Comments by "Frank DeMaris" (@kemarisite) on "Drachinifel" channel.

  1. Note that a 4.125" subcaliber projectile, wrapped in a sabot and fired from an 8" gun, was actually used by USS Saint Paul to shell targets in Vietnam at about 70,000 yards.
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  2. 47:11 "tell that damn aircraft to go around the other way", note that this anecdote was relayed, but transferred to the Arctic Convoys, by Alistair McLean in HMS Ullyses, along with the explanation "you're making us dizzy".
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  3. That comment about the resilience of the Regia Marina and how they came back from Cape Matapan actually sounds a little better than the US response to Savo Island. The speed with which both navies developed night battle doctrine seems comparable (a few months) but the Italians figured out the British used radar and had their own counter in testing within a month. In contrast, almost five months after Savo Island the USN was still insisting that the Japanese had a magical fleet submarine that was intervening in battles because "torpedoes with speed-range characteristics comparable to our own" could not possibly reach the cruiser line at Tassafaronga.
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  4. I work at a permitted hazardous waste facility that services a bunch of mad acientists employed by the US Navy, and I have never seen 80% hydrogen peroxide solution. Even the piranha bath I have seen and shipped out was only 50% solution.
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  5.  @bluemarlin8138  first guy to break a leg, loses!
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  6. Well, THAT sounds like a significant emotional event.
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  7. As an engineer (sort of, my work history is all environmental compliance) with a second semester of materials science, I approve of this and look forward to more. Particularly if we can ever really understand what the US was thinking when it was hardening class A armor plate for cruisers to 60-80% of the total thickness.
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  8. 1:59 "the 15 inch gun was going to be the new standard for a while" US and Japanese Navies: "We don't recognize European standards".
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  9. There's the boarding party/hockey team crossover joke I was looking for!
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  10.  @sawyerawr5783  "my father was the most even-tempered man in the world. He was always angry."
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  11. Contrast Outerbridge and Ward's response with the "fatal lethargy of mind" that existed 8 months later off Guadalcanal. Or, as richard Frank put it in Tower of Skulls: "Elderly Ward, its reservist crew and its neophyte skipper, thus concluded the only near flawless American performance of the day."
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  12. "The British always try to avoid a fair fight" As Murphy said, there's no such thing as a fair fight in war - only ones where you win or lose.
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  13. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
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  14.  @Mike-im5bo  he received a gag gift of a blowtorch labeled as a shaving kit.
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  15. You can't build enough. We'll take a production license.
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  16. BTW, was listening to early drydocks yesterday. Hilarious to go back and listen to Drach (when this wasnt his day job) talking about the "monster" 45 minute drydocks he was doing when he started them. 6 hour Patreon drydock: "Hold my Irn-Bru."
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  17. There is no such thing as "overkill". There is only "open fire" and "pass me more ammo".
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  18.  @taccovert4  "I don't care that isn't intended as an AA gun, I'm going to put it on a pedestal mount and MAKE it an AA gun."
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  19. The axiom is that "Good gunnery gets you straddles. God gives you hits.*
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  20. Typo: the incident Dahlgren witnessed that killed the gunner was in 1849, not 1879, five years later than the 1844 Princeton explosion.
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  21. "Someone builds a torpedo with a much larger warhead than anyone else has before ..." nudges Japan "He's talking about you."
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  22. That's part of it. A bigger part is a variety of other problems with the torpedo (the Mark 13 torpedo apparently did not use the Mark 6 magnetic influence explorer that plagued submarines and destroyers) and their doctrine. Doctrine called for very low speed, low altitude drops, but those actually prevented good entry into the water with the torpedo frequently slapping the water almost flat or skipping off the surface before having a faulty run. It wouldn't be until mid-1944 that a variety of improvements to both torpedoes and doctrine made them effective weapon systems.
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  23. Remember that the armor was generally a separate layer from the water-tight shell of the ship. Either it was bolted to the shell, or it was internal and the water-tight shell was outside the armor.
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  24. Drach, I'm afraid you left something huge out of the answer about intelligence during the Guadalcanal campaign. On May 28, 1942, too late to do any good for the Midway operation because the Americans already knew and were deploying their forces, the Japanese Navy finally switched their codes, from JN-25b to JN-25c. It would be six months before the US was able to crack JN-25c and begin reading the Japanese mail again, and this time period encompasses essentially all the significant actions of the campaign outside of the Japanese withdrawal at the end of January, 1943. Local considerations like you mentioned would have hampered the ability to utilize intelligence from radio intercepts, but the change in codes made it physically impossible until the new code was cracked.
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  25. It seems like ever time a history ends with "sold for scrap in XXXX" people lament the fate of that ship. Is "lost with all hands" really that much better of an alternative, since the narrative places the loss of Defense in such close proximity to the scrapping of her sister ships?
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  26. That reminds me of a joke about how the British should not feel bad about the Germans beating them twice in a short period at their national game (football/soccer), because the British beat the Germans twice at their national game in the first half of the 20th century.
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  27.  @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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  28.  @sergarlantyrell7847  has said a couple times that he is an engineer, dont know exactly what field.
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  29.  @DaveSCameron  our dear friend Google says this may have been HMAS Australia at the end of WW2 because Australian yards were under instructions to prioritize British Pacific Fleet ships.
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  30. It's important to keep in mind the weight of the shells in comparing the various 15" guns. The French and Italian guns fired 884 kg shells, while Bismark's were about 10% lighter at 800 kg. While lighter shells will have a greater velocity at the muzzle, it will also tend to lose velocity more quickly. While Bismark's shells are only about 30 m/s slower than the Italian shells at the muzzle, that has increased to 50 m/s at 20,000 meters. That combination of higher velocity and greater weight for the Italian shells translates to a difference of 3-4 inches of expected armor penetration at that kind of practical battle range.
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  31. 1:07:39 referencing Nathan Okun in return, he has explained the issues with US shells at the time. Just a week before, Massachusetts had some issues engaging Jean Bart because the fuses weren't as good as they would later become. Basically, the Explosive D bursting charge would off-gas in storage and the fumes would cause enough corrosion for the fuse mechanism to be unreliable, so only about half of the fuses on shells Massachusetts hit with worked properly.
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  32. I have to applaud Mrs Drach's reluctance to appear on camera. My own wife insisted on taking a picture of me at 3 o'clock in the morning Christmas day (the baby woke up at 2:30). It looks like a POW picture from Vietnam.
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  33. Supposedly a US sailor at Samar shouted, "They're shooting at us in Technicolor!"
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  34. The description of Villeneuve's Nelson fixation reminds me of the Japanese before the Battle of Leyte Gulf. They set out with faith in Divine Providence, or, as another officer phrased it, with faith in total annihilation. (Paraphrased from Hastings' "Retribution".)
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  35. Given the scars on the hull afterward, and the loss of UB-113 and UB-123 in the general time and place, it seems more likely than not that it was a submarine. While recent claims seem to put UB-123 elsewhere, UB-113 was "sunk by a North Sea barrage mine", i.e., no witnesses and pure conjecture.
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  36. Worth noting that a lot of those Americans who went to war before December 7, 1941 were "officially" Canadian. That is, they crossed the border to Canada and "lied" about the heir citizenship in order to enlist. "Where are you from?" "Cleveland, Ohio." "Lovely place, Ontario." Stamping papers
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  37.  @ph89787  destroyers are the domain of the dashing young men who live fast, fight hard, and die in heaps.
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  38. I've always looked at Mitchell as having a lot in common with the real life James Burton (not the character from The Pentagon Wars). Both had something of a point, but it was both so obvious and so trivial that they sabotaged themselves trying to force people to acknowledge it. Burton demanded live fire testing that would "prove" things that were already self-evident (a Bradley can't withstand an anti-tank shell or missile), while Mitchell actively endangered Navy personnel and interfered with their ability to examine the damage that was being done which was the entire point of the tests.
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  39. Something like 75% of the men who served in U-boats were lost in the war. Even for the US navy the loss rate for submarine crewmen was around 20%.
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  40. Well, according to W.E.B. Griffin (who was admittedly writing fiction), you could supposedly just unlock that handle and then do a little dive and pull up (or sharp bank) and let gravity pull the gear and spin the handle. Just keep your elbow out of the way.
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  41. The US 1.1" and Japanese 25 mm made sense as "medium" AA guns when the "light" AA guns were limited to 12.7 and 13.2 mm machineguns. Then airplanes dramatically improved in the mid and late 30s and the resulting inflation priced the 12.7 and 13.2 mm machineguns out of the AA market entirely and moved the 25 mm and 1.1" cartridges down to the "light" category.
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  42. Operation Watchtower included opposed landings on nearby Gavutu-Tanambogo and Tulagi, which resulted in substantial casualties to some USMC formations. However, these landings were smaller in scale and conducted by a few battalions. The main landing on Guadalcanal was a divisional affair, but (as noted) not opposed on the beaches. Torch was basically the first successful large scale opposed amphibious landing, perhaps ever but certainly since the disaster at Gallipoli in 1915. It helped show the Allies that they could, in fact, make an opposed landing and get this amphibious thing to work on the large (multi-divisional) level they would need later in the war for the intended landing in France.
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  43. 18:44 "twenty main battery guns of the 12-inch type". This is getting down to the old hail of fire concept from the pre-dreadnought era, but without the rapidity of fire associated with 6-inch to 8-inch guns.
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  44.  @YoloSwagNinja  rather, their only chance of victory was for the US to give up. It rested entirely on their perception of the US culture as a weak one where women had far too much influence, so the US would give up and make peace rather than pay the price required to fight the war to a decisive conclusion.
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  45. In December 1941, Vestal was captained by Cassin Young, who was blown off the ship by the explosion of the Arizona. He swam back, boarded his ship, countermanded an "abandon ship" order, and ordered the ship to get under way and move away from Arizona. Cassin Young would receive the Medal of Honor for his actions on December 7, 1941, and go on to take command of USS San Francisco on November 9, 1942. He would be killed in action engaging Hiei at the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal four days later, an action for which he would receive a posthumous Navy Cross.
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  46. A burning tanker full of aviation gasoline (100 octane by this point?) continues floating and burning for days before being boarded, salvaged, and sailed to her destination. Kind of a testament to the adage that you sink ships by blowing holes in the bottom to let water in, not blowing holes in the top to let more air in.
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  47.  @Eric_Hutton.1980  "semper" is legitimate Latin, being very common in such mottos (US Marine Corp, US Coast Guard, for example) and meaning "always". "Iratus" seems like dog Latin to me, but would be a reasonable approximation for irate or angry. It's apparently a play on something King's daughter once said: "My father was the most even-tempered man in the world; he was always angry."
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  48. ​ @GaldirEonai or, without the title, how little that narrows it down to any specific government.
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  49. Eric Hammel mentions a US destroyer that had been in a collision and received a patch of whatever steel plate was available. So for about 20 feet on one side the exterior shell was, say, 5/8" thick instead of the 3/8" thickness of the original construction. The crew jokingly called that their "armor belt"
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  50.  @wesleygay8918  that could be an interesting comparison, the work of BuOrd on torpedoes vs whichever Italian naval organization was responsible for testing and procedures for accepting lots of shells and propellants. I'd buy a book that did a compare and contrast on that subject.
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