After the main DSL meetup officially finished, I organized the last museum ship visit of the trip, to the aircraft carrier Hornet in Alameda.¹ Knowing that this would be a bigger ship, and easier to take a group through, I opened it up, announcing it both here and via the rationalist group meetup system, which brought 8 or so people I’d never met out of the woodwork. Add on cassander, Garrett, Evan and CatCube, and it was a good-size group.

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Hornet herself is an interesting ship, one of the Essex class carriers that bore the brunt of the fighting during the later half of the Pacific War. She served well throughout, although she was stateside at the end of the war after getting her bow smashed in by a typhoon. Postwar, she was part of the first batch of refits to fly jets and got an angled deck, but she never got steam catapults, limiting her utility in the strike role, so from 1958 on, she was classified as an anti-submarine carrier (CVS). In this role, she supported operations off Vietnam, and in the twilight of her career served as the recovery ship for the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 missions before being retired in 1970. Read more...

Corrosion is a serious concern in the maritime environment. A mix of salt, water and air is about the worst possible environment for metal objects to survive in, and if corrosion isn’t dealt with, usually at significant expense, it rapidly becomes a safety issue.

Marine corrosion is electrochemical in nature. For various reasons, different portions of a metal will have different electrical potential, causing electrons to flow between them. Areas with extra electrons (known as cathodic areas) give them up to the sea, combining with water and dissolved oxygen to produce hydroxyl ions (OH^-). These are then drawn back to the areas which gave up their electrons, known as anodes, where they combine with the atoms of metal to form metal oxides. If the ship is primarily made of iron or steel, the product is hydrated iron oxide, more commonly known as rust. Rust is generally quite fragile, and doesn’t protect the underlying surface very well. Other metals, such as aluminum and stainless steel, also corrode, but the products of said corrosion instead cling tightly to the surface, protecting the underlying metal from further corrosion. In fact, you may know aluminum rust by another name, sapphire. Read more...

It’s time for our biweekly open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn’t culture war.

A few pieces of recent news. First, the new USS Montana commissioned last week. This either broke a century-old curse, or will bring about the end of the world. Jury is still out there. Second, Hershel “Woody” Williams, the last surviving WWII Medal of Honor winner, died last week.

Also, it’s been a while since I did a book update, and I just cleared the 100,000 word mark in the process of working through the treaty battleships.

2018 overhauls are Rangefinding, SYWTBAMN-Aviation Part 2, The Great White Fleet Part 1, The Newport Conference and the US Dreadnought, my review of Batfish and Falklands Part 4. 2019 overhauls are Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 3, dndnrsn’s review of Bavarian military museums, Rangekeeping Part 2, Impressment, my review of the WWI museum and Signalling Part 1. 2020 overhauls are my picture post of Iowa’s Goat Locker, Coastal Defenses Part 4, The Pearl Harbor Rant, Mike Kozlowski’s review of Fort Monroe and The Last Sailing Battle. 2021 overhauls are The 3T Missiles - Launch Systems, Postwar Battleships - US, Coastal Defenses Part 8 and Norway Part 3.

On the other end of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco from the disastrous Maritime National Historic Site are two WWII-era ships in the hands of private nonprofits. One is the submarine Pampanito, a typical fleet boat of the type that strangled Japan, while the other is Liberty Ship Jeremiah O’Brien. They were moored at the same pier at the time of my visit, although it appears that O’Brien has moved to Pier 35 from Pier 45 since then. That said, shore facilities are minimal, and the rest of the review should likely be accurate.

Pampanito and Jeremiah O’Brien²

Jeremiah O’Brien

Jeremiah O’Brien

Jeremiah O’Brien is one of three survivors of the 2,710 Liberty Ships built to carry cargo in support of the Allied War Effort, one of the great industrial achievements of the war. That alone would make her interesting, but unlike the vast majority of museum ships, she’s fully operational, and regularly takes guests on cruises around the Bay, occasionally venturing further afield. Read more...

For centuries, Britain’s main enemy was France. As a result, the start of the 20th century found the south and southeast coasts dotted with naval bases, bases protected by fortifications. But the threat was changing from France to Germany, and new bases would be needed to cover the North Sea. The Grand Fleet would have to be based somewhere in Scotland, putting it in position to bottle up the German fleet. Several locations were considered, most notably Cromarty Firth and the Firth of Forth, both on the eastern coast of the Scottish mainland. But both of these had only a single entrance, raising the possibility of mines trapping the fleet in harbor. This tipped the balance in favor of the third option, the Orkney harbor of Scapa Flow, off the northeastern tip of Scotland.

Scapa Flow today

But while work had been undertaken to defend the Firth of Forth as early as the 1870s, the outbreak of war found the defenses of Scapa still no more than paper and a local unit recruited to man them when they were finally built. Jellicoe quickly ordered some of his ships to send a few of their smaller guns, 3″ or less, ashore to cover the entrances to the Flow against a potential attack, and had fishing nets strung to hopefully indicate if a submarine attempted to penetrate. But nobody had much confidence in these measures, and after a submarine scare in September resulted in wild firing by nervous gunners, the Grand Fleet withdrew to the waters around western Scotland and Ireland, although even this wasn’t enough to avoid loss to German mines. Read more...

It’s time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn’t culture war.

Comment of the week goes to doctorpat, who suggests getting the albatross of the A-10 off the Air Force’s back by donating them to Ukraine.

In other news, the HASC has finished its markup of the FY2023 NDAA, and as I predicted, a lot of the cuts have been reversed. Rather than buying 8 ships and retiring 24, as the Navy proposed, they’re planning to buy 13 ships and retire 12.

2018 overhauls are Pungdo, SYWTBAMN Aviation Part 1, Jackie Fisher, Battlecruisers Part 2, Did Iowa Move Sideways During a Broadside? and Auxiliaries Part 2. 2019 overhauls are Soviet Battleships Part 1, Alexander’s review of the Newark Air Museum and Lord Nelson’s Review of Soya, Battleship Aviation Part 4, The Scuttling of the High Seas Fleet and Spanish-American War Part 5. 2020 overhauls are Merchant Ships - Specialized Tankers and Cargo Ships, Naval Rations Part 1 and Tom Clancy. And 2021 overhauls are The Altmark Incident, The 3T Missiles - Introduction and Norway Parts one and two.

While in the Bay Area for the DSL meetup, I went into San Francisco to see the various museum ships around Fisherman’s Wharf, joined by cassander and Garrett, with RobRoy and his wife joining us there. There are three different organizations running ships within a few blocks, and it’s pretty difficult to figure out what is going on.

The museum ships from the maritime museum

We started with the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, run by the National Park Service. This includes both the San Francisco Maritime Museum, in an old Art Deco building, and the Hyde Street Pier, where there are a number of museum ships reflecting the area’s maritime heritage.

Mermaid, the boat that Kenichi Horie crossed the Pacific with

We started at the maritime museum. It’s a pretty building, but there isn’t that much stuff in it. I think some of it was closed off when we visited in June 2022, as there was only two small rooms open. The main room had some nice models of various ships and dioramas of scenes from San Francisco’s maritime history, along with a few artifacts, but I would classify it as OK at best. The only highlight here was Mermaid, a 19′ sailboat used by Japanese yachtsman Kenichi Horie on the first nonstop solo sailing voyage across the Pacific. They had several displays on his voyage, which were interesting, even if they assumed a greater level of knowledge of his voyage than I had going in. Read more...

One of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how the interplay between sea power and land power has shaped warfare over the last two centuries or so. The contrast between the situations in 1822, 1922 and 2022 is staggering, and as much as anything drove the different roles and structures of naval power at those times.

In 1822, the worlds of sea and land power were separate, as they had been for centuries. The only practical way to defeat a ship at sea was with another ship of equal or greater size,³ which in turn meant that a ship a few miles off even the most heavily defended port in the world could effectively blockade it. A few attempts had been made to test this, most notably Thomas Jefferson’s plan to replace the USN’s frigates with gunboats, which would defend the coast and not project power overseas, but they had failed completely. Read more...

It’s time again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn’t Culture War.

Apologies for how quiet it’s been around here. I have several reviews coming up from the DSL meetup.

2018 overhauls are Jutland Parts two, three, four, five, six and seven, SYWTBAMN - Coast Guard Part 1, Ship History - New Jersey, my review of Alabama and Falklands Part 3. 2019 overhauls are Shells at Jutland, The Battle of Jutland, Battleship Aviation Part 3, A Brief History of the Submarine, Inky’s Review of the Haifa Naval Museum and Falklands Part 15. 2020 overhauls are Jutland - The Blockade, Tomahawk Part 4, Coastal Defenses Part 3 and Soviet Battleships Part 2. 2021 overhauls are my review of Greyhound, Aviation at Jutland, Soviet SLBMs parts two and three and Coastal Defenses Part 7.

In 2016, I got to go to the Miramar Airshow, held at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, near San Diego. It’s the largest military airshow in the US, with the cream of the Marine Corps on display, along with contributions from the other services.

Planes waiting for the display as I drove in

As impressive as the air displays are, probably the best thing about Miramar is the stuff on display behind the flight line. About three of everything the Marine Corps and Navy have is laid out for people to look at and go inside. The sheer scale of the show area and the number of things to look at (not just planes, either) keeps the lines manageable, at least so long as you’re not terribly picky.Read more...