Comments by "" (@walterkronkitesleftshoe6684) on "Drachinifel" channel.

  1. The Royal Navy.... policing the abolition of the slave trade around the world's oceans for over 200 years.
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  2.  @richpontone1  Wikipedia says MANY things Rich... Not all of which are true. I could go on to wikipedia and edit it to suggest that Hood was sunk by someone throwing bananas down the funnel. The "plunging fire" theory was the "go to" theory for decades after the war, but try watching that video I gave the link to above and see what you think? All the best.
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  3. Both the RN and the USN had ships that exceeded the Bismarck class in all 3 of the primary aspects of warship design, those being speed, armour and firepower. The difficulty was in combining those 3 aspects in a single design whilst simultaneously keeping within the constraints set by the Washington (and in Britain's case the 1935 Anglo-German) naval treaties. On the other hand, the nazis being inherently untrustworthy, did not feel compelled to comply with the terms of the naval agreement they signed with Great Britain in 1935, and so faced no such difficulties. That being said Bismarck didn't fare too well when confronted with the likes of HMS Rodney, a much more powerful and well protected battleship that was 13 years her senior. As for "one on one" Britain didn't need to play that game, she had a far larger navy that amply showed its capabilities in dealing with nazi "superships".
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  4. PS. Once Bismarck was stopped from running away it only took 2 RN battleships and cruisers to "put her under".
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  5. What pride can you take from slaying a ship that was moronically sent out virtually alone against the British Home Fleet? Its only protection was the vastness of the North Atlantic and its speed, and the RN handled both of those problems admirably.
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  6. A single straddle on HMS Rodney followed by her own oblivion.
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  7. Declan's history of WW2..... The Allies won.
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  8. What you're describing is a distributed armour scheme, the very same layout of armour that was used on Bismarck herself.
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  9.  @lumberlikwidator8863  Hood WAS a surprisingly well defended warship when you take into consideration the continual uninformed BS spoken by commenters over many years and now in these threads. "she was a battlecruiser the same as those lost at Jutland"..... "she had no armour" .... even some idiots who opine that "she had wooden decks" and others that seem to consider her equal to Renown and Repulse!!! Hood was an evolution of battlecruiser theory. Post Jutland her uparmoured redesign took her into the new realm of the fast battleship. a THIRD of her 46000 displacement was armour, when launched she was as well armoured as the Queen Elizabeth class battleships, such as HMS Warspite that had survived everything the Kaiser's navy could throw at her when at Jutland her steering motors overheated and she circled alone twice in front of the entire WW1 German battle fleet, and then went on into WW2 surviving encounters with Italian battleships and nazi glider bombs. Hood was as far removed from the likes of the WW1 Tiger and Indefatigable class battlecruisers as I am from a ballet dancer (and thats a VERY long way). The RN's nomenclature for Hood as a "battlecruiser" was entirely down to her speed, which outstripped all her WW1 battleship cohort by a factor of 7-8 knots, and not based on her being "lightly armoured". Bismarck belt armour = 12.6 inches Hood belt armour = 12 inches (Though angled so as to give 13 inches of protection). Bismarck armoured deck = 4 inches Hood armoured deck = 3 inches Hood's vertical armour was well upto the average standard of contemporary battleships fielded in WW2 equalling the North Carolinas and South Dakotas of the Late 30s early 40s, her weakest aspect was her horizontal deck armour, but Holland knowing this had raced to close on Bismarck and had escaped the "danger zone" of plunging fire, only to be then hit by a million to one shot that likely found an obscure "achilles heel" in her vertical armour. So what that Hood couldn't catch German WW2 heavy cruisers? She had been designed to catch WW1 German cruisers which she could? Guess what NO German capital ship could catch RN heavy cruisers, so what's your point?
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  10. More turrets, mean more magazines spread out along the length of the ship, which means thousands more tons of armour to protect it all. If you concentrate your guns into fewer turrets holding more guns, then the magazines are less spaced out along the ship's length which hugely reduces the amount of armour required to protect it all. Weight saved that can be used elsewhere such as more armour / guns / propulsion systems. Perhaps the most novel design was the layout of the RN "Nelson" class battleships and the "Dunkerque" class French battlecruisers who had all their main armaments situated close together thereby requiring thousands of tons less armour to protect their magazines / gunnery feed systems.
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  11.  @PeterFruits-hm8rc  It's difficult to make sense of your ungrammatical and poorly spelt "sentence". "Trod" IS an English word, and by the appearance of your reply above, you should not be handing out advice on the English language until your own comprehension & mastery of it improves.
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  12. If you're not already aware Tony, the HMS Hood association website hosts individual memorial pages for each recorded member of Hood's crew, including both those onboard at the time of her sinking, and any who had served previously onboard her. The association is ALWAYS looking for confirmed pictures of the individual sailors to place on their memorial pages.
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  13.  @tonyduncan3243  If you have his name you may still find him on the association website. All the best.
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  14. I stopped reading at genocidal.... oh dear you've lost the plot.
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  15. No accounting for a lucky "million to one shot", plus its harder trying to sink a ship thats constantly running away from you at full speed., as soon as she was caught she was reduced to a floating target in 20 minutes. How EPIC !!!
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  16.  @simonpitt8145  For some reason YT did not notify me of your reply 5 months ago, I've only spotted it now due to a notification of Geoff's comment above. 1. By "easy" I assume you mean the million to one golden shot? Hood had the same armour protection as a Queen Elizabeth battleship such as HMS Warspite that had survived everything the Kaiser's navy could throw at her when during WW1 at Jutland her steering motors overheated and she circled alone twice in front of the entire German battle fleet, and then went on into WW2 surviving encounters with Italian battleships and nazi glider bombs. The effort required to bring Bismack to task was as much governed by the operational / geographical situation, as it was down to the combat effectiveness of Bismarck. Consider how earlier in the year Scharnhorst & Gneisenau had roamed the North Atlantic during "Operation Berlin" for weeks without being brought to combat. it's easy from the comfort of an armchair to underestimate the effort required to find a fast ship at sea that doesn't want to be found. 2. Refer to my response to Geoff Barney above. 3. "Half the RN" you say? The ships involved in the search for Bismarck represented less than 20% of the RN establishment, and as I say above they were required to corral a fast battleship in the vastness of the 41 million square mile North Atlantic in the era before satelittes, GPS, advanced radar and comprehensive long range aircraft coverage were "a thing". Once Bismarck had been located and slowed down, she was rapidly dismantled in short order by two better armed and armoured RN battleships. Also I'll freely correct my "full speed" comment to the more factually correct "as fast as her damaged hull and reduced fuel bunkerage would allow". 4. We both know that a single Japanese torpedo hit the support strut of PoW's outer port propellor shaft which then enabled the unsupported propellor shaft to destroy the water integrity of over 40% of her hull and bring down her main electrical systems. If you read some more about the actual events of that day you'll see that the Japanese aircrew were so impressed by the handling of the 2 doomed ships in an insurmountable situation that their commander overflew the scene the following day to drop a wreath in their honour. No operational battleship on earth in the same (ridiculous) situation at that time (Dec 1941) would have performed any better. 5. I fully understand the various reasons for Bismarck's poor performance on 27th May (apart from the usual uninformed parrotted "she was sailing round in circles" nonsense) including her being harangued all night by the 5th destroyer flotilla to break down her crew, an effective tactical decision made by Admiral Tovey, but when you say "a million to one lucky shot" to her rudders, as Gary Player once said "the more I practice the luckier I get", and the FAA practiced quite a lot seeing as they also put a torpedo into the rudders of Vittorio Veneto at the battle of Cape Matapan, (and indeed as the equally skillful Japanese torpedo bomber pilots did to PoW at Singapore) The rudders of a ship were the hard to hit but "destination of choice" for an aerial torpedo seeing as 75% of the rest of the hull was protected by elaborate torpedo defence systems. Also please don't view my critique of Bismarck purely as trying to diminish her combat worthiness, but as a balance to the gushing pre-pubescent nonsense spouted by legions of impressionable wehraboo children in ALL Bismarck comment sections. 6. Agreed that the choice of unreliable magnetic detonators was questionable in the first place, (As I'm sure you know ALL navies at the time were having their own problems with the relatively new technology of influence fuses), but if you're talking luck, then if Bismarck's "lucky strike" on Hood had not likely impacted her 4in HA magazine and set off the domino effect, then she would have completed her turn to port, and then engaged in a bloody, close in "knife fight" that would have seen both of them crippled or sunk, with the result that Bismarck would not have got as far as she did. All the best Simon.
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  17. It was estimated that around 700 Bismarck crewmen were in the water, Dorsetshire and Maori were compelled to leave after having rescued 111 men between them.
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  18. Nice idea, but we Brits would prefer it if it was a depiction of the true story about a British hero with "salt of the earth" British crews fighting alone against a deadly foe, as opposed to 5 star Admiral James "Hotshot" Walker USN winning the war single handed for the US.
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  19. The wreck of HMS Hood was located in 2001 by a team commisioned by the UK's "Channel 4" TV network. Her ship's bell was recovered in 2015 with agreement of the UK govt and board of the HMS Hood association by a team funded by the former Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen. The bell is now a focal point for commemoration of Hood's gallant crew at the Royal Navy Museum in Portsmouth England.
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  20. By your definition HMS Hood was a battleship.
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  21.  @mcduck5  While PoW's armour did function well during the gun duel, with the condition of her malfunctioning main weapons, any continued engagement of the Germans at Denmark Strait would likely have not ended well for her. PoW only managed to fire ~65% of the main calibre rounds she could have fired if her main guns had been functioning correctly, also during the engagement, BOTH of her 4 gun turrets jammed in their respective barbettes for a period of time.
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  22. 4 possibilities spring to mind. 1. Towing a paravane for the purposes of mine clearance..... but seeing as they appear to be escorting a convoy, that would not be necessary. 2. Towing a "foxer" which was a device used to decoy German acoustic torpedoes. 3. Towing a "towed array" (a towed hydrophone) which was a very new technology, effectively removing the "blind spot" that ship mounted hydrophones have to the rear of the ship. 4. The Ship's purser had been found with his "hand in the till" again and was being taught a lesson. My guess is its likely to be 2... but possibly 3.
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  23. "Die Bismarck" in almost ALL German manuscripts, not "Der Bismarck".
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  24.  @ricoh.3162  Capt Lindemann had jurisdiction over Bismarck's crew... NOT the whole of the English & German speaking world.
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  25. "No French official was privy to the British plans" Below is the vebatim British ultimatum delivered to Adm Bruno-Marcel Gentoul at Mers-El-Kebir on the 3rd July 1940 "It is impossible for us, your comrades up to now, to allow your fine ships to fall into the power of the German or Italian enemy. We are determined to fight on until the end, and if we win, as we think we shall, we shall never forget that France was our Ally, that our interests are the same as hers, and that our common enemy is Germany. Should we conquer, we solemnly declare that we shall restore the greatness and territory of France. For this purpose, we must make sure that the best ships of the French Navy are not used against us by the common foe. In these circumstances, His Majesty’s Government have instructed me to demand that the French Fleet now at Mers-el-Kébir and Oran shall act in accordance with one of the following alternatives: (a) Sail with us and continue the fight until victory against the Germans and Italians. (b) Sail with reduced crews under our control to a British port. The reduced crews would be repatriated at the earliest moment. If either of these courses is adopted by you, we will restore your ships to France at the conclusion of the war or pay full compensation, if they are damaged meanwhile. (c) Alternatively, if you feel bound to stipulate that your ships should not be used against the Germans or Italians unless these break the Armistice, then sail them with us with reduced crews, to some French port in the West Indies—Martinique for instance—where they can be demilitarised to our satisfaction, or perhaps be entrusted to the United States and remain safe until the end of the war, the crews being repatriated. If you refuse these fair offers, I must, with profound regret, require you to sink your ships within 6 hours. Finally, failing the above I have orders of His Majesty's Government to use whatever force may be necessary to prevent your ships us from falling into German or Italian hands." Even I can follow the clearly laid out options available in the ultimatum.... surely a French Admiral (Even a pompous, inadequate one such as Gensoul) would if in any doubt immediately consult his superior (Darlan) with the FULL text of the ultimatum he's been handed. Instead the idiot Gensoul, promoted above his ability, pissed about at a CRUCIAL point in European history and caused the death of 1300 French sailors. He was SO ashamed and embarrased about his handling of the whole episode that he never wrote a postwar account of it, OR took part in any interviews regarding the tragedy, right up to his death in 1970.
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  26. It was one of Holland's destroyer escorts (HMS Electra) which rescued the 3 sailors from HMS Hood. Holland had earlier sent his destroyers northwards to search for Bismarck before Hood's final action.
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  27. Lets look at some survivor testimonies (people who actually witnessed the events of Bismarck's sinking first hand), and not some unresearched, modern day nonsense written by the "hard of thinking" shall we? From "Battleship Bismarck: A survivor's story" Written by Baron Burkhard von Mullenheim-Rechberg, Bismarck's senior ranking survivor. Page 211 "Our list to port had increased a bit while firing was going on" followed by "Around 9:30am gas and smoke began to drift through our station" This means that prior to 9:30am Bismarck was already flooding, not something that happens to a healthy seaworthy ship, in other words she was already starting to sink. Then from an interview conducted for the highly regarded weekly history journal "Purnell's history of the second world war" in the late 1960's with Gerhard Junack (who was Bismarck's only surviving engineering officer and the survivor who supposedly enacted the "scuttle order"). He stated that... "Somewhere about 1015 hours, I received an order over the telephone from the Chief Engineer (Korvettenkapitän (Ing.) Walter Lehmann) to 'Prepare the ship for sinking.' That was the last order I received on the Bismarck. Soon after that, all transmission of orders collapsed." Heading back to the account of Mullenheim-Rechberg, on Page 212 he states that (before 10:00am) "I was using all the telephone circuits and calling all over the place in an effort to find out as much as possible about the condition of the ship. I got only one answer. I reached the messenger in the damage control centre and asked "who has and where is the command of the ship? Are there new orders in effect?".... The man said he was in a great hurry. He told me that everyone had abandoned the damage control centre, adding that he was the last one in the room and had to get out... then he hung up". This vain search for contact & information over the Bismarck's internal comms happened BEFORE 10:00am which throws some mild doubt on Junack's testimony where he says he was contacted by the chief engineer who supposedly gave him the "scuttle order" over the phone at 10:15am... Hmmmmm. If taken at face value these survivor testimonies show that there was at least a 45 minute gap between Bismarck starting to sink and the first mention of a "scuttle order" being given. Even if Bismarck's crew had done nothing, Bismarck was going to sink, and if the beaten crew want to help the RN, then all the better... But face it, Bismarck's crew weren't going to scuttle a perfectly seaworthy ship in the middle of the storm tossed North Atlantic of their own free will, it was only for the fact that the RN had already dismantled Bismarck and initiated the sinking process. In other words in every sense the sinking of Bismarck was the result of actions dictated by the Royal Navy. Anything else is just hurt German pride, bolstered by modern day delusional wehraboos. Germany was well known for trying to hide its national humiliations, such as when they scuttled their "grand fleet" at the end of WW1, like illogically saying "We lost.. but you didn't win", or a pathetic "You didn't beat us because we killed ourselves first" sort of idiocy. P.S "unmatched and unparalleled" Hahahah, comedy gold.
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  28.  @martinschnelle3077  YT never informed me of your reply. Please detail the passage where Baron Burkhard says the ship was scuttled? I won't hold my breath waiting because having bought the book at its first publication I KNOW that he says NO such thing. Bismarck was outmatched by a LARGE number of ships, The KGV's for example, which equalled her in speed, had a larger weight of broadside, and were more heavily and better armed and all the while being of a smaller displacement, not to mention the US fast battleships of WW2 which also completely leave her in the shade. Bismarck was basically a WHOLE generation BEHIND the most modern allied battleships, why even the Nelsons which predated her by 13 years had superior firepower and armour but were slower due to keeping within agreed international naval limits, something that the nazis never bothered with. You've already be proved in your other posts to be a low fact count, nazi fanboi BS poster. Stop embarrasing yourself.
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  29. Thats one hot crock of BS. Luckily for the US the UK SAVED your self serving asses from being isolated and sandwiched between a nazi dominated Europe and a Japanese dominated Asia. As for Bismarck she was spit roasted and tag teamed by two superior British battleships. IF any scuttling actually took place then all that was scuttled was a 51000 ton mountain of sinking, flaming scrap metal. All guns silenced, her superstructure devastated, her main armour belt broken and penetrated in several places, her command staff physically obliterated, internally aflame from end to end, her stern and port gunwales already underwater, a thousand of her crew dead, and further hundreds of her crew already in the water behind her.... All that any scuttling did was to sink her a few minutes earlier than was already happening. In the world of boxing the crew's scuttling efforts are what is known as "throwing in the towel", submission of a boxer AFTER he has been punched senseless by a more skillful & powerful opponent, and only a deluded child would say, "the victor didn't win because his opponent killed himself before he lost.", when the truth is the loser had his arse ripped off by the victor and handed back to him on a plate. Imagine the ignominy of being forced to commit suicide by your opponent? P.S Have they stopped teaching punctuation to the rednecks nowadays?
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  30. Apart from the simple fact that Hood initially misidentified her target and had to reacquire after realising her mistake and then received the "golden shot" before she could zero in on Bismarck, the other 3 ships ALL achieved the same average marksmanship, that is a "hit rate" of around 5-6% of shells fired.
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  31. Hahahaha, Keep watching the MSM narrative whilst mouth breathing, Do you think its not happening to all other countries at the same time? How dim you are.
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  32. Complete BS.
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  33. None of that shit here.
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  34. Apart from the battlecruisers that didn't.
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  35. No it didn't NEED to be "scuttled"... it was already sinking... just not fast enough for the liking of Bismarck's crew, who wanted the RN "big boys" to leave her alone.
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  36. Please concisely explain why she was NOT a fast battleship. She was a without doubt a pioneering fast battleship. At completion her armour and firepower was equal to contemporary battleship design, as well as being 8-9 knots faster. the very definition of a "fast battleship". Granted she was in need of modernisation before 1941, but it doesn't negate the fact that she was still a fast battleship though a dated one. Is a sports car designed in the 2000s NOT a sports car in the 2020s?
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  37. Only Germans and deluded children see sinking your own ships as a "victory".
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  38. Bismarck was "better than everyone else's stuff"? Well it's an opinion.... an uninformed one but an opinion nonetheless.
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  39. And also has some "preferred editors" with their own agendas who exert full editorial control over some pages.
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  40.  @akaj188  Strange how the "super German gunnery" failed to land a single shot on any of the 4 RN ships that ripped her to pieces on the 27th May. But to make up for the nazis poor showing the RN pumped over 400 shells into the mediocre nazi tub.
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  41.  @richhughes7450  The Japanese did sign up to various naval treaties during the 1920s/30s but by 1934 along with their withdrawal from the league of nations, they also renounced the naval treaties they had signed up for as the militarist factions within their government were angry with the displacement limitations as well as the ratios of capital ships permitted to the various signatories, as well as the increasing number of ships that were being built in excess of the treaty limitations by various nations. But inspite of walking away from naval arms control the Japanese still carefully hid the displacement and design of their new super battleships so as not to pour further petrol on the flames of the burgeoning international naval arms race. So yes, Yamato was not subject to any naval arms limitations.
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  42. FAR more ships were mobilised to hunt the Bismarck than you suggest, but that number of ships is NO comment on Bismarck's supposed "uberness" though as the vast majority of the RN ships that joined in the hunt never saw her and were required simply to corral a small fast task force that was busily avoiding enemy contact in the 41,000,000 square mile N. Atlantic in the era before over the horizon radars, satellites and even comprehensive air cover. When she was finally stopped from running away she was decapitated, declawed and dismantled in 90 minutes. How many men do you think it would require to catch an evasive greyhound on a football pitch? Now how many men do you think it would require to "finish it off" once it had been caught?
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  43.  @charlieb308  The RN rescued 110 Bismarck survivors in hostile waters... a stone's throw away from the Atlantic u-boat bases on the French coast, it was known by the RN that Bismarck had been transmitting beacon signals on known u-boat frequencies for the previous 24 hours. The fact that 110 Germans were rescued in such conditions is more of a surprise than the abandonment of the rest of the German sailors due to the sighting of a u-boat periscope is a disgrace. Before you say "there was no u-boat" then read the war diary of U-74 (Kpt Lt Eitel-Friedrich Kentrat) which shows that he was in the area of the sinking, and indeed picked up 3 Bismarck survivors. Before you say "a u-boat capt would not sink a ship carrying out rescues of drowning seamen" Read about the actions of WW1 German U-boat capt Otto Weddigen in U-9 when confronted with the WW1 British cruisers HMS Aboukir, Cressy & Hogue. If you're so disgusted by the abandonment of drowning sailors to cold lonely, lingering deaths, then I'll warn you not to read about the actions of Kriegsmarine admiral Wilhelm Marschall, who after the two German battleships he was commanding on 8th June 1940 sank the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and its two gallant escorting destroyers HMS Acasta & Ardent, and then sailed away without making even the most rudimentary effort to render humanitarian assistance to the +1500 RN sailors left in the emptiness of the Norwegian sea. Not a SINGLE RN sailor was rescued by the 2 German ships even though no other enemy ships were any where near. Or it is only German sailors left to drown that you get all "teared up" about?
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  44. That was never in dispute.
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  45.  @WillBoothe3  Why would anyone believe someone who doesn't know the actual story?
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  46. Great post, and thank you for your own service.
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  47. You're comparing apples with oranges. Read a bit more about the subject and you wil discover the glaring differences between Hood and the Invincibles/Indefatigables.
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  48. That "Holiday training camp" was probably "HMS Royal Arthur" which was a shore training establishment that was actually Billy Butlins pre-war Skegness holiday camp. My own father did his basic training there in 1940 before being posted to HMS Dorsetshire and witnessing the sinking of the Bismarck.
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  49.  @hujjesb  Great stuff. keep that family history safe mate, I've got a small "Introduction to service in the Royal Navy" handbook that was issued to my dad when he was sent there back in 1940. He said that winter was a hard one, and the east coast gets it worse from the east. He told me that two poor fellers from his intake died after they sneaked off to sleep in the boiler room to keep warm and were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning. Them old fellers had it hard, thank god it was them and not us. Bless em all.
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  50. "Choosing such an idiot for the position", You seem to be forgetting that 3 months eariler Lütjens had commanded "operation Berlin", where he took the Kriegsmarine's "twins" into the Atlantic, sinking / capturing 22 allied merchant ships, and successfully evading the RN's efforts to engage. As for Dorsetshire's torpedoes, listen to what one of the world's most experienced and knowledgeable marine forensic experts, Bill Jurens, thinks about the matter. https://youtu.be/9xX8XGMMXhE?t=3887 I'm no wehraboo apologist, but the failure was FAR from solely caused by Lütjens but mainly by the Kriegsmarine top brass ordering Rhineübung to take place inspite of it being under supported against a FAR stronger enemy, at a time when the German surface fleet was already losing the technology & resources battle. Lütjens suspected that was the case, but was duty bound to follow his orders.
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