I can remember when you first started doing the Drydock and wondered that if there was enough interest you'd do more. As we approach episode 300, have you decided whether or not there is enough interest from your adoring public?😆
Thanks for addressing my question, Drach. I hadn't been thinking so much about the sorts of scenarios you mentioned, in part because as a former sailor on a ship that was equipped with an EW suite that we knew was designed with the capability to make us a "designated target" in case of true cataastrophe to protect the carrier. That sort of tactical sacrifice, as cold as it may be, is something that I'd internalized. The strategic level comes harder to me. For a number of reasons.
The intractable problem Mahan couldn’t help Japan with was that when the US Navy sank a Japanese ship, the ship and crew died. Conversely, when Japan sank a US Navy ship, American industry just built (and crewed) two ships to replace it.
I was working in Lae New Guinea in the early 90's. I had some workers ,laying some pipes near the Lae brewery which was right on the waterfront. I went to start the boys working and thee first thing I noticed was a full torpedo on the beach. I was surprised at the size of the thing and also the fact it was still there in one piece. The machine operator just pushed it aside with his excavator and I must admit that I had a heart attack at this, we had a laugh at this after he reassured me it was empty but like I said the thing was huge. If I remember right ì would think it would have been at least 5-6 MTS long but I can't think of the diameter.
In Okinawa they're still finding military ordinance left over from the war - some of it still dangerous. Stuff is found both on land and by divers in the waters near the island. Stars and Stripes had an article about one recent find: "Unexploded shell from WWII found at tourist destination on Okinawa" by Keishi Koja on April 18, 2024. Here's a staggering quote from the article: "Crews disposed of 14.7 tons [of ordinance] between April 1, 2022, and March 31, 2023." Even in the USA I think there's some ordinance unaccounted for, both from the sub-launched Japanese seaplane attacks, and from the Japanese 'balloon attack'.
1:07:45 I can just picture Warspite sneaking up to Yamato: "Oh, you think darkness is your ally, but you merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, welded by it. I didn’t see the light until I was already a dreadnought. By then, it was nothing to me but blinding!"
You surprised me about your comment about the US being self-sufficient in almost everything including rubber (~29:12), which immediately came to mind mind as something really only found in SE Asia and because rubber was rationed in WWII. NATURAL rubber that is. I looked it up and the US established a large synthetic rubber industry in WWII, so you were right. The US had enough synthetic rubber production for military uses. How dare I doubt Mr. Drach!!!!
I'd like to see a video about the history of torpedo launchers on surface ships. Were they aimed by crew in the proximity of the launcher? Was the direction that the torpedo entered the water crucial or did a gyro compass setting determine the torpedo's path independent of the launch direction? When and how did the gyro control determine what direction to hold? What was the command to fire? - like submarines "Fire 1! Fire 2!..."?
Fish do follow normal hydrodynamic laws. All long distance pelagic swimmers have a basically teardrop shape with a rounded cross section. Best example I can give is the swordfish. The Sword on a swordfish (which they use for hunting) is long but narrow, but if you look at the *body* of the swordfish you will notice that it has that elongated teardrop shape that ALL fast swimming pelagic wanderers have. And I do mean all of them. Fish can have a somewhat longer length to breadth ratio because they can do something ships, torpedoes and submarines cannot, they can flex their bodies, so they can have a longer length to breadth without losing agility. Marine animals also have a bunch of other clever little adaptations for reducing drag. From how their scales are shaped and directed in the case of fish (especially sharks), or the skin structure in the case of cetaceans (Whales, porpoises and Dolphins) and so on. In fish and other marine organisms that are active swimmers (that is an important distinction) where you start seeing body forms not roughly tear shaped is in slow moving bottom dwellers for example, like Stonefish, or territorial active hunters that rely on extreme bursts of speed but do not actually travel far. All the long distance, fast travellers however are roughly teardrop shaped.
40:32 I think we have to point out that there was no great threat perceived or good reputation. In fact once the 6 friagtes started to be captured they were considered outdated designs, lots of rotten and defective wood and were suprsingly slow, they said stringly constructed as the only positive but nothing about being amazingly armoured etc. Unlike the French 24lbers ships captured that were quickly studied and their designs used to build British ships, which I think really shows how ridiculously overblown the hype around the 6 frigates is.
About Raking Fire - with 20-20 hindsight, I wonder whether it would have been effective in the battle against the Bismarck. Her stern armour was a vertical bulkhead, presumably vulnerable to close-range fire, and shells exploding against her hull on the inside may have opened seams and dislodged hull plates.
I'm not surprised trawlers made good anti submarine platforms, they are reasonably sturdy, plentiful and can stay out at sea for a good while at relatively little expense.
@@tigerland4328 The RN used converted Trawlers for Coastal Patrol duties in BOTH wars. Not to mention that some of their minesweepers were literally based on Trawler hulls. Also do not forget that the Flower Class Corvette's were based on a whaler hull, for the same reasons. If you are not looking for speed the hull forms of Trawlers and Whalers actually make a good base for Coastal or Near Shore patrol vessels for all the reasons described. Even better they can be built in smaller yards, freeing up your main yards for destroyers and other larger ships. Again another reason for the Flowers being designed the way they were, and on the hull they were was to take advantage of the many small boat and shipyards the UK had at the time that were not large enough to build Destroyers, but COULD build Trawlers and Whalers....
Reading about HMS St Lawrence as a kid I couldn't help to think of it like a lonely house cat - trapped in the Great Lakes all by itself yearning to get out to the ocean
Another factor regarding Titanic's relatively small number of lifeboats: I've heard that the sinking of RMS Republic, where they successfully radioed for help and evacuated everybody to other ships, was considered proof at the time that you didn't need enough space in the lifeboats for everybody onboard a ship. The thinking at the time, allegedly, was that you would call for help on the radio and use the lifeboats to transfer people to another ship, not that they were a destination in and of themselves.
Of course a massive difference between Troubridge's situation and most of the others you mentioned are that Troubridge wasn't assigned to protect other ships; while most of those you mentioned were. They would have violated those orders to have run and left the carriers of Taffy 3, Glorious, or HX 84 unprotected. For them forcing the superior force to take the time to engage and likely kill them buys time for the ships they're tasked to protect to attempt to escape and time for help to come. Rawalpindi is a bit different in that she wasn't fast enough to run away, her options were fight or surrender - and even the most ardent opponent of the Troubridge court-martial's result would be hard pressed to make a straight faced claim that it could encouraged RN ships to surrender to superior force without a fight.
One thing about the Titanic's lifeboat situation, it is unlikely that more lifeboats would have saved many more people, seeing as they really didn't get all the ones they did have away safely, the last 2 collapsible both only just managed to get away, with one being swamped (and a fair number of the occupants passing on prior to rescue) and the other being overturned,
True, but if the crew had begun to jettison large floatable objects (tables, doors etc), it might have saved some of the people in the water. You'd think that a Steinway dropped over the side might have kept Leonardo de Caprio alive for long enough for Kate Winslet to grow to be too old for him.
You missed a point on USA not being okay in WW2 for resources, USA still need chrome and other alloy elements. It is not a large amount of the material by tonnage but USA is not totally okay.
Mahan doctrine says to remove the enemy fleet so it can't use the sea and you can't. Japan's merchant fleet was too small to serve it's peacetime needs, meeting it's wartime needs was absolutely impossible. Japan had no possibility of building, acquiring or even manning a sufficient fleet. Mahan's message to Japan was "you are totally and utterly f*d." Japan entered the war in the hope that they could intimidate the US. When that failed, they fell back on plans their naval leadership knew would fail.
Thanks for taking my question about Lifeboats and the Tiranic. I like how the Olympics, like the Titanic, had storage space and pivoting davits for three times, and therefore enough, lifeboats. However, the Titanic only loaded the legal minimum, so as to not "clutter up" the boat deck. After the sinking, her sisters had their full load of lifeboats added, along with other upgrades, like enclosing the tops of tfe water tight bulkheads, etc.
Another real world analog for the Warspite vs. Yamato: USS San Francisco landed a hit into Hiei's steering gear which may have saved the San Francisco and also insured the subsequent demise of Hiei
On the subject of gubboat diplomacy, I have a book called "Gunboat!", which covers the deployment of gunboats from the Crimean War through to the Vietnam War. So what, you might ask. Well, one of the campaigns dealt with is that on Lake Tanganyika (on which I would love Drach to do a Rum Ration) during the First World War. That particular chapter in the book is called, and I swear that I'm not making this up, "Spicer -Simpson Pulls It Off". If this doesn't amuse you, try saying it with a nasally upper-class british accent of the type deployed by British-Pathe newsreel narrators in the 1930s. Or not. If you start, you'll be saying it for days.
Troubridge's unclear order came from Churchill personally. The court martial had the choice of finding T guilty or Churchill guilty by implication. There are many examples of RN cruisers avoiding action against superior forces. Beating T for obeying the orders Churchill wrote personally with the stick of Churchill's further errors is utterly unfair
Boris Johnson writes of Churchill: “No other politician has taken so many apparently risky positions. No other politician has been involved in so many cock-ups… flourishing in spite of them.”
01:00:10 - How did the term "gunboat diplomacy" get started? Reminds me of a story from the US Navy involving a riverboat in China during the Interwar Period. A certain Chinese warlord would have his people take potshots at a US gunboat as it sailed by. When the ship's captain protested, the warlord implied that he couldn't be held responsible for his ill-disciplined soldiers. The Ship's Captain replied that next time he sailed by, his ship's main gun might be trained on the Warlord's office, which was visible from the river, and if his ill-disciplined sailors just happened to put a shell or two through the office, he'd similarly have to argue he shouldn't be held responsible for his sailors' conduct. Mysteriously, the Warlord's soldiers got a lot more disciplined and the gunboat ceased to be harassed while passing through that particular stretch of river.
@@myparceltape1169 In many ways, Palmerston is the guy who inspired the later expression, for while he never quite said it the way we use it, his administration certainly found sending naval warships of all sizes to be a practical reminder of British Imperial Power during a time when quite a few people still didn't quite appreciate the scope and scale of Her Majesty's influence. Ironically, though, Palmerston rarely sent mere gunboats to make his point, larger warships like frigates and ships-of-the-line usually being what did the job. It is really after Palmerston's day, the 1880s onwards, that the small gunboat really became the favored "first responder" for diplomatic purposes.
I don't beleive so. The rounded pistol bullets makes them slower and less aerodynamic than rifle bullets, as pistol bullets designed with maximizing velocity in mind (like HK's 4.6mm and FN's 5.7mm) are shaped like rifle bullets. What the round bullet does is that it maximizes the mass in a given length of bullet (and pistols are generally limited to the lenth of cartridge that can fit comfortably in a grip) and decreases overpenetration so that more eneregy is delivered to teh target.
You could argue that Trowbridge's situation was different, compared to the Battle off Samar and the other examples you used, in that he was not fighting to buy time for other ships to escape or in the case of Taffy 3 bring their power into the fight while escaping. Goeben and Breslau could have escaped the armored cruisers just by superior speed. While it is true that Goeben had boiler problems and was unable to go at maximum speed she had out run Indomitable and Indefatigable and they were a few knots faster than Trowbridge's armored cruisers, not to mention the endurance superiority of turbines over triple expansion engines. As long as Goeben could maintain a superior speed she could sit outside the range of the armored cruisers guns and sink/damage them if they followed. There is also the problem that only the AC's 9.2" guns would have been effective against Goeben, since this is not WoWS and Goeben had little superstructure to damage, unless they could come close enough to hit deck armor instead of side armor. In my opinion Trowbridge's best chance would have been to have sent in his escorting destroyers and hope for a disabling torpedo hit. I might also add that it was the scandal over Trowbridge's choice that lead to the defeat at Coronel.
Getting closer does not make hitting deck armor more likely, especially for an armored cruiser firing at a ship which is larger and has more freeboard. It’s like saying “a person in a fight against a taller opponent should get closer because it will be easier to hit the top of their head.”
@@dougjb7848 The 9.2" , 7.5", and 6" have different trajectories and ranges. At ranges where the 9.2 can penetrate the Goeben's armor the 7.5 is ineffective against the armor it can hit . While at the same time the 7.5" and 6" is effective against Breslau. If you get close enough for the 7.5" to be effective vs Goeben you bring your armored cruiser into the effective range of Goeben's 5.9" secondaries. The AC's would have to find their zone of immunity vs Goeben. Where the armored cruisers' 9.2's would penetrate Goeben while Goeben's flatter trajectory 11" would have to penetrate the AC's thicker side armor. To avoid this all Goeben and Breslau would have to do is use their superior speed to avoid this.
White Star Line used the, expected, upcoming change in regulations as an excuse to not add any more lifeboat capacity until the regulations were finalised.
Given that blockading continental USA from Japan was geographically impractical, I do wonder why they didn’t push for an invasion of Hawaii, as it would be much easier from that forward base and would also deny that same forward base to the USA trying to reach out into the Western Pacific? I know the logistics of that invasion would be brutal, but the strategic gains are very significant
I think the only reason an Iowa could beat a Yamato in daylight was the Mk 8 FCS. The system was accurate enough to score hits from the first salvo and Iowa could fire accurately while maneuvering to dodge a Yamato's return fire. The only practical effect of Yamato's radar in a night engagement is that they would know someone is out there. They could use the radar to assist optical spotting if they had the Japanese equivalent of Admiral Lee but short of that they would be at a great disadvantage. I would think Admiral Lee would have had his screening destroyers lay smoke in a daylight engagement knowing that he could bring accurate fire through it while Yamato could not
In the 1950s aircraft designers used the Area Rule which led to a "Coke Bottle" fuselage. Was this ever used for submarines which have a conning tower/sail?
The area rule is due do the behavior of air/fluids at transsonic speed. (i.e. doesn't matter until you are close to or passing through supersonic speed. Submarines are... a wee might slower than that.
Interesting discussion of Warspite and Yamato. As I am aware, the KGVs were the only British Battleships in the Pacific. Do you have a British TF34 would have performed?
The discussion I was trying to get to was what would have been the outcome if the four KGVs in the BPF had been together as a substitute for the ISN fast battleship task force and actually got into combat against Yamato and her battle group as some hoped that USN task force 34 would. Questions such as would the speed of cycling the 14" guns make up for lack of single shell weight?
00:00:47 HM Troopship Birkenhead built 1845 (so first merchant shipping act) and sank Feb. 26th 1852, certainly had ships boats -but not enough hence the Women and Children first thing.
@@myparceltape1169 That was not the basis of their argument. At the British inquiry, On June 5th 912, Harold Sanderson director of the White Star Line said "I still do not feel a wise or necessary provision to provide boats for everybody on board ship.".
I should really remember to have a little drink of the adult variety ready for your 300th edition to celebrate the achievement. Irn Bru cocktails perhaps? Drinks party on the happy day anyone?
There is, I think, a significant difference between Troubling d's situation and those of Taffy Six, and Rawalpindi, is that the the latter two had charges to protect. The True ridge court really doesn't apply to their situations. Had Rawalpindi been traveling alone and chosen to engage Scharmhorst When she could have evaded few would have thought her action anything but suicidal stupid.
I wonder what, the Royal Navy feed the Warsprite as well as the tribal class destroyers, raw meat of various sources seems to fit with their known blood thirstiness.
Hi everyone a friend of mine asked has asked about "if Australia was to buy battleships insted of heavy crusers in the interwar would japan still atack Australia" i know drach has a on a dry dock ansered if Australia bought the remaining 13.5 battle crusers but i just cant find it, any help guys?
I think you’re REALLY pushing it with a night action with Yamato vs Warspite. Contrary to popular belief, Japanese optical systems were well equipped for long range night fighting, even without the use of things like Star shells. From 16,000 yards, without the usage of Star shells or floatplanes with optics a fraction the size of Yamato’s, the heavy cruisers Haguro and Nachi launched a torpedo attack that sank the light cruisers De Ruyter and Java respectively. I highly doubt Warspite could even close the range. The reason why Washington closed the range on Kirishima was because South Dakota served as a distraction for the entire IJN fleet. It’s likely Yamato or one of her escorts spots warship before she could even close the range. Warspite’s 15-inch guns basically couldn’t penetrate Yamato’s armor anywhere besides maybe Cape Mattapan ranges. Even Iowa’s guns could only penetrate up to 18-inches of steel realistically. There’s almost nothing Warspite can do to actually sink Yamato. Hit’s to the super structure could halt Yamato’s ability to fight back, but not stop it, and inevitably Yamato finds the range and you have a WW1 era dreadnought vs arguably the most capable battleship event produced in a surface engagement. If you ask me, a WW1 era dreadnought will never realistically beat a WW2 era fast battleship, that’s 30-ish years of technology improvement.
Dark night with driving rain squalls. Yamato is doomed at that point as optics are useless beyond short range. If you get a proper drop on Yamato, they dont have a chance to respond before half the superstructure is blown away. Warspite wins unfair fight is the takeaway here.
Just finished "Sink the Haguro!: Last Destroyer Action of the Second World War" by John Winton. The Haguro had radar at that point in the war - and the lookouts spotted the five British destroyers incoming well before any of them were within torpedo range, but for some reason the Haguro's performance was terrible. Not sure exactly what went wrong on the Haguro, but it's pretty clear that Japan's vaunted night fighting advantage no longer existed by that point in the war. Maybe low morale, maybe too much time spent as a 'Harbour Queen', maybe something unique to that ship or her current officers. Ships not performing as expected seems to happen a lot in war. That makes me very skeptical about any analysis based upon gun diameter and thickness of armor and so forth. For example, the rapid flooding of Prince of Wales due to a design flaw makes me very suspicious of claims that any given ship "can't be sunk". Who knows what problems will appear when a ship is exposed to battle damage? I think 'never realistically' is far too strong: Yamato has many advantages, but Warspite was a battle-hardened warship not a Harbour Queen. Yamato has an all-or-nothing armor scheme, which means there are vulnerable spots. It's not necessary to penetrate the armor to cripple a battleship - and shells can go through the water to get hits that cripple the steering or propulsion. If Warspite had 'fall-of-shot' radar that would be an even stronger advantage as that removes to some extent the human element in judging what the optical systems are actually telling one. There's actually an analogy we can draw with land warfare here. The German Panther tank had front armor that could not be penetrated by most Allied guns - and a very powerful gun that could easily penetrate most Allied tanks - and yet enormous numbers of Panthers were destroyed by both Allied artillery and tanks/tank destroyers, including a few very one-sided battles such as Arracourt in Lorraine or the later fighting on the Elsenborn Ridge during the Battle of the Bulge. Some of the books by Steven Zaloga go into details on how this happened. I think the lesson here is that weapon system statistics on paper don't always match real world performance. Even assuming clear weather, I think there's a reasonable probability Yamato would win, but also a decent chance of the opposite outcome - one that is going to be very hard to quantify because we just don't have enough data.
@@bluelemming5296 First up, Haguro was swarmed from all directions by destroyer attacks, of course her hit rate of low targeting multiple vessels all at once. For one, if Yamato could hit a small destroyer with three 18.1-inch shells from 20,300 yards, I'm sure she could hit Warspite. Yamato's reserve buoyancy was so massive, it literally would be impossible to sink her without breaching the citadel, and the AoN armor scheme is nothing short of an advantage, as it means Warspite's 15-inch shells would over penetrate without exploding, while the 6-inch-ish bow, stern, and upperworks armor would activate Yamato's shells. Essentially, you're saying it would take one in a millionth shot for Warspite to even significantly damage Yamato, let alone actually sink her. That's far from a realistic chance at victory in my eyes. Also, when I think of MN Bretagne being blown to smitheries by only four 15-inch shell hits, doesn't paint a good picture for Warspite if only less than half a dozen 18.1-inch shells are needed to sink her (potentially). German Panzers, besides all the technological break downs they suffered, were often simply outnumbered or overwhelmed through superior battle strategies using the best tanks the allies could throw, not beaten in 1v1 duals by WW1 era Mark 4s. A better analogy to that would be Yamato being overwhelmed by all four Iowa class battleships.
@@metaknight115 At the 10 mile range where Haguro's radar first picked up the British destroyers nobody was firing torpedoes. Haguro should have been able to pick one destroyer as a target for her main guns, and a second destroyer as a target for her secondaries (maybe even a third if firing on both sides), and shred all her targets before they reached accurate torpedo firing range. In 1942, things might have played out that way (minus the Japanese radar, but we'll assume the lookouts still would have spotted the British early). In 1945 that didn't happen, in fact the British ships didn't take any serious damage - only one British ship was hit, with 5 casualties and minor damage. There was a very long delay before Haguro opened fire, then the fire was almost completely ineffective. In short, something went badly wrong aboard the heavy cruiser, some human factor or combination of human factors. It's not easy to predict the outcome of battles. People who look at Yamato in terms of gun barrel diameter and armor thickness and reserve buoyancy are looking at things from the perspective of a mathematical fantasy world. All sorts of assumptions go into the calculations that produce the charts and tables that people love to quote: often we have no way of knowing exactly what the assumptions were because the people that did the work didn't document them, or the records were lost. Without knowing those assumptions, we have no way to assess how accurate they are or where things might have gone astray. Worse, people often don't realize they are making assumptions when they do calculations. There's a saying 'logic is a great way to go wrong with confidence' that is applicable here. I'm looking at this from the perspective of a scientist and engineer, who knows that the mathematical calculations often fail in the real world because the assumptions on which they are based are not valid. They have to be confirmed by real world experiments before they can be trusted. Even then, there will always be some sort of distribution of values, and often outliers in the data set - which is why engineers use something called 'engineering margin' in design. In mathematical tables, all shells at range k will strike at an angle w. In the real world, it's not the case that all shells at range k will strike at an angle w, but rather you'll get a variety of striking angles - and all manner of real world variables can affect that distribution. Often we don't know what the real world variables actually are, which is why we need to make measurements. In other words, without actual measurements, it's impossible to know the shape of the distribution or what outliers can happen and why. Further, you need a lot of measurements, not just a handful: the rule of thumb is you want at least 30 measured data points to support any single claim or assertion. Without such data, we can't do any probability calculations with any confidence that they will be reliable, so any claim that something is or requires 'one in a million shot' is not supported and has no meaning. Further, 20th century naval history shows that all sorts of seemingly unlikely things happen in battle. Warfare seems to be a thing of non-linearity and chaos - which makes any calculations and models even more suspect unless we allow them a large margin for the unexpected. How do you asses the probability that a repair job might leave things not properly waterproofed, not properly sealed against flooding, or that the designers simply missed something that turns out to be critically important (such as the design error in Prince of Wales)? No human being is perfect - hence there will always be flaws in anything we design - whether or not those flaws are important to any given situation will depend on the circumstances. Human factors are very important in determining the outcome of battles, but we often have no way to know 'a priori' what will turn out to be important in any given situation. I'm not saying Warspite is guaranteed to win. I'm not even saying it's likely to win. Instead, I am saying that we can't make simple predictions for outcomes and expect them to have any validity. At best what we can do here is to assign moderate weights to the known factors, while recognizing that we also have to assign moderate weights to unknown factors - and we don't know how much weight to put into each category. We just don't have enough data, nor do we have any way to account for human factors and the potential chaos of war.
In the film "The Dambusters", one high ranking RAF officer asks Barnes Wallace where he came up with the idea for a bouncing bomb, and Barnes Wallace tells him "Nelson".
@@dougjb7848 How do you know the tactic was used to try and increase the range? Maybe they wanted to get the cannonball to enter the ship on an upward trajectory to cause more damage, perhaps damage two gundecks instead of one.
From crude sketches I have seen the mine and anchor were in a metal frame which protected sensitive parts. Once the mine floats out of the cage I suppose a pin or some similar method arms the horns. The magnetic mines dropped by aircraft will have been different and required water ingress. There are many ways to cause it to self destruction if everything is set up correctly. There is a video showing on how one of those dropped over the Thames was found on the mud because there had been an error.
Having enough lifeboats means nothing if you don't have the proper means to launch them. Ill equiped as it was, Titanic had just barely enough Time to launch her compliment of lifeboats. Since the launching method was manual, having more lifeboats would only mean having empty boats going down with the ship or just delaying the evacuation.
Honestly, lifeboats before modern enclosed lifeboats with GPS and radios are a bit of a gamble at best. Its lucky that they didnt have significant storms or a longer wait for help, otherwise some of those boats might never be found.
@@chasler1741 in Titanic case, they were lucky the sea was flat calm. Also: those lifeboats were lowered manually over eight decks. No wonder many of them left the ship half empty.
What would you say sets the US apart from Napolion's Continental System, given that the latter is often considered an example of Britain using command of the sea to acheive decisive victory over the French, while you point to US geography as an OCP when it comes to naval warfare? Is it a matter of technology, or is the importance of the naval war somewhat overstated for Napoleon, and the unreliability of French "allies" and various land defeats far more important?
Distance. There’s a massive difference in feasibility between blockading continental Europe from across the English Channel and blockading the continental US from across the Pacific, especially since over half the US coastline isn’t even on the Pacific (and the only way to reach the other US coastline is to somehow seize the Panama Canal, which the US controls, or pull a reverse Second Pacific Squadron).
@@bkjeong4302 Except part of Drach's argument was that not only was blockading the US impractical, but even if you could pull it off the US was still capable of sustaining a war footing indefinitely.
The old life boats on the Titanic. IMO even if she had been built with the original number of boats she was designed with it would not have made a difference. Given the design flaw of not building the watertight compartments up to a common surface she was doomed. She also should have had the double bottom extended up to the water line. Damn the cost.
@53:57 *tongue in cheek* One would HOPE that the cruisers do a TWO dimensional pincer movement. Otherwise one of the is imitating a U-boat or aliens got involved and made one of them fly :D
As a Brit living in Canada and a rabid lover of navel history..I'm going to be in Halifax NS next weekend....other than playing with the 40mm pompom...is there anything else I should really take a good look at while at HMCS Sackville
A bit off topic but has anyone seen "American warships" on prime? Its a bit like battleship but with the Iowa instead of new Jersey. Throwing 16 inch shells at aliens 🤘🥳
In the book "A Glorious Way to Die," it was noted Yamato didn't do that much gunnery practice. I'm wondering if that might be a factor in a Warspite vs. Yamato fight.
Yamato’s gunnery was actually pretty good the one time she fired on enemy vessels (not that this made her remotely sensible given how overkill she was in that engagement, and the Japanese forces lost the battle before it even began due to being too late), and it has since been found that she got in a surprising amount of gunnery practice in the months prior to that.
Long pointy nosed fish have it for other reasons and take the drag penalty to hunt or display better. Flying reptiles were slow enough to not pay it and do have ridiculous wind vane heads with long faces. You don't see it till supersonic aircraft and they do it sometimes just to get sensors out of the shockwave cone. The application of needle tips is limited.
Truncated supersonic explanation. It is hazy for me, way outside my limited aero knowledge. All arguments come down to surface area drag. It is something like 30% more efficient to be blunt in subsonic planes. I concentrated on extreme low speed flight in wing-in-ground vehicles where it doesn't matter much.
Pterosaurs weren’t any slower (or faster) than birds in similar niches, and their head crest were a) insanely variable and b) had very little role to play in flight. Stop perpetuating outdated ideas.
If you could save 1 battleship, 1 aircraft carrier, 1 light cruiser, one heavy cruiser, one destroyer etc of the US navy from scrapping, which would you choose? (Course, ships that could actually be preserved as museums, no magic powers here. As much as I’d like to visit USS Johnston you can’t exactly unsink her).
My choice would be Battleship: USS California Aircraft carrier: USS Enterprise Heavy cruiser: USS San Francisco Light cruiser: USS Honolulu Destroyer: USS Dunlap Submarine: USS Archerfish
Lol..i can kinda read german , i can pronounce german , and its not far from english in many ways an cases , yet- moistly i dont understand german...pronounce every letter! ' i=e...ge = gay... ... On der die or das...just guess or stick to das... .. will their be a space navy?. An space marines?
on the tabletop version of your discord people get bullied to oblivion and then your mods mute them when they try to defend themselves, you should reset a new discord, this is the most horrid place i have ever seen online
I can remember when you first started doing the Drydock and wondered that if there was enough interest you'd do more.
As we approach episode 300, have you decided whether or not there is enough interest from your adoring public?😆
Thanks for addressing my question, Drach.
I hadn't been thinking so much about the sorts of scenarios you mentioned, in part because as a former sailor on a ship that was equipped with an EW suite that we knew was designed with the capability to make us a "designated target" in case of true cataastrophe to protect the carrier. That sort of tactical sacrifice, as cold as it may be, is something that I'd internalized. The strategic level comes harder to me. For a number of reasons.
Don't let Ridley Scott know about Jeanne de Clisson, please.
Tell Denis Villeneuve instead.
Your last try on „Flottenbegleiter“ was pretty good . Usually when a german word has „ei“ in it you would pronounce it like a single „I“ in English .
The intractable problem Mahan couldn’t help Japan with was that when the US Navy sank a Japanese ship, the ship and crew died. Conversely, when Japan sank a US Navy ship, American industry just built (and crewed) two ships to replace it.
ship(){ ship|ship& };ship
More like, for every ship Japan built, the US built seven.
Flottenbegleiter- At 5:37 you nailed it!
Der Zeitstempel ist minimal daneben,
änder mal bitte auf 5:38 oder 5:37 :-)
Ansonsten top👌
Vielleicht war ei minimal übertrieben, aber ich musste es mir mehrfach anhören um das als konkreten Verbesserungs Vorschlag zu formulieren.
@@jasperfromming6633 verstehe nicht ganz was du sagen willst.
@@ArfurFaulkesHake zufrieden? 🙂
Beautiful Saturday night in old Melbourne town!!
I was working in Lae New Guinea in the early 90's. I had some workers ,laying some pipes near the Lae brewery which was right on the waterfront. I went to start the boys working and thee first thing I noticed was a full torpedo on the beach. I was surprised at the size of the thing and also the fact it was still there in one piece. The machine operator just pushed it aside with his excavator and I must admit that I had a heart attack at this, we had a laugh at this after he reassured me it was empty but like I said the thing was huge. If I remember right ì would think it would have been at least 5-6 MTS long but I can't think of the diameter.
In Okinawa they're still finding military ordinance left over from the war - some of it still dangerous. Stuff is found both on land and by divers in the waters near the island. Stars and Stripes had an article about one recent find: "Unexploded shell from WWII found at tourist destination on Okinawa" by Keishi Koja on April 18, 2024.
Here's a staggering quote from the article: "Crews disposed of 14.7 tons [of ordinance] between April 1, 2022, and March 31, 2023."
Even in the USA I think there's some ordinance unaccounted for, both from the sub-launched Japanese seaplane attacks, and from the Japanese 'balloon attack'.
1:07:45 I can just picture Warspite sneaking up to Yamato: "Oh, you think darkness is your ally, but you merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, welded by it. I didn’t see the light until I was already a dreadnought. By then, it was nothing to me but blinding!"
5:38 this is, ignoring a general accent, the most correct pronunciation of "Flottenbegleiter".
Lived near the city of Chippewa for a few years and your pronunciation is correct
Happy Mother’s Day to Mrs. Drach!
3 Drydocks to 300!
4k Subscribers to 500K!!
Getting close Drach!!
ah statistics...
go Drach !!!!
Yay
Steady as she goes, Lad!
30 hour dry dock incoming
Thankyou for every extra 10 minutes we can get.
Thanks for answering my question!
You surprised me about your comment about the US being self-sufficient in almost everything including rubber (~29:12), which immediately came to mind mind as something really only found in SE Asia and because rubber was rationed in WWII. NATURAL rubber that is. I looked it up and the US established a large synthetic rubber industry in WWII, so you were right. The US had enough synthetic rubber production for military uses. How dare I doubt Mr. Drach!!!!
I'd like to see a video about the history of torpedo launchers on surface ships. Were they aimed by crew in the proximity of the launcher? Was the direction that the torpedo entered the water crucial or did a gyro compass setting determine the torpedo's path independent of the launch direction? When and how did the gyro control determine what direction to hold? What was the command to fire? - like submarines "Fire 1! Fire 2!..."?
Great as per usual. Thanks Drach.
Fish do follow normal hydrodynamic laws. All long distance pelagic swimmers have a basically teardrop shape with a rounded cross section.
Best example I can give is the swordfish. The Sword on a swordfish (which they use for hunting) is long but narrow, but if you look at the *body* of the swordfish you will notice that it has that elongated teardrop shape that ALL fast swimming pelagic wanderers have.
And I do mean all of them. Fish can have a somewhat longer length to breadth ratio because they can do something ships, torpedoes and submarines cannot, they can flex their bodies, so they can have a longer length to breadth without losing agility.
Marine animals also have a bunch of other clever little adaptations for reducing drag. From how their scales are shaped and directed in the case of fish (especially sharks), or the skin structure in the case of cetaceans (Whales, porpoises and Dolphins) and so on.
In fish and other marine organisms that are active swimmers (that is an important distinction) where you start seeing body forms not roughly tear shaped is in slow moving bottom dwellers for example, like Stonefish, or territorial active hunters that rely on extreme bursts of speed but do not actually travel far.
All the long distance, fast travellers however are roughly teardrop shaped.
Great video, thanks Drach.
40:32 I think we have to point out that there was no great threat perceived or good reputation. In fact once the 6 friagtes started to be captured they were considered outdated designs, lots of rotten and defective wood and were suprsingly slow, they said stringly constructed as the only positive but nothing about being amazingly armoured etc. Unlike the French 24lbers ships captured that were quickly studied and their designs used to build British ships, which I think really shows how ridiculously overblown the hype around the 6 frigates is.
About Raking Fire - with 20-20 hindsight, I wonder whether it would have been effective in the battle against the Bismarck. Her stern armour was a vertical bulkhead, presumably vulnerable to close-range fire, and shells exploding against her hull on the inside may have opened seams and dislodged hull plates.
Flottenbegleiter...Flotten Bayglider...pronounce it like this and it sounds kinda right:)
I'm not surprised trawlers made good anti submarine platforms, they are reasonably sturdy, plentiful and can stay out at sea for a good while at relatively little expense.
And are designed to survive heavy seas
This is probably the reason post war the Royal navy used trawler designs for offshore patrol vessels
@@tigerland4328 that and the silhouette. It's easier to hide a signals interceptor ship if it looks like a trawler at a distance.
@@tigerland4328 The RN used converted Trawlers for Coastal Patrol duties in BOTH wars. Not to mention that some of their minesweepers were literally based on Trawler hulls. Also do not forget that the Flower Class Corvette's were based on a whaler hull, for the same reasons.
If you are not looking for speed the hull forms of Trawlers and Whalers actually make a good base for Coastal or Near Shore patrol vessels for all the reasons described. Even better they can be built in smaller yards, freeing up your main yards for destroyers and other larger ships. Again another reason for the Flowers being designed the way they were, and on the hull they were was to take advantage of the many small boat and shipyards the UK had at the time that were not large enough to build Destroyers, but COULD build Trawlers and Whalers....
Best opening tune on UA-cam
true
As a Canadian, the idea of multiple first-rate battleships brawling on the Great Lakes is an amazing thought. As Drach said, "Interesting..."
Reading about HMS St Lawrence as a kid I couldn't help to think of it like a lonely house cat - trapped in the Great Lakes all by itself yearning to get out to the ocean
The king has uploaded
Another factor regarding Titanic's relatively small number of lifeboats: I've heard that the sinking of RMS Republic, where they successfully radioed for help and evacuated everybody to other ships, was considered proof at the time that you didn't need enough space in the lifeboats for everybody onboard a ship. The thinking at the time, allegedly, was that you would call for help on the radio and use the lifeboats to transfer people to another ship, not that they were a destination in and of themselves.
Of course a massive difference between Troubridge's situation and most of the others you mentioned are that Troubridge wasn't assigned to protect other ships; while most of those you mentioned were. They would have violated those orders to have run and left the carriers of Taffy 3, Glorious, or HX 84 unprotected. For them forcing the superior force to take the time to engage and likely kill them buys time for the ships they're tasked to protect to attempt to escape and time for help to come.
Rawalpindi is a bit different in that she wasn't fast enough to run away, her options were fight or surrender - and even the most ardent opponent of the Troubridge court-martial's result would be hard pressed to make a straight faced claim that it could encouraged RN ships to surrender to superior force without a fight.
One thing about the Titanic's lifeboat situation, it is unlikely that more lifeboats would have saved many more people, seeing as they really didn't get all the ones they did have away safely, the last 2 collapsible both only just managed to get away, with one being swamped (and a fair number of the occupants passing on prior to rescue) and the other being overturned,
True, but if the crew had begun to jettison large floatable objects (tables, doors etc), it might have saved some of the people in the water.
You'd think that a Steinway dropped over the side might have kept Leonardo de Caprio alive for long enough for Kate Winslet to grow to be too old for him.
You missed a point on USA not being okay in WW2 for resources, USA still need chrome and other alloy elements. It is not a large amount of the material by tonnage but USA is not totally okay.
Mahan sounds more like "may-in," at least on this side of the pond. Love the series!
That's interesting. In Ireland and the UK it's pronounced "ma'haan"
Pronounced "mu-han"(soft a) at West Point, where he worked.
@@coldwarrior78 liked ur own comment 😂
@@coldwarrior78 btw google alfred mahan pronunciation
@@coldwarrior78 West coast too. Never heard may-in before
Mahan doctrine says to remove the enemy fleet so it can't use the sea and you can't. Japan's merchant fleet was too small to serve it's peacetime needs, meeting it's wartime needs was absolutely impossible. Japan had no possibility of building, acquiring or even manning a sufficient fleet. Mahan's message to Japan was "you are totally and utterly f*d." Japan entered the war in the hope that they could intimidate the US. When that failed, they fell back on plans their naval leadership knew would fail.
Japan was two and a half years late in starting a war, therefore all excess merchant ships had been with drawn, and bought or chartered to Britain.
@@benwilson6145 Or sunk by U boats. (You're correct, of course.)
Thanks for taking my question about Lifeboats and the Tiranic.
I like how the Olympics, like the Titanic, had storage space and pivoting davits for three times, and therefore enough, lifeboats. However, the Titanic only loaded the legal minimum, so as to not "clutter up" the boat deck. After the sinking, her sisters had their full load of lifeboats added, along with other upgrades, like enclosing the tops of tfe water tight bulkheads, etc.
Titanic actually had 4 more lifeboats than the legal minimum.
Another real world analog for the Warspite vs. Yamato: USS San Francisco landed a hit into Hiei's steering gear which may have saved the San Francisco and also insured the subsequent demise of Hiei
On the subject of gubboat diplomacy, I have a book called "Gunboat!", which covers the deployment of gunboats from the Crimean War through to the Vietnam War.
So what, you might ask.
Well, one of the campaigns dealt with is that on Lake Tanganyika (on which I would love Drach to do a Rum Ration) during the First World War. That particular chapter in the book is called, and I swear that I'm not making this up, "Spicer -Simpson Pulls It Off".
If this doesn't amuse you, try saying it with a nasally upper-class british accent of the type deployed by British-Pathe newsreel narrators in the 1930s.
Or not. If you start, you'll be saying it for days.
Troubridge's unclear order came from Churchill personally. The court martial had the choice of finding T guilty or Churchill guilty by implication. There are many examples of RN cruisers avoiding action against superior forces. Beating T for obeying the orders Churchill wrote personally with the stick of Churchill's further errors is utterly unfair
Boris Johnson writes of Churchill: “No other politician has taken so many apparently risky positions. No other politician has been involved in so many cock-ups… flourishing in spite of them.”
01:00:10 - How did the term "gunboat diplomacy" get started?
Reminds me of a story from the US Navy involving a riverboat in China during the Interwar Period.
A certain Chinese warlord would have his people take potshots at a US gunboat as it sailed by. When the ship's captain protested, the warlord implied that he couldn't be held responsible for his ill-disciplined soldiers. The Ship's Captain replied that next time he sailed by, his ship's main gun might be trained on the Warlord's office, which was visible from the river, and if his ill-disciplined sailors just happened to put a shell or two through the office, he'd similarly have to argue he shouldn't be held responsible for his sailors' conduct.
Mysteriously, the Warlord's soldiers got a lot more disciplined and the gunboat ceased to be harassed while passing through that particular stretch of river.
A friend who did history at school told me the British Prime Minister (Palmerston) had the answer to foreign policy problems.
"Send a gunboat".
@@myparceltape1169 In many ways, Palmerston is the guy who inspired the later expression, for while he never quite said it the way we use it, his administration certainly found sending naval warships of all sizes to be a practical reminder of British Imperial Power during a time when quite a few people still didn't quite appreciate the scope and scale of Her Majesty's influence.
Ironically, though, Palmerston rarely sent mere gunboats to make his point, larger warships like frigates and ships-of-the-line usually being what did the job. It is really after Palmerston's day, the 1880s onwards, that the small gunboat really became the favored "first responder" for diplomatic purposes.
@@genericpersonx333The modern equivalent would be a US President asking "Where's the nearest Carrier?"
20:20 - This is also why handgun bullets tend to be blunt-nosed, while rifle bullets tend to be pointy.
I don't beleive so. The rounded pistol bullets makes them slower and less aerodynamic than rifle bullets, as pistol bullets designed with maximizing velocity in mind (like HK's 4.6mm and FN's 5.7mm) are shaped like rifle bullets. What the round bullet does is that it maximizes the mass in a given length of bullet (and pistols are generally limited to the lenth of cartridge that can fit comfortably in a grip) and decreases overpenetration so that more eneregy is delivered to teh target.
You could argue that Trowbridge's situation was different, compared to the Battle off Samar and the other examples you used, in that he was not fighting to buy time for other ships to escape or in the case of Taffy 3 bring their power into the fight while escaping. Goeben and Breslau could have escaped the armored cruisers just by superior speed. While it is true that Goeben had boiler problems and was unable to go at maximum speed she had out run Indomitable and Indefatigable and they were a few knots faster than Trowbridge's armored cruisers, not to mention the endurance superiority of turbines over triple expansion engines. As long as Goeben could maintain a superior speed she could sit outside the range of the armored cruisers guns and sink/damage them if they followed. There is also the problem that only the AC's 9.2" guns would have been effective against Goeben, since this is not WoWS and Goeben had little superstructure to damage, unless they could come close enough to hit deck armor instead of side armor. In my opinion Trowbridge's best chance would have been to have sent in his escorting destroyers and hope for a disabling torpedo hit. I might also add that it was the scandal over Trowbridge's choice that lead to the defeat at Coronel.
Getting closer does not make hitting deck armor more likely, especially for an armored cruiser firing at a ship which is larger and has more freeboard.
It’s like saying “a person in a fight against a taller opponent should get closer because it will be easier to hit the top of their head.”
@@dougjb7848 The 9.2" , 7.5", and 6" have different trajectories and ranges. At ranges where the 9.2 can penetrate the Goeben's armor the 7.5 is ineffective against the armor it can hit . While at the same time the 7.5" and 6" is effective against Breslau. If you get close enough for the 7.5" to be effective vs Goeben you bring your armored cruiser into the effective range of Goeben's 5.9" secondaries. The AC's would have to find their zone of immunity vs Goeben. Where the armored cruisers' 9.2's would penetrate Goeben while Goeben's flatter trajectory 11" would have to penetrate the AC's thicker side armor. To avoid this all Goeben and Breslau would have to do is use their superior speed to avoid this.
White Star Line used the, expected, upcoming change in regulations as an excuse to not add any more lifeboat capacity until the regulations were finalised.
Thanks
43:30 I believe Guierre might have under charged guns or had dodgy powder as is the only ship to have it's shot bounce off of the 6 frigates.
Given that blockading continental USA from Japan was geographically impractical, I do wonder why they didn’t push for an invasion of Hawaii, as it would be much easier from that forward base and would also deny that same forward base to the USA trying to reach out into the Western Pacific? I know the logistics of that invasion would be brutal, but the strategic gains are very significant
I think the only reason an Iowa could beat a Yamato in daylight was the Mk 8 FCS. The system was accurate enough to score hits from the first salvo and Iowa could fire accurately while maneuvering to dodge a Yamato's return fire. The only practical effect of Yamato's radar in a night engagement is that they would know someone is out there. They could use the radar to assist optical spotting if they had the Japanese equivalent of Admiral Lee but short of that they would be at a great disadvantage. I would think Admiral Lee would have had his screening destroyers lay smoke in a daylight engagement knowing that he could bring accurate fire through it while Yamato could not
In the 1950s aircraft designers used the Area Rule which led to a "Coke Bottle" fuselage. Was this ever used for submarines which have a conning tower/sail?
The area rule is due do the behavior of air/fluids at transsonic speed. (i.e. doesn't matter until you are close to or passing through supersonic speed. Submarines are... a wee might slower than that.
@@RocketsongTrue, but it must also have some benefits in hydrodynamics, because they incorporated it in the Astute class at least
Interesting discussion of Warspite and Yamato. As I am aware, the KGVs were the only British Battleships in the Pacific. Do you have a British TF34 would have performed?
_Prince of Wales_ was in the Pacific.
Still is.
@@dougjb7848
The British sent other KGVs into the Pacific for the Okinawa campaign, though their involvement was superfluous to say the least.
The discussion I was trying to get to was what would have been the outcome if the four KGVs in the BPF had been together as a substitute for the ISN fast battleship task force and actually got into combat against Yamato and her battle group as some hoped that USN task force 34 would. Questions such as would the speed of cycling the 14" guns make up for lack of single shell weight?
As someone from Chippewa, yes that's how you pronounce it.
I ask, why wasn't the idea of a hydraulically driven Gatling gun developed earlier? Did all required technology exist for use during WWII?
00:00:47 HM Troopship Birkenhead built 1845 (so first merchant shipping act) and sank Feb. 26th 1852, certainly had ships boats -but not enough hence the Women and Children first thing.
She was built for the Royal Navy as HMS Birkenhead therefore not civilian
Surprisingly enough, at the British Titanic inquiry, White Star Line argued that Titanic had enough lifeboats.
Legally, were they right under the laws of the country they were registered in?
@@myparceltape1169 That was not the basis of their argument. At the British inquiry, On June 5th 912, Harold Sanderson director of the White Star Line said "I still do not feel a wise or necessary provision to provide boats for everybody on board ship.".
I should really remember to have a little drink of the adult variety ready for your 300th edition to celebrate the achievement. Irn Bru cocktails perhaps? Drinks party on the happy day anyone?
There is, I think, a significant difference between Troubling d's situation and those of Taffy Six, and Rawalpindi, is that the the latter two had charges to protect. The True ridge court really doesn't apply to their situations. Had Rawalpindi been traveling alone and chosen to engage Scharmhorst When she could have evaded few would have thought her action anything but suicidal stupid.
Actually Mahon gave specific instructions that Japan should have followed. He said make friends with the sea power and get rich together.
I wonder what, the Royal Navy feed the Warsprite as well as the tribal class destroyers, raw meat of various sources seems to fit with their known blood thirstiness.
In legend.
Also for mine laying u boats, aerial mines took over a lot of the mission profile.
drach, sir? chain shot and bar shot? were they part of ready load supply? or were they stored seperate?
Amazing animations - Torpedoes and artillery ua-cam.com/play/PLnpCT67IkeGcz4uX5cO42ouvJNv55Hlys.html
Hi everyone a friend of mine asked has asked about "if Australia was to buy battleships insted of heavy crusers in the interwar would japan still atack Australia" i know drach has a on a dry dock ansered if Australia bought the remaining 13.5 battle crusers but i just cant find it, any help guys?
I think you’re REALLY pushing it with a night action with Yamato vs Warspite.
Contrary to popular belief, Japanese optical systems were well equipped for long range night fighting, even without the use of things like Star shells. From 16,000 yards, without the usage of Star shells or floatplanes with optics a fraction the size of Yamato’s, the heavy cruisers Haguro and Nachi launched a torpedo attack that sank the light cruisers De Ruyter and Java respectively.
I highly doubt Warspite could even close the range. The reason why Washington closed the range on Kirishima was because South Dakota served as a distraction for the entire IJN fleet. It’s likely Yamato or one of her escorts spots warship before she could even close the range.
Warspite’s 15-inch guns basically couldn’t penetrate Yamato’s armor anywhere besides maybe Cape Mattapan ranges. Even Iowa’s guns could only penetrate up to 18-inches of steel realistically. There’s almost nothing Warspite can do to actually sink Yamato. Hit’s to the super structure could halt Yamato’s ability to fight back, but not stop it, and inevitably Yamato finds the range and you have a WW1 era dreadnought vs arguably the most capable battleship event produced in a surface engagement.
If you ask me, a WW1 era dreadnought will never realistically beat a WW2 era fast battleship, that’s 30-ish years of technology improvement.
Dark night with driving rain squalls.
Yamato is doomed at that point as optics are useless beyond short range.
If you get a proper drop on Yamato, they dont have a chance to respond before half the superstructure is blown away.
Warspite wins unfair fight is the takeaway here.
You don't have a shortage of dark nights with clouds at sea level in the North Atlantic.
The 'Grand Banks' were famous for it.
Just finished "Sink the Haguro!: Last Destroyer Action of the Second World War" by John Winton. The Haguro had radar at that point in the war - and the lookouts spotted the five British destroyers incoming well before any of them were within torpedo range, but for some reason the Haguro's performance was terrible.
Not sure exactly what went wrong on the Haguro, but it's pretty clear that Japan's vaunted night fighting advantage no longer existed by that point in the war. Maybe low morale, maybe too much time spent as a 'Harbour Queen', maybe something unique to that ship or her current officers.
Ships not performing as expected seems to happen a lot in war. That makes me very skeptical about any analysis based upon gun diameter and thickness of armor and so forth. For example, the rapid flooding of Prince of Wales due to a design flaw makes me very suspicious of claims that any given ship "can't be sunk". Who knows what problems will appear when a ship is exposed to battle damage?
I think 'never realistically' is far too strong: Yamato has many advantages, but Warspite was a battle-hardened warship not a Harbour Queen. Yamato has an all-or-nothing armor scheme, which means there are vulnerable spots. It's not necessary to penetrate the armor to cripple a battleship - and shells can go through the water to get hits that cripple the steering or propulsion. If Warspite had 'fall-of-shot' radar that would be an even stronger advantage as that removes to some extent the human element in judging what the optical systems are actually telling one.
There's actually an analogy we can draw with land warfare here. The German Panther tank had front armor that could not be penetrated by most Allied guns - and a very powerful gun that could easily penetrate most Allied tanks - and yet enormous numbers of Panthers were destroyed by both Allied artillery and tanks/tank destroyers, including a few very one-sided battles such as Arracourt in Lorraine or the later fighting on the Elsenborn Ridge during the Battle of the Bulge. Some of the books by Steven Zaloga go into details on how this happened. I think the lesson here is that weapon system statistics on paper don't always match real world performance.
Even assuming clear weather, I think there's a reasonable probability Yamato would win, but also a decent chance of the opposite outcome - one that is going to be very hard to quantify because we just don't have enough data.
@@bluelemming5296 First up, Haguro was swarmed from all directions by destroyer attacks, of course her hit rate of low targeting multiple vessels all at once.
For one, if Yamato could hit a small destroyer with three 18.1-inch shells from 20,300 yards, I'm sure she could hit Warspite.
Yamato's reserve buoyancy was so massive, it literally would be impossible to sink her without breaching the citadel, and the AoN armor scheme is nothing short of an advantage, as it means Warspite's 15-inch shells would over penetrate without exploding, while the 6-inch-ish bow, stern, and upperworks armor would activate Yamato's shells.
Essentially, you're saying it would take one in a millionth shot for Warspite to even significantly damage Yamato, let alone actually sink her. That's far from a realistic chance at victory in my eyes.
Also, when I think of MN Bretagne being blown to smitheries by only four 15-inch shell hits, doesn't paint a good picture for Warspite if only less than half a dozen 18.1-inch shells are needed to sink her (potentially).
German Panzers, besides all the technological break downs they suffered, were often simply outnumbered or overwhelmed through superior battle strategies using the best tanks the allies could throw, not beaten in 1v1 duals by WW1 era Mark 4s. A better analogy to that would be Yamato being overwhelmed by all four Iowa class battleships.
@@metaknight115 At the 10 mile range where Haguro's radar first picked up the British destroyers nobody was firing torpedoes. Haguro should have been able to pick one destroyer as a target for her main guns, and a second destroyer as a target for her secondaries (maybe even a third if firing on both sides), and shred all her targets before they reached accurate torpedo firing range. In 1942, things might have played out that way (minus the Japanese radar, but we'll assume the lookouts still would have spotted the British early). In 1945 that didn't happen, in fact the British ships didn't take any serious damage - only one British ship was hit, with 5 casualties and minor damage. There was a very long delay before Haguro opened fire, then the fire was almost completely ineffective. In short, something went badly wrong aboard the heavy cruiser, some human factor or combination of human factors. It's not easy to predict the outcome of battles.
People who look at Yamato in terms of gun barrel diameter and armor thickness and reserve buoyancy are looking at things from the perspective of a mathematical fantasy world. All sorts of assumptions go into the calculations that produce the charts and tables that people love to quote: often we have no way of knowing exactly what the assumptions were because the people that did the work didn't document them, or the records were lost. Without knowing those assumptions, we have no way to assess how accurate they are or where things might have gone astray. Worse, people often don't realize they are making assumptions when they do calculations. There's a saying 'logic is a great way to go wrong with confidence' that is applicable here.
I'm looking at this from the perspective of a scientist and engineer, who knows that the mathematical calculations often fail in the real world because the assumptions on which they are based are not valid. They have to be confirmed by real world experiments before they can be trusted. Even then, there will always be some sort of distribution of values, and often outliers in the data set - which is why engineers use something called 'engineering margin' in design. In mathematical tables, all shells at range k will strike at an angle w. In the real world, it's not the case that all shells at range k will strike at an angle w, but rather you'll get a variety of striking angles - and all manner of real world variables can affect that distribution. Often we don't know what the real world variables actually are, which is why we need to make measurements. In other words, without actual measurements, it's impossible to know the shape of the distribution or what outliers can happen and why. Further, you need a lot of measurements, not just a handful: the rule of thumb is you want at least 30 measured data points to support any single claim or assertion.
Without such data, we can't do any probability calculations with any confidence that they will be reliable, so any claim that something is or requires 'one in a million shot' is not supported and has no meaning. Further, 20th century naval history shows that all sorts of seemingly unlikely things happen in battle. Warfare seems to be a thing of non-linearity and chaos - which makes any calculations and models even more suspect unless we allow them a large margin for the unexpected.
How do you asses the probability that a repair job might leave things not properly waterproofed, not properly sealed against flooding, or that the designers simply missed something that turns out to be critically important (such as the design error in Prince of Wales)?
No human being is perfect - hence there will always be flaws in anything we design - whether or not those flaws are important to any given situation will depend on the circumstances. Human factors are very important in determining the outcome of battles, but we often have no way to know 'a priori' what will turn out to be important in any given situation.
I'm not saying Warspite is guaranteed to win. I'm not even saying it's likely to win. Instead, I am saying that we can't make simple predictions for outcomes and expect them to have any validity. At best what we can do here is to assign moderate weights to the known factors, while recognizing that we also have to assign moderate weights to unknown factors - and we don't know how much weight to put into each category. We just don't have enough data, nor do we have any way to account for human factors and the potential chaos of war.
Good german, Drachinifel. You speaked _Flottenbegleiter_ right. 😅
Did they ever try skipping cannon balls? It seems like it would work to extend the effective range of the cannon.
In the film "The Dambusters", one high ranking RAF officer asks Barnes Wallace where he came up with the idea for a bouncing bomb, and Barnes Wallace tells him "Nelson".
If a cannonball were to skip across the water, that would reduce its velocity.
How does reducing its velocity increased its range?
@@dougjb7848 How do you know the tactic was used to try and increase the range? Maybe they wanted to get the cannonball to enter the ship on an upward trajectory to cause more damage, perhaps damage two gundecks instead of one.
@@nicksykes4575 In the movie, he claims that Nelson dismissed L'Orient with a yorker.
as mines were detonated by crushing one or more of the horns? how were the safety stored and deployed, without crushing horns?
From crude sketches I have seen the mine and anchor were in a metal frame which protected sensitive parts.
Once the mine floats out of the cage I suppose a pin or some similar method arms the horns.
The magnetic mines dropped by aircraft will have been different and required water ingress.
There are many ways to cause it to self destruction if everything is set up correctly.
There is a video showing on how one of those dropped over the Thames was found on the mud because there had been an error.
Having enough lifeboats means nothing if you don't have the proper means to launch them. Ill equiped as it was, Titanic had just barely enough Time to launch her compliment of lifeboats. Since the launching method was manual, having more lifeboats would only mean having empty boats going down with the ship or just delaying the evacuation.
Honestly, lifeboats before modern enclosed lifeboats with GPS and radios are a bit of a gamble at best.
Its lucky that they didnt have significant storms or a longer wait for help, otherwise some of those boats might never be found.
@@chasler1741 in Titanic case, they were lucky the sea was flat calm. Also: those lifeboats were lowered manually over eight decks. No wonder many of them left the ship half empty.
Ah. The right 297 :-)
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What would you say sets the US apart from Napolion's Continental System, given that the latter is often considered an example of Britain using command of the sea to acheive decisive victory over the French, while you point to US geography as an OCP when it comes to naval warfare? Is it a matter of technology, or is the importance of the naval war somewhat overstated for Napoleon, and the unreliability of French "allies" and various land defeats far more important?
Distance.
There’s a massive difference in feasibility between blockading continental Europe from across the English Channel and blockading the continental US from across the Pacific, especially since over half the US coastline isn’t even on the Pacific (and the only way to reach the other US coastline is to somehow seize the Panama Canal, which the US controls, or pull a reverse Second Pacific Squadron).
@@bkjeong4302 Except part of Drach's argument was that not only was blockading the US impractical, but even if you could pull it off the US was still capable of sustaining a war footing indefinitely.
What event is the first photo of? Looks like a sinking battleship?
I think it's HMS Audacious. She struck a mine and as she was sinking, one of the ships that came to her aid was RMS Olympic, Titanic's sistership.
Yes you pronounced Chippewa correctly.
It’s like Christmas every Sunday
It's like the discovery of vodka every Saturday - night...press on ! Comrade!
The old life boats on the Titanic. IMO even if she had been built with the original number of boats she was designed with it would not have made a difference. Given the design flaw of not building the watertight compartments up to a common surface she was doomed. She also should have had the double bottom extended up to the water line. Damn the cost.
Having the double bottom extended to the water line would have rendered the vessel useless, unless you want a tanker!
@@benwilson6145
I think I stated it poorly. Double bottom and double hull to the waterline.
@53:57 *tongue in cheek* One would HOPE that the cruisers do a TWO dimensional pincer movement. Otherwise one of the is imitating a U-boat or aliens got involved and made one of them fly :D
As a Brit living in Canada and a rabid lover of navel history..I'm going to be in Halifax NS next weekend....other than playing with the 40mm pompom...is there anything else I should really take a good look at while at HMCS Sackville
A bit off topic but has anyone seen "American warships" on prime? Its a bit like battleship but with the Iowa instead of new Jersey. Throwing 16 inch shells at aliens 🤘🥳
I was under the impression that the United States had to import rubber from either Indonesia or Central and South Americs. Is this not the case?
Goodyear had rubber plantations in its Liberian colony
Synthetic rubber.
In the book "A Glorious Way to Die," it was noted Yamato didn't do that much gunnery practice. I'm wondering if that might be a factor in a Warspite vs. Yamato fight.
Yamato’s gunnery was actually pretty good the one time she fired on enemy vessels (not that this made her remotely sensible given how overkill she was in that engagement, and the Japanese forces lost the battle before it even began due to being too late), and it has since been found that she got in a surprising amount of gunnery practice in the months prior to that.
Long pointy nosed fish have it for other reasons and take the drag penalty to hunt or display better. Flying reptiles were slow enough to not pay it and do have ridiculous wind vane heads with long faces. You don't see it till supersonic aircraft and they do it sometimes just to get sensors out of the shockwave cone.
The application of needle tips is limited.
Truncated supersonic explanation. It is hazy for me, way outside my limited aero knowledge. All arguments come down to surface area drag. It is something like 30% more efficient to be blunt in subsonic planes. I concentrated on extreme low speed flight in wing-in-ground vehicles where it doesn't matter much.
Pterosaurs weren’t any slower (or faster) than birds in similar niches, and their head crest were a) insanely variable and b) had very little role to play in flight. Stop perpetuating outdated ideas.
If you could save 1 battleship, 1 aircraft carrier, 1 light cruiser, one heavy cruiser, one destroyer etc of the US navy from scrapping, which would you choose?
(Course, ships that could actually be preserved as museums, no magic powers here. As much as I’d like to visit USS Johnston you can’t exactly unsink her).
My choice would be
Battleship: USS California
Aircraft carrier: USS Enterprise
Heavy cruiser: USS San Francisco
Light cruiser: USS Honolulu
Destroyer: USS Dunlap
Submarine: USS Archerfish
I think Mike Brady of Oceanliner Designs has a video on the evolution of life boats.
33rd, 12 May 2024
Lol..i can kinda read german , i can pronounce german , and its not far from english in many ways an cases , yet- moistly i dont understand german...pronounce every letter! ' i=e...ge = gay... ... On der die or das...just guess or stick to das... .. will their be a space navy?. An space marines?
on the tabletop version of your discord people get bullied to oblivion and then your mods mute them when they try to defend themselves, you should reset a new discord, this is the most horrid place i have ever seen online
But Titanic didn't need any lifeboats as it was unsinkable.👍