Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 220" video.

  1. Thanks for addressing my question about Lexington cost overruns. Rather confirms my suspicion that the USN should have skipped them, gone straight to Ranger, saving the tonnage allocation for when they knew what they were doing when designing carriers. I can't help but wonder about the arguments that went on, to get progressively larger piles of money out of Congress.
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  2.  @theamericanpotatonamedphil4306  the Lexingtons had one major drawback, vs the early British carriers, they were built after the Washington Treaty. The treaty defined any carrier, built or building, at the time of the treaty as "experimental" and not subject to the treaty's 20 year replacement cycle. The RN could have built replacements for Argus, Eagle, and Hermes, whenever they wished. I have read that Argus was disarmed and converted to a tender in the 1930s, to free up the tonnage for Ark Royal. The US could do the same with Langley, and so she was converted to a tender to free up tonnage for Wasp. As the Lexington conversions did not start until after the treaty, they could not be replaced until they aged out, in the late 1940s, according to the treaty. The Lexingtons were very wasteful of the one commodity that was in short supply, tonnage. A Yorktown could carry nearly the same size air wing, on a third less displacement. Even Ranger had a larger hangar than Lexington. How much did the Lexingtons contribute to USN design expertise? The Ranger followed the lead of Langley, not Lexington. Like Langley, Ranger had the boilers far aft, with hinged, deck edge, funnels, and, as originally planned, had no island. Two Rangers could have provided all the operational experience as the two Lexingtons did, on less than half the displacement, and at dramatically lower cost.
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  3. wrt the question about the USN in WWI, specifically, Battleship Division Nine. By some accounts, the RN was running out of men. They were using several pre-dreadnoughts as convoy escorts. The RN needed the men from those pre-dreadnoughts to man new destroyers and cruisers, so looked to the US to take over the job the pre-dreadnoughts had been performing. One criteria, as every drop of oil in the UK had to be shipped in, through the gauntlet of U-Boats, was that the US battleships be coal-fired. The initial squadron was New York, Wyoming, Florida, and Delaware. After some consultation with his British counterparts, Admiral Rodman made adjustments, adding Texas and Arkansas to the squadron, and sending Delaware back to the US. The jobs they did, like escorting iron ore carriers from Norway to the UK were not glamorous, but necessary. The pic Drac showed was the initial squadron arriving at Scapa on December 7, 1917.
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  4.  @CharlesStearman  I only know what I can read. Both the page on BatDiv9 on the Naval History And Heritage Command site, and the Wiki article say that, by 1917, the RN needed to lay up some pre-dreadnoughts to free up their crews for reassignment to destroyers and cruisers, and asked the US to backfill the RN's battleship force.
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