Comments by "" (@walterkronkitesleftshoe6684) on "Drachinifel" channel.

  1. No it wasn't Hood's wooden deck that was the problem.... It was her oarsmen who had tired themselves out after her sails had been torn in the north Atlantic storms.
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  2. What relationship does Hood's demise have to do with Jutland?
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  3. No.
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  4. What has 1776 and the US war of independence got to do with Britain fighting nazi Germany alone while the US sat and watched?
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  5. "An over rated design" while lauding the outdated when built Bismarck. Classic.
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  6. No accounting for "million to one" luck is there?
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  7. You forgot about who remained in control of the battlefield after the smoke had cleared = Britain wins.
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  8. PS. Once Bismarck was stopped from running away it only took 2 RN battleships and cruisers to "put her under".
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  9. Both the RN and the USN had ships that exceeded the Bismarck class in all 3 of the primary aspects of warship design, those being speed, armour and firepower. The difficulty was in combining those 3 aspects in a single design whilst simultaneously keeping within the constraints set by the Washington (and in Britain's case the 1935 Anglo-German) naval treaties. On the other hand, the nazis being inherently untrustworthy, did not feel compelled to comply with the terms of the naval agreement they signed with Great Britain in 1935, and so faced no such difficulties. That being said Bismarck didn't fare too well when confronted with the likes of HMS Rodney, a much more powerful and well protected battleship that was 13 years her senior. As for "one on one" Britain didn't need to play that game, she had a far larger navy that amply showed its capabilities in dealing with nazi "superships".
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  10.  @dovetonsturdee7033  Please don't wake the wehraboos up too quickly, they may have an adverse reaction to reality.
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  11. What pride can you take from slaying a ship that was moronically sent out virtually alone against the British Home Fleet? Its only protection was the vastness of the North Atlantic and its speed, and the RN handled both of those problems admirably.
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  12.  @richpontone1  Wikipedia says MANY things Rich... Not all of which are true. I could go on to wikipedia and edit it to suggest that Hood was sunk by someone throwing bananas down the funnel. The "plunging fire" theory was the "go to" theory for decades after the war, but try watching that video I gave the link to above and see what you think? All the best.
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  13. "She might not have been sinking at the time"? Nonsense. Lets look at some survivor testimonies (people who actually witnessed the events of Bismarck's sinking first hand), and not some winsome fantasy shall we? From "Battleship Bismarck: A survivor's story" Written by Baron Burkhard von Mullenheim-Rechberg, Bismarck's senior ranking survivor. Page 211 "Our list to port had increased a bit while firing was going on" followed by "Around 9:30am gas and smoke began to drift through our station" This means that prior to 9:30am Bismarck was already flooding, not something that happens to a healthy seaworthy ship, in other words she was already starting to sink. Then from an interview conducted for the highly regarded weekly history journal "Purnell's history of the second world war" in the late 1960's with Gerhard Junack (who was Bismarck's only surviving engineering officer and the survivor who supposedly enacted the "scuttle order"). He stated that... "Somewhere about 1015 hours, I received an order over the telephone from the Chief Engineer (Korvettenkapitän (Ing.) Walter Lehmann) to 'Prepare the ship for sinking.' That was the last order I received on the Bismarck. Soon after that, all transmission of orders collapsed." Heading back to the account of Mullenheim-Rechberg, on Page 212 he states that (before 10:00am) "I was using all the telephone circuits and calling all over the place in an effort to find out as much as possible about the condition of the ship. I got only one answer. I reached the messenger in the damage control centre and asked "who has and where is the command of the ship? Are there new orders in effect?".... The man said he was in a great hurry. He told me that everyone had abandoned the damage control centre, adding that he was the last one in the room and had to get out... then he hung up". This vain search for contact & information over the Bismarck's internal comms happened BEFORE 10:00am which throws some mild doubt on Junack's testimony where he says he was contacted by the chief engineer who supposedly gave him the "scuttle order" over the phone at 10:15am... Hmmmmm. If taken at face value these survivor testimonies show that there was at least a 45 minute gap between Bismarck starting to sink and the first mention of a "scuttle order" being given. Even if Bismarck's crew had done nothing, Bismarck was going to sink, and if the beaten crew want to help the RN, then all the better... But face it, Bismarck's crew weren't going to scuttle a perfectly seaworthy ship in the middle of the storm tossed North Atlantic of their own free will, it was only for the fact that the RN had already dismantled Bismarck and initiated the sinking process. In other words in every sense the sinking of Bismarck was the result of actions dictated by the Royal Navy. Anything else is just hurt German pride, bolstered by modern day delusional wehraboos. Germany was well known for trying to hide its national humiliations, such as when they scuttled their "grand fleet" at the end of WW1, like illogically saying "We lost.. but you didn't win", or a pathetic "You didn't beat us because we killed ourselves first" sort of idiocy.
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  14.  @notsureyou  You don't appear to be a "wehraboo" but you do a nice sideline in perpetuating some Bismarck "mythology" "It took from memory 15 minutes for the British to "find the range"" Do you have your copy of ""Battleship Bismarck: A Design and Operational History"" to hand? Right, turn to page 518, Table B-1 "Rodney engages Bismarck", read the third entry detailing HMS Rodney's third and fourth ranging salvoes where it says at the end of the entry that...."Later HMS Norfolk reported that hits were obtained by one or both of these salvoes". These hits took place 2 or 3 MINUTES after HMS Rodney commenced firing at 08.47
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  15. Why have you bothered to watch and comment?
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  16. "8 holes on Bismarck" indeed? You do realise that Bismarck was, above her armoured deck, ripped apart?
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  17.  @ghosterdude  But the 3 survivors of Hood outlaughed the 114 from Bismarck. British spunk for you.
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  18.  @cogitator1213  Silly boy... in what way did they win? The WHOLE point of the hochseeflotte sortie was to ambush and break the RN stranglehold the Royal Navy exerted over germany with her north sea blockade. They ended by running back off to port, and were too frightened of the "big boys" to leave in any strength ever again (apart from when they sailed to Scapa Flow to surrender), leaving the victorious Royal Navy with a bloody nose, but still in command of the north sea. You need to understand strategy and not concentrate like a small child on the headline numbers.
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  19.  @cogitator1213  You mean the victory where the "victors" ran off back to port never to set sail in deadly earnest again?
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  20. No it would be the same as wehraboos arguing that the allies never beat Germany because Hitler shot himself.
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  21. Childish wehraboos don't watch the documentary or read the report in full, and then consider the findings as a whole, they cherry pick passages out of context and try to represent them as the "big picture", hence their nonsensical babble that drives more intelligent viewers to near madness.
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  22. "Largely intact"? "Intact" as much as a swiss cheese and missing most of its superstructure. "operational medium artillery and anti-aircraft defences"? All firing had ceased on Bismarck within 40 minutes of the start of the battle, with most of her magazines flooded prior to sinking. The "Bismarck myth" continues unabated.
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  23. I'm interested to hear your evidence of where "the British" say that "(convoys) were irrelevant". As for Bismarck scaring "the piss out of the Brits", I don't know about you but if I'm ever scared "pissless" I find myself running AWAY from the source of my fear as fast as my legs can carry me, Could you refresh my memory and tell me which ship spent the full 8-9 days of it's entire operational life doing just that, and who was it running away from exactly? Seems obvious that just like everyone else you also have your own "pet bias" you like to take for a walk in YT comment sections.
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  24. Why be amused? The British empire was spread across the globe and highly dependent on maritime trade. All of that global shipping network had to pass through the bottleneck of the North Atlantic to the British isles. A fast and elusive German battleship task force running rampage through that bottleneck of convoy lanes would have had a potentially disastrous impact on the ongoing British war effort, out of all proportion to its relatively small size.
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  25. From ballistics tables its easily shown that at the approximate range of battle involved at the time of Hood's destruction, that the critical shell impacted Hood at an angle of approx 12-14 degrees (the exact range is not known for certain hence the spread of angle). As you can imagine that is nowhere NEAR the +80 degrees that would be necessary for your suggestion.
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  26.  @klasv7174  That is your free choice, I appreciate German military tech, but if you want a battleship to look like it means business, and not be bothered with having "graceful lines worthy of a ballerina" then only HMS Rodney will do, accept nothing less.
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  27. They probably thought the same as the crew of HMS Rodney and HMS King George V did before they tore Bismarck apart.
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  28. Do you think Adalbert Schneider (Bismarck's first gunnery officer) had his beady eye looking through his eyepiece with a crosshair lined up on Hood's magazine? A broadside salvo of 15 inch shells is analogous to the pellets in a shotgun scatter, but obviously on a MUCH larger scale. The CEP (circular error probability, or the radius of a circle that 50% of shells fired can be expected to land within) of Bismarck's main armament (38cm SK C/34) at the range involved in Denmark strait is approximately 330ft, so that in a perfectly aimed salvo by Bismarck's 8 guns incoming on Hood at a rough angle of 12-13 degrees, 4 shells could be expected to land within an ellipse (due to the shallow angle of the shells approach) 660ft wide and a couple of thousand feet long, that crossed 76% of Hood's length, but those 4 shells would be completely randomly distributed, so the luck aspect is that in that wide scatter one of the shells randomly penetrated a very obscure weak point in Hood's VERTICAL armour and impacted on the relatively tiny area of her 4in HA magazine. The simplified analogy is that if you prop a dartboard up 50 yards away and can consistently knock it over with a shotgun at that range then that is pretty good shooting, just as Bismarck / PE achieved during the Denmark Strait encounter. Now you can "knock the dartboard over" all day long with the shotgun and still NOT hit the dartboard's bullseye (magazine) with an individual pellet. As opposed to being a skillful shot by knocking over the dartboard, whether you hit the bullseye with an individual pellet is complete luck.
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  29. Of course, tha Yanks love to steal the laurels of their allies.... U571 anyone?
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  30. Can you imagine if he was an AMERICAN ???? He'd have a nuclear missle cruiser named after him, roads across the US would be named in his honour, and up until 20-30 years ago kids in school would have been taught his huge contribution to their country's war effort. Cross the Atlantic to the UK and almost NO-ONE knows about him. I'm from Liverpool, my father was in the Royal Navy during WW2 and a number of relatives were on merchant ships plying the Atlantic during the war so I was told about "Johnny" Walker since I was a young lad.
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  31. Unfortunately you're mistaken. HMS Hood DID dock at Hvalfjord on 23rd April 1941 for the purposes of refuelling after sailing from Scapa Flow in response to an erroneous report of Bismarck sortieing 2 days earlier. With regard to the actual sinking of Hood, HMS Hood had sailed from Scapa Flow in the Orkney islands late in the evening of 21st May, with orders to head to Hvalfjord to refuel, and then to patrol the Denmark Strait, but due to the British cruisers who were already patrolling the Denmark Strait spotting Bismarck / PE while Hood & her companions were still en route, they instead headed directly to intercept the German task force WITHOUT docking in Iceland prior to the engagement and Hood's tragic sinking.
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  32. And yet strangely failed to hit a single target afterwards inspite of thousands of shells expended !!!!
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  33. The Royal Navy.... policing the abolition of the slave trade around the world's oceans for over 200 years.
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  34. Wrong battle, that was Jutland, there's absolutely NO evidence it was the case at Denmark Strait.
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  35. More nonsense. Remember the saying "It's better to be quiet and thought a fool, that to talk nonsense and remove all doubt".
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  36. Wrong on BOTH counts.
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  37. The last reported sighting of V/Adm Holland was by Ted Briggs as he exited the bridge, sitting calmly & silently in his commander's chair with his head lowered, as if in resignation.
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  38. It stood every chance... what couldn't be accounted for was "one in a million luck" on behalf of the German side.
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  39. Ask the inhabitants of Dresden and 50 other German cities if the Avro Lancaster was "deficient". The Spitfire had the range necessary to blow thousands of "superior" luftwaffe aircraft out of the sky. Please name a modern British battleship that was more than mildly inconvenienced by the Germans. The sten gun, like the T-34 and sherman showed that production numbers instead of "technical excellence" won WW2. The matilda was the only tank in 1940 that put the fear of god into the Germans, luckily for them they'd already created AP ammo for their 88s. Cry harder wehraboo, we LOVE it !!!
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  40.  @WorshipinIdols  Before you gush too much over the performance of the German gunners (which you'll notice I have never said was anything but excellent), you've conveniently missed out other factors that throw a shadow over your suggested hit rates, not the least being that only 2 hits were conclusively confirmed on HMS Hood. First of all look at the total number of rounds fired by each ship. BOTH the British ships had unfortunately had their "T's crossed" and so were firing a total of 10 main barrels against the two German ships who being broadside onto the British ships were in return able to muster 16 main barrels (including 8 of Prinz Eugen's 203mm guns with almost DOUBLE the RoF of the larger battleships guns) as well as 12 secondary barrels to fire back at the British, resulting in a far larger volume of fire at the British ships than was fired at the Germans (even when taking into account the British opening fire first). Secondly you've also failed to take into account the misbehaviour of PoW's troublesome 4 barrelled "A" and "Y" turrets, which resulted in PoW actually firing only around two thirds of the shots she should have fired, the figures then start to look very different from the situation you suggest. I do in one of my books have a summary of the number of rounds fired by each ship, and when those numbers are taken into account, the hit rate of all the ships involved is in the area of 4-6% of shots fired. (Apart from Hood who as you know had mistakenly targeted and straddled Prinz Eugen by its fifth salvo before realising its mistake and then starting from square one in retargeting Bismarck). Considering HMS PoW was operating with a completely green crew and with one arm tied behind her back she gave MORE than an excellent account of herself. Both landing the first hit of the engagment and singlehandedly stopping "Exercise Rhine" in its tracks.
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  41.  @WorshipinIdols  1. No I fully intended to use the widely recognised term "incremental armour" which once again succinctly describes the spread of armour across the structure of a ship, but please feel free to use whatever word you wish. "Distributed" will also suffice. 2. No I did not mistake the 380mm hit on PoW's unarmoured bridge for the 150mm hit on the base of her forward starboard HA director. You already appear to have seen the photographs of the damage to PoW's aft funnel, I assumed whilst looking at that you would also find the photos of both the entry and exit points of the 380mm hit on the bridge that killed everyone there apart from Capt Leach and his navigating officer Lt Comm George Rowell. The entry and exit points clearly show the splinter plating of the unarmoured bridge peeled back like a banana skin. 3. PoW's armoured conning tower was sited BELOW the unarmoured bridge that was hit, which in turn was sited below the also unarmoured anti-aircraft control station which topped the bridge superstructure, and is where Lt Esmond Knight was stationed.
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  42.  @WorshipinIdols  I've only just spotted your first reply. The "ALL" of the "all or nothing" armour scheme refers to the "box" that covers the machinery spaces, magazines, shell handling, barbettes and turrets, and the "NOTHING" refers to the rest of the ship. Its pretty self explanatory really. Compare a diagram of the armour distribution on KGV and Nelson classes to that of the German ships. you'll notice that apart from the armoured "box" of the citadel (and one or two minor localised areas on their superstructure) the British battleships have virtually NO thinner armoured areas, as opposed to the German ships using the outdated "incremental" armour scheme, where multiple decks and vertical surfaces have armour of between 1 and 4 inches of armour just ripe enough to activate the fuses of incoming shells whilst not being proof to those same shells, as well as sizeable chunks of much heavier armour dotted around her superstructure. The hit on PoW's bridge as the photos you have no doubt already viewed will attest (they'll be there with the photos of PoW's perforated rear funnel) CLEARLY show the torn splinter plating on BOTH sides of the "flying" bridge and NOT the small area of 4 inch armour you suggest that actually faced the sides of the armoured conning tower 1 deck below. You're ALMOST correct in saying that the main armoured belt of the KGVs covered the area between the front of the A turret barbette and the rearmost point of the Y turret barbette in the same manner as Bismarck, but like Bismarck it did actually extend BEYOND those points with both fore & aft lower belt extensions, as well as having much heavier horizontal deck armour both fore and aft of the main turrets than Bismarck. I thought that we'd established that the idea of picking specific areas of a ship to target from 9 miles away was very much in the realm of "fantasy land", as the target you're aiming for is simply "the ship", with the precise point of impact being in the lap of the gods. Your erroneous "one bullseye is a lucky hit, 2 bullseye’s is skill and quality"s is once again drifting into the area of "nazi fanboism". You do realise that buying 2 lottery tickets does not halve the odds of winning, it merely gives you two chances at exactly the SAME outlandish odds that one ticket gives you. in the same manner two lucky shots are exactly that... two lucky shots. You cannot use a blunderbus of 8 x 15in shells to "snipe a bullseye" from 9 miles away. I'm glad you've given a fair appraisal of Bismarck's design, I'd equally like to state that I am NOT ignorantly attempting to diminish the quality of the German gunnery at Denmark Strait, but merely hoping to "keep it real".
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  43.  @WorshipinIdols  Look up "circular error probability" ... the RADIUS (and NOT the diameter)of a circle within which 50% of the impacts of a weapons projectiles can be expected to land.
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  44.  @WorshipinIdols  So now you've changed your original assertion from "Bismarck's hit wasn't luck but skill", to "everyone has a degree of luck". Thats fine by me. Of course the specific point of impact of ANY shell at longer ranges is affected by luck. The skill in long range naval gunnery is simply getting the shells within a couple of hundred feet of your intended target, the rest is providence. As for Bismarck "scoring hits with every salvo" that means that Bismarck must've only fired 3 salvoes at PoW, as that is the number of hits she achieved, when the truth is that there were plenty of salvoes that scored no hits (which is not to mock German gunnery, its just the nature of the game ), and as we agree none of the three hits detonated as intended, due to the design of PoW's armour scheme. Seems your entrallment with the German ships knows no bounds, attributing torpedoes to Bismarck (she had none fitted) and Prinz Eugen Who at no point during the Denmark Strait engagement was anywhere near in range to use her G7a TI steam torpedos even at their lowest speed setting. In what way do you consider that the RN "lost the battle"? Because of the loss of the Hood? What about the fact that Hood and PoW were tasked with preventing the German ships from breaking out into the Atlantic, and as a result of the action "operation Rhineübung" was stopped in its tracks and Bismarck then had to futilely run for its life back to France? Job done. Its the same reason that the RN won the battle of Jutland. German high seas fleet sets out to ambush the Home fleet with a view to breaking the RN North sea blockade, the RN suffers heavier losses BUT the blockade remains intact and the German fleet skulks back to port never to show its face again (except when it was surrendering to the RN at Scapa Flow).
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  45. No there was a HUGE amount of luck involved in Bismarck's hit on Hood's magazine. A full salvo of main gun fire from a battleship is analogous to a scatter of lead shot from a shotgun. During the battle of Denmark Strait, the Bismarck aimed at Hood from 8-9 nautical miles away. At that range the 38 cm SK C/34 (Bismarck's main armament) had a CEP (circular error probability - effectively the radius of a circle within which 50% of its shots would fall) of 100m. That means that if 8 of Bismarck's 15in guns fired at a single point 8-9 nm away, 4 of her shells would be expected to land (with completely random distribution) within an ellipse (think of it as a stretched circle, due to the angle of fall of the shells) measuring approximately 200m (660ft) wide, (or to put it another way 76% of HMS Hood's 860ft length), by more than two thousand feet long. The other 4 shots would land even further away from the aiming point. That being the case, how can an individual shell be aimed specifically at a tiny part of HMS Hood's structure, namely the 4in HA magazine, that its believed triggered off Hood's detonation? I'll give you a hint, there's a little clue in my paragraph above....where it says "completely random distribution". A simplified analogy is that if you prop a dartboard up 50 yards away and can consistently knock it over with a shotgun at that range then that is pretty good shooting, just as Bismarck / PE achieved during the Denmark Strait encounter. Now you can "knock the dartboard over" all day long with the shotgun and STILL NOT hit the bullseye (magazine) with an individual pellet. As opposed to being a skillful shot by knocking over the dartboard, whether you hit the bullseye with an individual pellet is complete luck. The idea of HMS PoW not being more heavily damaged because of the failure of the German fuses, was less to do with luck and much more to do with the KGV class's "all or nothing" armour scheme. PoW was hit by a total of seven German shells during the battle of Denmarck Strait and not ONE of them detonated as designed. This is because in the "all or nothing" system of armouring only the most vital "citadel" is heavily armoured, the rest of the ship's superstructure being comprised of standard naval "splinter" plating. This meant that a shell hitting non vital areas of the ship, instead of having their fuse activated by the shock of impacting on a substantial piece of armour instead passed through without detonating (or only partially detonating or with a delayed detonation) menaing that far less damage was inflicted on the ship.
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  46.  @akaj188  There were no British aircraft involved in the final battle on the 27th May, in fact Jack Tovey specifically ordered them to keep away. So that scuppers your rationale for why Bismarck made such a truly pathetic showing with her "superb German gunnery" in her final battle.
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  47. Some of us need more detail.... others don't. I'm sure there's a unicorn waiting somewhere for your attention.
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  48. No. At the start of the Denmark Strait encounter Prinz Eugen's chief gunnery officer (Korvettenkapitan Paulus Jasper) misidentified the two royal navy ships as "heavy cruisers" and consequently ordered the loading of high explosive rounds, when the 2 British ships were subsequently correctly identitified, he forgot to order a change to armour piercing rounds, and so for the whole Denmark strait battle Prinz Eugen was firing high explosive, which did not have the penetrating power to cause decisive damage to the British ships. Secondly both German ships initially concentrated their fire on HMS Hood, and both quickly obtained hits on her, but while they were busy doing that the untargetted HMS Prince of Wales landed several hits on Bismarck, and so Admiral Lütjens in Bismarck ordered Prinz Eugen to switch target to Prince of Wales, and this was who she was firing at when HMS Hood blew up.
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  49.  @tank3.095  "Hey look don't get all shirty because the RN smashed the French navy at Trafalgar" seems about as "funny" and "relevant" as your remark. Just saying.
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  50. You're forgetting that the KGVs had 10 main guns in THREE turrets not 8 main guns in FOUR turrets. Even using a simple rule of thumb thats a 25% decrease in armour requirement to protect the turrets, barbettes and magazines. Plus Bismarck's outdated incremental armour scheme meant there were mutliple thinner layers of armour distributed around the ship above her main deck armour, the KGVs did not have all that added weight of the additional armour layers, instead concentrating her weight of armour into her main deck and belt, one thicker piece of armour being more effective than multiple thinner pieces.
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