Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "Drachinifel" channel.

  1. Speaking of the WWI battlecruiser situation, some accounts I have read say that, in spite of the press of other priorities, construction of Hood proceeded as Hood, combined with the two Renowns then building, would make up the battlecruiser losses from Jutland. What if Fisher's salesman skills were just a bit better and the contracts for Agincourt and Resistance were also converted to Renown class battlecruisers? With four Renowns building, would Hood have been proceeded with, or any of the Admirals laid down at all? Then, in the late 1930s, with the KGVs and fast carriers under development, the other three Renowns receive rebuilds comparable to Renown's, because they can keep up with the new ships, while QE, Warspite and Valiant remain in their 1930 form, similar to Malaya and Barham. Would anything really change in WWII?
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  2.  @Blandge  I can see a US pre-war heavy cruiser being mistaken for a "California type" BB, because of the USN's affection for "clipper" bows. I don't know about the most egregious case. How many times did the Japanese claim to have sunk Enterprise? The second Lexington, CV-16, was claimed sunk by the Japanese so many times it became nicknamed "the blue ghost", blue for the camo paint color it was painted, and ghost because if was claimed sunk so many times. When I was on the Lex, some 50 years ago, I noticed a blue ghost mascot painted on the ship's C-1. The Wiki article says sinkings were claimed following actions on Dec 4, 43, March 8, 44, June 11,44, November 5,44
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  3. The British 18" torp was developed though the war too. The Mk XII had a 388lb warhead, but the MkXV, in service in 43, had a 575lb warhead, and the MkXVII. in service in 45, had a 600lb warhead. In the back of my mind is the thought the US Mk13 had it's short, fat, dimensions due to the TBD's eccentric way of carrying it's torp.
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  4.  @VinylScratchBass  That is CV-16. When the Lex first commissioned she was wearing a blue paint job. She gained the "ghost" part because the Japanese claimed to have sunk her so many times. When I was on the Lex, I was looking over her C-1 in the hangar one day and noticed a little blue ghost mascot painted on the fuselage. There are several photos on the net of the Lex's C-1 with various mascots that look like Casper the ghost, but that is not the paint job I remember.
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  5. I have read that PTs were also very handy attacking German "F-lighers" which were widely used in the Med the same way the Japanese used their Daihatsu barges. Watched a documentary a number of years ago, where a former PT Captain showed the smashed binoculars he had been wearing one night, when they deflected a bullet fired from an F-lighter, saving his life. When my dad landed in France in 44, he saw PTs off in the distance, guarding against any E-Boats that might try to take a shot at the transports. He was with me when I saw "PT 109" in the theater, and he commented he had not know they were as large as they were, because he had never seen one up close.
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  6.  @collinwood6573  considering how elderly the TBD was by 42, it was OK. It was considerably slower than the other USN aircraft, when loaded. That low cruising speed, I put down to the drag from the unorthodox way the TBD carried it's torpedo: hanging down at an angle, rather than cinched up tight under the fuselage. The reason the TBD was slaughtered at Midway was the attack was fatally botched. At Coral Sea, the TBDs, SBDs and F4Fs, made coordinated attacks. At Coral Sea, a few SBDs and F4Fs were lost to the Japanese CAP, but not a single TBD was lost to Japanese action. The only difference between Coral Sea and Midway was the SBDs and F4Fs all went in the wrong directions, leaving the TBDs exposed.
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  7. I did a post on a Naval group on Facebook a while back, speculating on a triple turret arrangement. That half salvo doctrine was one of the objections made, and redundancy was another. But the Scharnhorsts, with three triples, seems to discredit the idea of half salvos and redundancy being mandatory. After years of building triples, the reversion to twins just does not make sense.
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  8.  @michaelkovacic2608  Another reply on this post made me think for a moment. By the time Bismark was launched, in 39, the US and UK had, by mutual agreement, increased the treaty displacement limit to 45,000. and the gun escalator had also been triggered, so Bismark was treaty compliant.
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  9.  @brendonbewersdorf986  not quite up to the Bofors standard, but John Browning designed a 37mm AA gun for the US army. Originally clip fed, from the left side, it was modified to take chain link belts, and feed from either the right or the left. I proposed, on another page, that, given a proper water cooling system, the Browning gun could have been used in a quad mount very much like that used on the PomPom, instead of the USN trying to get he 1.1" working. Of the two, the Browning 37, and the Bofors, the Bofors is the better gun. I have my notes somewhere, but, iirc, it comes down to the Bofors having a slightly larger shell, and a higher ceiling. The US Army used the Browning gun well into 42, gradually replacing it as Bofors became available.
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  10. iirc, the Lord Clive class used 12" turrets scrounged from some very old pre-dreadnoughts. Due to their age, these turrets were subject to frequent breakdown. They were not the sort of thing to rely on. The Admiralty was probably right in scrapping the Lord Clives, and only keeping the monitors that had the new 15" turrets on them. Additionally, any monitor would be immediately recognized as not German.
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  11. wrt the alt history of no allied intervention in Greece, the Axis was working on getting access to the oil fields of Iraq and Iran. The Vichy government was increasingly accommodating to the Axis, allowing Luftwaffe units to operate in airfields in Syria. Italy and Germany had backed a coup in Iraq, April 1, 41, which removed the pro-British regime and installed a pro-Axis regime. The Iranian regime was also regarded as Axis friendly. Without Allied intervention, Greece may have been defeated sooner, enabling an amphibious operation from Greece to Syria. British troops invaded Iraq May 2, 41, closing the door on the possibility of unopposed Axis access to Iraqi oil, before the Germans could secure Greece and Crete.
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  12.  @gregorywright4918  Lexington's forward flight deck was squared up in 37. I don't think Sara had it's forward deck squared up until early 42. The last of the old BBs to be rebuilt were the New Mexicos in 1930-31. The Tennessees and Colorados received minimal updates, until damage from December 7th offered an excuse to rebuild some of them. Yorktown, Enterprise and Wasp were built with money from an industrial recovery program, as they required all new steel, all new machinery, and the work was contracted to private yards. That money would probably have not been available to modernize existing ships in Navy Yards, because modernizations would not require as much new material, so would not do as much to get industry moving again.
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  13. Sweepers weren't totally ignored. The USS Caine was a minesweeper, specifically a DMS, in the book a converted 4 piper, in the movie they used two Gleaves class DDs that the Navy had also converted to sweepers. There is one sequence in both the book and movie where they practice deploying paravanes. I looked in a 1945 edition of Jane's and found a class of converted 4 piper DMSs, exactly as described in the book. Curiously, there was a 1 digit gap in the hull numbers listed in Jane's, with no corresponding entry in the war losses section. That missing number was the one Wouk used for the Caine.
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  14. wrt to the question of Revenge being a downgrade from the QE, and other cases of following ships being less capable, another glaring example are the USN Mississippi class BB-23 and 24. The Mississippis were of smaller displacement than the preceding Connecticut class, and so short on speed and coal capacity that they were incapable of keeping up with the rest of the battle line. The Mississippis were the product of Senator Hale, the Chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, who refused to pass the Navy appropriation legislation the House had passed to the Senate floor until his two small battleships were funded. Press criticism of the Mississippis at the time was blistering and there were charges that Hale was insisting on the small ships for personal reasons. Hale retired from the Senate in 1911, making the ships expendable. The Greeks showed up, with checkbook in hand, in 1914, desperate for battleships to counter those the Ottomans had building in the UK. Even then, the US held Greece up for some $12M+, what the US had paid for the the undersized, and by 1914 obsolete, ships, when new.
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  15. My two cents worth: a navy can call a ship whatever it wants. The RN called the Courageouses "large light cruisers". That classification appears to have been accepted by the Washington conference, as the Courageouses are not listed among capital ships on either the retention or disposal lists. So the Courageouses appear to have been grandfathered, as were all the other cruisers that exceeded treaty limits for cruisers. That opens the door to the possibility that, if the RN had continued with the classification of "dreadnought armed cruiser", all of the ships now regarded as "battle cruisers", would have been recognized by the treaty as "cruisers.
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  16. wrt the question on relining guns, I happened to read a US Naval Academy gunnery textbook from 1915 last week that describes the process in detail. At the turn of the century, a lot of guns were initially built without liners, and had to be bored out to make room for the liner when the gun was refurbished. The feed rate for the boring operation was about 6"/hour, so boring a 12-14" gun would take 4-5 days, running continuously, per pass, and it would take several passes to bore the gun sufficiently to allow insertion of a liner. Initially, the liners were of uniform diameter, which simplified the boring operation. The liners were inserted and removed by placing the gun in an oven and heating it, to cause the metal of the gun to expand, so the unheated liner could be inserted. Removing an existing liner amounted to heating the outside of the gun, while running cold water through the bore to keep the liner cool so it would not expand with the heated gun. Then pressing out the old liner with a press. Sometimes, the uniform diameter liners did not want to come out, and had to be bored out, consuming a great deal of time and expense. So the shift was made to boring the gun and turning the OD of the liner with a slight taper, so they would separate more readily.
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  17. wrt the question on the F2A, as Drac said, the first problem was weight. The early models were quite agile. "Pappy" Boyington praised it's handling. But the Navy wanted armor, self-sealing fuel tanks, more guns, more ammo, and weight grew. Besides a disastrous impact on performance, the increased weight lead to more landing gear failures. In Aussie hands, the planes were put on a diet: all the armor, except that directly behind the pilot, was removed. The wing 50 cal machine guns were replaced with .303s. Besides the reduced weight of the .303 guns and their ammo, putting the weight reduction out on the wins would also reduce rotational inertia, which improves roll rate. The life raft and Brewster provided radio, which did not work worth a hoot, were also removed. As modified, the Aussie Buffs apparently pretty much held their own against the early Japanese army fighters. Another problem was the engines installed on the Aussie and far east RAF Buffs. There was apparently a shortage of Wright Cyclones, so the planes built for export were fitted with worn out airline castoffs (the DC-2 used the Cyclone) that had been 'refurbished" by Wright. Whether due to the engines being refurbs, or the fundamental design of the engine, I don't know, but the Buffs in far east service also tended to overheat and blow out their oil. Given that the Cyclone was also used in the SBD and B-17, I would lean toward laying the engine's ill temper in the export Buffs on their state of wear, in spite of being "refurbished". Best moves to improve the Buff, besides the weight reduction program the Aussies gave them, would be actual, new, Cyclones, or Pratt Twin Wasps, like the earlier, Grumman-built, F4Fs had. Or, take the entire program away from Brewster and give it to someone who knew how to run an aircraft factory, and had capacity available.
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  18. The A5 Vigilante had a folding vertical stabilizer. Perhaps a similar approach could have been taken with the Tornado.
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  19.  @HumphreyHorsehead  I would suspect the poo went into the water at sea. I think I have a pic, on my other computer, of the instruction plaque in the head of USS Silversides. Solid trash and garbage went off the fantail of the ship. When I was on the Lex, sometime during the day, the 1MC would bark "take all trash and garbage aft", and over the rail it went. Marine heads on pleasure boats used to discharge into the water too. I remember the rhubarb when pleasure boat owners on the Great Lakes had to install holding tanks, iirc in the late 60s. I used to ride passenger trains in the 60s. Their bathrooms dropped directly onto the tracks.
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  20. Drac, I started looking in to the Courageous class "large light cruisers" some days ago. There are two narratives about them that I see repeated over and over: 1: they were built with shallow draft to operate in the Baltic. and, 2: they were converted to carriers because of the Washington treaty. I can't find any support for either of those narratives that makes any sense. As you point out in your piece on the Courageouses, the Germans could send any capital ships into the Baltic that they wanted via the Kiel Canal. If the Courageouses were the only big gun ships the RN could get into the Baltic, they would be dead meat when the entirety of the High Seas Fleet came over the horizon. If the RN could get other capital ships into the Baltic, there is no reason to build the Courageouses. The WNT appears to not regard the Courageouses as "capital ships". The Courageouses do not appear on the capital ship disposal list, nor the capital ship retention list, nor is there any verbiage that I can find in the treaty compelling their conversion. Why were the Courageouses built? One person on another forum has offered a scenario that makes sense: the Courageouses were built as cruiser killers that were small and cheap enough, in relative terms, to build in large quantity. That scenario has the virtue of making sense. The Courageouses cost a third less than the Renowns, and used fewer of the limited inventory of twin 15" turrets per ship, allowing more of them to be built. Have you ever heard of this alternative to the generally accepted scenarios?
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  21. wrt the question about the USN experimenting with T-E drive before using it in battleships, USS Jupiter had TE drive. Laid down in 1911, she was four years ahead of the T-E powered New Mexico.
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  22.  @timrobinson513  the full text of the treaties is available on line. Makes for interesting reading. For instance, Italy and France were the only countries given BB building windows in 27 and 29, while no-one else could start building replacements until 31. The first London treaty extended the BB building moratorium from 31 until 36, but the two construction windows the 1922 treaty allocated to France and Italy did not expire in those years, but rather were good until used. That is how France could lay down the Dunkerques and Italy could lay down the first two Littorios when they did, while the UK could not lay down the KGV until 37.
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  23.  @jetdriver  by "fully modernized" members of the Big 5, I presume you are referring to California and West Virginia. Those ships had been sunk, and were going to be in the yard a long time anyway. As long as a lot of reconstruction was being done anyway, may as well build them to 1942 standard. Colorado received next to nothing in reconstruction, just added AAA. Once the war was on, as long as ships were not severely damaged, I can understand the Brits not wanting to take a ship offline for a year or two for major work. As for wearing out the QEs and Rs, the ships were over 20 years old and obsolete. With Italy out of the war in 43, the German capital ships mostly sunk, and the KGVs in commission, the old tubs were not worth more than what could be described as palliative care as they all had a date with the breakers on V-E day.
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  24.  @f12mnb  "The Battleship Builders", which focuses on the RN, says the really heavy cranes were in the fitting out basin, where they handled the turrets, guns and, the object of the question I put above, the turbines and boilers. The cranes along the building ways were smaller, as they only handled sections of steel.
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  25.  @brendonbewersdorf986  Salamis being about 100 feet shorter, and 30 feet narrower than Eagle, and 30 feet shorter, 30 odd feet narrower than Bearn, and the Germans not having the experience the UK obtained with Argus, Furious, and Vindictive, the amount of suckage a Salamis carrier conversion would exhibit would probably make the French say "whew Bearn isn't as bad as that thing the Germans have"
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  26.  @memeboy8207  as Fred said, the only TV series that comes to mind is "McHale's Navy". For theatrical films including PTs, "They Were Expendable" and "PT 109". When "PT 109" was in production, there were no 80 foot Elco boats available, so 85 foot former Air Force rescue boats were modified to resemble Elcos.
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  27.  @scottgiles7546  each DD carried a dozen Mark 8s. Not a very good torpedo, but the captain of the Scheer could not count on any particular one malfunctioning. It would take some pretty fancy driving to duck all of them. And, while Scheer was ducking torpedoes, the freighters of the convoy are disappearing over the horizon.
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  28. wrt the question about models vs drawings, in some applications, the model was built first, because of the difficulty of rendering 3-dimentional objects on 2-dimension drawings. When I worked in fluid handling in the 70s, it was routine to build a model of a refinery or chemical plant first, to work out all the pipe routing, then make up drawings from the model. It was routine to build full scale mockups of new aircraft for the same reason, to work out all the hydraulic and electrical conduits and possible interference with bulkheads. The Boeing 777 was the first aircraft to be designed entirely in computer, in the early 90s, because, 3D computer modeling had finally advanced enough.
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  29. USN procurement choices in 1936. That is a "target rich environment", especially BuOrd. It wasn't just the ineffective Mk 14 detonators. The air launched Mk 13 torp suffered multiple failure modes including the motor not starting, sinking, running too deep and running erratically. In a live fire exercise in the summer of 41, of 10 Mk 13s fired, only 1 ran hot, straight and normal. Once BuOrd was convinced the failures were not all pilot error and went to work, the faults were corrected and the Mk 13 was an excellent weapon, by late 44. Then there was the 1.1" AA gun. Looked good on paper, liquid cooling and an automatic ammo feed system so it could fire continuously, with a larger shell and greater range than the 25mm AA guns then available. But the 1.1" had multiple jam modes, plus the human factors issue of not having adequate room for the loaders to do their job. The Navy produced a color newsreel film about Midway that has several short looks at a couple 1.1s, firing. In the first 3 looks, the 1.1" in the foreground is blasting away with all 4 guns and looking very formidable. In the 4th glimpse, only the gun on the right end is firing, the other three are all stopped. The 1.1's faults were never corrected. If BuOrd was not going to conduct adequate development programs and deliver reliable weapons, they should have overcome their "not invented here" bias and bought weapons from other services. so we would have gone into the war with Brit Mk VIIIs in subs, Brit Mk XIIs in aircraft, and Bofors AA guns.
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  30.  @alantoon5708  the "Honor Restored" that I find on YT was made in 2011, with the survivors of the crew talking in studio. The film from the 60s was shot when Franklin was in the breaker's yard, with the crewmen on the ship retracing their steps and actions the day of the attack.
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  31. I posed several alt history questions a few months ago: USN Colorados never built, RN reorders all four of the ships cancelled in 1914 as Renowns, and a couple others. It will be interesting to see if any tickle his fancy. Maybe even a speculation about the UK swapping all it's West Indies colonies to the US in settlement of it's war debt? (the more I looked into that one, the better I liked it)
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  32. My favorite alternate Midway (I did see the new film, prefer the mid 70s version) would be if the US dive bombers and fighters from all three carriers took the same route to the Japanese fleet as their torpedo bombers did, so the attack has something resembling coordination. The Devastator did fine at Coral Sea. They stuffed 6-7 torps into the Shoho, and fired about 20 torps at Shōkaku, though they all missed. Accounts I have read of Coral Sea indicate that the Devastators operated without loss, while losses were sustained by the SBDs and F4Fs that were intercepted by the CAP. My theory of why the TBDs scored hits against Shoho, but not against Shōkaku is that the Shoho was lightly defended, but the greater amount of AA fire they were taking from Shōkaku motivated the pilots to rush their aim and release point, giving the ship more time to maneuver against the slow Mk 13s.
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  33.  @kommissarkillemall2848  yes, it was one of Reeman's. As for the romantic angle, it was the 60s. I remember the hot scene in the book. There was a hot scene in Jan de Hartog's "The Captain" as well. I found "Saracen" in the library at school. I would have been about 13 when I read it, and wondered if the librarian knew that bit was in there.
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  34. Why not take the direct approach, license the 40mm from Bofors? It was available about the same time as the Hotchkiss. Bofors would license it to anyone with a checkbook. The Soviets licensed the 25mm version from Bofors, reverse engineered it, and scaled it up to 37mm.
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  35.  @TheLeper2001  In the 1960s, Avalon Hill produced a game based on the battle. The game was initially fought on maps, and, when British and German units were found to be at the same coordinates, then cardboard tiles for each capital ship and each CL and DD squadron were used to lay out and fight the battle, using speed and range measuring devices and hit probability tables. A battle in progress on my living room floor looked very much like what Drac showed in the video. In the version of the game I had, the ship tiles were flat cardboard with a drawing of the ship, and numbers denoting speed, gunnery and armor factors. I would not be surprised if a later version of the game had molded plastic ship tiles like Drac used in the video.
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  36.  @sharlin648  in short, yes, the Pom-Pom was hindered by a low muzzle velocity, which limited range. Keep in mind how old the Pom-Pom design was by WWII. The early, smaller bore version, dated from the Boer War. I have heard wartime Pom-Pom gunners say their objective was not so much to shoot down enemy aircraft, as it was to provide deterrence: throw so much flack in the aircraft's path that the pilot decides to go look for an easier target. The Pom-Pom had something of a renaissance when the RN returned to the Pacific late in the war. While the Pom-Pom lacked the range to effectively engage attacking aircraft before they dropped their payload, in the case of a kamikaze, where the aircraft does it's damage at zero range, the range limitation of the gun was not a factor. When a kamikaze closed to effective range, a Pom-Pom could shoot it to bits much more effectively than an Oerlikon.
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  37. wrt the question about the 14" guns on the KGVs, British cordite seems to be considerably less dense than USN smokeless powder. While the weight of the charge in the British guns is less, the chamber size of the British guns is significantly larger. This is also true of the 16"/45 used on the Nelsons vs the 16"/45 used on the US Colorado class. The muzzle velocity of the British guns is a bit lower, but a lower muzzle velocity results in a higher trajectory and steeper angle of fall, which is better able to penetrate deck armor. The debate about whether to stay with 16", or having more guns by downscaling to 14", was a long standing debate. The USN had had exactly the same debate 20 years earlier. The head of BuOrd insisted that engagements would always be fought at 12,000 yards or less, a 14" could penetrate well enough, and, being smaller, more 14" could be carried. The USN General Board looked at the engagement ranges at Jutland, overruled the head of BuOrd, and made long range gunnery the priority. As Drac said, the choice for the KGVs was dependent on the same condition that the head of BuOrd had specified in 1915: engaging at short range. I have another theory about the move to 14" guns. UK industry's capacity to make large guns had atrophied since WWI. The guns for the KGVs had to be ordered by late 35, before the change to 14" was specified by the Second London Treaty, to meet the construction schedule for the ships. I have read that the new 14" was designed to fit in the same cradle as the earlier 13.5"/45. When Tiger and most of the Iron Dukes were scrapped in the early 30s, the Admiralty retained many of the 13.5" guns. Navweaps says 54 of those guns were in inventory in 1939. It may be possible that the Admiralty designed the KGV gun mounts for backward compatibility. If there was a development or production problem with the new 14"/45, I think it is possible the Admiralty was looking at completing some or all of the KGVs with the 13.5" as a stopgap.
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  38.  @LucioFercho  I think it was in Brown's "The Grand Fleet" where I read of post-war testing that showed the flash doors used in British capital ships were too weak. If the doors were closed, an explosion would blow them open, defeating their purpose. Why does the story persist that the safety features had been intentionally defeated by the crew? It may be true, or maybe not. The dead can't tell us. It is easier for the higher ups to blame the victims, than to admit that maybe their design was not fit for purpose. When the turret on Iowa suffered an explosion in 1989, the Navy was very quick to blame one of the men in the turret, floating a story that he had decided to commit suicide, and take everyone else in the turret with him, by placing a detonator in the gun to ignite the charges before the breech was closed.
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  39.  @untruelie2640  the Germans tried raiding northern England from Norway. The range was beyond the capability of the single engine German fighters. The unescorted bombers were slaughtered.
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  40. I'll second that thought. As it happens, I dug out my copy and watched it again last Saturday. The opening, where the crewman is hung for the temerity of suggesting the Captain's navigation is wrong reminds me of some of the places I worked over the years.
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  41. wrt the "Vickers 14" salesman", certainly not the only Vickers agent, but one of the most notorious, was Basil Zaharoff. who was in Vickers' employ in the early 1900s. If you happen to come across a DVD box set of the early 1980s production of "Reilly Ace Of Spies", Zaharoff, played by Leo McKern, appears from time to time. Jackie Fisher also shows up a few times. The series is based on "Ace Of Spies" by Robin Bruce Lockhart, based on the memories of his father, who worked with Reilly.
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  42.  @ernestcline2868  the first thoughts that come to mind: cruisers and battleships could take the extra top weight of cat, hangar, and aircraft better than a destroyer, and fleet auxiliaries could not keep up with the battlefleet, often plodding along at a maximum of 15kts. I suppose they could try the treaty work around the Japanese tried, by building aircraft carriers under 10,000 tons, to carry a dozen, or fewer scouts. But it was probably cheaper to mount the cats on the battleships and cruisers, than build new, dedicated, ships. Full on aircraft carriers were limited by the treaty in number, and expensive.
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  43. On that 1936 question, I'll give the USN General Board and C&R a thumping too. 36 is too early to prevent resources being wasted on the Alaska class cruisers, but it's just about right to have the Tennessee and Colorado class BBs updated into something useful in a mid 30s threat environment. As Drach's boiler video went into, boilers were much more capable in the mid 30s, than 20 years earlier, when the Tennessees and Colorados were designed. Use the space freed up by eliminating the motor-generator sets to install larger turbines to use the greater boiler output and they could produce a decent turn of speed. Being short and fat, they will not be efficient at speed, but then the length/width ratio was actually slightly higher than the also short and fat 27kt South Dakotas. Then a new superstructure and AA suite like West Virginia had after it's rebuild. If the budget was not available for the work, then i would lay up the Wyomings, New Yorks, Nevadas and Pennsylvanias to reduce running costs to make the funds available to C&R for the rebuilds. Just because the treaties allowed those old hulks to be run, doesn't mean they need to be run at the expense of improving newer, more capable, ships.
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  44.  @willrogers3793  Ship based helos vs floatplanes: Ever see a film of what has to be done to get the floatplane back on board the ship while the ship is under way? After the floatplane makes a water landing, which has it's own hazards in open ocean, the ship tows a large net through the water. The floatplane taxies up onto the net and a hook on the underside of the float catches the net. With the position of the plane wrt the ship stabilized, then the crane drops it's hook and the plan's pilot stands up in his cockpit, grabs the hook and attaches it to the plane. Then the plane is lifted on board. Fascinating process to watch, but landing a helo on deck is a lot simpler, faster and safer. There is a film on youtube of USS Chester recovering a Kingfisher.
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  45.  @VersusARCH  I would like to hear about the First Balkan War myself. Especially, why, in neither the battle of Elli or Lemnos, did either side attempt to torpedo the other's ships? I gather the Greeks had not had the money to buy 21" torpedoes for the new Aetos class DDs, but the Thyellas and Nikis had been in commission for years. Same thing on the Ottoman side. All the DDs ran back up the Dardanelles, instead of attacking, though I did read there were charges and counter-charges whether Ottoman command had signaled the DDs to attack and the DD squadron commander not seen the signal.
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  46.  @enoughrope1638  My Canadian friend likes to wind me up about how obsolete those destroyers were. I remind him that the USN was still using a lot of them too: first USN loss in the Atlantic was a four piper (Reuben James), first USN win in the Pacific was a four piper (Ward). Sending more modern DDs to the UK in 40-41 would have been taking them right off the tip of the USN's spear.
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  47.  @galbert117  on the Pacific fleet vs IJN on Dec 7th: of they stayed in Pearl and used the Steve plan: scramble every fighter on the island when the phone call came in from the radar station, while a DD steamed around Ford Island laying smoke (the Japanese can't hit what they can't see) there would have been less damage. If the battle line stood out to meet the IJN, it would have been a slaughter. The BBs were so slow that the IJN could stand off and use it's air group to sink everything in sight. The USN only had two carriers available in the Pacific that day. If they were in the fight, they would have been lost too. The third alternative is interesting: the USN at Pearl had far more cruisers and DDs available than the IJN force. Leave the BBs in port and sortie the lighter units. The US cruisers and DDs charge the Japanese formation and shoot up everything in sight.
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  48. wrt the question about the RN pushing for the reduction to 14" guns in Second London. Nothing prevented the Brits using 14" guns in the earlier treaties, if they wanted to do that to provide, what in their assessment, was a better balanced ship. The French had built the Dunkerques well below treaty maximums in both guns and displacement. Seems it's more a matter of the RN trying to use the treaty to force everyone else to build what the RN wants, rather than everyone else working their own design within the original parameters. This was done again wrt carriers. Seems the Brits did a survey of their repair facilities around the empire and found that some facilities could only handle a carrier of 23,000 tons, not the 27,000 tons the earlier treaties had allowed. So, Ark Royal was built to 22,000 and the Illustrious class built to 23,000. And, Second London cut the carrier tonnage limit to what the Brits wanted to build, not what any other party was capable of building. The "escalator clause" of Second London only covered the gun size increase from 14" to 16". It did not include the displacement increase. The displacement increase was negotiated between the US and UK in early 38, and, again, the Brits tried to limit the increase to the 41-42,000 ton range, the largest British facilities could handle. The US held out for 45,000, which they finally got in mid 38, enabling the Iowas. Without so much time wasted due to British obstruction wrt the tonnage increase, the US could have skipped the slow, cramped, South Dakotas and gone straight to the Iowas that they really wanted.
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  49.  @george_364  Consider the spring of 38: Germany just annexed Austria, Italy had invaded Ethiopia, Japan had invaded China, Japan formally dropped out of the naval treaty, Italy was ignoring it, France was mad because the UK had done it's own naval deal with Germany, without consulting France. The world is catching fire, and the UK is still trying to make sure the one country still willing to talk with it, the US, can't build a bigger ship than the Brits can.
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  50.  @timmyrtue7252  my first thought is that, for a while, the USN was very short of torpedo bombers. Only about 130 TBDs were built. I read, somewhere along the line, that what with attrition from accidents before the war, only 90-something of them were still in service. 41 were launched at Midway, but only 6 made it back to their carriers. 13 more were lost with Lexington at Coral Sea. The navy may have only had 40+ left. The TBD was pulled from front line service after Midway. It probably took a while for Grumman to build enough TBFs to get every carrier up to strength.
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