Comments by "Dave Sisson" (@Dave_Sisson) on "Drachinifel" channel.

  1.  @micnorton9487  The Belgica was the first expedition to try and reach the magnetic pole, so no one knew when the sea would ice over. By the time they gave up and tried to turn north, they were a week too late and ran into impenetrable ice flows. They did not know any better, but subsequent expeditions were based on what was learnt from the Belgica's experience.
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  2.  @ramjam720  True, but the Dunedin in NZ is a bigger and more important city than the one in America and it has a decent university.
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  3. There's no need to joke about it, decent sized ships in the form of high speed catamaran ferrys of over 10,000 Gross Tons can go over 50 knots if they're in a hurry. Incat is building a few more at the moment.
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  4. To be fair, the British were somewhat distracted by things like The Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic, plus the fall of France and Norway. So they had a lot of equipment, planes and ships to patch up before they could launch new ships.
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  5.  @chrissouthgate4554  Don't tell him that. I enjoy telling people that they oars to be used if the inefficient ships ran out of coal.
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  6.  @RippPryde  From memory she lived in a rather nice manor house, complete with a retinue of servants, etc. I'm unsure if her movements were restricted, but even IF they were, that's a very posh form of home detention, certainly not prison.
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  7. In the late 1990s during the Timor Emergency, the Australian navy found themselves short of fast transport ships. So they looked around and found a Hobart shipyard called INCAT had a spare catamaran passenger and truck ferry that operated at up to 50 knots. They hired it, dubbed it HMAS Jervis Bay and the big catamaran was far more successful than purpose built naval transports on the run to Timor. After a couple of years the lease expired and INCAT sold the ferry to a company in Europe where I think it is still running.
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  8. I think it just shows that a forgiving parent will allow a rebellious child back into the family when it grows up and realises the error of its ways. So when the United States realises how wrong it was to leave the Empire, the UK will forgive them and allow them to join the Commonwealth of Nations. (... and no I'm not British.)
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  9. My father was a medical student who was "strongly encouraged", (so not technically conscripted,) to join the Royal Australian Air Force. As he had two years of a medical degree, he ended up being designated a medic and was transferred to an island base in the Pacific. When the RAAF were transferred elsewhere, the American Navy was short of medics, so he stayed behind. At one stage he was both the only air force person and the only Australian on a base that was entirely US Navy.
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  10. Tyranny? Wow. Britain was the most liberal country in the world at the time. I'm not British, but I've always been shocked at the propaganda the Yanks put out about the United Kingdom in defence of their outrageous mutiny against their rightful king
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  11. You have cruisers and destroyers from four different countries quickly thrown together to form a fleet and only two of those navies had limited experience of working together. It's not a great surprise that things got rather confused.
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  12. Those things were incredibly versatile. After the war Australia was short of ships, but they were keen to assert their claim on part of Antarctica and nearby islands. The only spare cargo ship their government had lying around was an LST. So in 1947 it got a quick renovation, was painted bright yellow and was sent off to establish a base on Heard Island. The ship was not designed for the huge seas of the Southern Ocean, but despite a multitude of creaks and bangs, LST 3501 managed to get to the Heard Island and off load the expeditioners and materials to build a base. It did a few more similar voyages but the beating it received in the mountainous seas became too much for it, as it eventually broke down and had to be towed back to Australia where it was later scrapped. Not a bad performance for a ship designed for single use in calm waters.
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  13.  @SuperchargedSupercharged  Well that and they are on two different continents. I thought the audio was fine except for two 10 second bursts where it sounds like someone had fired up a vacuum cleaner.... and if someone is too precious to put up with that very brief minor inconvenience, then they're not really interested anyway.
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  14. Sadly Drach only covers the time up to 1950. he says that is because his expertise only goes up to that date and that he doesn't know much about missile warships. But I expect it is also because covering anything within living memory might cause disagreement and shouting between supporters of different nations. So he won't do coverage of the Korean War, Falklands War, all of the dozens(?) of spats between India and Pakistan and certainly not HMAS Melbourne, even if it wasn't a combat carrier in the Vietnam War.
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  15. Great work on profiling the two best theatre commander admirals of the war in the past few weeks; Cunningham and Nimitz
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  16. I thought the Americans valued their ice cream because it could be traded for booze with British and Australian ships, although I can't believe that American ships were totally dry. Surely they must have had something to drink?
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  17. I guess that's because you make rum in Queensland? Down in Tasmania they grow a lot of hops and barley, so they produce beer and whisky.
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  18. I suspect The front fell off is the funniest two minutes of satire on YouTube. I dare you to disagree. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
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  19. I think he avoids ships of the last 75 years as they may stir up nationalist politics... and Hermes has a service record that would certainly do that. But it's a fascinating ship, I certainly hope Drach covers it.
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  20.  @sarjim4381  Not the massive British Empire, rather I think of the scale of U.S. colonialism it as being more equivalent to something like the Dutch.
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  21. Uploaded at 11.00 pm Melbourne time. So just right for some relaxed viewing before I go to bed. 🙂
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  22. Bear in mind that the French and British had been mortal enemies for most of the previous 1,000 years. It would have been very, very hard for a French crew to put their ship under the command of their ancestral enemy.
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  23. That is a couple of years older than the monitor HMVS Cerberus. I wonder if it's in better condition than the Cerberus which has spent a century as a breakwater in Melbourne?
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  24. It is claimed that the water jet was refined and made practical in the 1960s by a New Zealand engineer called Bill Hamilton who had previously built lifts for ski resorts in Australia and NZ. Not sure how true that claim is, but Bill got knighted and as Sir William Hamilton he ran a successful company that produced water jet engines and boats powered by them.
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  25. There were lots of convoys that didn't go to Canada or the U.S. In the early years of the war Malta convoys were being constantly shot up, later after the Soviets and then Americans joined the war, there were the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and lots of long distance convoys to places like Australia and India.
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  26.  @MakeMeThinkAgain  Because the Belgica was the first ship to winter in the Antarctic ice and many of the crew wrote reports and books, subsequent expeditions took very close notice of their experience. Two things that were especially different were scurvy and psychology, several otherwise sane people went mad when confined in such a small place for such a long time in extreme conditions. So people like Shackleton, Scott, Mawson and Amundsen took precautions, although as you noted, they didn't always work.
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  27. I'm Australian and I call it The American Mutiny Britain has always been prepared to give self government to its more economically advanced colonies, if they ask nicely. But the Americans love firing their guns and being polite to others or asking nicely has never been their strong point. So instead they launched a mutiny against their rightful king. 😞
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  28.  @Maddog3060  I also like what the British did with their letter classes where they went through a dictionary and chose appropriate names. So they had five R class battleships and even the V class destroyers had Vanquish, Vendetta, Voyager, Virago, Vampire, Vixen, etc. All great names for warships.
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  29. Well there are big car ferries that cruise at 50 knots these days (made by a company called Incat), but 42 knots is an incredible speed for a warship of any time.
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  30. I don't know what Drach has against Australians and New Zealanders. I had dinner with Drach and his entourage when he was in Melbourne and he was quite pleasant and seemed be enjoying himself, so I doubt he forces us to stay up late out of spite.
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  31. I'm not complaining. I usually don't follow American stuff, so I probably wouldn't have clicked on it if I had known who was fighting the battle... but wow... I've never learnt so much in half an hour or had so much fun learning it.
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  32.  @spikespa5208  I tend to be more interested in post 1900 history, although the 1868 monitor HMVS Cerberus is rusting away 15 km from my house, so I may pay more attention to this era.
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  33. There were lots of convoys that didn't go to Canada or the U.S. In the early years of the war Malta convoys were being constantly shot up, later after the Soviets and then Americans joined the war, there were the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and lots of long distance convoys to places like Australia and India.
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  34.  @DanielsPolitics1  HMS Gay Bruiser would be the bouncer at your nightclub.
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  35.  @petesheppard1709  I don't think the US cats were too successful, I know their trimarans were definitely not. But that Australian commercial catamaran ferry actually won battle honors.
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  36. Exactly. In World War 2 the local foundry in my home town in Victoria, Australia happily churned out triple expansion engines that were used in merchant ships and corvettes, but there is no way they would have been able to build turbines.
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  37. I know you're Australian (I'm subbed to your channel), but no American would ever say that bigger is not better!
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  38. Perhaps a series of short vids on the smaller navies and what they did in WWII? The Canadians with their convoy escort speciality, Australians with their Scrap Iron Flotilla in the Mediterranean and then fighting in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the Dutch, mostly in the East Indies, but also in the Atlantic, whatever the Soviets did, etc. But whatever you do it will be great. Thanks for both entertaining and educating us.
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  39. I love that American hyperbole. A particularly exuberant Brit, Canadian or Australian MIGHT give a score of 11 out of 10 to something they really liked, but a Yank goes completely over the top with 100 million out of 10. :-)
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  40. I suspect most of the blame for that should go to the American Admiral King. He disliked the British so much that if they thought something was good, he tended to do the opposite. That especially applied to convoys. The British had protected convoys, so King seemed to like the idea of unprotected ships sailing on their own.
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  41. You didn't mention Singapore, probably more important than many of the others.
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  42. That would be an interesting topic. The destroyer HMS Glowworm famously rammed a German cruiser on purpose, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne sliced two allied destroyers in half during its career and there have been plenty of American collisions as well.
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  43. That was one of the early scares, but they grew over the next two decades, there were huge marches demanding that more battleships be built and an "Invasion literature" genre of emerged about how Britain would be under foreign occupation (usually German, but occasionally French).
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  44. Almost all the paddle boats used on inland waterways in Australia like the Murray-Darling system and Gippsland Lakes used old railway locomotive boilers with fireboxes adapted to burn wood. The riverboats were all under 150 feet long, so railway boilers had sufficient capacity to power them.
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  45. In the late 1940s the Australians were keen to set up Antarctic bases, but they were short of ships, so they got a war surplus flatish bottomed LST (Landing Ship Tanks) and sailed it through the stormy seas of the Southern Ocean to establish a station on Heard Island. The LST flexed and bent so much that it had to be written off on its return to Melbourne, but it was due to be scrapped anyway. They used ice strengthened ships on later voyages.
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  46.  @steveamsp  Exactly, how many admirals made such a huge impact that they are still widely talked about over a century after their deaths? Not many, there's Nelson, Fisher and Byng, although he was executed for cowardice, so not the best epitaph.
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  47. So... nothing to do with HMVS Cerberus? I'm not surprised as almost nothing has happened to that monitor in 150 years. But even though it wasn't what I was expecting, it was a great video anyway. :)
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  48. I can't understand the strange American superstition about the number 13. A friend tells me it even extends to cruise ships where the decks are numbered... 11, 12, 14. It's doubly strange that the western country with the highest percentage of practicing Christians has this pagan superstition. I wonder where it came from?
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  49. As a small child I went on a tour of HMAS Vendetta, I didn't remember that much about it, but I thought the name was rather cool and appropriately aggressive for a warship. So it stuck in my mind.
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  50. I visited the HMAS Castlemaine in Melbourne on the same day Drach did. It was balmy 12 degrees, so the sweat box that is Brisbane weather must have been quite a shock to him.
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