Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Battle class - Guide 187" video.

  1. Thanks, Drach. The Battle class were very pleasant looking ships, and I liked them at first sight when I first saw them as a kid. Of course, this was long before the internet, and ship pictures were only found after many a Saturday afternoon poring through every book with pictures I could find. I assumed that, much like the USN Allen M Sumner class, these had another twin turret aft, and all the pictures were of such poor quality they just didn't show the aft turret, hidden among the top hamper of all the Bofors guns. I must have been about 15 before I found a really good book about WWII British destroyers, something not easy to find in small town Ohio in what must have been 1959-1960. It was then I found out this class really didn't have any aft main battery turrets, but it had a single open 4" mount instead. Since the Sumner and Battle classes were of roughly equal size and displacement, it really didn't make much sense to limit the heavy DP guns to forward mountings only. To this day, I'm still somewhat baffled by that design decision on the part of the Admiralty. Maybe someone who knows more about British destroyers than I do can explain it for me. Admiral Cunningham hated these ships. He rather famously said, after his first voyage on HMS Solebay that the ship was too big and "had every damned weapon and gadget except guns". Cunningham was an old-time destroyerman and believed newer destroyers should match the "Greyhound of the Seas" design philosophy of older destroyers. Cunningham, as great an admiral that he was, just didn't have much appreciation for the need to accommodate all the new electronics and weapons of modern naval warfare. He wasn't wrong about the Hazemeyer mounts though. At six tons for a twin mount, and even heavier as more on-mount radars were added, they really were the first of what we now call a close in weapons system. The design and requirements were just too advanced for the times they were built. They were excellent mounts when they worked but, with the vacuum tube technology of the day, that wasn't very often. Combined with the mass of gears and valves needed to maintain the triaxial stabilization, it would have been a good mount if it was introduced in 1950 instead of 1940. Unfortunately, the RN decided the way forward was the STAAG mount, an even heavier and more unreliable mount, but that's a story for another day.
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