A week ago, I visited the Puget Sound Coast Artillery Museum in Fort Worden, Washington, at the gateway to Puget Sound. Tomorrow, September 7th, 2026, is their last day after 50 years.¹ And I, crazy person that I am, said "well, I'm going to be on the West Coast anyway, might as well tack on a couple days and see it before it closes." So I left Lord Nelson among the Pokemon people of San Francisco and flew up to Seattle, then drove out to see what there was. And it was a nice little museum. It's clearly a smaller operation, with laminated printouts for signage and displays that show what they have, rather than a carefully-selected subset of the collection to best tell the story they're trying to tell. But those can be lovely and charming. That was more or less how the 45th Infantry Museum felt, and I regularly miss it now that it's been replaced by something more modern and sterile. As for this museum, well, it wasn't going to set the world alight. It wasn't even the best one I visited that day. (Turner Joy down in Bremerton is one of the best-executed museum ships I've ever seen. Review coming at some point soon.) But they did a pretty good job of telling the story of coastal defenses in the early 20th century, and it's a story that is pretty hard to find elsewhere. I've tried quite often to visit coastal fortifications, and it's generally been a frustrating experience in some dimension. The concrete may be there, but the stories aren't. The Fort MacArthur museum seems to have folded at some point in the last couple years, and there wasn't anything in the area around San Francisco except for Fort Point, which is from an older generation. Here, there was not only a place to learn the stories, but also several lovely batteries to go hike around, and I'm sad that only the second half will remain for visitors after tomorrow.

But at the same time, isn't this the fundamental paradox of working in history? I'll never see a battleship at sea, her broadside throwing a dozen tons of steel and explosives at the enemy and shaking everything around. I was born too late for that, but I'm still fascinated by it, and I've spent a decade trying my best to capture a facsimile of that and so much else that is, fundamentally, lost to the mists of time. Museums are some of our best tools to fight back against time, to preserve bits from the flow and show them off to the public. I think that's why I love them so much. At their best, they're shrines to the past, to things interesting in their own right, things worth remembering.

So I came here, to this little town on the edge of Washington State, to take a look at this before it's gone. To capture that experience for myself before it's gone, and to share what I can of that with the internet. And maybe, if I'm very lucky, with readers in the distant future who are, for whatever reason, interested in this little museum that, for half a century, told the story of the men who guarded Puget Sound. They created a lovely little space, covering everything from the strategic reasons for the fort to the man it was named after to the experience of being stationed there throughout the fort's history. There was a little bit of detail on the weapons, and some lovely dioramas of the various batteries installed over the years. There was a room with a fire control table, although annoyingly little detail on how the process worked, and a room full of a random collection of guns that someone had, most of which had no connection to the fort. There was a rack of fake shells and real powder cans, and a video that explained that the coastal defense mortars worked because "although the sides of the ship were armored, most ships at the time still had wooden decks".² It had docents who were very nice, even when I insisted on arguing with their video. It was slightly weird and charming and I'm glad I got to see it before it was gone, and to write this obituary, at least for the physical space. They're going to try to continue digitally at https://coastartillery.org/, and I wish them the best of luck.

But it's also a lesson for those who are interested in history.³ Keeping this stuff doesn't just happen. It takes work to keep open the peepholes in the curtain of time, and to get people to look through them. And, yes, the artifacts will go off to different places, and the books will still exist, but it won't be here, within an easy hike of one of the best collections of preserved concrete in the country. And we'll lose the men and women who spent years working with the material, and who probably heard some stories from the men who were there that never got written down. So if you have the ability, support preservation efforts. Volunteer. Donate. Go visit, and see this stuff, so that if someday that museum shuts down, at least you can say you went and peeked through before time won and closed the hole.

The basic setup I used for all of these tests was fairly simple. I set up a grid of 10 medium buildings (130' x 80') in CMO and then on the opposite side set up a nearby airbase with 12 planes of the type under test. All were given the same loadout (usually the heaviest one for the weapon in question) and set up to attack one at a time, using only one bomb at a time on a given target to prevent overkill from messing up my numbers. I would run the scenario until either all of the targets were destroyed or all of the planes had flown their sorties. Variables included the plane, the weapon, attack altitude and environmental conditions (day/night and weather).

For my first test, I ran a simple scenario: a modern fighter (Super Hornet) using dumb bombs, able to attack as low as it liked, with no weather conditions or other problems. The results were pretty straightforward:

So at this point, it's probably worth talking a bit about methodology. I'm going to count as a hit any bomb which does damage to the target, which can include both direct hits (16 of the 27 here, and, yes, many buildings survived direct hits) and bombs that don't hit directly but still do damage. Average miss counts the distance as 0 for direct hits, which is obviously somewhat optimistic (the target does have dimensions, so add maybe 25-30' to get actual CEP). For the next run, let's use the same loadout, but raise the altitude to 12,000', the sort of altitude you'd use if you wanted to avoid being shot at with MANPADS and guys with rifles.

Obviously, performance this time was significantly worse, with a lot of the bombs falling so far wide that they did no damage, although there were also 12 direct hits on the 10 buildings, which strongly suggests that the direct hits do the vast majority of the damage, an impression confirmed by later tests. That said, this one took long enough that several of the buildings were only damaged by the bombs and ultimately destroyed by fire. But the obvious next question is how this would work with bigger bombs, so I replaced the Mk 82s (500 lb) with Mk 83s (1000 lb) and ran the scenario again.

We see slightly better performance here, mostly due to the greater lethal radius of the bombs. In terms of total tonnage, it took slightly more Mk 83s, but fewer sorties because there were more bombs per plane. But it's also worth going up the final step and seeing what happens if we use 2000 lb Mk 84s.

This was the clear winner in terms of number of bombs required, although relative to the Mk 83, 6 sorties were required rather than 5 because the plane could only carry half of the bomb load. But with that baseline out of the way, I think I'm going to go with the Mk 83 for further tests with factors that could affect unguided bombs. First, I'll get a low-altitude baseline for comparison in various conditions:

It's worth noting that the low-level attack with Mk 83s required only about half the bombs that the Mk 82 version did, largely because the bombs were far more likely to destroy the building in a single hit. This definitely confirms the decision to use the Mk 83 as my standard test bomb when possible. Next, let's see what effect night has on the attack.

This test showed very slightly worse performance in terms of miss distance than the low-level day attack (hit percentage was higher, but the only "miss" in the day test was a bomb that malfunctioned). But it's not really that surprising that a fully kitted-out Super Hornet, with ATFLIR and ASG-34 IRST can deliver weapons nearly as effectively in the dark. Let's see how well that holds up to going to medium altitude.

The medium altitude results are quite similar to the daytime ones in terms of average miss distance and total bombs required. Hit percentage was substantially higher, although I think this is probably not the best metric to evaluate these tests by. It counts any bomb which does any damage, so it's easy enough for a lot of bombs landing 250'+ out, which really aren't doing very much to the building, to count as hits.

But now that we have a modern baseline, it's time to start looking back. I'm going to start with one of the earliest multirole fighters in this database,¹ the F-4J Phantom II, largely because it can carry the same Mk 83 bombs that I've been using here. We'll start at low altitude.

Here, we see a significant falloff in ability to do damage. Most of the bombs are still getting close enough to do damage, but it's gone from 14 to 26 to wipe out all the buildings. I'm going to try taking this to altitude next, although there's an obvious problem waiting. The Phantom's bombload is only 3 bombs, and it took 38 for the Super Hornets to destroy all the buildings from medium altitude. I'm going to set each of the Phantoms up to fly twice, to ensure a reasonable number of bombs get used.

This was obviously a massively different result than the Hornets from medium altitude, and a good indication of why the arrival of PGMs was so revolutionary. At the same time, the Phantom was not exactly known for being one of the best bombing platforms of the day, so let's try a different plane, the 1975 version of the A-6 Intruder, again attacking from medium altitude.²

This was an interesting comparison to the Phantom. The average performance was significantly better, with a lot fewer genuine flyers landing 1000'+ from the target, but it wasn't all that much better at actually landing the sort of hits that counted. Yes, it got all buildings in 74 bombs instead of 8/10 in 72, but most of the "hits" were 200'+ away and didn't do all that much damage.

I ran a night test with the Phantoms, and the results were extremely similar to the day test, at least until I tried to send out the second wave and it wouldn't launch, because that bombing mission was day-only. I'm not sure how I got the first flight off, or how the game models night in general, but I think this post has run its course. I'll pick up the subject later.

Also, on an unrelated note, CMO has just rolled out multiplayer for the standard game, so if anyone is interested in contributing to future posts like this by letting me put humans on multiple sides, let me know. To be clear, this is less "let's see who is better" and more research like in this post. But I'm curious to see what I can do in cases where I'm less limited by my ability to script things.

Overhauls are Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 1, Falklands Part 5, The Battleship of the Future?, Wedding Decorations, A Brief Overview of the United States Fleet, Naval Radar - More Advanced Stuff, Speed and Range in Battleships, and for 2025, SCUBA Parts one and two, The Tanker War Part 2 and Exotic Hulls Part 1.

The most obvious problem that any series like this is going to run into is simply how to divide up the war, because even with 26 episodes, a lot is going to be left out. TWAW handled this particularly well, abandoning any real pretense that it was going to be comprehensive and instead making each episode a self-contained story about a specific aspect of the war. This could be a battle or a campaign, the home-front experience of some nation or it could be something narrower like the Holocaust or the occupation of Holland. Particularly groundbreaking at the time was a significant focus on Russian experience during the war, and those portions were still some of the most interesting to me, as it's not an area I've studied extensively. But more importantly, each story generally does a really good job of balancing the human stories with the broad operational story of the war. Often history focuses either on "what happened and why?" or on "what was it like to be there?", and TWAW manages to balance both rather well.

But more than that, there's a definite choice to present a wide array of different pieces of the war to choose from. The Burma episode (a particular standout) covers not only the back-and-forth fighting and interviews soldiers from both sides about the experience of the war, from battle to mud, but also includes a section about Vera Lynn's morale tour to the theater. There's some really lovely variety, and it shows what can be done with the documentary format when the people doing it take seriously their responsibility both as historians and as producers of entertainment. I also respect its commitment to using archive footage, which is extensive, and almost all of the people interviewed are speaking from first-hand experience.

This isn't to say that the series is perfect. Some of this is simply a matter of age and improved historical understanding of the events in question. On the whole, I think they did very well for the time, and I was frequently surprised at what they got right, but there are a few areas worth mentioning where they didn't. One obvious example is Ultra, which was revealed to the public a year or so after the series was broadcast, and significantly changed our understanding of the Battle of the Atlantic, among others. On the other hand, the current picture makes Ultra so prominent that it's almost a useful corrective. Another is their episode on the German home front, which draws heavily on Albert Speer's version of events (including interviewing him), another person history (and by history, I mostly mean Adam Tooze) has not been kind to. And I think their episode on the atomic bombing is a bit too sympathetic to the view that Japan would have surrendered without the bombs being dropped. There's probably other errors I didn't catch, but that's always a risk when dealing with older works of history, and in at least some cases, the quality is high enough to be worth that tradeoff.

I only have two major complaints about the series. First, I think it generally does not do a particularly good job of dealing with the naval aspect of the war. The only episode dedicated to naval matters covers the Battle of the Atlantic, and coverage elsewhere is spotty. A lot of this is probably downstream of their admirable commitment to the use of real footage and interviews with participants, and the simple fact that naval battles are hard to film compared to their counterparts in the air and particularly on land, limiting how much raw material they had to work with, and it was generally done well enough that I didn't find it too irritating most of the time.

Second, the series' coverage of the Pacific War is very limited. Of the 26 episodes, only five are about the Asia-Pacific side of the war: one on the early Japanese victories, one on Burma, one on the Japanese experience during the war, one on the atomic bombing and the Japanese surrender and one to cover the entirety of combat in the Pacific from 1943 to 1945.¹ The last one in particular is clearly overstretched for a single episode, and the situation was made far worse by the selection of a director, John Pett, whose style was entirely unsuited to telling that story, and who turned in the worst example of ignoring naval aspects of the entire series. Pett also did the episodes for Burma and the Normandy landings, and in all three concentrated largely on the experience of the men on the front lines. This was an entirely reasonable decision for the other two episodes, both of which cover relatively simple campaigns where the guy with the rifle is clearly at the center. But it completely fails when it's used on the episode with the largest scope in the entire series. The only naval battle to get any serious coverage is Philippine Sea, with 9 minutes of a 52-minute episode. There's a few minutes on the experience of being under Kamikaze attack at the end, but three-quarters of the episode's runtime is taken up by a discussion of fighting ashore, most notably Tarawa and Iwo Jima, sections that felt so padded that I initially suspected that the episode had been originally planned as two separate episodes, hastily stitched together at the last minute, before I went digging and confirmed that, no, this was intentional.

The handling of Leyte Gulf was particularly bad. There's a nice 20-second setup for a quick description of the battle, laying out roughly where everything is, and I was fully prepared for at least a few minutes of discussion of some of the most interesting actions of the war. Instead, the setup is followed series of pans over still photos of the battles, and the narration "After a series of confused engagements hundreds of miles apart, the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered heavy losses. It ceased to be an effective fighting force." Then things move on to land fighting in the Philippines. The largest naval battle in human history got the same amount of screentime as the bombing of Darwin or the rocket bombardment of Okinawa, and half the time that was spent showing newsreel footage of Peleliu with neither narration nor interview voiceovers.

Pett said in an interview that he wanted to do a naval battle, but didn't have the footage for it, and I agree that this is probably true if he was wanting to do 10 minutes of basically unbroken newsreel footage on Leyte Gulf. But I'm pretty sure there's enough out there that a clever filmmaker who wanted to talk about the battle would have been able to give it at least a few minutes without actively cheating. Interview a few participants (Leon Kintberger, captain of Hoel, was still alive at the time) and use them talking to the camera to pad things out. Use graphics to illustrate where everyone was. And get off your high horse about not having enough footage that's 100% accurate, because you illustrated a lot of Philippine Sea with footage of Corsairs landing at dusk despite the fact that there were a grand total of four of them with TF 58 during that battle. Show the battle line at Surigao doing a bombardment. Find some footage of one of the carriers in Taffy 3 doing something. Or if you absolutely cannot bring yourself to do that, spend 10 minutes on the experience of the fleet, because I know there's plenty of footage of that.

But that one episode aside, it's a remarkably good series. The use of almost entirely real footage makes it visually distinct, and the tone is serious rather than sensational. One failed episode aside, I've never seen a better exploration of WWII in documentary form, and I don't think I ever will.

A C-1 Trader

The Navy ultimately chose to procure the C-1 Trader, a variant of their existing S-2 Tracker ASW aircraft with an enlarged fuselage. Entering service in 1956, the Trader would go on to serve for three decades in the USN, ultimately becoming the last operational piston-engined aircraft to fly from American carriers. But it was slow and limited in range, and, more importantly, it was soon unable to carry the largest jet engines in use by the fleet. The Navy again turned to Grumman to adapt an existing design with a new fuselage, turning the E-2 Hawkeye into the C-2 Greyhound. Ultimately, it would serve for almost 60 years until the growth of jet engines, in particular the F135 for the F-35C, caused the Navy to procure a new COD airplane capable of carrying it. The winner in this case was the CMV-22,² based on the V-22 Osprey beloved of the Marines and loathed by budget analysts.

The Hercules aboard Forrestal

But while only three aircraft have actually served in the COD role since the mid-50s, there have been numerous other proposals, often for larger and longer-ranged aircraft. In 1963, looking for an emergency option that could better the C-1 Trader's range, the Navy carried out tests aboard Forrestal using a barely-modified KC-130F Hercules borrowed from the Marines. A pair of experienced carrier aviators were checked out on the Hercules and sent to conduct the tests about 500 miles out in the Atlantic. They were able to successfully conduct 29 touch-and-go landings, 21 full stop landings and 21 takeoffs, all without the assistance of the carrier's catapults and arresting gear. Famously, one test saw the Hercules stop opposite the ship's island with "Look Ma, No Hook" painted on the side, and it set a record for the heaviest aircraft operated from a carrier that stands to this day. But there were also problems. The biggest is that while it was technically possible, getting the necessary stopping distances required reversing their engines 3-4' off the deck, a maneuver that is generally frowned upon. The second was that the C-130 is a very big airplane by carrier standards, and landed straight down the deck instead of using the angle, which required the deck to be almost entirely clear of other aircraft. Since the days of Langley, the USN has kept a lot of planes on deck, so even landing a C-130 for five minutes would be extremely disruptive to normal operations, and it was way too large to park out of the way if something went wrong or they needed to wait. As a result of all this, despite the success of the tests, the procedure has never been repeated.

A C-2 lands aboard Lincoln

The Navy was still interested in the idea of a COD plane with more range and capacity than the C-2, and conducted a number of studies over the years. Because it was likely to be a small fleet, and the available funds were limited, very few of these were designed from scratch. Some were intended, like the C-2, to share commonality with other carrier aircraft,³ while others were based on whatever sub-C-130 transport was on the drawing board at the time. But the most interesting were a few proposals to use airliners as the basis for COD planes.

A 737-200 in gray with "United" on the side, so it's basically a USN jet

When I first heard this, I assumed it was a joke, or possibly the result of a gross violation of General Order 99. And while much of me still has a hard time believing it's real, and the former airline structures guy is still running around in terror,⁴ the math is just plausible enough to warrant investigation. The first round of proposals came in the early 70s, with a DC-9-10⁵ and a 737 variant of some sort⁶ put forward as candidates. I'm going to focus on the DC-9, as I have a spec sheet for the military version of the DC-9-30 and I don't have anything equivalent for the 737-200Adv.⁷ Both would have been big for carrier operations, but they were significantly smaller than the later members of their family, and just might have squeezed aboard.

A C-9 flies past a carrier, though not to land on it

Now, to be clear, neither would have fit aboard very well, but the biggest problem the C-130 had was its 132' wingspan, while the DC-9-10's was 89' and the 737Adv was about 93'. While this was still significantly wider than anything regularly flown from a carrier (at this point, that was probably the A-3 Skywarrior at 72.5') the extra 40' and the fact that they were planning to use arresting gear and catapults meant that they could slot (probably fairly awkwardly) into the existing flight deck ops instead of having to kick everyone off. Obviously, sticking around might be a problem but COD birds were generally expected to fly aboard, unload, get refueled and then leave again. Of course, other modifications would be required, and McDonnell Douglas planned to fit not only a tailhook, but also a new nosewheel that incorporated catapult fittings and could be extended to give a higher angle of attack for takeoff, an in-flight refueling probe, and strengthened structure to take the loads of carrier operations. Folding wings were even proposed, though don't seem to have been accepted as part of the initial study.

But all of this assumes that it's physically possible to land and take off in the appropriate distances. Sure, you can do it with a C-130, a plane deliberately designed for short-field operations, provided you have enough wind over deck, but these are airliners designed to operate from relatively big runways. They may not chew up tarmac like the first generation of jets, but would they really be small and slow enough to be compatible with the equipment on a carrier?

An F-111B lands on Coral Sea

Let's start by looking at the problem of landing. Per the SAC, for the design mission (10,000 lb of cargo), the C-9B should be landing at around 73,000 lb, with a power-off stall speed of 85 kts. If we assume 40 knots wind-over-deck, then it's going into the arresting gear at something like 45 kts, but it's also going to be landing at a similar weight to the weight the A-3 Skywarrior, the heaviest plane to regularly operate from a carrier, took off. But weight is only half the story. Speed is the other half, and it's here that I found something surprising. Looking through possible comparison aircraft, I found the F-111B, the result of an extremely dumb attempt to turn an Air Force light bomber into a Navy missile-slinger. It was cancelled before entering service, but it was definitely carrier-capable and even flew a few carrier tests. And at the maximum listed landing weight of 57,000 lb, it was stalling at about 100 kts, for a speed relative to the deck of 60 kts. If we assume that the arresting gear is basically limited by the kinetic energy of the landing aircraft⁸ then the total kinetic energy of the F-111B is 102.6⁹ while the C-9B comes in at only 74.1, a value lower enough that I'm actually reasonably confident that this could have worked, structural issues aside.

A Skywarrior prepares to launch, also from Coral Sea

But what about launch? Here, we're going to use the A-3B, the heaviest plane regularly to take off from a carrier,¹⁰ as our exemplar. It took off at 73,000 lb and a power-off stall speed of 124 kts. The C-9B's numbers are a takeoff at 99,700 lb and a power-off stall speed of 100 kts. If we again assume 40 kt wind over deck, we see the A-3 needing to get 257.5 from a combination of its engines and the catapult, while the C-9B needs only 179.5. Weirdly, it looks like the C-9 actually has a slightly higher thrust-to-weight ratio than the A-3, so again, we pass a plausibility check for this scheme.¹¹

An F-28 from a carrier navy on final approach, sadly sans tailhook

Despite the fairly impressive performance (10,000 lb of cargo for 2,200 nm) the plans for the C-9 COD went nowhere. But it was far from the only airliner proposed for conversion, either in the early 70s or later. I've already mentioned the Boeing alternative, but at the same time, Hawker-Siddley proposed a version of their HS 748 turboprop airliner, with folding wings and the usual structural modifications, but it seems to have gone even less far than the jet alternatives. Later, in the 80s, when the Navy was looking at a new COD plane to replace the C-2, they seriously investigated the Fokker F28, a somewhat smaller airliner than the DC-9 and 737, but ultimately decided to build more C-2s instead. And it looks like we'll probably never see such proposals again. Modern airliners are less rugged, because structural weight costs money to haul around, and there's just not much demand for a long-range high-capacity COD, particularly now that the CMV-22 has aerial refueling capability. But it's an interesting rabbit hole of history to go down.

The path of CripDiv 1¹

On the morning of October 15th, a group, dubbed "CripDiv 1", was formed to protect the two crippled cruisers, with three light cruisers and eight destroyers to provide close cover. Light carriers Cabot and Cowpens, with a separate group of escorts, would provide air cover. Houston, towed by heavy cruiser Boston, spotted the group shortly after Wichita passed the tow to tug Munsee, and finally reached her station around noon. Meanwhile, Radio Tokyo was putting out increasingly outlandish claims about the damage inflicted on the Americans, prompting parties in the streets. Halsey's staff wondered about how much was deliberate propaganda and how much the Japanese genuinely believed. If they were taking their more outrageous claims (half a million tons of shipping sunk, 53 ships including 16 carriers on the bottom) seriously, then it was plausible that they'd send surface forces out to mop up. One carrier group was sent to hit airfields around Manila on the 15th and 16th, while two others were pulled out of range of Japanese search planes in the hopes of luring them out. Only one was left in position to protect CripDiv 1, an understandably unpopular move among the men of the group. One of the captains of the escorting light cruisers commented "Now I know how a worm on a fishhook must feel" and the name "BaitDiv1" began to circulate.

Houston after the catapult was jettisoned

The men aboard Houston were too busy to think much about that. First, there was still the matter of flooding. They had done a good job stopping the spread of water through the ship, but there were still 6,400 tons of extra water aboard a ship that normally displaced 13,900 tons fully loaded, and a 12° list to starboard. Normally, this might have been evened out by pumping fluids around, but concerns about the ship's structural integrity and the fact that all of the pumps were busy trying to dewater flooded compartments meant that they would need to jettison weight on the starboard side instead. Over the side went the starboard catapult and float plane, searchlights, one of the ship's boats and even some armored doors. The lack of power meant there was no ventilation down below, and crews worked to dewater compartments on the 3rd Deck in conditions so humid that electrical fires spontaneously broke out. There was little fresh water, and the only noise besides that of the damage control efforts was the creaking of the ship's hull. But they were clearly winning their battle, and during the 15th managed to seal off and drain most of the flooded compartments on the 3rd Deck, lightening the ship by 1,900 tons and reducing the list to a mere 8°.

The Japanese hadn't given up on sinking the "remnants of the American fleet", although their efforts on the 15th were less than successful. Three air attacks were launched, although the first failed to locate them, the second ran into the buzzsaw of the one carrier group providing a distant screen for CripDiv 1, and the third turned back after the flight leader developed engine trouble. The 16th dawned inauspiciously aboard Houston, with a major electrical fire breaking out in the emergency steering space. It was brought under control fairly quickly, although it disrupted the power supply from the main emergency generator aft. But the forward generator was still operational, although power available was limited because of contaminated fuel, and it provided power to haul in the anchor chain as the crew prepared to transfer the tow from Boston to tug Pawnee, which had finally arrived to release the heavy cruiser for duty as flagship of CripDiv 1.

Pawnee

Passing the tow was difficult, as there was still a heavy swell, and the fire had disabled Houston's rudder control. As Pawnee came alongside, a wave slammed her into the cruiser's side, where the bigger ship's anchor became entangled on the tug's bulwark. When the seas reversed and the two ships parted, the anchor tore loose and went crashing through the tug's deck. Aboard Houston, the anchor chain went whipping across the deck, threatening the legs of any man who didn't jump over it. Fortunately, there were no actual injuries, and the rest of the process proceeded smoothly. An hour and a half after they started, Pawnee was pulling Houston into position a mile from Canberra, and took over as the guide ship for the group, as the jammed rudder made Houston the more difficult ship to tow.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the Japanese weren't quite done with the group. On the 15th, they had dispatched the Second Striking Force, a pair of heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and a destroyer screen, to annihilate the "remnants" of the fleet. This was exactly what Halsey had wanted, a chance at more of the Japanese surface fleet, but it obviously made the men of CripDiv 1 rather nervous. Another threat came from the other string on Japan's bow, the air attacks they were still sending against the force. For some reason the first strike, 99 planes flying from southern Japan, was recalled before it found the target. The same happened to the Second Striking Force shortly thereafter, when it came under attack by a few planes from Bunker Hill, and the decision to withdraw was confirmed a few hours later when Japanese scouts spotted some of the waiting carriers. They would survive to take a rather inglorious part at Surigao Strait later in the month.

But the second airstrike, 107 planes from Formosa, was more successful, arriving overhead around 1300. The outnumbered fighters from Cabot and Cowpens did excellent work, shooting down many of the attackers² and scattering most of the rest, but a trio of land-based torpedo bombers penetrated the screen around the crippled cruisers. Houston, without power, had to rely on her 20mm guns and what her 40mms could do in manual mode. It wasn't enough, and one of the bombers, a Fran, dropped a torpedo dead astern before crashing a few moments later, riddled by AA fire from the cruiser. The 20mm gunners switched their fire to the torpedo, but their efforts were in vain, and the weapon struck on the starboard side of the stern, underneath the floatplane hangar that took up a lot of the stern and, more importantly, underneath the supply of aviation gasoline for the floatplanes. The hangar hatch was blown into the sky, slicing the crane in two as it went, and most of the men who had been manning the aft pair of 20 mm guns were blown overboard. A massive fire erupted from the volatile avgas, soon spreading to the oil slick that Houston had been trailing, and endangering the men in the water.³ Forward of Houston, Pawnee was also in a tricky situation. She, like Houston, had weathered an air attack at only 4 kts, unable to dodge, and she was shackled to a now-burning cruiser of unknown structural integrity. Her captain ordered the message "WE'LL STAND BY YOU" transmitted to Houston, but also stationed a sailor with an acetylene torch to cut the towing cable in case the cruiser sank.

The diagram from the damage report. Click to enlarge.

But the men still aboard Houston had bigger things on their minds. After the initial shock of the torpedo hit, they rallied, laying out the fire hoses (previously kept rolled up for fear they would be cut by shrapnel during an attack) and rigging pumps. Foam quickly brought the fire, already dwindling as the avgas burned itself out, under control, and within 20 minutes, the crew could turn their attention to the other effects of the hit. The most obvious was that the hangar was now flooded, adding a thousand tons or so to the ship and basically undoing all of the pumping and jettisoning the crew had done so far. To make matters worse, the water in the hangar was sloshing back and forth, not only adding significant free surface to the problems facing the ship, but also threatening to smash through the bulkheads. We'll pick up the story with their attempts to deal with this threat next time.

The canal boat at Port Byron

The first was only sort of naval-related, but fits well with my general interests. The Old Erie Canal Heritage Park at Port Byron is just west of Syracuse and right off I-90, and is dedicated to the history of, unsurprisingly, the Erie Canal, originally opened in 1825. This was one of the great wonders of the era, dramatically easing transportation between the Hudson River Valley and the interior of the continent, and this fairly small park has the remains of one of the locks, as well as an old tavern, where crews would get a beer while their boat was locked through, and a visitor center with some exhibits on the construction and history of the Canal. The tavern has recently been restored, and is a fairly typical slice-of-life history museum, while the museum has recently acquired a replica canal boat, which they are in the process of setting up to open to the public. On the whole, it's a pretty nice way to take a break if you happen to be cruising that part of I-90, although it's probably not worth going particularly far out of your way for.

Afterwards, on the way up to the Canadian border, I visited the 10th Mountain Division and Fort Drum Museum, covering both the Army's activities in northern New York, and the history of the 10th Mountain Division, which is based there, in an area chosen back during WWII for its suitability for training armored forces and general lack of mountains.

A Kiowa Warrior on display outside the museum

The 10th Mountain Division was activated during WWII to give the US expertise in cold-weather and mountain warfare, and the initial population was heavily drawn from members of the Ski Patrol and other expert mountaineers and skiers. One battalion was used to spearhead the "recapture" of Kiska, but other than that, they didn't get overseas until 1945, taking part in the last stages of fighting in northern Italy. After the war the division was disbanded, although veterans went on to found more than half of all ski resorts in the US. It was briefly reactivated as the 10th Infantry Division in the 50s, then shut down again until the mid-80s, when it was reactivated once again as a light, deployable infantry division in the last-ever major expansion of the US Army. Since then, it has been deployed all over, from natural disasters in the US to Somalia and Haiti to dozens of tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite the name, it has no particular expertise in mountain warfare today, although it might be the premier cold-weather force in the US given how cold the area gets.

An M29 Weasel and sled at the museum

The museum itself is pretty small, and I was able to read basically every sign there in about an hour. But it was well-done and quite informative about an area of military activity I'm not particularly familiar with. One section covered the history of the area, from military activities before Europeans arrived through its use as a maneuver area in WWII, where, among other units, the 45th Infantry Division did training. Then it was the history of the 10th Mountain, which trained in Colorado during the war. This is split up between a big WWII room, including an M29 Weasel, and another section about the activation and activities of the modern division. Which comes up basically to the present, because the museum was opened in 2022, so even the Afghanistan War is past rather than present.

A sign in the bathroom

The only real downside is that Fort Drum is kind of in the middle of nowhere, and the museum isn't big enough to be worth going very far out of your way for. But if you happen to be passing through Watertown, it's worth taking some time to visit. It's an interesting and competent museum, and they also took advantage of their bathrooms to deliver a bit more information, something I really like when museums do.

The view down onto the Hudson. Also, it's a really pretty area.

Lastly, we flew out of Albany, and on our way south, we stopped by the Saratoga battlefield. There's a nice visitor center, including a lovely room about the wider global context of the Revolutionary War, and a driving tour of the battlefield, which is managed to keep it looking approximately like it did during the battle itself. It's an interesting chance to get out and study the terrain of a historic battle more or less intact. Looking down on the Hudson from the bluffs makes it abundantly clear why the battle was fought where it was, although we were shorter on time than I would have liked. Still, it was a nice day, and worth a visit if you happen to be in the Albany area. The other thing potentially worth doing in the Albany area is the destroyer escort Slater, which would have had priority except that, like in Buffalo, we were through on a day she was closed.

Something of interest to lots of you is Naval Estimates, a new game that is best described as Rule the Waves, but with a much more detailed engineering simulator built in. Or at least that's the plan. Right now, it's just the weapon and ship design simulator that's available, and it's just set up for the British, c.1905. That said, it's remarkably good for that. I did some checking against a few books, and it does as good a job as you can ask modeling pretty much everything. I plan to do a longer writeup when the battle system is available, but it's still an impressive result for a one-man operation, and Elouda (the creator) is hopefully just getting started.

Overhauls are my review of Batfish, Falklands Part 4*, Museum Ships - United States, Signalling Parts one, two and four, NWAS - ASW Part 1, Zumwalt Parts one and two and for 2025, my review of the Oakland Air Museum, Military Spaceflight Parts eleven and twelve and Allied Military Aircraft Part 1.

Stark next to flagship La Salle in Bahrain

Two months later, even before the escort operations began, the frigate Stark was accidentally attacked by the Iraqis in a tragic case of mistaken identity. Previously, the increasing US involvement in the Gulf had been a matter of little concern, but 37 dead sailors was enough to get the country's attention. Opponents of the administration charged that it was involving the US in an open-ended war against Iran without thinking through what would be needed to win or getting the approval of Congress. Many compared it to the Administration's bungled Lebanon strategy of a few years earlier. A particular concern was that the Iranians usually attacked tankers in retaliation for Iraqi strikes, so the vulnerability of American ships depended heavily on what Saddam did, and he wasn't even vaguely an ally. But he was smart enough to pause attacks on Iranian shipping as the escort operation began. The Iranians were obviously upset, but their actions rarely matched their rhetoric, so the reflagging went ahead and the first convoy was scheduled for late July 1987.

There was controversy over the management of the escort operation even before it started. Central Command (CENTCOM), which controlled forces inside the Gulf, had been set up only four years earlier, and many in the Navy believed that the convoy operation, named Earnest Will, should be run by Pacific Command (PACOM), which was vastly more experienced and controlled everything up to the Strait of Hormuz. Ultimately, though, the existing command structure would be respected, which meant that while the actual convoy would be under CENTCOM control, the bulk of the air support would be provided by the PACOM-owned carrier Constellation in the Arabian Sea. Unfortunately, this was the only air support available, as both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia refused to let the US use their bases, which meant that north of Bahrain, the convoy would be more or less on its own in the face of potential Iranian threats.² The biggest concern was the Chinese-made Silkworm missile, primarily positioned to cover the strait of Hormuz. Elsewhere along the route, the main threat came from the armed speedboats known as "Boghammars".

A Boghammar at sea

Unfortunately, the USN didn't have a great answer to either threat with the available forces. Aegis was not in wide service yet, and while shooting down a Silkworm wasn't impossible, it also wasn't something they could count on. The Boghammars were an even more serious problem, as American training and doctrine had emphasized open-ocean warfare against the Soviets, not fighting speedboats in the confined waters of the Gulf. One thing not well-addressed by this plan was mines, which both Iraq and Iran had laid in considerable quantities. The USN hadn't commissioned a new minesweeper since 1958,³ preferring to rely on NATO allies for the job, but that was obviously impossible here. They did provide some aid to the Saudis and Kuwaitis in clearing a minefield laid by the Iranians near the shipping channel, but mine protection for the convoy would come solely from sailors in the bows with binoculars and rifles, a tactic mostly effective against mines that had come loose and were drifting. The only real solution they had to this was deterrence, threatening severe retaliation against Iran for any attack on the convoys.

Bridgeton

The first convoy would include only two merchant ships, supertanker Bridgeton and LNG carrier Gas Prince, protected by cruiser Fox, destroyer Kidd⁴ and frigate Crommelin. Things didn't get off to a good start when House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin told reporters about the convoy's July 22nd departure date a week before it sailed, but that morning, Fox led the other ships into the Strait of Hormuz. Fighters from Constellation prowled overhead, and radars probed for Silkworms. In the heart of the missile envelope, the escorts moved in close, hoping that if a Silkworm leaked through, it would head for the larger and less vulnerable merchantman. Other merchant ships generally steered clear of the area, with traffic falling to a third of its normal level, but the only opposition was a trio of Iranian Phantoms, quickly scared off by the fire control radars of the escorts.

The next challenge was the Iranian Boghammar base on Abu Musa Island, just outside the western entrance to the Strait, and they passed it shortly after darkness fell. To make things more nerve-wracking, the area near the island was teeming with fishing boats and dhows, and it was impossible to tell on a radar screen if a small boat that refused to get out of the way was attempting to attack or just a sailor who was going on as his ancestors had for centuries. But no Iranians appeared, and the daytime passage past Bahrain went smoothly, even as the Iranians declared it was carrying "prohibited goods of some sort". The only remaining obstacle was a second Boghammar base on Farsi Island, smack in the middle of the Gulf about halfway between Qatar and Kuwait. The original schedule also had the convoy passing Farsi at 3 AM, at least until AWACS covering the area picked up Iranian speedboats operating in the area. Nobody was particularly interested in a night battle with the Boghammars, so the convoy was ordered to stop for a few hours and make the passage after daybreak.

Bridgeton as seen from Kidd

The Iranians had gone home by the time the sun rose, and Fox led the convoy past Farsi Island, with Bridgeton a thousand yards behind her. A few minutes before 7, the temperature had just hit 100°F, and breakfast was being served aboard Bridgeton when an enormous shock struck the ship near the bow, sending objects flying on the bridge a thousand feet aft and knocking a sleeping crewman out of his bunk. Fortunately, nobody was seriously injured, but it soon became clear that the tanker had hit a mine, laid by the Iranians the previous night. Fortunately, being enormous meant that despite taking on 20,000 tons of water, more than the combined displacement of the escorts, Bridgeton was still basically intact and able to continue to Kuwait. Bridgeton's captain, a retired USN officer, suggested that the other vessels get in behind her, using his ship as a "deep-draft minesweeper". The suggestion was accepted with alacrity, although the convoy commander chose to press on, assuming that the Iranians had laid only a single line of mines across the shipping channel. Sentries were stationed in the bow with rifles, but no further mines were encountered⁵ and the convoy reached Kuwait without further incident.

Mine damage to Bridgeton, from a Proceedings article by the ship's captain

But while the damage to Bridgeton was ultimately pretty minor, the damage to the USN's reputation was not. The first convoy had been the subject of considerable media attention, with a number of journalists aboard both Fox and Kidd, and they quite reasonably pointed out the USN's complete lack of preparation for what was in retrospect a pretty obvious threat. The Reagan Administration tried to downplay the whole thing, refusing to retaliate due to the lack of American casualties, while the Iranians blamed it on "the Hand of God" and avoided too obviously gloating about their victory. But it was apparent that if the convoy operation was to continue, the US would need not only better minesweeping capabilities, but also new tactics to deal with the Boghammars. We'll take a look at those next time.

One of the chief problems of any nuclear deterrent is that both the weapons themselves and the command-and-control infrastructure will be prime targets for an enemy's nuclear weapons. The first problem is relatively easy to deal with, and most countries solve it by sending some of their nukes to sea aboard submarines, which are by nature difficult to find. The British, in fact, like this approach so much that they chose it for their entire nuclear arsenal. But nuclear weapons aboard a submarine, while fairly safe, are also of little use if orders to fire them can't be given. The US solves this with a massive command-and-control infrastructure, including not one, not two but three different converted airliners. But there are two problems with this kind of system from a British perspective. First, it's really expensive, and the British can't afford US defense budgets. Second, Britain is considerably closer to potential threats, who should remain nameless but who I will assign the randomly-chosen name "Russia" to, than the US is. This gives even less time to get a message off to any nuclear forces, to say nothing of the problems of communicating with SSBNs.

Obviously, Britain has some infrastructure to get messages to the Continuous At Sea Deterrent. The system is centered at Northwood in the suburbs of London, which in the late 60s was linked to Downing Street by a two-way closed-circuit television system, tested daily. Unlike the US, Britain didn't have a clear constitutional line of succession, so the Prime Minister designated a pair of "nuclear deputies" that would be empowered to make decisions in an emergency. But by the early 70s, the threat of a Soviet "bolt from the blue" taking out the entire command and control infrastructure was simply too great, and a uniquely British solution was found.

Each submarine would be issued with a sealed letter from the Prime Minister, with instructions that it be opened if it appeared to the crew that Britain had been the victim of a nuclear attack and the country was effectively destroyed. A number of indicators have been given for this, the most famous (and most curious) being the absence of the long-wave broadcast of the BBC's Radio 4.¹ If it looks like Britain is gone, then the letter will be opened, revealing which of the four potential options the Prime Minister has taken: 1. Retaliate 2. Don't retaliate 3. Don't do anything yet, but see if you can find a surviving friendly government (the US and Australia are frequently mentioned) and place yourself under their control 4. Use your own judgement

Whichever option is taken would probably be the last official act of His Majesty's Government, and might not even have been by the current Prime Minister. Switching out the letters while a boat is on patrol is obviously impossible, and Tony Blair was rather irritated that one submarine that departed shortly before he took office in 1997 would carry John Major's letter, but the deployment and political schedules don't always align.² As the use of the letters has thankfully been unnecessary and retired PMs are understandably reluctant to speak on the matter, the only man whose letters we have any insight into is Jim Callaghan, Prime Minister from 1976 to 1979, who hinted in an interview that he would have ordered retaliation.

Jim Callaghan

But all of this requires that the British think about nuclear weapons in a fundamentally different way from the United States. The United States makes extensive use of "Permissive Action Links", devices that block the use of nuclear weapons unless a code, known only to higher headquarters, is passed to the unit with the bombs. This was set up to relieve Kennedy/Johnson/McNamaraite fears of some unit in the field flying off the handle and starting WWIII, but means that an extensive and robust communications infrastructure is required to make sure America's nuclear arsenal isn't suddenly rendered useless by a nuclear strike.³ The British have instead chosen to place their trust in the officers and men of the Royal Navy. In theory, if the entire crew of one of the Vanguards went crazy together, they could launch their missiles, but in practice, this threat is minuscule. The launch procedure requires several officers to work together, and even if they were to form a conspiracy to do so without being noticed,⁴ it's almost certain that other members of the crew would interfere if they hadn't gotten proper orders or the confirmation that the Letter of Last Resort was necessary.

As this goes out, Keir Starmer's letters are about to be recalled and destroyed, and Andy Burnham will sit down to write his version. I hope and pray we never find out what is in them, or any of those written by his successors.