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

  1. 56:17 Japanese escort formations, as stated in Shattered Sword, were generally too scattered to offer effective AA fire against aircraft attacking major ships. Carriers would be operating across 6-10 km spacings, with major escorts like the Kongos and Tones also being thousands of meters away from any of the carriers. This in comparison with US circular formations with major escorts 500-1000 yards from the carrier with destroyers another few hundred yards out of part of the major escort ring.
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  2. Amusingly, Perun had a video earlier this year about modern Arctic competition and icebreakers.
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  3. ​ @bkjeong4302 at the ranges these kinds of heavy, barrage AA guns fire, rotation speed is far less relevant than for the point defense guns. One of the few ways it could be relevant is if a squadron of torpedo bombers has split to attack from both bows and one group is circling at the edge of AA range (5 miles, maybe) to get into position. Although some quick math suggests that is less relevant than I first thought, since crossing at 150 knots at 10,000 yards is only about 0.5 degrees per second, much less than the 4 degree per second train rate for the turrets on the Iowas. Even bringing it into 4,000 yards where the Bofors mounts open up only increases the change in angle to about 1.2 degrees per second.
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  4. As I recall, the Japanese diving AP shells (standard for them in WW2) actually had a flattened nose for better directional stability under water (after the windscreen and cap broke off) with the intention of penetrating the skin of the ship below the belt. This flat nose is what made them worse for penetration on direct impacts, so the diving shells had to get lucky and hit a sweet spot just short of the target. As far as I'm aware, there is only one known case where this worked as intended, on Boise at Cape Esperance.
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  5.  @boudaakaranis8608  politics. Beatty had friends. I believe Drach has touched on this before, but Beatty seems to have been very good at playing the role of a dashing naval admiral, especially for those powerful friends who could protect and advance his career.
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  6. The US Navy absolutely did not run destroyers, regular or APD, in to Guadalcanal under cover of darkness. They had local air superiority and controlled the water around the island during the day, but after Savo Island they essentially abandoned the waters around the island to the Japanese during the hours of darkness. It would be a good two months before they challenged Japanese night-time control of the seas at Cape Esperance, which was a surprise to the Japanese in part because the US had ceded control at night for so long. It was the Japanese who found themselves having to rely on regular destroyers to move men and a tiny fraction of their needed equipment and supplies to Guadalcanal at night.
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  7.  @notshapedforsportivetricks2912  navweaps says "Vietcong positions" and "six structures".
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  8. While the Germans did receive six Fletcher-class destroyers in the late 50s, those were all decommissioned by the early 80s. In the early 2000s, candidates appear to include the Lutjens-class destroyers (a modified Charles F. Adams), and the Bremen-class frigates.
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  9.  @alganhar1  you will take a higher radiation dose on the flight there than you will diving on the carrier.
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  10. As I recall, that's exactly where the model pieces came from, just with some extra "business" daubed along the length of the barrels.
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  11. ​ @truckerallikatuk Boom. Boom, boom. BOOM!
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  12. The powder story at @20:20 may be a testimony to the comparative stability of US propellant charges in comparison with British cordite. Boise would similarly benefit from that stability in October 1942 when she took her magazine hit from Kinugasa at Cape Esperance.
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  13. My experience is that people in "flyover states" hate the fact that the coastal elites ignore them unless they are specifically there to pander to them. They take pride in being the real America" where the work a tually takes place, so if the elites write them off as being places they fly over, that's the elite's loss.
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  14. I wasn't in a boiler, but I did climb into a steam turbine during an internship to help the chief engineer check the integrity of the turbine blades.
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  15. Remember that Hood was lost historically, and PoW and Repulse were lost as Force Z, whereas if PoW is lost earlier and Force Z doesn't happen then the British are actually up a capital ship by the end of 1941 compared with historically.
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  16. The impression I get from my reading is that the PT boats were further south as a tripwire, so Nishimura's ships had more room to maneuver to avoid torpedoes. Further, the PT boats were distributed as 13 groups of three boats, so at most one group would still only be 12 torpedoes, slightly more than one destroyer's worth. Further, while the Mark 15 on the destroyers could make about 4,500 yards at 45 knots, the Mark 13 used on aircraft and (by this time) PT boats could manage 4,000 yards at only 33.5 knots, making them much easier to dodge when the target is aware. Edit: I found a chart indicating the PT boats were exclusively on the west side of the strait (off Panaon Island) so the Japanese had room to withdraw east (toward Danagst Island) without running into torpedoes on that side. Contrast with the destroyers which did deploy on both sides of the strait and presented a hammer and anvil attack.
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  17.  Admiral Tiberius  as at Samar, screw the loincloth! Ok, his uniform (and a couple fingers) were blown off by a hit to the bridge early on. I still haven't seen anything that says he bothered putting anything else on for the rest of the battle, as I'm sure he was too busy fighting his ship.
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  18. The obvious rejoinder is that all those witnesses are from Kormoran because Sydney was lost with all hands, so it doesnt mean as much as it would if there were witnesses from both sides. Agreed that accusations of perfidy in this case are mostly about "how could this merchant raider sink a warship?" while ignoring the way Sydney's approach was insufficiently cautious and contributed to her sinking.
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  19. Actually, there's an interesting point about shells "turning" to a more normal angle of impact, and that has to do with a phenomenon called "base slap". When the nose and cap of the shell dig into the plate and start rotating toward a more "normal" angle, that rotation continues through the penetration process. That rotation leads the mid-se tion or base of the shell to slam against the side of the hole in the plate. This can cause the shell to break up or damage the fuse, leaving a shell that penetrated the armor but not in a state where it would actually detonate.
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  20.  @ThatSlowTypingGuy  I look at it as the US not finding a need for cannon until after WW2. Rifle-caliber machineguns were not terribly useful to the RAF against German bombers, and were replaced by cannon, but the .50 caliber machinegun was extremely effective against tinderbox Japanese bombers and entirely adequate against fighters of all opponents.
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  21. @45:00 worth keeping in mind that SoDak took that bomb hit during an air raid and then there was time to communicate with BuOrd, which directed them to not use those guns. During a main battery gun action, it's unlikely anyone would notice gouges from the gun barrels until the gun itself burst during a later firing.
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  22. It's a concept called "relative effectiveness" and scales explosives relative to each other, with TNT defined as RE 1.0. Torpex had an RE of 1.3 and is actually considered obsolete now, replaced by H6 and PBX compositions, at least until there is another major war and cheaper explosives are needed to fill shells and bombs used in huge numbers.
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  23. From navweaps on the 20 mm Oerlikon: "One of the largest advantages of this weapon from a maintenance point of view was that, unlike the contemporary Hispano-Suiza 20 mm gun, the forces used to operate the automatic mechanisms were quite high, which meant that such factors as friction, insufficient lubrication, cold weather, different elevations, rain and the like were small in proportion to the operating forces involved and therefore unlikely to cause stoppages. In addition, the barrel on the Oerlikon gun could be changed in 30 seconds or less while it took about an hour to change barrels on the Hispano-Suiza."
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  24.  @halo51997  he did. Apparently someone made a copyright claim on that video. Drach explained yesterday that the complainant is so crazy and obnoxious that he won't even bother with the YouTube resolution procedure.
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  25. "Metaphysical struggle", well, at this time period and general area, everything was a metaphysical struggle. Having a war was seen as a way to see which side's gods were stronger, particularly when both sides claimed their gods had given them the same patch of land.
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  26. Drachinifel on a Sunday goes a long way to making up for the baby waking up at 0 dark 30.
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  27. 14. The US used Arabic numerals for its torpedo and gun designations, while the UK used Roman numerals.
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  28. Regarding destroyer squadrons and flotilla, the US Navy in the Pacific suffered even more from the need to meet divergent needs and replace losses. Washington and South Dakota went into action off Guadalcanal escorted by four destroyers selected based entirely on the fuel they had left.
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  29. Sounds like winter driving in Fresno.
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  30.  @VersusARCH  the 5" guns on Wake Island were 5"/51 guns, normally used as secondary guns on earlier battleships. In this case the guns were in coast defense mountings.
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  31. I wish I could find a source for this, but I've read that an Eisenhower administration official later wailed to some British or French counterparts, "Why did you let us stop you in Suez?"
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  32.  @ThereItIs_  that reply is also appropriate for this story: The Little Black Book of WW2 describes a destroyer engaged in pre-invasion bombardment in the Central Pacific. Being only a destroyer, they had been assigned prosaic targets, which included some latrines. Their fire on the latrines was rewarded with massive explosions, for in excess of what their 5" guns would normally produce. Turns out the Japanese in that garrison had disguised an ammo dump as a group of latrines thinking the Americans wouldn't waste ammunition on such an unimportant structure.
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  33. @Jefferson Tong of course the New Orleans are better, they're three classes further along. Amusingly, this is the only class of pre-war 8" gun cruisers for the US that did not lose half its number (3 of 7 for the New Orleans).
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  34. Interference from Doenitz's ghost.
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  35.  @Aubury  note that the "racist" sword cuts in both directions. The Japanese Army insisted that the US was so addicted to luxuries that it estimated the strength defending Guadalcanal at 1/10th what it actually was, i.e., it will be fine sending a division of 10,000 men to defeat 4,000 marines, when they've underestimated by a factor of 10 and there are actually 40,000 marines.
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  36.  @michaelkroger899  Japanese cruiser Kako would agree, but a WW1 sub with WW1 Mark 10 torpedoes disemboweled her just short of Rabaul after Savo Island.
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  37. 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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  38.  @Drachinifel  thank you for calling my attention to the loss of APDs Gregory and Little on 5 September, 1942. However, it appears those two ships were assigned to the Guadalcanal area and were returning to their anchorage at Tulagi when the Japanese squadron arrived. As destroyers they had carried four 4" guns, but the APD conversion replaced those with three 3"/50 DP guns and removed all torpedoes. The division commander was apparently considering whether the shellfire he was seeing was from a submarine they could attack, or a surface force they would avoid, when the decision was taken out of his hands by a PBY that dropped five flares on the presumed submarine which illuminated the two APDs for the Japanese squadron.
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  39. USS Saint Paul (CA-73) suffered an explosion in the left gun of main battery turret #1, caused by an attempt to ram a projectile into a gun that was already loaded because the gun captain mistakenly thought the gun had fired. 21 April, 1952.
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  40. You should hear the Chieftain's response to hearing the length of that first 5-hour Patreon drydock.
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  41. I've likened naval gunfire to infantry using shotguns with buckshot. If you're close enough, most of your projectiles/shot pellets are hitting the target, and individual hits have the ability to be dangerous to the whole ship. So you keep the range open so that you have a chance of surviving, which also gives the enemy a better chance of surviving but makes it pra typically impossible to target a specific location. When you're scoring 1-3% hits, you're far enough away that you cannot, in any practical way, target a specific location, much like trying to head shot an enemy infantryman with a shotgun at 300 yards.
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  42. Are you sure that's not Darkness, getting off on all that punishment?
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  43.  Admiral Kipper  while "unarmored American carriers" is a meme, it's worth keeping in mind that the Yorktown class had 1.5" of STS (structural steel that also provided protection comparable to class "B" armor) as the hanger floor, rather than the hanger ceiling, while the Essex class increased that to 2.5".
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  44.  @77thTrombone  he's explained that footage a few times. Apparently, what we see blown around was improperly stowed gear outside the turret blown about by the blast of the guns firing. A small boat, perhaps, improperly secured and blasted into kindling by the pressure differential.
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  45.  @lalucre1803  yes. Bismark scored it's "golden BB" hit as the Hood was turning to bring its stern turrets to bear. The turn caused the ship to heel hard in the direction of Bismark, reducing the angle of fall for that shot. Normally Bismark's shell would be marginal for penetrating the 3" deck armor at that range, but with Hood heeling 20 degrees in Bismark's direction, there is a shorter path through the armor.
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  46. Richard Franks points out that, by the end of 1942, pretty much every CA deployed to the south Pacific had been sunk or heavily damaged, and 8" guns firing 3-4 rounds per minute just aren't as useful as 6" guns firing 8-10 rounds per minute in swatting destroyers at night.
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  47. Just think, the Battle of the Kommandorski Islands in real-time would be ungodly length (4 hours or so) in addition to the whole boring as hell aspect of heavy cruisers firing a salvo every 30 seconds or so (for flight time and correction at 20,000-plus yards).
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  48. When she was sunk she was entirely alone. She and Prinz Eugen had a small destroyer escort (four?) up through Norway, but the destroyers never had the kind of range for Atlantic raiding missions.
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  49. Agree that Pearl Buck and the missionary societies to China would have retained a lot of influence in the USA even without naval bases in the Western Pacific/Phillipines. On the other hand, it's a little hard to see the Americans willing to go to war over the sinking of the Reuben James.
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  50. It was mentioned in passing early, with the note that Byzantine Empire tactics and Greek fire would need its own video.
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