Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "Naval Engineering - What happens when a shell hits a battleship?" video.
-
2
-
@p.a_thomas661 I have been reading "Sea Of Thunder". which was mentioned by one of the panelists, this week. The second half of the book is mostly about Leyte Gulf. Halsey wanted to meet the Japanese around dawn, so wanted to close at 16kts to get the timing right. iirc, Halsey went to bed to catch a few hours of sleep. Whoever was OOD, during his nap, I forget who, had speed increased to 20kts. When Halsey awoke, he ordered speed reduced to 16kts again. I would take that sequence to indicate that 20 was closer to "normal speed", and 16 was at Halsey's discretion for tactical advantage.
Kurita was making 18kts when steaming between Brunei and the Philippines, to conserve fuel, but stepped it up to 24kts, while steaming through the Sibuyan Sea. According to Wiki, Nagato lost some speed as a result of it's modernization a few years earlier, so would have been just about at full speed at 24.
The book does not give exact speeds for Nishimura's force. The author quotes the Japanese extensively, from both their immediate postwar interrogations and memoirs. The lack of detail about Nishimura's force, the entire battle is covered in only a couple pages, may be due to the low number of survivors on the Japanese side?
1