I have a hard time accepting that the Swordfish torpedo bombers were too slow for Bismarck to track. There were other slow torpedo bombers in service at the time Bis was designed, and would German engineers overlook the flying characteristics of the primary RN torpedo bomber?
Also, every gun on Bismarck could accurately track targets moving at much lower speeds than the Swordfish. The same FC directors used against aircraft were also used against enemy ships, moving at speeds from zero to 30+ knots.
See the video I posted in #18 above. It does a really good job of laying it all out.
Apparently there is a design tradeoff for the gun directors and the designers chose to be more accurate against faster planes than slower planes. Made sense since biplanes were mostly a thing of the past. In this case it worked against them.
Also, watching the video above, it turns out hitting planes from a moving ship is not at all easy.
Not to dispute the claim (which I’ve heard before), but…aren’t torpedo planes moving directly toward the target in a straight line (to allow the torpedo’s gyroscopes to stabilize)? If an air target is flying straight at you isn’t the issue of speed greatly simplified in the firing solution?
Hitler had no plans to invade Great Britain before events in 1940 pushed him to temporarily consider Sea Lion. There were no operational plans drawn up for such an endeavor, no construction of landing craft that would be needed for such an invasion, and no record of speeches or private meetings where he mentioned this plan to anyone. From Mein Kampf, public speeches speeches, and comments recorded in private meetings, he clearly intended for the German and British empires to coexist, and expected to force Britain to end the war through air bombardment and submarine blockade. If, as you assert, Hitler planned to invade Great Britain when the ships were being laid down in the late 1930s, or indeed at any time other than the brief period in 1940 when Operation Sea Lion was under consideration, what evidence are you basing it on? There should be planning documents, speeches, or meeting notes discussing this plan, but as far as I know and as far as any history on the topic that I’ve read knows, those simply don’t exist.
So, you are flat out ignoring Hitler Directive No. 16, his meetings with various top brass such as Raeder, von Brauchitsch, and Jeschonnek (representing the 3 services), etc.???
There was a small hope that there would be internal chaos in the UK due to the bombings and other losses. This would lead to political weakness so that even a small invasion could succeed in cooperation with friendlies on the British side.
Once that hope disappeared, time to go after Russia.
Only for the gun position directly opposite the incoming plane. All the other guns along the side of the ship are aiming at the plane at an angle, so they need to aim where they expect the plane to be at the time their shell reaches the plane.
No, I flat out mentioned it’s exact code name; not sure how you go from me specifically referencing something to a conclusion that I’m 'flat out ignoring" it. What I said, quite clearly, is that there was no plan by Hitler to invade Britain BEFORE 1940. If you didn’t read the dates your own link, Hitler Directive Number 16 was issued on the 16th of July in 1940, and (again as shown on your page) grew out of discussions and reports starting from May 21 of 1940. The page you link explicitly states that in 1939 “[A] combined operation having the objective of landing in England must be rejected. It could only be the final act of an already victorious war against Britain as otherwise the preconditions for success of a combined operation would not be met”. That’s pretty much the direct opposite of having a plan before 1940.
A torpedo bomber will not be heading directly at the target, unless the target is immobile. It must aim for a spot in the ships path where, hopefully, ship and torpedo will meet.
It did not seem to me that your statement “There were no operational plans drawn up for such an endeavor, no construction of landing craft that would be needed for such an invasion, and no record of speeches or private meetings where he mentioned this plan to anyone.” applied exclusively to pre-1940.
As to using the name, there are a lot of “code names” used by some that weren’t actually the code name at the time at all. It wasn’t clear if you deemed “Sea Lion” was an actual valid name or one of these later invented ones.
Little hint for the future: Read the entire post, and certainly the entire paragraph, if you’re trying to understand a post. Especially if you quote the entire paragraph. Writing so that every sentence completely contains all of the context of a post requires absurdly ungainly run-on sentences and a silly amount of effort, and is much less clear than normal language. No one actually does that.
the extent to which the Swordfish’s rate of speed made it hard to shoot is largely mythical. it is one that’s been repeated in sources that should have known better, to be fair.
What is perhaps for relevant is simply that in WWII, it was damn hard to shoot a plane down with an AA gun, and harder still with an AA gun on a ship, whkich add the ship’s movements to your problems. Striking a moving target in the air with ballistic projectiles is just an inherently difficult thing to do, and even again a biplane the time you have to do it is limited. Guns need to traverse, aim, adjust, etc. to take a truly aimed shot and with the technology of 1941 your aim isn’t going to be perfectly true anyway.
World War II warships that survived for awhile were constantly being upgraded and refitted, and if you read the history of a well experienced ship, the most common upgrade was more AA guns. They were constantly upgrading the AA capabilities and never had enough. Bismarck was a huge, heavily armed ship, and had 44 AA guns of three calibres, which was a lot for a ship at that time. By the end of the war that would have been considered wildly irresponsible. Iowa-class battleships had well over 120 AA guns; the gigantic Yamato had almost 200, and could fire AA shells from its primary battery, too. The USA had some ships, the Atlanta-Oakland class cruiser, which were pretty much nothing BUT AA guns.
They weren’t loading up on AA guns because the guns were accurate. They were loading up on them because they weren’t accurate, and the best defense (well, after effective fighter cover) was throwing as much lead into the air as possible.
At least one US Admiral, Forrest Sherman, told his BB captains that he did not care about their surface gunnery skills, but the crews must always be sharp on AAA.
In the Pacific, BB were Air Defence platforms, gunfire support vessels and not much else.
It is not mythical. It is not the only reason but it is part of the reason. See the video in post #18. The video does a good job and even has sources for its information. Apparently when building the gun directors for the AAA the designers had to choose to be more accurate for fast planes or more accurate for slow planes. I have no idea why there was a tradeoff but it was there. They chose to calibrate it for fast planes.
They were more than that. They were devastating mobile artillery platforms. During Desert Storm I the Iraqis learned that when a drone appeared overhead it was a spotter for the battleship guns. There is video of Iraqis surrendering to the drone rather than deal with the BB guns. I forget if it was the Korean or Vietnam war but one of the things that got the other side to the negotiating table was putting BBs in their coastal waters. When they showed up the other side agreed to peace talks as long as they were removed.
Further BBs had extensive machine shops aboard so they could produce parts needed on site as needed. A good thing in war as a lot of things break and they didn’t have Amazon Prime back then. They also had the best/biggest floating hospitals around short of a dedicated hospital ship. Nice to have a hospital nearby when storming a beach (a dedicated hospital ship is too squishy to risk close to the battle but the BB can comfortably stay close in).
The fire control computers (mechanical computers) used for AA and surface fire were not the same. Moreover various WWII navies’ AA director/computers worked pretty differently. The linked video is pointing to a specific and quite solid source, the renowned naval ship/weapon/electronics author Milton Friedman in his book “Naval Anti-Aircraft Guns and Gunnery” pg. 163 discussing German AA fire control in particular. The German directors determined target speed with a physical plot of range v time. If the plot was calibrated for a high speed, the points for a low speed would be too close together and error would increase. If calibrated for a low speed the plot would be too big to fit at high target speed. That’s the general idea, but also as the video refers to indirectly the exact working of those directors wasn’t available in Friedman’s sources. And again other types of AA directors described in that book (and for which lots of original material exists on the web, for example the simple lead calculating directors on USN light AA guns later in the war) wouldn’t have their accuracy negatively affected by low target speed per se. Friedman says the claim that slow Swordfish speed made it less vulnerable may have been true, but again speaking of the heavy (10.5cm) directors. The 2cm and 3.7cm guns were aimed by eye and in that case the slower the target the better, basically.
Also to note, the author of that generally good video is only surmising that light AA shells’ contact fuzes might not go off on hitting a fabric plane. He doesn’t give a source for that, and IMO that’s a lot more doubtful. In general WWII shipboard AA guns were conceived in the 30’s when most planes still had fabric skin so designers were very well aware that contact fuzes had to be extremely sensitive. It’s possible German fuzes were somehow an exception, but in case of the US 1.1" AA gun’s ammo it was the opposite problem, fuzes so sensitive to deal with fabric planes (no longer actually as common by the time the war came) they would sometimes go off immediately on arming when fired in rain.
But to summarize, lots and lots of planes attacked ships in WWII with little or no loss to AA. Or sometimes with loss, though heavy losses among a/c attacking ships were not common till much higher quality/quantity of AAA on ships (including proximity fuzes and light AA gyro sights in Allied case) later in the war. But there was nothing remarkable about a particular attack which suffered no outright losses, especially also with several a/c hit but not lost. The relatively more remarkable result was obtaining a hit. Plenty of British torpedo attacks by various a/c (Swordfish and Albacore from carriers or shore, various larger a/c from shore) didn’t obtain any hits, though others also famously did (the ones which didn’t are naturally less famous). In the big picture it was a credit to the British airmen in that attack that a key hit was obtained, but also can reasonably be called lucky.
I forget where I saw/read it (perhaps that video) where the claim was made that the heavy AA was far, far more lethal and that the 2 and 3.7cm guns which seemed close to worthless.
Fuzzy memory though…will see if I can find a source.
As a rule for early/mid WWII across various combatants it was closer to the other way around, especially against dive and torpedo bombers which posed the real threat to ships. Only heavy AA could reach relatively high altitude level bombing attackers but those seldom scored any hits on maneuvering ships. Against dive and torpedo attackers, especially the former, the bulk of kills were by light AA and that was often as ‘revenge weapons’, hitting the attacker after it had launched the bomb or torpedo.
Both heavy and light AA though might discourage attackers or throw off their aim, which was certainly better than not doing so. And attrition of the enemy’s attack force might in some cases be achieved for example by friendly fighters so arguably it wasn’t critical if AA downed attackers, just that it prevent hits. Although this reasoning went out the window obviously with large scale aerial suicide attack from late 1944 in the Pacific, then AA really needed to down attackers to be of much use.
The balance of effectiveness between light and heavy AA changed somewhat with radar proximity fuzes which USN 5" AA guns began using in early 1943, the British from later, but Axis warships never had those. Also it wasn’t necessarily the same across all navies, and depended on the volume of light and heavy fire. Surviving German heavy ships were loaded to the gills with 2cm, fully auto 3.7cm, (and also the Bofors 40mm was used by the Germans) by the time they operated without loss in the presence of swarms of Soviet a/c in the Baltic in 1945. Bismarck’s light AA outfit was very limited by comparison, but it was generally harder to add more heavy AA guns to ships.
I found where I got my idea. It was the same video channel but it was a video on flak towers used to shoot down bombers heading to cities. A very different thing.