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.

I got a surprise on the first page of this chapter. I had not previously heard about the Chicago Tirbune publishing the leaked warplans on December 5th, and it makes Hitler's decision to declare war on the US, previously extremely high on my "what were they thinking" list for WWII, make at least a bit more sense.

Beyond that, this is the first chapter that was really what I was hoping this book would be, a condensation of the best bits of The Battle of the Atlantic, with Morison's superb prose and ability to sample the entire picture really coming to the fore. Everything from a beautifully evocative picture of a convoy under attack to the German campaign against American coastal shipping to a discussion of the operations research teams that I love so much to a paragraph on the Civil Air Patrol, which has long been one of my markers for how much Morison covers in the main books. Yes, there's a bit of halo-polishing on King, and I think he's unfair to criticize the lack of units in the Eastern Sea Frontier, which was stripped because there simply weren't enough destroyers to go around. But on the whole, it's an excellent, lovely description of the early battle with the U-boats.

One thing that isn't mentioned in this chapter, and that I should talk about, is ULTRA. For those who don't know, ULTRA was the codename for British efforts to decrypt the German Enigma machine, and it played a significant part in the Battle of the Atlantic. However, it remained classified until 1974, a decade after this book was written. Morison was aware of it, having been cleared for it in 1956, but obviously couldn't include it here. This oversight has since been rectified, and if anything, ULTRA is probably overdiscussed relative to its contribution to the war. All that said, this chapter would have been largely unaffected. The German Navy introduced a new, more sophisticated Enigma in February 1942, and it wasn't broken by the British until December. They were able to struggle on with direction-finding data and the work of the OIC, which comes up late in the chapter. Here, I'm pretty sure that when Morison talks about HF/DF, he actually means it, but in later chapters, it's often a code for ULTRA.

Relevant Naval Gazing Posts:

• ASW in WWII - Forces
• ASW in WWII - Sensors
• ASW in WWII - Weapons
• Liberty Ships

A French optical telegraph

The discovery of electricity, and the realization that it moved through wires far faster than anyone could measure, quickly sparked interest in using it to send signals. A number of different efforts were made, although most were hindered by attempts to send each letter separately and unambiguously, which in turn meant lots of wires and complex machinery. The first commercial electric telegraph was of this type, but it was an American painter, Samuel Morse, who finally devised a truly practical system. Morse's great innovation was less in what he did than what he didn't do. Instead of multiple wires and complicated equipment, he used a single wire² and a manually-operated "key" to start and stop the flow of current, relying on a trained operator and a code he had devised to send and receive messages.³

WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT

The simplicity of the Morse system, first publicly demonstrated in 1844, saw the telegraph swiftly built out across the industrializing world, with relays amplifying the signal as it passed down the lines. But there was one serious problem: the cables were usually suspended from poles, which worked fine overland, but less well if a large body of water had to be crossed. The first experiment on this was done across the Hooghly River in India in 1839, with Morse himself carrying out similar experiments across New York Harbor three years later. One of the major problems was insulating the electrical wire from the sea. Rubber tended to degrade in seawater or get attacked by marine life, but in 1843, the arrival of gutta-percha, a natural plastic from a Malaysian tree, gave engineers a good solution. Not only did it resist the environmental threats posed by the sea, it could also be easily shaped when hot and then solidified when it cooled, making it easier to manufacture. Ultimately, it would remain vital for cables for nearly a century, until replaced by synthetic plastics.

An early channel cable being laid

Armed with gutta-percha, a telegraph engineer named John Watkins Brett came up with a plan to span the English Channel, connecting the French and British telegraph networks. His initial cable, laid in 1850, was simply a copper wire covered in gutta-percha, and it was so light that lead weights had to be attached as it was played out from Dover to Cap Gris-Nez. Despite rather slapdash manufacture and primitive laying methods, the cable was successfully played out across the Channel, but trouble began when the equipment was connected and gibberish spewed forth. A few messages did get through, enough to preserve Brett's concession from the French government, but when the telegraphers returned the next morning, the line was dead. A fisherman had fouled his anchor on the cable overnight, then hauled it up, and decided to cut off a section to see if there might be something valuable inside. It was the first shot in a war between seafarers and cables that continues to this day.

Over the next year, a second cable was prepared, this one with four conductors, insulated with gutta-percha and protected by hemp and galvanized iron. It weighed 30 times as much per foot as the first cable, and the attempt to lay it was nearly defeated by its weight, which made it run out of the ship faster than planned. Fortunately, extra cable was onboard, and it was successfully landed in France. The problems with the first cable, which each side had initially assumed was due to celebration on the other, were discovered to be the result of inductance and capacitance induced in the cable as it was submerged in seawater, which slowed the signal down and spread it out. It was easy enough to solve by simply sending messages more slowly, although it would be a serious problem for crossing larger bodies of water.

The next few years saw a cable boom within European waters. England was linked to Ireland, Belgium and Holland, and Corsica was connected to both Italy and Sardinia. Attempts to link Sardinia and Algeria were less successful. The first attempt failed because the heavy cable ran out too fast, leaving the cable ship a few miles short of the African coast. Navigational difficulties gave the same result during the second attempt, while the third was thwarted by a unit conversion mixup in the system that controlled how fast the cable ran out, again stranding them a few miles short of Algeria. The Crimean war saw the first military use of the telegraph, with the 1854 bombardment of Bomarsund being reported back to London via Danzig. The next year, the British laid a cable across the Black Sea to provide direct communications with their forces in the Crimea. Because of the urgency of the situation, the majority of the 300-mile cable was a simple insulated conductor, but techniques had improved, and the cable lasted for nearly a year. During this time, senior officials in London and Paris took advantage of this new opportunity to interfere, often giving tactical orders, much to the disgust of the commanders in the field. The French commander, General Pelissier, described the telegraph as "[our] greatest enemy - worse even than the newspapers". But the revolution only went as far as the cable network, and the next war the British fought, against China over restrictions on Opium, was so remote that news of its outbreak didn't reach London for four months. But closer to home, it was beginning to have serious tactical effects. In 1866, undersea cables allowing the Austrian garrison at Lissa to summon help when the Italians appeared, setting up the silliest battle of the early ironclad age.

But the holy grail of undersea cable routes was the North Atlantic, connecting Europe to America and uniting all of the major western nations. This would pose unprecedented problems of length and depth, and it would take extraordinary efforts to bridge that gap. We'll pick up the story there next time.

This chapter opens with a section that I almost really like, pointing out the execrable performance of MacArthur in the Philippines. And then the last word has to go and spoil it. Now, MacArthur is a complicated character, and I think his campaign in New Guinea was one of the great overlooked military masterpieces (unfortunately, it looks like it gets about 4 pages in Two-Ocean War, but the account in Morison's New Guinea and the Marianas is very good) but I also think he should have been sacked the instant he set foot on Australian soil. Based on this account, the performance of the Japanese air attack on the Philippine airbases is one of the very best of the entire war, and the sort of thing that even fairly rudimentary defensive measures could have gone a long way to mitigating. Also, there's not even a hint of acknowledgement that the whole plan was bad from the start. Whatever people may have thought the B-17 could do in 1941, it was not an effective anti-shipping platform and probably couldn't have done all that much to the air bases on Formosa, either, even if MacArthur hadn't let them get destroyed on the ground.

For fairly obvious reasons, Morison gives only the briefest account of the Malaya campaign, which was if anything even more badly conducted than the defense of the Philippines. After reading a book on it, I came away with the impression that the RN had done the best of the three services, and they lost two battleships.

But then we come to the campaign in the Dutch East Indies, which is one of the bits I like best in History of US Naval Operations, as it's almost totally neglected in most histories of the war, even more so than the Philippines. His description of Java Sea is excellent, finding just the right balance between detail and brevity. The one thing that stood out to me is how ineffective the Japanese torpedo attacks are, as my main reference frame for that is the fighting around Guadalcanal, where they did significantly better. But it's nice to finally see Morison hit his stride.

A DASH drone at Pima

But by the mid-50s, sonar ranges were getting close to 10,000 yards, way too far for those kind of depth-charge launchers to be effective. The submarine was moving, maybe unpredictably, and even if it was stationary, the sonar beams were wide and didn't give a precise enough location at range. Obviously, the homing torpedo was going to be at least part of the solution. First developed during WWII, it could handle quite a bit of uncertainty in the submarine's position by listening for the submarine and then homing in to blow it up. Initially, navies expected that the main long-range weapon would be heavyweight homing torpedoes, launched from the ship and wire-guided out to the point where their seekers could pick up the submarine. But it didn't work out that way. The big problem was simply that torpedoes were too slow for this to work well. A 40-kt torpedo, extremely fast for the time, would still take 7.5 minutes to reach a submarine 10,000 yards away, and the submarine could move significantly during that run. The obvious alternative was to deploy a smaller torpedo, probably one originally designed to be dropped by aircraft, through the air right on top of the submarine.

A RAT launcher on De Haven

And the obvious way to get it there was via some sort of rocket or something, which also raised the possibility of carrying a nuclear depth charge. The US did indeed go down this route, first with RAT (Rocket-Assisted Torpedo) and then with ASROC, but there were some problems. Both used unguided rockets, which meant that the torpedo might not land close enough to the submarine, and the ASROC installation itself was fairly big and expensive. That in turn raised questions about the ability to refit it to many of the older destroyers that were going to be the backbone of the ASW force well into the 70s. The solution they found to this problem would be in many ways years ahead of its time, but also an odd cul-de-sac in the development of military technology: the Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter, better known as DASH.

A Gyrodyne Rotocycle

DASH, more formally the QH-50, was based on the Gyrodyne Rotorcyle, about the smallest thing that can actually be called a helicopter instead of just an elaborate way to kill yourself. In particular, the coaxial rotors gave it a small footprint, making it easy to land on the sort of flight deck that could easily be fitted to the Sumner and Gearing class destroyers, while getting rid of the pilot would give it the payload to carry a torpedo or two, or maybe a nuclear depth bomb. It wasn't the most sophisticated helicopter in the world, or the safest, but that was considered acceptable. As an alternative to ASROC, it could deliver its weapon more accurately, and if the mean time between crashes was even a couple dozen hours, then in wartime, it would also be cheaper per weapon delivered.

A DSN-1 landing on Hazelwood with a pilot aboard for safety

The initial contract was placed with Gyrodone in April 1958, and required that the drone be capable of being placed within 200 yards of a target at 10,000 yards, which would hopefully be close enough for the Mk 43 torpedo it carried to be able to pick it up. The first version, designated DSN-1,¹ entered tests in 1960, but could barely lift a single Mk 43. To increase lifting capacity, the piston engine used on the DSN-1 was replaced by a Boeing T50 turboshaft engine. This also allowed the volatile and dangerous avgas to be ditched in favor of jet fuel, which was much more difficult to ignite. The initial operational version, the QH-50C, joined the fleet in 1963, the world's first armed unmanned aerial vehicle.

USS Radford with a DASH on her flight deck

It arrived into a fleet that had spent the last several years refitting destroyers, mostly WWII-era Sumners and Gearings, to carry it. To push off the cost of replacing the massive fleet of wartime destroyers, the USN had instituted the Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization Program, or FRAM. One part of FRAM was the addition of a small flight deck and hangar for DASH aft, where the ships had originally carried torpedoes and 40 mm AA guns, along with a torpedo workshop, maintenance facilities for the drone itself, firefighting equipment in case of a crash and 2,500 gallons of aviation fuel storage.

DASH and its operator aboard USS Nicholas

Operation was, at least in theory, relatively simple. The drone would be moved out of the hangar and made ready on the deck, where a local controller would order the takeoff. Controls were relatively simple, two knobs to set heading and altitude, and a stick to control the direction of movement. Once the drone was safely airborne, control would be passed to an operator in the CIC, whose scope combined the picture from the ship's sonar and local air-search radar. Once the drone was over the target, the payload (two Mk 44s or one Mk 46 for the QH-50C, two Mk 46s for the more powerful QH-50D, or a W44 nuclear depth bomb for either type) would be dropped, and the operator in the CIC would bring the drone back. Once it was close enough to the ship, the deck operator would take control back and steer it in for a landing. In calm seas, this involved simply placing it over the deck and reducing altitude until the skids reached the deck, at which point a switch in the skid would automatically change the rotor pitch to keep the drone there. For rougher weather, the drone was equipped to lower a line to the deck, which could be secured and used to guide it in.

DASH undergoing maintenance in a hangar

The problem was that while this describes an ideal mission, DASH performance was often far from ideal. In an attempt to reduce cost, most of the control system was entirely non-redundant, so any failure of the electronics, either on the drone or on the ship, meant that a $100,000 DASH² was going for a swim. Over half of the DASHs ever built were lost in service,³ about 80% to electronic failures, 10% to pilot error, and 10% to other causes. The electrical failures were exacerbated by sensitivity to electromagnetic interference and insufficient maintenance personnel, while a rather clumsy interface contributed to piloting issues.⁴ And it turned out that the math behind DASH as the cheap alternative to ASROC had a fundamental flaw. An ASROC booster ran about $5000, so in wartime, the drone would pay for itself in just 20 attacks. But DASH required a lot more peacetime training than did ASROC, and in those circumstances, the loss rate, one per 80 flight hours in 1968, was simply unacceptable. That year, production was terminated, and the system was quickly removed from any ship that had another long-range ASW weapon. Critics would later contend that it was accepted for service primarily because it would have been far too embarrassing to not buy it after refitting all of the FRAM destroyers with helipads.

A Japanese DASH

But that wasn't quite the entire story of DASH. A few drones were modified with TV cameras and used to spot gunfire off Vietnam under the codename "SNOOPY". They were reasonably successful in this role, probably because of improved electronics, and pioneered what has since become the defining role for drones. 17 were sold to Japan, which continued to operate them until 1977, with only three reported lost during that time.⁵ A few ended up in other roles, like calibration targets at White Sands Missile Range, which used them until the mid-2000s.

A DASH with a Fire Scout at Pax River

Even if the reliability issues had been solved, DASH probably wouldn't have lasted all that much longer. Sonar ranges had continued to increase, and any attack on targets out in the convergence zone would require the aircraft to be able to pinpoint a target before dropping the torpedo. While there was an investigation of a DASH variant that also carried sonobuoys, the role instead went to the SH-2 Seasprite, a small manned helicopter that also carried a surface-search radar, an important feature in a world increasingly concerned with anti-ship missiles. But ultimately, DASH would prove to be ahead of its time. UAVs returned to the fleet with systems like Pioneer in the late 80s, although the focus has remained on surveillance systems. The only real competitor DASH has had in a payload delivery role was Fire Scout, which proved even shorter-lived, but systems like ScanEagle and V-BAT remain a vital part of the USN's surveillance arsenal today.

One point I think Morison doesn't cover is the sheer improbability of the attack. It was a massive logistical stretch for the Japanese to pull off, with the carriers barely having practiced the necessary underway refueling techniques before departing, and the torpedoes arriving only two days before the attack. And it was only a few months earlier that the Japanese had even gotten enough carriers to pull off the attack. While it's easy to draw comparisons to Taranto, the British there were attacking at night, which meant they didn't have to worry about Italian aircraft, either over the target or attacking the carriers. The Japanese didn't have the ability to make a night attack like that, which meant that a lot of their force was going to have to be dedicated to hitting the American airbases, and Shokaku and Ziukaku didn't join the fleet until the second half of 1941. Without their airgroups, it would have been impossible to both hit the airfields hard enough to protect the carriers and do significant damage to the fleet.¹ And the whole plan was insanely risky, and could have basically come unglued if, say, the duty officer had taken the radar operator's warnings more seriously. Ships would have been buttoned up and AA guns manned, and while we can't say for certain what would have happened, the vast majority of the damage done during the attack happened in those critical first few minutes.

All of this makes a lot more sense of the focus by Kimmel and Short on keeping safe from sabotage and being ready to support a war further west. It's fairly common for people to assume that the enemy won't do something extremely stupid and risky, which means these plans succeed more often than they probably should. (For another example, see the Fall of France.) I do appreciate that Morison did his best to be fair to Kimmel and Short, and personally think there's a lot less excuse for commanders in the western Pacific, who we'll come to in the next chapter.

The narrative of the attack is pretty good so far as it goes, although with a few mistakes for reasons I don't understand at this remove. Notably, the bombs that sunk Arizona came from level-bombing Kates and not dive-bombing Vals, and she was formally decommissioned in three weeks after the attack. Also, for some unaccountable reason, he describes California as being the youngest ship there, even though West Virginia was two years newer. One thing I was expecting that didn't turn up was a longer discussion of the potential for an attack on the base facilities, which is often cited as a major mistake made by the Japanese. Morison himself indulges in some of this in Rising Sun in the Pacific, but here, it's relegated to only a sentence or two. I don't find the theory particularly convincing, as it relies on both a complete misunderstanding of Japanese strategic thought and a lot of worst-case theorizing about the effects of an attack, which more sober analysis shows would have taken maybe a few months to repair, not years.

I was also somewhat surprised by the lack of discussion of a "third wave", often cited as another mistake due to its presence in the movie Tora, Tora, Tora. In fact, it was entirely a myth created by Mitsuo Fuchida, and between the risk of American carriers appearing and the time required to recover, rearm and launch the planes, it would have been night when the planes returned, and the Japanese were not trained for night landings. But it turned out that Fuchida didn't even start talking about the third wave until 1963, when this book was written, so it was able to evade several decades of dubious history.

And then there's the weirdly long section on responsibility, which makes little sense at this remove. I suspect that it's here because "FDR knew about Pearl Harbor" was the 1963 equivalent of "9/11 was an inside job" today, and Morison doesn't seem shy about tying the history he's writing into the demands of the present day. This is made entirely obvious at the end of the chapter, but there are flashes elsewhere in what we've read so far. In retrospect, this tendency probably also explains the semi-conspiratorial tone of Chapter 1, and will hopefully not dominate other sections in the same way, even if he makes brief asides about it.

Also, for those interested, I wrote my own account of the battleships during Pearl Harbor as well as the aftermath.

Admiral Andrei Popov

The story of these ships has its origins in the 1860s, when Russia was forbidden by the treaty that ended the Crimean War from operating more than half a dozen 800-ton¹ coastal defense ships in the Black Sea. This was pretty small, particularly with the advent of ironclads, and thought soon turned to how to get the most out of this tonnage. It was clearly not enough for any conventional ironclad that could be competitive with vessels laid down by possible enemies like Turkey and Austria, so one Russian officer, Andrei Popov, proposed something radical. He had noticed that ironclads were generally growing shorter relative to their beam, as this made it more efficient to carry armor on a given displacement. Taken to its logical conclusion, a circular vessel would make most efficient use of armor, and while this would probably not be great for seakeeping or speed, a few small test boats worked well enough and it would also minimize draft, a serious concern for vessels designed to work in the shallow waters of the Crimean coast.

In 1870, as work was underway on early designs, Popov's job was made easier when Russia repudiated the restrictions on naval forces in the Black Sea. Prussian forces were currently besieging Paris, and Russia had helped them out by mobilizing troops on the Austrian border, leaving Britain diplomatically isolated. This was soon confirmed, with the only restriction being that any Russian warships built in the Black Sea had to stay there. But the Russians had fastened onto the circular design, soon christened popkovas by the Emperor in honor of their designer, and their finances were not in a state to support a proper seagoing fleet in the Black Sea, so they ordered one of the strange ironclads built in St. Petersburg, then disassembled and transported to Nikolaev, in modern Ukraine, where it would be reassembled. The ship, named Novgorod and placed into service in 1874, was 101' across and displaced 2700 tons fully-loaded. Armament was a pair of 11" breech-loading rifles mounted in a central barbette, with the circular design providing an unmatched field of fire, while a 9" belt protected the entire hull. Six shafts drove the ship to the rather dismal speed of 6.5 kts, although tests later showed that the outboard pair of shafts contributed very little, and the propellers were removed in 1876.

Novgorod under construction showing her six props

Originally, the plan had been to build a second unit, Kiev, to the same design, but after a pause to ensure that Novgorod was completed vaguely on schedule, Popov convinced the Emperor that the new ship should be made bigger to carry heavier guns and thicker armor. The redesign was accompanied by a new name, Vitse-admiral Popov, in honor of the ship's designer. Diameter was increased to 120' (later 126' when wood and copper was added to combat fouling) and displacement rose to 3,600 tons fully-loaded. The guns were now 12", and the main belt was 9" over 7" wrought iron. The inner shafts had two engines instead of one, and the increased horsepower allowed the ship to reach 8.5 kts.

A model of Novgorod

In service, neither ship was a roaring success, even by the extremely low standards of the Russian Navy of the era. They were very slow, and could be brought to a standstill by heavy weather. Worse, the extremely blunt hulls meant that the rudder was largely ineffective, with a full circle under rudder alone taking as much as 45 minutes to complete. But they did have six shafts, and when using the engines, they proved very maneuverable, able to spin in place quite easily. This led to tales that they were completely uncontrollable, which have colored popular perception of the two ships to this day. They served without distinction in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, and remained on the books until 1903, when both ships were in extremely poor condition and listed for disposal.

Vitse-admiral Popov

But the two ironclads were not the end of Popov's dreams of circular ships. He wanted a full-sized circular ironclad of 6,700 tons, which he hoped would be capable of 14 kts, but when the Russians asked William Froude to conduct tank testing of the hull form, he found that it would require five times the horsepower of a conventional ship to reach that speed. But by lengthening the circular hull somewhat, Froude discovered that the power requirements could be brought down significantly, while maintaining the steadiness that characterized the circular ships. Popov immediately seized on this design for future ironclads, although it was decided that they should get some experience with this new hull form at sea before committing to a fleet. Fortunately for him, the Imperial Yacht Livadiia had recently been wrecked, and he was allowed to build a new ship of the same name with an elliptical hull. She would be big enough (4,400 tons) to prove the concept, but wouldn't endanger anything vital if it didn't work.

Livadiia

Because of the limits on Russian facilities in the Black Sea, Livadiia would be built in Britain. With a beam of 153' and a length of 260', she was certainly shaped like nothing else, but despite the new hull shape, she managed to make at least half a knot over her 14-kt design speed,² and the power per ton required to drive her at 13 kts was very similar to that required by HMS Penelope, of the same length but only a third the beam. Maneuverability was also good, but the drawbacks of the hull form were discovered during her delivery voyage to the Black Sea. While crossing the Bay of Biscay in October 1880, she was caught in a fairly serious storm, with waves estimated at 20-25'. Throughout, she was exceedingly steady, but her flat bottom and 7' draft meant that she suffered from serious slamming, with the waves under the bow hitting with such force that those aboard found it difficult to believe she hadn't run into a solid object.

The storm did fairly extensive damage, and Livadiia was forced to make for Spain, where attempts at repair were stymied by the fact that no drydock available was wide enough to accommodate the ship.³ After seven months, she was able to resume her journey, but she arrived to a very different Russia than she had been expecting. In March 1881, while Livadiia was in Spain, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, and his successor Alexander III was skeptical of Popov and viewed Livadiia as a waste of money. She was quickly stripped out and left to rot, bringing to an end Popov's dream of a fleet of battleships with his unique hull form.

Novgorod shortly after entering service

But if Livadiia was a success, then that raises the question of why her elliptical hull remains entirely unique in the history of shipbuilding. Surely someone else would have needed the unusual set of characteristics she possessed, and her design was reasonably well-known at the time. I suspect that the answer lies less in the efficiency of the elliptical hull than in the inefficiency of so much else in 1880. Froude had built his first towing tank only a decade before, and Penelope, which Livadiia was compared to, was commissioned even before that. William Hovgaard credits the vessel's propulsive efficiency to favorable placement of the propellers, something that was going from a random accident to the result of careful study during this era. And I also suspect that the efficiency of the elliptical hull falls off at higher speeds, which were rapidly becoming necessary during the 1880s. As such, even while the idea of a short, fat ship reappears every few decades, modern proposals invariably have a more conventional hull form.

Overhauls are Russian Battleships Part 2, Carrier Doom Part 3, Early US Battleships, Ship Structure and Strength, Squalus, The Pre-Battlecruisers, Hornet Part 2 and for 2025, The 2024 Brown Award Post, We need to talk about ship names and reader Alex's review of the RAF Museum Cosford.

Also worth commenting briefly on is that, yeah, in retrospect the fall of France was pretty improbable. The German generals who told Hitler it would be a disaster were, by conventional lights, quite right, and it wouldn't have taken all that much for it to actually be a disaster. But instead, France fell, and we got the war as we now know it.

Beyond that, we're seeing Morison's tendency (with one notable exception) to lionize American figures on full display here. King is also famous as "the most even-tempered man in the Navy - always in a rage", which doesn't really come across in the description. He was definitely a competent and effective admiral, but I don't think Morison's superlatives are entirely deserved.

On the Pacific side, there's more of the same problems that showed up in the first chapter. I will note, for instance, that his count of fleet strength doesn't include Repulse and Prince of Wales at Singapore, or the Dutch and Australian cruisers in the southwest Pacific. His evaluation of Yamamoto's strategy is also off. The basic outline is not difficult to follow given modern sources. Yamamoto was trying to deliver a major shock to the US in hopes of forcing us out of the war, and, failing that, to give Japan time to expand and fortify her perimeter. I don't think his account of the politics on Japan's side is much better, but it's been a while since I read much on this. If anyone is interested in a recent and quite readable book on this, I'd recommend Tower of Skulls by Richard B Frank (Amazon affiliate link).

Despite my criticisms, I think this chapter was an improvement on the last one. The Atlantic side was the first time we've seen Morison's genius for describing the operational side of things, and next time out, we'll get his account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which will play far more to the book's strengths.