Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The Drydock - Episode 005" video.

  1. Thanks for answering my question about enclosed gunhouses. It makes sense that the semi-automatic loading of 5"/38 guns and the associated electrical and hydraulic mechanics led the USN to adopting enclosed gunhouses earlier. Another question, if you'd be so kind. Why was the Vanguard completed? The US had cancelled the Montana class in 1943, and it seems pretty clear that the day of the battleship was over by 1944, when work resumed on her. Given Britain's financial condition in 1946, why commission a ship whose usefulness was demonstrated by the fact she only remained in commision for nine years? The RN already had the four reasonably modern battleships in the King George V class, so why one more? I suppose national pride is one answer, but do you know of other reasons?
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  2. Part of why I like history is pondering the what if's. What if those pilots and crews were on the MS Sea Witch instead of the USS Langley? What if the 27 crated P-40's were able to be assembled before the Japanese overran Tjilatjap? What if they could have flown in support of the ADBA task forces? Probably, not much. We needed a carrier with dive and torpedo bombers. We needed the submarines, of which we had about 20 in the general area, to have functional torpedos. We needed the Dutch to have better trained and equipped troops. The most important thing we needed was less of a defeatist attitude. The US viewed the Netherlands East Indies as way too far away to be a tactical issue. The British were tied up trying to save Singapore. The Dutch knew they couldn't hold an area as large as the NEI with what they had in the way of forces. The Australians were trying to fight off the Japanese for the purpose of saving Australia, not the NEI. The Pearl Harbor debacle and the Singapore debacle demoralized the US and British leadership, and the Japanese seemed to be a race of supermen instead of the weak midgets we had envisioned them. It's really hard to imagine how dark the dark days before Midway really were.
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  3. Ah, yes, I wasn't thinking RN. If only Indomitable hadn't run aground while working up. She probably couldn't have made it to Singapore in time to join Force Z even without the grounding. There were several escort carriers in service that could have been in East Indies in the three month gap if Illustrious was needed elsewhere.
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  4. I suspect that two more ships in the ABDA force would have made only temporary difference. It wasn't battleships that made the difference, it was carriers and aircraft. Neither of these two ships would have been any better protected from air attack than they would have been in the battle that ultimately sunk both of them
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  5. Unfortunately, the Allies actually had local air superiority at the beginning of the Battle of the Java Sea, but it was foul weather that kept both sides grounded. When the weather cleared on March 1, the last surviving destroyer, the USS Pope, was sunk by a combination of gunfire and aerial attack, as the weather had finally cleared. Much too late for the Allied air power to do anything useful. Given that US only had only three carriers available for the Battle of Midway three months later, I don't know that the USN would have risked them to save the Java Sea ships. They certainly didn't want to risk a carrier to save Wake.
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