It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, as usual.
Something I recently found is the RTW2 wiki. This isn't well-indexed by Google, and it has a lot of good information, particularly for those participating in the RTW2 game who don't own a copy.
Overhauled posts since last time include Yalu River, DismalPseudoscience's review of Mikasa, German Battleships in WWII, The 15" Battleships, Museum Ships - United States, and my pictures from LA Fleet Week 2016.
While everyone has heard of Bismarck and Yamato, almost no one has heard of the battleships of Italy's navy, the Regia Marina. What makes this odd is that the Italian battlefleet might well have had a greater impact on the course of the war than the battleships of the other two Axis powers.
Italy began the war with a mere six battleships, four of them leftovers from WWI. These ships, split between the Conte di Cavour and Andrea Doria classes, had been the beneficiaries of the most extensive reconstruction received by any battleship in the interwar era. Their speed had risen from 21 to 26 kts at the sacrifice of the triple turret previously carried amidships, while the remaining 10 guns were bored out from 12" to 12.6". The deck armor was increased and a Puligese torpedo defense system was installed. All told, only about 40% of the original structure remained unaltered after the reconstruction. Read more...
In 1941, the USN's aviation community was faced with a conundrum. Thousands of new pilots would need to learn the art of taking off from and landing on aircraft carriers, but the previous solution of using an operational carrier would remove a desperately-needed ship from frontline service. Even the new escort carriers, less-capable merchant conversions scheduled to begin entering service in 1942, would be in great demand to fight the Battle of the Atlantic. One enterprising officer came up with a plan to solve this, taking ships and shipbuilding resources otherwise largely useless to the war effort, and turning them into the first decks that thousands of naval aviators would fly from, including future President George H. W. Bush.
The plan was simple. Instead of training aviators on the ocean, they would be trained on the Great Lakes. These lakes had long supported a flourishing maritime industry, and while canals did connect them to the ocean, many ships had been built that were too big for the locks.1 A pair of these, the excursion steamers Seeandbee and Greater Buffalo, were to be purchased and quickly fitted with flight decks. The ships that emerged, Wolverine and Sable, were the world's only fresh-water paddle-wheel coal-burning aircraft carriers. Not the only ships with this combination of characteristics, but the only carriers to have any of those traits.2 Read more...
The Japanese decision not to sign the 1936 London Naval Treaty placed the British in a bind. The treaty had been the latest step in a 15-year effort to hold down the size and cost of battleships, which had been working reasonably well. The British had considered the 35,000 ton, 14" gun treaty battleship limits too loose, and now Japanese intransigence would force another step up in gun caliber and tonnage relative to the ships of the King George V class, which were about to be laid down.
As usual, design studies had begun even before the first escalator clause, raising the treaty cap from 14" to 16", was invoked when Japan failed to sign. In some ways, the British were well-positioned for the change, as the King George V had, rather unusually, been designed for protection against 16" gunfire while carrying 14" guns. However, the greater weight of 15" or 16" guns would have meant unacceptable cuts in speed, so it was fortunate that negotiations quickly began for invoking the second escalator clause, which would allow increases in the tonnage limit over the 35,000 tons allowed by the treaty. Read more...
Gentlemen,
Strange times are upon us. The recent instability in Norway has been exploited by Austria to secure control of the country. We weren't even aware their navy was capable of reaching Norway, much less in the strength needed to get their before the force we sent to restore order. As a result, we and the British have declared war on them to preserve Scandinavia's independence from Central European influence. So far, we have been successful in our first battle, sinking the Austrian light cruiser Zenta.
Overall, we aren't too worried about this war. While a direct numerical comparison shows our fleet as currently inferior to the Austrians, we have several mitigating factors. First, the British, possessors of the world's largest fleet, are on our side. They're unlikely to deploy too much firepower into the Mediterranean, but they are a useful counterbalance to Austrian attempts to reach Norway, and to any possible German entry into the war. Second, the war broke out while a large number of our ships were in yard hands, being refitted with Central Firing. Two CAs and two Bs will commission in two months, with another pair of CAs the next month. Third, our ships are larger and more capable than their Austrian equivalents. Read more...
The end of WWII brought new challenges for naval communication. The carriers soon were tasked with the nuclear strike role, which demanded a level of reliability not provided by the existing HF radios. The communications gaps caused by the vagaries of the ionosphere were completely unacceptable when they might have to pass orders for a nuclear strike. Something better would be needed, and the demand only grew throughout the 60s, as the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations attempted to exercise closer control over US forces and fleets in the field.4
Initially, efforts were made to improve the performance of HF radio, most notably by using multiple frequencies. Ships had already maxed out the number of antennas they could carry,5 and specialized antennas were developed to handle multiple wavelengths at the same time, such as the discone antenna associated with NTDS. Even when it worked, establishing a connection took a long time. Worse, there were a few gaps in the USN's network of HF stations, and the stations themselves were often vulnerable to the shifting political landscape of the Cold War. An attempt was made to solve this by converting old aircraft carriers into communications relay ships, but only two were completed, and they spent most of their life supporting the fleet on Yankee Station off North Vietnam.6 A final drawback was the low bandwidth of HF signals. NTDS relied on using 30 different HF signals to pass all of the required information. But higher-frequency signals traveled only in straight lines, so new options would be needed. Read more...
As we've been talking about signalling and communications lately, I thought it appropriate to show off some of my pictures of the facilities aboard Iowa.
Unfortunately, radio isn't really my thing, and this post will be less informative than my usual posts on these subjects. If you want more information, I'd encourage you to get in touch with Iowa's very active amateur radio association. There are also some spaces I don't have pictures of, most notably the transmitter room on 3rd deck. It was locked when I went in 2018, and I didn't have time to visit in 2019 or 2021. Pictures can be found here at Nick England's superb website. The visual signalling gear is from the 40s, while I believe all the radios were replaced during the 80s reactivation. Read more...
Radio development continued after the end of the First World War, as transmitters became more powerful, receivers became more sensitive, antennas became smaller and everything became lighter and more reliable. As such, radio found new applications and became more vital than ever before.
During the interwar years, vacuum tubes had won out over all other systems for generating radio signals, and they allowed higher frequencies than had been normal during WWI. These bands were known as high frequency (HF), and they could be efficiently transmitted with much smaller antennas. HF radio could also take advantage of skywave propagation, where signals bounced off the ionosphere and could travel thousands of miles. Low and medium frequency signals traveled primarily via groundwave, which was absorbed as it propagated, and thus could not reach nearly as far.
It's time for our usual Open Thread. Talk about whatever you like.
Interesting thing of the thread is this 1940 article from Life magazine on seapower. Besides providing a good look at public perception just before the Fall of France, it has a very good section looking at the systems of a battleship.
Overhauled posts include The Newport Conference and the US Dreadnought, my review of Batfish, The Falklands War Part 4, the first part of my history of USS Missouri, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Coast Guard Part 2 and my history of the QF gun.
In early April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a few desolate rocks in the South Atlantic. The British mobilized their fleet in response. The carriers arrived off the Falklands on May 1st, swiftly defeating the Argentine Air Force. The Argentine Navy tried to interfere the next day, but withdrew after the cruiser General Belgrano was sunk by a submarine. Two days later, the Argentinians struck back, sinking the frigate Sheffield with an Exocet missile. Two weeks later, on May 21st, British troops landed at San Carlos Water on the west coast of East Falkland. The Argentine Air Force quickly got wind of this, and launched numerous sorties against the invasion fleet. The first three days were brutal for both sides, with the British losing two frigates and suffering several others damaged, while a third of the Argentine jets were shot down.8
Despite the battering that the escorts had taken, the amphibious shipping itself remained largely unmolested throughout the first three days at San Carlos. The attackers, approaching from the north and west, had dissipated their efforts against the frigates in Falkland Sound, which while expensive and annoying wasn't actually enough to disrupt the landing. To break up such raids before they could reach the landing area, Broadsword and Coventry were stationed to the north. Unfortunately, this concentrated two of the three available long-range air-search radars away from the amphibious group, while the third, aboard the damaged Argonaut, was hemmed in by the ridgelines of San Carlos. None of them could cover the southern sector, which the Argentinian commanders, aware of their lack of success, had decided to make use of. Aircraft hugging the ridgelines could arrive at the head of San Carlos Water with little warning, hopefully getting away before the defenders could respond. Read more...
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