Comments by "COL BEAUSABRE" (@colbeausabre8842) on "KMS Gneisenau - Guide 282" video.

  1.  @josephahner3031  Why not, you got them and the ammunition free from the previous owner. And you had the sinking of the Blucher to show coast artillery was not yet quite obsolete
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  2.  @ramal5708  Part of Norway's defense against Russia
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  3.  @bkjeong4302  Actually, except for the U-bootewaffe and coastal forces, the German Navy of WW2 made no sense. An attempt to build High Seas Fleet 2.0 ignored three facts of life. 1) Geography hadn't changed. The Great War's choke points were still there 2) The British wouldn't sit idly by while the Kriegsmarine executed the Z Plan. The British could outbuild the Germans and as a maritime nation, would do so 3) Germany is a land power - the Kriegsmarine would always be last in priority for material, manpower and production facilities after das Heer un Luftwaffe
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  4. There design experience was limited to the Baltic and North Sea
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  5.  @Emigdiosback  U-505 in Chicago, courtesy of the USS Guadalcanal and her escorts.
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  6. The Germans named their ships after generals. The British named their ships after admirals. 'Nuff said.
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  7. They were designed to be fitted with 3X2 15 inch as soon as Germany had in the industrial capacity to build the guns, mounts and turrets. War came first. As Rumsfeld said, "You go to war with what you have"
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  8. My dad, who was a sailor in WW2, said there were three speeds for a ship in action 1) Full Speed 2) Flank Speed 3) JESUS CHRIST! speed
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  9.  @hernerweisenberg7052  Totally irrelevant. The merchant ships sunk by S&G were a drop in the bucket "Third, and unlike the Allies, the Germans were never able to mount a comprehensive blockade of Britain. Nor were they able to focus their effort by targeting the most valuable cargoes, the eastbound traffic carrying war materiel. Instead they were reduced to the slow attrition of a tonnage war. To win this, the U-boat arm had to sink 300,000 GRT per month in order to overwhelm Britain's shipbuilding capacity and reduce its merchant marine strength. In only four out of the first 27 months of the war did Germany achieve this target, while after December 1941, when Britain was joined by the US merchant marine and ship yards the target effectively doubled. As a result, the Axis needed to sink 700,000 GRT per month; as the massive expansion of the US shipbuilding industry took effect this target increased still further. The 700,000 ton target was achieved in only one month, November 1942, while after May 1943 average sinkings dropped to less than one tenth of that figure. By the end of the war, although the U-boat arm had sunk 6,000 ships totalling 21 million GRT, the Allies had built over 38 million tons of new shipping.
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  10. Some ships are just magnets for shells, bombs, torpedoes and mines. I'm looking at you USS Saratoga
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  11. GreyWolfLeaderTW They were sort of "Anti-Battlecruisers" as they were supposed to be armored against 15 inch shells (it was always intended the 11.1 inch triples would be replaced by 15 inch twins) to make them true, if lightly armed, battleships. I use the US Navy classification of Large Cruisers, lumping then in with the Alaskas, Dunkerques and Deuschtlands due to their gun caliber. As you point out, 11 to 13 guns were no longer capital ship armament (and 14 inch barely made it, as everyone else was using 15 or 16 inch and, of course, 18.1 inch in one example). In truth all the Large Cruisers were simply all big gun versions of the Armored Cruiser which employed guns a step below capital rank (British 9.2 inch, US 8 and 10 inch at a time when the world standard for battlewagons was 12 inch)
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  12. " Mr president (Bush #1), we thought you said "No new taxes"" Bush "You misunderstood me, I said I wouldn't tax your gnu"
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  13. Two ships at the bottom of the Arctic Sea!
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  14. Are you blind! IOWA'S
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  15. He had a feud with his air wing commander and was going to get him court martialed. So, being one of those "I've pissed more water than you've sailed over" types, he ignored advice to send up a patrol at dawn. Result, he was surprised by S&G "In June 1939, as a captain, he was given command of the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious. D'Oyly-Hughes had learned to fly and continually rejected the advice of the ship's professional aviators, according to Winton. Returning to Britain from the Norwegian campaign on 8 June 1940, Glorious and her destroyer escort of HMS Acasta and HMS Ardent were surprised and caught by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the Norwegian Sea. All three British ships were sunk with the loss of at least 1,533 lives. D'Oyly-Hughes went down with his ship. Glorious had been sighted in conditions of maximum visibility, a condition in which an aircraft carrier would normally have one or more aircraft out on a Combat Air Patrol. Glorious had no such patrol, and was unable to reach maximum speed before coming in range of the enemy's 11-inch guns. Winton describes D'Oyly-Hughes' lack of belief in the effectiveness of air patrols and the questions raised by numerous commentators, including eyewitnesses from Glorious and Scharnhorst, about the captain's judgement in this and other matters"
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  16. Were you paying attention? She was a total wreck ahead of the bridge (A turret had been completely blown off) - they had to cut off her entire bow, disarmed her of most of her armament and left her to rot for a couple of years. She was a floating pile of scrap iron, not a warship, when she was scuttled. Nobody on the surface of this planet was stupid enough to think she could be rebuilt into anything like her former self without emptying the national treasury. It probably been easier and cheaper to build a third member of the class
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  17.  @vermas4654  They had the same chance as this collection of wreckage
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  18. I can think of worse places to sit out WW2 than Canada. French Canadian girls are SO sexy!
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  19. Nobody ever managed to use submarines with their battlefleet. Everybody tried, everybody failed. Sometimes spectacularly - look up "K boats" and "Battle of May Island"
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  20. Also, since the 11.1 inch guns were only useful to a raider, they upset the British more than 15 inch would have. Political own goal - Germany
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  21.  @m.claude5772  Under Versailles, they were allowed to produce ONE heavy gun (presumably coast artillery) per year
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