00:00:00 – Intro
00:01:08 – How did a County (Kent) class survive 5 (FIVE!!!) Kamikaze aircraft hits?
00:03:53 – How did the 8″ guns on the County class ships like Australia compare to the 8″ guns on the American heavy cruisers?
00:09:54 – Different construction materials for difference parts of a wooden warship?
00:15:09 – In WW2, how far could torpedoes turn from their launch angle and how far could they run out before they made this turn?
00:17:38 – Was the US Navy particularly bad for friendly fire incidents?
00:22:22 – Besides Yi and Nelson, what are some other examples you can think of where an Admiral won an engagement posthumously?
00:24:00 – What is your favorite moment of the Battle of Trafalgar?
00:26:40 – Was there anything a better admiral could have done to improve the French and Spanish battle performance at Trafalgar?
00:29:52 – Triple 18″ on the Tillman’s but not the Iowa/Montana’s, why?
00:35:36 – You keep mentioning the time period of the channel. What time period is that and why?
00:45:46 – How would building more Olympia’s change the USN?
00:49:42 – Of all the Naval Warfare films that you have seen, which in your opinion are the most and least accurate?
00:53:00 – Officer behaviour aboard Suvarov in the Battle of Tsushima?
00:56:23 – What warship could be considered a naval “Swordfish”?
01:00:02 – Battle of the River Plate 1956 movie questions?
source
53:39 What was that all about? That’s just Russian warfare lmao
The end there is a movie I have not seen. I know that many (I will use the term "Dump") on the 1976 Midway film, but it will be a guilty pleasure of mine for forever, as it is what got me interested in Naval History as a child (I think I was 6 or 7 when I first saw it). As someone who once worked in the media industry, though never in film, the point is to tell a story and draw people INTO that story. Midway did that for me as a kid, as did Tora Tora Tora. Even Pearl Harbor, with it's GODAWFUL useless love triangle, drew people into the history, even if learning the history was wrong (I think I watched that in the theater much as Drach describes watching 2019 Midway). The thing to remember with cinema is not to be mad at it's flaws, but to be happy to see people take an interest AWAY from in, then learn on their own. Many won't, but some will. History, even flawed, can inspire young moviegoers to be interested and learn, and I think that's a good thing.
On friendly fire, I doubt the US was any worse than anyone else. Friendly fire was simply extremely common in WWII. Identification of friendly forces within the same military was quite hard and communication between units within the same military branch was usually indirect if it existed at all and between branches and even countries things got far worse.
One of my favourite examples are Operations Totalize and Tractable which closed the Falaise Gap.
During Totalize the Caandian troops waiting to attack were bombed by the Amwrican Eighth Air Force who released their payloada early. A week later, to kick of Tractable, many of the same troops were bombed when Bomber Command's crews did the same thing.
Scheveningen is a difficult one.. four syllables.. 'Sche – ve – ning – en'. The first syllable sounds like clearing of the trought.. a S sound followed by a G (like God) scraping sound and a E that sound like a englisch A.. spoken like a Klingon.
Omg Drach 52:35 I love it yes with the deep 6'ing of those responsible for inaccurate movie portrayals I encourage this to the fullest degree thanks for more fantastic material.
Drach a modern but not contingent question how much of an issue is unexploded ordinance in European waters since the end of WW1? how common is it for trawlers to dredge up stuff and maybe be blown up when they do?
Drach, the RAF operated rescue boats during WW2, why wasn't that a royal navy duty? also could we possibly get s special on the small boat channel war and colonial riverine operations in china pre-Mao some time?
54:20 from what I hear the Russian Admiral would have kept right on fighting even though he was wounded, except he ran out of binoculars to throw😂😂😊
You might include Admiral Sir John Benbow in the list of postumous kind-of-victors for the action of August 1702; though admittedly:
* He only chased-off du Casse's squadron as his captains didn't support him, and
* It took him three months to die of his wounds.
Damned inconsiderate to be such a long time dying, eh?
Can we all please agree that Scheveningen is actually just pronounced "Dave"? 😉
Couple of points if I may:
I think Norm Schwarzkopf made a good point in his biography regarding the term 'friendly fire': once the round leaves the barrel, it's not friendly to anyone.
As for the American propensity for fracticide, I simply note from an RAN perspective that there's good evidence that Canberra was torpedoed by USS Bagley while also being shot up by Mikawa at Savo. Furthermore (although it's well outside Drach's remit), Hobart wore three Sparrows from a USAF Phantom on 17 June 1968 while on the Vietnam gunline, losing two KIA and eight WIA… or about a quarter of all RAN Vietnam casualties.
Given the volume of operations the RAN had been doing with the RN over the previous 50 years without hitting / getting hit by them up to that point… much as I would prefer otherwise, I'd say it's pretty hard to argue that the Americans' propensity for fracticide compares well with anyone else's…
I can tell from Drach's tone, he wants to do the Falkland's War one day (c'mon, it is the most interesting modern/semi-modern war) but the politics keep him at bay.
Anthony Quayle and John Gregson looked like they were having a blast during the battle.
Another factor to consider when comparing the Tillman and Montana class 18” gun installations are the design standards being required for the turrets. Look at the 16” and 14” gun installations on the Tennessee and Colorado class and compare that to the modern fast battleships and you get a good idea. You can also see hints of this in the design of the turrets for the Iowa class where BuOrd offered up a light weight 16”50 turret by dropping most of the advances that had gone into the North Carolina’s turret. That of course led to the famous turret debacle with the Iowas.
Re Midway 2019 I thoroughly detest the movie for all of the reasons you mention not to mention levels of flack being thrown up by the Japanese that would make a US task force in 1945 jealous. The errors they make are just so stupidly easy to fix (like not putting a CGI Yamato with Kido Butai) that it makes them even more offensive. It is on balance a more accurate film than Midway 1976 but I can forgive the 76 version many of its error because they represent what was the state of scholarship on the battle at the time. And many of the other errors in the film (like showing an angled deck Essex in place of a Yorktown) can be forgiven because it was the best that could be done at the time. Speaking of utterly horrible Naval movies Pearl Harbor would be near the top of my list.
@Drach I believe your method of covering modern wars and conflicts are great but I wish you could do more of them.
Example interview and ask Mighty Jingles about his service in the Royal Navy.
My brother Wright is looking forward to seeing you at P’cola on Wednesday.
When it comes to modern military YTers, the rule is that if they say anything with any claimed authority they’re either full of it or a spy. Neither are trustworthy. One does not idly breach the official secrets act.
As far as time your covering with your channel. The Captain Sequist . Play it as you do. not my place to say a dam thing. Steady as she goes.
Awesome Alex.
Thanks Drach.
Recommendation. "The Long Voyage Home". Not really a war movie. But John Wayne plays a young Norwegian mariner. Ward Bond is in it, too.
Regarding the torpedo 'turn' question, I'm wondering if the control system for the WW2 weapons will exhibit behaviors similar to other complex engineering control systems. I think the core of the control system is a spinning gyro, connected in such a way as to provide feedback if the torpedo strays from it's course, and thus it is a feedback control system. This suggests that torpedoes could have failure modes similar to those we see in other feedback control systems.
There are all kinds of feedback control systems in engineering. Entire textbooks are written on this topic.
One modern example of a feedback control system is the PLL or 'Phase Locked Loop', found in people's cell phones and network cards and a lot of other electronic devices. I think under some circumstances these can 'lose lock' or even 'lock onto the wrong thing'. Does that imply that the feedback control systems for WW2 torpedoes can have the same problems? Here 'lock' would refer to 'keeping course' or being 'locked onto the correct course'.
Another possibility is that the system might be complex enough to actually exhibit chaotic behavior under some circumstances. I think a 'coupled double physical pendulum' is one of the standard examples of a real physical system that exhibits chaotic or seemingly chaotic behavior. It's clearly a complex system: is the control system for a real torpedo in real circumstances also sufficiently complex to exhibit chaotic behavior?
The fact that torpedoes did sometimes circle 360 degrees and return back towards the launching unit suggests that either chaotic behavior or some sort of control system lock problem is possible.
This raises the question of what inputs can create the circumstances under which these behaviors occur?
In particular, I wonder what happens to a torpedo when subject to force or torque from underwater explosions, or from a ship's wake.
In his naval fiction book 'Scorpion in the Sea', author and former naval officer P.T. Deutermann mentions in several places that underwater explosions can generate enormous forces – even enough to break the legs of everybody standing on the metal decks of a ship if close enough, without actually being close enough to destroy the ship. This suggests that underwater explosions could affect the travel of torpedoes.
If an explosion was in front of a torpedo, I expect that could set off a contact detonator. The more interesting case (from a turn perspective) is what happens when one or more explosions are more to the sides – and don't cause a detonation. In that case I think we could definitely get a torque (at least in the case of two explosions on either side, perhaps one reaching the front of the torpedo first and the other reaching the tail of the torpedo first, causing a rotation) – and I wonder what happens with the control system under those circumstances: could that cause a change of course or even circular behavior?
Another thought is that the impact of a not-too-close but not-too-far underwater explosion on the torpedo breaks or jams some critical component of the control system. In an engineering sense, this is like an 'impulse' hitting the system – but the interesting responses would fall into the non-linear category so all the usual 'linear' analysis would probably be irrelevant. In other words, engineers tend to use enormous amounts of 'engineering margin' to get approximately linear behavior from systems, but these explosions seem like they could be large enough to exceed even an ordinarily acceptable amount of margin, in which case we would be well into the non-linear (and much less predictable) realm.
Systems with pressurized oxygen could exhibit leaks as a result of battle damage, leaks that could generate a torque – could this cause a course change?
All this seems potentially relevant to some of those chaotic battles in the Solomon Islands, where lots of shells were likely exploding underwater (as designed) while lots of torpedoes were also in the water.
Has anybody tried to analyze the behavior of these weapon systems from an engineering 'control systems' perspective? Were any studies conducted along these lines? Can people supply any anecdotes regarding this sort of thing?
It's hard to know whether we can trust conclusions people draw regarding what actually happened during these battles unless we know what is possible. Otherwise it seems like it would be easy to make assumptions – perhaps without even realizing one is making an assumption – that aren't valid. No matter how detailed the analysis of ship movements may be, a bad assumption can completely 'torpedo' any arguments being made based on that analysis.
1:11: 🚢 Survival of County Kent class cruiser after five kamikaze hits explained through strategic hit locations.
6:44: ⚔️ Comparison between American and British gun performance in terms of elevation and armor penetration.
12:41: ⛵ Variation in ship planking materials based on ship type and purpose.
18:41: ⚓ US Navy's limited combat experience prior to significant involvement in major conflict.
25:05: ⚔️ Critical moment in the Battle of Trafalgar where British ships initially struggled but later turned the tide.
31:26: 🚢 Comparison of ship designs show Montana is slimmer due to need for speed, while Iowa has a heavily tapered bow.
37:39: 📺 Analysis of historical and political events leading up to 1950 and the reasons for setting this as a cut-off date.
43:34: ⚓ Discussion on ships that served post-1950 despite originating pre-1950, focusing on their capabilities.
49:09: ⚓ Discussion on naval warfare films and challenges of replacing ships with copies of Olympia in Caribbean battles.
55:20: ⚓ Leadership in times of crisis, responsibility to lead by example, consequences of abandoning your post.
1:01:17: ⚓ Appreciation for the effort put into realistic naval warfare depiction in a 1950s movie.
Timestamps by Tammy AI
People often mispronounce Scheveningen, but I don’t think they normally get it that wrong.
I don’t speak Dutch, but I believe it’s something like scheer-fer-ning-en, but the “sch” is not as the standard English “sh” or German “sch” sound but rather an “s” followed by the “ch” in Scottish loch – if you can’t pronounce this, approximate with “sk”. Stressed on the first syllable.
On pronunciation; "Scheveningen" is pretty hard to put down phonetically for an English speaker, tricky parts being that the S is just a normal S, but then the CH is the same as in Scottish "Loch"; also the NG is one sound, the way it is at the end of a word in English. Word stress is on the 1st syllable. Note: in jokes and anecdotes referring to the WW II Nazi occupation, people are actually required to pronounce this place name in order to establish they're not Germans.
Now for some Russian pronunciation: it's su-VO-rov, rather than SU-varov, and Borodino is pronounced "baradi-NOH", as no dinos were borrowed in the making of these battleships.
39:20 They take that stuff swriously. When i went to India about eight years ago one of the boxes you had to check on the customs form was that you were not bringing into the country any maps that showed borders other than the official Indian ones (ie only showing the full Indian claims in Kashmir).
I think a Cleveland class would have been a better match for Graf Spee, about the same size and use a little set building magic to make the deck level guns look larger and the super firing guns look smaller, but I think all the Clevelands were in the mothball fleet at the time the movie was made. Activating one, even just enough to appear in a movie, would have been cost and time prohibitive.
For the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar, I think one of the most basic things they could have done was something Villeneuve actually considered: putting the fleet into multiple columns. Villeneuve actually suspected that Nelson would employ the tactic that he historically did, and considered using multiple columns rather than a single longer column as a way to defend against Nelson trying to break his line. Just putting the fleet into two columns instead of one would have halved the overall length of his fleet, meaning that more of his ships could have reached the site of Nelson's breaking-of-the-line points more quickly (possibly even faster than the trailing British ships could have arrived). Plus, making his fleet more compact would have made signaling easier, and probably made the fleet less unwieldly at making major course changes like the one that straggled them out prior to the historical battle.
Try asking Ryan about the USS New Jersey being a "sea going fairy swordfish" while you're on board…
A slightly different take as a warship-Swordfish… I'd nominate the Bathurst class. They had no right doing some of the things they did, but nevertheless they did it. Very impressive for cheap utility vessels that could be put together with local resources in Australia.
Question for Q&A: If every museum ship in the US was restored back to operational condition, how many navies in the world could defeat it in pitched battle?
ShKAYveningen