I remember reading in the “Navy Times” in the 1980s when the “New Jersey” was recommissioned
that a number of former crewmen came out of retirement to serve on the ship again. I don’t know how many but that makes me think it was one of the better types of ships to be on.
16 inch.
According to Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute, the main belt of the Bismark appeared to have not been penetrated by shellfire.
HMS Rodney sported 16 inch guns, and I would presume the Rodney had scored some hits on the belt. (They ultimately closed to within 2700 meters to hammer at the hulk. Pardon my French, but that’s fucking close.)
Yamato’s 18 inchers never hit an armored target.
Battleship turrets (and I think all turrets) are just sitting on rollers, held in place by their own gravity. When the Bismark capsized, those turrets “fell” off underwater, and sank on their own seperate way to the bottom. However, a direct hit on the turret, if it doesn’t penetrate, by a heavy enough shell can dislodge or jam the turret enough so that it cannot be rotated to aim and fire. Also, turrets need power to turn and elevate the guns. This can be either electrical or hydraulic. Knock out the hydraulics/power supplied to the heavy turrets, and they can’t be used. (Smaller guns, like five or six inchers out in “open” mounts, could be manually turned by the gun crew. Anything 8 inch or bigger is too heavy to move without some form of mechanical assistance. Ditto their shells.)
However, even though battleships are armored, it’s no guarantee that they will escape damage.
Battle of Jutland, HMS Lion:
Even if not cleanly penetrated (and I don’t know what the thickest plate documented to have been cleanly penetrated is), armor plates can be hammered out of position, especially if the supporting frame struture they depend on is stressed.
This site has ROV images taken of Bismarck. It shows the main belt and two of the barbettes were penetrated, but there are many more shell marks on the armour where they did’t get through. Unfortunately that site won’t let me post links to individual pages, you need to select “hull damage” and “upper deck & barbettes” from the bottom of the page if you want to see them.
As Dissonance posted above, Jean Bart is the best candidate for “shrugged off the biggest shell hit”. Although some other 16" gunned ships such as Rodney scored hits, the 16" shells fired by the North Carolina, South Dakota and Iowa class ships were about 350KG heavier than those fired by the Colorados, Nagatos and Nelsons.
I served aboard the USS Missouri during the first half of RIMPAC exercises in 1988 as a midshipman, and then transferred to the USS Long Beach for the second half. RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific) is a war games exercise for US allies in the Pacific. In 1988, the exercise involved the Australian, Canadian and Japanese navies, as well as the Nimitz carrier battle group and the Missouri battleship battle group. (and one, rusty Soviet trawler that tried its best to shadow us everywhere we went)
While I cannot address all of your questions, I will address the ones I can:
Guns. You can hear the “lowly” 5"/54 guns fire while you’re in the engine room. Those were the “little” guns that the Mo mounted in twin turrets. The Long Beach also also mounted a pair of 5"/54s amidships. On the much lighter cruiser, firing of the 5" guns shook the ship.
On the big BB, not so much. You could definately tell the ship was conducting gunnery, but in the engineering spaces, it wasn’t anything special. Although depending on which turret was being fired, we did get smoke in the engineering spaces.
Unfortunately, I was on board the Long Beach, following the Missouri at ~1 mile trail, during the 16" gunnery exercise. Ball of fire. Cloud of smoke. Deep, loud thump that you could feel in your chest.
I did get to conduct gunnery exercises on the Long Beach’s 5"/54s. The fire control computers were the original computers developed in WW2. They were manual/electro-mechanical computers, about the size and shape of an island you might find in a modern kitchen. Two of them in the fire control room…one for each gun turret. On all four sides of this computer were hand cranks that the various gunners mates would crank in order to input their particular data contribution to the fire control solution. They could track an airborne target moving at up to ~300MPH and deliver anti-aircraft fire, but anything faster than that and you couldn’t turn the cranks fast enough. Each gun turret also had a seat that a Marine would sit in and visually aim each gun. He sat right on top of the gun during firing. He used a sound-powered phone to talk to fire control. I assume his instructions were one of the inputs being frantically cranked into the fire control computer. Each turret also had a crude COSRO Radar system that was right out of WW2. The scope for this radar was also in the fire control room and a radar operator would pass info on to a GM who would crank away. Yes…all of this was on a nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser that was a primary defense to Soviet aggression during the Regan era.
I wasn’t onboard for any of the 16" gunnery on the Mo, but one might assume that there was a similar process, since both weapons systems were developed around the same time.
Life aboard the CGN and BB were similar. However, in heavy seas, the BB was a sweet ride. She was (and remains) a fantastic missile platform. Rock steady. This was necessary because of the big guns. Imagine the inaccuracy that would be induced on a 25 mile cannon shot if the ship were to roll a couple degrees. The cruiser, on the other hand, you would literally have to walk on the walls during heavy seas. She was 700 feet long and not much wider than a double-wide trailer. She would roll in a light wind.
In the end, the BB remains the most beautiful warship ever to put to sea, but she was doomed before the first shot was ever fired in WW2. However, like a beautiful woman, her stunning beauty kept her in the hearts and minds of sailors long after her designed purpose had passed into obsolesence.
She was fitted with 8 Tomahawk boxes and Harpoon tubes and paraded around the world as a modern fighting ship, but everyone knew even a tiny Spruance Class destroyer packed a harder punch. If the Navy were to keep her around, the solution would be to strip her decks clean and make her a giant vertical launch missile platform. But that would have stripped away her beautiful profile on a distant horizon. It wasn’t worth it…and she was withdrawn with her dignity intact.
Thanks for the correction! I guess I trust wikipedia too much.
Here’s a detailed account of the effect of a 14" shell from the Kirishima on the South Dakota. One of many cool articles onthis site.
Small ships had spartan conditions but the discipline was more relaxed and for that reason some sailors preferred them. US destroyers were positively luxurious in their standards of living accommodation, compared to British ones, and serious consideration was given to stripping out from Lend-Lease vessels such features as ice-cream machines or ice-water fountains lest it should make sailors ‘soft’. All warships tended to become overcrowded with a wartime complement on board and they became worse as the war went on and ships took on more AA armament and more radar and more people to work them.
As to why there were so many men aboard: redundancy. A warship expects to have casualties. Maybe a lot of them. But it must still be able to function so the navy made sure to put a lot of extra guys on board to increase fighting ability in the face of combat losses. It’s good to have a replacement or two for every job on the ship. Even the first officer is there to replace the captain if he’s out of action.
Even if no one dies, there’s extra men for damage control which allows the gun crews to keep working while fires or hull breaches are being brought under control. It’s nice to have a larger workforce even outside of combat. A lot of jobs require many work hours and everyone prefers to have those work hours spread out over a larger number of hands.
It was the basis for a movie starring Ricky Schroeder. Graham was indeed the youngest.
I’ve always enjoyed pictures like this one of the main guns firing. That’s an awesome amount of firepower.
Good point about the redundancy, particularly on exposed positions like the AA guns. There was a Japanese film made a few years ago about the last voyage of the Yamato. It was pretty interesting; dunno how historically accurate it was but it did end with the Yamato capsizing and suffering a magazine hit, creating a terrific explosion. Against even just fighter planes, the guys manning the AA guns were bullet magnets it seems.
I’m curious about crew accounts of ships suffering hits- my only reference is sci fi cheesiness with spaceship battles (you know, terminals exploding into sparks, everybody wobbling back and forth, that kind of fiction). How awful was it to be in a battleship that just got socked by a 16" shell? What does it sound like when a one ton slug of metal slams into a multiple ton sheet of metal armor plate? The noise must be hellacious. I’d be afraid to lean against anything!
Its also kind of ironic that even though Battleships were theoretically capable of hitting each other at ranges of 22 miles, most engagements were at short/point-blank ranges. Heck, the last BB vs BB engagement in history was basically a knife-fight in a phone booth type exchange. Ultimately it seems that there was no way to reliably protect them against torpedoes and bombs.
I know Battleships soldiered on long past their usefulness, but its still fun to think about the sheer scale of these ships- "Lets build a ship with guns big enough in diameter for men to slide down! Armor two feet thick! Shells as heavy as cars!
Its rather sobering to think that if you combined all the bus drivers at my job together, we would not be HALF the compliment a Battleship crew carried. And for the life of me, I don’t know 60% of my coworkers :eek: . I guess aircraft carriers were the same deal, since you had aircrews, plus all the multitude of personell maintaining, moving, fueling, arming, and fixing the airplanes.
I cannot answer specific questions as I have served only on a destroyer (2 weeks)(DD 535-USS Miller) for 2 weeks (Boston to San Juan r/t) and a light cruiser (CLG 7-USS Springfield) (600 feet, 16,000 tons) for 22 months (homeported on the French Riviera), but I used to live in Wilmington, NC, home of the USS North Carolina Battleship which was towed to Wilmington 50 years ago this Sunday. Big commemoration planned this w/e. Some of its history is at http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/butowsky1/northcarolina.htm
the AA batteries on the yamato were as effective as one can expect. they shot down more than a dozen planes. also, radio transmissions from the ship were so powersul that squadron leaders couldn’t coordinate with their pilots except through hand signals.
an approaching shell from the rodney sounded like a freight train approaching. and the shock of a direct hit was felt throughout the bismark.
the longest engagement won and lost was in WW@ between hms warspite (a WW1 BB and a veteran of jutland) and the guglio caesar. the warspite hit the stern of the italian BB at a distance of 26,000 yards, starting fires that reached part of the engine room.
the warspite co-holds the record for the longest ship-to-ship hit (along with the german BB sharnhorst.) beside these, no BB-BB fight was won and lost beyond 20,000 meters. even with radars, the BBs would eventually close to 10,000 meters and invariably switch to visual sighting. if the central fire control system was damaged, it’s every gun shooting independently.
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I know Battleships soldiered on long past their usefulness, but its still fun to think about the sheer scale of these ships- "Lets build a ship with guns big enough in diameter for men to slide down! Armor two feet thick! Shells as heavy as cars!
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for surface ships, in the past 40 years, the US navy has had some destroyer actions (against iran in the 70s) but for the most part they preferred to use iowa-class ships when coming within 20 miles of a hostile shore.
Here’s more on the history of the “Showboat” *USS North Carolina *and the 50th anniversary of her being towed to her present home in Wilmington NC (today, 10/2/11). She hit a floating restaurant, The Ark, while being tugboated into her berth.
If you find this subject of interest I highly recommend these books authored by James Hornfischer:
Neptune’s Inferno
Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors
Check it out: