When I discussed battleship main guns, I mostly glossed over the shells that they fired. The time has come to rectify that omission, and discuss the wide variety of shell types that have seen naval service over the centuries.

Early shells, with shot on the left¹

In the age of sail, the basic naval projectile was round shot, a simple round chunk of metal. This had the advantage of being cheap and fairly effective at making holes in a target. The problem was that poking small holes in something as big and tough as a ship, even a wooden one, was not a particularly fast way to kill it. A few men might be killed by flying splinters, but the holes were easily plugged by the ship's carpenter, and it took an awful lot of battering to actually kill another ship. Ordnance designers thus came up with a number of specialized projectiles that would have other effects. Chain shot, when two halves of a cannonball were linked by a chain, was used to slash through rigging and batter masts. To attack the enemy crew, canister or grapeshot was used, turning cannons into giant shotguns. However, all of these specialized projectiles lost velocity quickly and were thus limited to short range. The only way to improve round shot as a ship-killer was to heat it in a furnace so it would set fire to the target. However, this had serious drawbacks. The shot had to be heated, which took time, and the safety implications of trying to use heated shot from a wooden ship are obvious. As a result, its use was mostly confined to coast-defense batteries, although a furnace for heating shot was installed aboard USS Constitution.² Read more...

It's our biweekly open thread. Talk of whatever you want.

A thing I have recently started playing is Rule the Waves, a game that puts you in command of a fleet in the 1900 era. You get to pick the country, and then design, build, and fight the ships. It's one of the most addictive games I've ever encountered, to the point that I'm afraid I'll have to give it up.

Overhauled posts since last time include So You Want to Build a Battleship - Design Part I, The Pursuit of the Goeben and Breslau, Operation Staple Head, and my posts on the early dreadnoughts and the forces that fought the submarine in WWII.

With the brilliant South Dakota class, American designers built the finest of the treaty battleships. However, the clouds of war were gathering on the horizon, and rumors were circulating of Japanese battleships that dwarfed the ships being built under the Second London Treaty. In an attempt to prevent this from happening, the authors of that treaty had included an "escalator clause", which allowed the treaty powers to raise the treaty limits if ships that breached them were built by other powers. Public opinion was still largely pacifist, so it wasn't until March 31st, 1938 that the US, Britain and France exchanged notes invoking this clause, ultimately signing a protocol raising the battleship tonnage limit by 10,000 tons. This laid the foundation for the greatest of all battleships, the Iowa class.

Iowa in 1945

The extra 10,000 tons gave designers several options, and studies began almost immediately. One possibility was to fit another triple 16" turret on a stretched South Dakota hull, with the tonnage going into a longer citadel and bigger engines to maintain 27 kts. Another was to upgrade the guns to 18",³ which kept the length of the citadel down and allowed the armor to be upgraded. Both of these would have been entirely in keeping with the traditional American policy of prioritizing firepower and protection over speed. But some in Preliminary Design suggested a radical alternative, a very fast ship intended not to stand in the line of battle but to hunt down Japanese cruisers.⁴ The first sketches were of a ship armed with 12" guns, capable of cruising for 20,000 nautical miles at 15 kts,⁵ and with a top speed of 35 kts. To hold displacement down to even 50,000 tons would have meant that the ship was armored against 8" weapons, with an immune zone of 10,000 to 30,000 yards. Read more...

Lord Nelson and I recently took a trip to northeast Oklahoma. Our primary destination was Boarding House Books in Claremore, who are selling off a 15,000 volume private library. I picked up another set of Morison's History of US Naval Operations in WWII, as well as a gorgeous leather-bound edition of Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. But while we were there, we stopped in at the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and Planetarium.

Lord Nelson with the museum's F-14

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Today, the destroyer is the premier surface combatant, with only a handful of navies operating larger combatant vessels of any type. Its name is a contraction of "torpedo boat destroyer", which tells us where we must look for the origins of these vessels. The self-propelled torpedo,⁶ invented by Robert Whitehead in the 1860s, was a revolutionary weapon. Before, the only effective weapons against a big ship were big guns, which required another big ship to carry them. Now, virtually any vessel could be armed with weapons that were able to sink a battleship.

Torpedo Boat HMS Lightning

One obvious way to use this new weapon was to mount it on a small, fast vessel, which became known as the torpedo boat. The first torpedo boats, such as HMS Lightning of 1876, were extremely small, usually under 50 tons, and fast for the day, somewhere north of 18 kts. However, they were fragile and short-ranged, limitations that were often overlooked by their advocates, most notably the French Jeune Ecole, who believed that the torpedo boat had rendered the battleship obsolete. The British, who had long planned on a strategy of coastal attack, found themselves in a bind. They needed some way to keep their heavy ships safe while operating off enemy ports, and began to construct smaller ships to hunt down torpedo boats. Their first effort, known as torpedo gunboats, were built starting in the mid-1880s. They were armed with small QF guns and a few torpedoes of their own. They were seen as unsuccessful because they weren't fast enough to catch torpedo boats, although they would probably have performed well in action against their smaller, more fragile opponents. Read more...

Most of have probably heard of the Philadelphia Experiment. The common story is that the USN conducted experiments during 1943 involving somehow making a destroyer escort, the Eldridge, invisible and/or able to teleport. It's obviously complete nonsense, and several explanations have been offered for the story. But it turns out that the actual explanation is rather strange. The story we know today was created as a cover for something very different.

Philadelphia later in 1943

It turns out that the Philadelphia in question was not the city, but the ship. The light cruiser Philadelphia was a unit of the Brooklyn class, serving in the Mediterranean in 1943. She had gained distinction during the invasions of Morocco, Sicily and Salerno, and during the last invasion, she was the target of numerous German guided bombs. While she survived unscathed, several other ships did not, and the Allied navies began to scramble for an answer to the new weapons. Read more...

Once a battleship's hull had been assembled, the builder was faced with the task of getting it into the water. Launch was the most difficult and involved part of building a ship, as tens of thousands of tons of steel had to be slid down into the water without damage to itself or to the surroundings.⁷

Iowa slides down the ways

This was harder than it sounds. A careful balance had to be struck between making sure that the hull didn't hang up on the launching ways, the concrete tracks that it was built on, and making sure that it didn't go into the water so fast that it got damaged or ran into the opposite bank, a particular problem for yards on narrow rivers. Possibly the most fraught part of the process was when the ship left the ways, which didn't extend very far below the surface of the water. If the stern of the ship wasn't buoyant enough when the center of gravity passed the end of the ways, the bow would tip up, which was unlikely to end well. If things went well, the loads would instead be concentrated on the bow as the stern started to float, which meant that the launching cradle, the ways, and the bow itself all had to be specially reinforced. Read more...

I've decided to share my thoughts on a bunch of different naval fiction books I've read over the years. This is rather disordered, but it should be useful if anyone wants to read stirring tales of the sea, of whatever era.

Aubrey-Maturin Series by Patrick O'Brian

This is a series of 20.5 novels by Patrick O'Brian, covering the exploits of British captain (mostly) Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin during the Napoleonic Wars. I've read the first 12, and they're excellent, if somewhat strange. O'Brian is a fantastic writer, with a knowledge of sailing ships and the Royal Navy that frightens even me. But they're also written in an early 19th-century style, which is a rather wrenching change from what I'm used to. I'd definitely suggest trying them, but they may not be everyone's cup of tea. Read more...

In 1898, tensions between the US and Spain finally boiled over after the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor. Both sides prepared for war, the US to secure independence for Cuba, Spain to preserve the remnants of its once-great empire. But while the bulk of attention was fixed on the Caribbean, where Cuba was blockaded on April 21st and war was declared 4 days later, the first clash would be on the other side of the globe.

In the Pacific, the Asiatic Squadron under Commodore George Dewey was assembled at Hong Kong to attack the Philippines. Dewey was instructed to keep his ships full of coal, and enlist all the men he could get. Reinforcements were rushed to back up his initial squadron, the protected cruisers Olympia and Boston and the gunboat Petrel. The cruisers Raleigh and Baltimore were dispatched from the European and Hawaiian stations, the gunboat Concord came from fishery protection duty in the Bering Sea, and the Revenue Service Cutter⁸ McCulloch arrived from Singapore. In April, Dewey was instructed to purchase a pair of auxiliaries to support his drive on the Philippines, to land extra stores and woodwork, and to paint over the traditional peacetime white with wartime grey. Baltimore arrived on the 22nd, and the next day, as the blockade of Cuba was declared, the British governor asked the American squadron to leave.⁹ They sailed on the 25th for a nearby bay, where they trained and waited for the American consul from Manila to arrive with the latest intelligence. On the 27th, the consul boarded Olympia, bringing reports of the Spanish defensive preparations. Three hours later, the squadron had weighed anchor and was putting to sea. Read more...

It's time once again for our biweekly open thread. Talk about whatever you wish.

I recently was pointed to a pair of NYT articles from 1982 about the reactivation of the Iowas. While both parts are pretty long, they're worth reading for an understanding of contemporary public thought on the reactivation, particularly the political side. They're not much good for naval history or practice, and I feel a strong compulsion to cover them in annotations, but I'm glad I found them.

Overhauled posts since last time include both parts of my ride on the America, Thoughts on Tour Guiding, The Early Battlecruisers, Why do we need so many ships? and Anti-Submarine Warfare in WWI.