Comments by "Frank DeMaris" (@kemarisite) on "Drachinifel"
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@dreamingflurry2729 not because they might turn into enemies, but that the enemy you were fighting together might seize valuable assets if those assets aren't moved completely out of reach. What, you're going to trust Hitler when he says he doesn't want your ships? Can we even count the times that Hitler said, "Just give me this, I dont want anything else" and a month later he's making more demands? Hm, Rhineland, rearmament, ships over 10,000 tons, Sudetenland, the rest of Czechoslovakia, Poland ... Now we're supposed to trust that Hitler won't decide he needs those ships and just come take them? Or trust that the new French government, which just broke its promise not to seek a separate peace, will scuttle the ships before the Germans can seize them?
However distasteful the final outcome, the British did what was necessary at the time given their decision to continue resisting Hitler. If Gensoul had just accepted one of the options offered by the British, an option Darlan had already approved of (relocation to French colonies in the Americas), then those thousand or so French sailors would have lived to join the Free French in 1942.
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Of the five major surface actions off Guadalcanal, each side indisputably won two and the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal is just a near-death mess. At Cape Esperance, the US lost a destroyer and had two cruisers damaged (Boise heavily so), while sinking a cruiser and a destroyer and heavily damaging a second cruiser. Balance of damage is a bit in favor of the US, and they held the field. At the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, the US lost two destroyers sunk and two crippled, with South Dakota heavily damaged but withdrawn succesfully, while sinking Kirishima and a destroyer. Balance is again slightly thin the US favor. Savo Island and Tassafaronga were far more disproportionate losses for the US, which sank a destroyer and scattered damage to other ships in exchange for five cruisers sunk and three more heavily damaged (between the two fights, all but one of the sinkings at Savo Island). At First Guadalcanal, almost the entire force of five cruisers and eight destroyers was expended (sunk or crippled) to sink a couple Japanese destroyers and set Hiei up for the Cactus Air Force to kill during the day. Even when the US won, they did so by doing slightly more damage and turning the Japanese back from their objectives, not by any kind of crushing tactical victory.
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When discussing US super heavy shells, it is important to keep in mind that the US designed a whole range of super heavy shells and, in same cases, used them in the same guns as some standard weight shells, allowing a clear basis for comparison. In particular, the US 8" gun cruisers up to Tuscaloosa used the standard weight shell only, while Tuscaloosa and onward had exactly the same guns but the ammunition feed accommodated the longer super heavy shell. Looking at the armor penetration tables for the two shells, it is clear that the super heavy shells offers better penetration at any realistic range. The lighter shell is good for 10" of armor at 9,000 yards while the super heavy shell pushes that range out to almost 11,000 yards for the same penetration. A similar comparison can be made for the 16”/45 guns of the Colorado class with standard shells vs the almost identical (but lighter) guns on the North Carolina and South Dakota classes with super heavy shells. The comparison would not be valid for Arkansas and Alaska because, although the guns are almost identical, Arkansas never received a modern AP shell for WW2. Similarly, it isn't really valid to compare the AP shells used in the 14" guns because the lighter shell was of an obsolescent design with only a small AP cap head and the increase in weight was not as large as for a super heavy shells.
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Max Hastings (Retribution) observed "[i]t was a sore point in the navy that officers received a disproportionate share of medals - they accounted for less than 10 percent of personnel, but received almost two-thirds of all decorations. They were the ones in the spotlight if a ship was deemed to have done something good, while their men remained 'bit players'." So, to a large extent the awarding of medals to Scott, Kidd, and Calaghan is the usual institutional bias, which I expect is present in the Royal Navy as well; how many more Teddy Sheeans or Jack Cornwells might there be given perfect knowledge and objectivity?
Note that Kidd, Calaghan, and Scott having to die in action to receive the Medal of Honor represents an enormous tightening of standards (and creation of lesser awards) compared to a generation before. The occupation of Veracruz in 1914 resulted in the awarding 56 Medals of Honor, many of which simply say it's for "distinguished conduct". Rear Admiral Frank G. Fletcher received one simply for directing the occupation, while his nephew Frank J. Fletcher was one of the numerous "distinguished conduct" MoHs. All of which points to the US Navy not quite having gotten the memo of a couple decades previous, that the Medal of Honor is not supposed to be an attendance award or good conduct medal, but only for those who exhibit bravery above and beyond the call of duty in the face of the enemy.
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@KPen3750 I think you're begging the question of Iowa being significantly outclassed by Yamato. First, the Iowa can make 33 knots while Yamato can only manage about 27, so Iowa will have a firm grip on the range the fight is conducted at. Iowa also has great radar and fire control, while Yamato has mediocre radar late in her career; Iowa actually straddled Nowaki at over 35,000 yards at Truk in February 1944, while Yamato's shooting at slow escort carriers in October was ... unimpressive. So the Iowa can hang out at long-ish range and still hit Yamato despite maneuvering to "chase salvos" from Yamato, while Yamato is going to have to get lucky to hit Iowa. Iowa doesn't have to close to try to penetrate the main belt until she's comfortable doing so, much like KGV and Rodney closed on Bismark once her fire was no longer much of a threat. Iowa Carrie's a 1.5" decapping plate, and an uncapped shell loses about a third of its penetrating power, so the 6" main deck should keep those shells out at these long ranges. Even if Yamato gets lucky and scores hits, it has to get lucky again to slow Iowa enough to close the range to where it can reasonably expect hits. Overall, I think it's a much more even fight than your question assumes.
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Note that many US WW1 and interwar designs started WW2 with 5"/25 AA guns and/or 5"/51 single purpose anti-ship guns. Many of the battleships recovered from Pearl Harbor had mixed batteries of 5"/51 and 5"/25 replaced with a uniform battery of 5"/38 (looking at you, California and Tennessee). While these guns used many of the same shells (Mark 35 AA common, for example), the 5"/25 used fixed ammunition while the 5"/38 used separate shell and propellant, with the propellant in a brass case, and the 5"/51 used separate bags of propellant. So while the commonality of shells simplified manufacturing, there are still separate ammunition trains for all three guns because of the way the propellant is handled. It wasnt fully resolved during the war, either, and USS Indianapolis, for example, still had those 5"/25 AA guns in 1945 when she was sunk.
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The first question, in which Drach mentions the effect of director control tables on the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914, goes a long way to answer the question I've posed a couple of times and had answered, but only in part, once. If these two battlecruisers had yet to be refitted with a fire control table, then it seems wildly unlikely that the armored cruisers in Troubridge's squadron in the Mediterranean had. If SMS Moltke did have that kind of fire control table, then that would appear to give Moltke a huge advantage over the armored cruisers to go along with its speed. If Moltke has the speed to control the range, and a central fire control table, then it can deliver well-aimed salvos at 10-12,000 yards while the British armored cruisers are throwing out shells with only the barest slim chance of scoring a lucky hit. So it would appear the key issue is whether Moltke had that fire control table or not.
Edit: as noted below, Goeben rather than Moltke. Since Goeben wasn't assigned to the Mediterranean until 1912, there may have been time for her to have been refitted with a central fire control table before that assignment.
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@baronungernthebloody553 warships could comfortably fight in the 15-20,000 yard range, although the average would be dragged down a bit by some actions like Cape Matapan and the Washington/Kirishima engagement. At Surigao Strait, the battle force commander ordered the line to open fire at 26,000 yards, but for target identification reasons they held fire until a little over 20,000 yards. At this kind of range, a smaller and lighter shell is worse because it has less inertia and loses velocity faster. As an example, the US had two general types of 16"/45 guns, those on the Colorados which used a 2,200 lb AP shell at a velocity of 2,500 fps, and those on the North Carolinas and South Dakotas which fired a 2,700 lb AP shell at about 2,300 fps. At 20,000 yards, both shells are traveling a little over 1,600 fps, but the extra mass gives the heavier shell an extra inch or so of armor penetration. The Nelsons in British service fired a 16" shell of just over 2,000 lb at about 2,600 fps at the muzzle, but at 20,000 yards it had also fallen to a velocity of about 1,600 fps. The German Scharnhorsts fired an 11" shell of just over 700 lb at 2,900 fps, but at 20,000 yards it had fallen to slightly under 1,600 fps. So at combat ranges these shells all tend toward the same velocity, regardless of size and weight, but as long as the shell and gun combo are still competitive in velocity at those combat ranges, the heavier shell will win (shell construction being equal).
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@TheKingofbrooklin it's a shorthand qualitative basis for comparing the firepower of two ships when the guns aren't the same caliber. If both ships have, say, 8" guns (treaty heavy cruisers), then it's easy to count the number of guns and compare. But, for example, does a Cleveland class CL with twelve 6" guns outgun a County class cruiser with eight 8" guns? You can calculate broadside weight by multiplying the number of guns by the weight of the shell for each ship. The Cleveland's 6" guns fire a shell weighing 130 lb, so the broadside weight is 1,560 lb, while the County's shells weigh 256 lb for a broadside weight of 2,048 lb. Broadside weight suggests the County has more main battery firepower than the Cleveland, all else being equal. This estimate can be refined by incorporating the rate of fire; if the County fires three times while the Cleveland fires 8 times, the broadside weight over one minute is now 6,144 lb for the County vs 12,480 lb for the Cleveland, which nearly explains why the US and UK built so many Brooklyns, Clevelands, Towns, and Crown Colonies.
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@sergarlantyrell7847 true range was in the neighborhood of 14,000 m (15,300 yd). At this range Bismark's shell is falling at an angle just under 10 degrees and should penetrate just under 3" of deck armor. However, Hood was also heeling 20 degrees in a turn to bring the stern guns to bear. This makes the angle of fall almost 30 degrees, analogous to a shot from closer to 30,000 m. At this distance, Bismark's shell should penetrate about 5" of deck armor. So yes, if it hadn't been for that turn at that time, Bismark's shell should have just skipped off Hood's deck armor.
Edit: after further review I realized the 20 degrees was Hood's rudder setting. So the general principle above is correct, Hood would be heeling in Bismark's direction and presenting a steeper deck angle, but the specifics about the 20 degrees and resulting penetration of deck armor are not. I have not been able to quickly find anything that would indicate how much Hood would heel at the start of a turn with 20 degrees of rudder at speed.
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@lexington476 quality of coal is mostly a question of impurities, untenable waste content, and water. Heating value of high quality coal (anthracite) will be greater for a given weight, so a ship with 100 tons of high-quality Welsh anthracite will have more energy available in its fuel bunker than a ship with 100 tons of lower quality bituminous coal or lignite. As a result of having more energy in its fuel, the ship burning high quality coal can travel further on 100 tons of coal than the same ship burning lower quality coal, or can burn those 100 tons over the same time period and be going faster. In addition, the ship burning high quality coal (which has fewer non combustible impurities) will emit less smoke (nondurable ash) to be spotted and confound visual gunnery, while producing less slag or bottom ash that still doesnt burn but remains in the boiler and will need to be cleaned out. Therefore, a ship burning good coal will be faster or go farther than a ship burning bad coal, while being more difficult to spot from its smoke, giving its gunners an easier time spotting and hitting the enemy (because they're less affe ted by their own smoke) and requiring less intensive maintenance.
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Regarding Bismark (and as another engineer), here here! Iowa exceeds Bismark's displacement by about as much as Bismark exceeds the treaty battleships (KGV, North Carolina, etc), but Bismark does not dominate the treaty battleships the way it is dominated by Iowa. Bismark has a weird legendary status because of the unique circumstances it found itself in. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had sunk quite a few ships on their voyage, but withdrawn from battleship opposition, even antiques like Ramilles. With the Bismark the Germans have a ship that doesn't have to withdraw from an R-class battleship, is fast enough to evade anything except Hood, Renown, or Repulse, but outguns the later two. Then it sinks Hood and prompts the RN to pause the rest of the war to sink the Bismark.
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The one thing I'm not hearing mentioned in the last rule of thumb for battlecruisers is the question of displacement. The Invincibles and their contemporary battleship classes displace around 20,000 tons, while the Renowns and Revenges displace a bit over 30,000 tons. With Hood and the Iowas, there is a large step change in displacement compared with the "contemporary" battleship classes, which is why they don't follow the rules of thumb: they have a lot more displacement so they don't have to trade off armor and weapons for speed compared to the "contemporary" battleship. If the Montanas had been built, they would have been the proper contemporary to the Iowa's, and would (edit: might) have provided a suitable basis for comparison that follows the rule (i.e., the Iowas would have been the battlecruiser version of the Montanas). Edit: except that the Montanas represent another big jump in displacement, from 60,000 tons full load to 70,000 tons, so less apt q comparison than I was thinking.
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The Iowas tend to have the most readily available detail on this. The main battery turrets require around 94 men each, so there's 282. The secondary battery requires 20 or so men for each of 10 mounts, so that's another 200. The quad 40 mm Bofors mounts take about a dozen each, so that's another 240, plus a gunner and assistant for each of the 20 mm Oerlikons, total of about 320 for the light and medium AA guns. That's a total of about 800 men just to man all the guns, not counting fire control, engines, boilers, damage control, communications, watch, bridge, etc.
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@2:10:37 we do, in fact, have data for comparing the 16" "super heavy" shell to a standard weight shell. We have two 16"/45 guns in US service that are remarkably similar guns except for the shells. The Colorado class ships used the Mark 5 or Mark 8 gun with the 2,240 lb Mark 5 shell, while the fast battleships (except the Iowas) used the Mark 6 gun with the 2,700 pound Mark 8 AP shell. Chamber volume for the two guns was slightly different, with the Mark 5 and Mark 8 guns having 1.3% more chamber volume but being much heavier because they were older designs. The larger chamber volume allows the Mark 5 and 8 guns another 10 pounds of propellant, or about a 1.8% increase in propellant. Combined with the lighter shell, that gives the Mark 5 and 8 guns another 200 ft/sec muzzle velocity with a full charge.
Despite the higher muzzle velocity, the same USN empirical formula shows the Mark 8 shell is going only 50 ft/sec slower by the time it reaches 15,000 yards, and it has a full inch of additional penetration against belt armor at that range, or half an inch of deck armor. Even at the muzzle for a contact shot, the formula says the Mark 8 shell has a small fraction of an inch of additional penetration over the Mark 5 shell at the higher velocity. At ranges over 15,000 yards the situation just keeps getting worse for the lighter shell, with the heavier Mark 8 shell striking with the same velocity at 25,000 yards and still managing an extra 1.3" of belt penetration or 0.98" of deck penetration. The one advantage the Mark 5 shell has is a flatter trajectory, striking at 16.33 degrees at 20,000 yards compared with 17.9 degrees, and arriving about two seconds sooner, so the chances of hitting with any particular shell may be ever so slightly greater.
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If the USN had better information on the 24" Type 93 before the war, then the more important difference will lie in ship captains and flag officers realizing they're in torpedo range and taking evasive action. It won't help at Savo Island (surprise will do that), but at many later battles (notably Tassafaronga) ships stayed on base course and speed because the range was too great for torpedoes, and got hammered.
By Samar, the problems with the Mark 13, 14, and 15 torpedoes had been resolved, so while a larger (1,000 lb vs 700 lb) warhead would have been useful it wouldn't have made a huge difference. As noted, it (1,000 lb of torpedo rather than 700 lb) might have resulted in some outright sinkings rather than cripples that had to be sunk by aircraft later.
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@alessandrorizzuti7857 horribly for the Japanese. An Iowa is significantly faster than anything the Japanese had in service at the time, so it can chose whatever range it wants from whatever portion of the Japanese fleet it chooses. By the time an Iowa would be commission, the Mark 8 fire control radar was in service, which is the radar that distinguished West Virginia, California, and Tennessee from Maryland, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania at Surigao Strait and allowed West Virginia to score first salvo hits at over 20,000 yards. By contrast, the historic fleets at Tsushima were fighting at ranges out to the then-unheard-of 10,000 yards (although mostly around 6,500 yards). The Iowa could basically pick a target, sit out at, maybe, 14,000 yards (5" range), and obliterate one major Japanese ship with every 2-3 salvos while the 5" guns are smashing torpedo boats and destroyers long before they could reach torpedo range. Any random Japanese 12" hit would have no chance of penetrating any armored portion of Iowa, as no Japanese 12" shell penetrated more than 6" of Russian armor during the war, even at the much shorter ranges of that war.
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@tommeakin1732 at 10 kg the bursting charge is on the small side, but I dont think we can call it "tiny" unless we're using the same word to describe all US bursting charges. The 14" guns of the USN had almost identical 10 kg bursting charges, albeit explosive D rather than TNT, and while the British 15"/42 had an 18 kg bursting charge the US 16" Mark 8 also had an 18 kg bursting charge.
Theoretical rate of fire is not a particularly useful basis of comparison because, in practice, these guns rarely fire more than about one round per gun per minute. Bismark did almost exactly that at Denmark Strait, with half-salvos for ranging about every 30 seconds at first. Similarly, West Virginia at Surigao Strait opened fire at 0352 and ceased fired at 0402, having fired 91 rounds for a rate of 1.14 rounds per gun per minute. Even dropping out the last two half-salvos, she fired 86 rounds over 8 minutes 14 seconds, a rate of 1.3 rounds per gun per minute. It really just isn't practical to take advantage of the theoretical rate of fire without either ignoring the issue of correction (West Virginia had great radar and was on target for the entire engagement) or getting so close that the correction can be made by the time the guns are reloaded, i.e., down around 15,000 yards.
As for the lack of an HE shell, navweaps says the French didn't develop an HE shell for their 15" guns until 1949.
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@spookyshadowhawk6776 interestingly, the Germans did raid Scapa Flow a few times, including with 32 Ju-88s in March 1940. However, the description of this as a Pearl Harbor type raid suggests it is being done as an opening gambit. The Germans only had a dozen Ju-88s in service in September 1939, with only about one aircraft being completed each week at that time. 32 aircraft six months later may have been a big chunk of the Ju-88 force, although with over 15,000 of all variants produced by the end of the war it would obviously be possible to manage a 200-plane raid by, say, the summer of 1940, especially if the type was not being used as part of the battle further south. What it would accomplish by almost a year into the war and in the absence of surprise is probably very little. Note that the Germans didn't bother with aerial torpedoes until about 1941, and torpedoes would arguably be the better weapon for such an air raid until the Fritz X comesinto service in 1943.
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@karlvongazenberg8398 it isnt just better marketing. The pom-pom used a low-velocity round, at about 1,920 fps (585 m/s). Even when the high velocity round was introduced, it only got up to 2,300 fps (701 m/s), while the Bofors round came out at about 2,800 fps (850 m/s), for a longer effective range and flatter trajectory with an almost identical proje tile and bursting charge. Ammunition feed is also advantageous for the Bofors in some ways, as it can sustain its rate of fire as long as the ammunition supply holds out (yes, I know, it can get interrupted briefly as ammo is mishandled or just passed slowly as men get tired or have to go deeper into the magazine). The pom-pom has a definite belt capacity, and when the box is expended it has to cease firing entirely to change out the ammo box. At most, with a 140 round box, this is about a minute and a half of continuous firing, but then firing has to stop entirely while the box is replaced. There is a big difference between "this gun stops for two to four seconds at a time while the ammunition supply catches up" and "this gun stops for 30 seconds to a minute at a time to replace the ammo box".
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@bkjeong4302 keep in mind that many of the early encounters also used early radar sets that weren't well understood by the officers relying on them. Metric-wave SC search radars had entered the fleet in the fall of 1941, while dramatically superior centimeter-wave SG search radars were first fitted in April 1942. On August 9, 1942 lookouts on Chokai spotted USS Blue at over 10,000 yards with Blue's radar obviously not spotting them. The southern cruiser group was spotted at about 13,000 yards and the USS Vincenes in the northern group at 18,000 yards at the same time the Japanese opened fire on the southern group. Even on November 15, Japanese optics had detected and tracked the enemy from shortly after 2200, with the subsequent time spent maneuvering to allow a sweeping unit to clear the path for the bombardment group to proceed unmolested. Washington's SG radar picked up the Japanese at about 18,000 yards some time around 2300, after the turn to the west that started with the destroyers at 2252. This is all from Richard Franks book on Guadalcanal where, in the conclusions, he clearly states that Japanese visual spotting saw the Americans before radar saw the Japanese at both Savo Island and the Lee-Kongo battleship match.
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@calvingreene90 probably nothing good for the B-17 or its reputation. Early torpedo bomber doctrine called for a launch at 110 knots and 50-100 feet, and I dont know how many pilots would want to take a big, slow B-17 that low and that close to enemy light AA (500-1000 yards). By late in the war, the Mark 13 could be dropped at up to 400 knots in a shallow dive and from 5,000 feet, which can translate into a launching distance out around 2,000 yards. Of course, if the Mark 13 and doctrine were properly developed in the 30s so that kind of launch was possible from 1941, then yes the B-17 could have been used as a torpedo bomber, just as the B-26 was, and probably would have been a lot more effective in the anti-shipping role than it was with bombs from 15,000 feet. But in that case, the TBDs would have been far more effective and survivable at Coral Sea and Midway too.
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@caracal2455 remember that a lot of those ships, particularly the bigger ones (Iowas, Essex swarm) had been authorized by legislation in the late 30s, with Carl Vinson as a major force behind them. These included the Naval Act of 1938, the 3rd Vinson Act of 1940, and the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940. Also, it probably isn't really accurate to call it a "relatively small navy", as the treaty limits (which the Navy had built out to) put them in a tie with the UK for 1st. Yes there were battleships lost at Pearl Harbor, but only two permanent losses and several Pearl Harbor survivors were back in service just a few months later, such as guarding against a Japanese victory at Midway in June. Lighter forces were almost unaffected by Pearl Harbor and were available as escorts for the carriers and for cruiser/destroyer engagements in the Guadalcanal campaign.
As for the question, it seems to me that almost everyone's infrastructure has fallen off so much that building such a replacement Navy would be unlikely outside of an existential war that offers enough time to rebuild infrastructure and settle on solid designs for that new infrastructure to churn out. Another 30 Years War, anyone (hopefully minus the religious elements)?
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I'm going to disagree slightly on the issue of US superheavy shells, particularly with regard to the issue of hitting and penetrating deck armor. Keep in mind that we have a good basis for comparison between the 16"/45 Mark 6 used on the North Carolinas and South Dakotas and the 16"/45 Marks 5 and 8 used on the Colorados. The former could use the superheavy Mark 8 AP (2,700 lb), while the later was limited to the Mark 5 AP (2,240 lb), with a muzzle velocity difference of about 200 ft/s between the two guns using AP. Despite the lower muzzle velocity, the Mark 6 gun firing Mark 8 shell has about the same penetration against belt armor at short range, an extra inch of penetration by 10,000 yards, and about an inch and a half at 20,000 yards where West Virginia was scoring early hits on Yamashiro. The heavier shell is better able to resist the effect of air on its ballistic path, whether that is the existence of air slowing it down or a crosswind trying to push it to the side, so it retains more energy on impact at those practical battle ranges.
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@Dave_Sisson he's actually got a very good point once you get past the dramatic overstatement of his argument. A carrier will naturally have the advantage of reach, with aircraft flying out hundreds of miles versus guns reaching out 10 miles (with some accuracy, 15-20 if you dont care about wasting ammo), and speed comparable to a fast battleship, so it can just hang around out of reach launching air strikes. Even at the end of the war, fighters accounted for the vast majority of attacking aircraft losses, not AA fire. I think the biggest flaw in his argument is a narrow timing issue, that when the UK and US began building fast battleships the treaties were limiting their ability to build more cruisers, so it wasn't battleships or cruisers, but battleships or nothing. Moreover, while you can build three cruisers with the tonnage of a battleship, you can't crew three cruisers with the crew from a battleship. At the end of war, the King asked for authorization to increase the navy to 3.4 million men, but would have needed 4.1 million to crew all the ships in service or under construction, so it's easy to see how the manpower issue was already there and could have been aggravated with some building alternatives. And that's with the Army only forming 88 infantry divisions, a number completely inadequate for a serious war in Europe.
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@bjorntorlarsson that's the immediate manning requirements for the guns and, where that information is readily available, the magazines and ammunition handling rooms. For the Bofors mounts, I'm specifically talking about the quad mounts used on larger ships, estimating one loader and one ammo handler per barrel, plus one man to train (rotate) the mount, another to elevate the mount, and a mount captain, technically 11. Note that most of these people, especially ammunition handlers for the light and medium AA, have regular jobs on the ship (one watch out of three doing whatever it is) and feeding the guns is their battle station.
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There is a lot to that, and the destroyer commanders were definitely much happier when they were freed to operate under their own doctrine in some of the 1943 actions. At the same time, their successes in 1943 and 1944 were coming at a time when the fixes to the Mark 14 were coming online and propagating to the Mark 15 the destroyers carried. However, I also think most of the commanders (admirals especially) responsible for those 1942 actions had failed to keep up with te hnical developments in radar and, therefore, failed to make good use of it. Before Savo Island the entrances around Savo were patrolled by radar-equipped destroyers, but their patrols weren't coordinated so gaps opened up which Mikawa happened to slip through. Callaghan used San Francisco, with its older SC radar as his flagship while placing Scott in Atlanta, with superior SG radar, immediately in front of him, and none of the SG radar destroyers was in the lead. Wright commanded from Minneapolis, which had SG radar, but denied his lead destroyers permission to launch torpedoes from 7,000 yards on a closing course. He then further frustrated the destroyer commanders by announcing his presence with gunfire before the destroyers had finished launching their torpedoes. Only Lee seems to have fully understood his radar and exploited its advantages.
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As far as the New Orleans class goes, this is a question I've been considering for a while, albeit more broadly applied to all US treaty heavy cruisers. After all, there are four treaty heavy cruiser classes (Pensacola, Northampton, Portland, New Orleans), five if you add the unique Wichita. Of those 18 CAs, 7 were sunk, 6 of them during the first two years of the war with Indianapolis (Portland-class) being sunk by submarine torpedo in 1945. Several others suffered heavy damage during some of those early battles (the Oprah-show at Tassafaronga (love that image, "You get a torpedo, and you get a torpedo …"), the bar-brawl with the lights shot out on November 13th) even though they didn't sink. I suspect it has a lot more to do with the fact that the US had treaty-compliant cruisers engaged in desperate surface actions against cruisers and destroyers with much bigger torpedoes than the US anticipated when designing their cruisers. These close-range night actions played into the hands of the Japanese navy and what they had spent years training for, not that the US had the luxury of not engaging in those fights. The fact that both Pensacolas survived the war is more to the fact that they were seen as weaker than the later classes and not committed to those night surface actions in the southwest Pacific.
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@MrArtbv actual weight isnt as important as sectional density and ballistic coefficient. The later is determined based on actual shell and windscreen geometry, but the former (important for penetration and velocity retention) is simply the weight divided by the cross-sectional area. The 15" shell has about 44% greater se tonal density, so it retains velocity better. However, the 11" AP starts at such a higher velocity that it still retains almost the same velocity at 26,000 yards as the 15" shell. At 25,000 yards, the 15" is travelling at 1,460 fps and falling at an angle of 26.3 degrees, while at 25,000 m (27,340 yards) the 11" is slightly slower at 1,430 fps, but only falling at an angle of 25.7 degrees. This means the 11" gun has a slightly flatter trajectory at the 26,000 yard target, and a wider danger space for hitting that target. It's not a huge difference, and the 15" will penetrate better at that range, but the 11" will have a slightly easier time hitting that target..
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@Niels_Larsen almost everyone used picric acid during WW1 under a variety of names (shellite, martensite, ecrasite, shimose powder, etc). The major exceptions were the US, which used ammonium picrate (explosive D), and Germany, which used TNT blocks stacked inside the shell with some packing. Those countries that had used picric acid switched to more stable explosives or to mixtures of picric acid and more stable explosives (British "shellite" was, by WW2, a 70/30 mixture of picric acid and dinitrophenol). The navweaps website provides a lot of detail on the weapons and fillers used, although it can take a lot of looking for anything in particular.
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@jamesd3472 While the RN only built two classes of 8" gun cruisers (County and York), they built a total of 15 of them, whereas the USN went through four class les of cruisers to get to that point (Pensacola, Northampton, Portland, and New Orleans). The USN did lay down several classes of additional 8" gun cruisers during the war (Baltimore, Oregon City, Des Moines), but the earliest of those to be completed wasnt commissioned until April 1943 because the navy prioritized the 6" armed Clevelands. As noted, the RN built a lot of smaller cruisers (York, Leander, Arethusa classes) and kept C and D class cruisers in service to have lots of cruiser hulls for commerce protection. The fact of the matter, though, is that faster firing 6" guns are a lot more useful in swatting destroyers in night engagements, still useful against other cruisers, and still about as useless as 8" guns against battleship armor. Plus, the USN had the luxury of both time and distance to allow it to build more 8" gun cruisers as well as the 12" gunned Alaska class.
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For the alternative of Yamato at Guadalcanal in mid-Novembet, remember that Kirishima historically took a bunch of "shorts" that hit below the armor belt, so if Yamato takes the same hits it may survive but be extremely slow if it doesn't sink. Envision what happened to Hiei during the day on the 13th and Yamato eventually being scuttled.
To clarify, I'm envision Yamato replacing both Hiei and Kirishima, and from a fuel perspective that's just about right as Yamato burns 14 tons of fuel an hour at 16 knots while two Kongos burn just over 18 tons total. Yamato also has a lower top speed, so the high-speed run under cover of darkness has less margin for error for Yamato. I'd expect Yamato to pull back far enough (as Kirishima did) to be out of range of air attack on the 13th except possibly for the dawn search, so I'm not expecting any bomb hits during the day on the 13th.
For the battle on the 13th, Hiei was the focus of attention and also did quite a bit of damage to the US squadron; Kirishima contributed quite a bit less. Yamato has a good shot at crippling Helena (the last uncrippled US cruiser) and finishing off cripples like Portland and Juneau if it sticks around to do so, but that risks more air attacks given its slower speed exiting the battle area.
Historically, Kirishima still had incindiary shrapnel ready on the 14th, so most of its hits on South Dakota weren't a threat. There is one 14" AP hit to South Dakota's #2 main battery barbette, and you'd think that replacing that hit with an 18" would kill that turret completely. However, that shell first struck a hatch cover and started yawing, so by the time it hit the barbette it was sideways and I wouldn't expect that to penetrate the barbette armor. If Yamato is distracted by Washington at the same time, right after this hit, then South Dakota still has a good chance to get away. Whether Washington gets away depends a great deal on whether Yamato scores any hits that affect her speed. If Washington gets slowed down, the the Japanese cruisers can go after her with torpedoes and finish her off. Otherwise, I think Washington has a good chance to get away as it historically did, leaving Yamato badly hurting for the Henderson Field/Enterprise aircraft to finish off.
Yes, a lot of this assumes certain hits that historically happened are replicated. Yamato would better resist San Francisco's hit that historically wrecked Hiei's steering gear. South Dakota would not lose the #2 turret to a sideways 18" shell any more than to a sideways 14" shell.
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True as far as it goes. However, every WW2 torpedo I've checked on had at least two, and frequently three, speed settings. Fuel and oxidizer are fixed, so range is however far the torpedo will travel with that fixed supply of fuel at that speed setting. The 24" Type 93 had a slow speed setting of about 36 knots, which produced a range of about 40 km, beyond visual range from a sub in all likelihood. The fast speed setting was 48-50 knots, which cut the range to about 20 km. The 21" Type 95 would maintain that fast speed, but only had a range of about 5.5 km, easily long enough when most submarines are creeping to with a couple km anyway. The two weapons are actually the same overall length (9 m), but the extra diameter makes the type 93 much heavier, 2700 kg compared to 1700 kg, and with a substantially larger warhead in addition to far more fuel and oxidizer.
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Short version of my question: is the conventional wisdom that Admiral King bears a lot of blame for the losses of the American coast in early 1942 fair, or does the criticism demand that King take certain actions that were outside his authority?
The Timeghost WW2 channel recently touched on the Second Happy Time in early WW2, leading to posts repeating the conventional wisdom that Admiral King bears a lot of responsibility for the ships lost and crews killed because he did not organize convoys, did not black out cities, lighthouses, and other aids to navigation, and rejected British advice to this effect because of his Anglophobia. I find myself having to question this conventional wisdom for a couple of reasons.
First, what authority does the US Navy and its Commander in Chief/Chief of Naval Operations have to order a civilian ship captain to refrain from sailing once his cargo is loaded? If the ship has been chartered by the Navy to carry a particular cargo somewhere, then sure the Navy has a say in when and how that cargo is delivered, and the Navy also operated some of its own cargo ships later in the war, but I'm talking about Captain Harvey of the SS Farquarth with a load of lumber going from Portland, Maine to Charleston, South Carolina. I don't believe the Navy has the authority to order Captain Harvey to wait a week for the rest of the ships in the convoy (although the Coast Guard might have that authority). Was there any law or regulations giving the Navy that authority, and when was it adopted?
Second, the lighthouses and aids to navigation are under the authority of the US Coast Guard, which was part of the Navy Department since WW but under its own chain of command under Admiral Russel Waesche (during WW2), who would be answerable to Secretary of the Navy Knox. It seems to me it would be up to the Navy Secretary and Coast Guard to black out the lighthouses and shut down aids to navigation, in addition to possibly having the authority to regulate civilian ship sailings and form convoys.
Third, blackouts for coastal cities is completely outside the Navy's authority, or anyone else in the federal government. Even after the Office of Civil Defense was established, the blackout "orders" are actually requests signed by the state governors and local military post commanders.
Finally, King was notoriously impatient with fools, officers who did not measure up to his standards in carrying out their assignments (part of the infamous "He hated everyone" legend). He had prior experience in WW1 in the UK and I don't see any way he could have been ignorant of the importance of the UK having adopted the convoy system in 1917. His career included a number of postings associated with submarines following WW1, including a couple of operations to salvage submarines that had sunk in accidents (S-4 and S-51), so even if he never commanded a submarine himself its hard to see how some institutional knowledge about convoys making life more difficult for submariners would not enter into his awareness.
I see that Michael Gannon blamed King for failing to take British advice, and it appears other historians have accepted Gannon's portrayal of King, but for the reasons given above I have to wonder if this is really a fair criticism. It seems to me that much of the criticism, even accepting a mindless Anglophobia, blames King for not doing things that he had no authority to do anyway. The Coast Guard had authority over lighthouses and aids to navigation, and may have had the authority to prevent civilian ships from sailing outside of convoys, and no one at the federal level had the authority to order coastal cities to be blacked out. King could obviously have suggested to Knox that the Admiral Waesche should be ordered to shut down lighthouses and impose a convoy system, but I can't imagine King being able to do so with sufficient diplomacy to not raise questions about what the CNO is doing that he has time to worry about how the Coast Guard is doing its job. I've been a department head and have some idea how fine a line that can be to walk. I'm open to being persuaded that King had the de jure authority to do some of these things, but at this point it appears to me he is criticized for respecting the limits of his authority and expecting others to do their jobs as diligently as he does his.
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A couple of related questions. As we all know, the RN had problems at Jutland because its shells detonated prematurely. These shells used Lyddite (picric acid) as a burster, which is more stable than nitroglycerin and black powder, but still wasn't stable enough, in combination with the fuses used, to fully penetrate German armor before exploding. The Japanese also used picric acid (shimose powder) in their shells during the Russo-Japanese war, but didn't have the same problem (once they got some good fuses). One theory I've heard is that the Japanese applied a layer of lacquer to the inside of the shells, which kept the picric acid out of contact with the steel, while the British did not and this allowed the picric acid to react with the steel over time and form picric acid salts, which are incredibly unstable. Is there any validity to this notion?
On a related note, during yesterday's live stream there was a question that posited the US fleet taking the place of the British fleet at Jutland. One thing you didn't mention is that the US used a different burster, explosive D or ammonium picrate, in their shells, which should perform better than picric acid. Would those US shells (as available in 1916) have performed comparably to the later British "greenboy" shells, or somewhere in between the shells at Jutland and the green boy shells?
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@lukedogwalker Max Hastimgs, in describing the sinking of the MV Wilhem Gustloff, mentions an officer traveling with his wife and children during the evacuation from Danzig (Gdansk). After the ship was torpedoed by S-13, this officer shot his wife, both children, and then himself in their stateroom to save them from drowning/freezing in the Baltic Sea. Tens of millions of sailors over the millennia have deliberately chosen not to learn to swim, on the grounds that a quick death from drowning is better than prolonged suffering for hours or days.
This is a fundamental problem that comes up with the use of small ships, like submarines, for commerce raiding. For centuries, commerce raiders would take prizes and sail them (along with their passengers and crew) back to a port for disposal. Submarines have plenty of firepower for sinking both merchant and war ships, but do not have the room to rescue survivors or convey them to a place of safety before sinking their ship in accordance with the laws of war. Graf Spee, at the River Platte, carried dozens to hundreds of survivors from her victims.and had sent hundreds more back to Germany aboard Altmark. The war crime of submarines sinking ships without following cruiser rules is a natural result of using submarines and has nothing to do with the nationality of the individuals involved.
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@Cbabilon675 Hiei, absolutely, assuming it got that close and stuck around that long, or maybe suffered a breakdown that allowed Texas to catch it. Fuso and Nagato, [edit] maybe and probably not, respectively. Fuso also has 14" guns, but two more barrels, while Nagato has 16" guns. Armor is such that either side should be able to penetrate the other at any reasonable battle range. If Texas can arrange a night or bad weather engagement after it gets radar, then the odds improve a bit. Again, assuming the Japanese ship sticks around for the fight, even Fuso has a three knot speed advantage over Texas.
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@dbuckleton In Shattered Sword, Parschall and Tully go into detail on the damage, both from the bombs and the subsequent fires. Multiple hits to the flight deck with 1,000 lb armor piercing bombs (edit: after looking again I see it was one 1,000 lb bomb with the rest 500 lb) which, at this stage in the war, had 0.01 se ond delay fuses and would have detonated 5-6 feet below the ceiling in the hangar space, turned the hangar into a charnel house. Fuel from wrecked aircraft caught fire and turned that space into a raging inferno, an almost impassable barrier to evacuation from deeper within the ship. As the day wore on and the fires raged, Kaga was wracked by internal explosions that blew noticable parts off the ship (I remember a separate piece of wreckage was a sponsor with a couple of 25 km gun mounts, hundreds or thousands of meters away from the main wreck). If the Japanese had gotten her home, Kaga would have been good only for scrap, so it really shouldn't surprise anyone that, after everyone who could abandoned ship, such a large fra tion of the below decks crew was lost. Kaga suffered large losses in seamen, ships engineers, and aircraft mechanics.
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@stanklepoot do I really think that, for certain? No, I am raising it as a possibility considering all the events of the intervening two years. Remember, Darlan was unavailable in July of 1940, but back on duty soon after the attack. Giving the fleet to the Germans was a non-starter under Darlan. Two years later, he's in North Africa taking over as governor of Free French North Africa, and then being assassinated. By late 1942 it was clear that German defeat was only a question of time, and the rapacity of the German occupation was well known throughout Vichy France. The fleet has sat essentially idle in Toulon for over two years while the British kept fighting. I think it's possible that the French (not because they're French but because they're human) consoled themselves with the knowledge that, by keeping the fleet out of German hands, they were in some way proving that the British were wrong not to trust them, and that this contributed to the successful scuttling.
Not that the Germans gave themselves much chance of successfully seizing the French fleet. Case Anton began on November 11, but the Germans didn't get any force into Toulon to get control of the ships until the morning of the 27th. The Italians were long since reduced to doing almost nothing with their fleet because of fuel shortages, so adding to French ships without any additional fuel supplies would accomplish nothing in the Med. The German heavy units were reduced to conducting half-hearted sorties to try to intercept Arctic convoys, and the French fleet wouldn't make it to Norway even if it was seized and sent that direction. While Operation Lila was officially a failure, I would honestly be surprised if the Germans were all that distressed by the result. Scuttled or or rotting in Italian ports, as long as they're not with the Free French it's all the same.
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@jimtalbott9535 that question needs to be clarified a little. You asked about the electrical-mechanical fire control system vs the unaided eye, which could mean just looking over the top of the barrel and trying to time the roll of the ship. If that's what you meant, then the difference is huge, taking practical gunnery ranges from hundreds to a few thousand yards out to well over 10,000 yards.
What I suspect t you meant, though, has to do with optical range finding vs radar range finding, with the mechanical ballistic computer remaining the same. In that case, it really depends on the quality of the rangefinders and the conditions of the engagement. A ship with a number of high quality optical rangefinders (Italian or Japanese, for example) in a good weather daylight engagement would have no real disadvantage against an opponent with fire control radar, even a good one like the later war US Mark 8. At night (Surigao Strait or 2nd Naval Battle of Guadalcanal), or in bad weather (North Cape) fire control radar ranging can provide a huge advantage over optical ranging.
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@pioneer_1148 as I recall, the idea was to run it aground to provide "unsinkable" gunfire support. However, a battleship, especially a pre-dreadnought, is designed to resist gunfire above the waterline, the armor doesn't extend significantly below the waterline, so the "unsinkable" gunfire support would, in fact, have some much more exposed vital areas. In addition, a warship is designed to exist and fire its guns while in the water, with load-bearing members transmitting much of the stress of firing to the water. If the ultimate shock sink is not available as the designers intended, then who knows what the shock of firing the guns will do to the rest of the ship. An "unsinkable" gunfire support position is wasted if the guns break down after a half-dozen firings because of shock effects that the designers didn't expect because, you know, it's a ship. Drydocks have to deal with the ships coming into them pretty carefully and ensure they're properly supported before draining the water that normally supports the ship.
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@UNSCForwardontodawn that's more a matter of elevation. The original mounts could only elevate to 13.5 degrees, limiting range to about 19,000 yards. Yes, this would be outranged by the Japanese 8" guns, which could elevate to 40 degrees for a range over 30,000 yards. However, 30,000 yards is beyond the range where anyone has scored a hit, while the 12" mounts of an Indefatigable could have been modified to allow greater elevation. As an example, the 15" mounts were modified between the wars to change elevation from 20 to 30 degrees, extending the range by several thousand yards. The bigger problem with New Zealand in ABDA force is the vulnerability to torpedoes noted below. Even with some bulges added I expect one or two Type 93 torpedoes to disembowel such an old ship.
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@TheKingofbrooklin it may simply be a philosophical issue. The point of all or nothing armor is to preserve the ship, ensuring that the maximum amount of armor is protecting the vital reserve buoyancy and magazine/machinery spaces. However, it does mean that large areas of the ship are completely unprotected and any crew in those areas are unprotected, and I've seen a number of comments lamenting the fate of those unprotected crewmen on a ship with 12-14" of armor and nothing but the 1" shell plate protecting their own skins. The simple fact is that a distributed armor scheme will either weigh a lot more than an AoN scheme for the same thickness of belt and turret armor, or it will have thinner belt and turret armor to compensate for the additional armor weight elsewhere. In order to say that one is "better" than the other, one first has to decide what standard one is applying. If, as here, we talk about the efficiency of the design, then a distributed schemewill, by definition, be less efficient because it will either have thinner armor over the vitals or weigh more with the same maximum armor. One could define another standard by which to evaluate the armor scheme, and the distributed scheme might be "better" than AoN by that standard, but the standard would have to be clearly defined and then one would have to come up with a way to evaluate it. Maybe it eventually turns out that a distributed armor scheme leads to fewer casualties among the crew when the ship is damaged but not sunk (and crew survivability is the standard chosen for evalustion), but one would have to do a lot of resesrch and analysis to make that argument and the data pool may simply be too small to strongly support a conclusion.
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@v_rayyz7944 for obvious reasons, short range actions are pretty common at night, although the Japanese had excellent optics and specially selected lookouts that allowed them, in some cases, to spot and engage enemies at over 10,000 yards. Radar changes things, in one case allowing British battleships to sneak into about 3-4,000 yards before opening up on the Italian cruisers at Cape Matapan. In another case, excellent late-war surface search and fire control radars allowed the battleships at Surigao Strait to open fire, and score immediate hits on Yamashiro, at over 20,000 yards.
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@andrewirwin it depends on whether they are spotted and attacked by the "flight to nowhere". If they are, then Stanhope Ring's name would not be mud today and the battle probably goes about as well as historically. If they are not, then two carriers survive the morning attack and the battle continuing in the afternoon is a lot closer. However, each division of two carriers would have a smaller number of escorts and CAP fighters, so it's possible that more US planes survive the morning attacks, both from Midway and from the carriers.
One thing I found fascinating in Shattered Sword was the Japanese escort arrangements. Where US escorts operated close to the carrier, with cruisers sailing within 1,000 yards for mutual supporting fire and a ring of destroyers around that center, Japanese carriers were several thousand yards apart and the escorts operated several thousand yards from any of the carriers. This broad formation was intended to help in spotting incoming attacks early, but it deprived the Japanese carriers of supporting fire from any escort except one plane guard destroyer each. Considering the entire escort force was two heavy and two battle cruisers, plus one squadron of 11 destroyers with its light cruiser leader, splitting the force into two groups would leave each with a minimal escort force and far fewer eyes for spotting attacking planes or subs.
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@murtaugh6322 the US had a 1,600 AP bomb that would penetrate 5" of armor when dropped from about 8,000 feet, or about 2.7 m of concrete. From 20,000 feet, Tallboy was supposed to be able to penetrate almost 5 m of concrete. If armor penetration is proportional and all else is equal, we might expect Tallboy to penetrate about 9" of armored deck. Yamato had 8" of deck armor, 9" in places as I understand it, so from 20,000 feet a Tallboy should get pretty deep into a Yamato, given good fusing. Hitting anything from 20,000 feet is an entirely different question until we get into guided weapons like Fritz X.
Note: this is what engineers call a SWAG (scientific wild-assed guess).
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Does anyone else get the impression that the Pensacola class cruisers used up most of the luck available for US pre-war heavy cruisers? Neither was sunk, and while both suffered damage during various engagements (including actions at Guadalcanal), only Pensacola suffered crippling damage with a torpedo hit at Tassafaronga. In contrast, every other pre-war heavy cruiser class suffered the loss of half its members during the war (total of 7 out of 16, leaving out Pensacola class). Of the pre-war heavy cruisers that did survive the war (11, including the Pensacolas), most (Tuscaloosa and Wichita excepted) suffered crippling damage at some point, many in the Solomon Islands. In contrast, none of the Omaha class, only one of nine Brooklyn/St Louis class, and only two of eight Atlantas would be sunk. Granted, the Omahas were largely kept out of the war and the Atlantas were kept close to their carriers for AA escort rather than put in surface action squadrons, but still, as Franks puts it:
"The American 8-inch-gunned "treaty cruiser" fought her last night battle in the Solomons at Tassafaronga. This resulted partly by design, but more because of force majeur -- every one of the thirteen heavy cruisers used around Guadalcanal to date had been sunk or damaged."
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Not really. With guns this big, the weight of the projectile and its ability to retain velocity becomes a huge issue. The Nelson's 16"/45s fire a shell of just over 2,000 lb at a muzzle velocity of about 2,600 ft/sec, while the 16"/45s of the North Carolina and South Dakota classes fire a 2,700 lb projectile at 2,300 ft/sec out the muzzle. At 20,000 yards, both projectiles are down to 1,600 ft/sec, but the heavier shell retains more energy and will (if the construction is the same) penetrate more armor, although the angle of fall will be slightly steeper and claw back some of that advantage.
Edit: admittedly, at the same 40 degree elevation the Nelson's guns get an extra 2,000 yards of range. As noted though, firing at a moving target at that kind of range is pure optimism.
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@bluemarlin8138 Nathan Okun has a couple of articles on shell decapping on the navweaps website. Short version is that the armor piercing shell itself is very hard/brittle, and therefore prone to shattering on face-hardened armor plate. The cap spreads out the shock of impact, preventing the shock waves from concentrating in a way that shatters the shell, improving penetration substantially and especially at shorter ranges and higher velocities. What a "decapping plate" does is strip that cap off the shell, since the cap is generally only held on with solder or some adhesive. If the cap is knocked off, and has enough space between decapping plate and main armor plate to fall out of the way, then the shell is back to shattering (potentially). However, the Italians filled the space between the decapping plate and the belt with a material they called "cellulite" (some kind of cement foam), which may not have allowed the cap to fall away. In addition, they had tested a scaled down version of it for 8" shells (IIRC), but never conducted a full-scale test of the armor against battleship-sized shells, so the effectiveness is highly debatable. Note that the Iowa class had 1.5" STS outboard of the 12" main belt to serve the same decapping function.
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Even if we blame Hoover for the deaths of all 600 of Juneau's crew (rather than the 100 or so who made it into the water when she was sunk), he still got fewer men killed needlessly than Halsey did in Typhoon Cobra (790).
Hoover had two intact ships (Fletcher and Helena) escorting three, now two cripples (San Francisco and Sterrett). He had just witnessed Juneau vanish in a massive magazine detonation. Comparable explosions had left 0 survivors of about 900 crew (HMS Defence), 6 of 1026 (HMS Invincible), 18 of 1,284 (HMS Queen Mary), 3 of 1,019 (HMS Indefatigable), and 3 of 1,421 (HMS Hood). There was simply no reason to believe there might be any noticeable number of survivors left in the water after that detonation. In the mean time, Hoover was still escorting two cripples away from the battle area and a known sub contact. One can argue that Hoover should have signaled Juneau's loss and location by radio, rather than signaling a patrolling B-17 by lamp, since the Japanese sub had obviously seen him and made radio detection moot, but it really is unfounded to say he should have detached one of his two functional ships to prosecute the sub contact and/or search for survivors, or had one of his float planes go back to look and then stop to recover it (possibly) in front of another Japanese sub since several were believed to be lurking in the area. The Juneau survivors were rescued November 20-21, while Halsey relieved Hoover of command of Helena on November 23. It seems clear that Halsey relieved Hoover not because of Hoover's actions and knowledge available at the time, but only with the benefit of hindsight that there had been a significant number of survivors in the water and the failure to rescue those survivors promptly was embarrassing to Halsey.
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@RCAvhstape not necessarily. Remember that Roosevelt had been trying to get into the war in Europe since winning reelection at the end of 1940. Even before that, the US Navy's broadcasting of the location of any belligerent's vessels it encountered had the practical effect of helping the British hunt down German merchant shipping. Lend-Lease, in March 1941, was a decidedly non-neutral act, as was escorting British convoys part of the way across the Atlantic. Roosevelt's "shoot on sight" order was issued in September 1941, and the Navy, in the person of Admiral Ghormley, had been actively cooperating with the Royal Navy since July. The USS Niblack dropped depth charges on U-52 as early as April 1941.
More directly on point, however, is the promise made at the Atlantic Conference in August 1941, to go to war if Japan attacked the UK in Malaya. While in practice this would mean Roosevelt asking Congress to declare war, he obviously thought he could deliver if he was making that promise to Churchill. Really, the Japanese did him a huge favor by attacking the US as well, because that turned would could have been a close vote into a near-unanimous one (Jeanette Rankin of Montana voted against in the House). We must not overstate the potential for the US involvement in WW2 to be delayed.
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@bkjeong4302 yes, absolutely. But you asked how powerful the resulting fleet would be, which I think most people would interpret as a question about offensive power. In that case, were comparing obsolescent power proje tion to essentially no power projection. Yes, the 5" guns can be used for shore bombardment, but the increase in total number is modest and their ability to range inland is much more limited than the 12" and 16"/50. Defensively, it becomes an issue of diminishing returns, i.e., how much thicker can the US AA "wall" become? The Japanese likened their air attacks on the US fleet to throwing eggs at a wall almost a year prior, at the Phillipine Sea.
Come to think, a better question may be whether these 12,000 or so men are more use as DD crew in the Pacific or as another infantry division in Europe six months or a year earlier.
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@MrArtbv the acid rain program originated as a program to control emissions from coal boilers, but it applies to anything that burns fossil fuels and serves a generator rated at 25 MW or greater. This includes oil and natural gas fired boilers and combustion turbines. As for refineries, it's not that the crude used to make gasoline has less sulfur naturally (it depends on what the refinery was designed for, no crude oil has low enough sulfur to meet the standard for gasoline, which is 90 ppmv in California), but that the refinery sends the crude through various process to remove sulfur to meet the regulatory requirements for various products, which used to be as high as 2,000 ppmv for diesel but have ratcheted down to 15 ppmv since about 2008 in California. Crude oil sulfur content ranges from about 0.1% to 5% by weight; anything up to 0.5% sulfur by weight is "sweet". Any of those crudes can be refined into gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc, but once you've set up a refinery for a particulate slate of crudes it's expensive to rebuild it to use a different slate. That's why the US is currently producing enough oil to meet its needs, but is still importing sour crudes while exporting sweet crudes. Most of the refineries were set up in the 60s and 70s (if not earlier) to process sour crudes and the regulatory environment makes it practically impossible to switch.
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@lesliewilson2122 Hiei was a Japanese battleship crippled by gunfire damage to her steering during the night of November 13, 1942. The following morning found Hiei within easy flying distance of Guadalcanal, and the Cactus Air Force spent all day on the 13th pounding on Hiei. While the escorting ships weren't significantly damaged, the attacks prevented any succesful attempt to salvage the battleship.
At Cape Matapan, an aerial torpedo hit the cruiser Pola crippled that ship. A squadron, including the cruisers Zara and Fiume, remained behind to help repair and salvage Pola, unaware that a British force was closing. The battleships Valiant, Barham, and Warspite closed, guided by radar, to within two miles before opening fire in a night action that sank all three Italian cruisers along with two of the four destroyers.
Basically, unless you know for certain that the enemy is nowhere near, it can be safer to abandon the ship and scuttle it to prevent the enemy from salvaging it.
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This is a question that pops up every few videos, at least as far as translating antitank munitions into anti-ship concepts. The basic issue with that is how big ships are. With a tank, all kinds of important stuff like ammo and crew are right behind the armor, so just the shot itself and resultant spall can be enough. With a ship, outside of the turrets and armored conning tower, there is a lot of room behind the armor for reserve buoyancy to keep a damaged ship afloat, so once you get through the armor you need a significant behind armor effect. You'll never sink a ship by putting fist sized holes through the top above the waterline, outside of catastrophically bad ammunition safety in the turrets like the British battlecruisers at Jutland.
That said, there were a few interesting projectile variants put out during the war. The French and Japanese developed non-standard AP shells that were optimized for underwater travel with the intention they would land short and punch into the target under the belt (see USS Boise for the one know example of this working). You mentioned the Japanese heavy AA shells, but the Germans developed something similar for the 15" guns on Tirpitz. Both the US and Japan developed small-ish caliber anti-submarine projectiles with flattened noses for shooting at diving or just submerged submarines at to a few thousand yards, although the US developed theirs in the 50s for the 5"/38. The US also had chaff and white phosphorus projectiles available for the 5"/38 as variants on the standard illumination round or "star shell".
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@scottmason2557 it's hard to imagine this being true. First, capturing French ports and putting those u-boat bases was pretty high on the list of things to get done in 1944, while the Nazis remained in power in Germany (and German ports) for almost a year after D-day. Second, a u-boat coming back from patrol is going to be very low on fuel and food, and by 1944-45 isnt going to have many, if any, options for replenishment. It might, hypothetically, happen right after July 20 and the attempt to kill Hitler, but would require the u-boat captain to have heard of the attempt but not the result. Maybe the first week of May off a German or Dutch port, but still unlikely.
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@DardanellesBy108 that doesnt sound right. There were 15 before the war, two of which were permanently lost at Pearl Harbor. 10 fast battleships makes 23, unless the search turned up and included a demilitarized one. And while BK Jeong has a very good point about the usefulness of fast battleships in a carrier world, he overlooks the manpower issue. By 1945 the USN was trying for 3.4 million men in uniform, but to man all the ships it had built or under construction would have required 4.1 million. If we turn an Iowa (2,000 crew, 45,000 tons) into the same displacement of Atlantas (600 crew, 7,000 tons), we would have six Atlantas and need 3,600 men rather than the Iowa's 2,000.
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@vB34styy I think I understand what you're getting at, at least somewhat. If one large surface combatant today miraculously appeared somewhere between 10 and 15 miles from a WW2 battleship and both immediately commenced hostilities, the modern ship would have a big advantage in one aspect, since missiles actively seek their target while the battleship is taking some time to get on target. It wont necessarily take a lot of time (West Virginia at least bracketed, and probably hit, Yamashiro on the first salvo at just over 20,000 yards), but the the missiles will be s boring hits from the outset. The question then becomes what kind of missiles and warheads is it equipped with. Older sea-skimming missiles will just plow into the armor belt and not really accomplish anything unless they happen to hit above the belt. Newer missiles that conduct a popup attack will do damage to the superstructure but accomplish nothing below the armored deck. However, some of the Soviet anti ship missiles have shaped charge warheads that will go through the armor belt if they hit it squarely. However, some WW2 battleships have an exterior decapping plate that will set off the shaped charge warhead and give the blast room to lose focus before it encounters the main belt. If that happens, then everything under armor will be pretty safe. At the same time, battleship AP shell are likely to pass right through without detonating, whereas HE/HC shells will be devastating if they hit, but a battleship with the superstructure/radars/rangefinders wrecked by missiles is going to have a difficult time hitting anything. So I think the most likely thing is a mission kill on the battleship with no actual ability to threaten it with sinking, but the battleship could get lucky and the specific details about the missiles could change everything.
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Not really. All four Kongos visited Guadalcanal, Kongo and Haruna in October and Hiei and Kiroshima in November. In each case, the ships had unloaded some of their normal ammunition and replaced it with either Type 0 HE or Type 3 incendiary shrapnel (san-shiki) shells. In October, Kongo and Haruna delivered 104 Type 3, 189 Type 0, 55 sub caliber modified 12", and (bombardment rounds expended) 625 Type 1 armor piercing shells. This represents just over 2/3 of the normal ammunition stowage for those ships. In November both Hiei and Kiroshima carried Type 3 rounds in their magazines, as documented by hits on various ships during the battles on the 13th and 15th. Further, on the 15th Kondo thought Washington and South Dakota were cruisers and ordered his covering force to deal with them, which is not the kind of order he would have given if Kirishima was present to serve as a cruiser killer. Rather, in each case a Kongo class battlecruiser came to Guafalcanal it was specifically intended and equipped to serve in shore bombardment to neutralize Henderson Field.
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@davidwright7193 my point is that, unless I am mistaken, these actions (lend-lease, ship outfitting and repair) could have been taken by Germany as unfriendly acts, if not acts of war. Perhaps cash and carry as well, given that it was only evenhanded in theory. It seems to me, and no one has addressed this point yet, that any neutral nation is going to have to calibrate its neutrality based on the ability of the belligerents to punish any deviation from neutrality. Switzerland was surrounded by Axis powers, so it maintained strict neutrality. Sweden shared borders with occupied Norway and Finland, so also had to be strictly neutral. The US was far from Germany, so it could openly side with the UK, escort ships carrying war material for the UK, even fire on U-boats, and ... what? It gets back to a point I've made repeatedly about treaty compliance and enforcement: there are no international police to enforce treaties or the laws of war. Nations comply based on their interpretation of their own best interests, deciding what kind of response is justified and appropriate for any particular violation by another party. In practice, Germany had to decide whether each provocation justified going to war with the US. For some baffling reason, Hitler decided that Pearl Harbor changed the balance of power enough for him to declare war on the US.
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@tinafoster8665 Parschal and Tully go into a fair amount of detail on the bomb hits and their effects in Shattered Sword. Essentially, the Japanese carriers had their hangars full of fueled aircraft, with all but the dive bombers being fully armed as well (the Japanese armed the dive bombers on the flight deck as the strike package was warming up). The bomb hits on the carriers damaged both aircraft in the hangars and the aviation gasoline dispensing system that lined the hangar decks, starting massive fires that would eventually add the explosives in various bombs and torpedoes to the fire (not necessarily exploding, but at least burning). While the carriers had firefighting systems, these were primarily constructed from cast iron and therefore brittle and vulnerable to shock damage. The CO2 firefighting systems were, in some case, damaged and in any event inadequate for this kind of massive fuel fire, and the hangar bay crews who could have activated fire fighting mechanisms we're either dead or on fire themselves. The hangars we're also fully enclosed, so there was no way for bombs or burning aircraft to be dumped over the edge before things got worse, unlike US carriers where open sides allowed that along with warming up the aircraft in the hangar. The only one that could be as rived to luck was Akagi, which only took one direct hit, but that was from Dick Best so it's an open question how much was luck vs skill.
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@Metal_Auditor the Japanese definitely did launch some torpedoes at South Dakota, but they were also hitting her so much that she turned off to try to avoid the engagement, which obviously spoils the firing solution for torpedoes that have already been launched. Furthermore, SoDak was out around 10,000+ yards for this part of the engagement, while Washington snuck in a bit closer before opening fire at around 8,500 yards.
The 3"/50 was selected for development to replace the 40 mm Bofors in large part because it was just big enough to take a proximity fuse. The AA VT Mark 31 was in service during the war. For the 40 mm Bofors, some projectiles used a contact fuse that included a self-sestructive time component as well, but this time component burned out in the range of 3,000-5,000 yards (shorter for British, longer for US) as a safety measure to avoid having live rounds hit friendly ships or come down on friendly heads.
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The small arms ammunition, artillery shells, fuses, and gun cotton are all contraband of war. The unrefrigerated dairy products could be contraband if they were included in the blockade terms. Now, Article 40 of the London Declaration says that a ship transporting contraband can be condemned if the contraband amounts to more than half the cargo by any of a number of measures, including value. None of the contraband can "legally" be carried by a civilian ship, in the sense that it's still contraband and subject to confiscation or destruction by an enemy warship, but the ship itself is protected from sinking if the weight, volume, or value of the contraband makes up less than half the total cargo. Is that your basis for saying the presence of these items is mere "chaff" and doesn't justify the sinking? Regardless, the torpedo appears to have hit in the vicinity of the forward hold which contained close to 5,000 LIVE rounds for the field artillery which only needed a fuse inserted before they could be fired.
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@bkjeong4302 in Shattered Sword, Parschall and Tully give a rundown on the equipment, both guns and fire control, for all four carriers present. Fire control computers were present for the heavy AA guns (Type 91 for Kagan and the newer Type 94 for the other four), they just weren't especially good, and the lack of anything between their 12 or 12.7 cm heavy AA and the 25 mm light guns hampered their defense badly. The Type 91 is described as only being good for a box barrage, putting up shells into a space the attacking aircraft will fly through, while the Type 94 was fully tachymetric, capable of tracking targets loving in three dimensions, but simply too slow to track a dive bomber during the attack. They describe the Type 94 as being comparable to the US Mark 37, better than anything the British had at the time, and probably the best AA fire control system deployed on any axis warship. This is all in Chapter 8, where the authors take a pause between the launching of the strike on Midway and any income American attacks to describe how the Japanese were prepared to receive those attacks.
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@Kamarov2090 that's been discussed, although not in much detail and I couldn't tell you where. Basically, the AP shells on ships are just like the most common tank shells of WW2, armor piercing capped, ballistic cap (APCBC). Things like APDS are used at point blank range (effectivecively) where velocity is still high, and the volume of a tank is so small that just punching through the armor is enough because the spalling (fragments from armor) will fly around doing internal damage. At warship ranges, velocity has fallen from, say, 2,500 fps to about half that, but a heavier shell has more momentum and retains more of the initial velocity. Plus, the volume of a ship is so much larger that you need a bursting charge in order to actually affect anything. Sure, the 30mm APFSDS rounds from an A-10 will penetrate some warship armor, but all you get out of it is a bunch of 1" holes with no effect outside the projectile path.
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@peterkofhinewai5082 wasn't that the Arctic convoys? First, HMS Ullyses is a novel, so part of the "died hard" passage can be ascribed to a literary flourish. There is a truth to it though, in comparison with the other ships (destroyers, frigates, minesweeper, trawlers, cargo ships), since the cruisers are still military ships with proper subdivision and water tight compartment, and yet they are anywhere between 4 and 6 times the size of the destroyers depending on the specific ships. So where Fiji (for example) was crippled by two torpedoes and sunk by a third, a destroyer can easily be sunk by a single torpedo and a trawler would just be obliterated by the same torpedo.
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What these ships are firing at each other is armor-piercing capped ballistic capped (APCBC), which was the best thing against armor until the development of the shaped charge warhead. However, a tank has a fairly small internal volume with lots of important stuff inside the armor, so the majority of the time a penetrating hit will also be a mission kill. Many of those mission kills will start fires and become catastrophic losses, and almost all mission kills will be abandoned in the hope of later salvage and repair. There are exceptions, but they tend to be rare.
For ships, you have a huge volume (even within the armor) and fewer things that will immediately mission kill the ship. Sabot or HEAT rounds will punch small holes in the armor, but won't affect much other than what just behind the armor. In contrast, your AP shell can penetrate the armor AND set off a, say, 30-50 pound explosive charge behind the armor to do far more extensive damage. Even with those kinds of shells, it's normal for a ship to be battered into submission by a dozen or more heavy-caliber hits. Again, there are exceptions (Invincible, Indefatigable, Queen Mary, Hood, Boise could have been), but they are rare.
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@PlasmaRaccoon no, with a but.
Spaced armor on tanks helps to prevent spall from the back of the plate from damaging the innards and crew, because it can't get through the inner plate. It also provides space and additional standoff for a shaped-charge warhead to lose coherence and fail to penetrate. On ships, because there is just so much interior volume, spalling isn't a serious source of damage, and shaped charges don't show up until some big missiles in the 60s, so there is no reason for "spaced armor" as the tankers know it.
However, it is extremely common for battleships to have a main armor belt and then a "decapping plate" at some distance from the belt. For example, the South Dakota class battleships have an exterior shell plate 1.25" thick to serve as a decapping plate, with the main belt at a distance inside that shell plate. This decapping plate is intended to remove the armor piercing cap (basically, a blunt layer of steel to cushion the nose of the shell on impact with hardened armor plate) from the shell itself, which is not difficult as the cap is typically soldered or glued in place. If the cap can be removed, the the armor penetration of the shell against the belt is reduced in the neighborhood of 30%, as the hard steel projectile frequently shatters on the hardened armor plate.
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@Alex-cw3rz thing is, "monumentally flawed and terrible" is either a deliberate exaggeration for emphasis or badly overstating the argument. Both North Carolina and South Dakota used four void spaces in the system, and if both were arranged as liquid-air-liquid-air, the the South Dakota system was weaker. However, the comparative weakness was discovered during testing in 1939, before any of the ships were completed, and the South Dakotas were modified to reinforce the system and use liquid in the outer two spaces rather than mixing them up. The result is that when the ships put to sea, the two classes had comparable systems.
Note that the Iowa designers made the same decision, to tie the armor belt into the torpedo bulkhead, and then used the same solutions to compensate and make the system as strong as the North Carolinas was. The last two Iowas were still at a state where additional changes could be made that were estimated to give a system about 20% stronger. If the South Dakotas aren't competitive (I presume you mean against a KGV) because of the torpedo defense, then the Iowas have the same issue.
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@Tevildo I'm afraid you've misapplied some of the lessons from tanks, where kinetic energy is absolutely essential both today and 80 years ago during the war. Tanks have a comparatively small internal volume, so anything punching through the armor is likely to damage something important. Ships are much (much) bigger, so that bursting charge is absolutely essential to doing meaningful damage. The British 6" SAP shell carries 3.75 lb of Dunnite (I believe that's the explosive), while the HE shell carries 8 lb; if all you wanted to do is shatter the shell body into fragments with some velocity then .5-1 lb would probably be plenty. The comparison with tanks and various armor penetration mechanisms (pure KE, shaped charge, squash head, etc) has been asked before, but it always comes back to the sheer volume of the ship, small volume of genuinely vital spaces, and scarcity of hits in a normal action pointing to the need for a big bursting charge to do as much damage over as large a volume as possible with each of those rare hits.
When warships sank comparable warships using gunfire, it was usually the result of an accumulation of hits and resulting fires, especially if hits destroy firefighting equipment. The cruisers lost at Savo Island on 8/9/42 took dozens of 8" hits each, frequently accompanied by torpedo hits. Similarly, Furutaka at Cape Esperance was swamped with dozens of shell hits (90-ish) and sank some 3 hours later. Boise took a shell in the magazine, but the combination of stable US propellant and immediate flooding from the shell bursting below the waterline prevented the complete loss of the ship. At the River Plate, the four participating ships scored a total of about 80 hits, most (about 70) of which were on Graf Spee but which, because they were 6" shells, had only knocked out two guns in the secondary battery; it was an 8" hit from Exeter that damaged the fuel purification system.
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@galbert117 all active battleships on December 7, 1941 would include all 15 treaty battleships plus the two North Carolinas. Arkansas has 12" guns, the North Carolinas 16", and everything else 14". The Germans have 21 capital ships with 11" and 12" guns. While the five battle cruisers can outrun everything but the North Carolinas, the rest of the German line can only manage about the same speed as the standards are designed for, 21 knots. In addition, the Germans have six pre-dreadnoughts, 11 light cruisers (many of which have torpedoes), and 61 torpedo boats.
By 1941, the US has overcome the dispersion problems that made 6th Battle Squadrons shooting so unimpressive in 1918. While US bursting charges were generally smaller than British equivalents (23 lb for 14" AP vs 29 lb for 13.5"), the US always used a much more stable filler, so their AP shells would not simply explode on impact before penetrating belt armor. With the 15" guns of the Bayern class, the Germans really dont have any guns that can seriously threaten the US battleships until the range gets suicidally short. On the other hand, even the Konig class has belt armor that the 14" guns can penetrate handily at 15,000 yards.
If it were just the capital ships, then the Germans should expect to be curb-stomped. However, your question is about sinking the entire HSF, and that would rely on the two North Carolinas having to run down, potentially, the survivors of the five battlecruisers, 11 light cruisers, and 61 torpedo boats. If the Germans flee at some point, I think they'll definitely have some surviving ships, if for no other reason than the Americans running out of ammunition.
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@BeardyHobbs the thing about the Bismarck is not that it was a powerful battleship (it was pretty good), but that it was more than 10,000 tons over the treaty limit and this should have given it a lot more capability than it did. Prior to Bismarck, the Germans had the Deutschland/Lutzow class cruisers and the Scharnhorst class battlecruisers, both of which could outfight anything that could catch them and outrun anything they couldn't outfight, with three exceptions: Hood, Renown, and Repulse. With Bismarck, the Germans now had a ship that could match enemy battleships if it chose rather than just avoid the fight with superior speed. It was also 15 years newer than the majority of capital ships, like every entry on that list except Richelieu. Richelieu is actually a very close match for Bismarck, with the analysis having to get down into fine details and soft factors, while also being 10,000 tons lighter.
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@Cbabilon675 a star shell contains a flare, typically attached to a parachute or drogue to slow its fall. A timed fuse causes the shell to open in mid-air, expelling and igniting the flare. Ideally, this happens high over the target vessel at night so it can be seen clearly but the firing ship will not be exposed unlike a search light, which illuminates at both ends). For example, when Washington engaged Kiroshims she used her main battery and two of her 5" mounts. Two more 5" mounts engaged (IIRC) Atago, while the last 5" mount was devoted to firing star shells.
Edit: no to shaped charges and other more modern anti-tank developments like sabot and HESH. All AP naval shells of the time (i.e., by WW2) were what the Army called APCBC, which was also the most common anti-tank round of WW2 (not best, just most common). Basically, there was always room to make naval guns bigger for better armor penetration, but tanks were much more limited in their ability to transport and fire larger guns. And then after WW2 everyone gave up on armor so there has been no need for further refinements in naval shells for armor penetration.
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@0Elmilo0 IIRC, the British began using ranging machineguns in their tanks after WW2, I want to say with Centurion. The thing is, flight time to 1,000 yards is a second or two, so the gunner can quickly observe the results and fire the main gun. For a battleship gun at 20,000 yards, flight time is right around 30 seconds, so by the time the fall of shot is observed and adjustments made, the gun has also reloaded. Gunners also used a variety of techniques to establish the range more quickly, like firing partial salvos at shorter intervals or at different ranges. Bismark fired 4-gun half-salvos at the Denmark Strait, or a ship with three triple turrets might fire one turret at the range given by the rangefinders, the second turret at 400 yards longer and the third turret at 400 yards shorter, as a couple of examples. It really isnt going to be feasible to use something smaller to get the same ballistic information.
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@gil7459 this kind of question appears periodically, either a shaped charge, modern kinetic penetrator, squash head, etc. the short answer is that while it might do something useful to a turret, an armored warship is otherwise much too big to be seriously affected. In a tank, vulnerable stuff is a few feet inside the armor, while in a ship the vitals are more like 50 feet behind the armor.
As for napalm, it was pretty new during WW2, used for the first time in late 1943. It may not have occurred to anyone to use it during that war, although it was used by the Israelis in one of the attacks on the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War. It was not so effective that the Liberty's machine guns could not be used when Israeli torpedo boats approached within half an hour of the napalm attack.
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@Drachinifel In discussing the super heavy shells vs more typical shells, I find it useful to look at the data on navweaps for the 16"/45 Mark 5 (Colorados) in comparison with the 16"/45 Mark 6 (North Carolinas and South Dakotas). These guns appear to be almost identical, with the exception of the Mark 6 being about 10% lighter due to better metallurgy. The Mark 5 fires a lighter shell of contemporary design at a muzzle velocity about 200 ft/sec higher, but by the time the shells get to 20,000 yards the shell from the Mark 5 is only about 25 ft/sec faster, so the super heavy shell from the Mark 8 can be expected to penetrate an extra inch or so of belt armor at 20,000.
Similarly, the US heavy cruisers have practically identical 8"/55 guns, but from Tuscaloosa onwards they are the Mark 12 and 15 which can use a 330 lb superheavy shell in comparison with the 260 lb shell on older cruisers with the Mark 9, 10, 11, 13, or 14 guns. The super heavy shell comes out the muzzle about 300 ft/sec slower, but is about 20 ft/sec faster by the time it gets to 20,000 yards. As a result. The super heavy shell can be expected to penetrate 5" of armor (to pick a number) at over 24,000 yards compared with less than 20,000 yards for the lighter shell.
Note that in both cases, the use of the super heavy shell forces the use of a slightly smaller propellantcharge, contributing to the loss of muzzle velocity. It's just that, at practical battle ranges the heavier shell retains more of its initial velocity and delivers more kinetic energy for armor penetration. I also find this comparison useful because it eliminates a lot of potential variables. These are all US guns, using US propellant and US shell design philosophy. Armor penetration comes from the same US Navy predictive equation.
Edit: another arguable point of comparison is the 16"/50 Mark 2 proposed for the earlier South Dakotas and Lexingtons compared to the 16=/50 Mark 7 of the Iowas. Again, the lighter shell (2,100 lb vs 2,700 lb) uses a heavier propellant charge (700 lb vs 660 lb) to achieve a modest increase in muzzle velocity (2,800 ft/sec vs 2,500 ft/sec). Navweaps does not provide retained velocity data for the lighter shells, but we can expect the heavier shell to have close to the same velocity at 20,000 yards. Navweaps does provide expected armor penetration, showing the Mark 8 expected to penetrate 50% more at 20,000 yards (20" vs 13.5"), but that is likely to be confounded by changes in shell design, which is why I prefer to look at the 16"/45 guns and shells, as the Colorado class got a newer Mark 5 AP shell that navweaps calls a "major change" from the AP Mark 3 used on the 16"/45 Mark 1 and the 16"/50 Mark 2. The Mark 5 shell from the Mark 5 gun could expect to penetrate 16" of belt armor at 20,000 yards, compared to the 13.5" of the lighter Mark 3 shell from the same guns.
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@bkjeong4302 I'm not so sure about that. Even early in WW2 Scharnhorst had radar, its armor was battleship-grade even if its main guns weren't quite, and it's faster than anything else on either side. The battlecruiser portion of the engagement pits six British BCs, supported by four Queen Elizabeths that were allowed to lag behind, against five German BCs. Adding Scharnhorst to the German side gives them a substantial advantage until the QEs catch up, and the firing is at 14-18,000 yards. At that range, Scharnhorst should be s boring multiple hits with every salvo, and her guns fire shells a good 30 kg heavier at a slightly higher velocity. The British lost two of the six BCs historically, but with Scharnhorst they might be able to get all six and rid the RN of Beatty and Seymour. Granted, Evan-Thomas of 5th Battle Squadron would then be in command and able to signal a proper report back to Jellicoe, but if hedoesn't, or if Scharnhorst's radar picks up the Grand Fleet at long range, then the fleet engagement may be drastically different as well. Or the Germans might say we got the entire battlecruiser force with minimal damage, so mission accomplished.
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Light and heavy cruisers are defined by the Washington and London naval treaties, which limit cruisers to 10,000 tons and subdivide the cruiser category into light cruisers (guns no larger than 6.1" or 155 mm) and heavy cruisers (guns no larger than 8"). These designations arrive between the wars, in 1922 and 1930 when the treaties are adopted.
Armored and protected cruisers are concepts from the late 18th century. A protected cruiser puts the magazines and engine systems under a protective deck but does not have an armored belt along the sides of the ship, so the total protected volume is on the low side. Protected cruisers also tend to be on the small side. An armored cruiser tends to be quite large, with many displacing almost as much as a contemporary battleship, and has an armored belt to increase the protected volume in comparison with shoehorning vital equipment under an armored deck. With a few exceptions, armored cruisers dont use a uniform battery of large guns, so many British armored cruisers had a single 9.2" gun fore and aft supplemented by broadside arrays of 6" or 7.5" guns. OTOH, several German armored cruisers used uniform batteries of 8" (ish) guns in twin turrets. The early 20th century also saw light armored cruisers for use as destroyer leaders, small for cruisers (say, 4-5000 tons) with a thin armored belt (maybe 2" or so) and batteries of 4" guns or so, possibly with a couple of 6" guns.
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@TheSleepingMeerkat BK Jeong and I have discussed this repeatedly over the past year in these comments and I've found him to have a good point even if he makes it so vociferously that it distracts ts from the point he's making.
I think everyone can agree that the new Axis battleships of the 30s and 40s were a complete waste of time, money, materials, and lives (when sunk). The Germans, in particular, would have been better served by an extra 150-200 u-boats in place of the two Bismarks and two Scharnhorsts. The Japanese would have been better served by,well, almost anything in place of the three Yamato hulls (Yamato, Musashi, Shinano). The Italians are just in a weird position with the Littorios, since all their operations were always going to be in the Med within range of their land-based aircraft. So they might be a little more justified building new fast battleships but might have been better served by better aircraft and air tactics (level bombing at medium altitude is not a way to score hits on ships). So, except for Bismark and Yamato fanboys, we can all agree that the Axis powers could have made better choices than to build new battleships.
That basically leaves the British (KGV-class) and Americans North Carolina, South Dakota, and Iowa classes), both of which built significant numbers of carriers in addition to their battleships. I've made the point that both parties had, at the time they began building battleships again, maxed out their treaty limits for cruisers. Their choice wasn't between battleships and cruisers for AA and gunfire support, it was a choice between new battleships and nothing. In addition, the US had nothing to counter the speed and power combination of the four Kongos, further justifying some combination of four North Carolinas and South Dakotas.
Outside of that specific situational context, BK Jeong has an excellent point. A competently handled carrier will be able to maintain awareness of everything on the surface within about 200 miles in this time frame. A fast battleship is limited to the radar horizon, somewhere between 30 and 50 miles. Once the enemy force is spotted, a carrier can strike from several hundred miles away, while the battleship must get much closer against a target that is already aware of the battleship's presence and its course and speed, and has the speed to keep the range open. The US was willing to accept lower speeds for its "standard" battleships because it expected to be attacking enemy bases and forcing their fleet to fight; this worked well for them in the Pacific but also worked well for the Japanese at Guadalcanal.
This brings us to a point where BK Jeong has moderated his opinion slightly. The action of 15 November, 1942, is one of the few occasions where a new fast battleship did something to justify its construction (North Cape is another). A "standard" battleship probably couldn't have made it to Guadalcanal in time, even if it had been in the area, and a cruiser force would probably have suffered just as heavily as the one on the 13th did. If the US had a carrier available, it might have been able to hang out along the threat axis and surprise a Japanese surface force around sunset, but that's if they had a carrier available (they didn't), and such a carrier would have it's own vulnerabilities.
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@bkjeong4302 I think that's conflating two separate issues. Pre-war, they focused on developing a group of extremely skilled fliers, and managed to build up close to a thousand, the number being limited to those who could make it through the very demanding program. Kind of like Heinlein's Starship Troopers (not the movie), where the mobile infantry is composed or men who can make it through the training, and the strength is however many make it through the training. Or Haldeman's Forever War. Such an elite group is culturally appropriate, in line with the thought that a sufficiently skilled master can take on any number of opponents without fear of losing ("the invincibility of a sufficiently refined technique"). This goes right out the window with mass, industrialized warfare. It may even be sufficient for victory if the US gives up early on rather than fight the war to a conclusion.
My reference to the fuel situation is a hypothetical, starting from "what if the Japanese rotated experienced crews back to train replacements?" This would normally be my preference, rather than magically transporting that elite core of aviators across a couple years to the carrier battles of 1944. However, it occurs to me that, no matter what else happens in this hypothetical where the Japanese have a good replacement program, they may never have enough aviation fuel to give those trainees the necessary flight hours to become good. By mid-war the US replacements had ~300 flight hours on their log books before flying their first combat sortie. I dont know if the Japanese would ever have had enough aviation fuel for that (the Germans certainly didn't by 1944 or so), but they definitely didn't plan for a long enough war where it would be relevant.
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@kaltaron1284 the most basic issue is elevation. Single purpose guns tend to only elevate to about 20-30 degrees, although as fire control improved it became more common for them to go to 45 degrees for maximum range. Interwar British destroyers had "dual purpose" guns that could elevate to 40 degrees, fine for protecting the larger ship 500-1000 yards away that you're escorting, not fine in Norwegian fjords, and utterly useless for protecting yourself from dive bombers. AA guns typically ele ate to the 70-90 degree range.
For a successful dual purpose gun, a high elevation must be complemented by a high rate of fire and sufficient speed in train and elevation to track air raft into reasonably close range. This is an area where the Japanese 5"/50 Type 3, used on most of their destroyers, fails, as the mount was a little slow in train, used bagged ammunition and had to be lowered to about 10 degrees for loading, leading to a slow rate of fire for AA use.
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@lanemccullough7506 it depends on the gun being installed. 20 mm Oetlikons could be shipped on with the pedestal mount and, basically, just bolted to the deck, which helps explain the rapid proliferation of such guns. Eric Hammel (I think) had a comment in his book on the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (November 12-15) about Prince of Wales only having X 20 mm Oerlikons when it was sunk, but how the lowliest transport off Guadalcanal on November 12th had at least as many of that gun. Exchanging guns, say a 1.1" quad mount being replaced with a quad (or maybe twin) 40 mm Bofors, or replacing a 5"/25 with a single open 5"/38, might also happen at a forward base I suspect, but adding additionalcgun mounts and tying them into a new director would need more extensive work, probably on the West Coast (Puget Sound, San Francisco, San Diego).
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A surprisingly large fraction of allied supplies in the summer and fall of 1944 came across the beaches on LSTs (landing ship, tank). Its a design we would now call a Ro-Ro (roll on, roll off), so beach the ship, lower the ramp, and drive your truckloads of supplies a ross the beach and down the road to the supply depot however far inland that is. Ship raises the ramp, waits for the high tide, unbleached itself, and heads back to the UK for another load of trucks and supplies.
Market-Garden would have been much better directed at clearing the Scheldt estuary so that the capture of the intact port facilities in Antwerp could actually do some good. As it was it would be several more months, and lots of casualties, before shipping unloaded in Antwerp.
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@tapioisaac367 malfunctions, which are most commonly "errors in drill", are actually pretty common. For example, Duke of York fired 446 shells. against Scharnhorst over about two hours, but missed 241 firing opportunities (counting each gun missing one firing command as one opportunity). Note that the firing command actually comes from central fire control pulling the trigger to fire all guns at once (with slight variation for things like delay coils), so a gun that isn't ready will not fire and will not fire on its own under local control unless needed to clear the gun at the end of the action. West Virginia at Surigao Strait fired 93 projectiles in 16 salvos, with the last two being efforts to clear guns in turret 4. 91 shells in 14 salvos is only 6.5 guns per salvo for a ship with 8 guns.
As evident above, sometimes the crew is slow in loading or misplaces something important that causes the gun to not fire when the central firing key is activated. If they were fully loaded and the gun misfired, they will wait a while (maybe as much as 30 minutes) before opening the breech just in case it's a hang (delayed) fire rather than a misfire.
Note that for larger guns (6" and up, basically) the projectile weighs too much (130 lb for US 6" AP) for manual handling, so there really isn't an opportunity to drop a shell. Even if one falls over, the fuze needs to first be a tivated by the shock of being fired before it will be set off by the shock of impact on a target. So a shell may fall over and roll around in the shell room, but it's incredibly unlikely that any kind of accidental shock or impact (rolling over and crushing shell handling crew) would make a shell explode.
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The one thing about those guns at Gibraltar, both the coastal defense guns of the rock and the guns of Force H in the harbor, is the question of what kind of shells are available. The 15" guns at Singapore were useless against land invasion because they had few, if any, HE shells, being intended to repel attack from the sea by cruisers or battleships. An AP shell with a delay fuze of 0.02-0.05 seconds is effective tively going to dig its own grenade dump before going off well below ground, completely aside from having thicker walls producing fewer large fragments and a smaller bursting charge. If it came to that, the smaller coast defense and AA guns, and secondary and AA battery weapons on the ships, which would only have HE shells with point detonation fuses for use against destroyers or exposed superstructure, would be far more useful against infantry or tanks than comparatively small bursting charges from AP shells going off 20 feet under ground.
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@joshthomas-moore2656 BK_Jeong has something of a point about the AA presence of a light cruiser. The Cleveland and Baltimore class cruisers carry comparable crews and almost identical AA suites, but the US Navy found in 1942-43 that their 6"/47 armed light cruisers, with a rate of fire of 8-10 round per minute per gun, were far more useful at swatting destroyers in night actions than heavy cruisers with the 3-4 rpm 8"/55. Other navies had 6" (ish) guns firing at 5-6 rpm, maybe up to 8 rpm for the British 6"/50 Mark XXIII, so most light cruiser guns if WW2 do not make up in rate of fire what they lack in individual shell power compared to their heavy counterparts. On the other hand, if your navy also builds smaller ships as light cruisers because they have smaller guns, say the Italian Condotierri classes or the British Leanders and Arethusas, then the CL may also carry lighter AA suites and not be the better deal. On the gripping hand, an Atlanta or Dido can be a fine CL for AA work and the 5" or 5.25" guns still work just fine for swatting destroyers and making life unpleasant for cruisers, while the ship itself is lighter (about 6,000 tons) than a full size cruiser and needs a smaller crew (5-600)
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Adam Ladd as for a naval equivalent to "high octane fuel", no, there really isn't an equivalent in naval fuel. With aviation gasoline, higher octane fuel (100 octane and higher vs 87 and below) can have a significant affect on performance, including noticeably higher speeds, for example. Naval ships use vast amounts of fuel, so they use "bunker crude", which is minimally refined to minimize the cost of fuel. Basically, get the thickest crude oil elements (asphalt, tar) out, along with the really nice gasoline and diesel components, and you're left with a fairly heavy and viscous fuel oil that needs to be warmed up before it can be sprayed through the burner into the combustion chamber. This doesn't leave a lot of room for refining better fuel to yield better performance. What could be done is to remove more sulfur and other impurities to reduce longer-term maintenance issues, but won't have a significant affect on short term performance.
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@UNSCForwardontodawn that's certainly the point of staying organized, maneuvering against the enemy formation, and keeping the range open, I'm just observing that at more normal battle ranges the cruisers start having trouble getting through the Kongo-class belt armor. The sinking of Hiei is one of the few redeeming features of the Friday the 13th battle. Not saying the historical result is good, just that there's so many butterflies flapping their wings that it becomes difficult to make alternative predictions. I could see Kondo deciding to fall back and let his destroyers clear a path in the face of torpedo detonations and cruiser fire from dead ahead at, say, 10,000 yards, only for the cruiser line to take heavy torpedo damage from "beyond torpedo range" and have the Kongos come back to finish off cripples and conduct their bombardment. Note that the big friendly fire incident came about because Atlanta took a torpedo, lost power, and drifted into San Francisco's line of fire, a sequence of events not precluded by a more open engagement.
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I just noticed that the Japanese 12.7 cm/50 Type 1 and Type 5 guns, which equipped most of their destroyers in WW2, used bag propellant and a Wellin-type breech block, resulting in a rate of fire in the 5-10 rounds per minute range depending on use and elevation. Further, we all know that the Japanese never used a 6" gun cruiser, as the Mogamis were always designed to replace the triple 6.1" guns with twin 8" guns just like their other heavy cruisers. In contrast, the US used the 5"/38 (firing up to 15 rpmpg) and the 6"/47 (firing up to 10 rpmpg), and found cruisers armed with the later more useful in night actions than the ones armed with 8" guns. What do Japanese sources have to say, good or bad, about the significantly higher Americans rates of gunfire in those 1942-43 night surface actions? I'm aware that they were critical of American gunfire in general, with officers noting many salvos poorly set for either range or deflection, but did they notice and envy the higher ROF? Or did they just find the additional target illumination helpful in spotting and correcting their own fire?
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@Grimmtoof one reason is that the relevant documentation uses those units to give ranges. West Virginia's battle report for Surigao Strait, for example, states that the order was to open fire at 26,000 yards, but that fire was held to allow the targeting solution to develop until 20,240 yards. In addition, the US and UK use both statute miles (in the US, on land) and nautical miles, with different conversions, 1,760 yards per statute mile and 2,025 yards (ish) for nautical miles.
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I've been pondering lately the WW2 Japanese gift for snatching (strategic) defeat from the jaws of (tactical) victory. At Savo Island, Mikawa essentially swept the sea of the allies and then failed to exploit the victory by going after the transports. At First Naval Guadalcanal, Kondo comes in with an overwhelming force, crushes the US cruiser force, and then fails to conduct the bombardment mission that was his entire reason for being there in the first place. If Kirishima had bombarded the airfield, Hiei would have been in much better shape to get away rather than be harrassed and damaged by aircraft all day on the 13th and scuttled in the evening, especially if significant aircraft and fuel can be destroyed as happened the previous month. At Tassafaronga, the Japanese destroyers cripple three cruiser and sink a fourth, but fail to (IIRC) even unload the supplies they were supposedly delivering. At Samar, Kurita has overwhelming surface forces but gives up on his mission without making any serious effort to break through the es or carrier groups and reach the transports, which (again) are his entire reason for being there.
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@bkjeong4302 if Congress will let me abrogate the Washington and London Naval Treaties, I might consider another four Yorktown-class CVs (80,000 tons), four more Wichita-class CAs (40,000 tons), and nine more St. Louis-class CLs (90,000 tons) in place of the 210,000 tons of North Caroline and South Dakota-class BBs. Doing this also makes my manpower situation really weird for peacetime because those extra ships need about twice the crew as six BBs. Of course, Congress won't let me do that so my choice is between building replacement BBs (and finding, by the time they're done, that war has broken out and I dont have to scrap my Nevadas and such) and building nothing at all.
For the Royal Navy, the primary difference is that they dont have any recent 8" gun cruisers (the Countys date to the late 20s), so several more Ark Royals and a bunch of Town-class cruisers to eat up the KGV-class tonnage. Without the KGV-class there's an interesting question of whether the 5.25" gun also used on the Dido-class cruisers exists at all, so I haven't even considered more Didos for the moment. Again, Parliament is an obstacle to building above my treaty limits for cruisers and (possibly) carriers.
For the Germans, I've already said I'd prefer another 110 Type VII u-boats to the two Bismark-class BBs. The Japanese would be better served by 140,000 tons of rocks with which to drown ambitious officers eager for a war with the US (there are a lot of them, especially in the army). The Italians ... I'd really have to think about because the Littorios are about the only balanced ships they built. As I recall, everything else Italian turned speed up to eleven at the cost of survivability. This may be a good place for more submarines to dispute the Med with the Royal Navy. If the Germans and Italians focus on submarines, then the French would be well-served by several more Algeries and a LOT of destroyers.
(Edit: I forgot to address the Iowas. I wouldn't replace them with anything, leaving them unbuilt means I have another 8-9000 men to address the manpower shortage mentioned above.)
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@LionofCaliban as I recall, Richard Frank has some discussion about the limitations of various radar systems in his history of the Guadalcanal campaign. As the wavelength gets shorter the resolution tends to go up, but the display is also hugely important in getting the most ta tical use out of the radar. Early radars had kind of an oscilloscope display, with the return signal from a target showing up as a wave with a larger amplitude on the display (i.e., the operator has to try to interpret raw signal), while later radars had a display with slowly-fading pips for return signals, the sort of thing we normally think of when we say "radar". Richard Frank covers some of these issue in his discussion of the first Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, and he makes the point that Callaghan didn't do himself or his command any favors by making San Francisco his flagship because it had an older radar display, whereas Scott on Atlanta had a much better grasp on the battle (until San Francisco killed him) because Atlanta had a more modern display. Regardless, it was still possible for ships, especially destroyers and smaller, to hide in front of an island which would confuse the radar return and obscure the silhouette of the ship from visual observers.
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@ach3909 according to navweaps.com
According to US Naval Technical Mission to Japan report O-47(N)-2, the Japanese saw the following deficiencies in these mountings in decreasing order of seriousness:
The multiple mounts could not be trained and elevated rapidly enough, either by power or manual drive.
The gunsights were inadequate against high speed aircraft.
The guns had excessive vibration, making them difficult to keep on target.
The capacity of the ammunition supply equipment was inadequate, causing interrupted fire and a greatly reduced operating routine.
The muzzle blast caused problems for both the guncrew and equipment.
Honestly, with the 15 mm Type 96 and the US 1.1"/75 Mark's 1 and 2, the problems are very similar. The round is large enough to reach out a good ways, but also large enough to slow the rate of fire and encourage mounts with multiple barrels to get the rate of fire back up to near machinegun level (500 rpm, say). The large mount tends to be slower in tracking and elevation than the single and hand-held mounts (and the faster wartime planes) while the large round also cuts down on ammunition capacity that can reasonably be handled by one man. The advantage the 1.1" gun has is a second box magazine to draw from while the first is being changed out, but the total of 16 rounds (two 8-round magazines) is about the same as for the 25 mm (one 15-round magazine).
Either side probably could have worked the bugs out of its AA mountings, but the US had the option to just replace with the far better 20 mm and 40 mm guns. The Japanese received a few German 20 mm guns, and captured and copied a few hundred 40 mm Bofors from the British at Singapore, but never had a real alternative to its 20,000 or so 25 mm mountings of all types.
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@bkjeong4302 after some reflection I'm going to have to disagree with you for several reasons:
1) Battle of the North Cape
2) Naval Battle of Guadalcanal
3) Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal
4) Battle of Surigao Strait
During the time under discussion, through the end of WW2, carrier aircraft do not fly in lousy weather, and do not fly at night without specialist training which, IIRC, only the Enterprise air group had and only by about 1944. If the enemy has a weapon, you need to be able to counter it. Yes, an aircraft carrier in fair weather or better, and during daylight, can cripple, and possibly sink, any BB or BC that gets within range and is detected. An aircraft carrier cannot interfere with Kongo and Haruna, or Hiei and Kirishima, slipping into Ironbottom sound to trash the airfield and air group on Guadalcanal. A force of cruisers and and destroyers can, but are likely to suffer heavily and may not be able to prevent the bombardment mission. Of the 13 ships present at 1st Guadalcanal, only 2-3 escape comparatively undamaged, and Kirishima came back two nights later, where it was sunk by Washington. Can a cruiser/destroyer force defeat a force lead by a battleship? Yes, but it's likely to be at a huge cost, even against less capable battleships like Hiei. Battleships aren't the queen of the sea anymore in WW2 (which is why TF38 at Leyte Gulf has six BBs and 17(!) CVs and CVLs), but if you need to prevent an enemy battleship force from accomplishing its mission at night or in bad weather, then battleships are what you really need in that niche. Can they fill that role cost-effectively, considering their usefulness as escorts against air attack and for shore bombardment? I think that needs a much finer-grained analysis, including the cost of repairs and casualties among the cruisers and destroyers trying to fight battleships in poor weather or at night.
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@bkjeong4302 so the axis was using BBs for roles that "don't require" BBs. Even if I stipulate that the Germans shouldn't have built capital ships (which I actually tend to agree with), the fact of the matter is that the Japanese have capital ships, four of them the speedy Kongo class, while the US has no capital ships that can keep up with the Kongos (or later Yamatos) until the North Carolinas show up. The Japanese obviously found their cruisers and destroyers insufficient for shore bombardment to neutralize Henderson Field, whereas Kongo and Haruna rendered the Cactus Air Force combat ineffective. Since the Germans did build capital ships, the British have to be able to counter them even in a situation like the North Cape.
We agree, it seems, that capital ships did have a niche role to fill, and were extremely useful in other roles even if smaller units might be able to fill those roles more cost-effectively. The tonnage of a treaty BB can be used for, say, three cruisers and three DDs, or two cruisers and about eight DDs might be a better use, but a BB requires about 2,000 crew while two cruisers require about the same number combined (for example, Washington had a crew of about 1900 while Tuscaloosa had about 900), and the DDs take 150-200 apiece. For comparison, the US lost over 1400 men killed checking (not defeating) the Japanese on November 13th, and only 242 two nights later. If we ignore the human cost, cruisers and destroyers may be a more cost-effective counter to BBs, but the Royal and uS navies never looked at cruisers as being "expendable" in the same way as DDs and motor torpedo boats were. That's also under the assumption that the treaty limits on total cruiser tonnage go away, because otherwise the RN and USN are built out and simply cannot build more cruisers (and the RN was already building less capable cruisers to increase their numbers) without violating the treaty, which had not happened yet by the time the KGV and North Carolinas started building.
So ultimately, the Japanese had capital ships and the Germans built fast capital ships. The RN and USN have to be able to counter them, and another 20 years on would be able to counter with carrier-based aircraft with all weather/day and night search and attack capabilities, but in the mid 30s when they started the counter for a fast capital ship had to be at least a few fast capital ships of your own, which was still possible in those last few years before the treaties were finally abandoned, whereas the RN and USN can't counter with massed cruisers under the treaty, might have manpower problems, and definitely would have manpower problems as they lose cruisers trying to counter capital ships in the early part of the war. BBs no longer rule the waves, and would be completely obsolete in a generation, but I think it's taking the argument too far to say they were flatly obsolete and shouldn't have been built in the mid 30s.
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@bkjeong4302 I have not simply assumed that capital ships have to be countered by your own capital ships; I have demonstrated that for certain situations they are the only available counter that does not require a great deal of technical development and biblical prophecy levels of foresight to pursue. Carriers and their air groups can counter capital ships in bad weather and at night, one you develop aircraft, crews, and other technical capabilities for day/night/all weather strike that did not, historically, show up for another couple of decades. Cruisers can counter capital ships at night and in bad weather if you're willing to pay that price and your cruisers carry effective torpedoes, which the USN did not (and I've already mentioned the treaty restrictions); 8" gunfire crippled Hiei's steering but did not threaten the ship's survival. It would take a steady stream of air attacks from Guadalcanal to convince the Japanese to scuttle it during the evening of the 13th. Submarines might have been a good bet, but nobody had a good experience in the previous war trying to use submarines as significant fleet elements because of their slow submerged speed. That basically leaves your own capital ships, which we know can counter enemy capital ships.
As to the frequency of night actions, they happened every time the Japanese chose to send ships in at night. Samar and Kommandorski Islands are about the only surface actions of the Pacific in daylight.
I'm unimpressed by the Yamatos and don't consider them even a plausible excuse for the Iowas. I think I'd still bet on all four South Dakota's being able to take the two Yamatos in a straight fight, although not without losses.
While the Kilishima had some bombardment munitions, the damage to South Dakota clearly shows a mixture of 14" AP and bombardment impacts. Note (getting back to opportunity costs) that Kirishima, Nagara, and several DDs fought on the 13th and came back two nights later while none of the US ships from the 13th were present two nights later and the DDs were a scratch force of the four that had the most fuel.
You also made a point about Japanese cruisers on shore bombardment which I don't think fully comprehends the situation. On October 15 Maya, Myoko, and Isuzu bombarded Henderson field with a mixture of bombardmentand AP rounds. Maya and Myoko each had 10 8" guns, one more than most US treaty cruisers, in addition to strong torpedo batteries. That bombardment, and all previous ones, was nothing compared to Kongo and Haruna two days before.
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@bkjeong4302 you mentioned the new Yamatos in passing in an earlier post.
I think the big difference e, as far as shore bombardment goes, is that when the Americans starting invading islands at the end of 1943 they were trying to destroy land defenses after their carrier aircraft had eliminated the land-based air threat. Off Guadalcanal, the Japanese were trying to knock the Cactus Air Force out of the fight long enough to run slow transports with troops and heavy weapons to the island. An full salvo of 8" weighs about what two 14" rounds do, and the cruisers don't carry enough additional ammunition to make up the difference (120 rounds per gun vs 90). Once you build more cruisers you can throw more at the problem, but under the treaties when you're de idling whether to build KGV, North Carolina, and South Dakota classes you can't build more cruisers without violating the treaty. I think that's a key point you still haven't addressed, is that it isn't a choice between North Carolina and three more New Orleans cruisers. It's a choice between North Carolina and being the first to openly break the treaty to build more cruisers. The British have less excuse for KGV because they already have three fast capital ships, but the US needs a counter to the Kongos. I don't see them pulling B turret off the Northamptons, Portlands, and New Orleans in order to install torpedoes that can actually sink the Kongos.
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@bkjeong4302 I think it mostly has to do with the fact that an airfield is, ideally, a dispersed target with aircraft parked out along the edges or even further away, and in sandbag resentments to hopefully prevent fragments from nearby detonations from damaging the planes. The type 3 incendiary shrapnel shell was probably the best available option at the time, although although now we'd want ICM for that kind of target. For the pre-invasion bombardment, the cruisers and larger are trying to destroy fixed defenses using largely blind fire that will devastate any concrete bunker that takes a direct hit, so HE/common round are good and the type 3 is largely useless. It's kind of a side issue, but we do have that one data point for however much it contributes to the discussion.
The two ocean navy act authorized the last two Iowas, the Montanas, and the Alaskas. It has no bearing on the design and procurement decisions of the mid to late 30s before the treaties became irrelevant, such as the decision to build the North Carolina, South Dakota, and KGV classes, which have been the focus of our discussion.
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@potatomasher1852 the answer to that can get incredibly detailed and change as drastically over that period as gunfire control did. In WW1, especially at the beginning, aiming torpedoes depended almost entirely on the submarine captain's ability to estimate range, beating, and speed, and then do the math (or at least an estimate) in his head, or with a slide rule, because the boats are so small and don't have room for extra crew and equipment (not that the equipment even existed then). It will be apparent that HMS Cressy and Hogue assisted in their own sinkings by stopping to rescue survivors from Aboukir, making themselves easier targets for a U-boat that only carried a total of six torpedoes anyway.
By WW2, estimates of range, speed, and beating still depend heavily on the captains ability to make them through the periscope, but in some cases mechanical computers made the calculations. In particular, the US torpedo data computer was an enormous improvement over the previous methods for calculating torpedo settings.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpedo_Data_Computer
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@bkjeong4302 and such a carrier is also extremely vulnerable to air raids from Rabaul, which a carrier operating south/south east of Guadalcanal is not. Remember the lose of Chicago in early 1943 when the Japanese were evacuating Guadalcanal.
I saw the same table. The notes indicate this was an estimate from a study in 1944 and actual combat is likely to show worse results. However, Drach has made the point that Littorio was shooting well enough that it would have started scoring hits at that range if it hadn't given up the game. The point about dispersion is that, once you get the center of the pattern on target, a tight group (less dispersion) will, too a point, let you score more hits than a looser group will.
Still, I will concede the obvious point that the ability of a North Carolina/South Dakota/Iowa to score hits on a capital ship at extreme range (30,000+ yards) in actual combat conditions, while theoretically sound, has never been demonstrated. Just as Enterprise never demonstrated an ability to sink enemy capital ships at night.
Actually, I have to wonder what the US would have done if Japan had been a peer opponent with the ability to make good its ship, aircraft, and aircrew losses and mass produce the copied 40 mm Bofors from Singapore in lieu of the 25 mm Hotchkiss. If the USN found its air groups like so many eggs thrown at a wall (as the Japanese found in the summer of 1944) might carriers have given way to surface combatants again? Maybe, particularly if the Japanese also get VT fuses and enough fighters to keep bombers with guided weapons away from the fleet.
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@bkjeong4302 not, really. Those are escorting destroyers, not really units for power projection. If we say 2,000 men apiece for the Iowas and Alaskas. Hearings, Sumners, and Fletchers all require about 300 men, so maybe 40 more destroyers. Four Iowas and two Alaskas make for 104 5"/38s, while 40 Gearings would provide 240 such guns.However, there are already 54 destroyers present in the three carrier task forces at Okinawa when Yamato sailed, and several other carrier task forces elsewhere. Say a 50% increase in destroyers at Okinawa in exchange for a substantial reduction in heavy guns (three SoDaks), and only a modest increase in AA fire.
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Not exactly a question, just some additional thoughts. So it sounds like Goeben and the four armored cruisers might, at best, have had a central rangefinder reporting range, speed, and bearing data to the gun positions, which would have had to look up elevation data based on range and apply some Kentucky windage for lead. Maybe some central gunnery yelling "Shoot" or "Feur" into a voice pipe or (more likely, given distance) phone to the gun positions in order to coordinate the salvo. Isn't that much like Tsushima, where the effective firing range topped out somewhere in the 6-10,000 yards range? In that case, while Gieben's 11" guns technically have a range advantage of about 3,000 yards, hitting at that kind of range would be pure luck.
As for the engagement circumstances, as I understand it Troubridge tried to intercept at dawn in order to get in to that kind of effective firing range. When he saw that he couldn't, he broke off pursuit. From the chart I saw, it looked like an ongoing pursuit (if Troubridge didn't break off) would have been a race with the British squadron on Goeben's port and closer to land, leaving Goeben room to seaward to keep the range open. There might have been some room for Troubridge to force an engagement later than he wanted, say 0600 rather than 0400, but it's not clear to me that he could force an engagement close enough to give either side any real chance of scoring hits. Certainly it sounds like the court martial concerns about getting shelled to pieces over five miles of closing distance (i.e., from 19,000 yards down to 8,000 yards) are overstated given Goeben's fire control arrangements.
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@reduser3731 even big conventional submarines were only about a fifth of the size as a cruiser (Gato class was 1,500 tons or so), while the Japanese B1 class was 2,600 tons to carry a single seaplane. I suspect the hanger and its waterproofing are going to be weak points, and that the e trans displacement will take longer to submerge in a hurry. The Japanese lost 19 out of 20 B1s during the war, and abandoned plans to build another 15 of the 6,000 ton I-400 class. Cruisers definitely benefitted from recon aircraft, but including a plane and hanger compromises diving speed and durability, along with compromising the element of surprise (hmm, there's float plane, we've been spotted. Battle stations!), all important aspects of submarine operation. There's no record I'm aware of that I-19 (a B1 class) used its float plane to set up its attack on Wasp, North Carolina, and O'Brien.
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@aj41926 there is an article about Kirishima's damage on the navweaps site. While Lee would claim nine 16" hits on Kirishima, the Japanese documents indicate roughly twice that number of hits. In a few cases, multiple main battery shells hit in the same place at the same time and were not distinguishable. A number of other hits penetrated Kirishima below the water line and appeared to Lee as having fallen short. Those hits below the water line caused flooding and a list, which the Japanese corrected with counter flooding, but this created a vicious circle of progressive flooding which lead to the ships loss.
While the US was using 16" shells, the US notoriously used heavy shells that were almost entirely (to an extreme degree) steel, with very small bursting charges. While the 16" AP Mark 8 was almost twice as heavy as the British 13.5" (2,700 lb to 1,500), the British shell actually had a larger bursting charge (40.9 lb to 44.5 lb). What the US did have was slightly more reliable fuses and a much more stable explosive filler. Where the British (and French, Russians, and Japanese) used picric acid, which is very powerful but easy to set off, even by shock, the US used "Explosive D" (ammonium picrate), which is more stable but also a little less powerful.
http://www.navweaps.com/index_lundgren/kirishimaDamageAnalysis.php
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@ImRezaF I cant say if BKJeong is that specific guy, but I have exchanged quite a few comments with him and his position is that the "modern" battleship classes were all obsolete at the time of launch and the various navies would have been better served by more cruisers and carriers. I think he has a point about the Yamatos, Bismarks, Littorios, and Iowas, probably the KGVs as well, but that the US was justified in building at least four of the North Carolinas and South Dakotas. After all, the US had nothing to counter the four Kongos, whereas the UK had Hood, Repulse, and Renown for fast capital ships already.
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@ImRezaF yes, even at 29 knots Hood can outpace just about every other capital ship in the world. Nothing in the US is even close (standards at 21 knots, North Carolinas not in service until 1941), the Kongos are about 27 knots, the Dunkerques match Hood and the Richelieus aren't in service until 1940 as are the Littorios (which also match Hood's speed). Really, only the Scharnhorsts are both in service and exceed Hood's (degraded) speed. Honestly, the British governments of the 30s are like a backwards child chewing on the cat's tail and refusing to fund any important defense projects because "there won't be a war in the next 10 years". Nerfed fleet air arm, barely adequate development of fighters, tanks, and artillery, and very few desperately needed refits for major warships. I salivate to think would could have been done with Hood based on what was done with Queen Elizabeth.
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@dixieduffy7 almost certainly not, if for no other reason than lack of opportunity. The VT fuse was only really available to the UK and US (possibly France as well) within the time frame of battleship main guns. These powers also operated with carriers and large fighter screens by the time the VT fuse was in service in 1943, as well as having good and excellent heavy AA guns (4.5", 5", 5.25") to use VT fuses with. The powers that used battleship guns for AA were basically Germany and Japan, which used normal mechanical time fuses. There is basically a very narrow 2.5 year window where battleship guns with VT shells for AA use could have been a thing against large attacking aircraft formations, but no real need for it. Note that the US did issue a mechanical time fuse for AA use with the 16" Mark 13 high capacity (HC) shell and the newer battleships could elevate their guns to 45 degrees and have some hope of using it in the AA role, but again, by the time these ships were facing large air attacks and had access to the VT fuse, there wasn't any real need. I've seen a US Navy article from 1950 that lists the VT fused shells in service at that time: 5"/38, 6"/47, 5"/54, and 3"/50. The largest shell on the list was the US Army's 240 mm howitzer.
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@andrewszigeti2174 And have you considered in your analysis how much larger the Habbakuk's air group would be? When the F-14 was in service, the carrier air wing included a squadron of those in addition to several squadrons of F-18s, now it includes four squadrons of F-18s of various types. The larger Habbakuk air group would presumably include several times that number of fighters with which to intercept the Backfire raid, and presumably enough Hawkeyes to maintain several in an array along the likely threat axis rather than just one with escorts orbiting a couple hundred miles out.
Also, I have to wonder about the issue of fratricide among the missiles once the leading ones start detonating. We are, after all, talking about an inbound wave of 400-500 missiles with tactical nuclear warheads. This is not a warhead that needs a contact fuse to be effective, so how much will the first detonation at, to pull a number out of thin air, 10 meters out effect other missiles further back that haven't reach their detonation condition yet? Between heat, blast, and fast neutron effects I can think of a number of things that might produce squibs or even no fission at all.
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@readhistory2023 You're overstating some parts of the problem (at least for WW2) and understating some others. At 30,000 yards (16 miles-ish) it's more like 60 seconds flight time, about 30 seconds to 20,000 yards. With many navies, there was a mechanical fire control computer continuously (at least as much as possible) generating firing solution data based on inputs from the rangefinders and heading and bearing estimates. The computer then generated data that went out to indicators in the gun turrets, which the gun layers matched using their controls ("follow the pointer" control). For the US, AC electrical systems allowed the use of remote power control so the Mark 1 or 1A fire control computer dire fly controlled gun laying and elevation. In addition, that Mark 1 or 1A fire control computer was the most advanced control system in the world at the time. So, especially for shooting at another ship, there won't be long delays for calculations to be made and related to the gun crews, as this work is done electrically be the fire control computer and pointers/RPC.
For shore bombardment, range data will have to be manually fed into the fire control computer unless the ship can see and range on the target. Unless there are no friendly troops in the area, there absolutely will be ranging shots and delays to correct for the fall of shot, because no one is going to let a ship just blaze away if there is any possibility of friendly fire. The tank attack at Salerno is not going to close so quickly that the ships can't take 60 seconds t get the range right before they start dumping 150 rounds per minute at the attacking division.
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@UCw0wuZJUxWRd8jvhj0Q42Rw navweaps.com indicates, for the 16"/50 firing HC:
Time of flight for HC Shell with MV = 2,615 fps (797 mps)
10,000 yards (9,140 m): 13.1 seconds
20,000 yards (18,290 m): 30.3 seconds
30,000 yards (27,430 m): 53.2 seconds
35,000 yards (32,000 m): 70.3 seconds
39,500 yards (36,120 m): 86.0 seconds
150 rounds per minute is for a Brooklyn or St. Louis class CL with 15 6"/47 firing at up to 10 rpm. USS Savanah at Salerno, for example.
If you have to manually enter data into a computer, then I'm sure those. omputation times are plausible. The entire point of the Mark 1 and 1A computers used during WW2 was to have the sensors dire fly feed the computer continuously, with the computer continuously calculating the firing solution. Hence, for example, Johnston being able to dodge Japanese fire while maintaining accurate return fire for quite along time before her luck ran out. As an alternative example, Graf Spee scored only about 2.5% hits at the River Plate, which the Germans blamed on Langsdorf maneuvering too vigorously and throwing off their own firing solutions.
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@bkjeong4302 I understand a major element of this goes to the kind of electrical system used. Almost everyone else in the world, except the Germans, used DC (direct current), while the US and Germans used AC (alternating current). If I remember correctly, Nathan Okun once explained to me in a comment that the US began building remote power control (RPC) into its major warships in the mid-to-late 30s, so the new fast battleships had it from launch while ships like West Virginia and Salt Lake City had it installed during major overhauls/rebuilds. There is something about DC that did not lend itself to RPC the way AC does. It may be that the output signal from the fire control table/computer is a low-voltage signal that, in an AC system, can control another device that allows high voltage motors to operate in response, but an analogous arrangement did not exist for DC systems. So basically, the US (and the Germans, who only used it for bearing) had a crucial enabling technology installed that allowed them to implement RPC.
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@stephenbond1990 the comparison to the 1.1" machinegun is probably the most apt, as the the 37 mm Breda and 2-pounder pom-pom were noticeably larger rounds and the 25 mm Hotchkiss WAS the 25 mm Japanese gun, except the Japanese made some "improvements" that actually made it worse. Both the 25 mm and 1.1" rounds are perfectly serviceable in a suitable weapon, and enough bigger than the 12.7 or 13.2 mm machineguns used as light AA to analogize to the 20mm Oerlikon/40 mm Bofors interaction later in the war. Right off, the 1.1" gun has an advantage in being able to feed from either of two 8-round box magazines, allowing one to be changed out while firing from the other, while the 25 mm used a 15-round box magazine, which forced the gun to stop firing while the magazine is changed out. However, a decent rate of fire demands a multiple-gun mounting, which obviously increases the weight and tends to slow the rate of elevation and train. Ultimately, while the US found readily available replacements in the 40 mm Bofors and 20 mm Oerlikon, and so abandoned efforts to refine the 1.1" gun and work out the teething troubles, the Japanese only ever had some transferred German 20 mm guns and captured British 40 mm Bofors from Singapore, which they copied to the tune of several hundred guns by the end of the war. Lacking readily available replacements, the Japanese had to continue working on the 25 mm. As noted at navweaps.com:
According to US Naval Technical Mission to Japan report O-47(N)-2, the Japanese saw the following deficiencies in these mountings in decreasing order of seriousness:
The multiple mounts could not be trained and elevated rapidly enough, either by power or manual drive.
The gunsights were inadequate against high speed aircraft.
The guns had excessive vibration, making them difficult to keep on target.
The capacity of the ammunition supply equipment was inadequate, causing interrupted fire and a greatly reduced operating routine.
The muzzle blast caused problems for both the guncrew and equipment.
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@sreckocuvalo8110 clarify, do you mean scoring hits with the first salvo, or having all shells from a single full-broadside salvo hit the same target? If the former, West Virginia scored a hit with its first salvo at Yamashiro at just over 20,000 yards. If the later, it would almost certainly have to be something at extremely close range like the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (fought from about 4,000 yards down to maybe 20 feet for one destroyer dodging Hiei) or Cape Matapan (cruisers ambushed at night at maybe 3,500 yards). For a close range full broadside of hits, I doubt there's any good documentation because such a thing would be so devastating that it might be hard to discern and verify all the shells hitting. For example, when Washington sank Kirishima at slightly longer range (I think I've seen just over 8,000 yards), the crew recorded fewer main battery hits (9) than the Japanese damage control officer would later report (20). Some that Washington thought were short actually hit below the water line, and other hits from the same salvo were so close together that they wouldnt be distinguishable.
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@arivael as I recall, Jean Bart had one complete turret installed, but I see what you mean about the shell hoist as fire control and certain essential shell handling equipment had not been installed. Looking further at navweaps, I am honestly surprised to see how short and stubby the British shells were, having almost the same mass as the French shells but being much shorter. Part of that will be steel at the base that is lost to the boat tail, but the French shells also must have a very long, pointed windscreen to be so much longer overall without being much heavier.
As for Nelson and Rodney, I'm not sure what you mean. Navweaps indicates that a heavier shell was designed for them, increasing weight by almost 10%, but the financial situation of the 30s prevented this from being produced. You may be thinking of the way the Colorado class in the US never used to 16“ Mark 8 super heavy AP shell, but that was an issue of length in addition to weight. Navweaps says:
"These ships could not fire the "super-heavy" 2,700 pound (1,224.7 kg) AP Mark 8 projectile, as that shell was too heavy and too long for their handling equipment. However, in the late 1930s they were given the 2,240 lbs. (1,016 kg) AP Mark 5, which was a heavier projectile with better armor piercing capability than the 2,110 lbs. (957.1 kg) AP Mark 3 that was originally issued."
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I had been meaning to say something about Ernest J. King last week, but needed to look up some citations. I think King's biggest sin during the war, even bigger than refusing to learn from the Royal Navy at first, was also America's biggest sin. Namely, a failure to give serious thought to the kind and quantity of forces that would be necessary to win they war they were preparing for and then fighting. For example, the US fielded a half-dozen Marine divisions and about 90 (88, IIRC) Army divisions, whereas the Germans had several hundred divisions and the Soviets more like 500. On the naval side, as Max Hastings put it, "[King] set about creating an armada whose size owed little to rational assessment of the resources needed to defeat Japan, and almost everything to his own grandiose vision." And later "Warships were coming off the slips faster than crews could be mustered and trained to man them. The navy never assessed its manpower needs, it simply enlisted every sailor it could get." By June 1945 he wanted 3.4 million men, but would have needed 4.1 million to crew all the ships the navy had ordered. This issue of crews, BTW, is one reason I keep coming back to the issue of manning cruisers and destroyers in my discussions with BK Jeong. While you can get three cruisers out of the tonnage of a battleship, those three cruisers will take more men to crew them (3300) than the battleship will (1800-2600), especially if one of those cruisers takes heavy casualties that wouldn't have been incurred by a battleship in the same situation.
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@sarjim4381 not so much the lack of combat experience as the lack of realistic training in the peacetime Navy. The Japanese surface ships had just as little combat experience, but had conducted realistic training and it showed in their performance.
I see where Exeter launched torpedoes from both sets of launchers at around 0640, and Ajax launched some torpedoes and forced Graf Spee to turn off at 0724, but most of Graf Spee's maneuvering was a matter of "chasing salvos" to reduce the accuracy of British fire (which also contributed to Graf Spee scoring fewer hits than her gunnery officers would have expected). If Graf Spee was going to sit back and fire at long range, it wouldn't matter if the opposing ships had torpedoes or not. Historically, Graf Spee did chose to close and engage, which made the torpedoes relevant. If the Graf Spee tries to hang back at 20,000-plus yards, the 10,000 yard range of the British Mark IX torpedo will be completely irrelevant. Even the 24" Type 93 of the Japanese navy was significant primarily because of it's great speed and large warhead, and the most damaging example of its use, at Tassafaronga, required almost active cooperation from the US force. After Minneapolis was hit, New Orleans, Pensacola, and Northampton all continued on or returned to their base.ourse and speed, and got hit by torpedoes. Honolulu, on the other hand, maneuvered radically and evaded the torpedoes. It's really hard to say that the Mark 15 torpedo, with all the same issues that plagued the submarine force's Mark 14, would have been worth including on cruisers before the bugs were worked out in 1943, by which time radar and fire controls had advanced quite a bit from 1939.
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Used it independently, yes. Picric acid, what the Japanese called "shimose powder", was also used as an explosive filler by quite a few other nations by WW1. The British called it Luddite (after the town it was produced in, Lydd), the French Melinite, the Austro-Hungarians Ecrasite. The Russians were also using it by 1894, just not in naval shells that would be used during the Russo-Japanese war. They used wet gun cotton as a filling, modifying their shells in 1907 (presumably to replace the weak burster), and going through a complete redesign of their shells by early in WW1. The US would make an ammonium salt of picric acid they called Explosive D and use that to fill their shells, which made for a slightly less powerful but much more stable explosive.
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@MarekDohojda at what range? Even 30 years ago accuracy was pretty good at extreme ranges. OTOH, when three British battleships snuck up on three Italian cruisers during the Battle of Cape Matapan, they were probably scoring close to 100% hits from within 4,000 yards. From navweaps.com:
"As modernized in the 1980s, each turret carried a DR-810 radar that measured the muzzle velocity of each gun, which made it easier to predict the velocity of succeeding shots. Together with the Mark 160 FCS and better propellant consistency, these improvements made these weapons into the most accurate battleship-caliber guns ever made. For example, during test shoots off Crete in 1987, fifteen shells were fired from 34,000 yards (31,900 m), five from the right gun of each turret. The pattern size was 220 yards (200 m), 0.64% of the total range. 14 out of the 15 landed within 250 yards (230 m) of the center of the pattern and 8 were within 150 yards (140 m). Shell-to-shell dispersion was 123 yards (112 m), 0.36% of total range."
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@CaveShvig these bombs were used specifically during this attack to hit ships moored in the inside row, not exposed to torpedo attack. The bomber used was the B5N "Kate" torpedo bomber, which would normally use a torpedo for anti-shipping attacks. A squadron of Kates could attack a target with torpedoes using a hammer and anvil attack, with equal groups coming in on both bows, so that a ship that turns away from one group of torpedoes is turning broadside to the other group. This tactic gives a high likelihood of one or more hits when carried out properly. Level bombing attacks, even from medium altitudes of 8-15,000 feet or so, are still highly unlikely to score hits on a ship at sea capable of maneuvering. To have a reasonable chance to score a bomb hit on a maneuvering ship, it is necessary to either use a dive bombing or mast-height attack profile. However, if the Kate is at mast height, it might as well get lower for a torpedo attack (and such a low release will have minimal vertical velocity and won't penetrate much armor), and the D3A "Val" dive bomber cannot carry such a large bomb. So there is simply no reason to believe these 16" converted shells would be useful at hitting and sinking ships outside of this specific attack on motionless ships at anchor.
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@slavohazucha5239 one thing I've seen, regarding those magazine explosions, is that the British cordite formulation has contributed to it significantly. IIRC, the British used petroleum jelly as part of the formulation, while the analogous German propellant used a more stable additive, leading the British to revise their cordite formulation after WW1. As for Hood, Barham, Royal Oak in WW2, it's still cordite. The US Navy used a completely different propellant, so where Boise took a shell that caused a magazine conflagration at Cape Esperance, it did not cause a ship-killing explosion despite killing several hundred men in the forward turrets and magazines.
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@l0ckandl0ad Midway is definitely unusual. Torpedoes are very dangerous to ships, both merchant ships and warships, but aerial torpedoes early in the war were just as dangerous to the torpedo bombers because no one had yet developed the ability to launch torpedoes at reasonable speed and range for aircraft survivability. Doctrine called for release at about 1,000 yards or less, from under 100 ft altitude and a speed of maybe 150 knots. Low and slow to get the torpedo to function properly. Problem is, that makes the torpedo bomber neat for the slaughter against the 20mm Oerlikon and similar weapons. At the Santa Cruz Islands in October 1942, the Japanese had 49% fatalities among torpedo bomber aircrew.
In contrast, outside of Midway the USAAC medium bombers mostly found themselves on patrol or going after smaller vessels, like barges and transports, where a torpedo is kind of a waste. They tried a lot of different things, including massed machineguns in solid noses and 75mm guns in some models of B-25, but they had a lot of success with mast-height bombing once that was developed in 1943. I'm sure they retained the ability to use torpedoes, but rarely had the need to do so before the war moved out of the southwest Pacific and out of their effective range.
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I was listening to Drach and Military History Visualized discussing Italian contribitions to the war, and at one point Drach rattles off the list of cruisers lost in the Med. Ive seen that the RN lost some 28 cruisers of its own, not counting Australian and New Zealand navy ships, and of those 28 I count 9 C and D or Hawkins class cruisers. In addition, the RN had a large number of second-class cruisers (if you'll pardon the phrase), of which I count 5 being lost, for a total of 14 out of the RNs 28 cruiser losses. I understand that a the RN wanted larger numbers of ships in some ways for trade protection and economic warfare, but I have to wonder how much the lighter weight and older designs (of the C, D, and Hawkins classes) contributed to the losses.
In contrast, the US had 10 Omaha class cruisers that were almost as old as the C and D classes but lost none of them. Admittedly, the USN used them much the same way as the RN used the Revenges, but one did get into a surface gunfight and another took heavy damage from Japanese bombs but still managed to return to base. None, of course, was permitted anywhere near the cauldron of the Solomon Islands.
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@lucashenrique594 it's a question that has been asked a number of times, for all the various tank projectiles. Warship AP shells are just like the most common anti-tank projectiles of WW2, APCBC (armor piercing capped, ballistic cap). Thing is, tanks have essentially no internal volume to spare, so any hole-puncher is good. Ships have enormous volume behind the armor, so just punching a 2-3" hole in the armor, or straight through the ship, doesn't necessarily get you anywhere, and would take a long time and many such holes below the water line for there to be any risk of sinking. That said, check out the shaped charge warheads on some of those Soviet anti-shipping missiles, like the SS-N-1 "Styx" (P-15 Termit) used to sink the Eilat, 454 kg shaped charge warhead on a missile diameter of 760 mm.
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You've talked about the comparative performance of the 16" Mark 8 "super heavy" AP shell in US service, but I've never seen an answer that addresses an obvious point of comparison that addresses other potential biases and isolates the comparison to the shell. Navweaps provides a great deal of data on both the 16"/45 Marks 5 and 8 used on the Colorado-class and the 16"/45 Mark 6 used on the North Carolina and South Dakota classes (hereafter, "Mark 5 gun" and "Mark 6 gun", respectively). The Mark 5 gun could not use the Mark 8 AP shell because it was too long and heavy for the shell handling equipment but did receive a normal-ish weight (2,240 lb) Mark 5 AP shell of modern design (eliminating a bias from differences in shell design) in the late 30s. From what I can tell, the Mark 5 and Mark 6 guns are practically identical in all respects except weight, which is the result of another two decades of improvement in metallurgy. Further, the data from navweaps on penetration comes from the USN Empirical Armor Penetration Formula for both guns, eliminating another potential confounding element. Therefore, it seems to me that a comparison of the performance of the Mark 5 gun with Mark 5 shell to the Mark 6 gun with Mark 8 shell will provide the most appropriate basis for comparison that isolates the difference in shell weight from other confounding issues.
According to navweaps, the Mark 5 AP shell from the Mark 5 gun should impact at 1,629 fps at 20,000 yards, providing just over 16" of belt armor penetration and 3.5" of deck armor penetration. In comparison, the Mark 8 shell from the Mark 6 gun will strike at 1,604 fps (almost completely making up the over 200 fps difference in muzzle velocity), providing over 17.5" of belt penetration and over 4" of deck penetration. The superior belt penetration of the Mark 8 shell from the Mark 6 gun appears to be present at all ranges, although the Mark 5 shell from the Mark 5 gun is only expected to penetrate a few hundredths of an inch less at the muzzle. Why ignore this obvious basis for comparison in favor of focusing on a conjectural standard weight shell for the 16"/50 Mark 7 gun? Doesn't this comparison of the Mark 5 gun firing the Mark 5 shell with the Mark 6 gun firing the Mark 8 shell provide strong evidence that the Mark 8 shell is worthwhile across the board?
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@stevevalley7835 from what I'm seeing, the Oerlikon weighed about 150 lb, the 1.1" gun (just gun weight) up over 600 lb (water cooling probably has a lot to do with that), and the Bofors a little over 1,000 lb. I imagine the weight of the 1.1" could be cut down a bit, and I suspect such a weight reduction (along with a change in the magazines) would be needed to make it a viable hand trained gun. I think the US would absolutely need something to fill the role of the 20 mm Oerlikon, whether that's a version of the HS404 or the 1.1", because the .50 BMG simply does not cut it as a light anti-aircraft gun. Those light guns need to be effective at 1,000 yards or more to kill torpedo bombers before weapon release early in the war, and without an explosive shell none of those early war heavy machineguns can cut it, as demonstrated by actual use.
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chris younts this is untrue. Base pay for top-ranked officers in special position, like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tops out at about $22,000 per month. That's about $264,000 annually. The same officer in lesser positions tops out at about $15,000/month, or $180,000 annually. Yes there are allowances for things like housing, but eve all together it is FAR less than "over $1,000,000 per year". The civilian pay grades are similar, with top end pay for a GS-15 senior manager being about $177,000 per year even with the 27% locality adjustment for Washington D.C.
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One thing that is arguably left out is not just the radar effect, but the specific fire control radar setup the US was using bu this time. Am I correct in assuming that all seven of these fast BBs had the Mark 8 fire control radar for their main batteries at this time? This is the fire control radar that West Virginia (and, to a lesser extent, California and Tennessee) would show off to such magnificent effect a few months later at Surigao Strait. As a reminder, WV's gunnery report shows first-salvo hits at slightly over 22,000 yards and applied "no correction" (i.e., range is on) after 9 of 14 salvos. In the mean time, while the Japanese have some surface search radars, and the Type 22 on Yamato appears to have been tied into gunnery control also, I suspect the Japanese use of radar is at least 2-3 years behind the US/UK state of the art. It might not even compare well with the Mark 3 fire control radars used by Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi at Surigao Strai.
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@ericdickison7995 sure, during the run to the South Scheer will continue advancing to try to trap and destroy the Battlecruiser Squadrons. However, if the British have working shells and have sunk or badly crippled 4-5 of the battlecruisers in First Scouting Group, then turn back to the north when they see the High Seas Fleet, I very much doubt Scheer is going to follow them. Second Scouting Group's cruisers are not going to try to flank and pin Beatty, they'll get crushed in a hurry. More likely, Scheer turns for home shepherding his cripples. Beatty being Beatty, he will probably follow and try to harass, but that is a very dangerous game even at full strength, 10 battlecruisers and battleships against, what, 16 dreadnoughts plus the pre-dreadnoughts? Beatty would need to be very careful he doesn't inadvertently get too close to the HSF and lose a few more ships, but if he follows too far behind he is likely to lose track of them entirely.
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@unryumaru2095 all of them. The SC1000 was a 1,000 kg bomb, true. However, it was a thin case general purpose demolition bomb, while the Essex class had an armored hangar deck 2.5" thick, back up by a 1.5" thick STS 4th deck. The bombs would go off on, or possibly just under, the flight deck, wrecking the hangar spaces. However, you've specified that the aircraft have been launched, and by the time the Essex class entered service the US had started draining the aviation gas lines and filling them with CO2 when going into action and fuel was not actively being pumped. There is, therefore, essentially no possibility of fire in the hangar deck and no way for the bombs to penetrate the armored hanger deck. The best bet would be to use 0.1 second or so delay fuses on the bombs and drop them alongside the ship for a mining effect.
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@jeremyfeldmann7969 Is that a reference to gun caliber in mm? There's a common human preference for "nice round numbers". While 203 mm (8") is a nice round number in imperial units (inches), it isn't really in metric. Germany, OTOH, seems to have a distinct preference for referring to everything larger than small arms in centimeters, even if it isn't a nice round number of centimeters. Thus the various 88 mm guns of the imperial German navy and later German armies and navies are referred to as 8.8 cm guns, and the common secondary gun for Germany during the 20th century was various 15 cm (5.9") guns. So while the US used 8" guns on various pre-dreadnought battleships and cruisers, Germany would end up going with 21 cm guns on SMS Blucher. All else equal, there really isn't all that much difference between an 8" gun and a 21 cm gun, or a 15 cm gun, a 6" (152 mm) gun, and a 155 mm gun.
Japan and the UK were a little different. After WW1, Japan redesigned all of its guns in terms of cm, but it rounded them to the nearest whole centimeter, so what was previously a 3" (76.2 mm) gun was now designated as an 8 cm gun. This blend over into new gun designs, such that the guns on Nagato and Mutsu were actually 41 cm (16.1") rather than the even 16" specified by the Washington Naval Treaty. In the UK, there was a long history of designating guns by the weight of shot, with each step up in gun size attempting to achieve a rough doubling in shot weight; this would lead to some odd gun sizes like the 7.5" (200 lb, twice the 100 lb of a 6" shell) and 9.2" (380 lb, almost double that of a 7.5" shell). Obviously there was some slop there, with the British limiting their guns to even tenths of an inch and content with an approximate doubling of weight.
In more direct answer to the question, the tendency is to continue developing guns using the nation's own convention for what is a nice round number, and not sweating a few millimeters of diameter.
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@f12mnb the thing about those underwater hits is that the shells are worse if you score a direct hit on armor, and only work properly if they hit a few yards (maybe as much as 10) short of the target. At normal battle ranges, that window is much smaller than the natural spread of shell fire, putting this concept into the "difficult but awesome" category. A note on the first point about the diving shells being worse: navweaps shows armor penetration for the 277 lb 8" Type 91 shell as being 7.5" at 10,000 m, while the lighter US 8" shell (260 lb) is expected to penetrate 10" at 9,000 yards and 8" at 12,000 yards. At the same time, Washington claimed 9 main battery hits on Kirishima, but Japanese documents show about 20 main battery hits with 7 or so located below the waterline, so regular AP shells can accomplish the same thing without sacrificing performance against armor.
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@jeffrey8847 any cruiser or battleship preparing for a surface engagement where the main battery is likely to be used will prepare by running ammunition up the hoists to the guns. However, this is not an elevator that goes straight up. Rather, there are a number of steps along the way, and it can take a couple minutes for a specific shell to go from the shell room below the waterline up to the gun house to be loaded. A ship is not going to go to action stations and not get ammunition ready, because then it would take a minute or two for the first shells to be loaded. Rather, they will full the hoists and load the guns with the ammunition they expect to need and fire it at the target that presents itself. It is worse than useless to fire an AP shell at an exposed land target, both because AP has a sm!ller bursting charge and because AP uses a delay fuse, so the AP shell will bury itself deep in the dirt before a (comparatively) small explosion. While an HE or incindiary shrapnel shell isnt ideal against an armored target, either will still be a significant emotional event for the ship's crew, can damage unarmored portions of the ship, and can interfere with the effectiveness of return fire. Sending shells back down the hoists to be stowed again will take an eternity when the enemy is shooting at you, and by this time the Japanese had worked out that they could clear the ammunition hoists out the muzzle and get AP into the guns with 2-3 minutes of steady firing.
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@ineednochannelyoutube5384 for the high capacity shell, yes. The AP (42% heavier) comes out at about 750 m/s, give or take a little depending on barrel wear. A number of other guns fire AP at higher muzzle velocitie, such as the Littorios (850 m/s) and the Bismarks (820 m/s for the ships, 1050 m/s for the coastal artillery version). One can build a gun to throw any arbitrarily heavy shell at any arbitrarily high velocity, although it can quickly get into "awesome but impractical" territory. High velocity tends to come with a very short barrel life, even if the projectile can survive, early versions of the .220 Swift (2.6 g projectile at 1200 m/s) had a problem shedding the copper jacket. I dont want to think about how much heavier the gun would have to be, and the propellant charge, to get a naval artillery shell up to 1200 m/s, let alone the 1500 m/s achieved by smooth bore tank guns firing the aforementioned subcaliber saboted ammunition.
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Thanks for addressing my question about the pursuit of Goeben and Breslau in the last live stream. The thrust of the question focuses on the difference in fire control equipment. I presume that Goeben had the third level of equipment you described, with a main rangefinder feeding range and bearing data to the fire control table/computer/whatever, which then provided gunnery instructions to the gun positions electrically using the "follow the pointers" method. In contrast, I suspect (but do not know) that the British armored cruisers had the second level of equipment with a main rangefinder providing ranging information but the guns otherwise mostly operating under local control. In essence, Troubridge's cruisers would be prepared to fight a Tsushima-style engagement at a range of up to about 10,000 yards while Goeben is prepared to fight a Jutland-style engagement at 16-20,000 yards.
If this impression is correct, then Goeben is in a good position (if Troubridge tries to engage) to just keep the range open at, say, 14,000 yards (Goeben should have speed advantage over the armored cruisers) and pick them off with the two aft turrets and whichever amidships turret bears, a total of six guns. Troubridge does not appear to have any kind of speed advantage, so he would have had to find terrain that would restrict Goeben's ability to evade and make his attack there in order to have any chance of damaging Goeben noticably. While his guns can range out to Goeben's location, his inferior fire control equipment would mean that he is relying on luck while Goeben's gunners are steadily chewing through his cruiser squadron.
Edit: Goeben might also try to finesse a fight at 16,000 yards or so just outside the range of the British guns with their 15 degree elevation limits.
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@johnfisher9692 I dont see the math adding up. Supposedly, the 18.1" shell is good for 30-something inches of armor penetration at the muzzle. The thickest part of Bismark's belt is 32 cm (12.6"), backed up by a 10 cm (3.9") deck sloped at 60 degrees, doubling the effective thickness. Total is a little over 20" equivalent. One possibility is that his definition of "point blank" is far enough away that the velocity and penetration have fallen enough, although that will also effect both angles of impact. Another is that he's looking at the particulars of Japanese shells, which have a small cap head rather than a proper armor piercing cap, or that he's counting on the belt to strip the cap head and the turtleback to shatter the shell. However, deck armor is not typically face hardened because it is intended to stop bombs, which generally aren't moving fast enough to shatter on face hardened armor.
The state of the art for ship armor in WW2 was a form of spaced armor, with either a decapping plate well outboard of the main face-hardened armor belt or a thick outer shell that was sturdy enough to strip off the cap. The South Dakota and Iowa classes approached this with their thick STS shell and sloped armor belt, but didn't get the full effect because they used class B armor plate which was not face hardened. The British KGV class used an exterior slab of excellent face-hardened armor. The Italians designed the Littorio class with such a decapping plate, but may not have given it enough space from the face-hardened armor belt and filled in the voice space with a cement foam. The Bismarks used an exterior belt backed by a thinner plate, exactly the opposite of what is useful for spaced armor when dealing with capped projectiles.
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@TraditionalAnglican as I understand, you're arguing that improving allied aircraft were more responsible for increased allied success than Japanese aircrew losses. I think you overstate your case talking about the P-26 and F2A. The P-26 saw action in the Phillipines (26, out of 150 or so built). The F2A was on the Lexington (18) in December 1941, and at Midway (20) in June 1942, but all the carriers at Coral Sea and Midway used F4Fs, and the debate in the Navy was over the F4F-3 (4 guns with 450 rounds per gun) vs the F4F-4 (6 guns with 240 rpg). The F6F and F4U didn't see combat until early 1943 in the Pacific, by which time the remaining Japanese fleet carriers had withdrawn to the home islands to train new aircrew.
The first P-39s at Guadalcanal were a tually P-400s, export models rejected in Europe because of the lack of turbosupercharging. Performance of the P-400 fell to crap above about 15,000 feet, whereas the Japanese bombers came in at almost 30,000 feet where only the F4F could reach them. The Army didn't get any decent fighters at Guadalcanal until some P-38s were assigned after the November battles.
I think you may not fully appreciate how thoroughly the Japanese crafted their pilot training program for a short war, and were dumbfounded when the Americans didn't just give up in the face of an "insurmountable" advantage. It is well known how aircrew losses kept Zuikaku cooling its heels while Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu were lost at Midway. This was not an accident, it was simply a reflection of how few aircrew the Japanese had and how slowly they had been training them. They ramped up the rate later in the war, but the quality took a nose dive. Those later replacements had, maybe, 40-80 hours of flight time, while US pilots arrive at the fleet with 200-300 hours, which makes a huge difference.
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@messa2218 twocthings about those early 19th century battleships and their torpedoes.
1) they were not intended for short range use, but were limited to short range by the torpedoes themselves. The intent was that a battleship would have torpedoes available for finishing off slow moving or motionless cripples by letting water into the bottom. Torpedoes at the time had ranges of a few thousand yards at best, at a time when the Japanese were wrecking the Russian Second Pacific Squadron at about 8,000 yards and Jutland would be fought in the 14-20,000 yard bracket.
Edit: ok, I do see now where the Royal Navy expected to have its battle line using torpedoes at the opposing battle line, where ships were expected to fill 1/3 of the space in the line so about that number of torpedoes should hit. As it was, the capital ships only fired 21 torpedoes at Jutland because of the extreme (for torpedoes) range.
2) capital ship torpedoes were individual tubes below the waterline leading to a large torpedo flat that stored reload torpedoes and had enough room for men to get those reloads into the tube. Typical installation might be one in the bow, one in the stern, and one on each broadside, total of four. This should immediately reinforce the first point about finishing off cripples, because the definition of frustration is to try to hit an alert target with a single torpedo at significant range. Further, each of those torpedo flats is a massive flooding hazard, a large compartment below the waterline with no further subdivision (edit: as demonstrated when Lutzow took two 12" hits that immediflooded the forward torpedo flat and led to her loss).
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While discussing the Mark 8 16" AP "Super Heavy" shell, we should keep in that we already have the basis for an apples to apples comparison with the 16" Mark 5 on the Colorados and Mark 6 on the North Carolinas and South Dakotas. The two guns have the same barrel length, chamber volume (near enough), and working pressure, and almost the same propellant charge (535 vs 545 lb of SPD, with the older gun using the larger charge)). The significant difference is in the shell, as the Mark 5 16"/45 did not have an ammunition handling system that could accept the 16" Mark 8 AP, although it did get a new Mark 5 AP shell weighing 2,240 lb in the late 30s.
The Mark 8 shell from the Mark 6 gun has a muzzle velocity of 2,300 fps from a new gun, compared to 2,520 fps for the Mark 5 shell from the Mark 5 gun. As a result, the the Mark 5 shell reaches out to 35,000 yards at 30 degrees (the limit of the turret) while the Mark 8 shell has to be fired at 35 degrees for almost the same distance (34,500 yards) and tops out at just under 37,000 yards. At practical ranges, out to about 25,000 yards, the Mark 8 shell has penetration that is equally to or better than the Mark 5 shell (USN empirical formula):
29.74" to 29.68" at the muzzle
26.6" to 26" at 5,000 yards
23.5" to 22.5" at 10,000 yards
20.47" to 19.22" at 15,000 yards
17.62" to 16.24" at 20,000 yards
15.05" to 13.74" at 25,000 yards
So it seems unlikely to me that the 16"/50 would display significantly better armor penetration just by using shell of similar construction but more conventional weight compared to the Mark 8 superheavy AP.
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@MaxwellAerialPhotography have you read Shattered Sword? The authors discuss the operation and formations used by the Kido Butai. The carriers and their escorts operated in a loose ring quite a few nautical miles across (like, 10 or so). The carriers themselves operated several thousand yards apart, with no nearby escort except for a single pla e guard destroyer each. The lose outer ring of battlecruisers, Tone class cruisers, and destroyers with their light cruiser flotilla leader, served to guard against subs and spot incoming air attacks, calling the attention of the combat air patrol (CAP) to the intruders by gunfire. The larger escorts, while a little easier to get to than theCarrie's, contribute nothing to the carrier's AAA defense, and the carriers themselves relied primarily on the CAP and maneuvering to avoid incoming attack, with their own AAA occupying a distant third place. Hitting those escorts really doesnt contribute anything to winning the battle in either the short (this air strike) or medium (the next air strike) term.
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While I previously tended to agree with you that Nagumo bore a lot of responsibility for the Japanese carriers being so vulnerable when the dive bomber squadrons arrived, if you look at the way the attacks from Nidway trickled in, accompanied by his own aircraft returning from Midway, the Japanese never really had an opportunity to launch and assemble a strike force once the first strike reported Midway was not neutralized. Nagumo might, hypothetically, have launched his Midway strike, launched scouts to look for the carriers, and then launched the second strike armed with torpedoes to orbit, say, 30 miles to the east while waiting for a report on US carriers. However, I dont think anyone in the world would have done that at this point in the war. I think the earliest I've heard of anyone launching before having a definite target location is Halsey at Cape Engano in October 1944. Once Nagumo decides to prepare a second strike against Midway, he never has the time to get the strike force back on deck and launched before the SBDs start their divesa 1025.
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@patrickradcliffe3837 for land targets both the dive bombers and torpedo bombers would have carried "land" bombs (general purpose bombs for blast and fragments). Against ships, they'd use AP bombs on the dive bombers and torpedoes on the torpedo bombers, the "real ship killers" from the Japanese perspective. Yes, they could have dropped what they were doing at 0800 when Tone's plane reported an American force and launched with whatever that had at the time, but this would have meant a less coherent attack with weapons that were unlikely to sink anything. Tone's scout didn't confirm the presence of a carrier until 0820, while attacks from Midway were trickling in at 0755, 0810, and 0820, after which he landed his first attack force before turning Northeast at 0918. At 0925, 0930, and 1000 the three carrier-based torpedo bomber squadrons attacked, further disrupting any attempt to launch a strike. The fatal dive bombers then arrived at 1025 and turned Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu into flaming wreckage. Hence, I think the only way for Nagumo to get that strike off is to launch around 0600 or 0630 and have it orbit to the east waiting for the scouts to find the enemy.
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@pilotmix.2317 the US basically settled on 5" as its secondary weapon by the end of the 19th century, with the 5"/40 Marks 5 though 8 being used around the time of Olympia. By WW1, the US was using the excellent single-purpose 5"/51 as its secondary gun, even though most other navies were using something in the 15-15.5 cm range (5.9-6.1") for anti-destroyer work. After WW1, they needed an anti-aircraft gun and developed the 5"/25 to continue using the same shell manufacturing lines, although the gun is substantially more of a change than just chopping half the barrel off. These 5"/25s were used on just about everything through the 1930s and continued in use through the war, although the last two ships in the Brooklyn series would receive a newer gun. This gun, the infamous 5"/38, was basically a 5"/25 with a barrel that split the difference with the 5"/51 and some improvements in ammunition feed and handling. The 5"/38 was introduced in the early 30s when the US resumed destroyer production, and would go on to be mounted on just about everything in a variety of single and dual mounts.
One advantage of continuing to use the 5" is that these guns could all use the same shells. There is actually a record of a 5"/51 on USS Maryland shooting down a torpedo bomber using anti-aircraft common shells obtained from the supply for the 5"/38 guns. Compare that to the Royal Navy where various ships used a huge variety of 4", 4.7", 4.5", and (to a much lesser extent) 5.25" guns.
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@champagnegascogne9755 almost certainly not. The Yamatos had an armored deck almost 8" thick. While the US had a 1600 lb armor piercing bomb in service, which was expected to penetrate a 5" deck from about 7,500 feet, and a 1,000 lb armor piercing bomb that could penetrate the same 5" deck from 10,000 feet, I don't believe the USAAF heavy bombers was designed to carry such weapons. A 4,000 lb blockbuster bomb was available, but it was a thin-cased weapon intended for razing light structures with quick fuzing and blast effects. I'm open to being persuaded that the B-29 could carry those armor piercing bombs and that they might penetrate a Yamato deck from 30,000 feet, but I'm inclined to doubt it.
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@johnshepherd9676 that is an inherent possibility when carrying an aircraft (or many aircraft), along with fuel and ordnance for them, as demonstrated by Franklin, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Forrestal, etc. Or, for that matter, carrying any fuel or ordnance of any kind, as with the three battlecruisers at Jutland, or Boise at Cape Esperance. Or being a modern-day Russian tank in Ukraine that takes an ATGM that sets off an ammunition explosion.
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@ryananderson5702 I think the biggest issue is that the air crews can reasonably attempt to observe and count hits from various weapons, but have neither the endurance nor inclination to loiter for hours to see if the ship actually sinks or not. I say "inclination" because, with the exception of FW200s over early Arctic convoys, a long-endurance patrol aircraft hanging around to watch ship movements or sinkings is just begging to have a fighter sent out to shoot it down. Even when the attacking pilots can provide an accurate count of hits, it still remains to determine whether the ship was so badly damaged that it would, eventually, sink. For example, James Vose lead a squadron that claimed four direct hits on Shokaku at Santa Cruz Islands (with 1,000 lb bombs) and got them, but they were only enough to send Shokaku back to base, not sink it.
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@enscroggs by the time Musashi was sunk, the Mark 13 torpedo had been extensively modified, and doctrine refined, such that torpedo bombers could release their weapons from several thousand feet in a shallow dive at 250-300 knots, over 1,000 yards from the target, and still expect hot, straight, and normal torpedo runs. Only about 18 American aircraft were shot down by Japanese AA, but that is out of the paltry 259 sorties flown against Center Force that day (by my count, TF38 carried well over 1,000 aircraft on its carriers). I think you're overstating the significance of the escorts on the need to attack from all sides. Certainly the first torpedo attack on Musashi should have been (and was, apparently) a hammer and anvil attack on both bows, but once they start scoring hits and Musashi starts taking on water and is less able to evade, concentrating on one side for successive groups would have been good.
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@michelangelobuonarroti4958 what army, the Germans still held 1.5 million French troops as POWs. The colonial forces have neither the numbers nor the equipment to prevent an Italian conquest if the Italians go West for the French colonies rather than East into Egypt.
Hitler would have prevented the Italians from attacking the French colonies? Do you even hear how ridiculous that sounds? And if the Italians never contemplated a move against the French and their fleet, then why were the Italians so happy to have the French fleet in North Africa where their army was located and could go after them? The fact that the Italians elected to go after the Suez Canal says nothing about whether they considered any other possibilities.
Yes, the French were trusted partners right up to, oh, 22 June when they stabbed the British in the back and signed a separate peace with Germany. Both sides had solemnly promised each other that they would not seek a separate peace, and then the new French government broke that promise. Sure, the new French government promised that its Navy would not fall into German hands, but again, the surrender on 22 June showed what that governments promises were worth. You are correct in one thing only, the British were not living in 2019, or even at the end of 1942. To conclude that the new French government really meant it when they said they wouldnt let the Germans have their ships, the British would had to have been prescient. It is even likely that the British actions to secure the French fleet in July 1940 hardened the French resolve enough for them to go through with the scuttling in November 1942, just to spite the British.
A war crime and the fault of the British? Not by any stretch of the imagination. As I've shown, the British had every reason to secure the French fleet once they decided to continue resisting Germany. German acquisition of the French fleet would have made a succesful invasion of England more likely assuming the situation in the air could become satisfactory. The British secured other elements of the French fleet without violence in Alexandria, and without large casualties in England. At Mers el Kebir, Gensoul got pissy because the French-speaking officer sent to speak to him (Holland) was ONLY a captain. Gensoul refused to tell his government that one of the many options the British were offering was for the fleet to move to French colonies in the Americas, something Darlan had already authorized him to accept. Those thousand-plus French deaths lie primarily on Gensoul's head.
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@yes_head how so? He took command of the brand new South Pacific Area on June 19th, but orders to assemble forces and conduct an offensive to seize positions on Tulagi and surrounding islands did not come until mid-late July. It's hard to see much opportunity for Ghormley to show deficiencies that make his behavior suspect before Savo Island, whereas he certainly bears responsibility for the long seige through August, September, and into October without taking vigorous action to improve the position on Guadalcanal.
I see from wikipedia that Hornfischer claims Ghormley was expected to take personal command of the invasion force, but from my reading Franks is silent on that question, so I will have to make a point of finding a copy of Neptune's Inferno. The same wikipedia entry includes some information that contradicts Franks regarding Halsey's assumption of command, since Franks indicates that when Halsey arrived at Noumea as part of a familiarization trip ahead of TF16, he was met by a message from Nimitz directing him to take command; the wikipedia entry seems to indicate (based on Hornfischer) that Halsey arrived on the 16th of November, interviewed Ghormley and staff, and based on those interviews was directed to take command on the 18th.
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@stevevalley7835 looking at some photos of the 1.1" mounts on navweaps, it seems clear that the mounts were not well thought out. All four gun breeches occupy a space of what appears to be 2.5-3 feet, and each breech has the two magazines side by side with probably just enough room between magazines to avoid pinching fingers. This had to have made the mount incredibly cramped for the gun crew to work in, with essentially no margin for error in maintaining the rate of fire.
One thing to keep in mind about the Bofors, though, is that the original Swedish design was completely unsuitable for mass production. The blueprints included many notes about filing or drilling the part to fit at assembly, so many "interchangeable" parts were not in fact so. In addition, the Swedish mounts were all hand-powered, while the USN needed powered mountings for the elevation and traverse speed needed for tracking current aircraft. The ammunition design was also not suitable, particularly the fuze. Redesign of the gun and ammunition took time, so even though a license was purchased in mid-1941, it would be almost a year before the first mounts were being installed on US ships.
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Ships in harbor were already known to be extremely vulnerable, with Taranto the year before being the cherry on top. If all 10 Japanese capital ships magically appear at 15,000-20,000 yards and immediately open fire, it's still a suicide mission because they can't also destroy the planes on the airfields and can't get out of range before being attacked repeatedly, especially with Enterprise's group so close. Note that I'm also assuming that none of the coastal defense batteries, which are pretty much invulnerable to ship gunfire and include four 16" guns, gets into action, because they're likely to drive off such an attack pretty quickly if they get the guns manned and ammunition unlocked. So the Japanese capital ships could probably do just as much damage to the US ships in harbor, but it would be a pyrrhic victory, and if the coast defense batteries get into action it might not even be that.
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@fguocokgyloeu4817 it seems to me that most of the "DP" guns larger than about 5" (the 5.25" is still ok) are really single purpose weapons with higher elevations in the hope that they might do some good in the AA role. Most, if not all, such ships also had dedicated heavy AA batteries, such as the 100 mm AA guns on the Richelieu class. In the US Navy, it wouldn't be until the post-war Worcester class that a major ship had DP 6" guns and no 5" DP guns, but by then the Worcesters had automated loading and fuse setting for a high rate of fire. One issue you left out is that issue of fuse setting, because a 6" shell weighs twice what a 5" shell does, slowing the rate of fire and increasing the time from when the timing of the fuse is set and the gun actually firing. This "dead time" increases the potential dispersion between where the shell will burst and where the aircraft will be when it does. At some point, probably between 6" and 8", the dead time becomes so large that the only practical firing solution is to pick a range. set the fuse for that, and fire the gun at a time when you hope the aircraft are at that range; this slows the rate of fire even further.
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Probably going to need my asbestos underwear for this, but I'm not really concerned about the question of whether the attack k was "legal" or "illegal", because law demands some enforcement entity. What third party is going to arrest and prosecute England for attacking France, or for violating Swedish neutrality regarding the Altmark? There is no such third party. The "Laws of War" are treaties agreed to by signatory nations, and must be enforced by the actions of the offended nation and any other signatory that takes an interest. This question has frequently come up with regard to the Washington and London naval treaties and how they were enforced, and again there is no independant enforcement entity. If Vichy believes the attack at Mers-el-Kebir was illegal, then it is welcome to enforce that belief by, for example, declaring war against the UK, maybe contingent on Germany returning those two million French soldiers. Or where is the independant enforcement entity to prosecute the US for waging unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan? That was, after all, part of America's causus belli against Germany 20-some years before. No, it is the fear that another nation will do even worse to you for violating the treaty that causes nations to keep their treaty obligations. And what could Germany do to the UK that would be worse than what it was already doing elsewhere in its conquered territory in Europe (especially Poland)?
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@f12mnb this gets asked every few episodes. The problem is that ships are much bigger than tanks, and with shaped charges and sabot rounds the behind-armor effects are kind of limited. In a tank, the crew and ammunition are right behind the armor, but in a ship the turrets are the only comparable target. The armor belt is on or just behind the outer shell, with meters (or tens of meters) separating the armor from the vital engines and magazines. Further, tanks fight at fairly short range (by comparison) of a few thousand meters at most, while even destroyer guns can hit targets at several times that range, out to anywhere between 15 to 20 thousand meters. At that kind of distance, retained velocity is far more important than muzzle velocity, and heavier shells retain more velocity over distance. For example, the famously high velocity shells of the Littorio are down to about 524 m/s at 25,000 m, while the super heavy shells of the Iowa are only a little slower, just under 500 m/s, at the same distance, despite the Littorio shell coming out of the muzzle over 100 m/s faster. So, short story long, they wouldn't have worked well so were never really tried.
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I've always been amused at the notion of the "invincible" Bismark class. The design was not great, more of a follow-on to the Bayern class of WW1. The most important things about Bismark and Tirpitz were:
1) They were battleships. The Germans only had four, and only two with real battleship-grade weapons.
2) They were 45,000 ton battleships, whereas everything the Royal Navy had was tresty-compliant at 35,000 tons or less. That extra tonnage goes into more armor and speed than the 35,000 ton British ships have, speed comparable to a battlecruiser and armor comparable to a KGV.
Still, comparing the Bismarks to any contemporary construction you'll find that the Germans didn't get all that much out of the extra 10,000 tons, primarily because they'd lost a generation in warship design in the interwar period. The Iowas get several extra knots, competitive armor, and an extra gun (and larger guns) out of those 10,000 tons.
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@queenluna9731 So WW1 is 1914-18 and the Yamato class is laid down in late 1937 and early 1938 (Yamato and Musashi). That's almost 20 years later. Neither would do anything during the war, and Germany would be in no position to do anything about a future Yamato for almost two decades after the war. Even when the Germans got back into building warships, they suffered from the gap in building experience, resulting in designs that were much heavier than comparable allied designs.
The British, OTOH, might just make use of that knowledge of future Yamato to get an earlier start on rearming and refitting the RN, rather than continue adhering to the "No war in the next decade" budgetary rule well into the mid-late 30s. Maybe more refits for the rest of the QEs, Hood, and Repulse, maybe invoke the escalator clause in the treaty to get Lion-class battleships at 45,000 tons with 16" guns in place of the KGVs. Maybe they even liberate the Fleet Air Arm early enough to get some halfway-decent carrier aircraft early in the war.
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@omega7b948 take a look at the M110 8" howitzer and we can start talking about the technical feasibility of a self-propelled 14, 15, or 16" weapon. As a wild guess, since the M110 weighs 28 tons, while the 14"/45 gun by itself weighs 62 tons, I'm going to guess that a vehicle weighing close to 100 tons and with a, say, 1500 hp engine would do the trick. The lack of protection for the M110 gun crew isn't necessarily a problem because the gun positions themselves can offer considerable protection from direct naval gunfire. The problem I see lies in getting a 100 ton vehicle where it needs to go; what is the rating on the necessary bridges, do you have flatbed rail cars rated for a 100 ton vehicle, that sort of thing. The Tiger II is about 70 tons, the Maus is almost 200, so its arguably possible, but from an automotive perspective those vehicles are kind of a mess. It's hard to call that practical for the time.
(Edited) I will be damned, apparently the US did something very similar with the 14"/45 M1920 railroad gun. Two of these were used as part of the Panama Canal defenses and could move from one coast to the other in less than a day. Not a wheeled or tracked SPG, but railroad guns would provide a great deal of mobility if you just lay the tracks to the firing positions.
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@bkjeong4302 OK, understood. Of course I'm going to cite the night surface actions off Guadalcanal, because it's a good example of how enemy gets a say in the conduct of the war. While it's true the US couldn't know, in the late 30s, that it was going to have to defend an advance island base from Japanese attacks, they also couldn't know that, or at least when, carrier aviation might advance enough to allow operation at night and in bad weather.
The one piece of data I've been able to find about dispersion on the 16"/50 is that, in test firing off Crete in 1987, the pattern size was 220 yards at a range of 34,000 yards. Littorio was apparently firing similar patterns at 32,000 yards with good shells in 1940-41. This kind of dispersion suggests to me that, coupled with the Mark 8 fire control radar and Mark 1A fire control computer, hits at 30,000+ yards would absolutely have been feasible (more than pure luck) by late WW2 if there had been any need for it (six against two, oops now one, at Surigao Strait is not a place where hits at 30,000 yards are needed).
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@bkjeong4302 not really disagreeing on any of that. Certainly the Japanese were culturally obsessed with aircrew quality rather than quantity, what has been called "the myth of the invincibility of a sufficiently refined technique". I see that the Japanese planned to build 16 Unryu-class carriers starting in 1941-42, but only 3 were completed. Germany absolutely would have been better served by another, what, 150,000 tons of u-boats rather than the Schanhorsts and Bismarks, but the Bismarks were actually a little smaller than Hood. The French and Italian battleship programs were heavily influenced by the focus on the Mediterranean (always in range of land-based aircraft) and each other. The Japanese, on the other hand, have the misfortune, or poor timing, to put the first of two massive battleships into service just after the attack that was intended to obviate the "need" for them.
To clarify that last point, the Yamatos were intended to counter multiple "standard" battleships in the decisive fleet engagement. They were begun when the IJN still envisioned starting a war in the Phillipines and fighting the decisive engagement near those islands after attributing the US fleet with aircraft, submarines, and night torpedo attacks from destroyers and cruisers. The Pearl Harbor raid was intended to avoid the need for a decisive battle by presenting the US with a fiat accompli and hope they would accept it because the Phillipines were so far away and it would take so long to rebuild the fleet. Yamato was commissioned just over a week after Pearl Harbor, so what was the point again?
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@JohnRodriguesPhotographer supposedly at impact the V2 is travelling at about 2,880 km/hr, which is still about 800 m/sec. It masses about 12,500 kg at launch, but 8,720 kg of that is fuel which will (presumably) be fully expended by the time of impact, leaving 3,780 kg at impact. KE. at impact is about 1,200 MJ.
And Iowa's 16" shell masses 1,225 kg and has an impact velocity of about 470 m/sec at long ranges when it might hit the deck armor. KE at impact is about 135 MJ, or about 1/9th the KE of the V2 at impact. However, the AP shell has a thick, hardened steel casing tipped with a shock-absorbing cap to help prevent the steel casing from shattering on impact with the face-hardened armor. It is specifically designed to penetrate armor while remaining fit to burst. The V2 has a thin casing of steel to keep the warhead, fuel, engine, etc together during acceleration, along with a fuze intended to set off the warhead immediately upon impact. The additional velocity and mass of the V2 means that it has nine times as much energy devoted to scattering the components after a hard impact, just like the analogy of anxempty beer can on a college student's forehead, or a jet liner on the concrete containment dome of a nuclear power plant. The big warhead will add to the KE that is scattering parts of the V2 across the armored deck, and the shock may cause spalling of the back of the armor. Additional KE means bupkes if the projectile just shatters on impact with the armor.
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@bkjeong4302 I'm going to disagree with you on that last sentence. There is a reason people built "cruiser killer" warships. The most cost-effective (short term) way of killing anything is to so overwhelm it that you take no damage in response. That's part of the analysis of Savo Island (four sunk CA vs a half-dozen or so scattered hits) in comparison with Cape Esperance two months later (CA and DD sunk, a second CA crippled vs one DD sunk and serious damage to a CL and DD). Or, for a more time-relevant point of comparison, the Battles of Coronel and the Galkland Islands, both of which were curb-stomps because of that kind of overmatch in opposing ships. The cost of building and crewing a new ship can change that calculation (assuming you can find crew for them, the US was having trouble with that by the end of the war) but with the Kongos the ships have already been built, and rebuilt to be a little faster.
I can see why you might say they're not cost-effective against sub-capital ships based on what happened to Hiei, but night fighting always has the potential to skew the results (see Matapan and Tassafaronga for examples). Hiei took a lucky hit in the steering compartment from San Francisco's 8" guns at very close range (1-2 nautical miles, IIRC), but would have survived if it wasn't for the Cactus Air Force at Guadalcanal; certainly Helena and Fletcher (the only two uncrippled US ships from the battle) weren't going to circle back to try to finish it off. Really, the only thing that salvages that battle for the US is the fact that they prevented a bombardment, but they did so at horrendous cost (2 CL and 4 DD sunk, 2 CA and 3 DD crippled, leaving 1 CL and 1 DD relatively undamaged). If Hiei had survived or Guadalcanal (at least the airfield) been taken in November at the cost of Hiei, I dont think anyone would blink at making that trade for Japan.
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@mikbraikku USS Franklin was struck by two 250 kg (550 lb) semi-armor piercing bombs, and from fairly low altitude (Franklin'sreport says mast height). The Japanese famously used some AP bombs made from battleship gun projectiles, and "land" bombs that were fairly thin-walled with a large explosive filler for blast and fragmentation effect. A SAP bomb will have pretty thick structure, a hard nose with a delay fuse, and will still have a lot more explosive filler than a battleship AP shell. The ability of a bomb to penetrate deck armor is heavily dependant on the height it is dropped from and the ability of the bomb to withstand the force of the impact.
Essex-class carriers like the Franklin had about 2.5" of special treatment steel (STS) as both armor and structural steel forming the floor of the hanger deck. The Illustrious-class carriers had a 3" armored flight deck. I think we can be confident of the flight deck rejecting both bombs based on them penetrating Franklin's 1.5" flight deck steel and failing to then penetrate the 2.5" hanger floor. The bombs would, therefore, bounce/skid along the flight deck until the fuses set them off .2-.4 seconds after impact.
Since Franklin was in the process of launching a strike, with 31 aircraft on the flight deck loaded with aviation gas and munitions for attacking land targets (bombs and rockets), the bombs would have devastated the aircraft and crews waiting to take off, and would have created a large flight deckfire. The explosions are likely to warp the flight deck a little, and may cause collateral damage on the hanger deck where Franklin had another 22 planes, of which most were gassed and armed. A great deal will depend on whether the explosion and fragments do enough damage to the flight deck to allow burning gasoline down into the hanger deck to spread the fire. However, with the bombs going off at flight-deck level, the engines and fire mains are unlikely to be damaged, so the hypothetical British carrier should have an easier time fighting those fires.
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