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

  1. Hood had "no armour" (12 inch belt, and 3 in deck) and was large for no reason? What do you think drove her 45000 tons at nearly 32 knots? Don't you think her size was something to do with being powered by 4 large steam turbines fed by 24 boilers?
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  2. Quite simply Norfolk and Suffolk were tailing the Germans who were steaming at close to maximum speed, consequently the British cruisers had only a small speed advantge with which to close in the stern chase. Norfolk did manage to loose off a few salvoes near the end of the engagement, but they fell far short.
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  3. You guessed wrong.
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  4. She was already sinking via the process of progressive flooding, but such was the rate of its sinking that it would have entailed a further hour or more intense Royal Naval bombardment, the crew of Bismarck weren't prepared to endure that and so pulled the plug to speed it up. They knew it was their best chance of survival.
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  5. Whilst forgetting to mention the imperial pretentions of each and every European power from the 16th to 20th centuries. Read about the centuries long rape of the Spanish colonies, or Belgian abuses in the Congo, Dutch mistreatment of the locals in Indonesia. German atrocities in East Africa or French despotism in North Africa and SE Asia or indeed the concerted destruction of "first nation Americans" first at the hands of European colonists, then to completion by the modern United States of America. Unless, that is, you're not interested in "context" and your only agenda is pouring scorn on the UK. P.S The German battleship was named "Bismarck".
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  6. Its actually a ship... English speakers have for centuries referred to ships with the female pronoun..... we're not going to change that for a lot of pronoun obsessed children who think they've invented the wheel.
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  7.  @TxRattPack  Please search out German language military history websites on the internet, the vast majority of which still refer to her as "die Bismarck", "die" being the German FEMININE pronoun, as opposed to "der" which is the male counterpart. The "He" in relation to Bismarck was from a talk that her newly appointed captain, Ernst Lindemann gave at her commisioning, where unburdened by modern "sexual equality", he said that "a ship so powerful should not be considered as feminine", and decreed that the crew refer to the ship using the male pronoun. That is as far as his authority extended....the crew. He carries no weight with the rest of the English speaking world, who are quite content to refer to all ships as feminine.
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  8. "Penny pinching"? She was one of the most expensive ships ever built at the time of her construction, and was brought down by a million to one shot that hit an obscure weakness in her vertical armour.
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  9. Do you mean by carefully explaining the underlying issues? I see you just prefer the slimmed down version for the hard of thinking.
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  10.  @carlpolen7437  Dear oh dear.... "I like how you provide no concrete examples of your assertion", Do you mean in EXACTLY the same way as you yourself did when you also failed to provide an example your OP? Its people like you who "flame off" on correspondents without first checking that you're not also guilty of what you accuse others of that makes the internet the joy it is !!! Likewise my hat doffs to your good self.
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  11.  @carlpolen7437  You're comments above are not "concrete examples" but merely obsevations or perceptions you have formed of Drachinifel's content. Even IF Drach is slightly enamoured with the RN, so what? It makes a refreshing change and gives some much needed balance to the tsunami of outspoken, overbearing US hijacking of all aspects of world history, even where they weren't involved, and the increasingly programmed globalist railing against Britain after her population once again told the European branch of the globalist world takeover to "feck off". If as I suspect you are indeed from the USA then rest assured there's NO-ONE in the world who needs lessons in humility and fair mindedness that our redneck cousins. I'd furnish you with examples of bias from US commenters, but unfortunately my keyboard would not survive the excessive usage it would receive in type them in.
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  12. Please expand on your hypothesis.
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  13. Endrass.
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  14. Nonsense. 8in HE rounds had NO chance of landing a killer blow on a magazine 6 decks down in the bowels of a ship.
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  15.  @alexlupsor5484  Maybe the temperatures reached such a magnitude that atomic fission occured and a nuclear chain reaction took place? Nonsense, which if you take the time to read the 2 inquiries into her sinking will show you what nonsense it is you're talking.
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  16.  @CorePathway  What tends to be the sentence of a court martial passed down after an investigation of a internal service matter on a naval captain is to be "relieved of command" which happens more than you may imagine. Last year the captain of the US nuclear powered sub USS Connecticut was "relieved of command" after the sub collided with an outcrop of rock in the south China sea. If the offence is even more serious, or liable to bring the service involved into disrepute, the person concerned may be "cashiered" which basically means getting "kicked out of the service". I'm no expert but I'm sure someone will eventually follow up with a fuller more accurate set of details.
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  17.  @ZeldaTheSwordsman  Exactly. what all the wehraboos choose to ignore is that PoW was again comfortably shadowing Bismarck within 30 minutes of her withdrawal from battle, and after the remedial work you mentioned engaged in a further two fruitless gun duels with her.
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  18. Thin armour? Read more about HMS Hood from reputable sources and don't listen to the uninformed nonsense spoken in comments. P.S what happened to Bismarck's "Superior Targeting Capabilities" during the two Fleet Air Arm attacks on her, or in her last battle when she failed to land a single hit on ANY of the RN ships confronting her?
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  19.  @Sandhoeflyerhome  An early towed array would have been simply cable mounted hydrophones (basically a specialised underwater microphone) towed along beneath the wake disturbance of the tow ship, multiple "microphones" spaced equally along the length of the cable combined with advanced electronics onboard the tow ship could as well as initially detecting an underwater sound source also provide some indication of direction due to the phase shift in the signal picked up by the individual microphones. While a string of towed hydrophones was a relatively common technology it was the electronics onboard the tow ship that the hydrophones were connected to that were the REAL cutting edge advance. The idea of towing hydrophones underneath and behind the acoustic disturbance of a ship's propellers was first experimented with during WW1, but it appears that research died away after 1918, but the idea resurfaced in the 1930s and from what I can gather was largely driven by the pioneering work of a Dr Harvey P Hayes of the US. A Towed Array is a passive form of detection, the "active" (pinging) equivalent system is known as a VDS or variable depth sonar. That's the sum of my knowledge (largely gained through playing old PC game titles such as "Cold Waters" and "Dangerous waters")... but there will be plenty more info out there if you search hard enough. All the best from the UK.
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  20. The wreck was rediscovered in 2001, and lays in 9000ft of water. Due to the nature of her destruction the wreck of the Hood is severely damaged and lying in 3 main pieces. If you search for HMS Hood 2001 expedition you'll find a lot of material to read.
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  21. Furniture? Or shoe?
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  22.  @mikearmstrong8483  Sorry Mike, they don't. Capt Lindemann having to decree that Bismarck's crew refer to her using the male pronoun CONFIRMS that the usual custom in Germany is to use the feminine pronoun.
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  23.  @mikearmstrong8483  Read any German books and documentation and ships are referred to using the feminine "die" as opposed to the masculine "der". HMS Rodney, HMS King George V, HMS Hood etc were all named after men but as with all British ships were referred to as "she".
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  24.  @mikearmstrong8483  Its good to know there are others still carrying the torch against the dark tide of youthful nazi enthrallment that as always threatens to wash reality away. All the best.
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  25. So nothing to do with the removal of a very real threat to Britain's lifeline? Or the destruction of 50% of Germany's true battleship fleet?
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  26. Heavily gunned heavy cruisers.
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  27. The amount of effort required by the RN was more a testimony to the difficulty of finding a single ship in the vastness of the 41 million square mile Atlantic at a time when there were no satellites and only rudimentary radar and air covereage was available. The lion's share of luck went to Bismarck with her million to one hit on Hood's magazine.
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  28.  @justhimo2728  The first shots of the battle of Denmark Strait were fired by HMS Hood & HMS Prince of Wales, BUT you must understand that Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were NOT taking German pensioners out on a sight seeing cruise around the Atlantic and Caribbean, their mission was to destroy international civilian cargo shipping travelling across the Atlantic to supply Britain, the very thing that the Royal Navy existed to protect.
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  29.  @upthebracket26  We're the same age group, we know classic humour when we see it... I still watch all the 70s-90s stuff, it still beats the shit they put out nowadays. Keep your chin up, there's blue sky behind those grey clouds... all the best.
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  30. Was she? HMS Warspite and the rest of the Queen Ellizabeths were commisioned years earlier than Hood and all served admirably through WW2. What the problem was was that the "QE"s were modernised interwar, while Hood was in such demand during the interwar period that she only received much smaller upgrades.
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  31. Cars... razor blades.... engine blocks..... steel food cans, you name it.
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  32. And the relevence of your diatribe to this video is?
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  33. Hey Look !!! Another completely clueless commenter talking complete bullshit about a subject he has not the faintest knowledge of !!!
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  34. A manual antiquated aiming disk? I think you mean the dumaresque wheel which was a PART of the Mk 5 Dreyer table fire control system as fitted to HMS Hood. Hood fired SEVEN salvoes at Prinz Eugen TWO of which straddled the cruiser. Your strategic analysis of the engagement is flawed by your error with important details regarding the situation.
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  35. Do you think she would have allowed such a pause when she was slaughtering defenceless British merchant ships in the mid Atlantic?
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  36. Try hitting a 2.4m high piece of armour from 3.7km away with a 1 ton shell in a rolling ship on a storm tossed sea. If you can imagine trying to do that then you will have a clearer understanding of why so few 16in shells hit the main armour belt. They had little problem hitting the rest of the ship though.
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  37. Respects to the service and sacrifice of your great uncle, Oliver. I'm sure it was an emotional, poignant pilgrimage to his final resting place.
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  38. At the time of her completion in 1920 contemporary battleships could "only" steam at 22-23 knots, for a 45,000 ton warship to achieve 32 knots in 1920 was STAGGERING.
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  39. "Wehraboo" derives from "Wehrmacht" which was the combined armed forces of nazi Germany.
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  40. But strangely they failed to land a single hit on any British warship 3 days later... just before Bismarck was torn apart.
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  41. Graf Spee a battlecruiser? Hahaha.
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  42.  @touristguy87  You jest.....
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  43. Yes it runs contrary to the "heavily damaged PoW" story that is usually told. She continued to shadow and engage Bisamrck for a further 36 hours after the Denmark Strait engagement before having to break off to head to Iceland to refuel.
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  44. Stern of a ship was the no. 1 aiming point for an attacking torpedo bomber. Go read about the Italian ship "Vittorio Veneto" at the battle of Cape Matapan, and HMS Prince of Wales, when she was sunk 7 months after Bismarck in the gulf of Siam.
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  45. He'd also been a Fairey Swordfish pilot earlier in his career.
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  46.  @jonathanjones3623  You do realise that the incremental armour you allude to when defining Hood's status as a battlecruiser is exactly the SAME principle that was used to armour the Bismarck itself. Does that mean Bismarck was a battlecruiser? As for your definition of "dead short of adequate armor distribution and reliability of protection" that is a VERY wide net you're using to entangle Hood, such a net would also entangle the "American Battlecruiser" USS Arizona. It appears you erroneously consider Hood an equal of her naval contemporaries HMS Repulse and Renown (and indeed her predecessors Indefatigable, Invincible & Queen Mary). The belief that Hood was "vulnerable to plunging fire" at the range that was involved at the time of her destruction (17000 yards) does not stand scrutiny. Gunnery data both from the pre war German testing and that of the post war US navy concur that Bismarck's 38cm SK C/34 main weapons being of higher velocity had at the range of Hood's destruction an "angle of fall" of approximately 11-13 degrees from the horizontal, therefore the old belief of mortar-like "plunging fire" holds no water at all. Pair this data with the fact that prewar testing of Hood's horizontal armouring showed that it was impervious to 15in shellfire at angles of fall anwhere below 20 degrees. As for Hood's original designation as a "battlecruiser", I refer you to Shakespeare's line from Romeo and Juliet "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet", or in our case if a ship possesses battleship weapons, battleship armour and is a lot faster than other contemporary battleships then it is a "fast battleship".
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  47.  @jonathanjones3623  I've never seen so many words actually say so little. Well done. Why use 5 words when 500 will suffice? A chunk of Shakespeare that fits your diatribe very well is "A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
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  48. Not so much "not very good" but more a case of it being the "original fast battleship" that was not modernised enough throughout its 21 year career to keep it abreast of naval developments.
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  49. If you hunt down an old game called "Atlantic Fleet" on steam it provides a much simplified but passable naval gunnery simulation and a recreation of the Denmark Strait engagement.
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  50. Although she had performed far better than might have been expected from a green, inexperienced crew manning an untested brand new ship, she had received multiple hits (which due to her all or nothing armour scheme had not actually caused too much damage), BUT her bridge had been hit with the temporary dislocation of a sizeable part of her command function, and most importantly she had major problems with her main armaments malfunctioning, a number of her individual main guns had stopped firing and her aft "X" turret was jammed in its barbette and unable to turn. It would have been akin to PoW taking on two assailants with one hand tied behind her back. That said she was back shadowing Bismarck at full speed within 30 minutes of breaking off the action at Denmark Strait, and went on to have 2 further exchanges of fire with Bismarck before finally having to return to Iceland to refuel.
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