Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The Drydock - Episode 096" video.

  1. Queen Mary had quite a heavy armament added during her refit in during January, 1942 in Boston. She was stripped of her sparse British armament except for two of the questionable Unrotated Projectile rocket launchers mounted near the aft funnel. The rumor is Churchill himself wanted the UP mounts retained, so orders were dutifully followed. Otherwise, she was outfitted along the lines of a merchant cruiser, albeit a very large merchant cruiser. She mounted four 6" guns, two forward and two aft, six 3"/50 DP guns singly mounted fore and aft, five twin 40 mm mounts sited along the superstructure, and rounded off with twenty-four 20 mm cannon mounted wherever space could be found in typical USN fashion. Unusually for a merchant cruiser, she was fitted with directors for all her guns excepting the 20 mm cannon. Roosevelt and Churchill both realized what a catastrophe the sinking of Queen Mary would have been, both to the thousand of troops onboard and to British morale. She was actively hunted by German U-Boats and the German surface fleet, and escaped several close calls with shadowing U-Boats. Queen Mary mostly relied on her speed to evade attack when sailing unescorted, but the Admiralty wanted her to have the ability to fight it out with attacking aircraft or surface ships if it came to that.
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  2. The original Fletcher class also had problems with forward visibility. The bridge was low to begin with, being barely higher than the superfiring B turret. Visibility wasn't helped by the bridge windows just being a series of relatively small portholes. The bridge was raised slightly just before Fletcher itself was laid down, but it was a source of complaints from the bridge crew for most of the war. The bridge wings were truncated to the bridge sides to give the AA guns a better arc of fire. The addition of twin 40 mm mounts just ahead of the bridge didn't help side visibility. the combination of truncated bridge wings and the forward AA guns were a big enough problem for underway refueling that several collisions and near collisions resulted. The original flying bridge was completely in the open, so it was a friendly place in heavy weather. Late war and postwar, the bridge was was successively raised and enclosed with large windows canted inward to help with downward and side visibility. The Sumner class had many of the same issues made even worse by the larger twin 5"/38 turrets, and it was only the Gearing class that more or less solved the problem with a bridge slightly higher, slightly set back from B turret, and angled off instead of rounded.
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  3.  @colinwhaley244  Right, but that's not the sole purpose of the bridge. Visibility for side maneuvering by the captain or XO is important, and someone needs enough aide and forward visibility to pass orders to the helmsman. Keeping track of aircraft executing a bow on attack, or a surface ship crossing your "T" is also kind of important. There were many reason why good visibility from the bridge was important other than just steering the ship.
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  4. I'm an NHS patient living in the US. I normally get a monthly delivery of my meds, and they arrive about 6 days after being shipped through Royal Mail. My last delivery took slightly less than a month! I got an extra delivery at the start of this mess in March, and that enabled me to have enough medication to make it to the much delayed delivery, although just barely. Since I have COPD and asthma, some of these medications keep me out of the emergency room. I suppose I could have gone to an urgent care clinic here and gotten some of the items, but some would have been coming from England or India anyway, and I'm sure there still would have been a delay, not to mention paying three or four times the small amount I normally pay. This global lockdown has caused way more problems than many people realize. I hope we're less hysterical about things like this in the future.
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  5. Strangely, the 1918-1919 influenza, popularly known as the Spanish Flu, caused many fewer deaths among USN sailors than the Army, with about 5,000 sailors dying and nearly 23,000 in the Army, about twice the number per capita among soldiers. Only about 1,000 died aboard ship with the rest dying in shore stations. Reasons offered include liberty restrictions or avoiding ports with raging infections altogether, better diet and medical care aboard ship, and the Navy only using replacements from shore stations for sailors that actually died. The one ship that went against the trend was the USS Pittsburgh (ACR-4), with 663 sailors sick, some for a month or more, and 58 dead. The captain, George “Blackjack” Bradshaw, was a notably poor commander. He allowed working parties ashore and normal liberty while in port at Rio de Janeiro. Rio at the time was in bad shape from the flu, with bodies stacked in the streets and buzzards picking at the corpses. So many sailors died that it took nearly five months before replacements could be sent and Pittsburgh could get underway for New York, and she was held in quarantine for nearly a month offshore.
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  6. I thought I was late but, at three and a half hours, it's still in progress.
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