New Fast-Attack Nuclear Submarines to be Named Arizona and Oklahoma

[HalcyonDaze]

This is the same mentality that explains how the Navy's Mark V deep sea rig and it's pathetic attempt to replace it with a fiberglass version of the same technology, the Mark 12, survived 25 years longer than it should have.

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It was so painfully obvious that a form-fitting hat or mask with demand and freeflow capability that moved with the diver's head was superior to the 1830s bucket with with windows approach. I just couldn't comprehend how the great majority of the Navy diving community wouldn't even discuss the modern solutions even when navy saturation divers were using it and hot water suits. They were still using the 109Lb Helium Hat in the early 1980s!

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The amount of effort and money wasted on trying to make the Mark 12 work was finally recognized when one of the few Master Divers in the navy that "got it" showed an admiral the obvious limitations over a Kirby Morgan Superlite. That is one of many experiences that convinced me that government agencies should never design anything due to the inherent politics.

IMO, the agency that needs the product should develop performance specs and put it out for competitive bid to private industry for a solution. It doesn't eliminate intrenched bias but it makes it much harder for the evaluation committee to close their eyes to designs that outperform the "old way" of doing things. It is well-know that the Navy cultural bias to the past still exists far more than in the Air Force.

I would probably have to go digging through some of my old correspondence when I had a friend working as a marine mammal trainer at Kitsap, but I recall sending her an article on how even today USN divers are issued gear that is behind the curve of the open civilian market. Wasn't just a Navy problem either - back in the mid-late 1990s at least you could find better boots and packs on the market than what the Army and Marines issued, and some of the Air Force guys were rigging up civilian Garmin units to their planes before procurement got around to outfitting them with GPS.

In that same batch of correspondence was also an article about decades-old studies to use a hot-water suit heater powered by radioactive decay, which I'm sure thrilled the testers.

Not to delve into what may work today but if anyone wants to see a well designed battleship visit one of the Iowa class ships on display, the Iowa is in the Los Angles harbor (San Pedro) and well worth the visit.

The Iowas were an interesting design; they basically grew out of when Japan and Italy pulled out of the interwar naval treaties and the remaining signatories were allowed to up the maximum displacement on their battleships from 35,000 tons to 45,000. The USN had just finalized the 35,000-ton South Dakota-class, arguably one of the best-balanced "treaty battleships," and asked what they could get with another 10,000 tons. One branch looked at upping the armor and firepower while the other looked at Japan's modernized 30+ knot Kongo-class battlecruisers and went for something to run them down and escort carriers. Getting an extra six knots of speed wound up just about taking all of that 10,000 tons; the Iowas were no better armored than the South Dakotas and were only better armed in the sense they had slightly longer 16-inch guns (that was a whole other fun mess of bureaucratic miscommunication between the Bureau of Ordnance and the Bureau of Construction and Repair; the ships were intended to reuse existing Mark 2 16-inch/50-cal guns from canceled 1920s battleships and battlecruisers but newer, lighter Mark 7 guns had to be designed and built from scratch). Because the US needed fast carrier escorts, they got priority over the "armor and firepower" branch that evolved into the never-built Montana-class design after the treaty limits went completely out the window in 1939.

The Iowas did have their flaws; the thin bow section that gave them an optimum length-to-beam ratio for high speed without adding too much displacement had a habit of burying itself in rough seas and the 12.1-inch inclined internal armor belt would have been marginal against peer-level ships at practical combat ranges (by comparison, the Montana-class would have upped the belt armor to 16.1 inches). That speed however gave them their long careers; after WWII the Essex- and Midway-class carriers were decidedly the heart of the fleet and any major combatant slower than them was a liability. The relatively young North Carolina and South Dakota hulls with their 27-28 knot top speeds were all relegated to museum status or scrapped by the early 1960s. After the 1980s "600-ship Navy" sugar rush that gave the Iowas their second career (or third, in the case of USS New Jersey) was over it was realized how freaking expensive it was to run and crew 45-year old ships with no sources of new replacement parts or ammunition.

What it is your opinion on Admiral King?

I dive more into the naval architecture and tactics/strategy/logistics side of history; from what I've picked up King was not a pleasant person to work for or with by any means. FDR remarked that he shaved with a blowtorch every morning and King's daughter famously said "He is the most even-tempered person in the Navy. He is always in a rage." He rather famously did not get along with his British counterparts and it was hard for him to admit they might have some good ideas; he didn't get along with the US Army either. There is some dispute over whether those grudges cost lives and materiel in the U-boat campaign, although there were other factors (shortages of escort ships and the Army's initial refusal to make B-24 heavy bombers available for ASW patrols) and losses of materiel even at the worst point of 1942 were relatively low compared to the overall amount being transported by the US Merchant Marine.

With that said, when the reports about the Mark 14's teething problems got to his desk he twisted arms at BuOrd to make them fix their mistakes. While his peers in the Atlantic/European theater didn't care for him and neither did General MacArthur, the Pacific theater was really where the USN had to shoulder the bulk of the load. That was the war he'd spent his career planning for and he fought hard to get resources for it, even though he agreed with the overall "Germany First" strategy. King was the main advocate for the Guadalcanal campaign; at that point in 1942 the plan was to play defense in the Pacific while the priority was Operation Torch in North Africa. King persuaded FDR and the Joint Chiefs to authorize the invasion of Guadalcanal and that campaign dug a hole the IJN never climbed out of.

Short form, he went into the war with a deck of cards stacked in his favor and won. That's not the worst commander to have for a war by a long shot; King's squabbling with allies and service rivals looks like a campfire rendition of "Kumbaya" next to Axis infighting.

 

[Akimbo]

I would probably have to go digging through some of my old correspondence when I had a friend working as a marine mammal trainer at Kitsap, but I recall sending her an article on how even today USN divers are issued gear that is behind the curve of the open civilian market. Wasn't just a Navy problem either - back in the mid-late 1990s at least you could find better boots and packs on the market than what the Army and Marines issued, and some of the Air Force guys were rigging up civilian Garmin units to their planes before procurement got around to outfitting them with GPS.

There is another big factor at play — momentum in the form of training, manuals, and spares. That is different than the mentality that had admirals thinking of battleships when they should have been thinking of submarines and aircraft carriers.

The extreme case of being stuck in the past with Mark V deep sea gear was at a much lower level, enlisted through the Lieutenant-Commander level (O4). There were a lot of mustangs in Navy diving, people that came up through the enlisted ranks. Chiefs and low level officers rarely get advancements after divers died on their watch. Another important factor, IMO, is that very few navy divers were comfortable in Scuba and lightweight (but primitive) gear like the Jack Browne freeflow mask. This is the mask that Mike Nelson put on at Sea World at the beginning of every Sea Hunt episode.

According to Bob Kirby (the Kirby in Kirby-Morgan), Master Chief and Master Diver George Powell is the person who convinced the admiral to kill the Mark 12 boondoggle and switch to the Superlite hat. See: Hard Hat Divers Wear Dresses

George called the Jack Browne mask "black death". He was one of the first divers to make an open sea saturation dive out of Mark I Deep Dive System and was on the Mark II DDS when I came aboard. He was also the dive super on our Andrea Doria saturation dives. @Duke Dive Medicine has a few sea stories about George.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

Since we were talking about battleship design earlier, I figured I'd post this bit of 1910s hilarity:

 

[Jared0425]

Tillman was more realistic than the German H-39 and the Japanese "Super" Yamato. I have a 1:350 Montana class I'm going to build in the spring.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

Tillman was more realistic than the German H-39 and the Japanese "Super" Yamato. I have a 1:350 Montana class I'm going to build in the spring.

H-39 and the A-150 "Super Yamato" seem to have been relatively reasonable designs, assuming the Germans and Japanese actually had the industrial capacity to spare (which they didn't). H-39 was basically to be a somewhat upsized Bismarck of about 52-53,000 tons standard displacement with 16-inch guns in place of the 15-inch guns; the Germans actually did lay the keels on the first two before cancelling them in 1939 and some of the 16-inch guns wound up as coastal batteries in France. After 1940 Hitler ordered a series of new designs; H-41 was somewhat plausible (about the displacement of a Montana-class with eight 16.8 inch guns) but H-42, H-43, and H-44 were 90-130,000 ton pipe dreams. A-150 was basically to be a similar hull as Yamato, but with heavier armor and six 20-inch guns instead of nine 18-inch guns; however the Japanese unhelpfully burned much of the documentation for the Yamatos and A-150s in August 1945.

The author of that video made the comment that of the Tillman designs, Tillman #2 was probably the most absurd; at that time the USN and other countries were still trying to get three-gun turrets to work reliably and 25 years later the British and French would struggle with four-gun turrets. The Dunkerque and Richelieu classes seem to have avoided the jams and mechanical issues that plagued the King George V class (probably because they had done more extensive design work on cancelled WWI designs and the turrets were actually subdivided in half), but the French didn't fix the shell dispersion issues on the Richelieus until after WWII. Six 16-in/50 cal guns (bearing in mind the Mark 2 guns the USN had at the time were actually about eight tons heavier than the Mark 7 guns that went into the Iowas) in one turret would have been an insane bodge. Then there's also the issue of the proposed heavy armor on Tillman #1 and Tillman #4; casting armor plates that thick is problematic and the US in particular had issues because they were testing plates against their own super-hardened AP shells (more detailed explanation below).


Probably the scariest proposed ships axed by the Washington Naval Treaty were the British G3 battlecruisers and N3 battleships, which adopted the US "all or nothing" armor scheme (thickest possible armor on the vitals and light splinter protection on everything else) and a rather funky turret layout of two turrets up front and one amidships. The G3s would have basically had comparable speed and firepower to the Iowa-class with another 2 inches of belt armor, while the N3 would have packed nine 18-inch guns and comparable belt armor to Yamato, just on a slower hull and something like 20,000 tons less displacement. When the British had to cancel those they put the 16-inch guns from the G3s on the downsized Nelson-class battleships, and on HMS Rodney almost 20 years later they tore apart the Bismarck.

 

[Akimbo]

Then there's also the issue of the proposed heavy armor on Tillman #1 and Tillman #4; casting armor plates that thick is problematic and the US in particular had issues because they were testing plates against their own super-hardened AP shells (more detailed explanation below).

The seesaw development of artillery/munitions and armor is well documented in William Manchester's The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty That Armed Germany at War

It can be debated if advancements were intentionally held back by Krupp until sales of an existing technology saturated the market or it was just the natural evolution of R&D. Why develop a shell for armor that doesn't exist yet? Why develop better armor if no shell can penetrate what exists?

 

[Jared0425]

Realistically, the only "super battleships" that I always thought as plausible was the Montana class. I read in a book (I believe the title was called either battleships or the battleship book), that Tillman just threw out designs to avoid being cut from the post war staff and to push the Washington Naval Treaty (which I thought originally was a British proposal). I will watch the Tillman video tonight.

I was mistaken on H-39. I did read in a forum that her construction was supposed to be in queue after Tirpitz, but Graf Zepplin was worked on sporadically instead. It was the H-40s you mentioned that were a complete fantasy.

A-130 was also unlikely as the Yamato and Musashi had propulsion problems and issues with the super thick "turtled" armour. I did read in Januz Skulski's book that both classes suffered structural deficiencies in the bow and throughout the superstructure due to lack of expansion joints. In the heat of the tropics the steel would expand cutting into the electrical and steering components. I believe that the A-150 would have suffered worse, and was impractical in battle.

I'm not too fluent on the Dunkerque, Richeliue, and Littorio Class (the most beautiful in my opinion). So my knowledge is lacking there.

I dont consider HMS Vanguard as a "super battleship" nor the ill-fated Lion class as I think they mimic the Iowa class. The G3 design is quite formidable if she was ever deployed. However I think most naval historians consider the Battlecruiser a failure and a stain on Jackie Fisher's naval strategy and vision.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

Realistically, the only "super battleships" that I always thought as plausible was the Montana class. I read in a book (I believe the title was called either battleships or the battleship book), that Tillman just threw out designs to avoid being cut from the post war staff and to push the Washington Naval Treaty (which I thought originally was a British proposal). I will watch the Tillman video tonight.

I was mistaken on H-39. I did read in a forum that her construction was supposed to be in queue after Tirpitz, but Graf Zepplin was worked on sporadically instead. It was the H-40s you mentioned that were a complete fantasy.

A-130 was also unlikely as the Yamato and Musashi had propulsion problems and issues with the super thick "turtled" armour. I did read in Januz Skulski's book that both classes suffered structural deficiencies in the bow and throughout the superstructure due to lack of expansion joints. In the heat of the tropics the steel would expand cutting into the electrical and steering components. I believe that the A-150 would have suffered worse, and was impractical in battle.

I'm not too fluent on the Dunkerque, Richeliue, and Littorio Class (the most beautiful in my opinion). So my knowledge is lacking there.

I dont consider HMS Vanguard as a "super battleship" nor the ill-fated Lion class as I think they mimic the Iowa class. The G3 design is quite formidable if she was ever deployed. However I think most naval historians consider the Battlecruiser a failure and a stain on Jackie Fisher's naval strategy and vision.

As the video explains, Senator "Pitchfork" Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina was actually a thorn in the side of the USN; he wanted to cut the naval budget and he was getting annoyed with the seemingly obvious reality that every new battleship proposal was bigger and more expensive than the last one. He essentially sarcastically asked the USN to stop incrementally upping their designs and just show him the biggest one they were going to ask for. The USN of course had to play along because Tillman was on the Navy appropriations committee, but they never seriously entertained the idea of building one. Tillman did get a bit more enthusiastic when war with Germany was in the offering, but he died in 1918 which finally got him out of the Navy's hair (and a number of other folks who were not sorry to see him shuffle off the mortal coil).

As far as the battlecruiser, they really were an artifact of the early 1900s before small-tube boilers and more efficient designs meant that you could create balanced ships with good armor and firepower that could still hit the high 20s or low 30s of knots. At the time the first of the breed were designed, Fisher's original intent was that they would be deployed to hunt down and destroy enemy armored and protected cruisers; the Battle of the Falklands in 1914 was a textbook example. Unfortunately, mission creep was a thing back then as well; once you had swept the seas of enemy surface raiders (as the British did in relatively short order) you then had to find some other use for the battlecruisers. The obvious next job was using them to destroy the enemy fleet's scouting forces as at the First Battle of Heligoland Bight; however in large fleet actions the Germans were using their own battlecruisers as fleet scouts. That was a fight the older British battlecruisers were not built for and coupled with a lot of boneheaded decisions by Beatty (including stacking ready-use ammo in the turrets and removing flash protection doors to compensate for poor gunnery with increased volume of fire) the bill came due at Jutland.

While Fisher was still trying to push overgunned tin cans like the Courageous-class, at the time the trend was merging the battlecruiser and fast battleship. HMS Hood was arguably a fast battleship, although her belt armor scheme had definite flaws (one wonders how she would have fared if she had been fully modernized in the 1930s in place of Renown or one of the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships). If one looks at the designs that were thrown out by the Washington Naval Treaty, while the Lexington-class were overgunned and overengined tin cans the Amagi and G3 classes were not much less heavily armored than their Tosa and N3 battleship counterparts (granted, the Tosas weren't particularly well armored by contemporary battleship standards). After that, it's arguable that the only subsequent battlecruisers were the French Dunkerque and Strasbourg, which were built to chase and kill Italian heavy cruisers and the German "pocket battleships" rather than engage full-on battleships. The German Scharnhorst-class had battleship-grade armor and the plan was to upgrade them to 15-inch guns, while the American Alaska-class was more of a supersized heavy cruiser.

 

[cipherbreak]

How is this "non-diving related stuff"? Dive Dive *whee* *whee* Dive Dive.

 

[Jared0425]

HMS Hood was arguably a fast battleship, although her belt armor scheme had definite flaws (one wonders how she would have fared if she had been fully modernized in the 1930s in place of Renown or one of the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships).

I suspect Hood was quite the match for the QE and Renown class battleships. Unfortunately her encounter with Bismarck and Prince Eugen will forever blacken her extraordinary capabilities.

On paper Hood stood more than a match against Bismarck, and was superior to PE. Her sinking was a fluke to a multitude of factors of angle, light, ammo storage, and one truly lucky shot. If Hood and POW closed in at the optimal range, I truly believe the Bismarck would be at the bottom of the Denmark Strait and not Hood. Prince of Wales should have been the game ender, but since she was in a shakedown cruise with a green crew, it had the opposite result.

The British seems to be hard learners even after Jutland. HMS Barham should have never lit up like that either. I recall the Austro-Hungarian battleship sunk by Italian torpedo boats simply rolled over without a catastrophic explosion.

Considering the Japanese mirrored British practices, I wonder if Musashi, Yamato, and the Mutsu met the same fate because of their ammo magazines. I think the only massive magazine failure on a US BB was the Arizona being hit by something she wasn't designed to take.