It is time for our regular open thread, as is usual. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
It's also time for another virtual meetup. This one is going to be next weekend, 8/28, at 1 PM US Central (GMT-5). The basic plan is that we'll watch the first episode of Victory at Sea and discuss it, along with anything else we come up with.
2018 overhauls are Ship History - Missouri Part 2, Nautical Measurements, Falklands Part 5, Underwater Protection Part 1, my review of the International Museum of WWII and The Standard Type. 2019 overhauls are The Spanish-American War parts six, seven and eight, Turret Designations, Naval Weddings and Wedding Decorations. 2020 overhauls are my review of Hanford and Powder Parts one, two and three.
Comments
Allegedly one of the CH-46s used to assist the embassy evacuation in Afghanistan participated in the evacuations of the evacuation of Saigon. https://twitter.com/whatismoo/status/1426939056970244103
(the aircraft is definitely old enough to have participated in both events - but I don't think the older photo in the tweet is of the same bird)
Well, I guess that craft will have some interesting nicknames when this is all said and done.
Were heavy cruisers a good design? From what I understand they were essentially an artifact of the Washington Naval Treaty limits, and it seems like they were significantly inferior to a battlecruiser or fast battleship without being cheap enough to build in numbers like a light cruiser.
Heavy Cruisers were thought to be useful enough that we kept building them during WW2: the Baltimore Class CAs were designed in 1939 after the outbreak of war in Europe mooted the Treaty restrictions, and we built 14 of them between 1941 and 1945. Although if wikipedia is to believed, the design of the Baltimores had more in common with the Cleveland-class light cruisers (the former design starting out as an up-gunned and up-armored variant of the latter) than with Treaty-era CAs.
Also, were CAs significantly more expensive than CLs? Looking at specs of American designs on wikipedia (e.g. the aforementioned Baltimores and Clevelands, and the Treaty-era New Orleans CAs and Brooklyn CLs), I don't see much that seems like it'd make the CAs much more expensive. The Baltimores are a bit bigger than the Clevelands, but the New Orleanses are about the same size as the Brooklyns, with the same number and type of boilers and generally similar armor numbers. The main difference seems to be that the CAs carry nine 8" main guns while the CLs carry fifteen 6" main guns.
I wonder the same thing about heavy cruisers. At least the US built a class of 8" cruisers after the treaty limits expired and the Japanese refitted "light" cruisers with 8" guns, possibly at the expense of total throw weight per minute. At the same time, ISTR that 6" guns were generally capable of defeating cruiser armor at reasonable ranges. Given the much lower ROF of an 8" gun, it seems to me that one of these two designs was actually dubious.
Either 8" guns were needed to penetrate the armor, so in that case, why bother with 6" cruisers except maybe as destroyer-killers. (But if you're doing that, why not use 5" guns that can hit aircraft and still penetrate unarmored destroyers?) Or else they weren't, and 6" guns could beat CL/CA armor just fine, in which case, why bother with slow-firing 8" guns?
Obviously, once you get autoloaders like in the Des Moines class, allowing your 8" to shoot at least as fast as the older 6", then there's no particular reason to favor the smaller gun. (At least, not unless your 6" could track aircraft, and despite several attempts, AFAIK there's never been a 6" DP gun that was especially useful, not even the 6"/47s on the Worcesters.)
Long story short, it seems to me like either the Clevelands or the Baltimores were a weird choice. It seems like they'd have been better off not building the Baltimores and build more Clevelands and Alaskas instead, or else skip the Clevelands and build more Baltimores.
@Ike: Alas, the State Dept CH-46s in-country have been spiked and abandoned due to lack of good options to extract.
Remember the Ever Given? The vessel that stopped up the Suez for a few days. Well, apparently it went to Malta for a bit and has now transited, unladen, the canal again on route to the Far East (Qingdao) where further repairs can be effected.
A tug is doing escort duty. A tug and unladen. Costs keep adding up on this one.
Re the CAs, they seemed to work pretty well, although different nations handled things rather differently. As Eric points out, the American CAs and CLs of the interwar years were all 10,000 tons, with armament based on what the current treaty situation was. (Except the Atlantas, but we'll ignore them.) The British felt rather differently, and kept pushing for smaller cruisers because they needed a lot for trade protection and didn't want to be too badly outmatched.
So that means to a first approximation it's a choice between 8" and 6" guns. And the answer to that one is complicated. The 8" gun obviously fires much more slowly, but you get a bit more range and a lot more damage if you hit. It's been a long time since I read much on this, but by the 40s, it was actually possible to armor a cruiser reasonably well against cruiser gunfire. Weirdly, I can't find a good penetration table for either American or British 6" guns, but there's some discussion of design standards which suggests you can keep out a 6" shell past 10-12,000 yrds with a 3" belt, and stop it inside of 16-20 kyrds with a 2" deck. I do have an armor penetration table for the US 8"/55, and equivalent values for that are something like 10" and 3". (The belt numbers may not be comparable. The US used different standards for battleship and cruiser belts because it was assumed that cruisers wouldn't fight targets directly on the beam. But I have to work with what I have.) It's also worth pointing out that mounting design advanced quite a lot between 1920 and 1940, and that probably shifted the balance in favor of the 6". But IIRC, the USN did think the 8" was worthwhile, although they really wanted to marry it to the ROF of the 6", hence the Des Moines.
If they're all 10,000 tons, then what's the point of drawing a distinction between CAs and CLs? Why not call them all different types of CL (or CA)?
When the 8" cruisers were first designed, they were actually designated as CLs, in contrast to the heavier armored cruisers. But those disappeared, and they were redesignated as CAs. This made more sense when the CLs they were being contrasted to were WWI-era ships that were significantly smaller and more lightly armed. You could make a strong case that the big 6" cruisers like the Brooklyns and Clevelands should have been CAs instead of CLs, but that's not the way they went. (Probably in part to avoid tricky line-drawing problems between them and the smaller 6" cruisers like the Leanders and Arethusas.) And yes, this sort of decision has caused confusion ever since. Just like people who think "battlecruiser" means "halfway between a battleship and a cruiser".
On the topic of designation confusion: just as the line between a DDG and a CG is currently more than a little nebulous, at what point would one designate a missile-armed surface combatant as a BBG? (Ignoring the separate question of "whatever a guided missile battleship is, does it make any sense to build them"?)
A lot of folks in the various fora around the internet seem to think that big guns and enough armor to stop them are the defining features of a battleship, and as such, no modern ship could be called that unless it either had both such features or was built on the converted hull of a ship that once did. They claim a modern extra-large surface combatant, thus, could only be a battlecruiser, or, for those who are a bit more careful about the use of that word, a large cruiser.
CL vs CA was possibly changed to match the first London Treaty definitions, where they have the same weight limit but different gun caliber limits.
Wiki says the current Kirovs are officially heavy cruisers (while the 1930s Kirovs were officially light cruisers, despite their 180mm guns).
@Jade
I would actually be one of those people. The battleship is defined by armor and big guns, and neither of those seem likely to make a comeback. Sure, you can call other kinds of ships that (and the media do all the time), but I don't like resurrecting an old name and hanging it on a new type of ship. Maybe it would make sense if we were to build a type that's definitely new and fights in a way reminiscent of the battleship, but that's unlikely, and I definitely don't see there being any reason to use the term for a bigger version of ships that we have today. I'd use Large Cruiser for the Kirovs, because I also tend to be a purist when using battlecruiser.
@muddywaters
It does look like the US reclassified thanks to the London Treaty. There's not really a consensus about the Kirovs. Battlecruiser seems to be the most common, but it's not universal. As for the 1930s Kirovs, definitions got fuzzy when people built ships between 6" and 8". Those were practically unarmored, even if their guns were closer to 8" than 6", hence CLs.
As for the US building both 8" and 6" cruisers, there's two reasons I can think of for that.
One is different operational roles. The 8" cruisers could be for stuff like hunting down enemy cruisers, carrier escorts, and shore bombardment. While the 6" cruisers could be more oriented towards commerce raiding and killing lighter ships.
The other is bet-hedging. If guns, armor, and ship design had advanced enough since WW1 that it wasn't clear from combat experience whether a 6" or 8" main battery would make for a more effective cruiser, then picking one cruiser type or the other would bear the risk of being caught with a bunch of useless ships in the next war. And especially in the context of 1939-41 when the US was gearing up to make the Baltimores and Clevelands, the US's enormous industrial capacity meant the US Navy had the luxury of just building a bunch of both types of ship.
IIRC (and I really should read Friedman's US Cruisers again), it was mostly bet-hedging. Nothing like a WWII CA or CL was used in WWI. All of the cruisers of that war had guns in single open mounts, and very few mounted guns of around 8" (that weren't obsolescent, at any rate).
FWIW, re the Kirov designation kerfuffle, a guide the CO of Ramage kept in his office listed the Kirovs in the "Large Cruisers (CB)" section alongside the Deutschlands and Alaskas, tagging them as CBGN. Most of the other sources on board just called them CGNs.
None of those were anything like official, just various books various officers had. Wish I could remember which ones, exactly.
@eric
I think you hit on a very good reason for buying both, but in hindsight, I think we can say that the large 6" cruiser was a better idea, especially during most of the treaty period when it was difficult to build a cruiser that was armed and armored against 8" guns. A 10kt cruiser with 6" guns armored against an 8" would be superior to its 8" equivalent in most situations. Yeah, penetration will suffer, but you smother anything with enough 6" shells and you're going to ruin its day, and you could put out a lot of 6" shells.
Maybe, especially if you're looking only at cruisers vs. other cruisers. Cruisers tended to get thrown in against heavier ships as well, though, and 8" may have been more useful than 6" against targets like battleships, battlecruisers, or pocket battleships.
@philistine
up against something I can't penetrate I'd much rather have more shells wrecking them above the waterline. the 8" is only an advantage at ranges where it can penetrate but the 6" can't, and that's a fairly narrow space. And the range of the 6" guns was as far as any hits were actually scored at.
@cassander
I'm broadly with you on the superiority of the 6", but I don't think the superiority of the 8" in penetration was as narrow as you think. The best numbers I have suggest it was often twice as effective, if not more.
I'm reading Lehman's "Oceans Ventured", and early in the book he makes a tangential (to his main purpose, so not substantiated) claim that the CSA navy so effectively commerce raided the US Pacific whaling fleet as to drive it to near extinction, and that it never recovered to it's original size. Does anyone know where to look for more info on the subject?
At least a first level answer to my whaling question at:
I would assume Suvorov knows something about that, but his series hasn't gotten there. I suspect that Lehman is simplifying slightly, as the US merchant marine collapsed for reasons only partially related to commerce-raiding and heavily driven by changing national attitudes and technology.
Re: Ryan's question – to jump ahead a bit and look at where my series is going:
I didn't have solid numbers on the whaling fleet specifically, but Lehman's claim that Confederate raiding reduced it to about half its former size tracks with my sources who say that about half the U.S. merchant fleet as a whole was lost.
HOWEVER, I believe most of this was due to ships switching flags to foreign nations – Confederate commerce raiders only destroyed around 250 vessels (or ~5% of Northern shipping.) It's possible, though, that Northern whalers, who were specifically targeted by the South, suffered disproportionately high losses overall.
On a slightly tangental note, Lehman says that the purpose of the attacks on whaling ships was to hurt the Northern economy, and I think that's perhaps a little simplified: Southern military planners knew that whalers were typically owned in shares by middle-class New Englanders, and it seems to me they were attempting to damage Northern morale (although of course the economic damage is baked in to that attempt.)
Oh, it would probably be helpful if I actually answered the question, although the source you found, Ryan, is more focused on the whaling fleet than anything I have. But regarding the effects of raiding on commerce during the Civil War generally:
I found “CSS Alabama and Confederate Commerce Raiders during the U.S. Civil War,” by Spencer C Tucker to be helpful. It’s part of the book Commerce Raiding: Historical Case Studies, 1755 – 2009, edited by Bruce A. Elleman and S.C.M. Paine.
I also found “Flagging Out in the American Civil War” by Rodney Carlise helpful. You can find it here
Finally, Semme’s book Memoirs of Service Afloat during the War between the States has his own unique perspective that is obviously biased but full of helpful information regardless. You can also find some additional primary source stuff like contemporary letters in the HathiTrust library or Internet Archive, if you really want to get into the weeds – I’m happy to send you my bibliography via bean if you want all the sources I consulted!
You dropped an underscore in your link https://www.cnrs-scrn.org/northernmariner/vol22/tnm22_53-65.pdf
neverminded, formatting eats it - sorry. @bean, could you help us out?
Yeah, that's a common issue with links. Original link is now fixed.
Spam cleanup on aisle 5: Modern-Propulsion-Part-2#bi_ID20210827T112024
Yeah, I noticed a little while ago, but didn't get around to it immediately.
I'm not going to be able to make tomorrow's virtual meetup, unfortunately. Will be airborne at that time. Sorry, all.
I forgot to mention that I'm visiting family this week and won't be able to make it either.
Boy, spammers do love talking about propulsion, apparently
Yeah. Not sure why they're back after being quiet for so long. But they get the usual punishment. IP block plus a block of the site they were trying to link to.
Seems like the mission to find the Titanic was a cover-up!
At least according to one guy.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/13/us/titanic-discovery-classified-nuclear-sub/index.html
Ballard isn't "one guy". He's the person best placed to know. I think this was reasonably common knowledge several years before that article, although I'm not sure how far back that goes. In practical terms, it's not particularly surprising. The DOD said "go do a job for us, and if there's time left over, you can go hunt cruise liners". I think there may have been something that went on with the search for Bismarck.
Fair enough, I misread the denials at the bottom article. I thought they were recent, but it appears they were from the contemporary Times story.
I accept the correction.
Next you'll be telling me that those 'manganese nodules' were reeally just painted rocks.