The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, soon became one of the key chokepoints of world maritime trade, and proved so vital to the British Empire that the entire region was soon known as "East of Suez". In 1882, the British took informal control over Egypt, assuming formal control in 1914 on the outbreak of war with the Ottoman Empire. After defeating several attempts on the Canal by the Central Powers, the British pushed across the Sinai Peninsula and into the Ottoman province of Palestine. But the war had unleashed nationalism across the region, not least in Egypt, and in 1922, Britain declared Egypt independent, although with reservations regarding defense and Suez because no Egyptian government would agree to such provisions, a state of affairs that left the Egyptian nationalists far from satisfied.

Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and an obscure politician named Winston Churchill

Through the 20s and 30s, Egyptian politics was a strange balance of power, as the King, the elected government and the British all worked to achieve their goals. Things finally began to change in 1936 when the ambitious young Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, managed to use Italian intervention in Ethiopia to convince the Egyptians to sign a treaty which would withdraw British troops to the Canal Zone except in time of war. The arrangement would last for 20 years, and then renewal would be discussed. Eden and the British thought this had solved the problem in the long term, while the Egyptian nationalists believed they had only 20 years of British rule left to deal with. But the treaty required Egypt to give full assistance to Britain in the event of war, a clause that became vital four years later when Italy declared war on Britain and invaded Egypt from Libya. This immediately closed the central Mediterranean to British shipping, forcing supplies for both India and Egypt to go around Africa. Despite this, the Canal remained vital to the British war effort, allowing the Royal Navy to operate in the eastern Mediterranean, where it was able to deliver victories like Taranto and Matapan. The Italians invaded Egypt shortly after entering the war, and for two years, the battle raged in the western desert, with the advantage changing hands several times. Suez itself was subject to air raids and mining efforts, but these were not enough to cut the vital lifeline. Rommel was able to get no closer than 70 miles to Alexandria, whose fall might well have made Suez untenable, and the British were ultimately victorious, first driving the Axis out of Africa and then driving Italy out of the war. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

While the AirBnB has just filled up, I am still accepting signups for the Iowa meetup in May. It will be a lot of fun, and you should come.

Overhauls are Propulsion Part 4, Military Procurement - Pricing, Weather at Sea, CSA Raiding Part 8 and for 2024, Freedom of Navigation and American Policy Part 2 and Missile Defense Tests Part 3.

While reading the new book on the Iowa by Lawrence Burr,¹ I stumbled across a statement that threw me for a loop. He claimed that after the bombardments of Japan in July 1945, Iowa was ordered back to do gunnery practice at Kaho‘olawe in Hawaii, shooting on July 29th and 30th, and explicitly pointed out that she missed several airstrikes Third Fleet conducted during that time. This was a baffling thing, and I was having trouble believing it had actually happened. Third Fleet was off Japan at the time, and every effort had been made to keep as many ships forward-deployed at sea as possible. A massive underway replenishment apparatus was built, and when that wasn't enough, mobile bases were constructed at islands across the Pacific. Ships only got sent as far back as Hawaii when they needed serious yard work, more than could be done in the forward-deployed floating drydocks. And absent battle damage, that typically didn't happen until the ship had been on the line for a year or more. Iowa had been stateside until the end of March for a refit, leaving her as the least likely ship to be sent back.

Iowa refuels from the oiler Cahaba in July 1945

But even beyond that, this story didn't make sense on several levels. First, doing this would have deprived Third Fleet of a powerful anti-air platform while conducting air strikes on the Japanese mainland. Strikes were flown on July 24th, 25th, 28th and 30th, and further strikes in early August were cancelled due to weather. Given the distance between Japan and Hawaii, even at 20 kts, her maximum plausible cruise speed, Iowa would have taken a week to make the trip, and it's over 9 days at a more typical 15 kts. Second, even if Iowa's gunnery during the bombardments was so bad that more training was urgent, there was no reason to send her all the way back to Hawaii. All you need is an uninhabited piece of land, maybe with a smokescreen if you want to practice air spotting and make sure the crew doesn't cheat. This wasn't exactly difficult to accomplish in the western Pacific, and by doing it in the Philippines or even off Okinawa, the amount of time the ship is out of action is greatly reduced.² Read more...

What is the world's largest navy? The second largest? How has this changed over time? Can't we just count how many ships each has?

Oh. Well, it's true that not every vessel is equal, but all navies are a mix of large and small vessels, and so it should come out in the wash, right? What? Some navies expect to operate close to home and buy a lot of small ships, while others buy only big ships? So just counting hulls is going to make you look really silly, isn't it? That seems like something to avoid. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Longtime readers will know that I am a big fan of the Naval Institute Press, and works from their catalog form the backbone of a lot of posts here. And I recently got a new book from them, a volume from their Naval History Special Edition series on the Iowa. Now, I did not have high hopes for this as an improvement on the state of the art for history on Iowa, as it was short and in a standardized form, which rarely bodes well for quality. But I felt professionally bound to order a copy, as I do for all books on Iowa and the class, and was shocked by what I received.

The quality of the history in the book is adequate, with the only major error I've found being something he picked up from another, better source. (More on this coming soon.) But the writing is dreadful. Now to be clear, this is not because I'm a prose snob. The point of naval history books is the history, after all, and I've read plenty of books where it's clear that the writing is very much secondary to conveying said history. But I do think it's reasonable to expect that someone who is publishing a book could write well enough to get an A in a sixth-grade English class, and, well, Lawrence Burr can't. Each sentence is chopped out in isolation from the others, so you'll get paragraphs where three out of four sentences start with "the" or just don't flow into each other at all. Not to mention occasional howlers where a sentence is just obviously grammatically incorrect, and non-sequitur sentences that felt like someone really trying to get a draft up to the required word count. And to be clear, while I do blame him for being willing to write a book, I also blame the Naval Institute Press for not having an editor do at least one pass to catch obvious errors and remind him to occasionally vary his sentences a bit. Even more baffling is the fact that it was originally scheduled for (IIRC) spring of 2023, but was delayed repeatedly, to the point where I was making jokes about it never actually arriving. What was being done during that time? The book is not currently available through USNI's website, and I genuinely wonder if they're pulling it except for pre-orders because of how bad it is, but they didn't get back to me about it in the few days between my getting the book and this going up. In any case, please don't buy it, because it's not particularly good as history and it's terrible as a book. Also, there's five pages of ads for World of Warships.

Overhauls are Propulsion Part 1, my reviews of museums in Singapore, The Range of a Carrier Wing - An Experiment and for 2024, Naval Strike Missile and Freedom of Navigation and American Policy Part 1.

When I first visited Alabama 9 years ago, I was a neophyte as a battleship professional. I had officially started as a tour guide on Iowa a couple of weeks earlier, and still thought it would be a short-term thing till I saw the engines and fire-control system. I came away distinctly unimpressed, on two grounds. First, there was nobody to talk to, and second, I didn't think that much of the museum aspects. This time around, I solved the first problem by dragging the Fatherly One and some other friends to the ship for the visit,³ and they seem to have worked quite a bit on the second side themselves. Either that, or my taste has improved, which might be some of it, but there was a lot of stuff I think I would have remembered had it been there last time.

A battleship in fog⁴

Website

Since my last visit predates this blog by a couple of years⁵ I am going to do this pretty much de novo. On the whole, I had a great time, and owe Alabama an apology. I don't think she's quite as good as Massachusetts, but she's very close, and the decision of which one to go to should be made based mostly on logistics. Both ships are set up with a couple of tour routes, one through the upper decks and superstructure and a couple down below, and I think Alabama's layout was better, as I never really got turned around. Signage throughout was very competent, and Alabama is the most accessible battleship I've been to. All three turrets were open, and although Turret 3 was still pretty dim, Turret 1 was well-lit, and you could go up to the 08 level, versus 05 on Iowa and 04 on Massachusetts. They had also cut into the 2nd barbette, although unlike on her sister, you can't go into the powder flat. I think they did a better job of doing the "city at sea" aspect than Massachusetts did, at least in part because they'd cleared out less space for various onboard museums although most of it was just how well they'd dressed a lot of the spaces. Read more...

The Fatherly One and I went to visit the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, as it was the last of the big air museums neither of us had been to. I had high hopes, as all of the official museums I had been to were quite good, and it more than lived up to them.

An SBD, survivor of Midway⁶

Website

Now, the first and most important thing I look for in a really good air museum is a lot of planes that are rare or have an interesting history, and Pensacola delivered in spades. Everything from the first plane ever to fly across the Atlantic in 1919 (an NC-4 flying boat) to the first plane to land at the South Pole (an R4D) to the only survivor of the Battle of Midway (an SBD that they fished out of Lake Michigan after it crashed during training). Plus a lot of very rare planes from both the early days of naval aviation or the dawn of the jet age. I would have put it very high on my list just from the airplanes alone, even if they had been presented like the planes at Pima. Read more...

It is once again time for our Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Overhauls are my review of Top Gun: Maverick and from last year, RAM and The Small Carrier Problem.

Reader Alexander, who has previously reviewed the Newark Air Museum is back with another British air museum, this time the RAF Museum in Cosford.

Website

The RAF runs its own museum, split over two sites. I've visited their Midlands museum at Cosford a couple of times now and it's a good one. There are a great number of aircraft, missiles, engines and vehicles spread across four halls. The largest is the Cold War exhibition, where you can see all three V bombers under one roof. Two are veterans of the Black Buck raids, and their Valiant is notable for dropped Britain's first H-bomb. Amongst other artifacts here is a collection of missiles, including ballistic missiles, early ATGMs, land and naval SAMs and a range of air launched weapons. There are a couple of open cockpits with staff on hand, keen to explain the extent to which ejecting will reduce your height. Read more...

One of my hobbyhorses, which I have generally tried not to go on about here, is the proper naming of ships. Unfortunately, the recent activities of now-former Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, who used his last few days in office to go on a naming binge, have forced my hand.

Names for USN ships are selected by the Secretary of the Navy,⁷ but for a long time, the traditional naming scheme was more or less adhered to. Specifically, battleships were to be named after states (a requirement that was only removed in 2023) while cruisers were named for cities, destroyers for naval heroes and carriers after ships from the early American Navy, and later for battles, while submarines were named for fish. This began to break down after WWII, the first obvious breach being the carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt, named after the recently-deceased president.⁸ This was the beginning of an interleaved set of "great person" names for the carriers, with Forrestal and John F. Kennedy popping up in the 50s and 60s before the naming scheme switched fully with the Nimitz class. At the same time, the submarine scheme began to switch from fish to, first, "Congressional supporters of the Navy's nuclear program" and then to cities, as, according to Admiral Rickover, "fish don't vote". Read more...