Hello Drach. When large warships are constructed is there any testing of the major machinery before the ship leaves the slipway? Seems like it would be a lot easier to fix a busted engine, boiler or screw shaft before the armored deck and bulkheads are put in. Thanks
How useful were paravanes? I've seen them on ships both the explosion anti submarine versions and the minesweeper types but I'm very curious if they actually worked as advertised or where just something to make the crew feel better?
So that a hundred years later, people in computer games could get themselves sunk trying to charge their battleship into torpedo range. Seriously tho, no one had any idea what range combat would take place at in a given era of post sail naval combat.
In hindsight it was obviously stupid. I would somewhat challenge the idea that it was just because no one knew better at the time. I'm not necessarily privy to what everyone at the time was thinking, but the more I learn about history, the more forward-thinking people tend to be. What I find is more often the case is that, at the time, it was ALSO obviously stupid, but the price of putting torpedoes on the ship is cheaper than the cost of being wrong about the ship not needing torpedoes. More often it's hedging bets than anything else. I think there was a British admiral who said something to the effect that investing in battleships when the carrier seems to be the way of the future will cost a billion pounds or whatever. Investing in only carriers and being wrong would cost them their empire.
@@DocZFlux I loved mine until I learned the way of the Prinz Eugen..... Over twice the torpedoes, faster firing guns. I've gotten multiple double kills rushing between two battleships.
@@nickjohnson410 Good one lol👍,, reminds me of Drach's quips about American WW ll ships bristling with AA batteries being "the policy of slapping guns on every available space allowing more American sailors their 2nd amendment rights " lol...
I've often wondered why some battleships had torpedoes but I'd never thought to ask. And then this video! The First Sea Lord of UA-cam never disappoints.
KMS Bismarck: "DAT ONE! DA GROßENDREADNOUGHTEN ALLERSHOOTEN NACH VOME ONE!" Captain Darlymple-Hamilton: "Commander, feed the Jerries all the AP and Torpex, please." Bismarck: "AAAIEEEEEE!!!"
I wondered why Polish destroyers had as many as 2 x 3 torpedo launchers. If something disables one launcher (with explosives), chances are the whole ship will explode - like Grom did. IMO one less launcher made tribal class destroyers best ships of their class. But after WWI torpedoes on battleships is beyond just "legacy cost". Its plain dumb ignorance. Sometimes decades of it.
@@Paciat I wouldn't necessary classify Tribals as an example of a normal destroyer though, and I don't consider 2 x 3 torp launchers an especially large torpedo loadout. It is just that Grom was based to Tribals in order have sufficient firepower to pose a threat against German and Sovjet destroyers, but still carrying a torpedo loadout strong enough be a threat against larger units, because unlike the RN, the polish navy couldn't fall back on more torpedo oriented destroyers. Tribals could become full anti-destroyer destroyers / super-light cruiser, where a Grom was always had to more lifting as a torpedo asset.
@@Tuning3434 Im not saying 2x3 torps are a large loadout. Im saying its a large weak point (2 of them) in a ship. If an explosion of 3 torpedos was enough to sink that ship it might be better to just get one x4 or x5 torpedo launcher instead. And ORP Orkan does exactly that, replacing one of its torpedo launchers with a 102mm gun.
@@Paciat I think I can see a couple of pretty good solid reasons. Mainly around redundancy in the event of mechanical problems. In oceangoing vessels, sometimes gear just breaks. In ocean going combat vessels, gear might be broken by enemy action. Yeah, I have read about some of the more dramatic results of torpedoes detonating while they're still aboard the ship, but not every sort of damage that might disable a torpedo launcher is going to do that. For instance, shrapnel might cripple a launcher's crew while doing pretty much nothing to the equipment itself.
From a war gaming perspective: In my Rule the Waves campaigns, I generally treat 1905-1910 as the cut off date for submerged torpedo rooms on capital ships. In the 1890s, battleship carried torpedoes are useful as a coup de grace, since gunfire alone struggles to sink enemy ships without unreasonable expenditure of ammunition. Furthermore, fewer torpedo boats are usually available due to newness, low range, fragility, etc., and those that are around may only carry a few torpedoes with no reloads. Submerged torpedo rooms in larger ships can carry more torpedoes and reload them internally. In the 1900-1910 period, there is a chance that battleship torpedoes can be useful in night time or low visibility condition combat if combatants stumble upon each other at close range. There, getting a crippling torpedo hit can make all the difference in a brief knife fight skirmish. Obviously though, such engagements are incredibly risky for capital ships and it is often better to simply avoid nighttime capital engagements if possible. From 1905 to 1910, the benefits fall off too much. Gunnery improves, shells improve, and fleet screens improve. A hit to a large, undivided submerged torpedo room causes a lot of flooding. Destroyer screens get in the way of potential targets. Torpedo protection also gets better, so the effectiveness of individual torpedo hits goes down. From a more historical perspective: It's interesting to note that there were a few WW2 engagements where battleship torpedo tubes arguably would have been useful if they had been present, like at the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. Range of down to 9000 yards, low visibility, benefit of surprise, etc. The Kongo class were built with 8 submerged torpedo tubes after all, although only 21 inch tubes, but they were removed when anti torpedo bulges were added. So perhaps one could argue there was still some potential usefulness in a night engagement if Murphy's law gets the escort screen out of the picture. Realistically though, the communication to the torpedo room and the firing of the torpedo on an aimed trajectory just take too long for the sort of hypothetical short sharp engagements that I mention from RTW campaigns, and perhaps too long for the chaos at 2nd Guadalcanal.
I put at least 2 submerged tubes on every ship until the ships start going beyond 25kn. After that, I put nothing until I research the above water torpedo tubes on all ships at which point every ship gets at least 2 torpedoes (usually 4 in 2 double mounts). It’s especially helpful on my CAs which I tend to use in fleet battles to pick off enemy capital ships that have taken damage and fallen out of the battle.
@@GreenKnight2001same, the singularly most important thing about having torpedoes on your battleships in RTW is so you know at what range to fear the enemy destroyers
In 1908 the Royal Navy doctrine was changed to fire at the battle line as a whole instead of targeting a specific ship. The battle line spaced ~600' long targets every ~600 yards, so 1 in 3 chance of hitting unless they turn away. The Germans in particular caught on. Look at how many torpedoes the large cruisers of ISG fired at Jutland. “a hit … on the ship aimed at with a single torpedo at long range … can only be regarded as a fluke …. Under normal conditions a single ship should not be fired at from ranges outside 1,500 yards. The use to which the torpedo will most often be put in daylight is that of browning a line of ships, the object being to make the torpedoes cross their tracks between the bows of the first and the stern of the last ship of that part of the line taken as the target .” Royal Navy Handbook of Torpedo Control 1916
If battleships still existed now,being able to launch a bunch of CBASS ADCAPS would be fucking devastating. But if battleships still existed now they wouldn't even have guns, they'd just be huge hulls stuffed full of MK48s, Harpoons, and Tomahawks with maybe a few small (relatively) guns for shooting down at suicide high speed boats.
Not finished the video yet, but from touring Texas during her dry dock, the repair work exposed the area of her hull that was covered up that once had her torpedoes tubes, I believe internally the only thing left of the system is the air compressors. Still pretty cool.
Pity that at that time, no body offered an additional $ 500K - 1M. They could have gone full dreadnought-nostalgia and put those tubes back in, with a few museum grade torps added for effect.
At Jutland the Germans were firing spreads of torpedoes when retreating to discourage pursuit and not because they had a fire solution aimed at particular ships.
@@Dilley_G45 Yep. The point of Battleships having torpedoes is having a better chance of getting below your opponent's armor belt for a knockout blow when standing in the traditional line of battle.
That was a universally understood tactic. UK and US theorists called those "browning shots" after a hunting term. They were used in a multitude of other engagements, though typically the destroyers or cruisers would launch them rather than the BBs themselves.
Not only a fascinating answer to a strange question, but once again, I learned so much about the monitor-to-ironclad-to-predreadnaught era, and in the most interesting way!
@Drachinifel can you go over the pay of various navies over the years? We're sailors paid well, or just the bare minimum to get enough men to man the ship? Were any battles/wars decided because one side paid their sailors better?
In a nutshell, no they wernt paid well, but officers were. Before the days of the workhouse, and later on the welfare state, 'not working' was not an option. If you didnt work, you didnt eat, and your family had to starve out and take a die. And in coastal towns and cities, the sea was the only real source of employment, either shipbuilding, fishing, or the navy.
The other nice thing about pre-WWI battle lines was that the ships were fairly closely spaced, so missing ahead or astern might mean you hit some other ship. But of course in WWI battle lines tended to not be nicely lined up broadside to each other, and they tended to not sail in nice straight lines for the whole battle.
Re-examine the track charts of Jutland. The British line of ~600' ships were stationed 600 yards bridge to bridge, Or more correctly, Bridge to Foretop. As that is how the conning officers stadiameters worked.
As with most of these things that might look weird or even outright stupid to us nowadays, one should always approach them with the basic assumption that people "back then" actually had their good reasons to do the things in the way they were doing them. Especially in these cases in which almost everybody was doing them in a similar way.
Imagine how different things might have been if they had perfected some sort of torpedo guidance to make an "all big torpedo" battlecruiser more viable than the "all big gun" battleship.
If long-range autonomous guidance - and, by extension, proximity detonation - was possible in the 1910s, the 'Dreadnought' era might have been surprisingly short-lived. It would be the Jeune Ecole's dream: A weapon that the smallest ocean-going craft could carry, which would be effective against the mightiest battleship. Inertial-guided torpedoes fell short of that goal - Too hard to aim, too easy to dodge. At which point, anything bigger than a fast cruiser was little more than a colossal target, unless you could extend the effective range of the Battleship's weapons far beyond the guidance range of the torpedo. Or, in other words, you invent the Aircraft Carrier.
The problem is that (until you get cruise missiles and over the horizon battles) an ordinance with sustained propulsion like a torpedo is always gonna hit later than one that burns the same amount of propellant all at once (ie a big ol' gun). It's the same reason why ATGM launchers never caught on with tanks: They might be able to guarantee a hit in 15 seconds by guiding in a missile, but you can be pretty sure that one of the 2 AP rounds you've sent their way will have hit by then. Except with early to mid 1900's ships it's worse, since they can (with a theoretical perfect torpedo guidance system) guarantee a hit within the next half hour while you evaporate their hull with a couple dozen main-gun caliber AP rounds with all-right enough accuracy.
@@cookiecraze1310 You're not hitting a destroyer with a Battleship's main guns. That's what the secondary battery is for. On the other hand, the Destroyer just needs it's warheads to get a signal, and immediately pull away out of range after dropping a salvo. For both world wars, this would have been useless. Torpedoes at extreme ranges were not impossible to dodge, if you saw them coming. A change of speed, a hard turn, and they'd likely sail right past. That's what limited the *effective* range so much. But if they could track and seek? A Battleship is in DEEP trouble. It can't dodge like a Destroyer, or even a Cruiser. It would need decoys or other active countermeasures to take out the salvo before they reached the ship. Your point about ATGMs is why autonomous guidance can be such a game changer. You're assuming the firing craft is just sitting still, guiding the warhead in on a joystick while their target shoots back at their leisure. That's not what's happening. They can fire at extreme range and leave, because their target has no effective reply *to the torpedo*
@watchm4ker you're not really disagreeing with me. I was saying that an all torpedo battleship or Battlecruiser would be doomed to fail, same as an ATGM MBT. But, much like how most IFV's carry an ATGM launcher alongside their auto cannon, it does make sense for a destroyer or cruiser to carry torpedoes even without a perfect guidance system just so they can stand up to bigger ships. But that just wasn't what I was arguing about.
Drach, in your video about what happens when a shell hits a battleship, there is an aerial view of what appears to be a 13 gun capital ship at time stop 1:54 . What ship is it?
Fun fact: The Nelson & Rodney’s torpedos provided Japan with the inspiration for Japan’s Type 93 torpedos, AKA “The Long Lance.” So battleship torpedos did accomplish something! Also, Rodney probably DID get a toro hit on Bismarck, so there’s also that…
I wondered why as well. I thought that Battleships used torpedoes against themselves in the early years in battle lines. The amount of penetration of the main guns at those early effective battle ranges (as supported by an average of gun penetration tables at those ranges that I compiled from Navweaps and a Ballistic Simulator against Wrought Iron Armor and the efficiency percentage from navweaps for a type of armor in the 1890s applied to both the iron armor penetration and the base thickness of the armor to determine this) were inferior to ships that were equipped with even 12 inches of Harvey or Krupp Cemented Armor, especially if the enemy ship was crossing the T, but not flat broadside to the enemy (the theory of angling did help not only provide a smaller target, but also made it harder to penetrate if it did hit). Due to the lack of torpedo protection in the early years, a torpedo would be capable of doing significantly more damage than a shell at those battle ranges even if it did penetrate. I also surmised they could be used to disrupt formations in bow and stern launchers or the flank launchers used as a hail mary for a wounded battleship trying to fend off smaller units without escort (either alone during an ambush or its escorts were finished off). I also predicted that since smaller ships (Torpedo Boats, Destroyers, Cruisers) became more prevalent and less fragile than initially designed and that more modern weapons penetrated more armor than needed in addition to higher engagement ranges from the introduction of rangefinders; battleships didn't find torpedoes to be particularly useful anymore except for a convoy raiding role and that was why the Tirpitz was equipped with them. That was my preconception before Drach released this masterpiece. Turns out I was mostly right.
Any time I thought about this, the first ships that immediately came to mind are Nelson, Rodney and Tirpitz Other than those three, I didn’t know which other battleships carried torpedoes
A lot of the battleships around the time of before/ early ww1 did which is because there was no idea of what the range would be like in battle, by ww2 they knew
I want to take a second before I enjoy the latest episode to thank you for all your effort. I shared a link with my Pops RCN CPO Subs. ret. (*80 +y.o.) and he really likes it to. All the best in the holiday season to you and yours.
If your name is David Beatty then you might try the unplanned explosive self-disassembly method by just welding your flash doors open, but, unfortunately, this method only works on your own ships.
@@darrynreid4500 theoretically you could try boarding for a similar result, though at that point you may as well just stuff the enemy gun barrels and save that tiny last bit of effort.
USS Texas was built with 4 torpedo tubes, 2 each side. They were never used in combat, and were removed in the 1925 refit, which also added the below-water torpedo bulges.
It is little noticed that the Battle of Denmark Strait nearly became a torpedo battle. Because Hood was closing to within maximum torpedo range of 8-9 miles the two German ships turned west for evasion (this is when the famous film of the Bismarck firing over its port shoulder at PoW was taken from PE, and some classic pics). The Hood blew up, eliminating that danger (and the German ships turned back into their original SW course). Had Hood remained operational it is possible she would have launched at Bismarck if a solution was arrived at, initially a brace of 3 fish, and then repeat reloads. That might have turned out bad for the German BB. But had Hood not exploded she would have been in serious danger herself. The PE would have fired 6 fish from her port tubes. Although the Hood was the first Brit BB to be fitted with a sophisticated anti-torpedo system, having a narrow BC hull it was too shallow. Even one hit would have slowed down the vessel, allowing the two German ships to escape. 3 hits on its starboard flank could have put the Hood in danger of capsizing. As it happened the torpedo officer on the PE failed to fire ASAP, which was doctrine (to get damaging hits ASAP, and to get the fish off the ship before they might be lost due to hits and become an explosion danger to the cruiser). He got in trouble back in Germany. Did not matter in any case, and he would have gotten around to it had the Hood not sunk so early in the engagement. Each tube had a reload. Had Hood been seriously damaged or worse by torpedoes Holland would be sharply criticized for putting his flagship at such obvious risk. The solution would have to been to put PoW in the lead to absorb gun fire from Bismarck and keep his ships beyond torp range, ye old Hood being safe at the rear and free to range in on the Bismarck and kill it with 15” fire. Even better Tovey should have kept his entire battlefleet (KGV, PoW, Hood, Repulse which was better armed than the KGVs) together in which case the BDS would have been a historic walk over for the RN to the fury of Hitler who was not at all happy about the very ill-advised Operation Rheinubung and almost cancelled it. Hood would have survived for future operations and just maybe preservation as a memorial ship. Or maybe Churchill would have send it to Singapore as part of Force Z with probably bad results. (In that case Hood would have been illegally scrapped for its valuable radiation free steel [like PoW and R] -- this is no longer being done to preatom bomb wrecks as 21st century steel is not contaminated).
You are vastly overestimating the likelihood of hits at long range with torpedoes. There was an enormous difference between the theoretical maximum range and the effective range. The only way to overcome this with non-homing torpedoes is to launch a massive salvo, which isn't going to happen with a battleship or even a single cruiser due to the limited number of tubes. That's why destroyers were organized into flotillas, typically ~12 ships in WW1 and ~6 ships in WW2, so they could attack as a group and have enough torpedo launcher to have a decent chance of getting hits at longer ranges. If memory serves, JE MacDonnell in one of his books mentions you wanted to be about a mile out to have a decent chance of getting a hit with a RN torpedo - and closer was better. He was a RN/RAN destroyer officer in WW2. So the officers of the day knew it was very unlikely to get hits at long range. During WW2 US Pt boats tried for a 500 yard range, German U-Boats were trained pre-war to shoot at 600 yards. When they could, they liked to surface in the midst of a convoy to get 1 hit per torpedo, and convoys had ~1k yard spacing between columns. When HMS Glowworm went up against Admiral Hipper, they fired 5 torpedoes at 870 yards - Hipper dodged them all. Glowworm never had a chance to fire her other quintuple mount. Aerial torpedoes typically had a maximum range of ~2000 yards, but if an aircraft really wanted a hit and wasn't with a lot of other planes they would try to close much closer even though the odds of getting hit in return by AA fire were really high doing that. I believe the torpedoes fired at Scharnhost by RN destroyers were under 2k yards. One example of a WW2 flotilla action is the sinking of the Haguro - a flotilla of five destroyers vs one heavy cruisers. I don't know the numbers for range for all the destroyers, but I think the destroyers fired at ~3 miles or less, and some of their torpedoes were fired at 2k yards. At the Battle of Vela Gulf, a flotilla of US destroyers achieved a surprise torpedo launch at 6300 yards that was very effective. None of these numbers are anywhere near 8-9 miles. It's really unlikely anybody would have launched torpedoes unless the range closed quite a bit as the ships involved would sooner or later have been dodging to throw off enemy fire control which makes them especially hard targets for long range torpedoes. Reload times were generally not that fast - maybe 10 minutes for a battleship with 3 internal tubes, a lot longer for ships with external tubes (the Japanese managed it in 18 minutes once and that was considered quite good, many ships with external tubes didn't have reloads). There certainly were some special cases where hits were achieved at long distance with a small salvo, but these were quite rare and involved a lot of luck or special circumstances in addition to skill. Having a lot of targets in a group (convoy or invasion fleet or carrier group or just a large group of warships) helped with getting long range hits. A torpedo that missed it's primary target could still hit a secondary target. The Japanese liked to spend some of their torpedo strength trying for these kinds of long range hits - but they had a lot of launchers and carried reloads so they could afford to play the odds with a salvo of 20-30 torpedoes at long range (e.g. Battle of the Java Sea). Special circumstances could further reduce the likelihood of long range hits. Steam torpedoes had quite visible wakes that could alert the target in time to dodge. Bioluminescence could make even wakeless electric torpedoes visible. Targets with passive sonar could often hear incoming torpedoes.
@@bluelemming5296 Ah yes, but the BDS was exceptionally well suited for a long range torpedo duel that was inevitable had the battle continued. Usually targets are set at an angle to the launchers and modest in size, producing a complex solution with targets able to comb torpedo wakes. In this case after Holland’s turn the two sides would have been on subparallel courses eliminating convergence issues and presenting the targets at their broadside maximums. And the Hood was a HUGE target, at 860 ft almost as long as the Yamatos and Iowas. And with its narrow hull and single rudder not able to readily comb torpedoes. No BB was ever a better torpedo target than Hood. Bismarck not much better off at 820 ft,, better turning performance because beamier and twin rudders. Hood was in normal battle range of PE’s torpedoes because the latter’s torp officer was severely reprimanded in Germany for not firing his fish (apparently he dismissed the range data coming in from gunnery in favor of his own overestimate, oops). PR had 12 torps in tubes and reloads on its port side. Just one hit would have slowed Hood enough to allow the German ships to escape. Hood had something like a couple of dozen fish in tubes and reloads. One hit on B would have doomed it. Because we all are fascinated by the Hood going bang no one has looked into what would have happened at she remained operational and both sides started loosing their fish. We tend to imagine a nice, orderly running gun slugfest with both sides banging away at one another with artillery on fairly steady SW courses, kind of like the runs south and north at Jutland. Not bloody likely what with fish swimming about. PE & B had already turned sharply west due to mere fear of torps from Hood. Both side had to fire their fish. To unload their dangerous explosive warheads in favor of maybe applying them to enemy hulls. To disrupt the operations of the enemy. In particular for the B&E to try to escape destruction. What would Holland have done when lookouts spotted the wakes of PEs brace of torpedoes as they certainly would have at some point. He would have had to do something and fast and drastic, could not just sit there and present his enormous broadside to the underwater explosives. Turning towards them would have probably been disastrous. Turning away even if that worked as it may well have would have allowed the German ships to pull away with their edge in speed (H was limited to PoW’s 27 kts) and save themselves. Nor would the H torp officer sat drumming his fingers, he would have pumped out one diabolical machine after another until he ran out. Upon seeing the incoming school of fish from Hood Lutjens would have had to do further turn aways. Even if they never scored a hit the torpedoes would have been a very important factor that could have determined the outcome of the BDS. As per Jellicoe having to turn away from the High Seas Fleet at Jutland when threatened with torpedoes. This issue reinforces that Tovey was reckless when he sent just two deficient BBs to confront Bismarck and left them without the support of Victorious whose Swordfish could have prevented it from easily escaping even if they did not score crippling hits. Someone needs to take a closer look at this, examining potential torpedo ranges and angles and possible consequences, in order to better understand the decisions at they happened and might have happened of Tovey, Holland and Lutjens. Perhaps having largely solved why the Mighty Hood blew up our beloved Drachinifel can do a deep dive into this. Not like he has much else to do;)
@@gregp6210 With four tubes, Hood is going to have about a ~12 minute reload time if nothing goes wrong (the rough seas and hard maneuvering might have significantly increased reload times to 20-30+ minutes, but we'll ignore that for now). There is no 'school of fish' here, unless four fish every 12 minutes somehow makes up a school - and that's assuming all the launchers are working, never something you can assume on an old ship! Also, think about how many shells can be fired in 12 minutes. Bismark's rate of fire for main guns is 3 per minute, even if we downgrade that to 2 per minute for 'real world conditions', that's still 2x8x12=192 shells between each torpedo salvo from Hood. The torpedoes are simply not to going to dominate this battle. It took less than 10 minutes for Bismark to sink Hood after opening fire. That's time for only one torpedo salvo even under the best of circumstances! The one potential benefit here for a torpedo launch is the fact that the rough seas might actually hide the torpedoes from sight long enough, to get them close enough, that dodging is no longer a possibility. But even then, the ships are going to be constantly maneuvering, chasing each others salvos to avoid getting hit, which is going to make their positions very hard to predict, so the likelihood of a hit from long range torpedo fire is really low. Consider how many torpedoes missed during WW2 engagements when they were fired at far shorter ranges ... even against big targets like aircraft carriers and battleships. In the specific case of Hood, as far as I know she was still equipped with old Mark IV torpedoes (a WW1 design, possibly with some minor upgrades), which were not particularly long range, and since they were steam torpedoes would have a visible wake. I think the Prinz Eugen had G7A torpedoes (a much more modern design, ~1934), which are also steam torpedoes, so they too are going to have a visible wake. Not clear what the sighting distance would be in the sea state actually present for steam torpedo wakes. Hood is not going to want to get into a torpedo duel with a much newer warship that probably (as far as they know, not sure what they knew) has much newer torpedoes, which gives yet another reason to not get too close. I don't know if the torpedo officer on Hood was even authorized to open fire, and he would not have done so without authorization. Prinz Eugen is not going to want to close deep into the range of two battleships to launch torpedoes if she can possibly avoid it, even though she has new torpedoes. Even closing with one battleship to launch torpedoes is a horrible risk for a cruiser that's unlikely to go well, closing with two battleships is even less likely to go well. Also note that Repulse in her final battle was able to dodge lots of incoming torpedoes - and her turning radius is almost as bad as Hood. If Repulse can dodge large torpedo salvos, that suggests that Hood or Bismark can dodge much smaller salvos. For that matter USS Enterprise was able to dodge lots of torpedoes during her career - and this is a carrier! The situation with Jutland is not really a good comparison. The Germans had >60 torpedo boats (destroyers) at Jutland. When firing at the Grand Fleet, the Germans could throw enormous salvos against a large number of ships in close proximity, so missing one ship gives a really good chance of hitting another. That's not going to be the case here. It would take enormous luck to get a torpedo hit in the battle of the Denmark Straight. Finally, the captain of Prinz Eugen was a political appointee, who had previously commanded Hitler's yacht. His order to open fire with torpedoes at extremely long range (which wasn't carried out) can be taken as a sign of inexperience with the real world limitations of the weapon system, as can the staff criticism of his torpedo officer. Both political appointees and staff officers often had very little understanding of real world considerations that make theoretical ranges very different from effective ranges. The enormous number of examples of real world torpedo firing by warships (and aircraft) during WW2 at far shorter ranges - some given in my previous post - shows that competent officers didn't try to get hits at extreme range because they knew perfectly well they were just wasting ordinance, except in the special case of the Japanese who could get away with that because they had the extra ordinance and the best torpedoes in the world. The numbers just don't work out here for torpedoes to play a major role except by absurd luck.
@@bluelemming5296 You are often commenting on what you think I said, not what I actually said. I did not state that torpedoes were going to be the dominant factor in the BDS. I did state that they could have been far more important than has been realized, having a strong influence by forcing radical maneuvers even if no hits were made. Because BB scale shell are only a foot or more in diameter, and AP rounds contain only a few dozen lbs of explosive, shell hits are typically incremental in effect. The only ships sunk quickly by BB shell size AP projectiles were due to overly explosive cordite charges at Jutland, the BDS, and Pearl Harbor. Because they explode huge charges of hundreds of lbs of explosive against the underwater hull, rapid sinking of BBs by torpedoes and mines was much more expected and happened often in the Russo-Japanese and two world wars (and giant liners Lusitania and Britannia were sunk by single torp/mines despite extensive compartmentalization). A single torpedo into Hood would have slowed it down enough to allow B&PE to escape. In general a single torpedo hit is worth a dozen or two AP round hits. That is why a single large fish, deep placed torpedo hit is so fearsome that commanders go to great lengths to avoid them, more so than artillery hits which are a matter of course in long range gun duels. Salvo chasing consists of the target vessel steering left/right maybe 5-10 degrees without changing basic heading with enough subtlety to not let the enemy ship know that it is shifting range - deception being the whole point of the maneuver -- and to disturb its own gunnery as little as possible. It is nothing like the hard radical turning needed to dodge torpedoes. Salvo chasing does not effect torpedo solutions at all, and saying so is an argument of desperation. In any case captains did not always salvo chase because gunnery officers did not like it. Off Singapore that two Brit ships had to steer hard rudder circles to comb wakes, and would not have been able to conduct accurate gunnery. Had H or B had to dodge fish and did so successfully their gunnery would have been severely disrupted, as occurred when PoW had to suddenly steer around the sinking Hood. That is part of the point I am making, even nonhits of torps would have had a major impact on the course of the battle. Briggs described the seas during the BDS as long rollers, they were not very choppy and torp tracks probably would have been visible. I have not found evidence that it normally took 12 minutes for reloads. Some experienced subs could do it in 3, although that is unlikely for surface ships. We know that H did get into torpedo range of PE because as I said in both earlier posts the torp officer of the later was seriously punished upon return to shore for not firing his fish as soon as the H was in range, which means it was in range (because Holland wanted his flagship close enough to prevent a deck hit getting into a magazine, which happened to coincide with max range of PE’s torpedoes). In the legal proceedings the officer did not claim he did not fire because he thought the range was not optimal, but because his own ranging seemed to indicate H was outside max range and he discounted the more accurate ranges measured by the gunnery system. So if Hood at kept going there would have been a torp duel regardless what the commanders thought. The German torp officer had standing instructions to fire ASAP for reasons explained in prior posts, he did not get in trouble for not asking permission, he did for not doing his assigned job - this is similar to how AA missile crews do not have to ask the captain can I please fire at this plane or missile about to hit our ship, just fire at the damn thing. The captain of the PE did not know what was going down he not being involved in when to fire fish, the doctrine being to fire when a solution was arrived at. We do not know the situation on H, in any case if the TO was ready to launch no doubt the captain would have said by all means go ahead and see what you can do, it can’t hurt us and might hurt them and good to get the blasted warheads off the ship. I never claimed PE had a good chance of hitting H. The mere appearance of torpedo wakes would have forced Holland to make immediate extreme course changes that would have thrown off the gunnery on a ship that had an obsolete fire control system (which may have been further limited by an early hit by B) and allowed the B& PE to escape to the SE. It is well known the threat from torpedoes and mines is as almost much the need to not risk being sunk by them as actually being sunk by them. Because of all the torps that would have been crossing between the two forces it is likely that the BDS would not have settled down to the straightforward gunnery slugfest with the ships following fairly consistent parallel SW courses with at most modest salve chasing that most imagine. There would have been radical dodging turns that may have aborted the battle before the B&PE could be dealt with. A probability few if any have taken into account.
Hot take before watching the Video "Why did Battleships carry torpedoes?" - A: To blow up Asteroids inside a Wormhole if warp core wasn't balanced properly while going to warp inside the solar system.... Let's see how I did.... :p
The Moving Picture reference? I thought it was because Phasers couldn't be used at FTL speeds due to the warp core already using it's power on movement.
Watched it, very good but should really be series with running time of around 6 hours to give it justice. Also nice to see Drach hanging out with PhD Admirals these days 😁
What a fun video. I had forgotten I actually know a bit about this, since there was kind of a madness that swept naval thought when ironclad ships were becoming common. People generally seemed to think that the gun was dead as an effective weapon and that the future of naval combat would either be decided by the torpedo or the ram.
Considering it was once common for ships to have a big mix of differing gun types, shoving torpedoes into battleships didn't seem odd. Especially as the ranges the ships used to fire onto each other was notably closer.
Naval engineers: "Better get rid of these things. They are useless." HMS Rodney, viciously flipping the bird to the Admiralty from the other side of the street: "I'll show ya! I'll bloody show ya!!! Ya plonkers!" Great insight on the matter, Drach. Hood almost got Bismarck, too. Cheers.
Not enough torpedoes for that..considering it was expected that Battle lines would engage..so congrats,you can fire the grand total of 1! torpedo in the worst of circumstances...German head on firing torpedoes where a stupid idea
Depends on which side of the 'T' you're talking about. Torpedoes would be pretty useful for the fleet getting crossed. The fleet doing the crossing is at the wrong angle - realistically the detonator only works if the target is within the ballpark of a 90 degree angle of the torpedo's path.
Do you mean if you’re the one crossing, or the one BEING crossed? If you’re being crossed, forward aiming torpedoes might indeed be useful to break up the attack and force the enemy out of ideal firing position. But if you’re crossing someone else’s T, firing down the line at a ship that is bow-on to you would be damn difficult. Those WWII torpedoes had a tendency to glance off a ship unless they could hit a part of the hull that was perpendicular to the direction of motion of the torpedo…. or close to perpendicular.
@matthewnewton8812 The idea is that the lead ship fires torpedoes at the crossing formation, forcing them to maneuver and throw off their firing solutions.
@NashmanNash The lead ship begins firing torpedoes into the oncoming formation, forcing them to maneuver and throw off their firing solutions. The crossed fleet is also going to maneuver to form a battle line so that each ship, as the one ahead moves out of the way, will continue to launch torpedoes.
My take on this video: Pre-dreadnoughts typically carried 4 12” guns of a low rate of fire and short effective range. At short range most effects (blast & splinters) of shell hits could be kept away from the vitals (magazines and machinery) by a thick belt and armor deck. Hits would be few (few guns per broadside and low rates of fire). These battleships carried only a few torpedo tubes (1?) per broadside. But even 1 torpedo hit on a battleship could sink it; witness HMS Goliath, Majestic and Triumph hit by 1 to 3 small torpedoes (45 to 50 cm, 200-350# warheads). So getting into torpedo range might be a viable proposition as one didn’t have to face a hail of gunfire at long range. By the end of the pre-Washington treaty period, guns had gotten larger (13.5” to 16”) with rates of fire of 2-3 rounds per minute per barrel (RPM/B) for even the largest guns (versus e,g. 0.67 RPM/B for pre-1906 USN 12”/40). Ships carried more guns per broadside 8 to 12 (typical of super Dreadnoughts) with longer ranges (central predictor fire control). To get into range to *ensure a hit* from one’s own 1 or 2 torpedoes per battleship meant facing a hail of destructive shells at long range. The trade off simply wasn’t worth it risking fire control kills or penetration into vitals from long range plunging fire. Treaty battleships were larger 35000-78000 tons) with theoretically better subdivision, welded construction and side protection systems. They faced larger torpedoes (21 to 24” with massive (660 to 1080# - USN MK 14 to IJN 61 cm Type 93) warheads of more powerful explosives (Torpex v Guncotton/TNT/ Hexanite). Some IJN Yamamoto & Musashi needed a pounding to sink. Yes, torpedo ranges increased. But as pointed out ensuring a hit at very long range with a single shot was minuscule and one had one or two shots (vs 80+ rounds per barrel for guns). To sink or constructive destroy a capital ship with torpedoes meant getting close to an unsuspecting ship (submarine) e.g., IJN Shinano, mass attack by numerous destroyers and cruisers (Surigao Strait) or aircraft (pick about any USN carrier victory) or a lucky hit (KMS Bismarck or HMS POW). Did any WW II battleship ever use its torpedoes? IDK. Basically one is talking about Scharnhorst (?) & Bismarck classes (Bismarck class - nope), Nelson/Rodney (haven’t heard any accounts of use) and Hood (nope). The Panzerschiff don’t count. Source of certain tech data: NAVWEAPS.COM
26 днів тому
I recently saw the giant Cut Away Model of Viribus Unites at the Military Museum in Vienna. And the different Torpeado Rooms took up quite a lot of space
Its only relatively recently that I learned that battleships even carried torpedoes. There's very little ready information out there on this. Thank you for history on this regarding the background on their development, the installation and their eventual removal.
It sounds to me, it would make perfect sense if they had just installed tubes that could inject steam into the water to make it look like they fired torpedoes, and save the weight for other more important things like armor or more engine space😊
I've just been watching 5:00 to 10:00 and it looks like there's been a major change in the objective of battle; in the age of the steam iron-clad, the aim is to sink the enemy's ship. AFAIK, this wasn't the primary objective in the age of sail. Ships rarely sank, unless the magazines exploded, and in any case it was MUCH more profitable, both for the ship's crew and for the nation, to capture a vessel and bring it into your own fleet (often retaining its original name). For all the reasons you list; and this presumably explains the difference in gunnery tactics: the French aim high to disable the rigging, as this is the elegant way of disabling a ship with a view to capture. All this is implicit in what you're saying, but maybe worth foregrounding since it might imply that the early iron-clad steamships, although they still formed lines of battle like the old days, actually introduced a revolution in naval tactics. Or not, I might have got it wrong.
Very much so. For several big reasons. One is just the ability to sink. Wooden ships are generally much harder to sink than metal ones, and over on the weapons side this is around the same time we're switching from inert cannonballs to explosive shells, which are considerably better at inflicting structural damage to a ship. Another is the difficulty in capturing a ship. Wooden ships being shot at by inert cannons take a hell of a beating before they sink - odds are the crew are long since dead or thoroughly sick of having everything around them blown to bits piece by agonizing piece. The top (weather) deck is also critical to controlling how the ship moves, since that's where the tiller and sails are, so a boarding team can capture that and then just sail it off. Armoured steamships can lock the doors to the upper deck, hide their crew from the enemy boarding party, and then just steam off to find some place that has enough friendly troops to fight off the boarding party stuck on their hull, since the control system is deep within the bowels of the ship. And finally there's the value in the captured ship. For steamships, unless it's one that your country built and sold to the enemy in happier times, it's quite likely that the details of how to operate the engines are different from what your country does. Ditto for repair work - all the standard parts you keep in shipyards around your empire won't fit. And the guns are going to need different ammunition too, and as the Steam and Steel age progresses, you're going to find it increasingly more difficult to pull them out and replace them with something you make ammo for. This last one is the only thing that would be an issue for Age of Sail ships, but even the biggest cannon of that era could relatively easily be hoisted out through the cargo hatch and replaced by your country's biggest gun. (Also, it's much easier to adjust things such that you're now also making cannonballs that fit the new guns than it is to start making the kind of shells designed to fire out of an Steam and Steel era gun...making a metal ball of a given size isn't that complex. All in all...sinking enemy ships got easier, capturing them got harder, and also less worth the effort. Edit: My erroneous comment about the UK scuttling the German navy after WWI was incorrect - it was at Scapa Flow and they were in UK custody, but the scuttling was undertaken by German sailors under orders from a German admiral. Thank you, jackgee3200 for the correction!
@@jackgee3200 Well...that's an embarassing mistake in my history knowledge. I knew it was at Scapa Flow and that the ships were Britain's responsibility, but I thought that meant the German sailors had been either sent home or were being held as POWs, not just sitting in their ships. And apparently if any of the sources I've heard talk about this said it was Germans who did the scuttling, I wasn't paying enough attention. Thanks for the correction! I've edited the original comment such that it no longer makes this assertion, while also acknowledging the error had existed so your correction doesn't look out of place.
Until we invent the actual functional crystal ball, we're always going to be guessing what the future war's requirements will be, and largely we base future expectations on past wars. It's very easy and safe from a career perspective to fight the last war because there's citeable sources to point to. When torpedo doctrine was finally documented as now being ineffective due to the lack of using it in the prior war, then navies largely stopped trying to implement it.
So, what you are saying is during the 1980's refit, the Iowa's should have been given launch tubes for guided torpedoes. Just in case they were needed. 😆
22:05 The TL;DR is that shells hit or miss very fast meaning you can adjust. Meanwhile a torpedo traveling at 31 knots for thousands of meters is going to take so long to hit or miss the enemy will have plenty of time to target you with several torpedoes and gun volleys and communicate with the rest of their fleet about what to do about your ship.
They never got the chance. Contrary to popular belief, there were VERY few battles between opposing battleships from the predreadnought age to today. Also, in all ages right up to the current day, fish are EXTREMELY expensive. One Torpedo cost about as much as a Spitfire. You dont just throw them away, they dont miraculously respawn in a port like on video games.
i'm here for the pictures mostly... and then i find out something i didn't know, so bonus. much as i'm sure the creators probably hate it, i get great pleasure from cutting ads off, or muting them at the onset.
Thanks for the video. It's always fascinating to see technology introduce and then eliminate a weapon system on a given ship class. Leaves you wondering if a given country decided to just eliminate the torpedo from their battleship designs with the Super Dreadnaught what butterfly effects may have occurred?
7:41 There are rifles with 2,000 yard volley sights and I find that hilariously optimistic. I mean at least with naval guns you might see a big splash and walk it in, or view explosions against shore based targets. But a hundred people lobbing 6-8mm rounds 2,000 yards won't have any idea how far they missed by. Even if one of the enemy falls it is more likely someone in the volley missed and got lucky rather than a reason to fire at the same angle again.
How far away was the technology to create an acoustic homing torpedo at the start of WW2? The accuracy of such a system would reduce the number of torpedoes needed to be effective, which in turn would allow some truly colossal weapons if you start from a Long Lance platform. The ability for a battleship to carry a small number of ship-killing shots would be valuable if you can get predictable accuracy at extreme range with enough speed, especially at night or in poor visibility.
The Germans introduced acoustic torpedoes in 1943, with the more effective variety being deployed in August 1943. The US introduced air-dropped acoustic torpedoes in March 1943, which would be used by both the US and Britain. The US sub-launched acoustic torpedo would appear in small numbers in 1944. There are three limitations to keep in mind: 1. Decoys were easy to build and tow behind a ship (basically a noise source). 2. The torpedo had a limited acoustic 'hearing range', so you're still going to be limited in long range fire, if you don't get close enough the torpedo won't be able to hear the target. I think the German torpedoes could hear a 15 knot target at about ~500 yards. That might sound like a large distance, but when you are firing a torpedo that needs to travel many miles against a maneuvering target it might be really tough to get that close. 3. Like anything with a control system, there were failure modes such as losing lock or locking onto the wrong thing. An acoustic torpedo could even circle back at the firing ship (regular torpedoes could do this as well: two US subs were lost to circular runs where they were hit by their own torpedoes, and other navies experienced the problem as well). Subs could go quiet after firing, that wasn't so easy for surface ships and there would be very good reasons for surface ships to not want to slow down in combat - but high speed means high noise.
You’d think they would make one you could steer remotely. You have the best program and a great voice. You could make a killing doing commercials in the US.
This sounds like the revserse of adding missiles to main battle tanks: missiles (and now loitering munitions) are for long range and while it might be nice for a tank to be to engage from long range, it takes up space for its closer ramge role and cheaper vehicles (i.e. a Hi Lux) can fire the missile.
I've read accounts that Hood may have shot torpedoes at Prince Eugene, or at least Prince Eugene thought they spotted torpedoes. I think it may have been in the book "Killing the Bismarck".
It's the latter: they thought they spotted torpedoes but there's no evidence that any had actually been launched and it's not even remotely credible. Consider torpedo travel times and effective range issues to understand this. The theoretical range of torpedoes is enormously larger than the effective range - and competent period officers understood this - you can tell this from the firing ranges used in the vast majority of battles. Not every book writer or historian understands that, and very few 'armchair admirals'. The Japanese were a special case: they could and did gamble on very long range fire because they had lots of launchers and reloads and torpedoes that were far faster than those of any other nation. Even then, they tended to only do this when they knew they had enough targets that a miss on the primary target might still hit another ship. At the Battle of the Java Sea they would fire over 100 torpedoes - and only get three hits, but arguably those three hits determined the outcome of the battle. For other nations, if somebody is firing at maximum range, they're either extremely desperate or just incompetent. For example, if you look at the Battle of the River Platte - a daylight battle where both sides had big ships and torpedoes - both sides captains were very careful and deliberate as to when they allowed torpedoes to be fired. These were resources to be conserved until the optimal moment came to use them, as a 'threat in being': the other side couldn't risk closing with large warships so long as the torpedo threat was present so firing too early was a really bad idea even though keeping the torpedoes on board also posed a risk should they be detonated by enemy fire. Note this is very different from what you often see in computer games, which replace reality with illusion for sake of entertainment. Big and large here refer to cruiser-sized ships, the rules are somewhat different for destroyers. A good rule of thumb for the effective range of non-Japanese WW2 torpedoes is a mile or less, or ~2k yards/meters if you prefer. Since it's a 'rule of thumb' the numbers don't have to be exactly equal between different systems of units. Here, 'effective range' means you have a decent chance of getting 1-2 hits from a salvo of 4-6 torpedoes against an evading warship. There were lots of misses even at this relatively short range, and even really big warships could dodge all the torpedoes launched at them at this range if the circumstances were right.
I wondered why Polish destroyers had as many as 2 x 3 torpedo launchers. If something disables one launcher, chances are the whole ship will explode - like Grom did. IMO one less launcher made tribal class destroyers best.
It is lovely how the majority of people on Earth have no clue that ships used torpedoes. I mean, I saw the shells used the other day and it is mind boggling still.
Because there is no armor belt down there, and it is like the naval ship version of the bayonet. It is better to have and not need it than to need it and have it.
Except that a lot of ships were lost when their torpedoes got hit and went boom. Destroyers make sense since they're already glass cannons, an argument could be made for cruisers, but putting them on a battleship just adds a large weakpoint for very little gain.
Not quite. To have a torpedo room below deck you need to open holes in the armor to fire through, which weakens your armor protection. To have enough room for the machinery and reloads you need a large compartment. That becomes vulnerable to flooding, and greatly complicates counter-flooding and damage control in general. There's always the possibility of a fire starting or an explosion detonating your own torpedoes. Above deck, you don't have the 'large compartment' issue but the possibility of your torpedoes being detonated by incoming fire goes up. You also need crew members to man the weapons, and they have mass, they take up space, they need food and water. It's much easier to carry a bayonet because it doesn't carry any real liabilities other than a tiny amount of weight.
It's about thought. Given the expected battle scenario at that time were that battle would took place around 10-15000 yards so close range weapon might be necessary. For German at least, theirs were more or less over sized commerce raiders so I guess it was used to complement for guns
I suspect the modern torpedo seemed an obvious addition to the most expensive platform deployed by every fleet simply because the torpedo was an expensive weapon
“a hit … on the ship aimed at with a single torpedo at long range … can only be regarded as a fluke …. Under normal conditions a single ship should not be fired at from ranges outside 1,500 yards. The use to which the torpedo will most often be put in daylight is that of browning a line of ships, the object being to make the torpedoes cross their tracks between the bows of the first and the stern of the last ship of that part of the line taken as the target .” Royal Navy Handbook of Torpedo Control 1916 Given that the British Battle line of ~600' long battleships at Jutland were keeping station ~600 yards bridge to bridge, while torpedoes aimed at a particular ship had a very small chance of hitting, torpedoes aimed randomly at the line had a 1 in 3 chance of hitting regardless of range. Pretty obvious wht Jellicoe needed to turn away.
Honestly Quite like 40k's Imperial Navy's opening strategy just being mass torpedo strike Making battleships also having torpedo launchers along with there rams make a lot of sense "If every other ship is firing its torpedoes towards the enemy, why shouldn't the biggest of all of them also be firing torpedoes towards the enemy?" Plus it would be carrying bigger torpedoes with a larger payload
I'm wondering how accurate and consistent the speeds of those longer range torpedoes were - if they didn''t travel at the advertised rate the most carefully calculated firing solution would be useless.
Nothing made by humans is perfect. This is why a spread of multiple torpedoes was typically used at longer ranges - it helped correct for any errors in the process, including problems with the assumptions, the measurements, the calculations, and the equipment. In practice getting hits at longer ranges was extremely hard. This gave a further advantage to guns, as the theoretical range of torpedoes was a lot longer than the effective range, meaning if you really wanted that hit, you had to close fairly deep into your opponents gun range. Or you could have a lot of launching platforms and throw a really large salvo. Problems hitting at long range is one reason why a U-Boat might surface inside a convoy at night and start firing torpedoes (this happened a number of times in early WW2) - here it was quite possible to use one torpedo per target because the ranges were so close - the typical distance between columns of ships in a convoy might be ~1k yards. Before WW2, Doenitz trained his U-Boat crews to fire at ~600 yards. Similarly, PT boats and similiar vessels often tried to fire their torpedoes at ~500 yards. Aerial torpedoes might hit if launched at the typical maximum range of ~2k yards, but were much more likely to hit at 1k yards - though getting that close was very risky for the aircraft. Torpedoes had a control system to keep them on course and control systems are subject to well known failure modes such as losing lock. At least two US subs were sunk by circular runs of their own torpedoes during WW2. If you read a accounts of subs during that era [e.g. Red Scorpion: The War Patrols of the USS Rasher by Sasgen], you'll find that when they had to deal with a defective torpedo that didn't launch (whether in combat or training), the sub crews knew that a delayed launch followed by a circular run was a real possibility and had to be very careful trying to recover the situation. Nobody actually knows what happens to torpedoes in the water when shells or depth charges are exploding in the water near them, close enough to potentially disrupt the control system, but far enough out to not detonate the warhead. Water is very efficient at transmitting massive shock waves, and that shock could potentially impact the control system in both linear and non-linear ways (from an engineering perspective). This makes assessing battles more difficult, since we can't simply assume linear runs for torpedoes - which doesn't stop people from doing that, of course. For that matter, we can't make reliable or even credible linear probability assessments when non-linear phenomena can be present - despite the often strong temptation to do so. Jumping to conclusions is much easier than a careful consideration of possibilities and evidence. Night battles are especially problematic since you're much less likely to have somebody in a position to observe what is actually happening - and the human beings present are far more likely to jump to their own conclusions which may not match what actually happened. Dives on warships have a revealed a lot of problems with the 'perceived truth' of battles.
Might mention later but also torpedoes would be useful in night fighting as the effective gun range is far lower and its also far harder to spot the torpedoes. Might also be no flash allowing a certain element of stealth.
Except for Rodney/ Bismarck, no mention is made of other ships sunk or damaged by battleship launched torpedoes. Surely some of those torpedoes must have hit something. Is there a source for those statistics? Terrific story!
Pinned post for Q&A :)
Why didn't people use the space inside of the ballistic cap of a shell to add a small shaped charge to improve armour penetration?
@@jebewok8118Ideas and technology not there. 🙄
Curious if any other wwii battleship features had their origin hundreds of years ago
Hello Drach. When large warships are constructed is there any testing of the major machinery before the ship leaves the slipway? Seems like it would be a lot easier to fix a busted engine, boiler or screw shaft before the armored deck and bulkheads are put in. Thanks
How useful were paravanes? I've seen them on ships both the explosion anti submarine versions and the minesweeper types but I'm very curious if they actually worked as advertised or where just something to make the crew feel better?
So that a hundred years later, people in computer games could get themselves sunk trying to charge their battleship into torpedo range.
Seriously tho, no one had any idea what range combat would take place at in a given era of post sail naval combat.
my though as well
came down to how good the guns were and how much better they got range wise with accuracy and destructiveness.
Yeah, the Scharnhorsts are such fun to play as😅
In hindsight it was obviously stupid.
I would somewhat challenge the idea that it was just because no one knew better at the time. I'm not necessarily privy to what everyone at the time was thinking, but the more I learn about history, the more forward-thinking people tend to be. What I find is more often the case is that, at the time, it was ALSO obviously stupid, but the price of putting torpedoes on the ship is cheaper than the cost of being wrong about the ship not needing torpedoes.
More often it's hedging bets than anything else.
I think there was a British admiral who said something to the effect that investing in battleships when the carrier seems to be the way of the future will cost a billion pounds or whatever. Investing in only carriers and being wrong would cost them their empire.
@@DocZFlux I loved mine until I learned the way of the Prinz Eugen..... Over twice the torpedoes, faster firing guns.
I've gotten multiple double kills rushing between two battleships.
"If it's got room, put something there that makes the enemy go boom."
-Battleship Designers probably.
@@nickjohnson410 Good one lol👍,, reminds me of Drach's quips about American WW ll ships bristling with AA batteries being "the policy of slapping guns on every available space allowing more American sailors their 2nd amendment rights " lol...
Esp US BB architects
@@micnorton9487 We can thank Ching Lee for this initiative!
@@FrenchieQc Thank you Ching Lee👍...
Except on the HMS Hood just forward of the rear guns. I suspects it's a tea making facility :p
I've often wondered why some battleships had torpedoes but I'd never thought to ask.
And then this video!
The First Sea Lord of UA-cam never disappoints.
Battleships carried torpedoes because towing the torpedoes behind the ship was a perfectly horrible idea.
😂🤪😜😁😂
😂🤪😜
Anti-submarine captain?
😂😂😂😂
And firing them from gun door work
"Do you see torpedo boat?"
"Which one? The bigger one or the smaller one?"
KMS Bismarck: "DAT ONE! DA GROßENDREADNOUGHTEN ALLERSHOOTEN NACH VOME ONE!"
Captain Darlymple-Hamilton: "Commander, feed the Jerries all the AP and Torpex, please."
Bismarck: "AAAIEEEEEE!!!"
This is one of the "legacy costs" we run into when designing a new system. Requirements seldom accept "we can do without something we currently have".
Are you an engineer or a systems analyst?
I wondered why Polish destroyers had as many as 2 x 3 torpedo launchers. If something disables one launcher (with explosives), chances are the whole ship will explode - like Grom did. IMO one less launcher made tribal class destroyers best ships of their class.
But after WWI torpedoes on battleships is beyond just "legacy cost". Its plain dumb ignorance. Sometimes decades of it.
@@Paciat I wouldn't necessary classify Tribals as an example of a normal destroyer though, and I don't consider 2 x 3 torp launchers an especially large torpedo loadout. It is just that Grom was based to Tribals in order have sufficient firepower to pose a threat against German and Sovjet destroyers, but still carrying a torpedo loadout strong enough be a threat against larger units, because unlike the RN, the polish navy couldn't fall back on more torpedo oriented destroyers. Tribals could become full anti-destroyer destroyers / super-light cruiser, where a Grom was always had to more lifting as a torpedo asset.
@@Tuning3434 Im not saying 2x3 torps are a large loadout. Im saying its a large weak point (2 of them) in a ship. If an explosion of 3 torpedos was enough to sink that ship it might be better to just get one x4 or x5 torpedo launcher instead. And ORP Orkan does exactly that, replacing one of its torpedo launchers with a 102mm gun.
@@Paciat I think I can see a couple of pretty good solid reasons. Mainly around redundancy in the event of mechanical problems.
In oceangoing vessels, sometimes gear just breaks. In ocean going combat vessels, gear might be broken by enemy action.
Yeah, I have read about some of the more dramatic results of torpedoes detonating while they're still aboard the ship, but not every sort of damage that might disable a torpedo launcher is going to do that. For instance, shrapnel might cripple a launcher's crew while doing pretty much nothing to the equipment itself.
From a war gaming perspective: In my Rule the Waves campaigns, I generally treat 1905-1910 as the cut off date for submerged torpedo rooms on capital ships. In the 1890s, battleship carried torpedoes are useful as a coup de grace, since gunfire alone struggles to sink enemy ships without unreasonable expenditure of ammunition. Furthermore, fewer torpedo boats are usually available due to newness, low range, fragility, etc., and those that are around may only carry a few torpedoes with no reloads. Submerged torpedo rooms in larger ships can carry more torpedoes and reload them internally. In the 1900-1910 period, there is a chance that battleship torpedoes can be useful in night time or low visibility condition combat if combatants stumble upon each other at close range. There, getting a crippling torpedo hit can make all the difference in a brief knife fight skirmish. Obviously though, such engagements are incredibly risky for capital ships and it is often better to simply avoid nighttime capital engagements if possible. From 1905 to 1910, the benefits fall off too much. Gunnery improves, shells improve, and fleet screens improve. A hit to a large, undivided submerged torpedo room causes a lot of flooding. Destroyer screens get in the way of potential targets. Torpedo protection also gets better, so the effectiveness of individual torpedo hits goes down. From a more historical perspective: It's interesting to note that there were a few WW2 engagements where battleship torpedo tubes arguably would have been useful if they had been present, like at the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. Range of down to 9000 yards, low visibility, benefit of surprise, etc. The Kongo class were built with 8 submerged torpedo tubes after all, although only 21 inch tubes, but they were removed when anti torpedo bulges were added. So perhaps one could argue there was still some potential usefulness in a night engagement if Murphy's law gets the escort screen out of the picture. Realistically though, the communication to the torpedo room and the firing of the torpedo on an aimed trajectory just take too long for the sort of hypothetical short sharp engagements that I mention from RTW campaigns, and perhaps too long for the chaos at 2nd Guadalcanal.
In rtw, put torps on everything... so you can keep on eye on effective torpedo range 😅
I put at least 2 submerged tubes on every ship until the ships start going beyond 25kn. After that, I put nothing until I research the above water torpedo tubes on all ships at which point every ship gets at least 2 torpedoes (usually 4 in 2 double mounts). It’s especially helpful on my CAs which I tend to use in fleet battles to pick off enemy capital ships that have taken damage and fallen out of the battle.
@@GreenKnight2001same, the singularly most important thing about having torpedoes on your battleships in RTW is so you know at what range to fear the enemy destroyers
In 1908 the Royal Navy doctrine was changed to fire at the battle line as a whole instead of targeting a specific ship. The battle line spaced ~600' long targets every ~600 yards, so 1 in 3 chance of hitting unless they turn away. The Germans in particular caught on. Look at how many torpedoes the large cruisers of ISG fired at Jutland.
“a hit … on the ship aimed at with a single torpedo at long range … can only be regarded as a fluke …. Under normal conditions a single ship should not be fired at from ranges outside 1,500 yards. The use to which the torpedo will most often be put in daylight is that of browning a line of ships, the object being to make the torpedoes cross their tracks between the bows of the first and the stern of the last ship of that part of the line taken as the target .” Royal Navy Handbook of Torpedo Control 1916
If battleships still existed now,being able to launch a bunch of CBASS ADCAPS would be fucking devastating. But if battleships still existed now they wouldn't even have guns, they'd just be huge hulls stuffed full of MK48s, Harpoons, and Tomahawks with maybe a few small (relatively) guns for shooting down at suicide high speed boats.
Not finished the video yet, but from touring Texas during her dry dock, the repair work exposed the area of her hull that was covered up that once had her torpedoes tubes, I believe internally the only thing left of the system is the air compressors. Still pretty cool.
Pity that at that time, no body offered an additional $ 500K - 1M. They could have gone full dreadnought-nostalgia and put those tubes back in, with a few museum grade torps added for effect.
As a braindead World of Warships player, I find torpedos on battleships extremely useful after I’ve charged into melee range
If you're in melee range, use a fucking chainsword...
My scharnhorst 43 loves it's torps.
To be fair, battleships and battlecruisers did engage each other at point blank range on several occasions.
Melee Range !? Get out the cutlass, we're boarding !
"after charging into melee range" On fire and taking water having already used your fire suppression and damage control and are on cool down.
“Damn the torpedoes full steam ahead” what he really meant was “these torpedos are bad, let’s use their tonnage for more machinery”
The torpedoes Farragut was referring to were static sea mines, which were called torpedoes at that time.
He was predicting BuOrd's torpedo failures.
At Jutland the Germans were firing spreads of torpedoes when retreating to discourage pursuit and not because they had a fire solution aimed at particular ships.
Yep. It's *probably* not going to hit anything, but your enemy can't take that chance...
That's what the dozens of German torpedo boats did there. Not the few battleships torpedoes
@@simongeard4824 Like going through a mine field which means there's a very good chance.
@@Dilley_G45 Yep. The point of Battleships having torpedoes is having a better chance of getting below your opponent's armor belt for a knockout blow when standing in the traditional line of battle.
That was a universally understood tactic. UK and US theorists called those "browning shots" after a hunting term. They were used in a multitude of other engagements, though typically the destroyers or cruisers would launch them rather than the BBs themselves.
Not only a fascinating answer to a strange question, but once again, I learned so much about the monitor-to-ironclad-to-predreadnaught era, and in the most interesting way!
@Drachinifel can you go over the pay of various navies over the years? We're sailors paid well, or just the bare minimum to get enough men to man the ship? Were any battles/wars decided because one side paid their sailors better?
Generally, you are not going to get paid to the end of the voyage. And you are very rarely going to go to a liberty port to spend it.
I think he covered this in a drydock at one point.
In a nutshell, no they wernt paid well, but officers were.
Before the days of the workhouse, and later on the welfare state, 'not working' was not an option. If you didnt work, you didnt eat, and your family had to starve out and take a die. And in coastal towns and cities, the sea was the only real source of employment, either shipbuilding, fishing, or the navy.
The other nice thing about pre-WWI battle lines was that the ships were fairly closely spaced, so missing ahead or astern might mean you hit some other ship. But of course in WWI battle lines tended to not be nicely lined up broadside to each other, and they tended to not sail in nice straight lines for the whole battle.
Re-examine the track charts of Jutland. The British line of ~600' ships were stationed 600 yards bridge to bridge, Or more correctly, Bridge to Foretop. As that is how the conning officers stadiameters worked.
As with most of these things that might look weird or even outright stupid to us nowadays, one should always approach them with the basic assumption that people "back then" actually had their good reasons to do the things in the way they were doing them. Especially in these cases in which almost everybody was doing them in a similar way.
Except French design, otherwise your right. 😆
@@paidwitness797 But they tried to be smarter than anybody else. They exactly didn't follow my principle. 😅
Imagine how different things might have been if they had perfected some sort of torpedo guidance to make an "all big torpedo" battlecruiser more viable than the "all big gun" battleship.
If long-range autonomous guidance - and, by extension, proximity detonation - was possible in the 1910s, the 'Dreadnought' era might have been surprisingly short-lived. It would be the Jeune Ecole's dream: A weapon that the smallest ocean-going craft could carry, which would be effective against the mightiest battleship. Inertial-guided torpedoes fell short of that goal - Too hard to aim, too easy to dodge. At which point, anything bigger than a fast cruiser was little more than a colossal target, unless you could extend the effective range of the Battleship's weapons far beyond the guidance range of the torpedo.
Or, in other words, you invent the Aircraft Carrier.
So basically a missile cruiser except with torpedoes
The problem is that (until you get cruise missiles and over the horizon battles) an ordinance with sustained propulsion like a torpedo is always gonna hit later than one that burns the same amount of propellant all at once (ie a big ol' gun).
It's the same reason why ATGM launchers never caught on with tanks: They might be able to guarantee a hit in 15 seconds by guiding in a missile, but you can be pretty sure that one of the 2 AP rounds you've sent their way will have hit by then.
Except with early to mid 1900's ships it's worse, since they can (with a theoretical perfect torpedo guidance system) guarantee a hit within the next half hour while you evaporate their hull with a couple dozen main-gun caliber AP rounds with all-right enough accuracy.
@@cookiecraze1310 You're not hitting a destroyer with a Battleship's main guns. That's what the secondary battery is for. On the other hand, the Destroyer just needs it's warheads to get a signal, and immediately pull away out of range after dropping a salvo.
For both world wars, this would have been useless. Torpedoes at extreme ranges were not impossible to dodge, if you saw them coming. A change of speed, a hard turn, and they'd likely sail right past. That's what limited the *effective* range so much.
But if they could track and seek? A Battleship is in DEEP trouble. It can't dodge like a Destroyer, or even a Cruiser. It would need decoys or other active countermeasures to take out the salvo before they reached the ship.
Your point about ATGMs is why autonomous guidance can be such a game changer. You're assuming the firing craft is just sitting still, guiding the warhead in on a joystick while their target shoots back at their leisure. That's not what's happening. They can fire at extreme range and leave, because their target has no effective reply *to the torpedo*
@watchm4ker you're not really disagreeing with me. I was saying that an all torpedo battleship or Battlecruiser would be doomed to fail, same as an ATGM MBT. But, much like how most IFV's carry an ATGM launcher alongside their auto cannon, it does make sense for a destroyer or cruiser to carry torpedoes even without a perfect guidance system just so they can stand up to bigger ships. But that just wasn't what I was arguing about.
Thanks!
Drach, in your video about what happens when a shell hits a battleship, there is an aerial view of what appears to be a 13 gun capital ship at time stop 1:54 . What ship is it?
The only 13 gun battleships that existed, I believe, are the Italian Conte di Cavour class (as built, before modernization)
Due to Kamtchaca's legendary fear of torpedo boats, battleships wanted to inspire the same fear-hence torpedoes
Interesting and beautiful photographs. Ace. 👍
Fantastic content Drach. I had been hoping you would make a video to explain this… and you have 😊
The torpedo salesman was that good!!!
Fun fact: The Nelson & Rodney’s torpedos provided Japan with the inspiration for Japan’s Type 93 torpedos, AKA “The Long Lance.” So battleship torpedos did accomplish something!
Also, Rodney probably DID get a toro hit on Bismarck, so there’s also that…
I wondered why as well. I thought that Battleships used torpedoes against themselves in the early years in battle lines. The amount of penetration of the main guns at those early effective battle ranges (as supported by an average of gun penetration tables at those ranges that I compiled from Navweaps and a Ballistic Simulator against Wrought Iron Armor and the efficiency percentage from navweaps for a type of armor in the 1890s applied to both the iron armor penetration and the base thickness of the armor to determine this) were inferior to ships that were equipped with even 12 inches of Harvey or Krupp Cemented Armor, especially if the enemy ship was crossing the T, but not flat broadside to the enemy (the theory of angling did help not only provide a smaller target, but also made it harder to penetrate if it did hit). Due to the lack of torpedo protection in the early years, a torpedo would be capable of doing significantly more damage than a shell at those battle ranges even if it did penetrate. I also surmised they could be used to disrupt formations in bow and stern launchers or the flank launchers used as a hail mary for a wounded battleship trying to fend off smaller units without escort (either alone during an ambush or its escorts were finished off). I also predicted that since smaller ships (Torpedo Boats, Destroyers, Cruisers) became more prevalent and less fragile than initially designed and that more modern weapons penetrated more armor than needed in addition to higher engagement ranges from the introduction of rangefinders; battleships didn't find torpedoes to be particularly useful anymore except for a convoy raiding role and that was why the Tirpitz was equipped with them. That was my preconception before Drach released this masterpiece. Turns out I was mostly right.
Any time I thought about this, the first ships that immediately came to mind are Nelson, Rodney and Tirpitz
Other than those three, I didn’t know which other battleships carried torpedoes
A lot of the battleships around the time of before/ early ww1 did which is because there was no idea of what the range would be like in battle, by ww2 they knew
Pre-dreadnoughts had torpedo tubes as well
USS Oregon, for example, had 3 tubes on each side
Iirc Scharnhorst and Gneisenau also had a pair of above deck torpedo tubes
Pretty much all pre 1922 battleships had torpedoes
Hmm yeah Tirpitz is the first one I think of and scharnhorst
I want to take a second before I enjoy the latest episode to thank you for all your effort. I shared a link with my Pops RCN CPO Subs. ret. (*80 +y.o.) and he really likes it to. All the best in the holiday season to you and yours.
Letting water in is the best way of sinking a ship. Why did I never think of that?
If your name is David Beatty then you might try the unplanned explosive self-disassembly method by just welding your flash doors open, but, unfortunately, this method only works on your own ships.
@@darrynreid4500 theoretically you could try boarding for a similar result, though at that point you may as well just stuff the enemy gun barrels and save that tiny last bit of effort.
Alternatively you can fill them with marbles, but it's a noisy process and they usually catch you before you get enough onboard to finish the job
I missed it on Friday but its still fun! Thanks for answering that question that was burning in my head. Lol.
7:51 What about cannonballs on the seafloor today after a battle way back then?
USS Texas was built with 4 torpedo tubes, 2 each side. They were never used in combat, and were removed in the 1925 refit, which also added the below-water torpedo bulges.
HMS Marlborough 1912 on the other hand did get to fire torpedoes in anger.
It is little noticed that the Battle of Denmark Strait nearly became a torpedo battle.
Because Hood was closing to within maximum torpedo range of 8-9 miles the two German ships turned west for evasion (this is when the famous film of the Bismarck firing over its port shoulder at PoW was taken from PE, and some classic pics). The Hood blew up, eliminating that danger (and the German ships turned back into their original SW course). Had Hood remained operational it is possible she would have launched at Bismarck if a solution was arrived at, initially a brace of 3 fish, and then repeat reloads. That might have turned out bad for the German BB.
But had Hood not exploded she would have been in serious danger herself. The PE would have fired 6 fish from her port tubes. Although the Hood was the first Brit BB to be fitted with a sophisticated anti-torpedo system, having a narrow BC hull it was too shallow. Even one hit would have slowed down the vessel, allowing the two German ships to escape. 3 hits on its starboard flank could have put the Hood in danger of capsizing. As it happened the torpedo officer on the PE failed to fire ASAP, which was doctrine (to get damaging hits ASAP, and to get the fish off the ship before they might be lost due to hits and become an explosion danger to the cruiser). He got in trouble back in Germany. Did not matter in any case, and he would have gotten around to it had the Hood not sunk so early in the engagement. Each tube had a reload.
Had Hood been seriously damaged or worse by torpedoes Holland would be sharply criticized for putting his flagship at such obvious risk. The solution would have to been to put PoW in the lead to absorb gun fire from Bismarck and keep his ships beyond torp range, ye old Hood being safe at the rear and free to range in on the Bismarck and kill it with 15” fire. Even better Tovey should have kept his entire battlefleet (KGV, PoW, Hood, Repulse which was better armed than the KGVs) together in which case the BDS would have been a historic walk over for the RN to the fury of Hitler who was not at all happy about the very ill-advised Operation Rheinubung and almost cancelled it. Hood would have survived for future operations and just maybe preservation as a memorial ship. Or maybe Churchill would have send it to Singapore as part of Force Z with probably bad results. (In that case Hood would have been illegally scrapped for its valuable radiation free steel [like PoW and R] -- this is no longer being done to preatom bomb wrecks as 21st century steel is not contaminated).
You are vastly overestimating the likelihood of hits at long range with torpedoes. There was an enormous difference between the theoretical maximum range and the effective range. The only way to overcome this with non-homing torpedoes is to launch a massive salvo, which isn't going to happen with a battleship or even a single cruiser due to the limited number of tubes. That's why destroyers were organized into flotillas, typically ~12 ships in WW1 and ~6 ships in WW2, so they could attack as a group and have enough torpedo launcher to have a decent chance of getting hits at longer ranges.
If memory serves, JE MacDonnell in one of his books mentions you wanted to be about a mile out to have a decent chance of getting a hit with a RN torpedo - and closer was better. He was a RN/RAN destroyer officer in WW2. So the officers of the day knew it was very unlikely to get hits at long range.
During WW2 US Pt boats tried for a 500 yard range, German U-Boats were trained pre-war to shoot at 600 yards. When they could, they liked to surface in the midst of a convoy to get 1 hit per torpedo, and convoys had ~1k yard spacing between columns.
When HMS Glowworm went up against Admiral Hipper, they fired 5 torpedoes at 870 yards - Hipper dodged them all. Glowworm never had a chance to fire her other quintuple mount.
Aerial torpedoes typically had a maximum range of ~2000 yards, but if an aircraft really wanted a hit and wasn't with a lot of other planes they would try to close much closer even though the odds of getting hit in return by AA fire were really high doing that.
I believe the torpedoes fired at Scharnhost by RN destroyers were under 2k yards.
One example of a WW2 flotilla action is the sinking of the Haguro - a flotilla of five destroyers vs one heavy cruisers. I don't know the numbers for range for all the destroyers, but I think the destroyers fired at ~3 miles or less, and some of their torpedoes were fired at 2k yards.
At the Battle of Vela Gulf, a flotilla of US destroyers achieved a surprise torpedo launch at 6300 yards that was very effective.
None of these numbers are anywhere near 8-9 miles. It's really unlikely anybody would have launched torpedoes unless the range closed quite a bit as the ships involved would sooner or later have been dodging to throw off enemy fire control which makes them especially hard targets for long range torpedoes. Reload times were generally not that fast - maybe 10 minutes for a battleship with 3 internal tubes, a lot longer for ships with external tubes (the Japanese managed it in 18 minutes once and that was considered quite good, many ships with external tubes didn't have reloads).
There certainly were some special cases where hits were achieved at long distance with a small salvo, but these were quite rare and involved a lot of luck or special circumstances in addition to skill. Having a lot of targets in a group (convoy or invasion fleet or carrier group or just a large group of warships) helped with getting long range hits. A torpedo that missed it's primary target could still hit a secondary target.
The Japanese liked to spend some of their torpedo strength trying for these kinds of long range hits - but they had a lot of launchers and carried reloads so they could afford to play the odds with a salvo of 20-30 torpedoes at long range (e.g. Battle of the Java Sea).
Special circumstances could further reduce the likelihood of long range hits. Steam torpedoes had quite visible wakes that could alert the target in time to dodge. Bioluminescence could make even wakeless electric torpedoes visible. Targets with passive sonar could often hear incoming torpedoes.
“Over its port shoulder” technical term
@@bluelemming5296 Ah yes, but the BDS was exceptionally well suited for a long range torpedo duel that was inevitable had the battle continued. Usually targets are set at an angle to the launchers and modest in size, producing a complex solution with targets able to comb torpedo wakes. In this case after Holland’s turn the two sides would have been on subparallel courses eliminating convergence issues and presenting the targets at their broadside maximums. And the Hood was a HUGE target, at 860 ft almost as long as the Yamatos and Iowas. And with its narrow hull and single rudder not able to readily comb torpedoes. No BB was ever a better torpedo target than Hood. Bismarck not much better off at 820 ft,, better turning performance because beamier and twin rudders.
Hood was in normal battle range of PE’s torpedoes because the latter’s torp officer was severely reprimanded in Germany for not firing his fish (apparently he dismissed the range data coming in from gunnery in favor of his own overestimate, oops). PR had 12 torps in tubes and reloads on its port side. Just one hit would have slowed Hood enough to allow the German ships to escape. Hood had something like a couple of dozen fish in tubes and reloads. One hit on B would have doomed it.
Because we all are fascinated by the Hood going bang no one has looked into what would have happened at she remained operational and both sides started loosing their fish. We tend to imagine a nice, orderly running gun slugfest with both sides banging away at one another with artillery on fairly steady SW courses, kind of like the runs south and north at Jutland. Not bloody likely what with fish swimming about. PE & B had already turned sharply west due to mere fear of torps from Hood. Both side had to fire their fish. To unload their dangerous explosive warheads in favor of maybe applying them to enemy hulls. To disrupt the operations of the enemy. In particular for the B&E to try to escape destruction.
What would Holland have done when lookouts spotted the wakes of PEs brace of torpedoes as they certainly would have at some point. He would have had to do something and fast and drastic, could not just sit there and present his enormous broadside to the underwater explosives. Turning towards them would have probably been disastrous. Turning away even if that worked as it may well have would have allowed the German ships to pull away with their edge in speed (H was limited to PoW’s 27 kts) and save themselves. Nor would the H torp officer sat drumming his fingers, he would have pumped out one diabolical machine after another until he ran out. Upon seeing the incoming school of fish from Hood Lutjens would have had to do further turn aways. Even if they never scored a hit the torpedoes would have been a very important factor that could have determined the outcome of the BDS. As per Jellicoe having to turn away from the High Seas Fleet at Jutland when threatened with torpedoes.
This issue reinforces that Tovey was reckless when he sent just two deficient BBs to confront Bismarck and left them without the support of Victorious whose Swordfish could have prevented it from easily escaping even if they did not score crippling hits.
Someone needs to take a closer look at this, examining potential torpedo ranges and angles and possible consequences, in order to better understand the decisions at they happened and might have happened of Tovey, Holland and Lutjens. Perhaps having largely solved why the Mighty Hood blew up our beloved Drachinifel can do a deep dive into this. Not like he has much else to do;)
@@gregp6210 With four tubes, Hood is going to have about a ~12 minute reload time if nothing goes wrong (the rough seas and hard maneuvering might have significantly increased reload times to 20-30+ minutes, but we'll ignore that for now). There is no 'school of fish' here, unless four fish every 12 minutes somehow makes up a school - and that's assuming all the launchers are working, never something you can assume on an old ship!
Also, think about how many shells can be fired in 12 minutes. Bismark's rate of fire for main guns is 3 per minute, even if we downgrade that to 2 per minute for 'real world conditions', that's still 2x8x12=192 shells between each torpedo salvo from Hood. The torpedoes are simply not to going to dominate this battle. It took less than 10 minutes for Bismark to sink Hood after opening fire. That's time for only one torpedo salvo even under the best of circumstances!
The one potential benefit here for a torpedo launch is the fact that the rough seas might actually hide the torpedoes from sight long enough, to get them close enough, that dodging is no longer a possibility. But even then, the ships are going to be constantly maneuvering, chasing each others salvos to avoid getting hit, which is going to make their positions very hard to predict, so the likelihood of a hit from long range torpedo fire is really low. Consider how many torpedoes missed during WW2 engagements when they were fired at far shorter ranges ... even against big targets like aircraft carriers and battleships.
In the specific case of Hood, as far as I know she was still equipped with old Mark IV torpedoes (a WW1 design, possibly with some minor upgrades), which were not particularly long range, and since they were steam torpedoes would have a visible wake. I think the Prinz Eugen had G7A torpedoes (a much more modern design, ~1934), which are also steam torpedoes, so they too are going to have a visible wake. Not clear what the sighting distance would be in the sea state actually present for steam torpedo wakes.
Hood is not going to want to get into a torpedo duel with a much newer warship that probably (as far as they know, not sure what they knew) has much newer torpedoes, which gives yet another reason to not get too close. I don't know if the torpedo officer on Hood was even authorized to open fire, and he would not have done so without authorization.
Prinz Eugen is not going to want to close deep into the range of two battleships to launch torpedoes if she can possibly avoid it, even though she has new torpedoes. Even closing with one battleship to launch torpedoes is a horrible risk for a cruiser that's unlikely to go well, closing with two battleships is even less likely to go well.
Also note that Repulse in her final battle was able to dodge lots of incoming torpedoes - and her turning radius is almost as bad as Hood. If Repulse can dodge large torpedo salvos, that suggests that Hood or Bismark can dodge much smaller salvos. For that matter USS Enterprise was able to dodge lots of torpedoes during her career - and this is a carrier!
The situation with Jutland is not really a good comparison. The Germans had >60 torpedo boats (destroyers) at Jutland. When firing at the Grand Fleet, the Germans could throw enormous salvos against a large number of ships in close proximity, so missing one ship gives a really good chance of hitting another. That's not going to be the case here. It would take enormous luck to get a torpedo hit in the battle of the Denmark Straight.
Finally, the captain of Prinz Eugen was a political appointee, who had previously commanded Hitler's yacht. His order to open fire with torpedoes at extremely long range (which wasn't carried out) can be taken as a sign of inexperience with the real world limitations of the weapon system, as can the staff criticism of his torpedo officer. Both political appointees and staff officers often had very little understanding of real world considerations that make theoretical ranges very different from effective ranges. The enormous number of examples of real world torpedo firing by warships (and aircraft) during WW2 at far shorter ranges - some given in my previous post - shows that competent officers didn't try to get hits at extreme range because they knew perfectly well they were just wasting ordinance, except in the special case of the Japanese who could get away with that because they had the extra ordinance and the best torpedoes in the world.
The numbers just don't work out here for torpedoes to play a major role except by absurd luck.
@@bluelemming5296 You are often commenting on what you think I said, not what I actually said.
I did not state that torpedoes were going to be the dominant factor in the BDS. I did state that they could have been far more important than has been realized, having a strong influence by forcing radical maneuvers even if no hits were made.
Because BB scale shell are only a foot or more in diameter, and AP rounds contain only a few dozen lbs of explosive, shell hits are typically incremental in effect. The only ships sunk quickly by BB shell size AP projectiles were due to overly explosive cordite charges at Jutland, the BDS, and Pearl Harbor. Because they explode huge charges of hundreds of lbs of explosive against the underwater hull, rapid sinking of BBs by torpedoes and mines was much more expected and happened often in the Russo-Japanese and two world wars (and giant liners Lusitania and Britannia were sunk by single torp/mines despite extensive compartmentalization). A single torpedo into Hood would have slowed it down enough to allow B&PE to escape. In general a single torpedo hit is worth a dozen or two AP round hits. That is why a single large fish, deep placed torpedo hit is so fearsome that commanders go to great lengths to avoid them, more so than artillery hits which are a matter of course in long range gun duels.
Salvo chasing consists of the target vessel steering left/right maybe 5-10 degrees without changing basic heading with enough subtlety to not let the enemy ship know that it is shifting range - deception being the whole point of the maneuver -- and to disturb its own gunnery as little as possible. It is nothing like the hard radical turning needed to dodge torpedoes. Salvo chasing does not effect torpedo solutions at all, and saying so is an argument of desperation. In any case captains did not always salvo chase because gunnery officers did not like it. Off Singapore that two Brit ships had to steer hard rudder circles to comb wakes, and would not have been able to conduct accurate gunnery. Had H or B had to dodge fish and did so successfully their gunnery would have been severely disrupted, as occurred when PoW had to suddenly steer around the sinking Hood. That is part of the point I am making, even nonhits of torps would have had a major impact on the course of the battle.
Briggs described the seas during the BDS as long rollers, they were not very choppy and torp tracks probably would have been visible.
I have not found evidence that it normally took 12 minutes for reloads. Some experienced subs could do it in 3, although that is unlikely for surface ships.
We know that H did get into torpedo range of PE because as I said in both earlier posts the torp officer of the later was seriously punished upon return to shore for not firing his fish as soon as the H was in range, which means it was in range (because Holland wanted his flagship close enough to prevent a deck hit getting into a magazine, which happened to coincide with max range of PE’s torpedoes). In the legal proceedings the officer did not claim he did not fire because he thought the range was not optimal, but because his own ranging seemed to indicate H was outside max range and he discounted the more accurate ranges measured by the gunnery system. So if Hood at kept going there would have been a torp duel regardless what the commanders thought. The German torp officer had standing instructions to fire ASAP for reasons explained in prior posts, he did not get in trouble for not asking permission, he did for not doing his assigned job - this is similar to how AA missile crews do not have to ask the captain can I please fire at this plane or missile about to hit our ship, just fire at the damn thing. The captain of the PE did not know what was going down he not being involved in when to fire fish, the doctrine being to fire when a solution was arrived at. We do not know the situation on H, in any case if the TO was ready to launch no doubt the captain would have said by all means go ahead and see what you can do, it can’t hurt us and might hurt them and good to get the blasted warheads off the ship.
I never claimed PE had a good chance of hitting H. The mere appearance of torpedo wakes would have forced Holland to make immediate extreme course changes that would have thrown off the gunnery on a ship that had an obsolete fire control system (which may have been further limited by an early hit by B) and allowed the B& PE to escape to the SE. It is well known the threat from torpedoes and mines is as almost much the need to not risk being sunk by them as actually being sunk by them.
Because of all the torps that would have been crossing between the two forces it is likely that the BDS would not have settled down to the straightforward gunnery slugfest with the ships following fairly consistent parallel SW courses with at most modest salve chasing that most imagine. There would have been radical dodging turns that may have aborted the battle before the B&PE could be dealt with. A probability few if any have taken into account.
Id love a video about all the torpedo propulsion methods and advantages and disadvantages like electric and others at the time
A very informative video brilliantly narrated.Thank you.Roly 🇬🇧.
Hot take before watching the Video "Why did Battleships carry torpedoes?" - A: To blow up Asteroids inside a Wormhole if warp core wasn't balanced properly while going to warp inside the solar system.... Let's see how I did.... :p
The Moving Picture reference?
I thought it was because Phasers couldn't be used at FTL speeds due to the warp core already using it's power on movement.
Thanks Drach
I believe it is a case of rather have and don't need than need and don't have.
I dont think theres a better channel to fall asleep to and i mean that as a compliment
Drach good to see you on Times Radio.
Watched it, very good but should really be series with running time of around 6 hours to give it justice. Also nice to see Drach hanging out with PhD Admirals these days 😁
What a fun video. I had forgotten I actually know a bit about this, since there was kind of a madness that swept naval thought when ironclad ships were becoming common. People generally seemed to think that the gun was dead as an effective weapon and that the future of naval combat would either be decided by the torpedo or the ram.
Thanks Drach.
Considering it was once common for ships to have a big mix of differing gun types, shoving torpedoes into battleships didn't seem odd. Especially as the ranges the ships used to fire onto each other was notably closer.
"Torpedo boats!"
So that some battleship captain could channel his inner Khan and yell: "Aft torpedoes, fire!"
At least until enemy guns hit the torpedo magazine.
Bro...I clenched my fist and yelled it just like Kahn when I read it
@@mattc8018 ❤😎🤘
Surprisingly cool history here - thank you
Naval engineers: "Better get rid of these things. They are useless."
HMS Rodney, viciously flipping the bird to the Admiralty from the other side of the street: "I'll show ya! I'll bloody show ya!!! Ya plonkers!"
Great insight on the matter, Drach. Hood almost got Bismarck, too.
Cheers.
29:49 „reach out and touch people“ 😂
HE'S SUCCUMB TO THE FREAK
Let me thank you once again.
You drill into things.
Amazing photos in this.
Forward-launching torpedoes could possibly disrupt the enemy if they were executing a crossing-the-T maneuver.
Not enough torpedoes for that..considering it was expected that Battle lines would engage..so congrats,you can fire the grand total of 1! torpedo in the worst of circumstances...German head on firing torpedoes where a stupid idea
Depends on which side of the 'T' you're talking about. Torpedoes would be pretty useful for the fleet getting crossed. The fleet doing the crossing is at the wrong angle - realistically the detonator only works if the target is within the ballpark of a 90 degree angle of the torpedo's path.
Do you mean if you’re the one crossing, or the one BEING crossed? If you’re being crossed, forward aiming torpedoes might indeed be useful to break up the attack and force the enemy out of ideal firing position. But if you’re crossing someone else’s T, firing down the line at a ship that is bow-on to you would be damn difficult. Those WWII torpedoes had a tendency to glance off a ship unless they could hit a part of the hull that was perpendicular to the direction of motion of the torpedo…. or close to perpendicular.
@matthewnewton8812 The idea is that the lead ship fires torpedoes at the crossing formation, forcing them to maneuver and throw off their firing solutions.
@NashmanNash The lead ship begins firing torpedoes into the oncoming formation, forcing them to maneuver and throw off their firing solutions. The crossed fleet is also going to maneuver to form a battle line so that each ship, as the one ahead moves out of the way, will continue to launch torpedoes.
My take on this video:
Pre-dreadnoughts typically carried 4 12” guns of a low rate of fire and short effective range. At short range most effects (blast & splinters) of shell hits could be kept away from the vitals (magazines and machinery) by a thick belt and armor deck. Hits would be few (few guns per broadside and low rates of fire). These battleships carried only a few torpedo tubes (1?) per broadside. But even 1 torpedo hit on a battleship could sink it; witness HMS Goliath, Majestic and Triumph hit by 1 to 3 small torpedoes (45 to 50 cm, 200-350# warheads). So getting into torpedo range might be a viable proposition as one didn’t have to face a hail of gunfire at long range.
By the end of the pre-Washington treaty period, guns had gotten larger (13.5” to 16”) with rates of fire of 2-3 rounds per minute per barrel (RPM/B) for even the largest guns (versus e,g. 0.67 RPM/B for pre-1906 USN 12”/40). Ships carried more guns per broadside 8 to 12 (typical of super Dreadnoughts) with longer ranges (central predictor fire control). To get into range to *ensure a hit* from one’s own 1 or 2 torpedoes per battleship meant facing a hail of destructive shells at long range. The trade off simply wasn’t worth it risking fire control kills or penetration into vitals from long range plunging fire.
Treaty battleships were larger 35000-78000 tons) with theoretically better subdivision, welded construction and side protection systems. They faced larger torpedoes (21 to 24” with massive (660 to 1080# - USN MK 14 to IJN 61 cm Type 93) warheads of more powerful explosives (Torpex v Guncotton/TNT/ Hexanite). Some IJN Yamamoto & Musashi needed a pounding to sink.
Yes, torpedo ranges increased. But as pointed out ensuring a hit at very long range with a single shot was minuscule and one had one or two shots (vs 80+ rounds per barrel for guns). To sink or constructive destroy a capital ship with torpedoes meant getting close to an unsuspecting ship (submarine) e.g., IJN Shinano, mass attack by numerous destroyers and cruisers (Surigao Strait) or aircraft (pick about any USN carrier victory) or a lucky hit (KMS Bismarck or HMS POW).
Did any WW II battleship ever use its torpedoes? IDK. Basically one is talking about Scharnhorst (?) & Bismarck classes (Bismarck class - nope), Nelson/Rodney (haven’t heard any accounts of use) and Hood (nope). The Panzerschiff don’t count.
Source of certain tech data: NAVWEAPS.COM
I recently saw the giant Cut Away Model of Viribus Unites at the Military Museum in Vienna. And the different Torpeado Rooms took up quite a lot of space
Yes, I have asked this question….awesome 😊
Its only relatively recently that I learned that battleships even carried torpedoes. There's very little ready information out there on this. Thank you for history on this regarding the background on their development, the installation and their eventual removal.
It sounds to me, it would make perfect sense if they had just installed tubes that could inject steam into the water to make it look like they fired torpedoes, and save the weight for other more important things like armor or more engine space😊
So wise , Thank You
I've just been watching 5:00 to 10:00 and it looks like there's been a major change in the objective of battle; in the age of the steam iron-clad, the aim is to sink the enemy's ship. AFAIK, this wasn't the primary objective in the age of sail. Ships rarely sank, unless the magazines exploded, and in any case it was MUCH more profitable, both for the ship's crew and for the nation, to capture a vessel and bring it into your own fleet (often retaining its original name). For all the reasons you list; and this presumably explains the difference in gunnery tactics: the French aim high to disable the rigging, as this is the elegant way of disabling a ship with a view to capture.
All this is implicit in what you're saying, but maybe worth foregrounding since it might imply that the early iron-clad steamships, although they still formed lines of battle like the old days, actually introduced a revolution in naval tactics. Or not, I might have got it wrong.
Very much so. For several big reasons.
One is just the ability to sink. Wooden ships are generally much harder to sink than metal ones, and over on the weapons side this is around the same time we're switching from inert cannonballs to explosive shells, which are considerably better at inflicting structural damage to a ship.
Another is the difficulty in capturing a ship. Wooden ships being shot at by inert cannons take a hell of a beating before they sink - odds are the crew are long since dead or thoroughly sick of having everything around them blown to bits piece by agonizing piece. The top (weather) deck is also critical to controlling how the ship moves, since that's where the tiller and sails are, so a boarding team can capture that and then just sail it off. Armoured steamships can lock the doors to the upper deck, hide their crew from the enemy boarding party, and then just steam off to find some place that has enough friendly troops to fight off the boarding party stuck on their hull, since the control system is deep within the bowels of the ship.
And finally there's the value in the captured ship. For steamships, unless it's one that your country built and sold to the enemy in happier times, it's quite likely that the details of how to operate the engines are different from what your country does. Ditto for repair work - all the standard parts you keep in shipyards around your empire won't fit. And the guns are going to need different ammunition too, and as the Steam and Steel age progresses, you're going to find it increasingly more difficult to pull them out and replace them with something you make ammo for. This last one is the only thing that would be an issue for Age of Sail ships, but even the biggest cannon of that era could relatively easily be hoisted out through the cargo hatch and replaced by your country's biggest gun. (Also, it's much easier to adjust things such that you're now also making cannonballs that fit the new guns than it is to start making the kind of shells designed to fire out of an Steam and Steel era gun...making a metal ball of a given size isn't that complex.
All in all...sinking enemy ships got easier, capturing them got harder, and also less worth the effort.
Edit: My erroneous comment about the UK scuttling the German navy after WWI was incorrect - it was at Scapa Flow and they were in UK custody, but the scuttling was undertaken by German sailors under orders from a German admiral. Thank you, jackgee3200 for the correction!
@@jackgee3200 Well...that's an embarassing mistake in my history knowledge. I knew it was at Scapa Flow and that the ships were Britain's responsibility, but I thought that meant the German sailors had been either sent home or were being held as POWs, not just sitting in their ships. And apparently if any of the sources I've heard talk about this said it was Germans who did the scuttling, I wasn't paying enough attention.
Thanks for the correction! I've edited the original comment such that it no longer makes this assertion, while also acknowledging the error had existed so your correction doesn't look out of place.
Probably less inclined to chase something if you see a spread of torpedoes heading your way.
Until we invent the actual functional crystal ball, we're always going to be guessing what the future war's requirements will be, and largely we base future expectations on past wars. It's very easy and safe from a career perspective to fight the last war because there's citeable sources to point to.
When torpedo doctrine was finally documented as now being ineffective due to the lack of using it in the prior war, then navies largely stopped trying to implement it.
Why did bearn carry torpedoes ?
Drach always evading difficult french questions !😂😂
having french included in the question is all the answer you need.
So, what you are saying is during the 1980's refit, the Iowa's should have been given launch tubes for guided torpedoes. Just in case they were needed. 😆
Hey you never know when a submarine gets a little bold.
The “truss” like structure on the tube exterior in the dry dock shots, is that part of the launcher, or a loading fixture?
Did ww1 ships still have rams or was it all about length to beam length?
Dreadnoughts and cruisers mostly gave up their rams due to the larger range of engagement and inertial guidance torpedoes.
22:05 The TL;DR is that shells hit or miss very fast meaning you can adjust. Meanwhile a torpedo traveling at 31 knots for thousands of meters is going to take so long to hit or miss the enemy will have plenty of time to target you with several torpedoes and gun volleys and communicate with the rest of their fleet about what to do about your ship.
How long after the first hit with damage enough to slow it down would such a ship using speed as its defense last before it sinks?
Where was that photograph taken at 5:50? You really should annotate these photos 😃
Was about to ask same question. Somone moved some rock there. Must be an interesting story.
I always wanted why more battleships didn't launch their torpedoes. Kind of a "fuck it, chuck it" concept.
They never got the chance. Contrary to popular belief, there were VERY few battles between opposing battleships from the predreadnought age to today.
Also, in all ages right up to the current day, fish are EXTREMELY expensive. One Torpedo cost about as much as a Spitfire. You dont just throw them away, they dont miraculously respawn in a port like on video games.
i'm here for the pictures mostly...
and then i find out something i didn't know, so
bonus.
much as i'm sure the creators probably hate it,
i get great pleasure from cutting ads off, or muting them at the onset.
How much weight did torpedo tubes and firing machinery and storage of torpedoes cost?
They were pretty heavy and expensive.
Thanks for the video. It's always fascinating to see technology introduce and then eliminate a weapon system on a given ship class. Leaves you wondering if a given country decided to just eliminate the torpedo from their battleship designs with the Super Dreadnaught what butterfly effects may have occurred?
7:41 There are rifles with 2,000 yard volley sights and I find that hilariously optimistic. I mean at least with naval guns you might see a big splash and walk it in, or view explosions against shore based targets. But a hundred people lobbing 6-8mm rounds 2,000 yards won't have any idea how far they missed by. Even if one of the enemy falls it is more likely someone in the volley missed and got lucky rather than a reason to fire at the same angle again.
To scare away the kamchatka with threats of torpedo boats
can you review the Rättvisan?
Never really thought about it... I always just assumed they did because they could. Lol
How far away was the technology to create an acoustic homing torpedo at the start of WW2? The accuracy of such a system would reduce the number of torpedoes needed to be effective, which in turn would allow some truly colossal weapons if you start from a Long Lance platform. The ability for a battleship to carry a small number of ship-killing shots would be valuable if you can get predictable accuracy at extreme range with enough speed, especially at night or in poor visibility.
The Germans introduced acoustic torpedoes in 1943, with the more effective variety being deployed in August 1943. The US introduced air-dropped acoustic torpedoes in March 1943, which would be used by both the US and Britain. The US sub-launched acoustic torpedo would appear in small numbers in 1944.
There are three limitations to keep in mind:
1. Decoys were easy to build and tow behind a ship (basically a noise source).
2. The torpedo had a limited acoustic 'hearing range', so you're still going to be limited in long range fire, if you don't get close enough the torpedo won't be able to hear the target. I think the German torpedoes could hear a 15 knot target at about ~500 yards. That might sound like a large distance, but when you are firing a torpedo that needs to travel many miles against a maneuvering target it might be really tough to get that close.
3. Like anything with a control system, there were failure modes such as losing lock or locking onto the wrong thing. An acoustic torpedo could even circle back at the firing ship (regular torpedoes could do this as well: two US subs were lost to circular runs where they were hit by their own torpedoes, and other navies experienced the problem as well). Subs could go quiet after firing, that wasn't so easy for surface ships and there would be very good reasons for surface ships to not want to slow down in combat - but high speed means high noise.
You’d think they would make one you could steer remotely. You have the best program and a great voice. You could make a killing doing commercials in the US.
This sounds like the revserse of adding missiles to main battle tanks: missiles (and now loitering munitions) are for long range and while it might be nice for a tank to be to engage from long range, it takes up space for its closer ramge role and cheaper vehicles (i.e. a Hi Lux) can fire the missile.
KMS Bismarck: hey HMS Rodney where do you carry torpedos?
HMS Rodney: Mahan
Badum tsss.
I've read accounts that Hood may have shot torpedoes at Prince Eugene, or at least Prince Eugene thought they spotted torpedoes. I think it may have been in the book "Killing the Bismarck".
It's the latter: they thought they spotted torpedoes but there's no evidence that any had actually been launched and it's not even remotely credible. Consider torpedo travel times and effective range issues to understand this.
The theoretical range of torpedoes is enormously larger than the effective range - and competent period officers understood this - you can tell this from the firing ranges used in the vast majority of battles. Not every book writer or historian understands that, and very few 'armchair admirals'.
The Japanese were a special case: they could and did gamble on very long range fire because they had lots of launchers and reloads and torpedoes that were far faster than those of any other nation. Even then, they tended to only do this when they knew they had enough targets that a miss on the primary target might still hit another ship. At the Battle of the Java Sea they would fire over 100 torpedoes - and only get three hits, but arguably those three hits determined the outcome of the battle.
For other nations, if somebody is firing at maximum range, they're either extremely desperate or just incompetent.
For example, if you look at the Battle of the River Platte - a daylight battle where both sides had big ships and torpedoes - both sides captains were very careful and deliberate as to when they allowed torpedoes to be fired. These were resources to be conserved until the optimal moment came to use them, as a 'threat in being': the other side couldn't risk closing with large warships so long as the torpedo threat was present so firing too early was a really bad idea even though keeping the torpedoes on board also posed a risk should they be detonated by enemy fire.
Note this is very different from what you often see in computer games, which replace reality with illusion for sake of entertainment.
Big and large here refer to cruiser-sized ships, the rules are somewhat different for destroyers.
A good rule of thumb for the effective range of non-Japanese WW2 torpedoes is a mile or less, or ~2k yards/meters if you prefer. Since it's a 'rule of thumb' the numbers don't have to be exactly equal between different systems of units. Here, 'effective range' means you have a decent chance of getting 1-2 hits from a salvo of 4-6 torpedoes against an evading warship. There were lots of misses even at this relatively short range, and even really big warships could dodge all the torpedoes launched at them at this range if the circumstances were right.
Of course there is the famous supposition that HMS Rodney actually managed to Torpedo Bismarck?
I wondered why Polish destroyers had as many as 2 x 3 torpedo launchers. If something disables one launcher, chances are the whole ship will explode - like Grom did. IMO one less launcher made tribal class destroyers best.
It is lovely how the majority of people on Earth have no clue that ships used torpedoes.
I mean, I saw the shells used the other day and it is mind boggling still.
I was certainly hoping Rodney would get a mention at the end.
I thought you chose a particularly good set of illustrations for this video!
I wonder if the question is less: 'Why?', and more: 'Why not?'
Because there is no armor belt down there, and it is like the naval ship version of the bayonet. It is better to have and not need it than to need it and have it.
Except that a lot of ships were lost when their torpedoes got hit and went boom. Destroyers make sense since they're already glass cannons, an argument could be made for cruisers, but putting them on a battleship just adds a large weakpoint for very little gain.
Not quite. To have a torpedo room below deck you need to open holes in the armor to fire through, which weakens your armor protection. To have enough room for the machinery and reloads you need a large compartment. That becomes vulnerable to flooding, and greatly complicates counter-flooding and damage control in general. There's always the possibility of a fire starting or an explosion detonating your own torpedoes. Above deck, you don't have the 'large compartment' issue but the possibility of your torpedoes being detonated by incoming fire goes up. You also need crew members to man the weapons, and they have mass, they take up space, they need food and water.
It's much easier to carry a bayonet because it doesn't carry any real liabilities other than a tiny amount of weight.
@bluelemming5296 You can also deck mount, but torpedo tubes are not in the armored belt. They are well below.
It's about thought. Given the expected battle scenario at that time were that battle would took place around 10-15000 yards so close range weapon might be necessary. For German at least, theirs were more or less over sized commerce raiders so I guess it was used to complement for guns
I suspect the modern torpedo seemed an obvious addition to the most expensive platform deployed by every fleet simply because the torpedo was an expensive weapon
Would acoustic torpedoes have made a difference if they'd developed a few yrs earlier. An acoustic tracking Long Lance?
In what year, and at what distance did the target see the torpedo coming in time to evade it?
“a hit … on the ship aimed at with a single torpedo at long range … can only be regarded as a fluke …. Under normal conditions a single ship should not be fired at from ranges outside 1,500 yards. The use to which the torpedo will most often be put in daylight is that of browning a line of ships, the object being to make the torpedoes cross their tracks between the bows of the first and the stern of the last ship of that part of the line taken as the target .” Royal Navy Handbook of Torpedo Control 1916
Given that the British Battle line of ~600' long battleships at Jutland were keeping station ~600 yards bridge to bridge, while torpedoes aimed at a particular ship had a very small chance of hitting, torpedoes aimed randomly at the line had a 1 in 3 chance of hitting regardless of range. Pretty obvious wht Jellicoe needed to turn away.
Just in case the primary, secondary, tertiary, quantenary, quintenary, and in some cases sextenary battery guns are not enough to kill the enemy.
Honestly
Quite like 40k's Imperial Navy's opening strategy just being mass torpedo strike
Making battleships also having torpedo launchers along with there rams make a lot of sense
"If every other ship is firing its torpedoes towards the enemy, why shouldn't the biggest of all of them also be firing torpedoes towards the enemy?"
Plus it would be carrying bigger torpedoes with a larger payload
I'm wondering how accurate and consistent the speeds of those longer range torpedoes were - if they didn''t travel at the advertised rate the most carefully calculated firing solution would be useless.
Nothing made by humans is perfect. This is why a spread of multiple torpedoes was typically used at longer ranges - it helped correct for any errors in the process, including problems with the assumptions, the measurements, the calculations, and the equipment.
In practice getting hits at longer ranges was extremely hard. This gave a further advantage to guns, as the theoretical range of torpedoes was a lot longer than the effective range, meaning if you really wanted that hit, you had to close fairly deep into your opponents gun range. Or you could have a lot of launching platforms and throw a really large salvo.
Problems hitting at long range is one reason why a U-Boat might surface inside a convoy at night and start firing torpedoes (this happened a number of times in early WW2) - here it was quite possible to use one torpedo per target because the ranges were so close - the typical distance between columns of ships in a convoy might be ~1k yards. Before WW2, Doenitz trained his U-Boat crews to fire at ~600 yards. Similarly, PT boats and similiar vessels often tried to fire their torpedoes at ~500 yards.
Aerial torpedoes might hit if launched at the typical maximum range of ~2k yards, but were much more likely to hit at 1k yards - though getting that close was very risky for the aircraft.
Torpedoes had a control system to keep them on course and control systems are subject to well known failure modes such as losing lock. At least two US subs were sunk by circular runs of their own torpedoes during WW2. If you read a accounts of subs during that era [e.g. Red Scorpion: The War Patrols of the USS Rasher by Sasgen], you'll find that when they had to deal with a defective torpedo that didn't launch (whether in combat or training), the sub crews knew that a delayed launch followed by a circular run was a real possibility and had to be very careful trying to recover the situation.
Nobody actually knows what happens to torpedoes in the water when shells or depth charges are exploding in the water near them, close enough to potentially disrupt the control system, but far enough out to not detonate the warhead. Water is very efficient at transmitting massive shock waves, and that shock could potentially impact the control system in both linear and non-linear ways (from an engineering perspective). This makes assessing battles more difficult, since we can't simply assume linear runs for torpedoes - which doesn't stop people from doing that, of course.
For that matter, we can't make reliable or even credible linear probability assessments when non-linear phenomena can be present - despite the often strong temptation to do so. Jumping to conclusions is much easier than a careful consideration of possibilities and evidence.
Night battles are especially problematic since you're much less likely to have somebody in a position to observe what is actually happening - and the human beings present are far more likely to jump to their own conclusions which may not match what actually happened. Dives on warships have a revealed a lot of problems with the 'perceived truth' of battles.
Might mention later but also torpedoes would be useful in night fighting as the effective gun range is far lower and its also far harder to spot the torpedoes. Might also be no flash allowing a certain element of stealth.
What was the last successful capital ship torpedo that hit its target?
Rodney vs Bismarck.
Battleships carried torpedos as an ongoing deterrent against the Kamchatka.
Except for Rodney/ Bismarck, no mention is made of other ships sunk or damaged by battleship launched torpedoes. Surely some of those torpedoes must have hit something. Is there a source for those statistics? Terrific story!
whats that intro music?
10:00 Like the Korean Turtleships?
So good