Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The Drydock - Episode 007" video.

  1. Thanks a lot of for answering my questions about the Vanguard. As a Yank, I don't always understand British thinking about what ships were built and what weren't. All your reponses make sense. It's unfortunate that the British government never saw the possibility of the Vanguard being more than the world's largest and most heavily armed royal yacht, her main use until she was placed in reserve in 1955. It's unfortunate that she never participated in the Korean Conflict. The RN might have gained a new appreciation for the need for shore bombardment even without another world war After a fairly comprehensive and expensive refit, and being placed into reserve in 1955 , Mountbatten and Anthony Eden came to power and seemed to be bent on disposing of half the RN fleet. After just four years in reserve, the decision was made to scrap the Vanguard and, by 1960, she was gone. The USN/US government maintained many ships in reserve postwar, some of which were war weary and completely obsolete, like the USS Wichita, for fifteen or more years before the mass scraping program set in from 1960 to 1962. I guess the end of empire, in some people's minds, also meant the end of the need for the RN beyond nuclear submarines, and that the USN would become the protector of the UK itself. It was a decision that would come back to haunt the British in 1982.
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  2. The wholesale scraping of useful RN WWII ships hadn't even begun in 1956. You weren't betrayed by the US. You were betrayed by Anthony Eden and Louis Mountbatten. You were betrayed by vacillation about how to seize the canal that lasted for over three months, thus putting the invasion at the same time as the Soviet invasion of Hungary. You were betrayed with the appointment of Stockwell as task force commander. You were betrayed by an operation with insufficient amphibious craft to quickly seize the canal and carry forward Operation Musketeer before any other protests mattered. The US warned Britain and France that they didn't support military force in regaining control of the canal. Regardless, the British, French, and Israelis secretly planned to do just that. After not supporting the operation to begin with, and being put in the position of supporting an operation to reimpose British and French colonialism on one hand and oppose Soviet colonialism on the other, the US had no other choice to oppose both. The British didn't "stand" with the US in Korea. It was an operation of the United Nations, and they were required to assist in Korea. The combined numbers of troops from the much smaller Commonwealth countries of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand equaled the number of British troops that served in the conflict. The number of US troops committed was 326,000 compared to the British contribution of about 40,000. The only aircraft on the ground from the Commonwealth came from Australia and South Africa. The RAF didn't contribute any aircraft except for a single Sunderland unit. The RN was the only service that had a major British commitment of aircraft. Your understanding of history seems to be colored by your vitriolic hatred of the United States. Given the fact you could write unironically that the US only gave Britain a "little help" from 1939 to 1942 suggests your hatred of the US runs deeper than the just the Suez incident.
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  3. ha, do you brits have any sort of limit on your inability to comprehend English? You must, since you missed the part where I wrote "in some people's minds". Some people's minds included those in the Admiralty and 10 Downing Street. Maybe reading the story at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uk-military-navy-commentary/commentary-what-the-u-s-should-learn-from-britains-dying-navy-idUSKCN10L1AD will enlighten you to the current situation of the RN vs the UN.
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