It's time once again for our usual open thread. Talk about whatever you want that isn't culture war.
Scott Alexander, formerly of the blog Slate Star Codex, where Naval Gazing came from, is back, with a new Substack blog, Astral Codex Ten. And DSL is running the monthly effortpost contest, with 17 entries for January.
2018 updates are Russian Battleships Part 2, Why the Carriers Aren't Doomed Part 4, SYWTBABB - Strategic Background, Early US Battleships, Aegis and Amphibious Warfare Part 1. 2019 overhauls are the Mk 23 Katie, Commercial Aviation Part 6, the King George V Class, German Guided Bombs Part 1, The PHS Corps and my history of Wisconsin. And 2020 overhauls are Operation Crossroads and Battleship Torpedoes parts one, two and three.
Comments
Some trivia of possible interest to Naval Gazers: the Lovell telescope, a 76-metre radio antenna built in the 1950s, uses a drive system partially salvaged from the turrets of two Revenge-class battleships which were decommissioned after WWII. The mass above the elevation drive is 1500 tonnes, which is probably comparable to a battleship's main guns.
That's broadly similar to the rotating mass of the entire turret, not just the guns. But it sounds like they were using the traverse system, not the elevation system, so that checks out.
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@Blackshoe
I am about halfway through your recommendation of Crimes of Command and am finding it quite compelling reading. A few quibbles such as my wondering about the statement on page 58 that the Navy and Marines lost seven thousand aircraft between 1946 and 1949, but the author is delving into fascinating aspects of command and accountability.
I'll have more thoughts when I finish, but being from another service branch, I can say this is an excellent work that is worthy reading well beyond Naval, and even military, circles.
@Neal: glad you like it so far. Yeah, my biggest complaints against the book were a) that it would have been nice for there to be an annotated bibliography, b) the writing is a little too on the academic side for probably most people (which makes sense since it borrows from his PhD thesis work a lot). I've also thought that if you weren't interested in 1) Naval officer culture in particular or 2) military officer culture in general, I don't know what you would get out of the book. It fits an interesting niche, and I appreciate that, but I also admit it limits its audience (although this blog is fortunately that audience.
In more general OT news, I am now watching The Crown, and have gotten to the episodes that kind of talk about the Falklands (it's mostly a thing happening in the background). This season has been off in general, but Gillian Anderson as Thatcher is incredibly grating, especially her voice. I don't know how many Americans can appreciate this, but for the Brit readers who haven't watched, it comes across to me as a version of the Hyacinth Bucket voice from Keeping Up Appearances. At the least it's very obvious that she's doing a voice, and it's distracting.
Re the Crown, the portrayal of Thatcher annoyed me to the point that I stopped watching entirely after I think four episodes. Normally the show seems sympathetic to all of the characters, but it just can't stop dropping anvils on her, and Anderson's voice in particular drives me nuts. Not to mention the removal of several months between Mark's disappearance during the Dakar and the start of the Falklands, which made her look unbalanced.
Has anyone been following the MS Estonia saga?
Quick summary: In late September 1994, the ferry MS Estonia capsized and sank in the Baltic while on passage from Tallinn to Stockholm, with the loss of 852 lives. The weather was rough, but not unusually so for the season, and all scheduled ferry services were running.
Officially, the cause of the sinking is that the ferry's bow visor was torn off by waves, eventually allowing water to enter the car deck. There have been all sorts of other theories, including that there was an explosion or that the ferry was rammed by a submarine or warship.
Most of the bodies of the dead were not recovered, and therefore an international treaty forbids vessels and citizens of signatory countries from approaching the wreck. However, last year a Swedish film crew chartered a German-flagged ship (Germany being the only Baltic state that didn't sign the treaty) to film the wreck with an ROV, in order to make a documentary that was recently broadcast on the Discovery Channel.
They found a large hole in the side of the ship, which was previously not known to be there. It looks like it was caused by a collision not an explosion. As a result of the footage, Sweden, Finland and Estonia are planning to reopen the investigation.
The film crew were charged with violating the treaty, but the Swedish court ruled today that it had no jurisdiction as the crime took place on a German ship in international waters.
Interesting. I had not been following that until now. International law always makes that kind of stuff exciting to watch, and I'm curious to see what the new investigation shows.
The survivors reported that people stole stuff off them as they were evacuating and so far as I know there's no evidence as to who it was (only that it wasn't passengers of the Estonia).
Combining that with a collision…
I actually had heard about the news WRT MS Estonia, because I have a Google alert for "shipwreck" where it came up. The announcement about the hole in the hull was fascinating, and immediately made me think, "Huh, must have hit a (probably Russian) submarine."
Aside: one discovery about this Google Alert is how annoyed I get by how the media uses the word "shipwreck" which often comes down to "a ship that sinks", rather than the "site where a sinking/sunken ship comes to rest".
Currently reading Shattered Sword through for the first time and it's brilliant and highly readable. I want all books to be this good. Now I'm curious: since Parshall & Tully were overturning a bunch of pop conventional wisdom and older Western historiography, have there been any major developments since then?
Reading this makes the recent Midway even more grating to have watched, in hindsight.
... and, apologies if overly political and CW, but, in conversation with a history nerd friend, I just compared Japan's reluctance to bend doctrine and organize a new air group for the undamaged Zuikaku to provide a 5th flight deck for Operation MI to Western medical regulation of vaccines and rapid sars-cov-2 tests, with American efforts to repair Yorktown an instructive contrast. No object-level political point intended here.
Say goodbye to the Learjet. Apparently it hadn't been selling well for some time, and Bombardier has decided to end production of the aircraft as part of a more general round of shutdowns and layoffs caused by the current pandemic.
Guess I'll just have to get a Gulfstream then...
With Bombardier selling their airliners, their rail division and now shutting down Learjet how long are they actually going to keep making anything?
My theory is that all companies eventually either become hedge funds -- just pools of money that try to make themselves bigger -- or go out of business. Either way, Bombardier is transitioning rapidly toward the end state.
Bombardier isn't transitioning into a hedge fund, though, it's transitioning into a welfare bum. (And it's been doing that for decades, tbh.)
Agreed with Alsadius on Bombardier being a welfare bum, although I will add that in my admittedly pedestrian understanding, so are most other players in this industry.
"Boring Things That Made a Real Difference in WWII"
That's the title of a yet-to-be-written book that we thought up in the video meetup this weekend. The first chapter will be "The RN Blockade of Germany". What are some of the other chapters?
A lot of Operation Research would probably qualify, except for the part about them actually being interesting (at least to us).
The title is obviously a deliberate misdirect, in that it's clear that these are things which look boring but aren't. Of course, the book is going to be at least 2/3rds logistics stuff, along with OR, the OIC, and some of the more backwater theaters of war (South Atlantic, Aleutians, etc).
Maybe something about the work done to improve farm productivity will make it into the final edition.
My aforementioned Google News alert alerted me to the story of SS Oria, and its losses. Which made me wonder what percentage of massive shipwreck-related losses were war related (I already knew about MV Wilhelm Gustloff, for example).
And the answer is, uh, apparently most of them, as it turns out.
I’m not particularly surprised. Wartime is likely to see operations well outside the norm, which means more people on ships and less slack if things go wrong. My go-to example is Rohna, which is second only to Arizona in terms of Americans lost on a single ship, but which I had to look up the name of just now, whereas everyone knows about Arizona.
There's a Diplomacy game brewing on the DSL forums, if anyone who isn't a member there is interested.
Non-traditional map (TBD which one), 2 days per turn. Pass the word.
Eisenhower famously said that the five most important pieces of equipment in WWII were the jeep, the two and a half ton truck, the bulldozer, the "duck" (an amphibious vehicle), and the C-47 plane, none of which were designed for combat.
We can probably cross off the Duck, the bulldozer, and the C-47 as not being boring enough, but the Jeep and the deuce-and-a-half probably deserve a chapter.
I'd think the bulldozer (as a symbol of the construction effort) would feature prominently, alongside the deuce and a half and maybe the jeep, for logistics.
Bill Slim not losing in India would be up there for me, although "boring" might be being redefined as "not well-known to Americans", which is of course not the same thing (I assume it's more well known to Brits).
Looks like they're adding MOAR MUSEUM to bean's old stomping grounds.
Yeah, I've known about that for a while. I have mixed feelings about it (a lot of me wants the ship to stay the way it was when I was there) but it's also kind of exciting. No idea how long it will take, or how the fundraising is going.
The Surface Navy Association being involved is not pleasing, but I will try and not hold that against them if I ever get out there.
Interesting. Hadn't heard anything about them before this. Care to elaborate?
@bean: the short answer is SNA has a reputation as being an organization devoted to meeting the needs of admirals and industry, not the fleet. There's a reason their annual meeting is held in that beating heart of the Fleet, Crystal City.