Keeping Nimitz in paint

If you ask a linguist, they'll tell you that the use of "she" for ships is a remnant of when English used to be gendered, like most European languages. But English lost that a thousand years ago or so, when Vikings and Frenchmen invaded, each bringing their own gendering system with them, and it eventually just made sense to ditch the whole thing. And that makes sense, as far as it goes, but raises the question of why it was ships that survived with their gender most strongly intact.

My basic answer is that it's because a ship rapidly become almost like a person to her crew, and it would be extremely weird to call a person "it". You can see this in daily life by looking at pets. Even a reluctant pet owner, like yours truly, would be disturbed by someone who insisted on referring to my cat, Dean, as "it". And yes, you could argue that's because cats do actually have genders, but it's not quite that simple. If someone referred to a dairy cow as "it", that would not set off any alarm bells, even though the cow's gender is integral to its status as a dairy cow. And this, ultimately, is because the dairy cow isn't a person, at least not to most people.¹

I also think the use of the feminine gender contributed to its survival with respect to ships. Up until the last 50 years, ship's crews were almost entirely male, and while the ship is a person, we're talking about a person of a very different type from all the guys around you. So the obvious assumption is that if they're all male, the ship must be female. Speaking personally, it also just feels that way. When I was in LA, I was single, and we jokingly referred to Iowa as "the girlfriend".² Obviously, there's probably some cultural conditioning to me feeling this way, but it does seem to work.

And a little bit of me believes that's because ships really are female, and get irritated when you gender them incorrectly. There's evidence for this, in a really interesting correlation between how a language genders ships and how its speakers perform at sea. Every single global naval power of the last 500 years, be it Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain or America, has spoken a language that universally genders ships as female, and as we know, the last two even kept it while other gendered words are driven out. Less successful powers may break this rule. In traditional German, ships gained the gender of the thing they were named after, although this went away in the 1600s after the fall of the Hanseatic League, when the English practice became standard, as it more or less is to this day. Occasionally, a regress will happen, as in 1913, when Whilhelm II bullied HAPAG into using the masculine pronoun for their new liner Imperator, and he was appropriately punished. Later, Bismarck's captain had similar thoughts about his ship, and we can all see how that worked out for him.³ And Slavic languages like Russian always gender ships as male, which explains a great deal about their inability to build successful navies.

Of course, there's the question of what happens to non-Indo-European languages which don't gender inanimate objects.⁴ The results of Japanese warfare in the first half of the 20th century implies that not gendering ships sits somewhere between properly gendering them and systematically referring to them as male in terms of effectiveness.

The big event since I was last here was the Naval Gazing meetup in Dayton. Everyone had a great time, and I'm looking forward to next year. I also am curious how much people want me to start posting extracts from my tour script as blog posts versus waiting for me to get the audio we recorded out as a podcast with slides.

Overhauls are Russian Battleships Part 3, Battleship Aviation Part 2, A Brief History of the Submarine, FFG(X), Tomahawk Parts one and four, NWAS - Poseidon, my review of Greyhound, Don't Overread Moskva and for 2024 Pentagon Wars and Procurement, Simplified Ships and Shipbuilding, my review of the Western Museum of Flight and my thoughts on Hornet and visitor experience.

Back in the Pacific, we see the battleships getting into the action against the Japanese mainland, as well as the sad tale of Indianapolis, by far the most overdone story of the Pacific War relative to its importance. (I have seen libraries where their entire naval section was three SEAL memoirs and two books on this tragedy.) More fun is the discussion of the massive underway replenishment effort, a subject I've always loved.

I would describe Morison's take on the Japanese surrender as pretty accurate to more recent scholarship, although with a bit of Hirohito-mythologizing thrown in, as was standard at the time. We simply don't know what Hirohito actually thought, basically as a result of a conspiracy by both Japanese and Americans in the immediate postwar years to protect him from any war guilt. (There's probably more evidence in favor of him being reluctant than gung-ho, but we don't know much either way.) There's also decent evidence that in the days before the Japanese surrender, as the scale of casualties from an invasion became apparent to American planners, the idea of a direct invasion of the Japanese home islands was being reevaluated, and probably wouldn't have actually taken place.

Morison also skips over Truman's scandalously nepotistic decision to hold the surrender ceremony aboard Missouri, thus denying Iowa her rightful place. And I don't love that he dates the start of the war to the attack on Pearl Harbor, instead of the Japanese attack on China in 1937.

Because it's short, I'm also going to cover the conclusion here. This is where Morison seems to fully switch to editorial mode and start polishing the halos really hard, although I was also amused by his comments on the need for gunfire support in amphibious landings and confused by his complaints about the lack of torpedoes on ships bigger than destroyers. King's section seems the most overtly political, with references to the postwar situations in Malaya and Indonesia, as well as a tiny bit of MacArthur-bashing. Beyond that, it's mostly a catalog of Admirals who did a good job (Fletcher being notable by his absence, which is better than the alternative) and a call for a strong Navy, which I can't really disagree with.

Hope everyone has enjoyed this series. I'm going to take a couple weeks off before I start another book.

Website

The main pavilion is focused on Dayton's engineering history, from its status as a manufacturing hub in the mid-19th century to the invention of the cash register by the company that became NCR (they have a really cool display of models sold all over the world) to more modern stuff. It was great, and made me wonder why there isn't a National Museum of Engineering, because that should totally be a thing and I would go there a lot. The exhibits were done well, and cover a lot of subjects in a way that felt accessible without being patronizing, a sadly common problem in science-type museums.

Outside, they have a whole bunch of smaller buildings covering various aspects of the town's history in a rather pretty park that it was slightly too hot to appreciate properly. Many are originals moved from elsewhere, although some are replicas, and they represent everything from the early settlers to an 1830s paper mill to the work of WAVES in the NCR factory assembling Enigma-decrypting machines in WWII. Particularly notable is the Wright Brothers museum, which contains replicas of their shop, the world's largest collection of their artifacts, and the 1905 Flyer III, whose restoration was overseen by Orville shortly before his death. There's also a building with a disassembled NCR payroll machine, which I really enjoyed, and an operational steam train that circles the grounds, which we didn't go on. My only real criticism is that they should have had like a big cutaway model of a mechanical cash register so you could see how it worked, and they didn't. We only had a couple hours, and saw less than a third of the stuff outside. It's not the best museum in town (the competitive bar there is insanely high) but it's definitely worth adding to a trip to the area.

Oh, and as for the park's name, it started around a Carillon, a traditional bell tower, and they apparently do concerts with it from time to time if that's your thing.

There's lots of other stuff around Dayton, much of it tied to the National Aviation Historic Trail, which I'm hoping to get a separate review of at some point soon. But outside of that, if you happen to be in the area, I also have a reader recommendation for Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve, which is "a big forest full of trails with a gorge near the edge of it. You can go down into the gorge if you want more exciting terrain, and there is a small cave down there somewhere. Also a beaver dam making a big lake." In any case, Dayton is a fun place, and I'd recommend going, not just for the Air Force Museum.

I was also intrigued by his comments about the New York Fire Department providing the impetus for the development of fog nozzles, which I don't think came up when I wrote about the subject. I did a bit more digging, and discovered that while nothing Morison says is technically wrong, the framing is extremely weird. The fog nozzle was pushed on Adm. Cochrane at BuShips by Harold J. Burke, who was a member of the New York City Fire department, but was a Lieutenant in the Naval Reserve at the time, and he did go on to run the damage control school with Lt. Thomas Kilduff, who was formerly of the Boston Fire Department. As far as I can tell, there was no particular institutional involvement by either city's fire department in the DC school or program, which would explain why I'd never heard about this.

I certainly appreciate Morison's skillful portrait of the Okinawa landing, and of the destruction of Yamato, although I have to nitpick his comment that "not another battleship was ever built". Both Vanguard and Jean Bart were completed after the war, and I maintain that the battleship remained important for a decade or so after this. I also feel compelled to point out that the effectiveness of the armored flight decks on British carriers is overstated, and that the smaller air wings imposed by said decks meant they were hit about as often as the Americans, despite having far fewer ships.

And then we come to the horror of the kamikaze attacks on the Americans off Okinawa, one of the most brutal battles of the war. I don't have much to add to Morison's account, except to call him out for ignoring the loss of the William D. Porter, a favorite here at Naval Gazing. But with that campaign closed, next week will be our final chapter in the book.

Website

This is an incredibly good museum on several levels. First, the collection is unmatched. I don't know of anywhere else you could look at the history of land-based military aviation, from the Wrights to supersonic flight to stealth, entirely with real airplanes. Across the four big hangars, there's an example of almost everything the USAAF/USAF has flown since the 20s, along with many planes stolen from our enemies, and quite a few of the planes themselves have cool stories, ranging from a number that set important records to the Cornfield Bomber. Not to mention the unique planes, like most of the stuff in the R&D Gallery, home of the world's greatest airplane, the XB-70.

The BT-14 "crash"

But it's possible to have a good collection and deploy it badly, like they do at Pima. Fortunately, the museum's presentation is as good as the collection. Signage is plentiful, and they even had some cool braille signs for the visually impaired, which I've never seen at an air museum before. And while it's certainly big enough that I wouldn't criticize it for just having planes and an engine or two, it goes far beyond that. The planes themselves are frequently staged to tell various stories and add visual interest to the gallery beyond "just a bunch of planes". Probably the standout here is the "crashed" BT-14 in the early years gallery, a fun way of pointing to the problems of training new pilots, but there's lots of cases where a few mannequins and a piece of machinery or two subtly illustrate some aspect of aviation that would otherwise be easy to overlook. There's also a fair number of big artifacts (vehicles, radar equipment, and so on) to bring out the ground-based aspects of the Air Force's work. And almost everywhere that isn't one of these has some sort of display, be it a more in-depth explanation of the development and duties of a nearby airplane or a case showing the uniforms of someone important and relevant to the gallery.

They often have former pilots near their airplanes. This gentleman was a Wild Weasel pilot in Vietnam

So, in this case, Dayton manages to fulfill all three possible criteria for a good air museum. It's got a big collection of interesting airplanes, it displays them well, and it also has a lot of good supporting exhibits, which would be worth seeing even if they were separated from the airplanes. I have long recommended Dayton as a place to go if you like airplanes, and the best air museum in the world for geeks.² But after this visit, I think it was even better than that. In terms of museum implementation, it’s probably not quite as good as NASM on the Mall, but it’s surprisingly close, and a much better place to go for people who aren’t into airplanes than I expected. And while it can’t match DC in the quantity of other stuff to do, Dayton also has a lot of other attractions, both aviation and otherwise.

Unfortunately, it was too difficult to destroy that stupid art display

Of course, no museum is completely perfect, and there are a few things I need to warn you about before you go. First, there's a rather hagiographic section on Billy Mitchell, which of course is full of vile lies. Second, at the time of our visit, they had a couple of cars and a motorcycle that had been built by the Air Force for recruiting purposes, sitting right in front of the B-2 and blocking access to the JDAM that I wanted to talk about. But most irritatingly, there was an art display smack in the middle of the main corridor in the R&D section, which blocked the lines of sight I wanted to use in my last section of the tour. It's not that I object to this (or the cars) being in the museum, but they should be well out of the way of anything important, and they simply weren't.

But despite those minor niggles, it's still one of the very best museums I've ever been to, exceeding even the very high expectations I had developed after months of carefully studying the site and its collection for my main tour. You should definitely go.

There’s also an interesting reappearance of “current politics c.1963″ when Morison starts talking about how it’s a problem that the Allies didn’t move more swiftly into Indonesia. 1963 was the start of the Indonesian confrontation, basically an undeclared war between Britain and Indonesia over the creation of Malaysia, and I suspect Morison talks about that mostly because it was in the news at the time.

And this was going to be a short chapter, so operations in the Philippines got combined with Morison’s account of the war against Japanese commerce fought by American submarines. It’s a rather lurching shift to go back to 1942, and the necessity to cover a campaign of this scale means that almost all individual elements are lost in the early years, except for an admittedly amusing story about carrying Muslims to the Philippines (although I still can’t figure out why they wouldn’t be able to eat ice cream). This is better in 1944, although the rapid-fire recounting of actions (some of which I’ve read about at much greater length) is a lot to take in all at once.

Also, I should point out that ″Shinano″ did not have a 30 cm flight deck. That’s a full foot of armor, and I’m not sure any ship ever built had a deck that thick. It was a more normal 3″/7.5 cm, and ″⁣Shinano″⁣ is the canonical example of progressive flooding caused by insufficient watertightness, although the complacency of the crew didn’t help much. I am also sad that the coolest submarine of the war, ″⁣Barb″⁣, was only mentioned briefly once, and didn’t receive recognition for blowing up a train, sneaking in absurdly close to the enemy coast and setting a speed record on the way out, or using rockets to pioneer the modern submarine mission of land attack.

French dredge Pas de Calais II being launched in 1933

As the departure day approached, it looked like things were coming together. The channel was on schedule for completion, and Jean Bart would be met by HMS Vanquisher, who would escort her to safety on the Clyde. But the political situation was in flux, and on the 17th, her destination was changed to North Africa. The British were not informed. But bigger changes came the next day, when word reached Saint-Nazaire that the Germans were approaching, and the ship needed to leave as quickly as possible. The need to fill the dock meant they'd miss the next tide, so the first opportunity would come at 0300 on the 19th, and a bit of unfinished work in the channel meant that at one point it had lost 5m of its 50m width, making a narrow squeeze for Jean Bart's 33m beam. But the bigger challenge was that it would have to be navigated in the dark. Two teams spent the afternoon of the 18th frantically working, one to make the final preparations for sailing, the other planting scuttling charges in case she was unable to do so.

Problems continued to occur aboard in the last minutes before leaving. While an auxiliary boiler could provide steam for the turbogenerators, the circuit breakers had not been properly calibrated, and each time they tripped, the feed pumps for the boiler stopped, plunging the ship into darkness until an emergency diesel generator could be started. Restoring normal operations took an hour or so, and the decision was made to jam the circuit breakers closed to make sure it didn't happen again. And once the ship was afloat, it was realized that a slight list meant the draft to port was 20 cm greater than to starboard, cutting the margin on sailing from 40 cm to 25. Some quick rebalancing of fluids, with the results read by an engineer with a flashlight because the dock's power had already been sabotaged, raised the margin to 33 cm, but it was still going to be extremely tight.

Finally, at 0320, Jean Bart started to move. High water was only 40 minutes away, and an hour after that, she would either be in the main channel or stranded. Things had already begun to go wrong. Two tugs would control the battleship's bow, while a third would pass beside her in the drydock with only centimeters to spare to secure her stern. Unfortunately, that tug had grounded on the way in, and delayed things five precious minutes. Worse, as the tugs at the bow began to pull Jean Bart out, the hawser at the stern parted, and she cleared the dock at close to 3 kts. To make matters worse, the dock itself didn't align with the channel. A fan-shaped area had been dredged to allow the ship to be turned about 30° to align with it, but with the failure of the stern hawser, Jean Bart ran aground on the bank. But the tide was still rising, and the stern tug soon pulled her off, and the other tugs turned her to the appropriate heading. This was a tricky procedure in the dark, and the captain mistook debris for one of the channel markers, causing the bow to ground on the port side of the channel, followed moments later by the stern grounding to starboard. By this point it was 0345, and within 15 minutes, operations were complicated by a falling tide.

HMS Vanquisher

Other tugs were swiftly called in, and the mighty ship was finally pushed off at 0425. But she was now in the channel, and it was only about 10 minutes before she was finally free and orders were given to start the engines. A few minutes after that, a trio of Heinkel bombers appeared overhead, and although AA fire from various guns kept them at altitude, one bomb hit the ship between the two turrets, doing minor damage to the ship. French fighters soon appeared overhead, and the Germans headed for home, leaving Jean Bart free to move under her own power for the first time. The tugs were cast off, and she made for the open sea, picking up destroyers Mameluk and Le Hardi on the way. HMS Vanquisher also appeared with a pair of tugs, part of the abortive plan to move the battleship to British waters, but they were sent away, and operations began to transfer fuel from a fleet tanker to Jean Bart. This was complicated, as the French had only begun to experiment with underway replenishment a few years before,¹ so both ships had to heave to about 60 nm out to sea, and it took 90 minutes to get the hoses across and another 6 hours to get all of the fuel and water transferred.

But even as the fluids were being pumped across, engineering problems caused by the Jean Bart's hasty departure were appearing. The steam-powered ventilators hadn't been completed, leaving only the electrical ones used when the ship was alongside, which were unable to keep up with the needs of a ship actually using her machinery. Temperatures in the engine room rose as high as 70°C before engineers managed to get one of the turbo-ventilators working. A bigger problem was leaks in the condensers, which were costing four tons of feedwater an hour. The ship was stopped, despite the threat of nearby U-boats, and the engineers managed to get things under control in only an hour, although overheating and vibration limited the ship's speed to no more than 12 kts, enough to make the Admiral nervous. Worse was to come 90 minutes later when the vacuum pump for the starboard condenser exploded, forcing that set of shafts to be shut down again and cutting speed to 7 kts.

Jean Bart in Casablanca harbor

The engineers quickly concluded that the pump was beyond repair, and the only feasible option was to replace it with one scavenged from the inoperative aft turbines. But this was not a standard procedure, and it took 18 hours for the exhausted engineering team to get the new pump up and running. And while that work was underway, it became apparent that the condenser was leaking feedwater to a point where they would be unable to reach Casablanca. The solution was to run the fresh water provided for washing through an auxiliary boiler and use it as feedwater, along with water condensed out of the AC system for the boiler room, which was pulling out 800 L/hr. This wasn't great for the boilers in the long run, but that was a secondary concern.

After the vacuum pump was repaired, the revolutions were increased, although the ship soon ran into problems with vibration caused by a bent propeller blade, most likely a result of the second grounding during the launch. But despite this, she was soon able to make 21 kts, and maintained this speed for the next two days, finally dropping anchor at 1655 on June 22nd. Despite all of the problems, she had averaged 16 kts on passage, surely the speed record for a warship in her first three days afloat. Jean Bart would remain there for the next two and a half years, until the Americans appeared offshore and she fought Massachusetts, the only battleship to survive a gun action against an American counterpart during the war. After the French capitulated, she would spend the rest of the war providing parts for Richelieu before being completed by the restored French Republic, the last battleship to enter service with any nation.

But all of this brevity is in service of getting to the main event. Sibuyan Sea is quickly dealt with, but he spends plenty of time on Suriago Strait, the last action between battleships, which Morison gives a fitting rhetorical sendoff to. Then Samar, where I would complain that he falls into the too-common trap of focusing on Johnston over the other escorts in Taffy 3, but I'm also wildly biased in favor of Hoel for various reasons. The other major factor that I think gets ignored in Morison's account of Samar is Kurita's probable sleep deprivation, and the mental strain of having a couple flagships shot out from under him, which likely contributed to his remarkably bad decision-making.

And then there's Cape Engano and the infamous incident with Task Force 34, and I think Morison sort of drops the ball on this one, because there's really no discussion of the confusion that led to the San Bernadino Strait being uncovered beyond the bare fact that it happened. For those who don't know, the conventional view is Halsey is primarily responsible for the screwup, although I'm in the more recent revisionist camp that points out that Halsey's priority was the Japanese carriers, not covering the landings directly, so it was ultimately up to Kinkaid to make sure he was covered. (Although this doesn't excuse Halsey's poor phrasing of his orders, which everyone outside Third Fleet misunderstood.) I also feel compelled to point out that if he had left TF 34 to block Kurita, it would have done wonders for the historical reputation of the battleship, because nobody would believe how little damage Kurita's fleet did to Taffy 3 in real life. But Morison basically skips all of this because he can gloss over it and talking about it doesn't really make the USN look good.

Strasbourg is launched in Saint Nazaire

This worked quite well, and when the only long set of ways available, originally used to build the liner Normandie, was taken up by Dunkerque's sister Strasbourg, the decision was made to build Richelieu, the first of their 35,000-ton treaty battleships, in the same manner. The center section, 197m long, was built in the same drydock as Dunkerque, while the 43m bow and 8m stern were built elsewhere and mated up in drydock.

But by the time they came around building Richlieu's sister, Jean Bart, the international situation had become critical enough to unlock some extra infrastructure budget, and she was to be built in a new and unique facility at Saint-Nazaire. It was composed of two parallel docks, one that was normally dry and where the basic assembly would be completed and another that was much deeper and typically kept full of water where final fitting out would be done. They were separated by a low platform a meter above the dry side, which gave the engineers a place to assemble materials and played host to five cranes, including the enormous Grue Gusto, capable of lifting 240 tons. After the hull was mostly complete, it would be floated from the dry to the wet side over the central platform.¹ It's not entirely clear what advantage this had over just building a conventional drydock, but it's possible that it was cheaper and building mostly in the open was easier.

The construction dock used for Jean Bart postwar. The construction platform is on the left, the fitting-out dock on the right.

Another factor may have been the local geography. The shipyard, Ateliers & Chantiers de la Loire, was on the north side of the Loire estuary, almost a kilometer from the main shipping channel across relatively shallow water. This meant that a special channel would need to be dredged to get the ship out, probably acceptable for a ship launch every couple years, but a major pain for regular use of a drydock.

But it would also be a major pain for other reasons as Jean Bart neared completion in early 1940. She had been "launched" at the beginning of March, with seven months of fitting out ahead before she went to sea for the first time. Unfortunately, it was only two months later that the German offensive began, punching through the lightly-held Ardennes and outflanking the French and British armies before they had a chance to react. By the middle of the month, it was clear that all of France was at risk, and efforts began to make Jean Bart ready for sea in the hopes of keeping her out of Hitler's clutches. The highest tides on the Loire arrived at two-week intervals, and it looked like the best option was to shoot for a series around June 20th. The ship would obviously be far from finished, cutting the required channel depth by a meter, but it looked like she could be made ready to move under her own power and the dredging completed in time.

Richelieu's sternpost under construction, because I couldn't find anything more relevant

Immediately, the project to get the ship complete had top priority, with the number of assigned workers limited only by the need not to get in each other's way. The first priority was to get at least some propulsion completed, although the full system, with 4 turbine sets and six boilers, was quickly discarded in favor of just the outboard shafts, driven by 3 boilers, which should still let the ship make 25 kts. The work was down to the wire, with the propellers installed on June 7th, the boilers first being lit about a week later, and the final connection of the turbines to the shafts taking place on June 18th, 12 hours before the ship was scheduled to depart. Other systems were almost as close to the wire. The electrical generators were accepted that same afternoon, although the distribution system continued to have serious problems. The rudder and steering system was tested on June 16th, but it would be of limited use because the gyrocompass only turned up on the 18th and was taken aboard for later installation, while the magnetic compass had yet to be calibrated to account for the distortions of being on a massive steel ship. Other critical systems included internal communications and quarters for the reduced crew, but some really important features, like internal watertight bulkheads, had to be left unfinished to make the date.

One problem hovering over all of the planning and preparations was weight. A great deal was already aboard the ship, and the biggest variable was completion of the ship's armament. The secondary turrets were not available, so the openings were simply blanked off, while the turntables and gun mountings for the main guns had just been installed. Initially, the plan was to fit all eight guns and leave the turret armor off, but by June 10th, it became apparent that this wasn't feasible, and a switch was made to installing the guns and armor in Turret I, in the hopes that Turret II's guns could follow for installation wherever the ship ended up. This worked less well than expected, as the crane being used to move guns 5 and six broke after loading only the first one, and the second one was sabotaged before the Germans arrived. A pair of 90mm mountings, without fire control or ammunition, were installed, as were some lighter AA guns scavenged from around the dockyard.

But even as the projected date was drawing near, so were the German Armies, and getting her out would be an adventure in its own right. We'll pick up the story next time.