Gen 5

Development of Gen5 fighters technically began in the late 1980s, but the end of the Cold War meant large delays in development. As a result, the first Gen5 fighter did not enter service until 2005. As with every previous generation, these aircraft are larger, more expensive, and more capable than their predecessors.

There are also far fewer of them. Despite being in development since the 90s, only 3 true Gen5 fighters have been put into service, the F-22, F-35 and J-20. The sheer cost of development deterred a lot of countries from attempting the effort once the Cold War ended. Once countries began to need replacement aircraft, the sheer size of the F-35 program further discouraged competition. Developing the F-35 was a hugely expensive effort, but once developed, unit costs fell rapidly, and the fly away price of an F-35 is comparable with in production Gen4 fighters.

Stealth

Gen4 fighters took advantage of the growing power of radars to achieve far greater capabilities than their predecessors, but those improvements equally enhanced the power of the fighter’s great foe, the surface-to-air missile. These too could be actively guided, and since they didn’t need to fit on an aircraft, they could be far larger. The S-300 missile system developed by the Soviets in the late 70s could theoretically detect and fire on targets hundreds of miles away, and later versions of the system only grew more powerful. The traditional approach to defeating air defenses, flying higher and faster, was clearly not viable in the face of threats like this. Survival for 5th generation fighters required a new approach.

Lockheed Have Blue, the first stealth aircraft. Both flyable versions crashed

The first inklings of the new possibilities came from an ironic source, a Soviet mathematician named Petr Ufimtsev who published some mathematical models for radar deflection. He showed that while large objects reflect more energy than small ones, not all that energy goes in the same direction and the shape of an object determines what direction the energy will go. Because radars depend on energy reflecting back in their direction, how visible an object is on radar depends on its shape as well as its size. A large object that reflects most incoming energy away from the source will be less visible than a small one that does not. How visible an object is measured by its Radar Cross Section (RCS), measured in meters squared. An object with an RCS of 1 has the same return as a perfectly conducting sphere with a cross sectional area of 1 m2

To show what it means in practice, we return to our 10,000 strength radar. As noted before, it sees a return of .1 at 18 miles from target with an RCS of 1. Reduce the target’s RCS to .1, and the strength of the return drops proportionally. This means seeing that same .1 strength return requires closing to 10 miles. Reduce the RCS to .01, and it has to close to 5.6 miles.

Stealth does not make aircraft invisible. There is always some return, and sufficiently powerful radar that’s sufficiently close will be able to detect stealth aircraft. But reducing the range at which an aircraft can be seen by the enemy dramatically increases its survivability and lethality. Operating with powerful radars and long range missiles, stealth fighters can destroy targets from great distances, before the target even knows they are there.

This makes reducing RCS hugely advantageous, but far from easy. Ufimtsev was allowed to publish his work because Soviet authorities considered his models impractical to implement. Calculating the RCS of a complex object was computationally difficult, and simply not possible in 1962. By the mid-70s, computers had improved enough that it became possible – but only for objects composed of flat surfaces; curves were still too difficult. This need for flat surfaces led to the distinctive angular faceting of the Stealth Fighter, and caused it to be nicknamed “the Hopeless Diamond” by engineers who despaired of ever getting such a shape to fly.

Aerodynamics was not the only difficulty. Eliminating points of radar reflection required changes to all aspects of aircraft design. Engine intakes could no longer be shaped to maximize airflow, but had to hide the engine fan blades from enemy radar. Weapons could no longer be carried externally: they and the pylons that carried them were large reflectors. Instead, they needed to be carried internally, pushing up size and cost while reducing carrying capacity. Even things as seemingly simple as landing gear and fuel ports needed careful attention, because every gap or opening in the airframe was a potential reflector. Special radar absorbent materials (RAM) are used to help with some of these problems, but what they can achieve is limited. The vast majority of stealth comes from shape, design, and build quality, not materials.

These challenges meant that it simply wasn’t possible to produce a proper stealth fighter with Gen4 technology. While the F-117 was called the Stealth Fighter, this is a misnomer. It had no air-to-air capability, no gun, and couldn’t fly at supersonic speeds. Similar in size to the contemporary F-18A and powered by the same two engines, it had about ⅓ the payload and was famously difficult to fly. It was a remarkable achievement, but it was a highly specialized attack aircraft not a fighter. A true stealth fighter was not yet possible.

By the late 80s improvements in computing technology made it possible to run RCS calculations on curved shapes. This opened up the possibility of a true stealth fighter, but it was far from the end of difficulties. Once designed, stealth aircraft must be manufactured to an extremely high level of quality. Carefully designing your aircraft to minimize gaps gains you little if your manufacturing process produces large gaps anyway. F-117s were effectively hand built by an elite team of engineers, but that was practical because only 59 were built. A proper fighter had to be produced in the hundreds, on an assembly line. And once built, they had to be maintained. Similarly, the B-2 bombers are among the most expensive aircraft to operate in the US inventory. They need to be kept in temperature and humidity controlled spaces to preserve their radar absorbent materials.

An F-22 lifting its bay doors to show you its internal weapons storage

By Gen5, these challenges had been met. Nearly 200 F-22s were built and over 1,300 F-35s have been made at time of publication. These had considerably more “baked in” stealth, with more durable coatings and less need for TLC. Little is known about exactly how stealthy the Chinese J-20 is, but it has also been produced by the hundreds, with no signs of slowing. Stealth is a prominent feature of virtually every fighter currently being developed, and that is unlikely to change any time soon.

Super Cruise

Gen5 fighters do not have an overall higher top speed than their predecessors. In fact, they are slightly slower. Maintaining stealth requires that the inlet ducts be carefully shaped to hide the engine fan blades, not to maximize airflow. That said, Gen5 is not without improvements in engine technology. While no single big technological leap stands out, better materials technology and design led to improved efficiency, thrust to weight ratios, and engine life.

Static test of an F119 engine from an F-22

In theory, improved engines and internal weapon carriage should allow Gen5 fighters to be capable of super cruise: going faster than the speed of sound without the use of afterburners. This gives the fighter all the traditional virtues of speed – the ability to close on or disengage from a target, launch weapons from a higher energy state, and evade threats more effectively – but without the fuel penalty that makes afterburner sprints so costly.

In practice, supercruise is unevenly realized. The F-22 can exceed Mach 1.5 on dry thrust, but design compromises in the F-35 left it with a very nominal super cruise ability, at just Mach 1.2 (the lower edge of supersonic flight) and for very limited durations. And while the Chinese claim supercruise capability for the J-20, their continuing struggles with engine technology raise doubts about the veracity of this claim. That said, improved engines in development for both the F-35 and J-20, so the gap between promise and reality is only going to narrow in future.

AESA Radars

The most basic function of a radar system is scanning, sweeping the beam back and forth over a wide area looking for radar returns, the classic green blooping display that lights up when something is detected. But a return, on its own, is just a blip on a display. It could be an enemy. Or it could be a friend. Or it could be a flock of birds. To be useful, returns needed to be recorded and watched over time so they could be properly tagged and analyzed.

Radar guided missiles add another complication to the situation. A fire control radar needs to have a relatively narrow beam in order to produce useful returns. This doesn’t mean that it can’t scan, but it does mean that scanning requires physically moving the radar antenna around to sweep its beam over the area to be covered. But to guide a SARH missile, that beam must remain pointed at the target continually. This means it can track or scan but not both at once.

Early radar systems solved these problems with brute force. Sea and land based radar systems were built that could combine multiple radars, some of which would be dedicated to scanning and others to illuminating targets. Tracks were kept by hand, literally. Rooms were set up where radar operators would describe what they were seeing to plotters who would record plots (the record of a single return) as tracks (collections of plots) by writing them down on large boards. These systems worked, but could be swamped by too many targets and were obviously totally unfeasible for use in a fighter jet.

The solution was automation, and the first step in that direction was recording plots and storing them in computer memory. This was first done in the 1950s aboard ships; large analog computers could log the returns from multiple radars and record the plots over time, in theory following dozens or hundreds of different tracks at once. This was an important step, but still relied on multiple radar antennas to track and scan simultaneously. This, plus the sheer size of early computer memory meant this was still not practical for aircraft.

5 megabytes of memory in 1956

The next step forward was the electronically scanned (or phased) array. As we saw earlier, a radar works by physically pointing a radar beam around the volume it wants to scan. You can think of a mechanical radar as a giant flood light. Each part of the antenna releases energy, making a very bright light. But it’s heavy so it only moves slowly, and can only do one thing at a time.

The phased array works differently. Instead of physically moving the radar around, a phased array uses computers to control devices called phase shifters. These can delay or alter the phase of the beam coming out of different parts of the antenna. Doing so alters the way the beams interact with each other causing the beam that gets emitted to “bend” in different directions, which can be used to sweep the resulting beam over the target area. This allows them to sweep their beams hundreds of times a minute.

The first phased arrays were called Passively Scanned Electronic Arrays (PESAs). These could still only form one beam and do one thing at a time, but were capable of switching between tasks with every sweep of the beam. Combined with computer memory and processing, they could mimic the effect of multiple beams by storing results between sweeps and automatically maintaining tracks. The PESA is still a floodlight — it still only points in one direction — but instead of moving around, it has complicated mirrors and lenses that let you redirect the beam very quickly.

Different methods of radar scanning

PESAs found homes on ships and ground installations, but rarely on aircraft, for two reasons. First, PESAs required serious computing power to operate, power that simply couldn't be packaged small enough for a fighter in the 1970s. Second, the more power pushed through a transmitter, the more problems there are with cooling and reliability, and these were more easily managed on land and at sea than in the air. As a result, Gen4 fighters were initially designed with mechanical radars backed by digital computers, which could approximate track-while-scan capability by recording plots and predicting future movements, but were limited by the slow mechanical sweep of the antenna and could lose tracks during rapid maneuvers. By the time computing had miniaturized enough for electronically scanned arrays to be viable on aircraft, a new architecture had emerged: the Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA). Instead of one powerful transmitter driving the whole array, the AESA has dozens or hundreds of transmit/receive modules (TRMs), each one effectively a small radar of its own. Smaller modules cool more easily, allowing more power to be pushed through the system. The aggregate output of smaller modules can far exceed that of any single transmitter system, and having multiple independent units is intrinsically more reliable.

Instead of a floodlight, the AESA is dozens and dozens of flashlights. These can be combined and pointed at one target, or they can emit at slightly different frequencies and do multiple things at once. An AESA radar can have some modules track while others scan, form complicated radar beams that are harder for radar warning units to detect, rapidly change frequencies to resist jamming, or even use the radar as an electronic warfare system.

AESA radars were developed towards the end of the Gen4 era, and most Gen4 fighters are now equipped, or can be, with AESA systems. But Gen5 aircraft were designed to take advantage of AESA radars from the ground up – not merely as a better radar, but as the foundation for something more ambitious: combining data from every sensor on every aircraft in a formation into a single shared picture of the battlefield.

Sensor Fusion

The idea of combining the sensor data from multiple aircraft is an old one. As discussed above, the US Navy led the way in trying to build systems that could integrate data from multiple ships and aircraft into, cohesive single operational picture that was shared across the fleet. By the Gen4 era, they had succeeded in building systems that could integrate multiple radar systems together, and then use data links to share radar tracks, target information, and even weapon guidance across multiple platforms.

While this was a huge step forward, the integration was, to a degree, superficial. Each platform uses its own sensors to make its own tracks, then shares that information with others. Systems exist to compare tracks and eliminate duplication, but no platform has access to the raw sensor data the others are collecting, only the conclusions drawn from it.

Sensor fusion goes beyond this, sharing the underlying raw data itself across platforms. This is made possible by the AESA radar, whose flexibility allows it to double as an extraordinarily high bandwidth data transmitter capable of sending data hundreds of times faster than the Link-16 systems used by Gen4 aircraft. As a result, each platform in the network doesn't just have access to its own sensor data, but to everything collected by every aircraft in the formation.

The practical payoff is significant. When multiple aircraft are all looking at the same target from different angles, their returns can be compared and cross-referenced to produce a far clearer and longer-range picture than any single radar could generate. Targets that might be too faint or ambiguous for one radar to confidently identify become clear when seen through several simultaneously. For the pilot, this means a dramatically expanded picture of the battlespace knowing where threats are earlier, with greater confidence, and without having to illuminate the target with his radar in ways that could reveal his position.

Gen 6

While no Gen6 fighter has yet entered production, the outlines of what they will look like are beginning to emerge. As with previous generations, Gen6 is not defined not by a single technology but by the integration of several simultaneously: larger airframes built for Pacific-scale ranges, tailless designs that push stealth further than ever, adaptive cycle engines that resolve the age-old tradeoff between efficiency and speed, and perhaps most significantly, the replacement of the lone fighter pilot with something closer to an airborne battle commander directing a fleet of drones.

Adaptive Cycle Engines

As discussed earlier, turbofan engines use a large fan to push air around the engine. The proportion of air that bypasses the engine core versus the amount that passes through it is called the bypass ratio. For example, an 80% bypass ratio means that 20% of the air goes through the engine core like a traditional turbojet and 80% does not.

As a rule, higher bypass ratios are more efficient. As discussed earlier, moving air relatively slowly via fan is more efficient than moving it quickly via jet. But just as with propellers, the amount of thrust the fan adds drops off as aircraft speed increases. As a result, while commercial airliners can use high bypass ratios (85%+) to get tremendous fuel economy at subsonic speeds, fighter jets have had to use lower bypass ratios, forcing unpleasant tradeoffs. The F-22, for example, has relatively short range in part because of the very low bypass ratio (23%) its F119 engines required to optimize for top speed and supercruise ability. The F-35's better range performance is in part due to the higher ratio (36%) of the F135 engine, but that higher ratio is partly responsible for its limited supercruise capability.

The adaptive cycle engine cuts this Gordian knot by allowing the engine to change its bypass ratio and achieve the best of both worlds. At takeoff and low speeds, it can operate at a ratio nearly as high as those used by commercial jets, allowing shorter takeoff runs, higher takeoff weights, and greater range and payload capacity. At supersonic speeds, it can operate in a very low bypass mode, as if optimized for high-speed flight. The result is an engine that is more efficient at every speed, giving Gen6 fighters meaningfully longer range, greater payload, and better supersonic performance than any fixed-ratio engine could deliver.

Tailless Designs

Stealth shaping does a good job of handling the problem of radar reflection, but there's another way to get a return from an object: resonance. When hit with a radar beam with a wavelength roughly twice their size, metallic objects will resonate, emitting radar waves in that frequency in all directions. This gives radar designers a potential counter to stealth, by broadcasting at the right frequency they can cause parts of an otherwise stealthy aircraft to light up like a beacon.

The most vulnerable parts of a conventional fighter are its tail surfaces. Vertical and horizontal stabilizers are relatively thin, relatively exposed structures that extend well beyond the main body of the aircraft, exactly the kind of feature that resonance radars are designed to exploit. Tails also create sharp angles where they meet the fuselage, generating radar returns of their own. Gen6 designs are responding by eliminating them entirely, along with any other extraneous protrusions that might give resonance radars a target. The result is a cleaner, more continuous airframe with small control surfaces tucked as close to the body as possible and coated in radar absorbent materials to handle what shaping alone cannot.

The most important thing about tailless designs is they look awesome

The problem is that tails do a great deal of work. They provide stability and control in pitch, roll, and yaw — the three axes of aircraft movement. Remove them and you have an aircraft that is, in the most literal sense, extremely difficult to control. The B-2 and B-21 bombers demonstrate that tailless designs can fly, but they are large, relatively slow aircraft that prioritize stealth and range over agility. Building a tailless fighter that can match the maneuverability of current Gen5 aircraft is a fundamentally harder problem.

The solution is thrust vectoring, steering the aircraft by pointing the engine nozzles rather than relying on control surfaces. This is not a new idea. The F-22 used two-dimensional thrust vectoring to improve pitch control, and some versions of the J-20 have incorporated similar systems. But Gen5 thrust vectoring was a supplement to conventional tail surfaces, not a replacement for them. Gen6 will need full three-axis control from thrust vectoring, improving pitch, roll, and yaw without any meaningful tail surface to fall back on.

Manned-unmanned teaming

Gen6 fighters will not fly into battle alone, but will be accompanied. All current programs envision pairing them with a variety of unmanned assistants — variously called Loyal Wingmen, Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), or Remote Carrier Vehicles.

Contrary to popular wisdom, drone aircraft are not a new technology. The idea of controlling an aircraft via radio dates back almost as far as aviation itself and such aircraft were produced during the first World War.

A Hewitt–Sperry Automatic Airplane in 1918

Remote-control aircraft, though, were long limited by the fragility of wireless communication. A drone needed both to receive instructions and to communicate information about its location, speed, and altitude back to its controller to maintain situational awareness. A disruption on either end was likely to result in the loss of the aircraft. This meant that unmanned aircraft were largely confined to simple tasks like serving as target drones.

By the Gen5 era, improved computing technology had changed the situation. While far from fully autonomous, drones had gotten much better at keeping themselves in the air without constant inputs from their controllers, and improved communications bandwidth made them far more useful on the battlefield. Advances in sensor miniaturization meant they could carry increasingly capable cameras, radars, and electronic warfare equipment without needing to be the size of a fighter.

Gen6 fighters will build on these changes, though exactly how is harder to say with any certainty. Proposals have ranged from unmanned versions of the Gen6 fighters themselves, capable of bringing their full suite of combat capabilities, to tiny aircraft like the XQ-58 Valkyrie dedicated to jamming, acting as decoys, or carrying additional weapons, and mid-sized platforms like the MQ-28 Ghost Bat. These less capable platforms will leverage sensor fusion to contribute to and draw from the sensor picture of the manned fighters they accompany, while being cheaper and more expendable than full-on fighters.

The combined effect of these developments is to dramatically multiply the combat power of a single Gen6 fighter. Traditional fighter tactics have always relied on wingmen, paired or grouped aircraft watching each other's backs and dividing up targets. The Gen6 fighter will bring its own wingmen, replacing them with a distributed fleet of drones. The result is a crew that may effectively command a small squadron — extending sensors far beyond what any single aircraft could carry, saturating enemy defenses with targets, and striking from multiple directions simultaneously. The manned fighter remains at the center, but surrounded by a swarm of semi-autonomous robots.

At least, that’s the vision. It remains unclear how well any of this will actually work under real combat conditions. Drone teaming has been tested extensively in exercises, but jamming, electronic warfare, and the chaos of actual combat will stress these systems in ways no exercise can fully replicate. The concept is promising enough that every major air power is investing heavily in it — whether it delivers on that promise remains one of the defining open questions of the coming generation of aerial warfare.

Size

Fighter jets have grown in size with every generation, and Gen6 will be no exception. In fact, they may represent the biggest leap yet, for two related reasons. First, the desire for greater range and payload will be especially intense in Gen6, because these aircraft are being designed with the demands of a Pacific conflict in mind. Earlier generations were usually optimized for fighting in Europe, where combat ranges were rarely more than a few hundred miles. A Pacific conflict could demand ranges measured in thousands.

Gen6 fighters will be large

Second, there is the likely return of the second seat. Both the F-22 and F-35 relied on greater automation and simulators to handle cockpit complexity, and eliminated the need for two-seat variants. The Chinese have experimented with the two seat J-20S, but it's unclear how many will be built. In Gen6, though, the GIB is likely to make a return. The long ranges envisioned would strain any single pilot's endurance, and operating a swarm of drones will likely demand a dedicated second operator.

A harbinger of this trend is the only Gen6 fighter yet revealed, the Chinese J-36. Although details remain highly speculative, photographs confirm it's a massive aircraft featuring huge wings, three engines, and side-by-side seating rather than the tandem arrangement typical of fighters.

Dean is participating, and you should, too

On the whole, I enjoyed this chapter. It's a good look at both some ships that I didn't know much about and at the Japanese procurement environment between the Russo-Japanese War and the start of the treaty era, although the recounting is very dry. More broadly, this is a good illustration of the difference between what you see in a lot of warship books and what Norman Friedman does so well. If I had to describe his secret sauce, it would be working in the details he gives of who is doing what in a way that makes the narrative at least somewhat more approachable than a textbook. Also, he's really good at preemptively answering questions you might have, or at least nodding to them and saying he doesn't know why, either. For instance, why was Tone fitted with two short 8 cm guns in addition to the 15 cm and 12 cm? My first guess would be that they were for firing starshells, but there's no mention of the purpose at all, and a later class has four, which probably rules that out. (This isn't unique to Japanese Cruisers. I've seen other books which missed fairly obvious questions, most irritatingly Dulin & Garzke's book on Bismarck.) But there's at least a lot of detail here, which is really useful should I decide to write on one of these cruisers at some point.

I have mixed feelings on the way the chapter was structured. On one hand, it's nice to see all of the different twists and turns the programs underwent in an era where Japan had an active budget office that didn't always give the Navy what it wanted. On the other, it's not exactly linear, and I kept getting confused early on about which programs were being built or punted down the road.

One thing I noticed was the rather interesting aircraft arrangement on the Nagara class, with the plane inside the bridge and the flying-off platform forward of it. I know the British had experimented with some stuff like that, but I hadn't remembered that anyone had actually built a ship like that from scratch. Of course, it also illustrated the dangers of including such unorthodox features, as the difficulty of the takeoff meant it was never used operationally. (I am confused as to why similar features worked on British light cruisers during the war, but that could have been as simple as wartime willingness to accept dangers that would be too great for peacetime operations.)

The section on Yubari also had some interesting tidbits, but again reveals what I suspect is a fundamental weakness of the book. The idea of "hey, why don't we build that ship, but on 57% of the displacement" is fundamentally pretty interesting, enabled mostly by the adoption of superfiring twin turrets for the 14 cm guns. But while that sort of thing can help, the huge tonnage reductions can have other drawbacks, and it would have been really nice to have the authors discuss that more explicitly. I didn't even realize how they'd done it until I got to the armament section. They do mention that berthing was either wet or badly-ventilated, but that's as far as they go in terms of drawbacks. Also, it was weird that they credit the twin guns with a higher rate of fire than normal singles, which is the opposite of how it usually works.

More seriously, we are about halfway through Two-Ocean War, and this seems like as good a time as any to talk about what should actually happen next. Do we want to keep Naval Gazing Book Club as a thing, and if so, what book should we do next? Obviously, it should be something that's a fairly easy read, and reasonably cheap. A couple candidates I would submit are Blind Man's Bluff, an excellent history of submarine espionage during the Cold War, and Norman Friedman's The Fifty-Year War, a comprehensive history of the Cold War that is the best I'm aware of for people who have at least some familiarity with the overall war. But feel free to suggest other books, just not ones that cost $200 or that a cat could hide inside.

The landing beaches in Port Said

Finally, on November 6th, the Anglo-French force was ready to go ashore in strength. Pre-landing bombardment began shortly before 6, although it was restricted to a thousand rounds from the 4.5" guns of the destroyers for fear of collateral damage. Half an hour into the bombardment, the LSTs disgorged their cargo of LVTs loaded with the Marines of 40 and 42 Command for the 30-minute run to the beach. The bombardment continued as the amtracks swam in, pausing occasionally to clear the way for airstrikes, before lifting just before they crawled up onto the beach. It had done its work, and resistance on the beaches was minimal, with the main dangers being sniper fire and exploding weapons caches. Follow-on waves quickly followed in LCAs, which beached offshore. Fortunately, the troops already ashore had drawn the attention of what Egyptian defenders there were, so the process of wading to the beach was pretty straightforward.

A Centurion unloads on the beach in Port Said

Once ashore, the men of 40 and 42 Commando began pushing south into Port Said, aided by a small number of Centurion tanks that had been landed with the second wave. 40 Commando was tasked with securing the area around the harbor to allow follow-on forces to land, while 42 Commando was to push south and link up with the French Paras at Raswa. The push down the city's main roads went fairly smoothly, although a couple of the Centurions got bogged down on a golf course and troops moving up and down the road faced sporadic sniper fire. Clearing the harbor proved to be more difficult. The Egyptians turned a number of large, stoutly-built structures into strongpoints, holding them fiercely even in the face of fire from the Centurions. On a few occasions, rockets and cannons from the fighters overhead were necessary to overcome resistance, and at one point, a destroyer offshore intervened against a Soviet-built SU-100 tank destroyer. Despite the resistance, casualties among the attacking force were fairly light, but reinforcements were slow to arrive. The inner harbor, where the second wave had been scheduled to unload, had been deliberately blocked by sinking ships there, forcing troops and equipment to come ashore further north on improvised piers.

A Whirlwind takes off from Theseus

But not all of the follow-on troops and equipment would come ashore there. The battle for Port Said would mark the debut of a new kind of military operation: vertical envelopment, the practice of landing military units in a battle zone via helicopter. Now, helicopters weren't entirely new, with the US having deployed a few in WWII and more in Korea, but they were primitive and couldn't carry very much, limiting their use primarily to casualty evacuation and moving VIPs around. But the technology was improving, and both the US and Britain had been experimenting with the possibilities for moving entire units this way. The US had just converted the escort carrier Thetis Bay as a troop/helicopter carrier, but the British didn't have an equivalent ready to hand. Instead, they would improvise, using the light carriers Ocean and Theseus, serving as training ships when the crisis broke out. Their aviation facilities were hastily reactivated and an air group was scraped together from Navy Whirlwinds and Army and Air Force Sycamores, which promptly set to work figuring out the best way to transport a 450-man Commando¹ from the ships to a landing zone 15 miles away.

Helicopters carrying 45 Commando fly over the invasion force

They had sailed from Malta with the rest of the invasion force, with 45 Commando embarked, but due to concerns about the risks of the operation, the decision was made to hold 45 Commando in reserve. There was serious concern from the men aboard Ocean and Theseus that they would not get into action, but not quite 3 hours after the first landing, orders came down for the unit to land, half a dozen helicopters at a time, in the town's stadium. The first helicopter in was a Whirlwind carrying the unit's CO and the team responsible for controlling the LZ, and it landed successfully, but under such heavy fire that the pilot, hit in the thumb by a bullet, returned almost immediately to pluck them out. The LZ was quickly changed to one on the waterfront near the statue of de Lesseps, and 45 Commando joined in the effort to secure the area by pushing west to link up with 3 Para. Unfortunately for them, tragedy struck when an attempt to direct a group of Wyverns against Egyptian positions resulted in them strafing 45 Commando's headquarters, causing 16 casualties, including the unit's CO.

An aerial view of Port Said, looking south

By this point, rumors were circulating that the Egyptians were interested in surrendering, and General Hugh Stockwell, commander of the landing force, went ashore in full uniform along with his French counterpart, Andre Beaufre, to try to persuade the Egyptians to give up. It turned out that the rumors were wrong, but Stockwell was in no hurry to return to his command ship, and spent the rest of the day wandering around Port Said, out of contact with his superiors.

British troops advance in Port Said

This proved to be a critical mistake, because despite the Anglo-French victory on the battlefield, the political tide had turned decisively against them. Harold Macmillian, Eden's Chancellor of the Exchequer² and previously a loyal supporter of his policy in Suez, reported during a cabinet meeting that British gold reserves were rapidly dwindling as investors sought to move assets out of a country that was increasingly seen as an international pariah. Despite British economic decline over the previous 40 years, the pound remained a major international reserve currency and a pillar of British economic and political power, and the depletion of the Bank of England's gold reserves could bring all of that crashing down. Normally, the British would have been able to count on American help, but Eisenhower, whose second term was being voted on that very day, refused to do so, as he believed it would be disastrous for America's position in the battle for the goodwill of the third world.³ The Soviets were making threatening noises, and Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, announced that both Israel and Egypt had agreed to an immediate cease-fire, and that a UN force would be assembled to secure the Canal.

British troops after the cease-fire

The combined forces of his Cabinet colleagues, the US, the Soviets and the UN were too much for Eden, and he buckled around mid-day, agreeing to the cease-fire. Getting the French to sign on took a bit longer, and by the time Eden made the public announcement in the afternoon, the time of the cease-fire was set at midnight in London, or 2 AM in Egypt. But faulty communications and absent commanders meant that very little of this was apparent in Port Said. Instead, units had only begun to move south before digging in for the evening, the furthest forward being a unit of the Royal Tank Regiment 10 miles south of Port Said, and plans were drawn up for a significant push to seize El Quantra, the next major settlement along the Canal, on the 7th, and maybe push on to Ismailia, the halfway point of the Canal.

The results of the Anglo-French assault on Port Said

But with the impending cease-fire, orders went out to secure as much territory as possible, hopefully including Quantra. Communications in the area were still bad, and it was after midnight by the time word reached the tankers, who then waited for the infantry of 2 Para to arrive before pushing south down the narrow causeway that ran alongside the canal. There was only 45 minutes left when they finally set out, and they had 20 miles or so to go. But breakdowns slowed the convoy, and when 2 AM arrived, they were still on the causeway, an obviously unacceptable place to dig in. Swearing the journalists accompanying them to secrecy, the force pushed on another 20 minutes, finally arriving at Al Cap, four miles north of Quantra. There, they could dig in in reasonable security, taunted by the lights of their objective to the south. The war was over, although the Canal itself was still blocked and diplomatic repercussions would echo for years. We'll pick up the story there next time.

This chapter seemed somewhat disordered, which isn't surprising, as it was drawing from three different books in the original, including all of Operations in North African Waters, which I remember as one of the more interesting books in the series. I also don't love the amount of time spent discussing allied strategy, and the (probably related) short shrift given to what may have been the only naval battle Morison himself witnessed. As a describer of strategy, Morison is not particularly brilliant, and I really wish we'd gotten more detail on the actual landings.

But he goes a long way to redeem himself at Sicily (helped by the fact that the account is quite a bit longer), where I really enjoyed the combination of "introduction to WWII amphibious operations" and the anecdotes about the landings (featuring my own hometown 45th Infantry Division). In particular, the callout to the landing craft crews felt appropriate, although he didn't mention that many of those were crewed by the Coast Guard.

The inclusion of a lot of the Battle of the Atlantic stuff was is particularly weird, and is making me wonder about the way this was written. There's no particular reason that the stuff here shouldn't have been in Chapter 5 except for length, and it was really weird to switch from amphibious operations to convoy battles and then back to amphibious warfare. My only real guess is that Morison was trying to keep the chapter lengths roughly equal, and couldn't afford to make Chapter 5 any longer than it already was. While that's handy for what we're doing, I think it makes the book weaker overall. Particularly weird is that the submarine campaign against Japan ended up shoehorned into the Philippines chapter.

A couple of other notes: first, the LCVPs were wood, not steel, and that's another error on the list of "that should have been easy for a competent proofreader to catch", and we see him again diving into politics c.1963 with the discussion on "Unconditional Surrender", although that one has aged better than most of the other examples we've seen, given that it's still live today. (I think he has the right of it, as the Japanese were proposing terms that amounted to "we're going to do this again in 10-20 years" right up until the end. But that's an issue for a later chapter.)

Initially, things went according to plan. The Israeli invasion kicked off on October 29th, and the other two powers quickly directed both sides to withdraw. Nasser was predictably unwilling to suffer the humiliation of bowing to his former colonial overlord, and two days later, the British and French began a sustained air campaign from carriers and nearby land bases, swiftly wiping out the Egyptian air force and clearing the way for a ground invasion.

But despite the success of the air campaign, the Anglo-French commanders faced a serious problem. The need to hide the plan from the rest of the world had meant that the amphibious force hadn't set sail until October 31st, and the slow speed of the LSTs carrying the armor meant they couldn't begin landing operations until November 6th. Initially, this hadn't been seen as a major problem, because the landings had been planned for about 10 days after the air campaign began. But the pretext for the intervention was growing more transparent by the hour, and international opposition was building from both of the superpowers. It was unclear how long London and Paris could stall a ceasefire, and having one declared before there were boots on the ground would be diplomatically disastrous. As such, almost from the outbreak of hostilities, the French airborne commanders in particular began proposing immediate drops of troops into the area around Port Said.¹ The British, with memories of Arnhem still fresh, were far more reluctant to commit unsupported airborne units days ahead of the arrival of relief, and also pointed out that the airfields on Cyprus were mostly full of fighters and bombers currently busy shooting at Egypt, so the size of any drop would be fairly limited. Eventually, the obvious compromise, the deployment of airborne units on the 5th to secure critical areas around Port Said, followed by the amphibious landing the next day, was adopted.

3 Para landing at Gamil

At dawn on the 5th, British and French fighters appeared over Port Said as usual, but this time, they were accompanied by transports. The British transports, Hastings and Valettas carrying 3 Para, were headed for Gamil airfield, four miles west of Port Said. Air strikes had been unable to completely suppress resistance on the airfield, but Egyptian attempts to shoot at the descending paratroopers were surprisingly ineffective, and the "Red Devils" soon retrieved their weapons and swiftly set about securing the airfield. Despite the lack of heavy weapons imposed by the rather antiquated side-loading transports,² they were in control of the airfield within 30 minutes and had suffered no more than a dozen casualties, which were swiftly evacuated by helicopter to the ships offshore.

The bridge at Raswa, captured by the French paratroopers

The French paratroopers dropped at Raswa to the south of the town, planning to capture a bridge across a secondary canal that would speed the advance south, as well as the water treatment plant for Port Said, without which the town would swiftly become uninhabitable. The available drop zone was ludicrously small, only 200 by 500 yards, and to make sure they hit it, the drop was made from well under the minimum altitude regulations demanded. Despite this, the assault was entirely successful with minimal casualties, carrying both the bridge and the waterworks within a few hours.

Members of 3 Para ready a jeep at Gamil

At Gamil, the British Paras began to push east towards Port Said itself, but even with aid from the "cab rank" of fighters overhead, Egyptian delaying tactics meant it was slow going, with little hope of a dramatic breakthrough. An extra company was dropped in the afternoon, but the decision was made to call things to a halt. Communication problems and limited equipment had plagued the force all day, and the advance company was low on ammunition and still well outside Port Said. There had been some hope of securing the areas where the landing was to take place, but that was clearly not going to happen, and the risk of Paras ending up in one of the zones slated for the supporting bombardment from the fleet offshore was judged too great, particularly with the comms problems.

French paratroopers drop on Port Fuad

The French, more confident in their forces, also made a second drop that afternoon, but instead of landing on the same drop zone as the initial wave, a second battalion was dispatched to Port Fuad, on the east side of the Canal. The French troops managed to clear the town by morning,³ although this information didn't reach the offshore ships until a few minutes before an airstrike was scheduled to go in, validating British concerns about friendly fire. Control of the waterworks gave the invaders a great deal of leverage, but it wasn't enough to convince the Egyptian garrison to surrender. On the bright side, a reconnaissance south from Raswa determined that the road to Ismailia was open and unmined, at least for the 10 km or so that the team was willing to go for fear of being mistaken for Egyptian by marauding aircraft.

But by the evening, both groups of paratroopers were in secure positions, and the way was open for the main force to land the next morning. While most of them would come ashore as they had for the last 15 years, one contingent would introduce to the world a new method of amphibious operations - vertical envelopment. We'll pick up the story there next time.

As usual, we'll begin with the recitation of the errors. Here, Morison spends less time on the Hudson that spotted the Japanese on the way to Savo Island than he did in The Struggle for Guadalcanal, and as such is less unfair to the crew. (In that one, he's so unfair to the crew that the US Navy officially apologized decades later.) Second, there's the bashing of Fletcher that we talked about last time, which is often hilariously over the top. We also see him disliking someone else, Capt. Bode of Chicago, although with somewhat greater justification. Still, it's kind of weird to see him speaking highly of Callaghan, who screwed up far worse than Fletcher ever did. I'm also confused by his claim about there being shells on the decks of the Japanese battleships in the opening stages of First Guadalcanal, which does not match my understanding of what happened there. I was under the impression that the Japanese initially opened fire with the bombardment shells, but couldn't find confirmation in later accounts either way. In any case, I can't see how you'd end up with shells out on deck while trying to get them back to the magazines, and suspect Morison got carried away here.

Beyond that, it's a very solid account of the battles, although with effectively no analysis of why they turned out the way they did, which gives me something to talk about. The Japanese, knowing they would be outnumbered in a war with the US, had sought to equalize this by fighting at night, and it had been a major pillar of their training in the interwar years. The Americans had not taken this nearly as seriously, and while their advantage in radar should have been enough to compensate, they were still figuring out how to use it. Also barely gestured at is the superiority of Japanese torpedoes, which were significantly larger than their American counterparts, and ran on pure oxygen for greater range and speed. These "Long Lances" (a name coined by Morison himself) had also been the beneficiaries of an extensive (and expensive) test program, which the Americans hadn't bothered with for their torpedoes. We'll see even more of this in future chapters.

And of course I would be remiss if I didn't say a few words about the battleship action we see here, one of only three times in the war when US battleships fought their Axis counterparts. South Dakota suffered a power loss due to the shock of her guns firing, and with the radar cut off, maneuvered into a position that silhouetted herself against a burning destroyer, turning her into a punching bag for the Japanese fleet and exacerbating the power loss as hits lead to shorts throughout the superstructure. And we have more exciting battleship combat to look forward to next week, when we go back to the Atlantic.

Eagle, Albion and Bulwark together

The Israeli invasion kicked off on October 29th, and Britain and France quickly issued their directive for both sides to withdraw. As expected, Nasser was entirely unwilling to suffer the humiliation of backing down in the face of Egypt's former colonial overlord, allowing the military plan to go into effect. Unfortunately, the plan was rather hindered by the lack of bases. While Britain had extensive bases in Cyprus, there was no harbor on the island suitable for the invasion force to assemble, forcing them to stage out of Malta, about four days steaming from Egypt.

This gave several days for air power to wear down the Egyptians before the ground forces arrived, with the primary punch split between RAF Canberra and Valiant bombers flying out of Cyprus and Malta and planes operating off the British and French carriers in the eastern Mediterranean.¹ When the crisis started, only HMS Eagle was in the Med, but she was soon joined by Albion and Bulwark, as well as French carriers La Fayette and Arromanches. While the French carriers were equipped surplus American planes from WWII, 36 Corsairs on Arromanches and 18 Avengers on La Fayette, the British had modernized their carrier forces. Eagle carried 9 Wyvern attack aircraft, 17 Sea Venom all-weather fighters and 24 Sea Hawk fighters, while the smaller Bulwark had an all-Sea Hawk group of 33 aircraft and her sister Albion was split between 23 Sea Hawks and 9 Sea Venoms.

Canberras in flight

The ultimatum expired early on the morning of October 31st, and for a while, there was discussion of striking first during daylight, but fear of Egyptian/Soviet counterattacks on the British bases on Cyprus meant that the attacks were delayed until that evening. Even this delay wasn't enough to get the British forces in the field ahead of events. The bomber crews hadn't been sure if they would be attacking Israel or Egypt until the previous day, greatly limiting their ability to analyze and learn their targets. And in a moment of the odd comedy that so often accompanies war, the ground crews for the Malta-based Valiants had to break down the gate of the bomb dump to get the weapons for their aircraft because the base commander hadn't been told that a war was about to start. The comedy continued after the first wave, targeted at Cairo West airfield, was already on the way to the target. The British learned that the US was running its civilian evacuation near Cairo West, and as American casualties would obviously do grave damage to their diplomatic efforts, the bombers were recalled. The result was chaos at Malta as the returning aircraft tried to land while the second wave was taking off for the hasty replacement target, Almaza. To make matters worse, the pathfinders for the redirected attack mistook Cairo International for Almaza. The British after-action report pointed out that while Cairo International was home to some of Egypt's Soviet-built aircraft, none of them were actually damaged during the raid. Subsequent night-bombing raids were more successful in finding their targets, but had little more effect on the airplanes that were the goal of the initial attack.

A Sea Hawk is armed aboard Eagle

But dawn on the 1st brought the arrival of tactical aircraft from the carriers, as well as British Venoms and French Thunderstreaks and Mysteres from bases in Cyprus and Israel. Thanks to careful preparation² and the use of cannons and rockets in shallow dives, they were far more effective than the bombers had been. Careful planning was employed to make sure that every plane was over the target as quickly as possible to give the defenders little warning, and second passes were avoided if at all possible, as they greatly increased the chances of being shot down. If one had to be made, it would be from a different direction than the first pass to make the defender's lives harder.³ The planes withdrew on the deck, often flying so low that AA guns couldn't depress enough to engage them effectively, and none were lost that day. Opposition in the air was nonexistent. Nasser had ordered his fighters to stand down, as he believed the British and French would be forced to withdraw in a few months, and he would need the pilots, and what planes could be evacuated to remote strips, for his long-term campaign against the Israelis.

The blockship sunk in the canal

Strikes against the airfields from both land bases and the carriers continued throughout the day on the 1st, and while they were resumed early on the 2nd, it soon became apparent that the Egyptian Air Force had been essentially wiped out, and the air campaign moved onto its second phase, attacking various targets in an attempt to soften things up for the upcoming landing. These ranged from a blockship the Egyptians had positioned to close the Canal to depots full of military equipment to truck convoys on the roads west of Cairo. Civilian targets were entirely off-limits, preventing the tug slated to move the blockship from being sunk and allowing the Egyptians to seal off the Canal, and the defenders rapidly realized that parking a military truck between two cars made it safe from marauding fighters. On the 3rd, a major effort was made against the Gamil Bridge, which connected Port Said to the rest of Egypt. Initial dive-bombing attacks were ineffective, and an alternative method, using a low-level attacks with delayed-action bombs, was used. This was dangerous for the attacking aircraft, and a Wyvern from Eagle was badly damaged during one of these attacks, with the pilot ejecting three miles out to sea and being picked up by a Whirlwind helicopter after some Sea Hawks dissuaded Egyptian defenses ashore from interfering with the rescue.

The Sea Venom makes a wheels-up landing on Eagle

The Wyvern was not the only aircraft to take ground fire on the 3rd. A Sea Venom from Eagle was also hit, and while the aircraft did make it back to the carrier, damage to the hydraulic system meant that the landing gear couldn't be lowered. Despite this, the pilot made a safe landing, although his observer was injured badly enough by the ground fire that his leg had to be amputated. The next day, Eagle withdrew to replenish, and the remaining air effort shifted to focus even more tightly on tactical targets in support of the landings the next day. One of these early strikes saw a Sea Hawk off Albion hit, with AA fire shattering its canopy, while a second suffered a serious bird strike coming off the target. Both pilots were able to make it back safely, but it was an illustration of the dangers of low-level attacks. The land-based aircraft had similar experiences, with one of the Venoms returning to Cyprus from a strafing mission with a piece of truck axle embedded in its wing. But at the end of the day on the 4th, the air effort had done enough damage that the invasion moved onto the next phase, actually landing troops in Egypt, which we will pick up next time.

Tanks burn after an air attack

But before we move on to the landings, it's worth spending a brief moment on the Anglo-French effort to secure control of the sea during the opening days of their intervention. The French carriers appear to have taken responsibility for flying sweeps over the Med, most likely because the British jets were faster and thus less vulnerable to ground fire. Their only encounter with the Egyptians came early on the 1st, when they found a destroyer and a frigate, but the Corsairs were ordered to bomb from 8000', far too high for any sort of accuracy. The Egyptians got the message and ran for port, although on the 2nd, Corsairs attacked a "Motor Torpedo Boat" with rockets that was later discovered to be the French submarine Creole, which sunk itself before they could damage it. More interference came from the US 6th Fleet, which was operating nearby, and whose aircraft frequently forced the British carriers to launch interceptors. This was extremely irritating, as the ships had to clear their decks and turn into the wind for both launch and recovery, a procedure that interfered with the ability to get strike packages in the air.

HMS Newfoundland bombarding shore targets in Malaya, 1955

Slightly more consequential was an action in the early hours of the 1st. A British force composed of cruiser Newfoundland and destroyer Diana was sent into the Gulf of Suez, just south of the Canal, to deal with any Egyptian warships in the area. Ship traffic in the area was heavy, but shortly after 0100, the crew of Newfoundland spotted a darkened vessel heading south. The two ships turned to follow, and Newfoundland used her signal light to reveal the vessel as a River class frigate, three of which the British had transferred to Egypt a few years previously. The Egyptian ship, Domiat, was ordered to stop, but her crew opened the throttle and trained her weapons, a pair of 4" guns and some AA armament, on Newfoundland. The cruiser's crew responded the only way possible, opening fire with 6", 4" and 40 mm batteries. The range was only 1,400 yds, and every 6" salvo landed at least one hit on the frigate. The Egyptians fought back bravely, landing two 4" hits on the cruiser. One hit the superstructure and detonated in the cinema, killing a Chinese civilian onboard as a tailor, while the other blew a hole in the pay office and lightly wounded another Chinese civilian, this one working in the nearby canteen. An apparent attempt to ram the cruiser brought Diana into the battle, but the valor of the Egyptians was to no avail. Within 5 minutes, Domiat was ablaze, and she rapidly rolled over and sank. Diana fished 72 survivors out of the water, although two succumbed to their wounds.

Survivors from Domiat aboard Diana

The rest of the war was quiet for Newfoundland, the only excitement coming a few days later with what was believed at the time to be Egyptian torpedo boats and is now thought to have been a radar mirage created by anomalous propagation.

Overhauls are Classes, Weather at Sea, Auxiliaries Part 0, Revolt of the Admirals Part 1, Modern Propulsion Part 4, The Nimitz Class and for 2025, my reviews of the Naval Aviation Museum and Alabama, Measuring Fleets and Iowa and Kahoolawe.

We open with the briefest descriptons of the Battle for Wake Island, which brings up one of the (mercifully short) list of major flaws that Morison has. Normally, he's extremely positive on US leaders, to the point that I was sort of expecting his half-page word kiss to Admiral Nimitz to end with "and he walked to work across Pearl Harbor without even getting his shoes wet". But for reasons that nobody has ever worked out, he really disliked Frank Jack Fletcher. The tonal dissonance this provokes in the main series is actually pretty amusing, where he goes out of his way to shower everyone else with praise, while Fletcher cannot do a single thing right. Obviously, this is an area where modern historians have taken a rather different approach, most notably in John Lundstrom's Black Shoe Carrier Admiral. Current views are that Fletcher was generally a competent and effective admiral, and in particular that he really did need to fuel before approaching Wake.

The Fletcher-bashing continues into Coral Sea, where Morison is extremely careful to give Aubrey Fitch credit for actions on the 8th. Beyond that, there's not a whole lot to say about his coverage, which is fairly brief, as Midway is where his real interest lies. Still, at least Fletcher "learned a thing or two" from Coral Sea beforehand, allowing him to win one of the great victories of the war. (He's nicer than he was in the full account.) Much as in the Atlantic, the war was shaped by codebreaking in a way Morison could only nod at here. The famous story is that the target of the operation ("AF") was confirmed by ordering Midway to broadcast that it was having trouble with the water plant, and subsequently the cryptographers picked up "AF is short of water".

In the account of Midway itself, Morison gives a lot of credit to Miles Browning, which is odd because the same is not true in his full account. No idea why this is, and it's an area where more recent history largely disagrees. It's also worth pointing out that the Japanese weren't as close to launching their strikes as Morison makes out. Details on this, and everything else wrong with the conventional understanding of Midway, can be found in the excellent Shattered Sword. Morison generally stays at a high enough level I don't need to get into the others, but the book is very much worth a read if you're interested in Midway, or a more numbers-heavy take on naval history in general. And then we close with yet another swipe at Fletcher. I generally like Morison's rather personal and opinionated take on history, but this is just making him seem petty.

But that changed pretty dramatically on Wednesday, when the Pentagon announced that an Iranian frigate had been sunk by a US attack submarine, revealed on Friday to be USS Charlotte, one of old Los Angeles class boats.¹ This is only the second time in the history of the nuclear submarine that torpedoes have been used in anger, and the first in over 40 years, since HMS Conqueror put General Belgrano on the bottom of the Atlantic. Even better, we have video of the torpedo hit, and I thought there was enough interesting stuff going on there that it was worth dedicating this week's post.

Dena commissioning

So, first, what do we know about the victim? Dena was a unit of the Moudge class light frigates, domestically produced in Iran. These are definitely on the small side for frigates, with an official displacement of only 1,500 tons, and other sources given even lower numbers. Armament is a 76 mm and 40 mm gun, some lighter weapons, plus four SAMs that are about the size of SM-2MR and that look to have performance somewhere between that missile and ESSM, depending on variant. I can't quite see the logic of fitting such a small number of SAMs instead of a larger number of smaller missiles, and I wonder if they might be intended to be used in surface-to-surface mode. Rounding things out are a quartet of C-802 anti-ship missiles and a deck for an ASW helicopter, although there's no hangar and none of the pictures show the ship with the helicopter aboard, which makes me suspect that it's primarily intended for rearming and refueling helicopters based ashore. I also question the official speed of 30 kts, which seems a bit high for 20,000 shp on the claimed displacement. CMO gives 28 kts, which is more plausible.

The view from Charlotte before the torpedo hit

But none of this mattered on Wednesday. Dena was returning from the Milan naval exercise and an international fleet review hosted by India. This was all near Visakhapatnam, halfway up the east coast of India, and as Dena was headed home, Charlotte found her, and fired the fatal shot somewhere between 19 and 50 nautical miles² off of Galle, on the southwestern tip of Sri Lanka. Initially, General Caine, the chairman of the JCS, reported that a single Mk 48 was used, but the same report that named Charlotte also claimed that the first torpedo fired malfunctioned, and the second was successful. Reports are that Dena was able to get off a distress call before she sank, although I suspect this is more likely to have been a self-contained, automated system given the damage apparent in the video. Ultimately, the Sri Lankans were able to recover 32 survivors and 87 bodies. Reports vary on how many were aboard the ship, and thus how many remain unaccounted for, with the total aboard reported as being between 130 and 180 depending on the source. I suspect the numbers towards the higher end are correct due to the relatively high ratio of bodies to survivors. The lower numbers imply that two-thirds of the crew either were killed in a way that their bodies ended up floating separately from the ship (a likely fate for anyone in the structurally destroyed aft section, but unlikely further forward) or died after successfully escaping the ship (somewhat unlikely given the relatively prompt arrival of rescue forces, although we still don't have a detailed timeline for that).

https://youtu.be/wqveh-GHp-E Which brings us to the video, which I've embedded here. The first thing to note is that this is clearly a thermal image, with the bright spot amidships being the funnel and the exhaust gasses from the diesels. Second, this is clearly a classic underbottom explosion, with the astonishing violence that usually accompanies those. The Mk 48 torpedo is designed to kill far larger ships, so it's not surprising how much damage we see here. What is slightly surprising is how far aft the torpedo detonates. Based on the stadiometer markings, the torpedo went off only 40' or so from the stern, and I would expect based on the other example I've seen of a Mk 48 hitting a surface ship that it would be aiming more amidships. In any case, you can see the structure of the aft hull coming apart as the bubble jet forms, as in the top image, exhaust gasses being driven out of the funnel by the inrushing wave of water and the main radar falling off the mast. Moments later, the lifting of the aft hull drives the bow down, and then things go entirely gray as the spray from the hit blocks out most of the image. By the time things clear, towards the very end of the clip and about 14 seconds after the torpedo hits, she almost looks back to normal, although this is obviously not true. There's no exhaust gasses, although the funnel itself remains hot, and it looks like there might be a gap in the hull just aft showing warmer interior spaces (probably some part of engineering). Whatever was on the flight deck is totally gone, and it's obvious that she's going down by the stern very quickly thereafter. Reporting is that she sank only 2-3 minutes after the hit.

The bow is driven down, and the spray column obscures the stern

Dena was not the only ship the Iranians had in the area, and on Thursday, the replenishment ship Bushehr was interned by Sri Lanka, while LST Lavan was interned by the Indians.³ The fact that there isn't a declared war going on makes things a bit confusing, but in practice, this means that the ship (and probably the crew) are effectively under arrest, taken off the board until the end of hostilities, but still belong to Iran. It was not unusual during the world wars for ships that would clearly be unable to reach a friendly port to seek internment in a neutral power, as it saves lives (and ships) relative to making the enemy actually sink them. This would have been a good plan for Dena, and it's not clear if the Iranians decided against doing so, or were unable to get India or Sri Lanka to agree to it before Charlotte caught up to her.

I'm going to avoid getting too deep into the legal weeds on the actual sinking, largely because that ties deeply into the legal status of US actions against Iran, something well outside the scope of this blog. All I can say is that in practical terms, Dena was clearly a danger to any non-submerged American forces in the region, and removing that kind of threat is generally considered to be well within the rights of a belligerent.

The end of the video, with the ship looking almost intact

But there's a last naval aspect to the conflict that eclipses all of this, the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Arabian Gulf. Something like 20% of the world's supply of oil and natural gas passes through Hormuz, and it's always been Iran's trump card if they think there's an existential threat to the regime. They finally declared it closed a few days ago, and daily transit volume has fallen from the typical rate of about 120 ships a day down to single digits. At the moment, this looks to be largely downstream of insurance shenanigans, and we don't seem to have seen attacks on the few ships which have transited. The problem is that while the Iranian Navy looks to have been comprehensively smashed, it doesn't take a navy to close a 20-mile wide strait. Iran has a lot of options for nastiness, ranging from Shaheds to C-802s to unmanned surface vessels (which have already been deployed against tankers inside the Gulf) to mines. Mines are a particular concern, given the generally low state of USN mine warfare capabilities and the difficulty of clearing them while under missile attack. The price of oil is headed upwards, and the Gulf States are likely to become pretty unhappy with the war if the closure persists. Definitely an area to keep an eye on.

3/9 Update: Two interesting aspects have come out in the day since I've published this. First, Iran apparently requested docking permission for all three ships from India when the shooting started on the 28th, and India agreed on the 1st, three days before the sinking. It's possible that there was ongoing diplomatic wrangling about the details of the deal (the Indians wanted full internment, the Iranians were hoping to keep the ships on the board) but in any case, Dena could have been safe well before she was sunk.

Second, the Iranians are claiming that Dena was unarmed, and that this was obvious because she was on her way back from an exercise with India, because you have to be unarmed to participate in those kind of things. Now, from a strict law of war perspective, this is meaningless. There's a deck gun visible in the video, and that's more than enough to make her a legitimate target. "I am out of ammo" is easy to say and hard to check, and the laws of war are pragmatic about such things. I also find it highly doubtful on a practical level. I've never heard of this rule, nor had a former naval officer I contacted, and there's no trace of it on the internet before the past week. I also really doubt that the USN would be willing to offload 80 missiles from the destroyer scheduled to participate, both from a logistics perspective and because they generally try not to sail defenseless warships around. The Indians themselves are not willing to back up the claim that Dena was entirely unarmed, either. Maybe she was carrying a lighter load than usual, but that's the sort of thing which is very difficult to confirm without putting people onboard, and when combined with Iran's behavior re internment, leaves this firmly in "good shoot" territory.