Youtube hearted comments of Sar Jim (@sarjim4381).

  1. As usual, it take a number of failures happening in just the right order to cause a disaster. This is also why airplanes crash.
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  2. It became pretty clear by the mid-30's that the 8" guns of the Lexingtons were a lot of weight and space for something that was unlikely to have ever been used in battle. There were plans to replace them with 5"/38 guns after their outstanding trials successes in the first postwar destroyers. However, the one good thing about the 8" guns was they received the then experimental FC (Mk3) radar fire control director. The Lexington received two of these in late-1941 and participated in trials of the first radar directed surface gunfire. It turned out to be accurate enough that it was able to get a fix within 50 meters on the range and direction of a surface target. It worked particularly well on the Lexington due to less local interference by the superstructure compared to a battleship, and the operators on Lexington were able to confirm distance to target by being able to track her own shell splashes, using lobe switching. The FC (Mk3) was installed on a number of battleships in late 1941, and the lessons learned from the Lexington were used to improve accuracy with the FC (Mk3). One of the first FC (Mk3) battleship units was installed on the USS Washington, and her radar operators, trained by the Lexington operators, were able to straddle the Japanese battleship Kirishima on her first salvo during the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, probably saving the South Dakota by doing so. In a way, the Lexington actually did participate in surface action almost six months after she was sunk.
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  3. "Queen Mary was somewhat more performance impaired, as it exploded..." Nothing like the dry and sardonic humor of a Brit.
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  4. LOL. Youtube's closed captions thinks Admiral Doenitz's real name is Admiral Donuts. The are all sorts of funny things coming from this system.
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  5. This was a great discussion of the alternative outcomes. I suspect this was the last battle the Japanese would have had any chance of winning, as long as winning means "we sunk more ships that you did". In terms of the overall outcome of the war, the shipyards were pouring out huge numbers of the Fletcher class and their bigger and more dangerous brothers, the Sumner and Gearing classes. Vast numbers of Cleveland light and Baltimore heavy cruisers were still coming down the ways, not to mention the fearsome Iowa class. US carriers, from escort to fleet types, were also being commissioned and stationed in the Pacific, so any Japanese warship could count on meeting not only generally superior US surface ships but being swarmed by hundreds of US aircraft. As a final blow, the British Pacific Fleet shows up in January, 1945 with four more modern battleships, six fleet carriers, fifteen light carriers, and eleven excellent cruisers. This doesn't even take into account all the other smaller ships. The combined US and British logistic trains meant almost any ship damaged in battle could either be put back in service in a few days or made ready to sail to a rear repair area for heavier work. Japanese ships damaged really depended on whatever a crew could scrounge for repair work, all the while trying to remain camouflaged and dodging constant air attacks. By early 1945, very few ships were able to run the gauntlet of US subs to get back to mainland dockyards, and most of those they did were further damaged or sunk by allied air attacks. One can only wonder about the state of morale of many Japanese sailors in 1945. The Japanese were well and truly stuffed long before the events of August, 1945.
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  6. The Coast Guard cutter was the USCGC Modoc (WPG-46). She really played a more critical role in running down the Bismarck than she is often given credit for. She was on Greenland ice patrol and had responded to an SOS from several torpedoed ships from a convoy in the Bay of Biscay, along with her sister Northland and the much smaller USCGC General Greene. While rescuing survivors, she was amazed to see the grey outline of a large battleship loom up out of the gloom. The Modoc's radio operator had copied the British message ordering all RN ships to intercept the Bismarck. The captain was therefore aware of the rough position of the Bismark, but never expected to find herself this close to the path of the ship. She signaled Bismarck with signal lamps and radio but received no reply as she steamed past in silence. The Modoc's radioman immediately got on the aircraft radio the Modoc carried, raising that American piloted Catalina. She was able to give the Catalina the last seen position of the Bismarck. The Catalina was able to locate the Bismarck within fifteen minutes of getting the message from the Modoc, and was then able to notify Coastal Command. Thus, Modoc played an important part in the final location of the Bismarck. The three cutters continued to rescue men in the sea, all the while frantically signalling the Prince of Wales of their identities as Norfolk prepared to lob eight inch shells toward what it presumed to be a German destroyer. The Bismarck was already past the cutters, and the PoW was able to relay the cutter's friendly status to the other British ships and stop the Norfolk from opening fire, helped by a timely jam of her forward turrets. The three cutters patrolled the area looking for survivors but found none, only wreckage, floating corpses, and body parts, before making way again for Greenland. It was the closest to a major historic battle ever witnessed by Coast Guard Cutters
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  7. I'm sure you were just being ironic about the wreck, but it's no longer radioactive...or at least that's what we were told when our party dived on it. This was in 1990, and I'm still alive at age 72, so I don't think effects were two bad. There are so many wrecks to dive on within five miles of Kwajalein that it would take months to dive on them all. In addition to the Prinz Eugen, we dove on a couple of good sized Japanese transport ships, a subchaser, and a number of aircraft, including a group of B-25's and a remarkably intact PBM Mariner. We only had seven dive days although we spent eleven days in the islands. It wasn't cheap, but it was the trip of a lifetime.
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  8. I can't imagine being a German sailor having to coal up every week in the tropical heat and humidity. Life must have been hell for them even without the risk of enemy action.
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  9. Terrible accident. I had to undergo hazmat response training for my job, and the SL-1 accident was used as an example of a nuclear reactor accident that would require local resources. The control rod design was always an issue with these small reactors since there was no way to restart a cold reactor without someone manually withdrawing a fuel rod by hand. The need for portability precluded any kind of machinery to do the job. Then reactor only contain 40 of the normal 59 fuel rods since the reactor was only being used for power and not to test providing steam for space heating. as part of the specs for the reactor. The fewer control rods meant the withdrawal of the control rod would make the reactor critical much faster, and that's just what happened. As to why Byrne decided to withdraw the control rod as far as he did, we will never know. The best guess, minus the suicide idea, is the rod was stuck and, in the process of yanking on it. it came free faster than assumed and caused the accident. The Army CID and Atomic Energy Commission investigators along with the Idaho State Police spent quite a bit of time investigating all aspects of the three men's lives as well as lives of their families. Byrnes' wife was having an affair with another man, prompting the divorce case. It was not with Richard McKinley however. Could it have been suicide on the part of Byrnes? It's possible, but the stuck fuel rod, something that happened six times in the previous year, seems a lot more likely of an explanation. My training was mostly that if I saw steam coming from a reactor building, get back in my vehicle and hightail it out of there.
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  10. And fast forward to 2018 and planes and submarines are the battleships of today. Although Brazil once again had a second hand carrier, this time French rather than British, the worn out condition of the carrier combined with several major fires since being brought on strength in 2000 led to her decommissioning in 2017 and probable scrapping. Given the need for the Brazilians to have something that looked like a carrier in the fleet, she scrambled to make the British and offer they couldn't refuse and purchased the ex-HMS Ocean, renaming her the Atlantico. Since she is a mere 20 years old, the youngest major ship purchased from another navy since the Brooklyn class light cruisers in 1951, there's some chance that she may remain in service for another 15 years or so as a helicopter carrier. The dreams of Brazil to operate a true fixed wing carrier appear to be dashed at the moment. Argentina and Chile are no longer major players in South America. Argentina is in deep financial trouble, and her surface fleet has been relegated to possibly a few corvettes. Chile maintains a much more effective navy, but the youngest combat ships are the ex British Duke class frigates at 28 years old with other classes now being 30 years old or or older. Chilleans now seem content to control the Pacific coastline of her long borders while maintaining a navy strong enough to dissuade the Argentine and Peruvian Navies from any mischief. Speaking of Peru, while she wasn't part of the early 20th century arms race, she has now modernized most of her vessels and is probably the equal of Chile and much stronger than Argentina. The newest race is for submarines and naval aircraft. The Brazilians are still talking about building a nuclear sub, and Brazil, Peru, and Chile will all have air-independent submarines sometime in the 2020's. AI subs will be the new Dreadnoughts of the 21st century. Brazil is looking toward Embraer to build a new maritime patrol aircraft that would be the equal of the P-3 Orion, as well as maintaining their current fleet of upgraded Skyhawks, aircraft that don't have a carrier to operate from after a long battle with the Air Force to allow the Navy to operate fixed wing combat aircraft. There are rumors that Peru is in talks with Russia for a new maritime patrol platform as well as new SU-35s that could serve as maritime strike aircraft. Chile may cooperate with Brazil and Embraer in purchasing a new maritime patrol aircraft while continuing to upgrade its considerable fleet of F-16s. The Dreadnought race may be over but the arms race in South America continues unabated.
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  11. In addition to the Hipper being attacked by a blazing zombie ship headed straight for it with siren wailing, another strange incident occurred with one of Hipper's Arado Ar 196a float planes. It had taken off on a scouting flight on the morning of April 9, 1940. Due to the damage to the Hipper from the ramming, it was unable to return to the Hipper before it ran out of fuel. The crew then landed off the village of Eide and paddled ashore in their emergency raft. They posed as tourists trying to buy gas for their stranded car. Even though the locals didn't know Norway had been invaded, they were suspicious and called the local police - all three of them. After a short tussle, the identity papers on the two men (Ltn Polzin and Obit Techam) revealed them to be German navy pilots. This was shortly confirmed when a fishing boat towing the float plane returned to harbor. The crew were arrested and the aircraft turned over to the Royal Norwegian Navy Flying Service. They hastily painted out the German markings, substituted Norwegian insignia, and flew off to repel the Germans. The Norwegian Navy had a relatively large number of floatplanes. They were familiar with flying them, and several Norwegian pilots that understood German were recruited to fly the plane since they could understand the gauges and German instrument labels. The Arado flew several reconnaissance missions for the Norwegians and British, eventually ending up in an as hoc squadron of two British twin engine Walrus float planes, a Norwegian M.F. 11 floatplane, and the captured Arado. The British were eager to examine the Arado since it was the most modern float plane in German service. The British wanted to return to Britain before their planes were lost in the deteriorating situation in Norway, and the Norwegians wanted to fly to Britain to get modern planes and return to Norway to fight to the end. Plans were hastily made to fly this motley flotilla to a British seaplane base in the early morning of April 18. The two Norwegian pilots were not to return until 1945. The hazardous five hour flight went off without a hitch...until they got close to the British base. The Walrus's crew didn't have current radio codes or frequencies, the Arado had a German radio that couldn't operate on British frequencies, and the M.F. 11 didn't have a radio at all. The flight was picked up on radar and Gloster Gladiators were launched to intercept what was assumed to be an enemy flight. The two Walrus were faster than the Arado or M.F. 11 so they were ahead them on the flight. When the British fighter pilots spotted them, they knew the Arado was German and assumed the M.F. 11 was an unknown German type, since they appeared to be chasing the Walruses. They moved in for the kill, downing the M.F. 11 before the Walruses circled back, frantically wagging their wings, and the attack ceased. The pilot of the M.F. 11, a Lieutenant Diesen, was able to crash land on the water uninjured, and he and his crew were rescued. The story of the Admiral Hipper's float plane doesn't end here. The British started testing the Arado immediately, and personnel of the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment (MAEE) started to catalogue all the parts and make blueprints. A Fleet Air Arm commander was given flying duties to report on the attributes of the plane. All went well until April 26. The Arado landed safely after its fourth test flight. What happened next is a little murky, but it appears a strong wind gust got under the wing of the plane and, despite frantic efforts to save it, the fated Arado tipped over and sank in 150 feet of water. It was raised several days later but was too damaged to fly again. The engine fuselage, and instruments were examined and provided valuable data to the MAEF, and some of the features made it into later British float planes. Some bits are still left at the British and Norwegian navy's museums.
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  12. The USN's fleet train was the thing most responsible for the more varied and palatable food served on most USN ships. Whole ships were devoted to refrigeration and freezers, and those fresh foods were broken up into ship size loads for everything from minesweepers up. My dad's PT base in New Guinea and Solomons was visited every several weeks by these supply ships, who offloaded the food package to their tender. They would then be distributed to the individual boats. He'd get fresh milk, eggs, and frozen meat of all kinds, including turkeys for the holidays. His tender, the USS _Mobjack_, had added refrigeration space to hold all this food, but each PT also had a refrigerator. Not very big, but enough for five days of refrigerated food before they had to visit the tender for another load, generally needing to rearmed anyway. Each boat had a tiny galley, with one member of the crew being designated as the cook. This was pretty good duty on PT boat since they didn't have to do all the repetitive tasks like swabbing the deck and cleaning out the below decks spaces. A good cook was second only to a good skipper in terms of fighting effectiveness and morale. My dad's boat's Cookie (they were all called Cookie) was particularly good, turning out bread, pies, and even breakfast cinnamon rolls. He remembers his hams, steaks, and turkeys as being particularly good. When the boats were at base for heavier repairs and general shore duty, they had to eat at the base mess, and his memory of the food at these messes was nowhere near as good as they ate on the boat. Cookie and the skipper were both good horse traders, and they almost always ended up with a couple cases of cokes, a couple cases of beer, five or so gallons of ice cream, and some fresh vegetables. When they were at advance bases, they were stuck with C and K rations and whatever fish they could catch from the back of the boat. The best day he remembers from advance bases was when his boat sailed over a reef with about a foot of water under the keel. The sharp eyed lookouts didn't see just the reef but also a huge lobster colony! The boat immediately dropped anchor, and a couple of the good swimmers (my dad couldn't swim at all) dove down to start grabbing them. They managed to snatch about twenty of them before the squadron commander called on the radio and wanted to know why they were stalled in the lagoon. They "fixed" the engine problems and got underway again. That night they had the lobster feast to end all feasts. Cookie was even able to work some kind of magic with margarine to make it kinda taste like drawn butter. He said he didn't know if it was all the lobster or just being exhausted after having no nights off for almost three weeks, but he said it was the best night's sleep he ever had while in the Navy. :-)
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  13. Sorry, Drach, but you can't win with this one. We all know it's pronounced Ay-Jacks because that's how the scouring powder of the same name is pronounced, and we heard TV ads for decades telling us the right pronunciation. We're not about to let go of all that conditioning for some Brit coming along telling us Ajax is really pronounced like some asthmatic wheeze!
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  14. The USN fleet of just underway replenishment vessels now numbers 16, and a replacement fleet of 20 is already under construction. There are fourteen 41,000 ton dry cargo/ammunition ships and well over 150 other special purpose, support, and supply ships. No other navy has the ability to supply such large numbers of ships at sea with virtually anything needed, from bandaids to new power plants, as the USN. The lessons of the long distances remote from any land base supplies in the Pacific during WWII were well learned.
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  15. Thank your lucky stars you never smoked. I did from when I was about 16. I'm now 73 and quit five years ago, but it wasn't soon enough, so I'm now suffering from COPD. I first visited Russia in 1992, right after the collapse of the USSR. I brought in five cartons of Marlboros, the maximum allowed at the time. I didn't sell them. I gave them to friends I met and used them for tips to taxi drivers and tour guides. It was nearly impossible to get real US made Marlboros, and a pack of 20 was appreciated even more than getting dollars as a tip. Almost everyone smoked, and people smoked almost everywhere. We went to the Moscow Circus, and every seat had an ashtray in the arm rest, and almost everyone was smoking. Now that I think about it, the only places I didn't see people smoking was in museums and churches. I tried some Russian smokes, including Apollo, Kosmos, Diplomat, Crest, TU-144, and Belomorkanal. The last were the weirdest I've ever smoked. They were in a cardboard tube and burned in an uneven way and produced an acrid smoke from the cardboard. They had the strongest tobacco I've ever smoked. I was so dizzy from one drag I had to sit down for a few minutes. The Kosmos and TU-144 were about the closest to a US smoke, but even they were a lot stronger than a Marlboro. I liked the TU-144's because I was a private pilot, and it's the only cigarette brand I've seen named after a plane. The pack was beautifully printed with the gold panel and color picture of the aircraft on the front. I still have an unopened pack as a souvenir of that trip. I never saw the TU-134 brand or I would've gotten one of those too. The Moldovan made Marlboros were pretty good, but still didn't taste like a US made Marlboro.
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  16. Thanks, another excellent video. Have you seen the Wikipedia article on this? It appears to have been written by a Russian with orders to show the Soviet army took extreme precautions with the troops, everything came out fine. and stories about soldiers and villagers getting cancer were alarmist and conspiracy theories. It has all the hallmarks of coming out of the St. Petersburg disinformation bureau.
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  17. John Paul Jones was probably the most unlikely person to end up as one America's greatest naval heros. Even more strange, he only managed to reach the rank of Admiral by joining the Russian Navy. The book "John Paul Jones: America's First Sea Warrior" (Joseph Callo) is a great book about his life, not only his well known naval achievements, but also his personal life, which was almost exciting as his naval battles. I believe it's now available as an ebook and in print for about the same price. There are several other books about Jones with deceptively similar titles, but none are as comprehensive as Callo's tome.
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  18. "Give the crew something to do in case of air attack..." So true for the 25mm guns
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  19. The problem of telegraph decoding precedes navies. When telegraphs first started to be used commercially, messages were charged by the letter. This was very expensive, especially for transatlantic cables, and prompted various commercial entities, including Western Union, to come up with number blocks and code books so entire phrases could be transmitted using a single code block of five numbers or letters. This didn't provide signal security since codes books were widely available. However, large business soon developed their own encoding techniques and private code books so competitors wouldn't be able to read their messages if they were intercepted. This was the beginning of using codes for operational security.
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  20. Helena was a good example on how long it took some admirals to understand, or at least appreciate, the critical difference radar made to fighting the Japanese. A bit if trivia. Look closely at the 5"/38 turrets on Helena and then compare them to any later ship with the same turrets. The Helena had the first twin 5"/38 turret, and the style was more curved and svelte, in keeping with the rest of the ships's design. However, it served no practical purpose and actually slightly reduced gun crew space. For the remainder of the over 2,700 twin mounts that were produced, cost and speed became the important factors, with aesthetics a distant third.
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  21. Excellent video, and fair coverage of all sides in this one. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the operation. anyone with an interest in military aviation history still stands in awe that this operation was successfully carried out. In later US war games, it only succeeded 10% of the time.
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  22. While the hedgehog was a far superior A/S weapon over the stern discharge depth charges and the K-gun launcher. However, Hedgehog caused the Germans to start on a crash program to develop acoustic homing torpedoes. These could be fired just before a Hedgehog attack started, the torpedo homing on the sounds of the ship attacking it. These so called "down the throat" shots sank or seriously damaged a number of US DE's before an acoustic decoy was developed, once again by the British, called Foxer. It was towed several hundred yards behind the destroyer, the long cylindrical body having large parallel gaps to let water rush through. This generated cavitation noise about ten to one hundred times that of a ship's propellers. Since the acoustic system on the torpedo was set to home in on the loudest cavitation noises, Foxers were used very successfully to decoy Zaunkönigs on North Atlantic convoys, with only an estimated 77 hits from over 700 Zaunkönigs fired. Foxer came late to the war for some DEs, since production problems initially limited the numbers available for non-convoy escort DE's. USN captains developed their own brute force decoy system, firing off a salvo of charges from their K guns just before firing the Hedgehogs. This provided enough noise to decoy off any Zaunkönigs fired their way. Hunter killer groups centered around an escort carrier and three to five DE's were especially at risk from the Zaunkönig torpedoes since most of their attacks were on subs diving after being caught on the surface, and the DE's had to race in and fire off a Hedgehog salvo before the sub could escape. The K-gun diversion mostly stopped those "down the throat" attacks that sank about 14 DE's during the War. Interestingly, no US destroyer class carried Hedgehog during the war. In USN doctrine, the destroyer was a fleet unit whose main role was protecting the battle fleet. This required a much larger torpedo loadout than a DE, generally two quintuple tube mounts compared to the single triple tube mount on a Buckley class DE. A Hedgehog mount required about the same space and weight as another triple launcher, and US destroyers were already at their weight limits. DE's were able to handle the weight because they less overloaded to begin with, so they could usually retain their triple tube launcher while mounting a Hedgehog. During the late war period, threats from aircraft were greater than subs, so most US destroyers lost at least one set of tubes, and sometimes both if they were assigned radar picket duty. It's not hard to see the weight problem when the average Fletcher went from an AA armament of seven 20 mm cannon and a single 1.1 quad mount to ten 40mm and 10-12 20mm cannon. This increased on the Sumner and Gearing classes to 12-14 40mm guns and as many as 17 20mm cannon, some in twin mounts. The destroyers did finally receive Hedgehogs after the war, generally at the expense of the B mount 5" guns and a much reduced antiaircraft suite, usually six 3"/50 guns in twin mounts. Hedgehogs survived several attempts at "improving" them, lasting until the early 60's, with the advent of ASROC, finally ending a long service life.
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  23. The weakness of all all these large submarines was the poor torpedo loadout. The I-19 was 45 longer than a Gato class sub and 1,000 tons heavier surfaced and 1,200 tons heavier submerged. They also needed a crew of 94 officers and men compared to the average of 70 on a Gato. Even with all that extra tonnage and length, she was only three knots faster on the surface and a knot slower submerged than a Gato. She carried 17 torpedoes with no stern torpedo tubes compared to six bow and four stern tubes on a Gato. Her one superior trait was range, 14,000 miles at 16 knots and about 20,000 miles at 10 knots. The Japanese just added too many roles to one sub.
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  24. The French gave it the old college try with dual purpose armament, weighing down this class with nine six inch guns that were designed to be dual purpose. The weight saved by removing these and replacing them with either more 100 mm guns or, as the Americans proposed, the standard 5"/38 guns in twin mounts, would be an obvious benefit to the Richelieu class. The British understood that value and proposed replacing the Nelson class mixed armament with ether six or eight such twin mounts, although the limited availability of such guns saw WWII run out before this could happen. The French, however, still wanted their supposed dual purpose 6" guns, even though they never worked as intended before the war. They would spend even more money after the war trying to make these guns work in the AA role without any more success. The French wanted French weapons, working or not. The USN, not learning from the French example, went ahead and built the Worcesters, the heaviest class of "light" cruisers in any navy, armed with 12 of the supposed 6"/47 DP guns, and expended large amounts of scarce resources trying to make these work in the AA and surface roles, having little more success than the French. The class lasted only ten years in service and had guns that were not effective in the surface or AA role compared to the reliable 5"/38. The only two times she fired her 6" guns in anger in the AA role were both off Korea. The first was at an unidentified aircraft headed toward the ship. After three rounds of 6" fire that missed, the target was identified as a British Short Sunderland flying boat, and fire was checked. The second was the "Battle of the Geese", when Worcester, Helena and four destroyers opened up on an unidentified radar target that was later determined to be two large flocks of geese. It's unknown the number of geese casualties, but more than 300 rounds of 5" and 6" were fired at the poor creatures.
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  25. The Atlanta class antiaircraft escorts really came into their own when the quad 1.1 guns and .50 machine guns were replaced with the more capable 40mm and 20mm guns in late 1942. The introduction of the proximity fused round, or "VT" round, for the 5" guns made the Atlanta class the most useful antiaircraft escort in any navy. What the Atlanta class wasn't was a light cruiser, even though they were classed as such initially. They were really very large destroyers, and the original group of ships with te 5" rear wing turrets were very unstable in rough weather as too much armament was attempted on an enlarged destroyer hull. Their lack of ability to fight in a antisurface role was tragically shown by the loss of the Atlanta and Juneau during the Guadalcanal Campaign. The Oakland subclass removed the wing 5" turrets and replaced them with additional 40mm mounts, which improved stability and added much needed close-in fire. The designers of the class back in 1936 could hardly have foreseen the massive growth in electronics, directors, and radars that, while they increased the effectiveness of the ships, also exacerbated their topweight and stability issues. This was mostly solved with the introduction of the Juneau class, but they commissioned just too late for service in WWII. In belated recognition of their true role, all the surviving Atlanta/Oakland/Juneau class ships were reclassified as CLAA, Anti Aircraft Surface Escorts. Most never saw action again after WWII with only the Juneau in commision during the Korean War. The time of the gun based escort ship had passed, and all the survivors were decommissioned from the reserve fleet in 1965 and scrapped during the following two years. The Falklands War of 1982 caused a renewed interest in guns for antiaircraft protection of the fleet.
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  26. The biggest difference between RN and USN rations was the amount of refrigerator (cold room) and freezer space available. The USN built almost all ships from about 1934 forwards with enough cold room and freezer space available that the crew could have mostly fresh food available for the first 8-12 days (depending on climate) at sea and frozen meats and vegetables for about 20-23 days. By 1942, it was the goal of the Bureau of Supplies and Accounts (later Bureau of Logistics) to retrofit every ship with enough cold room and freezer space to have enough room for food based on the above plan. Each ship also needed to have about twice that cubic footage available for dry stores like flour, rice, and potatoes. The USN prepared a tremendous amount of dry store products. Loaf bread was the most popular, but men from the South wanted biscuits and grits while men from the North generally wanted oatmeal and toast or sliced bread. They all wanted cakes, pies, doughnuts, and coffee cakes. On destroyer size ships and up, one night was usually steak night, and every meal had some kind of meat product, with bacon, chicken, turkey, and some types of fish being common. The main meal in the Navy was called dinner, and that meal had the most food. Supper was served in the evening and was generally the lightest meal of the day, even lighter than breakfast. Breakfast was often eggs, bacon or sausage, griddle cakes, French toast, dry cereal, grits, or oatmeal along with fruit, fresh or canned. A pot of soup with bread, butter, and coffee as almost always available in the galley for men who missed a regular meal or were just hungry. Men out on the gun line during regular meal hours were brought out trays of sandwiches along with coffee, milk (if available), and fruitaides. Surprisingly, peanut butter and jelly was the most popular sandwich, followed by the aforementioned spam slathered with mustard and ketchup, and sometimes cheese. The fleet train could generally resupply ships with dry and frozen foods at sea, but they obviously couldn't do so when the ships were under constant threat of attack from kamikazes, and that's when the cook's talents (or lack of the same) would come to the fore. A good cook knew twenty ways to prepare food men would grow to hate, like spam or Australian lamb, and make it tasty enough the men would eat it. He could make dry eggs and dry milk taste like the fresh products, and knew how to substitute one ingredient for another and still make food that mostly tasted good. It's said that ships with the happiest crews had good cooks, and captains often horse traded with other captains for cooks and kinds of foods. Bad cooks could find themselves reassigned from a cruiser to something like a minesweeper just so a captain could get a good cook assigned to his ship. There are numerous stories of good "cookies" given anything they wanted by officers and crews, from women to vodka, as long as they could keep them on their ship. I'm sure being an admiral was good, but it seems like being the most popular cook in a fleet was even better. Well, rats, I've done another "War and Peace", but I now realize I have no idea how things went in the RN. From everything I heard and read, British and Commonwealth (especially Australian) ships didn't fare as well in the food department. Anyone here who knows how food service went in the RN?
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  27. Don't ask me why, but Mackinac is actually pronounced "Mac-en-naw".
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  28. Growing up in Cleveland, we probably learned more about the various battles on the Lakes, especially Lake Erie. It always seemed odd ot me that we were going to somehow conquer Canada, especially with our rather pitiful forces. The fact we even came as close as we did was quite amazing.
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  29. Singapore is a good example of a modern navy that started with almost nothing. Even Singapore as a independent country didn't exist until 1965. It has gone from a navy with a few small ex-RN and USN ships to one with a growing and modern submarine force, six large missile frigates, six missile corvettes, numerous offshore patrol craft, and four large modern amphibious transport docks. They established all the naval schools and logistics depots needed to man and supply the ships almost from scratch into a system admired by most other navies. It's been quite a feat to get it done in the space of slightly more than fifty years.
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  30. Seems like having the facility surrounded by residential areas wasn't a good idea.
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  31. Amazingly, the Enigma machine was patented in 1918 by Arthur Scherbius, a German electrical engineer. It's first successful use was by the German Army in the late 1920's as a method to communicate among German manufacturers. The Germans were forbidden to rearm under the Versailles Treaty, and Enigma offered an ideal way to communicate between the Army and manufacturers that were illegally building tanks. Even though the encoded text was transmitted over normal shortwave frequencies, it was assumed the that massive number of key combinations would make it impossible for the Allies to know what the resurgent German Army was up to. The first successful attempts to break the Enigma code wasn't done by, as might be expected, the British or the Americans, but by the Poles, starting in the mid 30's. The amazing math described by Drach gave the Poles what they needed for their "Bomba", the first brute force machine to decode Enigma messages. It was the first of many built by the British and Americans.
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  32. My cousin served aboard the New Jersey from 1986 to 1989. The two "resort pools" on the New Jersey were retrofitted to the former 40 mm gun tubs because of rulings from the brass. Back before they got involved, swimming in tropical waters was a way to cool off during long deployments to the Pacific. Given the freeboard of the New Jersey, some sailors got injured diving from her decks. It was mostly things like a few broken arms, but those in charge of fleet safety weren't having it. No more swimming, and morale plummeted. Even though living spaces were air conditioned, working space weren't, and place like workshops and the engine rooms could get over 110 degrees in the tropics. Captain Katz solved this by having his engineering staff rig up a portable swimming platform that was only about five feet about the sea surface. Morale returned to normal as the guys could once again get in some swimming. This worked until the medical staff in Washington got involved. With reports that some men were picking up various tropical parasites from swimming in the Persian Gulf, swimming was banned completely to save the three cases that had ever showed up from the New Jersey, all easily cured. For those that have ever sailed in tropical waters, not being able to swim so you could cool off from the oppressive tropical heat just seemed impossible, and crew morale immediately suffered. Captain Katz once again called on his engineering staff for a solution. Once of the Machinist Mates was a swimming pool installer in civilian life. He came up with a vinyl over foam covering that could be used to line the two forward abandoned 40 mm gun tubs. They were filled from portable pumps that ran through a filtering system devised by engineering to make sure those nasty parasites couldn't get on board. The crew was able to at least paddle around and cool off, and morale soared. Thus, the New Jersey came to be the only USN combat ship to ever have two swimming pools.
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  33. The original 37mm/C30 gun was a pretty terrible antiaircraft weapon. It was the only weapon of its size that was single shot and hand loaded. The practical ROF was no more than 30 RPM, totally inadequate for antiaircraft fire. The mounting was hand operated and very slow to train and elevate. The M42 was a far superior gun, fully automatic and fed from a five round clip, much like the 20mm, but it wasn't available until 1944. The M43 gun was the first with the option of a power twin mounting but changed the clip to an inferior 8 round strip loading, lowering the practical ROF to 180 RPM compared to 250 RPM for the M42. Unfortunately for the Germans, the development of single and double wet mounts of the 37mm M42 and quad mount 20mm guns gave Doenitz false hope that U Boats so armed could successfully fight it out on the surface against allied aircraft and transit the Bay of Biscay safely. The first couple boats armed with these weapons did have some success as at least five Coastal Command aircraft were lost flying into this unexpected wall of flak. Coastal Command was quickly able to work out the types and locations of the weapons through photo reconnaissance flights. The countermeasure was to always attack in groups of three and from the bow if possible, since no boat had more than a single 20 mm mounted forward. Even the few U-Flak boats armed with two quad 20's and two twin M42's mounted fore and aft were not able to fight off the swarms of Coastal Command aircraft that set upon surfaced U-Boats from mid-1943 on. The real answer was a Dutch invention, the schnorkel, so the boats never had to come to the surface at all.
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  34. I was 11 in 1957 ang got a subscription to Popular Science for Christmas so I was able to follow along with Vanguard's progress from refit to reserve to scrapping. I thought the scrapping proposal would surely be shelved by the Prime Minister. Little did I know at the time about the fatal combination of Eden and MacMillan for the RN. I thought Vanguard was the best looking, even while being utilitarian, battleship of the era.
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  35. Fantastic! I've been waiting for a PT boat guide. My dad was in Ron 10 on PT-124 from January 4, 1943 until it was disbanded in November, 1945. The Lewis guns and turrets were long gone when he arrived. They only carried two torpedoes by mid-1943, and they spent the vast majority of their time shooting up those barges, by then being used for attempted resupply of isolated islands. The Japanese barges kept adding bigger guns, and the squadron kept scrounging bigger guns of their own. It was an arms race in tropics, and the Navy, with the exception of the 40mm Bofors, never approved any of it. Dad's boat did have some ad-hoc armor. One of the guys was a metal worker, and he crafted a pair of 3/8" sheet steel plates from a scrapped P-39, and the crew installed them around the refrigerator/freezer. It used ammonia for refrigerant, and a stray round going through the refrigerant line filled the boat with ammonia fumes. Even worse, it meant the refrigerator was out of commission, and that meant no cold milk or ice cream, things they got from their monthly visit to the USS Mobjack, the squadron's tender. No one much cared about armor for the crew, but they wanted their ice cream and milk! Oh, I forgot to mention that no one in the squadron thought very highly of Cdr. Bulkeley. He got to be a big celebrity because of the daring rescue of McArthur, and pretty soon he became the Navy's version of him. He was apparently an intrepid sailor, and the guys felt like he wanted to make sure everyone knew it. His book "At Close Quarters", written in 1962, got an even frostier reception, since most of the guys felt like it was a self promotion book, but also a promotion for JFK and the PT-109. A lot of other heroic actions by PT boats got short shrift in the book.
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  36. The only really effective role of US PT boats in the Pacific was preventing Japanese resupply of isolated island garrisons. It was all gun battles between the PTs and Japanese barges to starve out these garrisons. The torpedos had no aiming system except point the boat in the right direction, fire, and hope for the best. Even with the improved Mark 8 torpedoes, the firing mechanisms weren't built for the exposed position of the torpedoes on a PT in the tropics. The electric firing black powder charge often leaked water and the firing mechanism shorted out. Most boats actually engaged in a torpedo attacks had men standing by with a large sledgehammer to hit the exposed trigger and fire the torpedo. The boat had to slow down to an even keel before firing or the gyro wouldn't be able to get a good position and the torpedo would run off in surprising directions, including circling back on your boat. The tubes were packed with grease and oil to ensure the torpedo didn't get stuck in the tube. The black powder charge would sometimes ignite all this grease, causing a huge cloud black smoke that immediately gave away the position of the boat. My dad was on PT boats from late 1942 until May, 1945. By mid 1943, the tube were landed and the torpedoes were carried in simple shackle mounts. To fire the torpedo, one man popped the shackles while another yanked a lanyard to start the torpedo motor. Both guys then pushed to torpedo overboard to start the attack. As you might imagine, this was even more inaccurate then firing them from tubes, but at least the torpedoes would run once they got in the water. My dad's boat made eight torpedo attacks. Seven missed, and the one that hit was a dud. The boat went from carrying four torpedoes to two and, by early 1944, none, with the weight and space saved devoted to more 20mm and 40mm guns. Most boats after 1943 functioned as motor gunboats. They were successful in that role, but some of the romantic stories about the PTs charging in on torpedo attacks and sinking a major surface vessel were more propaganda than reality.
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  37. I've seen a certificate created on board the Wisconsin at the time of the sinking of that KC-97 Stratofreighter. I think the plane floated around off the Azores for something like 10 days, but all the crew were rescued. It detailed the hunt for the plane as it took evasive action (the wind blew it faster to the south than predicted), and the heroic resistance by the aircraft (it was actually used for target practice), with a total of something like thirty 5" and a couple thousand 40mm rounds required to sink her. This lead to her being named an honorary US Navy vessel, the "USS Curtis LeMay". Some artistic scamp even made up a ship's patch showing the KC-97F with a large cigar being chomped on (LeMay was an inveterate cigar smoker) by the teeth in the mouth that replaced the cockpit windows. Given that LeMay and the Navy were locked in a battle royal at the time about which would be the service to provide nuclear deterrence (the Navy ultimately winning), I suspect neither the Air Force nor LeMay were amused.
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  38. 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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  39. Good morning to the usual suspects. Excellent topic! Destroyers and their development is not a common topic. Those little guys just don't have the appeal of battleships or aircraft carriers for most people but they have quite story to tell.
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  40. We could go in some of the interior spaces without a problem. They were marked with green circles while the prohibited ares were marked with a big red X. I think the "safe" areas were exposed to the air and rain long enough before she sank to disperse at least the radioactive dust particles.The divemaster always had a geiger counter with him just in case. There are a lot of compartments that aren't accessible due to structural collapse anyway so most of the dive is hull and deck. Still quite an amazing dive. We were down for less than an hour so I don't think we could have had much exposure. I was able to get into the radio shack (I"m also a ham radio operator) and, to my surprise, it looks like most of the German radios were left in the ship before the Bikini blasts. They are, of course, completely encrusted in marine growth now, but I sure would have heisted a couple of them if I was a sailor preparing the ship for the tests.
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  41. This just started and, even though it's 4:00 in the morning here, I can't wait to spend 42 minutes with Drach presenting the most amazing naval battle of WWII.
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  42. I remember my dad telling me the story about the Uganda and her crew "refusing" to fight against Japan. That wasn't exactly true, of course, but he and the hundreds of thousands of other USN sailors had signed up "for the duration", and just the idea you could decide you wanted to go home while your allies continued the fight caused a lot of hard feelings between the USN and RN crews in the Philippines and the crew of the Uganda. It got to the point liberties had to be arranged so Uganda crew members were the only ones ashore due to constant fights breaking out. Even though the sailors on the Uganda continued to crew and fight the ship right up until the end of the war, it was a sad end of the war for a Navy that carried more than its fair share of burden during that war.
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  43. 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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  44. 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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  45. 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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  46. 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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  47. As has been mentioned by Joanne, Khrushchev established the Patrice Lumumba University in 1960. Its stated intention was to offer higher education to Africans who were unable to obtain it at home. The Soviets made a big deal about how they were practicing racial equality at a time when many blacks were not being admitted to de facto white universities in the US. In reality, the Soviets built the the school in an isolated section of Moscow specifically to isolated them, and black students were not permitted to go to the city centers unaccompanied. Students complained of being segregated from most Russians, and that Russians treated them like a colonial power. The university was admitting students from sub-Saharan Africa that didn't even have a secondary education all the way through students from places like Libya and Tunisia that had educations comparable with most European schools. This not only caused a very high dropout rate, but the more highly educated students, who were generally light skinned, demanded that the black students be segregated to a different section of the university so their lack of education wouldn't hold them back. Although the University started out mostly offering education in engineering and construction, all the students were required to take courses in communist theory and third world liberation. As the school became more political, more and more of the students went back to their countries to become political agitators and revolutionaries. Almost all African countries were dictatorships at the time, and even avowedly Marxist countries like Ghana stopped allowing students to study at Patrice Lumumba. The university started admitting more students form Central and South America to keep up enrollment, but the political education caused the same issues when they returned home, and more racial clashes broke out. There were actually demonstrations by African students in the late 60's and early 70's demanding things like a bus line that would allow them to get to the city centers, the end of prohibition of interracial dating, and more education in science and medicine with less political indoctrination. Over time, the university "social agencies", the ones that really ran the place, gave into these demands after the western press started reporting on the demonstrations. This was the start of African students being able to mingle with the Russian population and the incipient antiblack racism you talked about started to emerge. It was easy to be for racial equality until your daughter started dating an African or Africans demanded the same public accommodations as Russians. There were near riots in Moscow and other cities when Africans were allowed in the same bars as Russians and alcohol fueled fights broke out. Soviet police were rumored to use street beatings as a non-judicial punishment for Africans they felt "got out of line". Some African students left because they felt their treatment was no better than what they would have gotten in the US and the quality of the education was worse. Soviet leadership was aghast at the lack of gratitude when these student returned home ad started criticizing the USSR. The end for Patrice Lumumba U came along with demise of the USSR. The university was renamed The Russian Peoples’ Friendship University, or RUDN. It still exists, but mainly serves students from Russia's minority regions, other former Soviet republics, and a smattering of foreign students. Educational standards have declined dramatically, and, even within Russia and the former CIS republics, an RUDN degree isn't accepted in many places. There have been moves in recent years to increase standards, but that would mean not admitting many of their preferred students, so the battle between education and ideology continues.
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  48. Miasma was still a current theory for through the 1880's for all sorts of disease outbreaks in the American South, but especially malaria. Given the prevalence of swamps in the South, the theory was that it was the rotting vegetation from the swamps that caused the diseases, but not because of water consumption. The cause was breathing the "night vapors" from the common foggy nights in swampy areas. The cure was to have your house be just slightly above these fogs, or going to a "resort" that was in a drier area when an outbreak of disease had begun. People would close themselves up inside their homes to prevent breathing the night air, and doing so also prevented many mosquito bites, the real cause of malaria. A coincidence of the miasma theory was draining the swamps would prevent miasma, but doing so also gave mosquitoes less places to breed. Since the swamps were greatly decreased, and malaria also decreased, the miasma theory was reinforced rather than debunked. Even in the early twentieth century, when transmission of malaria by mosquito bites was well proven by the construction of the Panama Canal, it was still common to see real estate sold with a location above the "vapors" as a desirable feature.
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  49. 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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  50. 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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  51. Now you've opened the Pandora's box of a ship class! Enough to keep you occupied making videos for about the next year at least. :-) One indisputable fact about the Essex class is they are the best examples of US industrial ability and logistics of any class of naval vessel anywhere. Building 24 Essex ships while building two even larger Midway class carriers at the same time is a feat that still boggles the mind today.
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  52. Stalin arrived at his dacha for the summer. After the first night, he discovered his brand new bed was infested with bedbugs. The local pest exterminators tried to kill off the bedbugs but they kept biting Stalin anyway. Finally, a professor who studied bedbugs at the university in Tbilisi was called. He had a simple solution. "You just organize them into a collective farm" he said. "Half of them will flee and the other half will starve to death". Badaboom, badabing!
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  53. Secondary armament for the Wichita was going to be 6 dual 5"/38 guns in a similar layout to those of the Baltimore and Cleveland classes. The overweight and poor stability issues instead had her carrying the same number (eight) five inch guns as the rest of the earlier Brooklyn class, albeit the more capable 5"/38 instead of the 5"/25 gun. Since the twin 5" turrets were out, the next plan was to mount all the guns in single Mark 30 enclosed base ring mounts that were coming into use on the first Fletcher class destroyers. However, even those proved too heavy, so half the guns were in single open Mark 24 mounts. Thus, Wichita was the crossover ship when it came to secondary armament. She was the first US cruiser with enclosed 5"/38 mounts and the last cruiser with open 5"/38 mounts.
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  54. Those were some great anecdotes, particularly about Brezhnev. I can clearly remember when Khrushchev was removed in October, 1964. I listened to the English service Radio Moscow almost every night to catch up on the latest news and propaganda. Every news section of the broadcast always had some mention of Comrade Khrushchev making a speech or visiting a collective farm or factory. For two nights straight, there was no mention of Khrushchev so I figured something was up. There wasn't the usual 24 hours of sad classical music when a leader died so I knew that wasn't it. The nest day, mention was made of Comrade Kosygin making a major address to some organization, and the next night it was Comrade Mikoyan making another big speech. No one knew who was running the Soviet Union. It wasn't until five days had passed that Khrushchev's regular mentions on Radio Moscow were replaced by Comrade Brezhnev, and then we knew Brezhnev was in charge of the Soviet Union. I was only 18 at the time but I remember thinking how strange it was the no one knew who was really in charge of the largest country in the world except by how he was mentioned in radio broadcasts.
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  55. "...largely for morale purposes..." Great description of the tertiary armament of US battleships before the arrival of the Oerlikon 20mm gun. It's striking how huge those bridge wings are. I think the Floridas were the apex of huge bridge wings.
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  56. While the evidence of dazzle or disruptive camouflage being effective against submarines is still controversial, what's not controversial is the effects of painting ships when it came to keeping convoys together and handling them in port. The same disruptive effects that made it hard for a sub to estimate range and heading did the same when escorts had to try to keep such ships on station in convoys. Many escorts had a hard time telling which ship was which and if it was on or off station. Books of dazzle painting schemes were issued to escorts and convoy commanders to help identify ships, and the use of semaphore signals was often needed to confirm a ship's speed and heading. Even so, there are reports of collisions between dazzle painted ships because of these issues. Since dazzle painting was expensive to apply and maintain, it was generally only applied to ships of 3,000 or more. German submarine commanders reported they didn't bother with non-dazzle painted ships, assuming they were too small and less valuable targets, so dazzle painting was a signal to a submarine of which ships to attack firsFt. The same problems were even worse while ships were in port, since the ships were packed in together under conditions of poor visibility made it hard for tugs to know what ship they were trying to maneuver and where they should go. This too led to confusion and some collisions. There have been humourous reports of sailors returning from a hard night of of drinking while on liberty. They'd climb onto the wrong ship because they all kind of looked alike through bleary eyes. Sometimes a tottering sailor would sneak past the officer of the deck and just crawl into an available bunk to sleep it off. The realization they were on the wrong ship didn't happen until morning muster. :-)
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  57. 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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  58. The USN survey team that looked over the Milwaukee after its return from the USSR loan stated the Milwaukee was the filthiest ship the team had ever seen and recommended its immediate scrapping. Anyone know what condition the Royal Sovereign was in when it was returned?
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  59. Japanese subs sank about 75% of all merchant ships sailing from the west coast in the first month of the war. Her subs were the largest and fastest in the world in January, 1942, had the longest range of any sub, and had the most reliable torpedo with the largest warheads of any navy at the same date. Japanese sub skippers were more than willing to go after merchant ships. It was only orders from Tokyo that changed the targets to prefer warships. Captains that sank the most warships were also the most liberally rewarded by the Admiralty with promotions, so it didn't take long for sub commanders to fall into line. The USN would have had to devote many more resources to antisubmarine warfare, and supplies to the South Pacific would have taken much longer to arrive. While it wouldn't have changed the overall outcome of the war, it was a real missed opportunity on the part of the IJN to cause some real havoc here.
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  60. They Croydon Crash was nearly the death knell for single engine commercial passenger aircraft. It was also the start of using paved runways for commercial airports. The same public distrust of single engine airliners spread across the Atlantic, and an indirect outgrowth of the Corydon crash and other similar crashes was the growth in the early 30's of twin engine all-metal monoplanes like the Lockheed Vega, Boeing 247, and Douglas DC-2. The stage was set for the beginnings of civil air transport as we know it today.
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  61. 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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  62. The Russian have an active disinformation campaign going on that targets various forms of digital media, and Wikipedia gets hit a lot by them. Since all the original sources are in Russian, and many of them were written for the express purpose of denying Russian responsibility for any bad effects of Soviet policies or events, they tend to get away with it without some pretty difficult and tedious research by non-Russians. Now people are reading the Wikipedia article about Totskoye and coming away with the impression the Soviets were really good about protecting everyone from radiation and pollution, even though Western militaries in 1954 didn't have a clear idea of how badly radiation could affect people. Just another reason to be cautious about using Wikipedia as a source without confirming it from other sources.
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  63. I used to live in the area of the Pacific NW that was a major target of these balloons. Most of the area in 1944 was covered in dense forest, and it rarely rained in summer. By September. most of the area was bone dry and, as we still see today, huge fires can break out from things as simple as lighting strikes or discarded cigarette butts. We were lucky the winds were unfavorable until November, when most of the area had received rain that put an end to the threat of large fires. We don't really know how many balloons reached the area since the population was sparse and the only evidence would be if they had started a small fire that forest rangers saw from their fire towers. Even today, there are occasional finds of remnants of the balloons, some which probably did explode, just not starting a fire large enough for anyone to see before it went out. It would have been big trouble for the US and Canada if the Japanese had decided to use chemical or biological weapons, but even worse trouble for the Japanese. There would have been a massive response by the US, and the immediate and long term results would have been horrific,
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  64. Phil is still around at 83. Vladimir Posner is also still around at 84. I became familiar with Posner from listening to his nightly commentary on the Radio Moscow North American Service on shortwave in the 1960's. He was a very smooth and engaging personality, and much different than the usual stolid Radio Moscow presenter. My assumption always was that he was a KGB agent, and, with his native English speaking ability and casual delivery, was able to spread Soviet disinformation so smoothly you almost didn't realize it. I don't think he's ever admitted he was in the KGB, but he has admitted his role as a Soviet apologist. He must have been considered an exceptionally reliable Soviet agent to be able to travel between the West and East so freely. He was even able to engage in some mild criticism of the Soviet government in ways that wouldn't have been tolerated from any other public figure. I quite enjoyed listening to him on my shortwave radio, but I also never forgot his real role as part of the Soviet media.
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  65. US PT boats had dedicated deck mounted smoke generator cylinders from about 1939 on. Some boats had one and some had two, all mounted near the stern. They were made from standard 33 gallon tanks of a design made for ammonia storage. They were generally filled with titanium tetrachloride which, when ignited, produced a dense white smoke cloud all out of proportion to its size. My dad's boat had two cylinders so they could lay down smoke while beating a hasty retreat after attacking Japanese supply barges. Some of these were armored and had guns up to 3"/25 size so they didn't want to hang around, given the biggest gun they carried was a single 40mm Bofors.
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  66. Count me in the "Large Cruisier" camp, but with some planning and work, these could been instead CBAA class ships. The concept of the Atlanta class enlarged to twenty-two 5"/38 twin mounts for a total of 44 barrels, eighteen 40mm quad mounts for a total of 72 barrels , and somewhere between thirty-six and forty 20mm twin mounts for a total of 72 to 80 barrels would have made these ships a nightmare for Japanese aviators. Deleting the 12" guns and their magazines would have freed up space for installing all the PPI radar screens and plotting tables to enable the Alaska class to be the USN's first true fighter control ships. They could have also been more easily converted to antiaircraft missile ships postwar. [Edited to correct some mistakes between mounts and barrels]
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  67. One of the reasons for the superfiring height aft mount in the Littorio class was to work in hangers for their three seaplanes. The hangers had a track leading out to the stern catapult that allowed fairly quick mounting of the aircraft while protecting the aircraft from weather and blast effects from the main battery. US battleships using catapult storage of their floatplanes suffered repeated damage to the catapults and even had the aircraft blown overboard when the aft turret needed to fire mostly astern. It was actually a pretty good idea without having to result to the below decks and elevators used in the Cleveland class cruisers. These seemed like a good idea as well, but they had never ending problems with leakage through the elevator doors when they shipped water over the stern, and even from the torrential rains tajhat were a feature in the tropics. Mechanical problems with the elevators and even shock damage from near misses were also continuing problems.
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  68. Neither the L-29 or the l_39 could have created sonic booms. The L-29 Delfin was a straight wing trainer with a top speed of 510 mph. The L-39 Albatross was a higher performance version of the Delphin, but it was still straight wing and had a top speed of about 600 mph. Both are far below supersonic speed at any altitude. My guess is you were hearing (and feeling) Mig-25 fighters from Vasylkiv air base. Given the dates, they were mostly likely Mig-25RB reconnaissance bombing versions flying nap of the earth training missions at supersonic speeds. Low level breaking of the sound barrier sounds like bombs being dropped nearby, and the sonic wave can cause some real damage, like breaking the windows out of structures and causing cracks in weak, old homes.
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  69. Interesting concept, but you just know the losing side is going to be looking for revenge, and a wider war will always develop. There have been a few instances of this kind of thing, and it only works if there's a strong cultural imperative that the small battle will be the only battle. Some Native American tribes that couldn't risk all out war because of their small number of warriors settled disputes of honor or territory with small battles, but traditions were strong enough that the battle didn't expand to the rest of the tribes.
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  70. 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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  71. 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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  72. 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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  73. I don't know if this was also true in the USSR, but Slovenia had two casinos, and no Slovenians were allowed to enter. You had to show your passport or the temporary ID card you got if your hotel kept your passport. One was the Grand Casino Portorož, located in the Grand Hotel in that beach resort city. The other was in Nova Gorica, but I don't remember the name. When I first went to the Grand in 1988 it had a strict dress code. Long pants and collared shirt during the day and jacket and tie at night. Women had to wear pantsuits or dresses. It was a very classy place, but minimum bets for blackjack was $5 during the day and $10 at night. You had to change at least $100 in hard currency for chips. The bar was very nice. I was there in the low season and had a very attractive female bartender all to myself. I think I was the only non-Italian there. We stayed at the Grand in 1995 and got a two bedroom suite for $105 for five of us. I doubt I could get one now for that price.
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  74. Even if the Germans had managed to build more Type XXI boats even a year earlier, they would have been descended on hordes of allied escorts and destroyers. Even worse, part of the horde would have been an increasing number of Saipan class light carriers with 35 aircraft armed with depth charges, and Mark 24 "Fido" and Mark 27 homing torpedoes. Sonars on the escorts were constantly improving, as was airborne search and attack radar. There would have been enough aircraft available to fly the equivalent of a combat air patrol over any convoy. The better that the Mark XXI would have performed, the more it would demanded a huge response from the allies. If anything, the German Navy would have lost even more boats because of the umbrella formed looking for what still would have been a relatively small number of Type XXI boats. No matter how it worked out, it would have been a slight setback to the allies followed by a much, much larger setback to the remnants of the German Navy.
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  75. I like the song, but it shows the difference between the RN and USN. When the British get together at the pub, a song typically breaks out. When US sailors get together at the bar, especially if there are Marines about, a fight typically breaks out. :-)
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  76. Wow! Thanks for the shoutout, Drach. I apologize to the other subscribers for droning on sometimes. After 55 or so years of studying naval history and spending a small fortune on reference books, many of your topics set off the "Oh, I've read about that before" response. Add in the USN and RN as my favorite navies, nuns forcing me to learn touch typing, and we have the ingredients for my mini "War and Peace" comments. :-)
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  77. I enjoy seeing your longer videos lately, and the Berlin Airlift is sure a subject than can occupy an even longer video. Good job.
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  78. I can assure you the unfaithful wife story wasn't just in the USSR. We have tons of them in the US. I'll give you one. A guy and his wife want a son, but their first two children are girls. After trying again, his wife delivers a son. It was the ugliest baby he ever saw, and he was really pissed. "How could this happen?" he said to his wife. "Look at our two beautiful daughters! Have you been fooling around on me?" he asked. His wife hesitated, smiled her sweetest smile, and said "Not this time, honey."
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  79. Six Tambor class submarines were armed with 5"/51 wet mount guns. The decks required enlarging and strengthening to accommodate the the much greater size and weight compared to the 3"/50 gun they replaced. They were reportedly popular with gunners. More subs would have been so equipped except for the objections of Admiral Thomas Hart. It was his belief that submarines should spend their time off our coasts torpedoing enemy b=vessels. To support his beliefs, he initially forbade planners to arm a submarine (except for the large minelayers) with anything larger than 3"/50. This was because a larger gun would encourage submarine commanders to battle it out on the surface, thereby leading to the loss of more submarines. He never seemed to understand the need for a gun large enough to sink merchant ships while having enough range to avoid the usual 3" and 4" self-defense armament of the merchant ship. He was on the General Board that recommended adopting the Mark 6 torpedo exploder, the one that caused almost all the troubles with US torpedoes. He was the commander of allied naval forces in Java, and his hesitant and incompetent leadership lead to loss of almost every allied naval vessel in the the Battle of the Java Sea. Fortunately, he was relieved of command in February, 1942 before he could do further damage. Admiral Hart easily makes by list of worst admirals.
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  80. It's been a long, long time since I played a naval themed board game of any type. I was never a big fan of any board game other than Risk, which my friends and I used to play for days straight sometimes. It was the first time I learned of a place named Kamchatka and where it was located.
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  81. The Fermilab Research Center near Chicago has radiation shields that contains steel and armor plate from 10 light and heavy cruisers and five aircraft carriers. Even though submarines had no armor plate, they did have large quantities of high quality lead sheets used for ballast, and three Gato class submarines contributed their lead ballast sheet for protection against stray particles showing up while protons.strike their targets, interfering with the high speed photography used to determine the path of an accelerated proton. The accelerator tunnels can stretch for a mile or more so lots of lead was needed. I believe more lead was salvaged from an additional four submarines in the 70's. The lab has stockpiled large amounts of cruiser armor plate to use in new construction since there are obviously no more steel armored cruisers being made. The Lab has expressed interest in salvaging armor plate from the Iowas if they are ever scrapped. To my knowledge, none of the armor plate used in the Lab comes from a battleship.
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  82. There were so many reports from all navies in WWI and WWII of how ship's mascots contributed to the crew's morale that it just seems like modern foolishness to outlaw them, particularly cats, which serve a useful purpose aboard every ship. Sometimes things were so bad that passing around the ship's cats and dogs for a good petting were the only thing that kept the men going. I hope we don't have to go through another major conflict to find out the truth of this.
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  83. Wows. It is amazing that you've now gotten to three years. Seems like it was only about a year ago I started watching your videos when you had maybe 10k subs. Congratulations.
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  84. A proviso for the Littorio being able to hit a target at extreme ranges is that this was only true for fair weather daylight engagements. The Italians had developed a very effective radar called the Gufo as early as 1937. It was actually ready for introduction by 1940, but budget cuts and a general lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Italian high command for radar stalled introduction until 1942, after heavy Italian losses . By the time the Gufo was introduced to enough Italian warships to be useful, the armistice intervened. It's probable that more ships equipped with the Gufo would have stiffened the Regia Marina's resolve to engage in night battles rather than retiring before dark.
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  85. While there were no dedicated PT boat carriers I'm aware of, the story of the SS Stanvac Manila, a tanker that was torpedoed with six PT boats from the second division of Squadron (RON) 10 being carried as deck cargo, may be as close as the USN got to a PT boat carrier, albeit from a ship never designed for such a role. Stanvac Manila was torpedoed May 24, 1943, off Nouméa, New Caledonia. While the merchant crew abandoned ship, the senior PT officer, and senior officer onboard, Lt. (jg.) Russel W. Rome, belayed the abandon ship order, and the PT crews started to free the boats from their cradles. The naval armed guard remained aboard, and they, plus the PT crews, fighting from their boats, were able to keep Japanese planes at bay while the tanker slowly sank. I won't write another book here, but check out the story at http://www.pt171.org/PT171/writeups/stanvac.htm. RON 10 was my dad's squadron, and he was aboard the Stanvac Manila that day. Amazingly, my dad's boat, PT-172, was able to motor into Nouméa harbor under its own power, and three of the remaining five boats floated free and were towed into harbor. No better example than this of the fighting spirit of green PT boat crews encountering their first taste of combat.
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  86. You're welcome. I don't miss the days of the Soviet Union, but it was interesting to listen to Radio Moscow and try to guess what was really happening then. What made it more interesting was to then listen to Radio Warsaw amd Radio Sofia to see how fast any change in the partly line from Moscow was picked up by the radio broadcasts from satellite countries. Some, like East Germany, were in lockstep with Moscow while others, especially Czechoslovakia and Romania, took longer to fall in line. I heard a good KGB joke recently - Why do KGB agents always work in groups of 3? One can read, another one can write and the last one is there to keep an eye on those two intellectuals.
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  87. The RN, USN, and, I believe, the French used range clocks, large clock like round structures with a pair of hands, generally mounted high up on the main and fore masts. They could communicate the range when found by the lead ship, or indeed any ship, in the line, allowing the following or leading ships to use that range without resorting to all the tables. There were still some small adjustments made to compensate for their place in line and any variation in direction, but range (or concentration, in RN terms) clocks allowed all the ships in the line to set their guns to a known range and get into action rather than each ship having to find their own ranges.
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  88. There are already 62 Arleigh Burke class in service. They can carry between 90 and 96 missiles, depending on the Flight variant. The Navy's goal is to have at least 70 always in service with 10 in refit, building replacements plus some additional ships as the earliest ships reach about 30 years old and retirement. Even if we only allow 90 missiles and assume only 50 Burkes would actually be available for combat, that's still 4,500 missiles. As you say, having 10 in a battle fleet is at least 900 missiles. The Burkes are also able to defend themselves pretty well against submarines, and they do have an effective gun for surface action or shore bombardment. It's difficult to see how any battle is going to need more than those 900 missiles, and the USN can just keep adding Burkes until the job is done.
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  89. I've never understood why virtually all navies in the Dreadnought period thought casemate guns mounted at the extreme bow and stern positions were a good idea. Not only could any practical gunnery officer have told them that such positions were nearly impossible to fight in anything other than nearly calm seas, they were a positive menace to the ship's safety. It was nearly impossible to seal any casemate position from incoming seawater. Positions located at such extreme positions were subjected to battering seas from the bow and following seas at the stern. Nevertheless, battleships and battlecruisers continued to be built with such gun positions right to WWI, when experience showed why they were such a bad idea. This led to almost all of them having to be refit, with the positions plated over, thereby losing six to eight guns of their secondary battery. I just shake my head every time I see an armament layout for ships like the Von Der Tann.
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  90. It looks like an abacus. I don't know if Russia still produces and uses the abacus but it's widely used in China,, and they make millions of them every year. They have a whole bunch of different ones on Amazon.
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  91. Thanks for answering my question about fighting whatever the Kirov is called now. Yes, I meant a Java Sea type battle, with a scratch force of vessels fighting a Kirov class ship and her escorts. I think you've identified the best role for an LCS - a decoy and sacrificial target. :-)
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  92. Unfortunately, it was their weak antiaircraft armament that contributed to the loss of many of the Tribal class ships.
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  93. Once the socialist protesters show up, a scuffle will always escalate. Even the 1886 version of Antifa was trying provoke a riot, and this time, they succeeded.
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  94. Good thing gI was in bed before this episode was posted. I would have passed out at the computer trying to stay awake. Youtube is so messed up. I was about to whine because there was no time stamped list with this episode, but I thought Drach wouldn't do that to us with a three hour plus episode. I refreshed Youtube and, sure enough, there was the list. I hate Youtube sometimes.
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  95. "I showed her my ass...". LOL. Sometimes all you could do was laugh in the Soviet Union.
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  96. Warning! This is going to be another of my "War and Peace" type posts. :) The plan, as I understand it, for covering landings on the Japanese mainland from air attack would have mainly been assigned to massed squadrons of Fletcher, Sumner, and Gearing class destroyers. There was a rushed refit of most of these units from mid-1944 to right up to August 1945 for every ship of these classes to have at least twelve 40mm Bofors guns with fourteen and even sixteen on the Gearings. This was done by landing all the torpedo tubes and, in typical USN fashion, covering the available deck space with twin and quad mount Bofors, supplemented by 20mm mounts wherever they would fit. Another goal of these refits was to install completely up to date radars and fire control equipment to allow every vessel to use VT rounds in their 5"/38 guns. Magazine spaces previously used to store torpedoes were given over to gun round storage. Many of the Sumner and Gearing class ships would also have been radar pickets, much like we saw in the earlier campaigns. The destroyers would have been backed up by the various permutations of Atlanta class cruisers, any of the three British Dido class that could have been spared from carrier screens, and masses of Cleveland and Baltimore cruisers. Most of these ships had increased AA guns fitted along with the requisite radars and fire controls systems. The Canadian Prince Robert, a former passenger vessel converted to a merchant cruiser and later as an auxiliary antiaircraft cruiser, had performed well in the Mediterranean. It was expected her main role in the planned invasion of Japan would be covering landings and escorting supply ships. Many British, Australian, and New Zealand destroyers, corvettes, sloops, and frigates would have been assigned to cover landings of British and Commonwealth troops. The major push with the British ships, in addition to increased AA defense, was adding air conditioning and stores refrigeration equipment. Ships built for the North Atlantic would have been much reduced in combat effectiveness in the tropics without these additions. The accounts of men serving on some unconverted warships serving in the Pacific are quite harrowing in terms of below decks temperatures and humidity. The 31 RN submarines were expected to play a major role in patrol and reconnaissance offshore from Japanese naval bases, rescuing downed carrier pilots, and attacking any remaining Japanese warships foolish enough to sortie from port. A little remembered ship was the HMS Ariadne, an Abdiel class fast minelayer, and one of the first RN vessels of the later Pacific Fleet, joining the US Seventh Fleet in January, 1944. Her very high speed was put to good use landing many US Army raiding forces on various islands as well as laying over 1,000 mines. The other two Abdiel class minelayers assigned to the British Pacific Fleet (BPF) would have been equally useful if they had been ready for BPF use before the war ended. In addition to the better known roles of the battleships and carriers of both navies, a major role for the British was the Fleet Train (BFT). The BFT had 54 large ships, from oilers to ammunition ships, and well over 100 smaller ships assigned. The RN had extensive experience supplying their ships while underway. Many of the ships were Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) vessels, and some were mostly manned by merchant seamen. It was expected the British Pacific Fleet would be sustained by their own Fleet Train with enough excess capacity to also supply some USN ships. It didn't quite work out as planned, with some USN supply ships needing to be added to the BFT. Nevertheless, the ships and crews performed magnificently under sometimes horrendous condition, since many BFT vessels didn't have a/c or refrigeration. The high intensity work of underway replenishment and island supply without the help of even one air cooled space onboard tested the mettle of the crews, and they stood up better than could be expected. A humorous sidelight described by one of the RFA crewmen was when a special alarm sounded, and the men rushed up on deck. The men weren't carrying helmets and life vests that you might expect with most alarms. This alarm had men carrying soap and towels, since the alarm let men below decks know of a passing rain squall so they could cool off and get in a shower, both rare experiences on most RFA ships. As usual, a combined British/American operation couldn't go off without politics getting in the way. It started with Churchill want to use British forces to recapture lost British territory like Burma and Hong Kong and leave the Pacific islands to the Americans. Strong protestations from the Chiefs of Staff eventually overcame Churchill's objections. The RN chiefs rightly believed that not participating in the eventual conquest of the Home Islands of Japan would decrease British influence in the Pacific and rob the RN of valuable experience participating in fleet operations and amphibious landings larger than any they had done in the past. BPF experience was part of the planning for the Suez operation and, indirectly, gave the RN confidence they could support amphibious landings in the far off Falklands. Things on the American side were no better. The Commander-in-Chief United States Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations was Admiral Ernest King. He was a well known Anglophobe who saw the British as coming in after most of the battles were over and then claiming part of the prestige of helping to defeat Japan. He raised so many objections to the offers of help from the British that Roosevelt himself had to intervene and essentially order that King accept the offer of a BPF. It appeared to the public that allies were cooperating in the defeat of Japan when the reality was the USN was dragged kicking and screaming into accepting the offer. King, after grudgingly accepting, set down a requirement that the BPF be totally self-sufficient. Try as they would, the BPF wasn't capable of that, and later USN aid was freely given, sometimes over the objections of Adm. King, and some BPF supply ships aided USN ships. Admiral Nimitz had more pragmatic objections based on the differences in British aircraft, carrier operations, and a myriad of logistical problems, from incompatible radios to completely different guns and ammunition between the two navies. To the credit of both navy's operational staffs, most of these problems were overcome in a matter of six months. Adm. Nimitz became an enthusiastic supporter of the BPF carrier forces after seeing their performance at Okinawa, when the armoured decks of the fleet carriers and well trained damage control teams allowed RN carriers to absorb Kamikaze attacks and continue to operate. All in all, and ignoring the political interference, it was quite a performance from two fleets that had to learn to work with each other in a matter of months.
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  97. Another amazing bit of history dug up by Dr. Felton. I don't know how he does it, but each one just goes to show me I don't know as much about the war, especially the Eastern Front, as I thought I did.
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  98. Soviet era electric trains were never sold in stores. They were used as gifts to the children of high ranking Party members, military men, a foreign notable visitors, and and as awards for high performing Young Pioneers. The train sets were almost always one diesel engine, two passenger cars along with three streetlights, three signal lights, station, bridge, and set of crossing gates. Other than paint schemes, the "state" trains remained the same up until the end of production in 1969. The only major change was as DeStalinization got underway. All the trains produced before 1960 has Stalin's initials on the side along with a five pointed Soviet star. Khrushchev ordered the initials removed in 1960 as well as the star. The star was replaced with the state railroad logo. Sets were apparently produced until about 1969 since there's no evidence of sets made after that date. They were probably still used as giveaways for a few years after that, and it seem like the set given to the Polish ambassador in 1973 was one of the last. Trains sets were no longer all that special as one could buy much better sets from the DDR and Hungary after 1970. The tracks and transformer were close copies of US O27 Lionel parts. There was no attempt to model a specific Soviet diesel engine. Indeed, there was no attempt to copy any engine except for the general outline of a double cab engine. It seems the most important things was to make them beautiful. They used an exact replica of American Flyer couplers, and oddly included buffer plates on both ends of the engine. Oddly because Soviet engines never used buffer plates or screw type couplers, just American style automatic couplers. The assumption is the train should have a vaguely European look to it. The engines were all hand built and hand painted, and some of the variations in paint schemes may come down to the individual doing the painting that day. The freight and passenger cars are also vaguely Soviet in design but they too include buffer plates. Some parts of the set were copied directly from other manufacturers. The crossing gates is an exact copy of a Marlin set. The operating crossing gateman is an exact copy of a Lionel #45 accessory. The Soviets copied other companies products at will with no worries about patent problems. I have seen a few of the engines at train shows but just don't have enough money to get one since they start at about $800 for an average condition example all the way up to $5,000 for an as-new model in the original box. Cars range from $85 to $200 each, and the beautiful -station that came with each set generally goes for about $750 for a decent example. A set in the original wooden crate these were all packaged in is a near impossible thing to find. One sold at auction a few years ago for $28,000 and I'm sure one would bring even more today. There was no record kept of production, but estimates are about 4,500 sets were made from 1951 to 1969. The engines and cars I've seen have been of a high quality mechanically while the paint job quality varies by individual model painter and, I suppose, how rough a weekend he may have had. :-)
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  99. Ranger was always considered kind of developmental carrier, a step between Langley and the Yorktowns. US wargames of the 30's showed flush deck carriers presented few advantages compared to the operational efficiency of having an island, and stacks exhausting through the top of the island were far superior to the side mounted exhausts of Ranger. She could have been a better carrier if the stacks could have been changed when the island was added but, this still being in the depths of the Great Depression, the money wasn't available for that drastic of a redesign. Nothing could be done to improve her low (for a fleet carrier) top speed, and the flight deck and hangers all required strengthening to cope with the demise of the biplane. For the rest of the war, other than a few relatively low intensity periods of combat, Ranger worked out what was to become an increasingly important carrier task - transportation of and flying off fighters to reinforce AAF aircraft and crews in Africa and Europe. After a disastrous start to this task that caused the loss of ten aircraft on her first mission, she was able to fly off more AAF P-40s from the deck to supply badly needed replacements in North Africa. As far as I know, these are the only instances of P-40's flying off from a carrier. She settled down to her transport task until 1944 when she returned to the East Coast to operate as a training carrier. Given the flood of new carriers and pilots coming online, this was probably her most important role. Her role as a training carrier continued until October, 1946 when, being well and truly worn out, she was struck off the naval register and sold for scrap in January, 1947.
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  100. Radford was one of only three Fletchers to receive a FRAM II overhaul. This was a more austere overhaul than the complete reconstruction of the FRAM I ships. The original intention was reconstruction almost all the surviving Fletchers. However, the experience with the three that did get the modernization was they were far overbudget as the inevitable feature creep added more and more electronics and other equipment, and the increased crewing demanded by all the new equipment made the Fletchers intolerably crowded. The main reason for the FRAM II upgrade was so the ships could handle the DASH drone helicopter. While derisively known as the Down At Sea Helicopter by some captains and crews, those that operated the drones in strict accordance with the Gyrodyne (makers of the QH-50C drone) procedures found the drones to be both controllable and effective. The Radford was one such ship, making more than 500 flights, including launching two torpedos while being fed dummy targeting information while the drone was over the horizon. The DASH helicopters developed a generally poor reputation in the USN due to the lack of command support, general laziness of the crews in not making enough practice flights, and poor adherence to maintenance procedures. In contrast, the Japanese Marine Self Defense Force, with I will call the Japanese Navy to save my fingers, operated sixteen DASH drones from the decks of seven destroyers. The Japanese Navy, known for their adherence to both command instructions and maintaining their equipment, operated the QH-50D drones with nearly complete success, losing only three drones from 1969 to 1977. This is compared to losing well over half the drone fleet in the USN. The Japanese were well satisfied with the DASH drones, and only decommissioned them in 1977, due to the USN abandoning the program the previous year, leading to fears of parts and spares shortages after that date. The Japanese Navy flew their Dash helicopters every single day, at sea or in port. The program had a command officer assigned that stayed with the ship and the program from the date the drone was introduced until he retired or the DASH drones were taken out of service. Compare this to the USN, which had some ships flying the drone only twice a month, the absolute minimum demanded by regulations, and some ships having only a Petty Officer Third Class being in charge of the drones on his ship. The program, while being chronically underfunded and undermanned, did lead directly to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) now carried by by many USN combat ships. Believe it or not, the UAV program of today is underfunded and undermanned, and naval aviators don't like the current crop of UAVs any more than they liked the Gyrodyne DASH helicopters.
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  101. It is the New Orleans class with "S" not being silent. An engineering study was done as a graduate paper by three Anapolis students. The conclusion was that the seam welding between #1 and #2 turrets was slightly less reinforced than it should have been. Combine that with some lucky torpedo hits and we get those blown off bows. As you said, the combination of excellent subdivisioning and damage control saved those same ships to fight another day.
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  102. Just to show what an idiot I am, I spent 15 minutres watching this before I finally figured out these models have no relationship to reality as I understand it.
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  103. 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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  104. Your videos are absolutely not too long. There are times I wish they were longer when you're talking about things like what a certain coin would buy. That's the kind of information a non-Russian like me can't easily find.. As for your supposed lack of focus, you're a storyteller. Storytellers do a pretty poor job when they feel like they can only read from a script and watch the clock.
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  105. Pretty versatile ships as well, operating everything from Fulmars to Tracklers to Skyhawks. Not bad for a design supposed to only last three years and built with scantlings made from old bully beef tins. :-)
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  106. The U Boat attacks were generally confined to the waters of the Gulf of St Lawrence, the only part of the St Lawrence riverway wide enough and deep enough to allow U Boats to have the operational space they needed. As it turned out. the attacks on allied shipping in the Gulf turned out to be an advantage to Canada and the allies. Rather than convoys having to all assemble at Sydney NS, some of which were taking many days to navigate up the St Lawrence, shipping was diverted to the Canadian National Railway lines to Halifax, and convoys formed up there. The harbor was better, as were the defenses, and the removal of most of the convoy traffic from the St Lawrence decreased the U Boat targets and caused German to abandoned operations in the St Lawrence by mid-1943. U Boats did try to insert spies and pick up escaped POWs from the region, but none of those operations ever succeeded.
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  107. Modernized Fletchers also had two dual 3"/50 mounts, and those could have joined in if the Fletcher could have closed to within the effective range of all her guns. Very few modernized Fletchers kept all five 5", but a combination of the 5" and 3" would have been devastating to an Independence LCS. Even with just four 5" guns, each mount could maintain a ROF of 20 RPM, so that's 80 rounds per minute. Each 3" mount could maintain a ROF of 50 RPM. That adds another 100 rounds per minute, for a total of 180 RPM compared to the much smaller 57 mm gun's ROF of 200 RPM. We have good evidence of a Fletcher's ability to withstand battle damage by having had a lot of them tested to destruction. We really have no idea of the survivability of an Independence class. My guess in the end result would have the Fletcher sustaining a fair amount of non-fatal damage while the Independence class vessel would have been sinking or sunk.
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  108. Thanks a lot of for answering my questions about the Vanguard. As a Yank, I don't always understand British thinking about what ships were built and what weren't. All your reponses make sense. It's unfortunate that the British government never saw the possibility of the Vanguard being more than the world's largest and most heavily armed royal yacht, her main use until she was placed in reserve in 1955. It's unfortunate that she never participated in the Korean Conflict. The RN might have gained a new appreciation for the need for shore bombardment even without another world war After a fairly comprehensive and expensive refit, and being placed into reserve in 1955 , Mountbatten and Anthony Eden came to power and seemed to be bent on disposing of half the RN fleet. After just four years in reserve, the decision was made to scrap the Vanguard and, by 1960, she was gone. The USN/US government maintained many ships in reserve postwar, some of which were war weary and completely obsolete, like the USS Wichita, for fifteen or more years before the mass scraping program set in from 1960 to 1962. I guess the end of empire, in some people's minds, also meant the end of the need for the RN beyond nuclear submarines, and that the USN would become the protector of the UK itself. It was a decision that would come back to haunt the British in 1982.
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  109. It takes a long time to tell the story about a larger than life character like Stalin. I was in high school so it must have been 1962 or 1963 when Radio Mosco's English service broadcast a ten part series on the "Great Patriotic War". I have always had an interest in history so I listened faithfully through the static to see what the Soviets said about WWII. You'd think the Russians pretty much did it single handedly listening to that program. You'd think the allies just parachuted into Germany after Russia had mopped up almost all the German troops. There was no mention of the war with Finland, the three Baltic republics asked the USSR to join with them, no mention of the Soviet-German non aggression pact, and, of course, no mention at all of the millions of Russian POWs who returned to the USSR but never made it back to their homes. US lend lease aid got mentioned only in passing, and I think only because of all the pictures of the hundreds of P-39 fighters with the Red Star and the tens of thousands of Studebaker trucks hauling around all the Soviet troops. The reason why Japan surrendered was because of the USSR declaration war against Japan, a whole six days before Japan surrendered. The two atomic bombs were just imperialists testing their weapons of death on the helpless Japanese. Our own history can be somewhat distorted for political gain, but listening to that series was like being Alice going down the rabbit hole.
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  110. It's called the Aswan High Dam. The US and Britain were supposed to give Egypt loans to build it but cut Egypt off after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956. Egypt then turned to the Soviet Union, and they financed the dam a low interest $1.2 billion loan. Construction started in 1960 and the dam was finished in 1970. I visited it in 1992. A monument to the the Soviet Union was on the crest of the dam when I visited. It's an absolutely massive structure, almost three miles wide and 360 feet tall. The hydroelectric plant supplies about half of Egypt's power.
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  111. The growth of the pagoda structures reflect the Japanese faith in their optical rangefinders. As their weight and size grew, they needed ever taller and stronger structures to support and make best use of them. This also reflected how little faith the IJN had in radar, since their doctrine was their rangefinders would be more than adequate day or night. It wasn't until late 1942 that the Japanese realized how much USN surface search and radar fire control was mauling their ships. That set off a furious pace of development for their own radars. UNfortunately, it did the same for the army, with many identical types being developed in tandem with no coordination between the two services. If some miracle would have occured and the talented men for all services worked together, the IJN may have had effective radars by late 1944, but even that would have been too late. There are very few cases in the history of warfare where the types of circular gunfights engaged in by the Japanese armed services so badly impacted their chance of survival, let alone victory.
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  112. 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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  113. I guess a lot of tourists coming back from their trips overseas must have looked like the Michelin Man when they got off the plane. :-) There must have been a fair bit of bribery between the tourists and border guards. No black market survives without it.
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  114. Once all of us in the South get a more detailed itinerary, it's possible we could set up a shuttle from, say, Atlanta to Charleston and then Charleston over to Mobile. I'm about halfway between Charleston and Mobile, so I can handle the Mobile leg if someone can handle the Charleston leg. At least you won't be a prisoner to airline schedules if we can make that happen.
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  115. Rats!. I knew that a notification would show up at 0430 CDT, just as I was finally going to be about to get to sleep. Oh, well, time for a cup of very strong coffee.
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  116. The amount of water that can come over a ship's surface is quite amazing. SS Edmund Fitzgerald Was easily the largest Lakes ore boat when launched in 1959 at 728 feet. Her freeboard to the deck level was 35 feet while the bridge added yet another 18 feet. During the 1975 storm that sank her, the water not only topped the deck, it even topped the bridge during ~ 80 mph winds..
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  117. For those who may not have seen it, there's an interesting postwar summary about the 40mm Bofors from the Bureau of Ordnance at https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/Admin-Hist/075-Ordnance/075-Ord6R.html. While the 2 pdr was the finalist in the USN medium AA gun along with the Bofors gun, it was the continued British use of cordite powder that caused the Bofors to be the winner. Muzzle velocity was indeed important, but the fact the 2 pdr was already using inch measurement compared to the known problems of adapting metric to inch for the Bofors was an important variable that probably would have led to the 2 pdr's adoption if not for the cordite issue. Since it was a powder no longer in use in the USN, it would have required an entirely new manufacturing and supply line for the round, or a total dependence on Britain for supply. Neither one was considered desirable and, after September, 1940, it was considered that British supply might not even be possible. All the other issues could have been worked out, but cordite powder did the pom pom in for the USN.
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  118. For once I was actually in bed when this video came out. It's kind of weird watching this after I have awakened instead of trying to stay awake. The most effective nuclear naval ordnance would have undoubtedly been the nuclear depth charge. A lot of USN nuclear depth charge testing is still classified, but what's available shows a single Mark 90 nuclear depth bomb could have destroyed any submarine within a 5-7 NM radius of the ship or aircraft that dropped the bomb, and the damage radius was about 10-12 NM. There's a good film about Operation Wigwam, which included a test of a Mark 90, at https://archive.org/details/gov.doe.0800018.
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  119. Now I know, when watching one of the many Russian car crash videos, why drivers yell "suka, blyad!" all the time. :-)
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  120. Thanks. I was vaguely aware of this one but it's nice to get some details.
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  121. I heard Qxir was kind of a narcissist though...
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  122. How about a t-shirt with a drawing of the fully rebuilt Hood? I'd buy one of those, if only just to get other warship aware friends to ask "What's that?"
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  123. Holy crap! Five hours today? Time to get out some extra coffee and a couple fresh chair cushions. Great combination of Christmas, Boxing Day, and New year's presents for all of us naval fans. Thanks, Drach!
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  124. Back in the days where there really were a multiplicity of guns on USN ships. the Marines provided gun crews for at least two 5"/38 mounts and a couple of quad 40mm mounts. They not only provided the crews, they became the experts on repair and and maintenance on their mounts. They'd assist Navy ordinance men at those tasks when asked, and they provided a far bit of training for the FNGs that were assigned to gunnery roles. With far fewer guns on Navy ships now, Marines still man some of the free swinging light weapons like.50 caliber M2 machine gun and 25mm Bushmaster cannons. They are the landing force in being if a small target needs to be attacked and secured, and they provide ship security for nuclear weapons compartments and various top secret areas of the ship. Marines are responsible, along with the Navy Master At Arms, for the overall protection and security of the ship while in port and at sea, with Marine NCOs often acting as the Officer of the Deck. They were generally in charge of the brig, and moving prisoners between the Captain's Mast and place like sick bay. What Marines really practice for is an attack of the ship while it is in port. If the SHTF and the ships is under fire from attackers attempting to seize the vessel, the Marines are the ones that turn out with weapons locked and loaded, ready to fight off the threat or die trying. In between such feats of derring do, Marines also swab the decks and do KP, so it's not all fun and games.
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  125. Thanks, Drach, and entertaining and informative story of one of the few campaigns where luck on both sides were the major operational factors. Churchill must have been ready to bite the head off a tenpenny nail over that one. I wonder if there was any chance of engaging Norway in some kind of secret alliance where they would at least share more information? I know Norway had always been a neutral nation, but my reading of a couple of Norwegian diplomat's biographies indicated they knew the peril they were in after the German invasion of Poland and didn't believe Germany or England would permit them to stay neutral. Maybe a couple of English diplomats with Norwegian connections could have convinced Norway to accept an RN shield against German attack, thereby leading to less RN sneaking around and into Norwegian waters and the attendant diplomatic flurry each time it happened. Norway wouldn't have to join Britain in war in September, 1939, just look the other way as the RN kept an eye on German operations.
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  126. Of the eight preserved US battleships, all but one (Texas) is a "modern" era ship. The Iowas were always considered ready reserve ships up until the mid-2000's. They were in excellent material condition when they were finally retired. The Navy knew that any plan to scrap the ships was unthinkable so they actively worked with the states and ultimate museum anchorages to preserve the ships, even to the point that the agreements with the museums was the ships had to be maintained in "as-delivered" condition and were subject to repossession by the Navy at a time of national need. Even though only one of the four was the namesake of a coastal state, the value of preservation as tourist attractions was already well in place by the 1990's Of the four South Dakotas, the two preserved ships (Alabama and Massachusetts) are named for coastal states that fought for their preservation. The two that were scrapped (South Dakota and Indiana) are inland states with nowhere to display the ships. Both states preserved many pieces of the ships before scrapping, and they are now displayed in suitable monuments in their respective states. The name ship of the North Carolina class is displayed at Wilmington NC. Starting from 1960, when the donation fo $331,000 collected by schoolchildren to purchase the ship, to being a self-supporting museum today, North Carolina has done a remarkable job of preserving her "Showboat". North Carolina was a donor ship for parts needed to renovate the Iowas when they were being refurbished in the 1980's. Unfortunately, many of her mechanical systems were removed at the time, along with the barbette of turret #1, but the parts live on in the Iowas. North Carolina is still a cosmetically beautiful ship and well worth the visit. This brings me to the shame of the state of Washington. While other states were already preserving or taking steps to preserve their ships, Washington simply didn't seem to care. At the same time that NC school kids were collecting pennies to buy their ship, the Washington legislature seemed to think the same $330,000 was an outrageous price and refused to fund the purchase. Vets attempted to get the same kind of schoolkids campaign going but, once again, no one seemed to care. The ship was decommissioned in June, 1960 and towed away for scrapping in May, 1961, probably a modern record between the two events. The ship's bell and a few other mementos are on display in the Bremerton Naval Museum, and that's only because of the efforts of the late Helen Devine, museum curator, digging through crates and boxes in a dusty warehouse in Olympia to find them and bring them to the museum. Other than this one corner of the museum, there's no real memorial to the ship, and certainly no memorial commensurate with the ship's historical value. Another move is underway to construct a proper memorial, but most of the ship's crew have passed on, and only some lonely naval historians and buffs have taken up the cudgel. The last Ship's Reunion was in 2005, and even the ship's website (http://www.usswashington.com/) is now mostly a mass of broken links. As you may be able to tell, I'm more than a little ill with the state of Washington and the shameful way they have treated "their" ship and the veterans who sailed on her. I've visited all the other battleships, and just thinking about the fate of Washington sets my teeth on edge.
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  127. Three guides in one day and it's not even my birthday! I've never found an answer to this one. Was there a weakness in the forward scantlings in this class? It seems like almost any torpedo hit from the bridge forward caused the bow to be blown off.
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  128. I have written about the Laconia incident previously. While the results of the sinking of Laconia and the later attack by a USAAF B-24 was terrible, and I'm in no way defending the ultimate decision to attack made by the pilots, there were a number of "fog of war" issues surrounding the entire incident. Please take the time to read The Origins of the Laconia Order at https://preview.tinyurl.com/sybm439. It gives a much clearer picture of what was happening before, during, and after the attack than most accounts. Drach, I have a read a lot about the Laconia Incident, as I know you have. I have never read in anything authoritative that the U-156 was attacked by a B-25. As far I know, it was that one B-24 that was the only US aircraft to attack her. An A-20, one of four flying escort for a Stratoliner carrying a British admiral, reported the day previous to the sinking of the Laconia , being fired on by two surfaced U-boats. None of the five B-25's dispatched to look for the U-boats made contact, and they were at the extreme end of their range in any case, so could not loiter in the area to look. The B-24 that ultimately carried out the attack was dispatched to try to find those two U-boats because it had the range to conduct a useful search. The pilots had no idea Laconia had been sunk or that she was even in the area. If you have more information on this B-25 attack, I'd like to have a link.
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  129. The US navy's goal by mid-1944 was to have all destroyers assigned the Pacific theater that retained their twin quad torpedo launchers to be be fitted with at least ten 40mm barrels, those with a single quad launcher to have at 12 barrels, and the complete anti-kamikaze ships with no torpedo launchers were fitted with between 14 and 16 barrels. The most heavily armed were some Gearing class ships with a pair of quad 40mm mounts amidships in the same positions as the landed torpedo launchers, a pair of twin mounts opposite the bridge, and another pair of twin mounts aft ahead of the depth charge tracks replacing the previous three to five single 20mm mounts at the same location. This was a total of 20 barrels. At the same time, all the remaining single 20mm mounts were replaced with twin mounts. Most of these ships were used as radar pickets that were heavily attacked by Japanese aircraft once they realized ot importance of their early warning role. The ability of these ships to send up a hail of antiaircraft fire was a surprise to Japanese pilots and caused many suicide attacks to be broken up, especially when there were enough destroyers available to assign pairs to a radar picket station. The problems with this kind of heavy armament was not the stability issues that have been written about, it was where to berth and feed all the extra crew. Each quad mount required a crew of 8-10 and twins 4-5. that was a total additional crew just to man the mounts of 32-35 men compared to the original three twin mounts. This doesn't count the additional crew needed for ammunition handling, magazine manning, and machinist and gunners mates to repair and maintain the mounts. The additional electronics and Combat Information Centers already required an additional ten to fourteen men before the armament changes, so even the Grearings were hard pressed to find space for these crew, and it was even worse for the converted Fletchers and Sumners. Even the amount of extra provisions required was estimated to add some thirty tons to the displacement, not to mention the additional cooks and stewards needed. The USN before the kamikaze threat prided itself on every crew member having their own berth. By April, 1945, hot bunking, hammocks, and even deck sleeping was the norm. Many more complaints by the men centered more around the difficulties of getting a hot meal than the rough berthing. Letters home from Pacific theater destroyer crews told of waiting for up to two hours to get through the mess line, only to have that disrupted by general quarters for another air attack. Some gun and CIC crews ate nothing but sandwiches and coffee for days on end. If you want to start sailors to bitching, don't feed them hot meals, and the bitching from crews extended from letters to their families all the way to letters to their Congressmen and Senators.
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  130. What a great video history! An interesting side story with USN destroyers were the experiments with mounting seaplanes. The first attempt was with the USS Charles Ausburn (DD-294) mounting a TS-1 floatplane in 1923. The fixed platform was inconveniently mounted directly in front of the bridge. This not only obstructed vision from the bridge but also greatly interfered from the field of fire from the forward 4" gun. Several successful flights were conducted, but the inadequate crane capacity, being needed to lower the plane and retrieve it, and the fragile nature of these early seaplanes, made the experiment generally a failure. The seaplane and platform were removed in early 1924 with the Ausburn being restored to the configuration of other Clemson class vessels. The next attempt was aboard the US Noa (DD-343), yet another Clemson class. I realize this is slightly outside the 1939 limit of the discussion, but the plans for the seaplane mount were started in 1938, and Noa was originally scheduled for recommissioning in 1939, so close enough. Frank Knox, then Secretary of the Navy, was a great believer in the idea of using destroyers as seaplane carriers to extend their range for fleet protection and commerce raiding. To test this concept again, the Noa was taken in hand when she was recommissioned in April, 1940. She had an XSOC-1 seaplane mounted this time on a rotating platform, displacing the aft bank of torpedoes. She also had a boom with a much greater lifting capacity, and the XSOC-1 was a much more robust aircraft than her predecessors. This time the experiment was more successful, with many flights, and the ability to retrieve the plane while underway, a difficult task for a relatively small Clemson class ship. Noa retained her seaplane until November, 1941, and the generally successful experience with Noa led to Knox mandating the construction of six Fletcher class destroyers with seaplane capability, this time with catapults (!). However, as Drach would say, that's a story for another day.
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  131. Both of these cruisers belied their Italian origins in their turret designs. They suffered the same excessive shot dispersion problems as the Italians due to the barrels being mounted too closely together. Swedish 6" ammunition was better quality, and some changes were made to how a salvo was fired. One barrel fired a few hundredths of a second sooner than its opposite barrel. That helped, but it never totally solved the problem. I'm not aware of any Swedish results of using the main armament as dual purpose, but I suspect it wouldn't have been any more successful than what was seen in the USN Worcester class DP cruisers. The Tre Kronor class were constructed to a budget rather than to maximize their lethality. The goal was for a 33 knot vessel, with the same SHP as a Brooklyn but only powering two shafts rather than the Brooklyn's four. Even though the length of the Tre Kronor was virtually identical to the Brooklyn, the hull was more finely designed, with a beam seven feet narrower than a Brooklyn. While that meant the goal of a 33 knot top speed was accomplished on two shafts, it had other undesirable effects. The narrower beam meant the Tre Kronor could carry less armor per foot of length as any more armor would have reduced top speed. Some of the weight of what was available for armor had to be allocated to the ice strengthened bow. Consequently, she only had a 2.8" belt and a total of 1.2" of deck armor. This compares to the 3 1⁄4–5" of belt armor and 2" of deck armor of the Brooklyn. Turrets were even worse, with Brooklyn having a 6" turret roof and not more than about 4.5" on the Tre Kronor. Conning tower armor was the one place the two ships were more or less equal. It's probably a good thing that the ex-Tre Kronor never met the ex-Brooklyn in combat. The armor disadvantages combined with a weak seven gun broadside compared to the ex-Brooklyn's fifteen guns wouldn't have contributed to a good outcome for the ex-Tre Kronor.
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  132. The captain (and naval commanders in general) had two big problems with the design. The worst was the ship carried 30 shells composed of "desensitized blasting gelatin", a combination of nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin. The were only desensitized to the extent this volatile mixture was somewhat protected by their brass or steel shells and fired using compressed air. The ammunition was carried in a magazine with about an inch of "armor" which was really just sheet iron. Estimates from amorers were even a near miss by a large shell like one of eleven or twelve inch shells Drach talked about would be enough to set off the nitro in at least one or two shells. Once that happened, the propagating shock effect would have set off the entire magazine. As was said at the the time, the upside to this was neither rescue efforts nor funeral expenses would be involved for the crew, since the resulting explosion would have been rather like a miniature HMS Hood blast. In addition to the dangers of sailing a ship filled with poorly protected and only marginally stable explosives into action, it doesn't take many measurements of the hull and freeboard compared to average wave heights, even in the Caribbean, to realized this vessel was much more like a coastal yacht than an ocean going warship. The vessel took green water over the bow in even moderate seas due to the low freeboard, and much of that water would go directly down the gun tubes if the barrel plugs weren't in place. This is a pretty obvious issue for a ship that would need to be pointed toward a target with the barrels unplugged during combat. The very fine curve to the stern was needed to achieve the relatively high speed of 20 knots in a 252 long vessel with only 3,200 horsepower worth of engines The stern shape caused large waves to backfill over the stern in a following sea, This made the stern 3 pounder gun unusable and flooded the below decks spaces through the large ventilators on the stern section of the main deck. While it wasn't the worst naval vessel ever built, it's usually on top ten lists for these and other faults.
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  133.  @Drachinifel  The best original source I've been able to find is at https://maritime.org/doc/label/index.htm#pg27. Section 20 lays out exactly how port and starboard mounts are to be numbered. It's from 1936, but USN numbering hasn't changed since then. There is more information from original sources at https://maritime.org/doc/guncat/cat-0018.htm and a secondary but generally reliable source athttp://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/Gun_Data.php. You are probably aware of these. From the same Navweaps source there's a diagram of German battleship main battery designations at http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-062.php.
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  134. I like your long and boring videos. This one isn't quite as boring or long enough, but it's okay anyway. :-)
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  135. I'm not sure the Didio class was equal to the Atlanta class for some antiaircraft roles. It wasn't until the Bellona subclass that the 5.25" turrest finally remote power control (RPC) and the High Angle Control System (HACS) Mark VI combined with the type 275 radar with blind fire capability that the 5.25" gun was able to achieve the role that it did best the Atlanta's, that of firing at very high altitude aircraft. The RPC reduced the turret crew from 12 to 10, allowing more room in a cramped turret. Combined to the maximum AA ceiling of over 40,000 feet compared to the 5"/38 of about 37,000 feet, and having a higher bursting chage and weight of explosives, and an increased one minute 10 RPM, the HMS Black Prince was able to hit Japanese bombers flying at 36,000 feet and drive off Japanese snoopers flying at 40,000 feet while she was off Okinawa. This was a major shock to the Japanese, who had been able to fly safely at high altitude, out of range of the 5"38 guns.
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  136. Interesting video. I hope you're doing okay. You don't sound quite as animated as usual but, then, with all this crap going on, who does?
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  137. Tell us about "fire ships". I've heard of them but know nothing about them.
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  138. For anyone interested in Carely Floats, this Australian report (https://www.awm.gov.au/sites/default/files/encyclopedia/hmas_sydney/carleyfloat.pdf) has just about anything you'd ever want to know about them. One survival item added to many Carley floats later in the war was tobacco and rolling papers in waterproof containers. These were built with a waterproof lid so they could keep the tobacco and paper dry after being opened This may seem to be a weird kind of survival item, but studies done with sailors that survived on Carley Floats or liftboats/rafts showed that maintaining morale was second only to fresh water when it came to survival. During WWII, smoking was nearly universal among men, and facing some unknown period of time fighting the sea with no smokes cause an immediate drop in morale from the physical effects of withdrawals and just not having the psychological benefit of something associated with normal life. Even with only enough tobacco for one smoke a day, sailors reported they felt better, there was less disagreements among the other crewmen, and they all worked better together toward the shared goal of getting rescued. Yes, I know smoking is bad for you, but life was different 80 years ago.
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  139. That's a massive garden for one person. How many times a week does she have to water? My garden is about a tenth of that size and it takes a couple hours of work each day. All the marigolds really do produce a natural insecticide. Does she still cook with wood like it appears the neighbor does? A pension of $50 a month doesn't leave much left over to buy appliances like washing machines. This reminds me of the village in Slovenia that was in the same state. My late wife's relatives live there, and all of them have large gardens like this. During the Tito era, the state spread factories out to the villages so an invasion couldn't wipe out all the industry at once. The village had a chair factory that employed about 75 workers so the village was able to maintain a population of about 350. After independence in 1991, the factory no longer got subsidies like it did in the communist era. The machinery was old, and the chairs were very poorly made. The factory went out of business by 1996 and all the men had to try to find jobs in the surrounding villages. Last I looked, the population is down to about 100 and the village is slowly dying.. Most the sons and daughters of the mostly pensioner population still come out from the city to plant and tend the gardens so they can get good quality fresh vegetables. The produce sold in supermarkets is not good quality, and the kids were used to better.
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  140. Finland never became truly independent until after the collapse of the USSR in 1981. They were occupied by Sweden and Russia until 1918 after which they became theoretically independent but in reality still under the economic domination of the USSR. The Finns, really for the first time, decided they weren't going to knuckle under to any more Soviet demands and fought. While the Finnish Army performed better than anyone thought they could, the outcome was inevitable, and more demands by the Soviets had to met as part of the ceasefire. The Finns decided to use the support of Germany in 1944-1945 to eject Soviet forces from Finnish territory. Once again, the Finns were on the wrong side, and another armistice and accession ended the war in 1945. This was the start of a period of enforced neutrality and economic domination by the USSR until the collapse of communism in 1981. For the first time in its history., the Finns were truly free to choose their own path. Thanks for this series, Sergei. It;s too bad more people didn't more people didn't seem to find this interesting, but I thought this was a fascinating trip into the mind of a Soviet citizen in the later period of the USSR.
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  141. The Yugoslav government allow people to keep what was called "family land". That was an acre or two that a family had to prove had been owned by members of the family going back to about 1800. Other than those plots, all land was owned by the government, and all farming was done on collective farms. If anyone doesn't believe capitalism is the only system that assures the maximum supply of goods to the people, they should have visited Slovenia in the 70's and, I imagine, the Ukraine at the same time. People who lived in the city would always go out to the country and work their family lands. Estimates I've read is those plots produced almost 40% of the food grown in Slovenia. Family plots produced food from literally even square inch of soil while the collective farms always looked half empty, and the plants looked half dead.
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  142. "U-571" was one of the worst naval dramas ever made. It not only rightly pissed off the British over the idea the US somehow captured an Enigma machine before they did, they showed it happening in a completely unbelievable way. The really aggravating part is they had the chance to make a film about a heroic capture of U-Boat and Enigma machine by the USN that really happened with the capture of U505. Why they chose to make up this story that put together every bad bit of pseudo history is beyond me
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  143.  @PlainlyDifficult  I believe it. Keeping Baby Plainly asleep is way more important than getting too animated on a video. :-)
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  144. Dang it! Ready for bed and Drach shows up! Will Sar Jim actually stay awake for the entire hour? Stay tuned...
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  145. LOL. I love these anecdotes developed over the decades. I didn't see the punchline with Georgian college student coming.
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  146. I hope today has been a better day for you.
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  147. I'm about 250 miles from Mobile (yes, you pronounced that right) and I'd sure like to be part of any meetup we can get organized there. How many others are there here that are close enough to Mobile to think they might be able to join up?
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  148. Good morning, fellow Drach fans. Sitting here watching the radar to see if I get any tornadoes in the next couple of hours so a Drydock episode is just what i need.
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  149. Rats! Just about to finally go to bed and Drach comes on at 0415 CDT. Oh well, thank goodness, I'm retired so I can afford to lose out on another hour of sleep. :-)
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  150. Antonov has been kept busy retrofitting turboprop engines into piston powered AN-2 airframes. What's more amazing is that Antonov is about to restart production of a new version of the AN-2. Still a biplane, it will have a five blade turboprop engine with some of the body panels made of carbon fiber composites. There are supposedly several hundred orders for this new version. Not bad for an airplane first flown in 1947.
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  151. Good article. I think it was a shame to destroy a historic piece of art just because people didn't want it on the main street of Kiev. I'm no fan of Lenin, but the statue could have been removed in one piece and then displayed in a museum. It's a piece of history now smashed and gone.
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  152. I'm familiar with Slovenia since my late was from there, and from the days that Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia. Most of the Russian bread is the same type sold in Slovenia before the revolution in 1991. The ring type bread was usually sold as a bagel, and a lot of pastries were sold, probably influenced by w=how close Slovenia was to Austria. One thing I never saw in Slovenia was cornbread. Bread there was various forms of rye and wheat. I think the revolution would have started a lot sooner if Tito had attempted to sell only cornbread.
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  153. ​ @Drachinifel  Well, it figures that's a book I don't have. I'll have to see if I can get a copy at reasonable cost. I generally use the two volume Hitler's U-Boat War by Clay Blair as a reasonably reliable source for details of the war. I was flabbergasted to find both volumes in hard cover and in good condition for $5 at a yard sale! I wish I could find deals like that every day. :-) Blair, in volume 2, pages 64-66, states it was not only a B-24, but it was the same B-24, again flown by Harden, that attacked U-506 the day after the attack on U-156. However, take a look at http://www.uboatarchive.net/U-506A/U-506INT.htm, the interrogation of survivors by the RN after the sinking of U-506 on July 12, 1943 by yet another B-24. Oberleutnant Hans Schult not only survived the sinking, he was on the bridge during the Laconia incident. Confusingly, Schult reported the first attack had British and US aircraft involved. The timeline given by Schult, or at least as recorded by the unnamed interrogator(s), doesn't help matters, as it appears the attack on U-506 may have occured later on the same day. Schult reported the order came after the first attack to take as many survivors on the U-boat below as wouldn't interfere with the combat capabilities of the boat, put the rest in the lifeboats, and cast them off. It was apparently hoped the lifeboats would attract the attention of the planes away from the U-boat. When an aircraft did return some three hours after the lifeboats were cast off, no one was on deck, and the lifeboats were some distance away. All the attacking aircraft saw was a surfaced sub so it attacked. It dropped two bombs after U-506 was already at 130 feet after a crash dive. The bombs (which may have actually been depth charges) exploded but were not close enough to cause damage. U-506 apparently continued toward a rendezvous with French warships and never saw the lifeboats again. She met up with the French "a few days" later and handed over her survivors. Schult never actually mentions the type of aircraft involved in the attacks, so I suppose it's possible one was a B-25. In general, the B-25's were conducting patrols closer to Ascension Island, then a top secret base, in an attempt to keep U-boats away from the island. The B-24's were used for patrol further offshore due to their greater range and ordnance load. At this late date, I don't think we'll ever be able to say for certain. What does seem to be certain is there were no survivors on the deck of the U-506, and no lifeboats visible to the pilots of the attacking aircraft. At this point, I have a splitting headache from trying to figure all this out. Time for another cup of coffee and some ibuprofen.
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  154. I suppose Nagato vs Hood also depends on time of day as WWII approaches. As shown in the early 1942 period, the Japanese superiority at night fighting would confer an even greater advantage.
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  155. The statue of Lenin was first at the 1939-1940 World's Fair in New York City. It was removed back to the USSR after the fair and stored until after WWII. It was erected in Kiev in 1946 and lasted until 2013 during the the Euromaidan demonstrations. That statue was pulled down and replaced by a golden toilet, a good joke itself. The really huge monument at the World's Fair wasn't Lenin. It was a 79 foot stainless steel statue on top of a 188 foot pedestal. The statue was of a man with a lighted red star held in his raised right hand. It got the nickname of ""Joe the Worker", much to the dismay of Stalin. It too was removed back to the USSR, but it was never seen again. It's presumed it was melted for its steel at some point during the war.
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  156.  @PlainlyDifficult  OTOH, I'm not unsubscribing, so it's not all bad news.
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  157.  @Drachinifel  LOL. The trouble with Europe is you guys just have too many seas to deal with. Over here, it's easy. Atlantic, Pacific, done and dusted. :-)
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  158. Near the end of the war, the USN finally started giving 40mm gunners more protection with the "turret" design (http://www.kagero.pl/images/nicewatermark/occnvai296the-battleship-uss-missouricati96navyiti686-02_missourishopk1.jpg) of steel plate all around except the the rear of the mount. The height of the gun tub and armoring of the tub was also increased. The USN never came up with a full enclosed mount for the quads, but the late war design was better than the previous mounts. They had zero protection from even splinters except for the gun tubs. Inexplicably, the successor 3"/50 mounts reverted to zero protection again. The guys on the 20mm guns, except for the totally inadequate forward shield, were pretty much on their own.
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  159. Excellent schedule. It looks like it will work. My offer still stands. If we can get another subscriber to get you from Charleston to Columbus GA or Dothan AL, I'll be your taxicab over to Mobile. I haven't confirmed it yet, but i suspect a flight from Charleston to Mobile will involve flying backwards to Atlanta with a change of planes there, and it will undoubtedly be an expensive fare. I hope we can make this work for you.
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  160. Admiral Callaghan was, by all accounts, an excellent naval commander that inspired the  confidence of his men and his superiors. He seemed like a natural choice for command of Task Group 67.4 in time for this battle. What Callaghan showed, however, was the dividing line between this naval officers who used and understood radar and those who thought radar was a kind of flash in the pan that would never last and really didn't work. If Callaghan had understood what radar could do for him, he would have positioned his ships so the best radars and crews would be in the van of the attack. Instead, he tried to fight in more of a WWI type of battle than one on the cusp of clear USN superiority due to nothing but a collection of vacuum tubes and wires. Unfortunately,
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  161. I wouldn't like to try to discredit any military based on one failure. What was interesting to me is the use of the Marshal Shaposhnikov for this oublic publicity test. The ship was commissioned in 1985 and had `quite a serious fire while inder refit in2018. The Russhians have neve publically stated the cause of the fire, but the combination of the refit and fire repair was iver three years, so the combination was a lot of work. The Kalibr missile launch was apparently part of her post refit sea trials. Fire repairs and refit have now stretched to over four years. This is on top of it being a vessel more than 35 years old. I have no idea if any of this contributed to the launch failure, but almost all the missile fire control electronics were replaced as part of the refit and upgrading. If I was the admiral in charge, I'd want to be having a very serious talk with all my engineering and weapons officers to make sure this kind of failure never happens again.
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  162. My grandma still had her water well in the backyard that was very similar to the one your video. Even though the water district had laid water pipes to her area and she had pressurized water in the house, she still only drank the water from the well. It tasted weird to me when I was you son's age, since I was used to chlorinated city water. Unfortunately, she passed on in 1993, and I've never been back to the old home place since it was sold shortly afterwards. I'd like another taste of that well water if it still exists to see what it tastes like now that I've got some years under my belt. The one thing I do remember was how cold that water was, even on a hot summer day. It must seem like traveling across generations when you go back to Michigan from the Ukraine.
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  163. In English, it would be a spa for the places with health treatments. Resorts generally have no medical treatments as part of the regimen, although some things like massages might be available. Closest I can come up with "places of rest" all-inclusive type hotels that includes everything including meals and entertainment. The place with the A frames would probably be closest to a hostel. I was just reading an article about Yalta. It was doing pretty well until the 2014 Russian annexation and creation of the rump Autonomous Republic of Crimea. About 20% of tourists to Yalta were from EU states before the annexation. That has almost dropped to nothing now and the economy has really been blasted.
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