500 foot long car ferries. but they are catamarans built in Tasmania of all places, about as far as you can get from England.
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  282. That concept looks a lot like the giant 40 knot catamaran car ferries (and military transports) invented in 1990 by a company called Incat in Hobart (of all places). But those ships are powered by props or water jets, not by giant wheels.
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  283. Have a look at the biggest fast catamaran ferries made by companies like Incat. Their 110 and 130 metre designs have huge garages for cars and trucks which could be fitted with hoists. They already have a flat top except for a small bridge which could be moved to one side to make way for a flight deck. https://www.incat.com.au/incat-vessels/096/
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  284. The front fell off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
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  285. In both world wars and the Falklands War, ocean liners were requisitioned as troop transports, but today the Queen Mary II is the only ship with pretensions to liner status as modern cruise ships are neither fast nor easily able to handle big seas. While it's very unlikely, what are the possible troop transport contingencies for a second Falklands War or if a hostile country invades an American colony like Guam?
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  286. It's also a nice end to a cold, snowy Australian winter Sunday. :)
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  287. Steam trains used some coal as fuel to boil a LOT of water to make the steam that powered them. So if you take out the water towers, you stop the trains.
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  288. The first Thames tunnel was built by his father, Sir Marc Brunel, although a young Izzy did help a bit.
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  289. I was surprised to hear the Americans had a battleship on Arctic convoy escort duty, I thought they had all their capital ships in the Pacific and left the Atlantic and Indian oceans for the Royal Navy to take care of. Did the U.S. have other important ships in the Atlantic and North Sea?
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  290. Probably because it sank the Bismarck?
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  291. He spoke unusually fast in this video, if he had spoken at his normal pace it would have been several minutes longer.
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  292.  @TheCaptainbeefylog  I slightly prefer Beenleigh Rum to Bundaberg, although I suspect there are dozens of rum distilleries in Queensland?
    2
  293. Ummm... HMAS What?
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  294. Recently there was a very good video on the Indian Ocean naval war in the 1500s between the Ottomans and the Portuguese. Both sides had allies amongst the Indian princely states and their navies were involved too. I think it was on the Kings and Generals YouTube channel, but I'm not sure. If you search for it. you should find it.
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  295.  @mitchelloates9406  Oh I agree, but the fastest of those big Incat ferries goes 57 knots. At that speed they don't need armour. I wonder if anyone has thought of turning one into an old fashioned gunboat? . . (I'm joking.)
    2
  296.  @Scoobydcs  Exactly, the German and Italian navies tied up most of the Royal Navy in the North Sea / Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea respectively. That is why so few British ships were available to fight the Japanese. If the Royal Navy was able to deploy most of its fleet to the Pacific and Indian oceans, the Japanese would not have got nearly so far with most of the American and British navies fighting them.
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  297. For the Washington treaty, Australia tried to have its battlecruiser counted separately, so it would not be seen as part of the British fleet. But the other powers would not accept that. So (I think) the Australians sank it in a gunnery exercise. There is no reason why a Canadian capital ship would be treated differently to the Australian one.
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  298. HMAS Otway was one of half a dozen Australian Oberons. It is preserved at the town of Holbrook, hundreds of kilometres from the sea. It was named after a range of cold, rain sodden hills in the state of Victoria.
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  299. In WWII the British lent the Americans HMS Victorious when the USA was down to just one carrier. The Yanks promptly renamed it USS Robin and it had no trouble handling American planes fighting against the Japanese.
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  300. It's important to remember that one of the most successful German merchant raiders in the First World War started life as a banana boat called Pongo. Never under estimate the speed and power of fruit carriers!
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  301. Yes, but I think the wrecks of both those Australian submarines were found earlier this century?
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  302. Does that doubling power for an extra 3 knots apply to those 10,000 gross ton catamarans made by companies like Incat that cruise at 40 to 50 knots, or is the equation different for big catamarans?
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  303. I only studied history at undergraduate level. But I write (non martime) histories anyway, some of them have even won awards. But I've been told you need a higher degree to call yourself a historian, so I use get around terms like 'writer of histories'. What I'm getting at is that if Drach calls himself a historian, quite a few people will get their knickers in a twist over him saying that.
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  304. A Japanese midget sub did manage to sink an old Australian ferry that was being used as a depot ship in one of their ports. Although that's hardly a major achievement, certainly not compared to the Italian mini subs sinking a British battleship.
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  305. Possibly a more accurate term might be 'Client State'?
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  306. Not sure about it being a colony. Most Australian states were effectively independent by the late 1850s, but bickering between Melbourne and Sydney delayed federation until 1901. With more steps such as the Statute of Westminster in the 1930s, there was almost no British influence over Australia by World War II. Unlike America, places like Australia and to a lesser extent, Canada, gradually attained independence, rather than all at once like the USA.
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  307. If I ever get sent back in time, please remind to refuse any offer of a job as a naval gunnery officer. I thought I was good at maths, but I think my head would explode trying to do a job like that.
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  308.  @mbryson2899  Fair enough. But am I wrong to assume that attacking or praising the more divisive person in modern politics is going to provoke an argument? Provoking a political argument might be appropriate in a political context, but I reckon probably not in a historical naval context. But if you are one of those people who like having fights everywhere and all the time, I will just back away slowly.
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  309.  @Maddog3060  If you want a fast and mobile ship with lots of space on top, perhaps an Incat catamaran style ship would be better? They range from 72 to 130 metres and the smaller ones have been used as vehicle and troop transports by a few navies, including the U.S. and Australia. The key advantages would be that they have speeds up to 55 knots and above their 3 or 4 decks they have a huge flat top which could accommodate, as you put it, "a buttload of dakka".
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  310. The inside of The Rock is amazing, in the middle there is huge theatre in there, also a hospital. To the north, facing towards Spain, there is a long tunnel a few metres behind the face of the rock with occasional portals for everything from rifles right up to huge guns. Now that Gib is an effectively semi-independent city state, the British military is nowhere to be seen and the inside of The Rock is over run with tourists.
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  311. Yes, but Philippines, Puerto Rico etc were only colonies controlled by the U.S. But Aust, NZ, Canada, etc were members of the League of Nations and no one disputed that they were fully self governing countries.
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  312. Matthew, you may be right, but both of the old ships preserved in my city, the 1868 monitor HMVS Cerberus and the 1941 corvette HMAS Castlemaine strike me as entirely rational and not likely to suffer from gender confusion. So we will have to agree to disagree on this, I maintain that ships don't have genders, even the ones named after people. :)
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  313. It's absurd to pretend that ships have genders, that is ridiculous anthropomorphisation. Last week I was chatting to a cute little corvette that is preserved in my city and it assured me that it is not female.
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  314. Unless people have seen the short video clip, that won't make sense. But I think everyone has probably seen it?
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  315.  @Yuzral  You forgot the late medieval First Barons War, Second Barons War, plus the wonderfully named "The Anarchy".
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  316. I still think Gneisenau, Scharnhorst AND the Alaska's were battle cruisers. ... 😜 ... Sits back and waits for the angry comments.
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  317. The United Kingdom (or Britain) consisted of FOUR countries. They were usually listed in order of population: England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. So describing a Scottish, Irish or Welsh town as being in "England" is like describing a town in Alabama as being in Texas, just because Texas is the biggest state in the area. That's a great way to irritate or offend everyone. Please don't do that again. Signed a colonial (not from the USA) who can't understand why the Yanks persist in doing this.
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  318. Aww, I'm in Melbourne and I don't like Chinese food, so there's no point going to the Chinese restaurant. 😞 I wish he was going somewhere that catered to broader tastes. So will have to stalk Drach at the other places he is visiting. 😮
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  319. I had always called the Carthaginian queen Dye-doe, but when Drach pronounced it Dee-doe, I began to wonder if I'd been saying it wrong all my life. (And yes, I do occasionally hang out with people who mention the Aeneid or Carthaginian history.)
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  320. I think Drach said somewhere that he would do a video on the whole of the Scrap Iron Flotilla (as Goebbels called Voyager's squadron in the Mediterranean), but it would be some time in the future. So far no commitments for vids about RAN destroyers in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
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  321.  @gwtpictgwtpict4214  Yes, Histograph has some excellent naval videos and his map based style complements Drachs more photo oriented approach.
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  322.  @stevevalley7835  Thanks for the informed reply. It was just something I was vaguely wondering about, but you seem to have given it some thought.
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  323. One of the YouTube naval channels (probably Drach), has already covered it.
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  324. I know Rodney torpedoed Bismarck, the only occasion when a battleship was successful in torpedoing another battleship. I think it had submerged tubes, but I'm not sure.
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  325. Since this got a few likes, here's a link to the record of the Antarctic LST with photos. I can supply more info if Drach or anyone else wants to know more. http://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-antarctica/history/transportation/shipping/labuan
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  326. I liked the artists touch of inserting Odin's ravens Huggin and Munin in the foreground to observe the action, so later they could fly back to their master and report the events to him.
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  327. Strangely there is an alpine stream in Victoria also called the Diamantina River. It starts high above the treeline on Mt Hotham and descends to the valley of the East Kiewa River. I wonder if was named after Lady Bowen?
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  328. He didn't, although I was expecting a comparison with the destroyer HMS Gloworm ramming the German cruiser Hipper.
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  329.  @88porpoise  Thanks for your insight, I knew about the abolition of medals (which I think is a bit silly and PC), but I didn't know about the specifically "service at sea" awards.
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  330. I was a corporate librarian for big companies in the city until I (and hundreds like me) got "Googled out of a job" early this century. These days I index the occasional book as I remember what I was taught during my four years at university. I would be happy to produce a proper index with a proper thesaurus for free, IF Drach asked me to and was prepared to answer half a dozen short questions about what he wanted to be. But it would take me quite a few months.
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  331. There's an excellent video on the Battle of the Java Sea made by someone else, perhaps Histograph?
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  332.  @jerry2357  That's pretty much it. During the war a foundry in my home town in southern Australia ended up making traditional steam engine parts for small warships. That sort of thing was well within their abilities, but something as sensitive and sophisticated as turbines would be far too complex for a foundry in a medium sized town. That sort of thing was left to big factories in the cities which were running at full capacity making turbines for destroyers and larger ships.
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  333.  @hanzzel6086  Umm, The Azores are Portuguese and the Allies were allowed to base planes there half way WW2.
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  334. I understand that it is the oldest (semi) surviving monitor in the world, bizarrely beached in the middle of a city of five million people. They should be able to find the money for that?
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  335.  @johngregory4801  Thanks.
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  336. The first film was made before CGI so all the spaceships were scratch built models embellished with parts from plastic kits they bought from toy shops. So the guns may have been taken directly from a model of a British ship.
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  337. Drach has a cut of date of 1949. He says that is because more recent ships are beyond his area of expertise, but I think he also wants to avoid the nationalist politics of the last 75 years.
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  338. What's the big deal about number 300? Have I missed something?
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  339. How sensitive of the Yanks to send a ship named after the leader of the 1770s mutiny against British rule to assist the British. A bit of trolling has its place, but I'm not sure it's appropriate to send a ship named Washington to help the Brits on Arctic convoys.
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  340. It is much easier to find a book if you mention the author, title and year of publication. It is even easier still if you have the ISBN, a number printed in all books published in the last 50 years.
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  341.  @andrewfanner2245  Surely the Alaska Class at the end of WW2 were battle cruisers? I know the Americans had a phobia about using the term 'battle cruiser' (I have no idea why), but the Alaska class ticks almost every box in the definition of battle cruiser, far more than many ships that were formally described as that.
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  342.  @augustosolari7721  In the past there were many ways of measuring a ship's tonnage and it is very confusing. But since the 1980s there have only been Gross Tonnage and Displacement. Displacement tonnage is what a ship would weigh if it was measured on giant scales, while Gross Tonnage measures the volume of a ships enclosed spaces worked out by a complex formula. So I don't know what the Titanic's Gross Tonnage was, but another famous ship, Queen Elizabeth 2 was 70,000 Gross tons and 50,000 displacement tonnage.
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  343. They U.S. was very much a minor naval power at the time and distant from any potential conflict area. So I doubt Jackie Fisher would care what they thought.
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  344. So the Americans don't have a rank similar to Marshall, Field Marshall or Air Marshall? That must be a bit awkward for a country with such a large army and air force?
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  345. There are over 300 large cruise ships with an average of 3000 passengers and 1500 crew each and they operate 52 weeks per year. Despite that massive scale, there hasn't been a single death in the last decade (excluding things like Covid and suicide). That makes cruise ships the safest form of transport, safer than trains or flying and far safer than cars.
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  346. Coming from Australia where guns are almost completely banned (although I spent some time in the infantry, so I know how they work), that absolutely terrifies me. I can't believe you can just walk into a shop and walk out with a flamethrower! As the saying goes, "only in America".
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  347. They did cover it, but not in exhaustive detail. Does this mean that 2 hrs 34 minutes isn't long enough for you?
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  348. The British lent the Americans an aircraft carrier when the Yanks were short of them and they also gave them smaller ships like corvettes, so that sort of thing did happen.
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  349.  @IntrospectorGeneral  That makes sense, while all major features in Victoria had been named by then, the Victorian Diamantina River is only a minor mountain stream that is a tributary of the West Branch of the Kiewa River.
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  350. Yet the Americans intensively sent a bunch of ships named after people or battles where they fought the British, to fight alongside the Royal Navy. But the much later, when the channel tunnel opened, trains arriving from France arrived at Waterloo Station, which was a reminder to the French of what happens when they upset the UK.
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  351. His videos started out VERY rough, but he is improving. I doubt any YouTube channel is polished and professional in their early videos.
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  352. Many years later the Australians also named a submarine after him.
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  353.  @MS-gr2nv  Malaya was a self governing colony being prepared for full independence before the "Emergency" happened. The UK gave it independence when the worst of the war had finished and it became the country of Malaysia.
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  354. The UK did not get any help from the US in Malaya, a rather similar war to Vietnam, except that the communist insurgency was defeated. So perhaps the British reluctance to assist in Vietnam was also due to the Yanks not helping in Malaya?
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  355.  @TheStefanskoglund1  The big fast catamarans are fairly popular in Denmark where companies like Molslinjen operate them.
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  356. Great video, Plainly Difficult has an alternative take on HMS Habakkuk in his video and gives more detail on what it would have been like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x3xZIcueRc
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  357. Well Britain may have been neutral, but it's colony of Victoria wasn't. While in Melbourne CSS Shenandoah was refitted and resupplied while the government gave official receptions for the officers and rail tours for the crew. 40 new crew members were recruited and there was nothing the UK could do about it as Victoria had been given "responsible government" eight years earlier.
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  358.  @jimtaylor294  In the 1920s the Australians built a seaplane carrier / tender named HMAS Albatross. So that's at least one ship named after a bird that had its own aircraft.
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  359. Aglet
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  360. That's tiny. One decent gulp and the bottle would be empty. Perhaps it is 500 ml?
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  361. Is that named after the autonomous Channel Island or the Confederate raider, or both?
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  362. It's post 1949 (Drach's cut off date) and besides after a brief time as a carrier, it spent most of its life as a transport ship doing things like ferrying vehicles to Vietnam .
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  363. Australian riverboats often used second hand engines from railway locomotives, mainly because they were much cheaper than purpose built boat engines.
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  364. I doubt either of them could do a convincing British accent, although the original film was made in Mexico by an Australian crew using British and Australian actors, so I guess anything is possible?
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  365. The thing about these Australian corvettes and the slightly smaller British Flower Class corvettes is that they could be built in small boatyards that normally made things like fishing boats or coastal traders. They were powered by normal steam engines which could be made in railway workshops. That meant no resources at proper shipyards were diverted from building important larger ships like destroyers.
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  366.  @John.0z  They briefly tried a fast cat on the Tasmanian route over 20 years ago, but the stability tech was less advanced back then and it got nicknamed "Spewcat". If you're near Melbourne, there are a couple of much smaller 35 metre Incat boats on the Port Phillip Ferries routes from Portalington to Docklands and Geelong city to Docklands. They depart from just behind the main train station, although service is suspended during lock down. https://www.portphillipferries.com.au
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  367.  @John.0z  Both companies have improved the ride of their big ferries a lot in the last 25 years, the newer ones are surprisingly smooth. But some only have a cruising speed of around 35 knots, while others are closer to 50 knots which obviously affects the ride. In photos you will see that ships from Austal and Incat look quite different at the front. Which has the best ride is subjective, but overall I slightly prefer Incats.
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  368. Hulls on large (over 100 metres) wave piecing catamarans like those built by Incat have a slightly hour-glass shape. They are more bulbous below the water, fairly thin on the waterline and then they widen again above the water line.
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  369.  @erikaoharadwashington5769  They usually only make people a knight or dame for a lifetimes achievement, unless someone does something really special (like invent the internet), when they get a title at a younger age. So we can't expect Drach to get a knighthood until he is about 70.
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  370. This is about the British navy, so you are more likely to get results if you say 'More, please'.
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  371.  @stevek8829  Well if you want to go for the ship capable of the highest speed for sustained periods, it's Francisco, an Incat fast ferry. At 99 metres, it's smaller than a lot of their ships, but it has reached 58 knots and can hold 50 knots for long periods. Built in Tasmania and operates in South America, it has crossed the Pacific, but not the Atlantic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSC_Francisco
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  372. I agree, but Drach has to keep a world wide audience happy. So the next extended series will probably be in the Mediterranean, Pacific or something the Yanks did.
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  373.  @markjames4951  I was replying to original post about the German battleship Tirpitz possibly relocating to Indo China by pointing out that it could never get there. I don't know how you got the idea that I was saying anything about the French (Vichy or otherwise) and their navy?
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  374. Have a look at a map of the time, almost all of the Indian Ocean was bordered by British territory, they also had all but one of the islands in the middle of the ocean. There is no way a ship that size would not be detected and hunted down by a bunch of British battleships and carriers.
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  375. In the age of sail? It would probably be Cochran in a rowboat defeating a Spanish second rate. He was famous for doing that sort of thing.
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  376. Hydrofoils had a fairly short life, they (and large hovercraft) were mostly made obsolete by the invention of large water-jet powered catamarans by a company called Incat in 1990. The fast cats were faster, more stable, more durable, cheaper to operate and they can be built to much larger sizes.
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  377.  @daan9559  Get an Android tablet instead. They show up fine on mine.
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  378. Since you appear to want a debate, I'll respond. I live in a fairly laid back country (not the UK) that had a man with a gun kill a lot of people in 1996. The center-right government repsonded by banning guns and forcibly buying all guns in the community. The result is that we have had no mass shootings in 26 years, meanwhile the USA averages more than one mass shooting a week. The USA gun policy costs thousands of lives. Is your hobby really worth that?
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  379. The Alaskas filled 4 of the 5 definitions of battle cruisers, but the Americans had some sort of phobia about using the term, so people come up with all sorts of ways to try and classify them as some sort of mega cruisers instead.
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  380.  @Edawgpilot  Charles III is legally the King of Australia even though that country's full name is Commonwealth of Australia.
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  381.  @iffracem  My point was that the tiny ship that arrived from Launceston with the first settlers in what became Melbourne, was called the Enterprize. There's a replica that sails on Port Phillip and it's a amazing to think that something so small could brave stormy Bass Strait with all the people and supplies needed to start a settlement.
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  382.  @WALTERBROADDUS  That depends where you are. The United States only build naval and coastal vessels, but Europe churns out a wide variety of cruise liners and other ships every year as well as naval vessels. Asia does an even greater variety of freighters. Then there are more niche categories like the two Australian shipyards that have a monopoly on big 1,000+ passenger, 40 knot catamaran ferries. But if you live in a place that doesn't build much, you would have to be prepared to move locations.
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  383. His stuff is long form, free ranging and perhaps a little undisciplined? Nowhere near as tightly edited as Drachs is.
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  384. So the US had a heavy cruiser named Canberra and one of the first types of American jet bombers was also named Canberra. It's strange to name both an important ship and a very significant type of bomber after a foreign city.
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  385. It seems that after the fall of Singapore, the British navy mostly took care of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the intensive combat in the Mediterranean Sea, while the US Navy mostly took care of the Pacific, with help from smaller navies like the Australians. Royal Navy headquarters in the Indian Ocean were at Columbo in Sri Lanka which in many ways was closer to the action than Australian cities like Brisbane that the Americans used as bases.
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  386. I'm a native Castlemaniac (I lived there for my first 17 years) and I was there, although I wasn't manning the guns.
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  387. But they were big by destroyer standards of the time, almost mini-cruisers. The last of the gun boats before missiles became fashionable.
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  388. I laughed a lot, even though I have no idea who Cthulhu is/was. My guess is something like the ancient Hittite god of war, but I'm far too lazy to look it up.
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  389. It's the same with modern passenger and cargo ships. A company can order half a dozen cruise ships or container ships from the same shipyard and they always vary slightly in their dimensions.
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  390. Ben Wilson is referring to 'The Front Fell off', a classic 2 minute 1991 satirical sketch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
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  391. But countries with "helicopter carrying destroyers" like Japan and Australia can not call them aircraft carriers, even if they really are carriers, because China would be very upset and no one except the current American government wants to upset the Chinese. Spain has a carrier of a similar design to the Australian ships, but they are a long way from China, so they can call their ship an aircraft carrier.
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  392. In the late 1940s the Australians wanted to establish Antarctic bases, but they were short of ice strengthened ships. However they had Landing Ship Tanks left over from the war. So they partly rebuilt a LST, painted it bright yellow and sent it south to set up an Antarctic base on McDonald Island. The expeditioners said they could see and hear the LST bending in the middle as it tried to cope with the huge waves. Understandably it was scrapped when it returned to Melbourne.
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  393. The Australians built their own Daring class destroyers. They were a successor to the larger battle class.
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  394. I saw that video too. It was rather good but I forget who made it. Possibly Mark Felton Productions or The History Guy?
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  395. But he was half French, the ancient and traditional enemy of Britain.
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  396.  @charlespfaff6585  No worries, it's fine to be a bit prejudiced, as long as we admit that we are.
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  397. So 4 out of 5 are from the United States? That seems like a well balanced selection. I wonder what country you live in?
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  398. The largest cruise ships today are over 250,000 Gross Tons or four times the size of the 80,000 GT ship Drach discussed. But they are the mass market ones, premium ships are under 150,000 GT and luxury ones are well under 100,000 GT.
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  399. I thought that was for the possible Tiki Bar that Drach mentioned?
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  400. People forget that two years before the Gallipoli campaign it was in the hands of the Bulgarians who conquered it easily. But they gave it back to the Ottomans in a peace treaty after the Second Balkan War.
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  401.  @xenophonBC  Nah, just a bogan Australian who writes histories in a non war related field.
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  402.  @xenophonBC  I'm not American or British, so I don't know the precise dates, but about that time HMS Victorious was one of 4 British carriers on operation Pedestal to relieve the Siege of Malta (it was one of the survivors). I could ask you why the U.S. didn't send any carriers to help out in the Mediterranean Sea or Indian Ocean, but as I said, both major allied powers had their own theatres of operations with only a very few crossovers.
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  403.  @xenophonBC  I know a lot of British carriers were being dive bombed in the Mediterranean Sea escorting convoys to besieged Malta, while others were attacking German forces in Norway. Others were based in Sri Lanka defending the Indian Ocean. But in 1942 and 1943 they did manage to deploy the carrier HMS Victorious to assist the American fleet in the South Pacific where it was renamed USS Robin despite retaining its British crew. BTW, I'm not British, but you seen to dislike them, I've found them to be one of the nicer European nationalities.
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  404.  @xenophonBC  I guess that makes sense,. The American colonies like Hawaii, Philippines, Samoa, etc. were in the east, while the UK colonies like Burma and Malaya were mostly in the west
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  405. Remember that the Americans took care of the eastern part of the campaign against Japan while the British Empire was responsible for the western part. So the British 14th Army, the Indian 2nd Army, etc fought in Burma, the Australian 1st Army fought in New Guinea, etc, while the Americans concentrated on the smaller islands to the east. Thus the British vessels that survived the fall of Singapore, Indonesia, etc were mostly deployed to the Indian Ocean and other places where they had little overlap with the United States. There were a few exceptions such as Australian ships cooperating with Americans in places like the Coral Sea. Meanwhile in the European theatre almost no American ships entered the burning cauldron of the Mediterranean Sea, that was mostly left to the British.
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  406. Except they were the Japanese equivalent of lords, so it's more like the Duke of [insert large Japanese region] versus the Earl of [insert medium sized Japanese region].
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  407. I want rum!
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  408. So you would really like the battleships HMS Nelson and HMS Rodney then.
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  409.  @rishikeshvijay7680  I actually went back and watched some videos in that series, I couldn't find the video with Indian Naval action, but the one called "Battle of Diu 1538" has a little. But I probably shouldn't expect to find a lot on a western YouTube channel, I'm sure Indian people will have made more detailed stuff on subjects like this.
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  410.  @ianyoung1106  Well around 1802 they tried a settlement near Portsea, but they didn't like it and moved on to establish Hobart instead, taking everyone with them except Buckley. So I don't think a few convicts who only stayed a couple of months counts. They did try and send a shipload of "exiles" (not quite convicts) to Melbourne in circa 1849. But the public rioted at the idea of semi-convicts in their city and the ship was ordered to go to Sydney instead.
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  411. Hey, all my ancestors going back 185 years are from South Australia and Victoria. Neither of those states got convicts, so there's no criminal blood in my veins!
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  412. Drach did a good video on the WW2 Sydney, look for it with the subtitle Angry Australians...
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  413. Wasa only lasted a few hours, but its sinking was the ship designers fault, not enemy action.
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  414. If you're not worried about where a plane is built, Avro Lancasters apparently had the range and capacity to deliver both bombs.
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  415. Right now the Princess of Asturias (the Spanish equivalent of the Prince of Wales) is working her way through naval college and being promoted at a very fast rate.
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  416.  @sixstringedthing  Thanks for that, I had forgotten about Vice-Admiral Otway.
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  417. There is a retired film director called Bruce Beresford. He started out making "Exploitation films", moved on to Art films and ended up making big budget Hollywood films."
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  418. The number (if any) of Royal Marines on a ship depended on the voyage. So a small ship sent on a voyage of discovery to uncharted seas might have more marines on board than a large ship on blockade duty near a home port.
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  419. I suspect customers would be a bit pissed off when, after they have bought a shiny new DVD, they discover that they can watch identical content for free on YouTube with only the inconvenience of a couple of ads.
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  420. Rusty has been having a problem with middle age spread (like most of us), so he is in no position to play a skinny man. Besides, shouldn't a British person play their greatest admiral?
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  421. I gave you a like just because you used the slightly archaic word matelot. Personally I still use the work lascar.
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  422.  @BleedingUranium  That was a big deal for the United States (and a tragedy for Spain), but it didn't have much effect beyond those countries and their colonies. But the other naval battles cited were, to some extent, world changing.
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  423. All we need to know was that there were very few places in the world that were distant from a British naval base. So an appropriate song would be "Britannia rules the waves", or at least they did 110 years ago.
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  424. Several did but HMS Rodney is the only battleship that hit another battleship with a torpedo. The victim was the Bismarck.
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  425. Well if you want to live (and everyone does want to live), you just decline the invitation. There's no way anyone is going to choose certain death.
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  426.  @jmantime  You may be right. The functionally independent colony of Victoria was swimming in gold and HMVS Cerberus was built to compliment their surprisingly large navy which included a 120 gun First Rate. But that ship (I forget its name) remained flagship after Cerberus was commissioned. So perhaps it's owners didn't think it was as much of a capital ship as a First Rate?
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  427. HMVS Cerberus was hardly a capital ship. It has (or had until they fell off a few years ago), only four guns and was too feeble to leave the sheltered bay that is surrounded by Melbourne for its entire life. Still, it is the oldest semi surviving monitor in the world.
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  428. I live in a city of 5 million people that was founded by a ship called Enterprize. They now have a replica of it taking school children on short cruises from Melbourne.
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  429. If you need a really powerful steam locomotive with lots of driving wheels, it's simpler and cheaper to just build a Garratt locomotive.
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  430. But using the term 'colony' creates a false impression to modern people as those Aust / NZ colonies were effectively indepedent with full control over their own affairs, budgets and administration, except for some aspects of foreign affairs.
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  431.  @christopherconard2831  The English Civil War was 250 years before this book was written and none of its battles occurred in the parts of England discussed here. So I doubt there would be any memory of what women put under their skirts during the conflict.
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  432. He's too fat to fit into a 16 inch barrel.
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  433. Except the Crown continued to pay sailors in their employ after their ships were sunk. It was the private shipping companies that stopped paying crew when their ship went down.
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  434. Well the Dutch submarines were mostly in the Indian Ocean based out of Ceylon and Western Australia and very few American boats or ships went into the Indian Ocean, it was mainly a British (and allies) naval theater.
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  435.  @mbryson2899  So you believe that very divisive partisan politics should be debated in circumstances like here, a bunch of strangers talking about non political history? Wow, you must be a very passionate and angry person. I prefer a more a slightly quieter and less confrontational approach to life.
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  436.  @WalterReimer  Except that before the war the Philippines was an American colony with only very limited self government. I can't think of a single country bordering the Pacific that had closer relations with the U.S. than they did with the U.K. except for a few unstable tropical Latin American countries.
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  437. Without reading your link, it strikes me that in the 1920s the UK had far more allies in the Pacific Ocean capable of operating and maintaining capital ships than the USA did. Australia had their own before the first world war, Chile sort of did too, then there's Canada, Netherlands, even little New Zealand could probably manage to run a battleship. But which reliable and trustworthy allies did the U.S. have? So if the Yanks had given away cruisers and battleship to their somewhat shaky allies (perhaps Ecuador?), the Brits could give away far more ships to a lot of countries that they knew would help them in a war.
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  438. Yep, the mostly intact 1860s monitor HMVS Cerberus is still rusting away just off the coast of suburban Melbourne.
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  439. I'm not sure if that is relevant. A rum ration would be more effective at increasing morale and it would require less equipment and supplies.
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  440. Why are people making a big deal over 300? How is it more important than 250, or 200 or any random number like say, 287? Have I missed something?
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  441. Hey, don't knock the Swordfish! Despite being declared obsolete, it was in service to the end of the war and sunk more Axis tonnage and ships than any other allied aircraft, including all those new fangled monoplanes!
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  442. I live in a city of 5 million people that was founded by a small civilian schooner named Enterprize. But almost everyone spells it with an 's'. I suspect the people of Melbourne prefer correct spelling over correct history?
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  443.  @88porpoise  Exactly if Vikings in Denmark embarked on a trading voyage to somewhere like Greenland, they would usually stop off in both the Faeroe Islands and Iceland along the way. They didn't do those voyages in one stage, rather they "island hopped".
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  444. Rum at 10.00 pm Melbourne time is far more suitable.
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  445. That doesn't make sense as an enemy would know which ship to target to take out the admiral or commodore in command of the squadron.
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  446. In the 19th century the educated British middle class developed quite a craze for ancient Greek and Roman literature and a degree in "classics" was amongst the most prestigious, even if it didn't give people useful work skills. Many years later, the people affected by the classics craze were the oldest and most senior people in the work force, including politics and the navy. Thus all the Greek and Roman ship names from circa 1890 to 1940. Other British ships were named after notable earlier ships such as Royal Oak and Warspite. Then there are the "Letter Classes" such as large numbers of destroyers, submarines, aircraft carriers of the same type all starting with the same letter. That was useful as if a destroyer had a name starting with 'G', you instantly knew its capabilities. (There was even an R Class of battleships.) Then there are geographical themes which Americans also used such as the Town Class light cruisers or the County Class heavy cruisers, Crown Colony cruisers, etc. Tribal Class large destroyers were named after ethnicities from across the Empire, well mostly, I'm not sure if HMS Cossack was named after any tribe or people in the Empire or if they just thought it was a cool name. Dave in Melbourne, Australia. (Who did a few units of classics, but never thought of majoring in them because it wouldn't get me a job.)
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  447. I'm sure there would also be a place for the Russian Black Sea fleet in the 21st century.
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  448. I think they were the first major country to ban the slave trade and a couple of decades later, the first major country to ban slavery, free the slaves and compensate slave owners?
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  449. Don't worry. He would need to be a industrial chemist or a chemical engineer to get it right, but anyone else is likely to get it wrong. Okay, now I've thought about it, perhaps we should worry?
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  450. Thanks, I was looking for a chemical engineer or a industrial chemist to explain and confirm all that. Regards from Melbourne.
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  451.  @andrewreynolds9371  I have to rather strongly disagree with you there, but we all have the right to interpret things differently. :-) But I do hope you are consistent and also consider Scotland and Wales at the time as English land?
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  452.  @simperous4308  I grew up in a country town that didn't have a Chinese takeaway. By the time I moved to Melbourne my tastes were mostly established. I have a fairly varied diet, but Asian stuff just doesn't appeal to my taste buds. Anyway, I know people with far stranger diets, like vegetarians, organic zealots and people who won't eat anything with wheat in it. As for me, I'll eat anything but Asian and seafood.
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  453.  @WALTERBROADDUS  I heard that he always wanted to be a Field Marshall, but American army ranks did not go that high, so he joined the Philippine army so he could attain a rank higher than a mere general. That may not be true, but it does reflect his huge ego.
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  454.  @grathian  Could we compromise by saying that while American admirals did not ignore radar, their British counterparts were quicker to fully utilize its potential?
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  455. Ah, you watched Mark Felton's video too.
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  456. But before reliable long range radar they needed spotter planes to find the enemy. The dinky little frigates and destroyers escorting battleships could not range very far from their mother ships, but spotter planes could go hundreds of miles.
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  457. I recall that early this century, the Australians were scrapping some very fast and large ocean going patrol boats that were bigger than WW2 corvettes, they were approached by someone who wanted to buy one and convert it into a private yacht. But apparently the deal didn't go through and they were all scrapped.
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  458. One of the best satirical comedy sketches ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
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  459. The Briish put a huge cordon of every destroyer, frigate, corvette, sloop and any other small ship that had Sonar/Asdic and could carry depth charges at both ends of the English Channel. Any German ship bigger than a rowboat would have been destroyed.
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  460. There are half a million other subscribers, so don't get too entitled unless you are a patron. Sadly Drach can't answer requests from even 1% of us.
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  461.  @silverhost9782  Well no. Charles IIIs father was Greek/Danish. Elizabeth IIs mother was Scottish aristocracy. George VIs mother was Mary of Teck. The Tecks had a German title but had lived in the UK for a long time, so she actually didn't have much German blood. George Vs mother was Danish. The last UK monarch to marry a German was Queen Victoria in 1840. So myth busted, they are not very German at all.
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  462. Even the latest aircraft carriers look modestly sized compared to a decent sized modern cruise ship.
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  463. The British would have moved some of the guns on Gibraltar so they could fire north?
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  464.  @5peciesunkn0wn  I found his disregard for the truth and accuracy very upsetting. So I just blocked his videos and I'm a much calmer and happier person now. :)
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  465. Look very closely and you will see "Oregon" written on the ship.
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  466. Drach may have possibly confused Deadweight Tonnage, Displacement and Gross Tonnage in the discussion of RMS Mauritania et. al. Passenger ships are generally measured by Gross Tonnage which is a measure of enclosed volume rather than displacement. Because liners tend to be mostly full of air, the GT is always far higher than the DWT, so the ships were smaller than is implied (but still huge by the standards of the day).
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  467. Source of The Front Fell Off jokes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
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  468. Hollywood requires a syrupy love interest and inserting some American heroes, even if there were no Americans involved in real life.
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  469. Okay the German surface fleet could have been contained by a slightly smaller part of the Royal Navy than was historically devoted to it, but the biggest fight in the west was for control of the Mediterranean. The British had to keep a big chunk of their navy located there to stop Malta falling and stop the Axis shipping stuff to North Africa. Then they had their third naval theatre of the Indian Ocean with a surprising number of carriers, battleships and other naval assets located there. I doubt the Royal Navy had enough assets to open a fourth theatre in the Pacific, especially when the Americans wanted to keep most of the glory in that area to themselves.
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  470. No, please don't. The pictures are useful to help me understand what Drach is talking about.
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  471.  @TricksterColonel  It just occurred to me that it was Victoria that repaired and reprovisioned the commerce raider CSS Shenandoah in 1865 while giving its crew tours of Melbourne and the countryside. Interesting that they ordered a monitor a couple of years later.
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  472.  @Drachinifel  It would be nice to see how HMVS Cerberus fits in with all this development. Technically it belonged to Victoria rather than Britain, but it was designed and built in Britain and was partly integrated with the Royal Navy's Australian squadron.
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  473. If you look at the modern design of the 400 foot, 40 knot, trimaran fast ferries, they are really monohull ships with a couple of small outrigger hulls placed well back on the ship. So the front 40% of the main hull would get no protection from the outer hulls.
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  474.  @colbeausabre8842  Zheng He didn't even change his home country much. By contrast James Cook indisputedly changed the world.
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  475.  @bskorupk  While Cerberus had 12 times the displacement of Tyr, it didn't perform well in high seas and it may not have left Port Phillip after 1890s. Port Phillip is a fully enclosed saltwater lake, a bit like a small version of the Black Sea, so it was happy in the sheltered waters there. In any case it was under powered and the cool waters of Bass Strait and the Southern Ocean are a huge distance from the tropical areas where the IJN was operating, so I doubt it could have had any useful function in WW2, even if it was still afloat.
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  476. Send it to defend Singapore? Although with hindsight that might not be a good idea.
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  477.  @jonathanmormerod  The Americans name a lot of ships after politicians, which is outrageous as everyone dislikes politicians. The rest of their ships seem to be named after cities and states.
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  478.  @leftcoaster67  I'm not sure about "advance of tech", it was never a good plane even when it was new. By contrast, look at the Swordfish an open cockpit biplane. Identified as obsolete in 1939, it was firing rockets by 1944 and has the distinction of sinking more axis shipping than any other plane.
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  479. Ah, do you suspect that the British are taking revenge for what some of them call "The American Mutiny" of the 1770s?
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  480.  @notshapedforsportivetricks2912  A quick observation, while I'm not British I do know that referring to any person or object from Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland as "English" is inviting people from those countries to cause you bodily harm.
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  481. Umm... I think you're in the wrong place. This is a British naval history channel, not a Yankee political channel.
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  482. Over the past 50 or so years, every class of Australian Patrol Boats has been a lot bigger than their predecessors. They have risen from a tiny 100 tons displacement to a hefty 1,650 tons, making the latest batch of patrol "boats" the size of wartime destroyers.
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  483. Perth is the most remote large city (population over 1 million) in the world, Adelaide and Jakarta are the nearest large cities and they are thousands of miles away. Probably better to visit eastern Australia and New Zealand where things are a bit closer together, unless you like really remote places.
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  484. Is it correctly pronounced Jay-nus or the way Drach says it?
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  485. But other countries, especially Britain, had planes that filled similar roles, so the US could build them under license, just like they built the Merlin engine or post war, the Canberra bomber.
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  486.  @mahbriggs  Well perhaps a bit less wrong? For nearly 200 years Argentina has claimed that the Falklands are occupied territory and that the impoverished people had no say in things. And that was sort of true in 1982. But today it is prosperous (average income is 1.8 times that of the UK) and has an elected government. The only reason they can't be fully independent is their small size and what one of their politicians called "the obvious military threat", although he was careful not to say which country they found threatening. So Argentina had a bad case for their claims in 1982, while they have absolutely no case to claim the Falklands today.
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  487. Australia didn't have Flower Class corvettes. Instead they built their own Bathurst Class corvettes.
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  488. It amuses me the way Americans name their aircraft carriers (and other things) after politicians. In most other western democracies politicians are seen as unpleasant but necessary, so very few people would respect anything named after someone as dodgy as a politician. I guess that's because of cultural differences between the USA and Europe, Australia, etc.
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  489. Now you have given me a horrible image of a poor little corvette being mounted by a randy battleship and the corvette being crushed in the mating process.
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  490. Either that... or the stereotype that while the French did not like the Germans, they had spent most of the past 1000 years at war with the English, so the French disliked the English even more than they disliked the Germans.
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  491. Nah, one is far too hot and the other is freezing cold. Gibraltar is also at an ideal location and has a perfect "Goldilocks climate".
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  492.  @ginoc44  It doesn't look like any of the many species of kingfisher we have in Australia, but different continents, different varieties I guess.
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  493. I think the days of the BBC being clear and easy to understand are in the distant past. Recently there has been a woman who covers British affairs for the BBC World Service, but she has such a thick "subcontinental"' accent, that it's a real effort to understand her.
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  494. Yes, but sadly the crew of the SY Endurance had to put down Mrs Chippy after the ship was crushed by ice in 1915.
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  495. As a non American it seems strange to me that the U.S. waited so long to establish a separate air force. Most other countries did that in World War One or shortly after. Is there any reason that the United States waited nearly 30 years?
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  496. In relation to The Battle of the River Plate in 1939 and its aftermath in Montevideo... sort of, occasionally, sometimes, yes.
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  497. Drach has ruined the answer I often give to people who ask what they were... They are oars, because ships in that period often ran out of coal and they had to have back up propulsion. I'm not sure if anyone believed me though.
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  498.  @camberweller  TYPO. ...what he wanted IT to be.
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  499. I do some historical work on ski lifts and I thought they were the only transport that measured speed in metres per second? (They range from 6.5 m/s down to 0.8 m/s.)
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  500. I thought it was just a publicity stunt by the previous government. Is it being taken seriously by senior defence staff?
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  501. If you want to offend someone from the three other countries that constitute the United Kingdom, call them English. If you want to offend people from the majority of the Netherlands, say they are from Holland. If you want to offend a Canadian, call them an American, etc. I'm not from Europe or North America, but I understood that concept by the time I was 10 years old.
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  502. It looks like Drach followed your advice, he just released one.
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  503. There was a lot of confusion as to what happened when Sydney just disappeared (no radio calls were made), it took a month or two to work out what happened to it, so the news of its destruction was fairly recent.
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  504. Snakes on a Ship? It sounds like a prequel movie for Snakes on a Plane.
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  505. Remember that United States ships were "dry" during the war. No wonder they tried to make friends on ships of allied nations that quite sensibly had rations of rum, beer, etc for their crews morale.
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  506. The British lent a battleship to the Soviets. When they gave it back at the end of the war, the guns were rusted in place, the ship was overrun with rats and nothing worked. Not surprisingly it was scrapped as soon as it got back to Britain.
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  507.  @paulcarter2663  Not even the occasional mock ramming, just to keep the subs slightly nervous? ;-)
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  508. I doubt the model submarines would be that scared... unless your River Class frigate has tiny depth charges that it launches at them?
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  509. I understand that in Australia during the Vietnam War, there was a period of several months between someone being notified that they were being conscripted into the army and the date they were required to turn up. During that time you could voluntarily join any of the armed forces and obviously you would not be required to turn up later with the conscripts. It seems likely this would also apply to other counties and other conflicts at other times?
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  510.  @gwtpictgwtpict4214  In Melbourne, one idiot ordered 24 x 48 roll boxes of toilet paper on line. It took up half of his flat and he was unable to sell it. I imagine he will be using it for the next decade and each year he will gain slightly more living space.
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  511. Was that one of the Insect Class sloops? There are lots of weird names amongst that lot.
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  512. Does it really matter?
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  513. There are so many port cities called Portland across the English speaking world that I had trouble guessing which one. There's the original one in England, one in southern Australia, and at least two on different coasts of the United States.
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  514. Paddle wheelers remained popular on rivers and coastal estuaries well into the 20th century because there was no danger of an expensive propeller being damaged if the boat grounded, hit a snag, rock or other solid object.
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  515. Except it was paid for and named by the government of Victoria which had a booming economy and therefore could afford to buy its own navy. Why they called it Cerberus, I don't know, but I doubt they saw saw their land as anything like hell.
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  516.  @1987palerider  You're right. I recall Drach videos on the Ark Royal and other British fleet carriers being sunk or disabled on Malta convoys, so they were probably running low on carriers, just like the USA.
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  517. Did the British have any more spare carriers that they could lend to the USA?
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  518. Wartime subs in many countries fly a pirate flag after a successful mission with hand sewn stipes for every ship they have sunk, plus things like daggers for commando raids. If the Americans also do this, USS Barb would have a train on their pirate flag. wikipedia page Use of the Jolly Roger by submarines.
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  519. Everyone likes The Cruel Sea and Battle of the River Plate. In Which We Serve is rather old fashioned and modern viewers will cringe a bit, but it does depict realistic action on a WW2 destroyer.
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  520. Yep, I use Squarespace for a website with articles on Australian mountains and I have used that photo carousel feature a couple of times.
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  521. The live questions are where most of the silly stuff is, things like "what if this WWII ship was transported into the Space Treck TV show", absurd questions like that. So I just don't watch it. But people directly donate money in that segment, so Drach has to do it to make a living. I can handle the occasional dumb question in normal drydock with the knowledge that most of them are diverted to the live stream.
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  522. That was the most popular form of engine on Australian river boats. If a railway was scrapping a locomotive, but it still had a good firebox and boiler, there was a good market for the parts from builders of inland paddle steamers.
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  523. That is a great theory, I had never realized that before, but your 40-ish year rule seems to apply to many (perhaps most?) new technologies.
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  524.  @nimbusshadow-wings  Well like many parents Britain is quite old and older people are not as strong as they were when they were younger. :D
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  525. The Australians kept using DUKWs and LARCs to land supplies at their Antarctic bases long after their military had stopped using them. And I think I recall one doing tours of London and the Thames River?
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  526. While I loved visiting HMS Victory and HMS Warrior, I was rather disappointed by the Mary Rose, only parts of it remain and it was rather expensive to get in. But the Vasa in Stockholm is brilliant, it is completely intact and utterly huge, that is the one to see if you want to see a really old ship of the line.
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  527.  @20chocsaday  It was written by Andrew 'Banjo" Patterson. I don't like it, it's an unpleasant story about a suicidal sheep duffer.
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  528. I saw it just before I went to bed, ah the confusion of different time zones.
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  529. If you're a marine ecologist and write about it, at least you get paid for your pursuing your interest. I write books and articles on the mountain history of my country, I've even won a couple of awards. But like most history writers, my costs far outweigh any money I've made.
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  530. Apart from being designed by expert naval architects, cruise ships have an obvious safety margin. If the weather gets really rough and they can't avoid a storm, they always empty the 3 or 4 swimming pools they have on deck 14. That gives them vastly more stability in just 5 minutes.
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  531.  @matchesburn  Wow, please calm down, there are more important things to worry about than insulting people on the internet. Anyway, the incident you refer to happened over a decade ago, look it up on Wikipedia. :)
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  532.  @notshapedforsportivetricks2912  I had a look at MV Triton on Wikipedia and while the ship found some use, that type of design wasn't going anywhere.
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  533. A shipyard in Hobart invented the large truck carrying fast catamaran in 1990, this was widely copied, and a shipyard in Perth, Australia developed the idea into a trimaran. Around the turn of the century, the Royal Australian Navy was short of fast transports for the East Timor operation, so they leased a fast catamaran from Incat, the Hobart company and it used it to shuttle troops and vehicles to Timor. Other navies noticed how successful this commercial ferry was in naval operation and either built their own, or got Incat to build them. As ferries they run between 35 and 55 knots, but naval ones are usually slower.
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  534. His approach seems to be... why stick to dull facts when making up an entertaining story is more fun.
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  535. The Australians had a different approach. After sorting out the troublemakers and genuine ideologues, they allocated Italians to farms in cool climate mountain valleys, so any attempted escapes would have to be over mountains or down the valleys through towns where guards were stationed ready to intercept escapees. But the Italians were happy to sit out the war as farm workers growing crops like hops and there were almost no escape attempts.
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  536. Too heavily defended and way too far from any Japanese base.
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  537. June is the start of the Australian ski season, it would be fun to see Drac in the snow on the other side of the world.
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  538. I had no trouble understanding every word. If your hearing is not good, there is the option of turning on subtitles.
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  539. Catamarans and trimarans have very little space inside the hulls. So they are good for modern fast ferries, but not so good for cargo and naval vessels.
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  540.  @TinBane  Interesting, I heard somewhere that procedures on the US ship were different from the Australians and that caused confusion.
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  541. I thought the carrier Melbourne (there have been other ships ranging from frigates to cruisers bearing the name), just had a fetish for ramming and sinking destroyers. It's interesting to hear that the destroyers were largely at fault.
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  542. That's also why Hood became worn out and in need of a refit before WW II.
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  543. With an average of three posts per week, Drach will post every two and a bit birthdays.
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  544. A company called Incat (in Tasmania of all places), makes the worlds fastest passenger ships, their big vehicle ferries run at speeds between 35 and 56 knots. But I guess you can't fit a nuclear reactor on to a 400 foot long catamaran.
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  545. I thought flying the Jolly Roger was reserved for submarines returning to port after sinking an enemy vessel or some other major success, or is that just the British?
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  546. I was thinking along similar lines, my choice was CSS Shenandoah
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  547. Actually food exporting countries of the Allies like the U.S.A. and even Australia had some level of rationing during the war. But in those counties, it was nowhere near as severe as it was in the U.K.
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  548. Studio filming in England, location scenes in Morocco(?) and England. Special effects filmed in California.
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  549. If it looks like a V-1, smells like a V-1 and has the very distinctive V-1 sound... then it IS a V-1, even if it was built in a different factory and goes by another name. It looks like "Murica claiming credit for something that was 99% German engineered.
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  550. That's hardly news. It always rains or drizzles in Melbourne.
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  551. Italy.
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  552. By then New Zealand and Queensland were fully self governing, but both colonies would have been thrilled to host a Royal Navy squadron or two, they would probably have supplied them and done any necessary refits for free. Cities like Auckland and Townsville aren't that much further from Hawaii than most of the west coast of the USA. So freeing Hawaii from the U.S. takeover wouldn't have been as logistically difficult as you suggest.
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  553. The Royal Air Force expended an enormous amount of time and energy trying to bomb the German ships at Brest into tiny pieces at the bottom of the sea, but they didn't manage to do that before The Channel Dash, (I think it was called Operation Cerberus?), where the German fleet did a run through the English Channel at top speed and made it back to Germany, albeit with several ships heavily damaged. So if the RAF couldn't sink the other large German ships at Brest, they probably wouldn't have had better luck with sinking the Bismark.
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  554.  @LeCharles07  Unlike the United States which went from being colonies to full independence within a few years, Australian and Canadian independence was drawn out in many stages.The first was Responsible Government where individual colonies got full control of their own governance and defence (within the empire), although the Colony of Victoria also adopted its own foreign policy when it blatantly helped the Confederates against the wishes of Britain. Next came federation of the colonies into the Australia and Canada we know today. Then came adoption of the Statute of Westminster which made them truly independent (they had only been functionally independent before then). Between these big steps towards independence there were dozens of smaller ones over nearly 100 years.
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  555. Yes, they were named after the original HMS Erebus and Terror which were the first ships to sight them.
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  556. The "Dazzle ships" of the First World War.
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  557. There's a reason why engineers and mechanics are respected as highly skilled jobs. How they do it is beyond me.
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  558. They say that Swedish is the second easiest language for an English speaker to learn, (the easiest is Castilian Spanish). While English has more Danish derived words, Swedish grammar is closer to English.
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  559. There is a complete Oberon class submarine preserved a long way inland at Holbrook, half way between Melbourne and Sydney in Australia.
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  560. They had something similar in Hobart (Tasmania, Australia) which has a similar climate to Washington State. It served for many years but was eventually replaced with a long high bridge that ships could pass under.
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  561.  @jamesmckenzie9551  USS London was technically named after a sailor with that name, but in reality, most people thought it was named after the City of London.
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  562.  @kennethlamb378  Thanks for that.
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  563.  @kennethlamb378  I'm interested, but could you summarize the relevant bit in a couple of sentences? Thanks.
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  564. I view him as a great patriot who fought for his rightful king against a mutinous rabble.
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  565. My image of the American coast guard is their attacks on and persecution of, heroic rum runners who were trying to bring refreshment to a thirsty American population.
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  566. So does that alternate position claim that the British blockade was not responsible for the Turnip Winter and ersatz food like sawdust bread that people refused to eat?
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  567. It was 80 years ago, so IF anyone who knew them is still alive, they will have had plenty of time to come to terms with the tragic loss.
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  568. Modern ships don't have an armour belt. And an armour belt would be a very handy defence against these new drone boats.
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