Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "10th Light Flotilla - Italian Underwater Operations at Malta and Alexandria" video.

@DELTATROOPER5555 I would expect that the powers with the largest fleets offer the most targets for frogmen. Imagine if, while the battleship forces are duking it out around Leyte Gulf, a swarm of Japanese frogmen got in among the invasion force, all those stationary ships full of cargo, or in any of the big anchorages the allies had around the Pacific. The Brits adopted both midget subs and manned torpedoes. The USN established the UDT teams, originally to clear obstacles for amphib landings in 42. The UDT teams evolved into the SEALs of today. Why didn't the Germans and Japanese pick up the idea?
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@the_mighty_cornflake3858 the Fusos and Ises were a mite slow. A more interesting scenario might be converting the Kongos, but the Kongos were real workhorses through the war, used until they were wiped out, while other battleships sat in port. So would CV converted Kongos have greater utility than the Kongos as battlecruisers? By 44, seemed that more carriers would have been redundant anyway, because they didn't have enough pilots to man the carriers they still had. Too many moving factors in that scenario for me to game out.
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@robertstone9988 there are pix on line of a model of Arizona as it is today. Outside of the tip of the bow, the forward half of the ship is structurally destroyed. Had Arizona sunk in deep water, that forward half would probably have broken up during the fall. Drawings I see of Hood sinking show the forward section at a steep angle, with the bow far into the air. Material I read says the bow broke near the spot where the way the keel is made changed. I suspect Hood's bow broke off due to the same forces that broke Titanic in half from one end being entirely out of the water, with the forces acting on that weak spot where the keel structure changed. Then the pieces of Hood would suffer additional damage from impact with the bottom after their long fall, while Arizona only settled a few feet, coming to rest with her quarterdeck barely awash.
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@robertstone9988 HMS Furious was intended to have single 18" fore and aft, but then the fore turret was replaced by the flight deck before completion. Furious went in months later, when the rear 18" was pulled and a landing deck for aircraft added. The 18" guns were later remounted on some of the Lord Clive class monitors.
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@robertstone9988 your question seemed to make sense to me, and I gave my theory about why Arizona is, sort of, in one piece: the wreck only dropped about 20 feet, so didn't have a chance to fall apart, like Hood did. I take the "final salvo" as exactly that. If the guns are loaded and ready to go, and the trigger is right in front of you, why not pull it? Those shells aren't going to do any good sitting on the bottom. If the forward magazines had detonated, there wouldn't be much left of the Hood at all, as the extent of damage would probably be about equal to the length of the ship shattered by the aft mag explosion.
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@mikesaporitojr3313 offhand, I would say Italy. Japan gave notice in 1934 that it would leave the treaty system when First London expired at the end of 36, so it had a free hand when it did things like build the Yamatos. Germany was not part of the treaty system. Italy was a member of the treaty community when it laid down battleships and cruisers that violated the displacement limits, and it lad down a lot more treaty breaking ships than Germany did. so would have been a bigger violater than Germany, if Germany had been a member of the treaty system.
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