Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The Drydock - Episode 156" video.

  1. Compared to the prices the British were asking for refitted and somewhat modernized Colossus class ship like HMS Venerable, almost new when sold to the Dutch in 1948, there was no way a two ship class like Siapan could have competed, even if the USN wanted to sell them. The low cost enabled the Dutch to afford a complete modernization in 1955-58, including a new island, angled deck, and steam catapult. The cost for this modernization was helped by the fact the cost was spread to the same modernization done to the Brazilian Minas Gerais, ex-HMS Venerable, another Colossus class vessel. Even after a serious boiler room fire in 1968, boilers from the never completed HMS Leviathan, yet another Colossus class carrier, were available to replace the damaged boilers, and, although the Dutch were near to discarding their carrier, it was still repaired well enough (and cheaply enough) to sell to Argentina in I969, where it stayed in service until 1986 until various problems rendered her unserviceable until her scrapping in 2000. Still, she had some useful service in the Falklands War of 1982, nearly 40 years after the war she was built to fight.
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  2. I don't really understand the question about the Avengers at Midway. Is he asking about the Avengers that flew from Midway somehow alerting Hornet about the location of the Japanese carrier of the Striking Force? This would have been in violation of the rules of radio silence unless the aircraft was specifically tasked with finding the carriers and reporting to the fleet of their location. Hornet was holding at a point about 325 miles from Midway. Midway Avengers would have had to find the Japanese carrier and then been able to radio Hornet. Avengers had two radio sets, one VHF and one HF. VHF sets were uncommon in other aircraft simply because there wasn't room or weight available for them in smaller planes like the Dauntless. They were also in short supply at the time of Midway, so Avengers were about the only single engine aircraft that had them. Regardless, a VHF set at 325 miles wouldn't have had the range to reach Hornet. They were good for about 125 miles at 15,000 feet, with maybe 200 miles on a good day with some kind of atmospheric ducting going on. That leaves HF radio. It would have had the range under ideal conditions. but transmissions were in Morse code. The radio operator had to first convert a message from plain language to Morse, then to the security code of the day, then transmit the message. Receiving was the same thing in reverse. It was a slow and tedious process, and one prone to errors as individual characters were covered by atmospheric noise, and HF was very prone to that kind of noise. If the receiving operator noticed the error, the snder would have to repeat the whole message. Sometimes errors weren't noticed because a vital piece of something like the lat/long got copied wrong, and that error just got passed along. That's how the Hornet's air group ended u in the wrong place to begin with. Even if everything went perfectly, Hornet would have had to rebroadcast the location and hope all the planes got it, a highly unlikely happenstance. In mid-1942, pilots relied a lot mor on the wingman and what the squadron commander was doing rather than worrying about the radio.
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