Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Drachinifel"
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How many total rounds of any caliber naval ammunition was produced, how many were expended, and how much it all cost during WWII is devilishly difficult to find out at this late date. I did manage to come up with one very preliminary estimate from six different sources for 40 mm rounds. It appears that about 17 million rounds were produced in 1942, 89 million in 1943, 130 million in 1944, and back down to 15 million in 1945. That's a total of about 251 million rounds. The total spent on 40 mm ammo ranges from about $600 million to $700 million. Just choosing the midpoint, I'll assume a reasonable amount was $650 million. Given that, $650 million divided by 251 million means each round cost $2.58 in 1945 dollars. A single 40 mm gun had a practical rate of fire of 80-90 RPM, so let's choose 85 RPM. $2.58 per round multiplied by 85 equals a cost of $219.30 per barrel per minute, or $877.20 per minute for a quad mount. Now we know why there were so many ads about buying war bonds!
Now, just getting this admittedly imprecise data was about two hours of trawling the net and a splitting headache, so anyone wanting to try to come up with the same figures for things like five inch rounds, have at it. :-)
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The reason why the electric razor trick could have worked was razors of that time only had shielding so they didn't interfere (much) with the medium wave AM broadcast band from about 550 KHz to 1550 KHz. This was the only band used for commercial broadcasting at the time, FM and higher frequencies still being in the future. An unshielded electric motor emits tons of spurious RF signals, and that's why the razors (may) have worked. As it turned out, the Fritz-X and HS-293 receivers operated at a frequency of about 50 MHz, quite high for 1943.
The Americans and British spent a lot of time trying to discover the guidance frequencies so they could develop transmitters to jam those frequencies. They sent a total of 40 radios to sea on two DE's off Italy in hopes of being able to pick up the frequencies of glide bombs actually in use. Through a combination of faulty intelligence and bad luck, the frequency pairs chosen were in the 17 MHz to 20 MHz range. After deploying some hastily built jamming transmitters, the results were...nothing, since the jammers were nowhere near the correct frequencies. Through one bit of luck, a single guidance transmission at 50 MHz was picked up, opening up the possibility that all the previous work had been for naught.
A twenty-three year old US second lieutenant was part of the team trying to decode this knotty problem. He was also an amateur radio operator and had built a number of his own ham radio transmitters. He calculated that a 50 MHz receiver would ideally operate with a 3 KHz intermediate frequency in a single conversion circuit. Without getting into all the complexities of an IF circuit, the main advantage is the IF, operating below the transmitting frequency of signals the operator wanted hear, made it far easier to design band pass filters. These were then able to filter out frequencies outside the desired range. A frequency of 3 KHz was ideal because there were no commercial broadcasters operating in that range. Anything being received above or below the IF could be removed with high or low band pass filters. A 3 KHz signal couldn't be removed as it was needed for the IF to work. A number of Hallicrafters ham transmitters were modified to operate at 100 watts at 3 MHz, a powerful signal that would swamp an IF in that range. They were tested off Florida and then sent to Italy. No ship with the jamming transmitter was successfully attacked, and glide bombs could be seen going wildly off course as soon as the jammer was turned on. The project to modify the radios received an AAA1 priority since D-Day was less than four months away. Between British and American radio manufacturers, over 500 jammers were built in about a month. It didn't take long for the Germans to figure out we had come up with some kind of radio jammer, but it took them until after D-Day to come up with their answer, a wire guided missile that couldn't be jammed
Now, about the electric razors. In theory, an unshielded electric razor motor is one of the dirtiest electric devices around. It will put out spurious emissions on almost any HF frequency, including 3 KHz. However, the RF energy has to be tiny, like in the tenths of a watt. Because the path from a shaver to the glide bomb is line of sight, the power output isn't quite as important, but I'd need to be convinced that the electric razor defense ever really worked. The HS 123 and Fritz-X bombs only had about 1 hit for every 20 launched, and having them just go out of control through a guidance failure wasn't uncommon. Having a guidance failure for reasons other than guys waving around electric razors seems a lot more likely to me. I've scoured all the books I have and and online resources and, although I've found numerous instances of the electric razor story, I've yet to find evidence of any kind of controlled test to show it would work IRL. Unless I can find something, I remain skeptical.
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There were 24 large ferrocement barges constructed by the US, mostly being used by the Army during WWII, with several being taken up from USN service as floating refrigerator/freezer craft. They were 265 feet and about 3,000 tons and were used mostly to transport frozen meat, chicken, eggs, and milk between Pacific bases to improve the diets of the men as the war dragged on. The most famous was the Ice Cream Barge. It's only job was to manufacture, store, and distribute ice cream to the fleet and shore bases. To do the job it had 14 ice cream plants capable of turning out 12 gallons of ice cream per minute in vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. The facilities were so overtaxed by demand that another ice cream barge was about to build when the war ended. It was towed from island to island by two Navy tugs. The role of ice cream as a morale builder was so valued that Navy Secretary Forrestal gave standing orders that the barge was not to leave port unless Navy meteorologists could guarantee there was no bad weather on the way for at least twice the period of the next voyage, and an aerographer's mate was on board to take readings and observations during the voyage.
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The initial 3"/50 was also capable of antiaircraft fire, but it was a terrible gun for surface action, with a shell weight barely adequate to penetrate the hulls of larger merchantmen, let alone a warship. They were armed with this inadequate gun specifically to discourage surface action. The Pacific war changed from mostly using torpedoes to actually needing an effective deck gun by late 1943. The remaining Japanese shipping was mostly shallow draft sampans and coasters that couldn't be sunk with a torpedo. The 3"/50 was generally swapped out with a 4"/50, a very effective gun for surface action. Many skippers wanted to retain their 4"/50s when the official armament became the 5"/25. They avoided enough yard time to allow the gun to be changed and generally did whatever subterfuge they could to avoid losing the 4"/50. A few managed to retain the 4"/50 right up to the end of the war. Most skippers did come to recognize the hitting power of the 5"/25 gun, especially when a director was mounted in the last year of the war. The 5"/25 needed no preparation for diving, unlike the 4"/50, which needed a muzzle plug and the telescopic sight removed.
Although the 5"/25 was theoretically capable of antiaircraft fire, the Mark 40 mount only allowed a maximum elevation of 40 degrees rather than the other marks of 5"/25 gun mounts that allowed an elevation of 85 degrees. This made the wet mount submarine gun a single purpose antiship piece. Even if it had been capable of antiaircraft fire, it's doubtful a submarine would have chosen to fight it out with an aircraft 10 miles away flying at 15,000 feet rather than diving to avoid the fight. The 40mm gun(s) was an effective antiaircraft weapon at the 3 to 5 miles range a sub might have to fight off an aircraft that jumped them at the surface. It was also found the gun did a good job of shooting up and sinking many of the lightly built Japanese merchant shipping remaining toward the end of the war.
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Admiral King was an alcoholic, womanizing, and constantly pissed off desk sailor. He seems to have developed his Anglophobia sometime during WWI when he was a staff officer assigned as liaison to the British Home Fleet. He apparently got into several battles with British officer over antisubmarine tactics, and is rumored to have only just escaped sacking when discovered in the bed of a British admiral's wife, although I have never been able to learn the name of the admiral or his wife, so that's really hearsay at this juncture. After that, he seems to have developed a loathing of all things British, and the RN in particular. He refused to allow convoys off the US coast for the first six months of the WWII. While his stated reason was we didn't have enough escort ships, others suspect it's because the convoy was a British invention. He also fought the Army's plan to fly B-24's to fly from Greenland and Iceland to close the Iceland gap to German subs. He felt the Navy's next flying boat, the Coronado, could handle the task, even though the Coronado turned out to be a failure as a long range patrol bomber.
On the plus side, King was the main advocate for the invasion of Guadalcanal in the face of fierce Army opposition. While it was a long and bloody campaign, history has proven King's strategic thinking correct. Guadalcanal was the first retaking of conquered Japanese territory in the war, and it proved the Army and Navy together could use amphibious operations to take islands from the Japanese. He was also instrumental in seeing that enough naval strength was available in the Pacific in 1942 to protect supply lines to Australia and prevent the Japanese actually invading the country.
By far his most egregious decision was his role in the court-martial of Charles B McVay III, captain of the USS Indianapolis. He overturned Admiral Nimitz's letter of reprimand as a result of the sinking of the Indianapolis and instead demanded a court-martial, and carried his demands all the way to Secretary of the Navy Forrestal. Forestall gave in because he didn't want to start an open battle between him and King so soon after the end of the war. The court-martial eventually convicted Captain McVay in November, 1945 of failing to zigzag as an antisubmarine measure. Even though Forrestal overturned the sentence, and McVay had an essentially honorary promotion to rear admiral just before his retirement in 1949, the court-martial was the end of the career for a promising and honorable Navy officer.
Indianapolis's survivors came together and tried for many years to have the court-martial removed from what they consider "their skipper's" record. McVay spent many years in self recrimination over the deaths of so many of his men, even though most (but not all) the survivors tried to rally around him. His family stated he received hate mail and telephone calls from some survivor's families for many years after the court-martial, particularly as each anniversary of the sinking approached. McVay suffered from mental health problems for years after the court-martial. His family reported he would wake up screaming from nightmares he was back in the water with his shipmates, trying to fight off attacking sharks. Finally, he lost the battle and, in 1968, committed suicide using his Navy service pistol on the back steps of his Litchfield, Connecticut home.
After all the attempts to clear McVay's name, it was a 12 year old schoolboy's class project in 1998 that finally bought the miscarriage of justice to national attention. Hunter Scott testified before Congress and turned over the voluminous notes he took from interviews with almost 150 Indianapolis survivors. Congress passed a resolution in 2000 asking the Navy to exonerate Captain McVay. President Clinton, to his credit, signed the resolution the same year. The Navy finally, after fighting tooth and nail not to, exonerated Captain McVay in July, 2001, with Secretary of the Navy England ordered McVay's Navy record purged of the court-martial and of all implication of wrongdoing on his part.
Why was King so intent on seeing McVay convicted? The evidence implicates King carrying a grudge all those years because McVay's father, Admiral Charles B McVay Jr, had ordered a letter of reprimand be placed in King's file in 1922 because he and others were caught sneaking women onto a Navy ship. He apparently decided his best revenge was seeing the career of his son destroyed, and this is exactly what Admiral Charles McVay Jr thought was the reason. King has been accused of the death of many US Navy sailors and merchant sailors because of his refusal to initiate convoys. That can be argued, but one death can be laid squarely on King's shoulders, and that was the death of Captain McVay.
I'm sorry for the length of this, but I couldn't let the mention of Admiral King pass by without telling this story. Like Hunter Scott, I was a 16 year old schoolboy in 1963, and my junior history project was the sinking of the Indianapolis. Captain (then Rear Admiral) McVay paid me the honor of speaking to me for almost three hours over two days about him, his ship, and the sinking. He told me of the heroism of not only his own crew but what survivors would call the Angel of the Sky and the two Angels of the Water. Many more of the crew wouldn't have survived without them. The rescue was more a result of them and their amazing efforts than the Navy. Look them up to find out what they did or this will become more of War and Peace than it already has. Even in 1963, McVay still bore the full responsibility for the sinking if his ship. My school project didn't stir anything but one newspaper story, but it left me carrying Charles McVay in my heart. My heart sank on that terrible day of November 6, 1968 when I heard of Admiral McVay's death, and not a November 6 goes by that I don't think of him.
There are only two villains in this story. The first are the unknown naval bureaucrats that denied the Indianapolis a destroyer escort and then delayed rescue for days because they didn't have a system to alert them when a single ship was overdue. The other is Admiral Ernest King.
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Vought produced two world beating fighters and two dogs. You mentioned one dog, the Cutlass, that actually made it to squadron service. At least one could argue the Cutlass failed because it used too many new features at once with and underdeveloped engine, but it did have potential.
The other Vought dog was the F6U Pirate. It used a thoroughly conventional layout of straight wings and various aerodynamic bits and pieces in an attempt to wring out maximum performance from the largest turbojet available at the time, the Westinghouse J34 with an afterburner, a first for carrier aircraft. Unfortunately, US engine designers were still working out how to make powerful turbojets that would fit in small naval fighters, and the J34 wasn't the engine designers hoped for. It was seriously underpowered for sea level use, although the Pirate did have a top speed of nearly 600 mph at 20,000 feet. At sea level, however, it could be outrun by the speedy F8F Bearcat prop fighter, leading to the nickname "Groundhog". Given the straight wind design, it had no real development potential, so only 33 were built. On the plus side, it was a docile aircraft to fly and never killed any pilots, something that couldn't be said for the Cutlass, with 320 produced, in which 25 pilots died and 28% of the airframes were destroyed in accidents.
Amazingly, in an attempt to win public favor for an aircraft already being being denigrated as a widowmaker, the Cutlass was ordered into use by the Blue Angels. I've never been able to find out what admiral made that decision, which is probably just as well for him. While trying to make full power take offs, the aircrafts experienced multiple serious flameouts, total hydraulic failures, engine fires on the ground and in the air, and a landing gear door falling off into a crowd of spectators, miraculously not killing or injuring anyone. The last straw was Lt. Lewis "Whitey" Feightner experiencing a total hydraulic failure in the first Cutlass Blue Angels flight while attempting to make a full afterburner takeoff. After clipping some trees at the end of the runway and losing one of the two engines, Feightner contemplated ejecting but was afraid of the risks to the people on the ground. He stayed with the plane long enough to get the backup hydraulic system on line so he could make a hard left turn, get the gear down, and safely get back on the runway, all the while a huge blue flame of hydraulic fluid trailed behind him. The crowd cheered, assuming it was part of the show. During a straight and level flight on the way to an airshow in Chicago,, the other Cutlass in use also experienced a flameout, forcing Feightner's wingman, Lt Harding MacKnight, to make an emergency landing at Naval Air Station Glenview. Being short on fuel, Feightner had to make an emergency landing at what was then Orchard Airpark, plowing through rows of peach baskets place on the new runway to keep vehicles off, thereby landing on what became the first runway of what we now know as Chicago O'Hare Airport. The Blue Angels brass, deciding discretion was the better part of valor, had the two aircraft dismantled and trucked to NAS Memphis, where they served for many years a maintenance instructional airframes. Ironically, both were eventually destroyed while being used for firefighting training.
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One of the potential advantages of the Montana class postwar was for midshipmen cruises. The term "midshipmen" In this regard is a little misleading, since the postwar Navy had summer cruises for not only Annapolis midshipmen but for naval cadets from the various colleges and university, midshipmen from the Coast Guard and Merchant marine academy, plus quite a large number of petty officers being trained for specialized roles like electronics and engineering. While a Montana required a large (2,400 crewmen) manning in war, she could get by with about half that number in peacetime, especially with the trainees filling in some roles. That left a lot of berthing space for midshipmen of all types, something that was lacking in the cruisers normally used in that role. Not only could they have accommodated between 500-600 midshipmen, their 15,000 mile range at 15 knots would have allowed them to visit any part of the world with one fueling, an expensive proposition for smaller ships with less range. The class also had expansive flag accommodations, useful for training command staff, as well as the largest Combat Information Center afloat, allowing more training opportunities. The fact the flag accommodations would have also been the most comfortable in the Navy for admirals tagging along on training voyages wouldn't hurt, since their recommendations were important for deciding what ships remained in active service. They would have been carrying modern 5"/54 guns, and probably would have had their 40 mm guns replaced with the 3"/50 guns that became standard postwar, allowing trainees experience on a wide range of modern weapon types. Of course, all this assumes that at least a couple of the class would have been built and commissioned by war's end. If they had been, their best postwar use may have been as the world's largest training ships.
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It also depends on the type of antiaircraft guns mounted on a sub. The quad 20 mm mounts on U Boats did a good job of sending enough metal downrange that attacking aircraft, if not shot down, were at least thrown off the accuracy of their bomb runs. As you say, once Coastal Command figured out the limitations of those mounts and changed their routes of attack, being attacked by three or more aircraft was almost always a death sentence for the sub, even if they shot down one or two of the attacking aircraft. In addition to bombs and depth charges strafing was a killer for surfaced subs. Since the AA guns had very little in the way of splinter protection, strafing would disable or kill many of the members of the gun crews, and they couldn't be replaced fast enough to drive off all the attackers. The idea of the Flak U Boat (U-flak) was only tested on four boats. While there was some limited success by the first two U-flaks (U-256 and U-441), they and the other two that were actually converted suffered heavy damage and lost 10-20 crew during the attacks by the RAF. Once the U-flaks were repaired, they were returned to service as normal VIIC boats when it was obvious that the idea was a failure.
The US experience in the Pacific was quite different. All the fleet boats had at least one 40 mm Bofors, and many had two. The most heavily armed boat I've been able to find was USS Balao a boat whose captain seemed to delight in collecting guns. It had two 5"/25 guns, two 40 mm, at least two and sometimes three 20 mm cannon, four .50 Browning machine guns, and, although I don't know how many times this loadout was used, stanchion mounts for another four or five .30 Browning machine guns. In the case of the USN, this wasn't really in response to Japanese air attacks (although somewhere around 100 aircraft were shot down during the war) but to strafe Japanese armored barges that were resupplying stranded Japanese troops. Their draft was too shallow to sink with a torpedo, so subs often teamed up with PT boats to use their radars to locate and attack these barges. All the boats would use their smaller guns to keep Japanese gun crews away from their heavy armament until the sub could bring it's 5" guns to bear. It was the only weapon in the absence of a destroyer that could sink a barge, and most barges kept to shoal waters where the destroyer couldn't follow them. My dad served on a PT boat, and his boat was involved in these "combined operations". Being a much braver guy than me. he said it was the most fun he'd ever had during his service while he was still vertical. :-)
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The USS Narwhal and Nautilus with their pair of 6" (152mm) guns proved to be surprisingly useful in the Pacific once their difficult and unreliable MAN diesels were replaced with the slightly less powerful but infinitely more reliable GM engines. Their great size, large fuel tanks, and great interior volume allowed both boats to conduct war patrols of 70 days. They were the first submarines to have "cold rooms" (refrigerators) and freezers, so fresh vegetables and fruits were available during the first two weeks or so of a patrol and frozen meats available for almost the entire time, something only dreamt of by earlier submariners. Both boats received partial air conditioning to make things less onerous for passengers and crew for their new roles of being a general workhorse for many special operations, carrying everything from commandos to evacuees from occupied islands, including women, children, and at least one infant. They carried ammunition and other supplies to island outposts and the occupied Philippines, did shore bombardment everywhere from the Aleutians to the Japanese mainland, and landed various Army personnel as liaisons and advisors to local guerilla groups in the Philippines. In between, both boats sank a surprising number of enemy vessels with deck guns and torpedoes while withstanding a several severe and prolonged depth charge attacks. They were really more successful than the Navy ever expected them to be. Both boats were completely worn out from hard service at the beginning of 1945 and were decommissioned in April and May of 1945, stricken days later, and unceremoniously sold off for scrap before VJ Day. The only remnants are the two 6" guns of the Narwhal functioning as the Navy equivalent of gate guards at the submarine base in New London, CT.
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@dogofthedesert6642 Good points. I think Drach was just modeling the slugfest, but, even with Taffy 3, it was the aircraft from the escort carriers of Taffy 1 and 2, responding to the calls for help from Taffy 3, and their near suicidal attacks, that helped convince Kurita he was under attack by the main US fleet. It was the aggressiveness of the DD's and DE's that helped convince Kurita that he was under attack by cruisers of the main US fleet and the battleships would be just over the horizon. While the US had technological advantages, it was the training, morale, and fighting spirit of the USN that turned that battle. Kurita was trying not to lose the war in a day while the men and ships he was opposing fought like they were trying to win it in a day. Had Kurita actually been opposed by the entire force of Admiral Oldendorf, the slaughter would have been horrific.
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By 1941 it was clear that the 1.1" AA guns were not going to be the standard armament for the USN. Many of the early bugs with the mounts and feed system had been worked out by Pearl Harbor and they were considered to be reliable guns. The problem was testing and the results of battles in the Med showed a 1.1" (28mm) was just too light to reliably bring down more modern planes, the Zero being a prime example. Consequently, planners revised the armament plan for DE's to have 8-10 40mm and DD to mount 10-14 of the same guns. Because of the space and weight available on the Fletchers, the final loadout on Fletchers by the end of 1942 was a minimum of 10 guns, with a quad mount in place of the previous quad 1.1" between mounts 53 and 54, and twin mounts on either side of the aft stack. A way was found, by adding a pair of gun platforms, to add another pair of twin mounts on either side of the forward bridge level. That was a total of 12 barrels and was the most common package by mid-1943 when there were finally enough Bofors guns to go around.
The 16 gun ships landed turret 53 and added a platform for another quad that was superfiring over the existing quad mount, giving a total of 16 guns. 20mm guns carried for 7 to 18 depending on build date and the number of twin mounts available. The 40mm and 5"/38 guns were all radar directed, and the 20mm sights were constantly upgraded during the war. There really was no other platform with the speed, maneuverability, firepower, and electronics of a Fletcher. The Japanese recognized the danger of the radar equipped early warning Fletchers and concentrated their attacks on such ships, especially off Okinawa. It was only their heavy AA armament that allowed most of them to survive in that role, with several having downed five or more Japanese aircraft unassisted in a single day.
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Surcouf could have been a fairly successful cruiser submarine if she had survived long enough to actually reach the Pacific. Her nominal diving depth wasn't exceeded until the much later nuclear attack submarines of the USN. She would have been useful for attacking merchant shipping while operating as a normal sub and warships on the surface using her main battery. She was relatively immune to depth charge attack since her great diving depth of almost 600 feet (183 meters) exceeded the capability of Japanese depth charges in early 1942, and she probably could have gone to 900-1000 feet (274-305 meters) without serious risk to the hull, making her effectively immune to underwater attack, at least from the surface. With the addition of some radars and additional night fighting equipment, she could have done a good job of shore bombardment on the many small Japanese outposts in the Pacific, as well as landing raiding and reconnaissance parties using her small boats.
All that potential came to nought on the night of February 18 or early morning of the 19th, 1942, while enroute from Halifax to transit the Panama Canal and on to the Pacific. About all we know for sure is the last thing heard of her was a routine position message sent at 1600 on the 18th. The SS Thompson Lykes reported colliding with and running over an underwater object. Unfortunately, this was very early in the war for the US, and there was an unreasonable fear of U-Boats infesting the Caribbean. The crew of the Lykes reported men in the water yelling for help, some in English. Assuming she had hit a U-Boat and not wanting to fall prey to the other German subs assumed to be in the area, she continued on, sending a signal to the Panama Defense Frontier base at Panama City on the night of the 18th. The actual time of the message is still a little murky, but it seems to have been at about 2200. What the Lykes actually hit is still a point of much debate. The damage to the Lykes was described as being not serious enough to have hit a sub the size of Surcouf, and the crew described the object as much smaller than the Surcouf. Postwar records proved no German sub was within hundreds of miles of the point of the collision. Merchant ship crews had virtually no training in warship recognition at that time, and how accurately the crew could have estimated the size of what she hit on a moonless night is open to considerable doubt. Even if Surcouf's main radio antenna had been damaged by the collision, she would have only been about 80 miles (130 km) north of Cristobal, Panama at the time of the collision. Assuming she could remain on the surface, the crew could have rigged up an emergency antenna carried for just such a purpose. She was plenty close enough to Panama that a mayday sent on any of the several longwave and HF emergency channels of the time should have been picked up by someone. In particular, the HF emergency frequencies at night could have been picked up hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Hams and shortwave buffs on the East and Gulf Coasts avidly monitored these bands at night, yet not one reported receiving a mayday that night.
Theories abound as to what happened to the Surcouf, and they are easily found on the net. They range from the possible to completely fanciful. I won't get into them here or another book will result. The most likely fate of the boat was she was jumped by a PBY Catalina on routine patrol over the Gulf of Panama. Tropical waters are noted for ships leaving bright luminous wakes, the result of the billions of photo flash plankton that abound in the warm waters. A boat the size of the Surcouf would have left a long, bright, and attractive wake to any patrolling bomber. The crew of the Surcouf was probably maintaining an active surface watch, but there were no enemy aircraft reported anywhere in the Caribbean, so an aerial watch was either not maintained or was very relaxed. The PBY, seeing the wake from many miles off, came in low to attack what it believed to be a large Japanese sub. Stories were current at the time of Japanese subs that exceeded 400 feet (122 meters) and 5,000 tons. While the I-400 class was indeed in this size range, construction didn't even begin until 1943, so none were in the Caribbean. Some ideas of what the Japanese had then came more from "Popular Science" than any official naval briefings.
The huge wingspan of the PBY allowed it to cut back power and approach a sub at 100 feet (30 meters) above the surface. The crew of the Surcouf probably never saw or heard the Catalina until is was on its attack run. There were no internationally agreed to recognition signals at the time, and IFF systems were still in the future. The boat's only hope was to dive quickly enough that the PBY would lose it. Diving time for the Surcouf was about three minutes, actually quite fast for a boat of her size and top hamper, but nowhere near fast enough to escape the incoming attack. The PBY was probably carrying four 500 pound (227 kilogram) depth charges and several 100 pound (45 kilogram) bombs. The usual method of attack was to drop the depth charges set to 25 feet (8 meters) first to keep the sub on the surface. If the depth charges didn't sink the boat, the plane would return to attack with bombs. The depth charges would have been devastating to the Surcouf if the attack was accurate, exploding just below the hull of the boat as she attempted to dive. Many German and Japanese subs were sunk during just such attacks. and my guess is the PBY crew, with the Surcouf not taking evasive action on the surface and not having the time to fight back with antiaircraft fire, was the victim of just such an accurate attack, and sank quickly as she was attempting a dive.
Many such attacks were reported in the early months of 1942. The PBY, seeing nothing on the surface after she circled back, and seeing no wreckage, probably patrolled the area for a short while, then resumed her patrol after reporting the attack by radio. The vast majority of such attacks in the Caribbean turned out to be schools of dolphins, a whale basking on the surface, and even vast schools of anchovies being herded by predators. I imagine the report was written off to just such an occurrence, one of many logged but never further investigated. The Surcouf was never heard from again, even after a fairly extensive sea and aerial search. The wreck site has never been identified, so all we have left is the theories and the lost souls of about 120 sailors. The wreck would lie below about 9,000 feet (2743 meters). Perhaps, as our underwater detection and exploration improves, we may yet have answers as to what happened to the Surcouf.
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PT Boats got more standardized armament as the war progressed, but they were pushed out ASAP from 1940-1942 as a force in being. Since the assumption was their four torpedoes would be the main offensive weapons, a pair of dual .50 caliber machine guns was included, mostly to keep the heads of enemy gunners down. By early 1943, it was clear the role of the PT was going to be to stop small vessels from resupplying Japanese islands as we hopped over them. These Japanese boats were mostly very shallow draft barges, and torpedoes were useless against them. Many were quite heavily armored against PT boat attack. This started an arms race between Japanese and USN crews about which would have the most effective armament.
PTs never returned to anything larger than forward floating dry docks or small shipyards established by the SeaBees on conquered islands. There wasn't much formality when it came to adding or deleting equipment from boats. It was pretty much up to each skipper what he could scrounge. The arguably best Japanese barge buster was the Pontiac M4 37 mm cannon taken from crashed or salvaged P-39 fighters. P-39s were plentiful in the Pacific, and more M4s became available as the P-39 was taken out of service for replacement by more modern aircraft. Every boat in my dad's squadron was eventually equipped with a bow mounted 37 mm gun, and most of them were installed by the crews with the help of the few shipfitters available. They next started scrounging every 20 mm oerlikon they could find and nailing them down anywhere there was deck space. One of the few authorized additions was a stern mounted 40 mm from mid 1943 as the kamikaze threat increased. By end of the war, my dad's boat had three 20 mm cannon, one astern of the 37 and one each on the deck next to the charthouse, and the Bofors gun at the stern. Two more twin 50s were installed athwartships of the charthouse, and eight 5" rocket launchers were bolted on just ahead of the charthouse. My dad said the rockets, that were supposed to be used for shore bombardment, were usually fired at barges as the boat first ran into attack. They weren't accurate at all, and dad doesn't remembered any barges sunk with them. They were pretty terrifying coming at the Japanese at night with all the flames, smoke, and noise each rocket created. Many of the barges were manned by Japanese fishermen, and he says several barges just ran up the while flag rather than enduring any more of those things headed at them.
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Design work on the North American AJ Savage series had begun just after the atomic bomb attacks on Japan. The Savage was a considerably larger aircraft than the B-25. Wingspan was 75 feet over tip tanks, measuring 50 feet with the wings folded compared to 67 feet for the B-25. Empty weight for the Savage was 27,558 with maximum loaded weight of almost 51,000 pounds compared to 19,480/35,000 pounds for the B-25. The outstanding difference for the Savage was a bomb load of 12,000 pounds compared to 4,000 pounds for the B-25. The Savage was operated successfully from modernized Essex class carriers, but it an aircraft rushed into service to preserve the Navy's role in the atomic era, that large size and load carrying ability due to the 10,000 pound weight of early atomic bombs. The Navy had even larger bombers built in the 50's as the A-3D Skywarrior and huge A-5 Vigilante to defend their role as a nuclear deterrent, but all carrier aircraft were knocked out of that role by the ballistic missile submarine.
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Good picture of the four Fletchers and Tamandare, ex-St. Louis, sailing out in 1961 to confront the French "fleet" that consisted about 25 fishing boats. The French were sending the 2750 ton destroyer Tartu to look after the fishing fleet after two Brazilian corvettes drove the French fishing boats out of the area of the Continental Shelf.
The Brazilians and French were deadly serious about their fishing rights so DeGaulle sent Tartu as a show of force. Unfortunately for Tartu, the Brazilians responded with their aircraft carrier, two cruisers, and seven destroyers, and their air reconnaissance located Tartu when she was still 200 miles away from the fishing fleet. When Tartu discovered the Brazilian fleet looming up on their radar, discretion became the better part of valor. She cruised outside the territorial waters of Brazil while a Brazilian corvette captured the French fishing boat Cassiopée to raise the stakes. Given the weakness of the French fleet trying to fight a war off the Brazilian coast, cooler heads prevailed, and the dispute was settled by the World Court. It would certainly been an interesting war game, and President João Goulart was quite prepared to give the French a bloody nose.
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This is a great idea for a WWII naval series. I'm looking forward to the late entering allied naves and neutral navies. One small correction however. The introduction to the British of the Hazemeyer stabilized 40 mm Bofors mount was when the Dutch minelayer Willem van der Zaan arrived in Portsmouth after the fall of the Netherlands. She was newly commissioned at the time, and the Hazemeyer mounts weren't yet fully developed. In particular, the Dutch version of the later British Type 282 radar wasn't mounted at the time of her escape, and the Dutch crew had to do the mounting and integration of the radar to the mounts with no written specifications, those having been left behind at the Dutch dockyard that was going to do the work just before the country was overrun by the Nazis.
The cruiser De Ruyter did have a fully developed battery of five twin Hazemeyer mounts, certainly one of the most effective light antiaircraft systems of 1940. The RN was duly impressed with the performance of the guns during practice with the Dutch navy in the prewar period, and the plan was to have her system fully documented while De Ruyter was in refit at Singapore in February, 1942. We now know the fate of both De Ruyter and Singapore during that disastrous month. Some of the details of the Hazemeyer mounts still weren't known to the RN even postwar, since the plans of both the Hazemeyer company and its German parent, Siemens-Halske, were destroyed in the ensuing fighting. Hazemeyer had planned to move the radar and the optical sights to an off mount director somewhat similar to the US Mark 51 director, but the war was over for the Dutch before that advanced beyond the planning stages.
The RN struggled for years with the STAAG and Buster systems, but by the time the mounts themselves would operate reliably, the 40 mm gun was considered obsolete. A few were hastily repossessed from museums for use aboard British landing ships during the Falklands war. Several Argentine aircraft were claimed damaged or destroyed by these guns, but I've yet to find confirmation of this. The gun crews used the weapons enthusiastically, firing off hundreds of rounds during the air attacks, so it's certainly possible at least one aircraft was hit by one of them.
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