Comments by "" (@VersusARCH) on "The Drydock - Episode 100" video.

German raiders carried floatplanes in both world wars (SMS Wolf in WW1 and most of them in WW2) and they did carry bombs but not torpedos. But interestingly the KMS Michel carried torpedo boats. There were torpedo carrying floatplanes like the M6A Serian.
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@Drachinifel Yes the Serian was highly specialized plane (for I-400 and AE class submarines of the IJN) and reached operational status too late to see combat in WW2. I just mentioned it as trivia. There were other torpedo-capable floatplananes in both world wars, albeit to my knowledge none were used on merchant raiders, mostly for the reasons you mentioned.
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IMHO the German camouflage paint scheme on the Tirpitz kinda makes it look like an un-modernized Queen-Elizabeth class ship or possibly even an R-class when seen from the side. I dunno whether that too was the intent and if it was if it worked.
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0:52 Thank you for addressing this. Japan relied LESS on the battleships than ANY OTHER MAJOR NAVY. Because they had excellent naval aviation. And only when its back was broken (locally or globally) did they attempt to rely on the big guns of their battleships. But you are wrong in assuming the Japanese considered their battleships as decisive weapons. I know many US historians are propagating that erroneous theory and I am sad to see you fell into the trap of accepting it uncritically. No. They considered them a second rate reserve that they used only when considered absolutely necessary and all other options were exhausted. Because they knew they were far less cost-effective than the aviation and lesser warships not to mention they were morale keeping units with a lot of prestige in public perception as well as the most difficult (in the given circumstances impossible) to replace.
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@davefranklin7305 That might be true among the conservative higher ups like Osami Nagano, mostly prior to Pearl Harbor, but they were not in operational command of the Combined fleet which was handled by their younger and more up-to-date, tech savvy subordinates like Yamamoto or Ozawa. Yamamoto committed the Kongos to shell the Henderson Field on Guadalcanal only after the carriers, land airpower and lesser warships got beaten back (Eastern Solomons, Santa Cruz, Cape Esperance, aerial campaign from Rabaul). At Midway - he withdrew them after the carrier debacle (USN targets too fast, the island - not worth it). Ozawa's plan for the battle of the Philippine Sea relied on long range airstrikes, battleships were only the escort. Only at Leyte Gulf where his air arm was woefully inadequate did he commit the battleships as the main striking force - because he had nothing left. No oplan survives contact with the enemy. Also applies to contact with technological advances. Whether rationalizing holding back battleships as the main strike force was used in planning papers to sell any particular carrier airpower-reliant plan to any conservative higher-ups I don't know but that is the likeliest explanation. By looking of what the Japanese actually did - they sure did not consider the battleships as a decisive weapon. Simply too slow, too heavy on resource consumption, firepower of too short a range compared to airpower, too big a moral blow if lost, too vulnerable to air or submarine attack. In short - cost innefficient. Finally - after Midway they began a huge crash program to rebuild the Kido Butai that included turning the two Ises to hybrid battleship-carriers, while after losing two Kongos at Guadalcanal they - as Drach said, converted the 3rd Yamato Class battleship hull to - not a carrier (since - low top speed) but - a huge air transport (with limited asw carrier capability for self defense). If this isn't a proof enough that they put emphasis on airpower (in case of carrier airpower - hit and run) rather than battleship guns - I don't know what is.
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38:19 - while the RN trolled the French, the French did respond a bit - Surcouf, Suffren, Dugay-Trouin, Massena, Montcalm, later also De Grasse for instance - named after the French naval and land commanders successful against the British. Oddly enough the British kinda trolled THEMSELVES (or showed a bit of solidarity with their French allies - take your pick) with the monitors Marchal Soult (named after a Napoleon's marshal, a fierce adversary of the British in the Peninsular war) and Marchal Ney named after a Napoleon's marshal that beat them at Quatre Bras (debatable). The Dutch navy trolled the RN with the names of their cruisers and destroyers - named after their famous admirals that successfully fought the English in the Anglo-Dutch wars (must have been fun for the captain of the RN HEAVY cruiser Exeter to be commanded from the Dutch flagship of the ABDA force at the Battle of the Java Sea - the LIGHT cruiser De Ruyter...). But the USN was perhaps the biggest troll of the British... Ships named Yorktown, Lexington, Saratoga, Bunker Hill, Bon Homme Richard... All connected to US victories over the British during the US War of Independence. And even if one got sunk the USN would give the same name to a new ship... Must have been fun for the British Pacific Fleet in late WW2 operating with the USN... In turn, one navy that nowadays kinda trolls the USN is the JMSDF - re-using the names of the Kido Butai's carriers and other major units of the IJN that terrorized the Americans in early Pacific War (although many of the names have actually had a far longer tradition in the IJN).
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@bkjeong4302 I find the American approach similar to the Japanese. They used theirs more frequently since they were on the offensive and needed to do shore bombardment. Off Guadalcanal assets of both sides were temporarily exhausted when they used them. Spruance used them needlessly at Truk, IMHO primaraly to allow them to collect experience, but since it was fishing in a barrel no harm was done. USN built 10 battleships after the Japanese built their last one, but that is more due to USN utilizing its industrial superiority to play it absolutely safe - i. e. to be superior to opposition in every imaginable respect, rather than any obsessions with battleships (they cancelled the Montanas, but persisted with the Essex swarm as well as designing the Midways). Among the 3 major carrier capable navies it is the RN that put the comparatively greatest emphasis on battleships compared to carrier aviation. But only comparatively, and mostly due to most limited funding (although it does merit an interesting comparison with Japan which had been fighting a massive war in China for 4 years yet managed to allocate enough resources for their naval aviation to make it second to none in late 1941.). Both sides mostly used battleships as defense of carriers for the, in Pacific very unlikely event, several days of bad weather prevented air operations and enabled enemy surface fleet to threaten or even force a surface action.
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@ibbi32 Where did you get that? The Japanese WW2 destroyers were heavily armed, especially for their displacement. One supposed exception was the heavy Akizuki class armed only with 100mm guns but the Japanese actually rated that class the most useful as those 100mm guns were true dual purpose guns making them effective AAA escorts.
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@johnshepherd8687 Can you confirm AF was on the diplomatic plate?
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@Cbabilon675 Because they mostly used existing ships and by the time all of them got retrofitted with torpedo bulges in the limited number of drydocks the war would have been lost. Many times over.
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@thebismarkandthehood The Japanese harbor security was heavy (and the US spy network in Japan was... NOT), they did not discuss their true stats over the radio to be picked up by codebreakers and what data on the class the Japanese did release to to public during the war was misleading. For instance they released a photo of the new heavy cruiser Tone as the photo of the Yamato...
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@matsv201 There were many types but most were impractically large for any shipborne operation, let alone from a relatively small fast freighter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_torpedo_bombers
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One more interesting "weapon" of the WW2 Arado 196 floatplanes the German commerce raiders employed occassionally was a “cable bomb"-a kinda lasso made out of cable which it would use to try to take out radio antenna emmitters of any allied or neutral ships the plane spotted and was to direct the raider to attack. The planes were unmarked and attacked with an advantage of surprise. By far the strongest defense of a raider was stealth, and when surprise-attacking an unsuspecting merchant, (without trying with threats first), at least some of the raider's gunners would be targeting the radio equipment so as to prevent the merchant to send a message describing what is happening and attracting any nearby enemy warships to rush to the location and find the raider (RN quickly introduced a universal code R...R...R...R... for all allied and neutral merchant ships to quickly signal a raider attack - presumably relying on radio triangulation to work out the location. They also developed a secret code for every allied and neutral ship - if an intercepted ship who identified herself as a particular allied or neutral merchant failed to communicate that ship's secret code upon request from the intercepting warship - that would mean that she is in fact a camouflaged enemy raider). The floatplane's wire bomb was an extension of that tactic.
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@lycossurfer8851 No, this is the one I read :) https://www.njuskalo.hr/image-w920x690/antikvarne-knjige/gusari-slika-121334515.jpg
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