Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered"
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I don't know if it's already been covered, but the whole history of LORAN in the Pacific deserves to be remembered. The Coast Guard took over operation of the 72 widely dispersed and lonely atolls in the Pacific from the Aleutians into Canada, down the West Coast into Mexico, and then across the Pacific to Japan, South Korea, and over to Australia. The stations were difficult to keep in phase with the early tube type receivers and transmitters, and the station equipment needed constant testing, maintenance, and repair. Some stations were only visited by a resupply ship once a month, or even once every two months. The Coast Guardsmen had to learn not only the LORAN radio equipment, but normal radio communications gear, the generators that supplied power, and desalinization equipment on some islands. They had to become experts with just about everything a base required, as well as learning enough medical skills to care for each other in case of sickness or accident until they could evacuated. Almost as important was having one guy that was a good cook with the monotonous diet of canned and dried foods. My uncle served at a couple bases as a replacement when waiting for the rest of a new crew to be delivered, and he said it was great duty for a guy who just didn't like a lot of people around, fishermen and divers, or for someone escaping from a wife he didn't want to be around. :-)
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The Bathurst class minesweeper/corvette, of which the HMIS Bengal was a member, were really awful vessels. She was poorly armed, as shown in this battle, and too small to be effective ships operating in the Pacific. They were built to an Admiralty design for ships that, would serve in the Atlantic, not in the tropics. Below decks spaces were cramped and poorly ventilated with ratings often suffering from heat exhaustion. The ratings had to sleep in hammocks slung in what also operated as 10 man mess decks, the ships having more subdivisions than a normal corvette to help them survive a mine hit, a perpetual danger to a minesweeper. Because of all the subdivisions, it was impossible to ventilate any of the subdivisions adequately. There were no showers and only one head, the ratings having to use a buckets and sponge to try to keep clean, and a seat slung on either side of the ship as toilets. There were only two iceboxes That had ice enough for about a week for provisions and no freezers. Men would often take their bedding on deck, as it was nearly impossible to sleep in the stifling heat below, doing the best they could beneath moth eaten canvas awnings as their only protection from frequent nighttime rain showers. Several crew members wrote in their memoirs after the war that men went weeks never getting more than five or six hours sleep.
The six to ten officers had individual or two man cabins at main deck level with things like bunks, electric fans, portholes, and desks. They ate better food than the ratings and had their own steward to serve them in the officer's wardroom. The ratings had their typical two cups a day of watered down rum while the officers enjoyed their own bar. The Bathursts replicated the worst of the British class system, but on a modern warship, and morale and discipline suffered as a result.
Good captains did what they could to improve conditions, bringing onboard better provisions when they could be found and having officers and men eat the same food. Some allowed the engineering staff to modify the deck air intakes to bring more air below decks and having cots built for sleeping instead of hammocks. Other officers were either incompetent or just cruel, this treatment leading to four mutinies aboard the Bathursts, the most of a single class on the allied side. Most were small scale revolts but one, one the Pirie while in port, was serious enough that the captain had the main gun spiked and called on Australian army troops to surround the ship and arrest the men involved in the mutiny. Ten men were later sentenced to prison for their part in the mutiny, the men testifying to incompetent and cruel behavior of the captain at the courts martial. Amazingly, he wasn't relieved of command until six months after the mutiny, when he barely averted another mutiny.
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None of the bombs and other explosives are waterproof. The fuzes are constructed using lead azide, the actual detonating chemical, a copper springs, and a steel trigger. The dangerous part is the lead azide since exposure to humidity or static electricity can cause it to explode. Because of this, it's generally handled and even stored underwater. The only bombs with detonators are apparently the bomb clusters, generally six to twenty 20-lb M41 fragmentation bombs wired together to produce one droppable munition. These are much different than today's cluster bombs. The triggers would have experience the equivalent of a fall from 10 feet for the trigger to work.
Even if all the cluster munitions were detonated at once, a very unlikely scenario, there are somewhat less than 200 tons of these on the ship. The seismic wave would be fairly small, somewhere between two and four feet, depending on what study you believe, and enough to cause some minor flooding in areas right along the banks of the river. The fragments from the bombs would be the greatest danger, but those fragments generally didn't go further than about 700 feet in the air, and the amount of water around the bombs would absorb a lot of the energy. OTOH, attempting remove these explosives would expose the lead azide to high humidity and static electricity, the two things that really will set it off. There's no safe alternative, but leaving all the lead azide underwater is more safe that trying to remove it and expose it to air. The risk of a catastrophic explosion of all 1400 tonnes of the explosives at once seems extremely remote.
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@1pcfred I can see you're a real expert on things naval. Firstly, the 9% rate was for ships sunk, not number of men killed. The number of merchant sailors lost from all causes in WWII was between 8,000 and 12,000 while about 1,500 ships of all types were lost due to all causes. There were about 14,800 ships in the merchant fleet by 1944. As you can see, the average number of sailors lost per lost hull was about 8 at the highest estimate, and that from an average crew of 38 to 50. If we were losing 10% of every crew that left port we would have rapidly lost the war.
The 9% rate was hulls lost from all causes, including submarine and aircraft attacks, not men lost. These were ships that, in first three years of the war, spent a lot of their time either under attack or damaged by enemy action. About 30% of merchant sailors killed due to enemy action were killed without their ships sinking. By comparison, the casualty rate among WWI merchantmen was over 20%, and that was from virtually no aircraft attacks and much less efficient and deadly submarine attacks. Better antisubmarine warfare and convoy techniques in WWII saved a lot of merchantmen that would have been lost in WWI. Merchant sailors face risk every day from things like weather, grounding, and collisions, yet men still go down to the sea in ships. Luckily, you don't have to do that if you don't want to.
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