The Navy Thread

USS Theodore Roosevelt is visiting Portsmouth — Along with the USS Winston Churchill.

Indeed, the Nimitz-class is indeed too large to enter Portsmouth Harbour, and has to dock in the Solent.

The Ulyanovsk Would Have Been The Soviet Titan Of The Seas.

I think an Essex-class from WW 2 would have taken her down. A few A-4 Skyhawks with some bombs and/or missiles and there ya go.

If not that, then definitely a Kitty Hawk or America. Or Big E: Cold War Edition.

Oh hai, ye class of many names but I knew thee best as "Kremlin".

She would have made a nice feather in some 688 commander's cap, I think, rather than getting into a knock-down drag-out with Strike Fleet Atlantic.

edited 22nd Mar '15 2:01:22 AM by Night

I just finished Vincent P. O'Hara's Struggle for the Middle Sea as recommended by someone over on the armored vehicle thread (where a ship conversation sprang up for some reason); pretty interesting stuff. It's quite notable that the Italian Regia Marina, by his accounts, acquitted itself quite well in that war, but extreme caution on both the Italian and British sides led there to be few fleet engagements, though quite a few squadron-sized ones. The RM was never allowed to proceed aggressively rather than cautiously by its political masters, and Italy's infrastructure was never really up to a prolonged war, especially in terms of fuel. After the first year of the war, the RM was continually fuel-starved.

I also hadn't realized just how many naval engagements were fought between the British and Vichy France, not just Mers-el-Kebir.

It seems that the Mediterranean sea war also showed how essential air cover was; the Royal Navy was rarely willing to go into seas where they could be reached by land-based Italian or German bombers.

The flaw of the Regia Marina was that their radar was poor to non-existent and thus they could not fight effectively at night, regardless of the frequently high quality of their crews; meanwhile, the RM had no control over air power and the Regia Aeronautica seemed very incompetent or careless about giving the Italian fleet any air cover.

Interestingly, "few fleet engagements, lots of squadron engagements" pretty much sums up the surface-ship war in all oceans. Lots of destroyer and cruiser action in the South Pacific.

Yeah, if Kancolle has taught me anything, it's that a lot of ships get sunk in these smaller engagements or taken out by subs in the middle of nowhere.

Or by hitting mines; from what I could tell, mines took out more ships than other warships did in the Med.

It also turns out that battleships were almost unusable due to how expensive they were and how unwilling everyone was to lose one. That was essentially the lesson of both WW 1 and WW 2, and in WW 2 they were much more vulnerable to air power besides. Taking a battleship outside safe waters was risking losing it for no gain.

^ To some extent. The big battlewagons proved somewhat invaluable in various areas from naval interdiction (why hello thar Truk), to sea based artillery, to fleet protection from aircraft (the Iowas were notoriously hard to approach from the air, they had that much Dakka) and more. Their biggest drawbacks were their lack of weapon range compared to their cost. For the same cost as a North Dakota you could build and man a full Essex complete with full air wing that could attack any target 5 times further away.

Of course battleships did have an advantage carriers did not: Survivability. After Repulse, not a single Allied battlewagon was lost to any source in the Pacific and damn did the Japanese try to bring them down. I-19 at Guadalcanal fired on what was pretty much our only functional battleship in the Pacific (USS North Carolina) at the time and failed to sink her despite three torpedo hits. In the same engagement she sank the US carrier USS Wasp with the same number of torpedoes.

Nit: Prince of Wales was the battleship lost, not Repulse, which was a battlecruiser with lesser armor.

Prince of Wales was largely lost because loss of electrical power meant that pumps were inoperative; had they had power, it's likely it could have remained afloat.

edited 24th Mar '15 3:27:58 PM by Morven

So it was the same problem Sheffield had in 1982? The Exocet failed to detonate and thus blow the ship in half but it did cut the power irreparably in the heat of the moment.

Not really an excuse considering how far the Japanese managed to get without radar; the Regina Marina simply hadn't bothered to train or prepare to fight at night, openly dismissing night battle as an impossibility before the war. It's a really bizarre choice and I'd someday like to find out what their reasoning for doing so was, considering the night action at Jutland or the various night destroyer attacks of the Russo-Japanese War.

I think it was none other than Yamamoto who disparagingly compared battleships to babies that were constantly crying for fuel.

Granted, sometimes just sitting there in safe waters was a pretty useful way to handle a battleship. The German's Tirpitz spent a lot of time doing nothing in Norway, but just the fact that it was there was enough to make the Royal Navy constantly keep a bunch of ships in the area to keep her from possibly threatening the convoy lines.

Yes, but while her "fleet in being" role tied up British resources, she couldn't actually contribute to many merchantman kills.

On the topic of battleships and fuel, Tully and Parshall--they of Shattered Sword fame--offer up a theory as to why the Japanese never pulled off a repeat performance of the Bombardment of Henderson Field. Namely, fuel constraints. The IJN's poor logistics strike again.

@Night: this article looks at the issue a bit more, though it still fails to get an answer as to why the Regia Marina was so unprepared to fight at night. I think the observation that the RM was way too stingy about launching torpedoes is accurate, though, and it's quite likely that author's right that Italy was fundamentally unprepared to produce enough weaponry for the war they ended up fighting. Torpedoes are good at night, when the enemy couldn't see or avoid them nearly as easily, but you need to launch a lot of them to get results, and the RM did not.

One has to feel something for the Italian forces, forced to battle better-equipped, better-supplied enemies like that. Plenty of individual and unit bravery that got them so damn little, for want of fuel and armaments to spare.

Italy was prepared for one year of war at most, and even that was stretching things.

The presentation march of the German Navy: Praesentiermarsch der Marine.

edited 28th Mar '15 4:26:32 PM by Achaemenid

The Interrogation of a U-Boat Crew: June 29th 1941.

A report of an interview with the crew of a U-Boat sunk by the escorts of Convoy HX-133 in 1941. The officers of U-651 did not endear themselves to their British captors.

edited 2nd Apr '15 2:05:55 AM by Achaemenid

Russian trawler sinks in the Sea of Okhotsk, 54 dead.

It's time to declare war on sea ice and build battleships to defeat it.

Audio recording of USS Sealion's attack on Kongo.

From my Kongo-class histories over on the Warships forums.

edited 2nd Apr '15 12:21:23 PM by Night

Sheesh, were all Japanese ships built to be complete death traps? The more and more ships I keep finding in the history books the more and more of them keep having appallingly high casualty rates when sunk or otherwise taken out.

Catastrophic kills have catastrophic casualties; an ammo detonation would kill a tank crew even more thoroughly than this, but an engine hit means they probably bail out alive for the most part. A lot also depends on the method in which the ship is abandoned; an orderly abandonment saves lives vs. everyone having to just jump over the side, but not so many as having friendly ships able to come alongside and take the crew off.

Kirishima, despite taking 20 16" shells plus 17 others, had 212 dead and 1,098 survive including her captain. Hiei had 188 of her crewmen are killed and 151 wounded during First Guadalcanal and her day-long ordeal at the hands of the Cactus Air Force.

edited 2nd Apr '15 4:13:51 PM by Night

I'm wondering about Kongo foundering due to only two torpedo hits, not in sensitive areas like the screws or rudders. A contemporary US Standard probably would have survived.

edited 2nd Apr '15 4:16:49 PM by SabresEdge

^ The first successor to the Standard-type the USS North Carolina took 3 torpedoes from IJN submarine I-19 at Guadalcanal.

She survived to see the end of the war.

The Japanese were in general very concerned about flooding and worked on it before the war a lot, but as Parshall and Tully note they were strangers to systems engineering and their damage-control was badly hampered by that fact. They were also quick to use counterflooding where the USN would instead juggle tanks or reduce topside weights to correct a list; they were trying to rapidly restore combat capability rather than preserve buoyancy.

Kongo was also not in a battle-ready condition when hit; only god knows what the condition of her watertight hatches and bulkheads was. The majority of them may have been open. The Imperial Japanese Navy did not do standardized hatch conditions like the USN's Conditions; all watertight bulkheads were sealed at battle-ready, but their condition when the ship was not at general quarters was a matter of chance or the preference of the captain and how he'd trained his crew.

edited 2nd Apr '15 4:51:52 PM by Night

Remember that the Kongo took a beating from ships that are barely 20% of her displacement too, just less than a month before sinking...