Before WWI, both the British and German navies expected that the war's early days would see a massive clash of their fleets, a "New Trafalgar" that would decide control of the sea at a stroke. This was not to be, as the Germans, eager to avoid a battle with the stronger British fleet, stuck close to their bases in coastal waters that the British avoided due to the threat of mines, submarines and torpedoes. The only way for the two sides to meet was if one of them knew in advance where the other would be, and the British, thanks to the capture of German codebooks early in the war, had set up an organization to intercept and decode German signals, and it was this organization, Room 40, that would trigger the Battle of Jutland.

British battleships in Scapa Flow

Signs of what was to come began to accumulate in mid-May, as the Germans dispatched 18 U-boats to lie off British bases in hopes of catching the Grand Fleet as it sortied. The Germans, unconcerned with the threat of British interception, coordinated the sortie, including the U-boats themselves and the minesweepers necessary to get them to sea, via radio. But none of them headed for the trade routes bringing vital supplies to Britain, giving Room 40 a clear sign that something was afoot. Read more...

It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.

First, there will be no post Sunday. It will be going up on Tuesday instead, because Jutland.

Second, I will be at the DSL meetup in San Jose, and plan to visit Hornet next Sunday (6/5). If anyone else wants to go, I'd love to have company.

Third, I am contemplating a "bad military history" bingo card. Topics on the list so far include the Magniot Line, Pearl Harbor and the demise of the battleship, Hampton Roads, Polish cavalry charging panzers, the guns at Singapore not pointing inland, and stupidity of WWI generals. But I'm still short, so any suggestions will be welcome.

The free space will be "talking excitedly about things that have happened before". See the ATGM and anti-ship missile discussions about Ukraine.

2018 overhauls are There Seems To Be Something Wrong With Our Bloody Ships Today, Millennium Challenge 2002, Auxiliaries Part 1, Falklands Part 2, The New Maginot Line and Jutland Part 1. 2019 overhauls are Battleship Aviation Parts one and two, Pictures - My First Museum Ships, the Falklands Glossary, the Montana class and SYWTBAMN-Aviation Part 4. 2020 overhauls are FFG(X) and Tomahawk parts one, two and three. 2021 overhauls are NWAS Poseidon, The Future of the Aircraft Carrier, Directors and Soviet Battleships Part 3.

Currently topping The Atlantic's "Most Popular" list is an article claiming "A Whole Age of Warfare Sank With the Moskva". Unfortunately, it bungles the history involved completely, to the point that you get an emergency Naval Gazing.

The author begins by talking about the Battle of Hampton Roads, ending the section "In one day, every wooden ship of the line of every naval power became immediately obsolete." This is clear nonsense. Hampton Roads gets a lot of press because it was the first clash between ironclads, but it was clear that the ironclad was on its way. Britain and France had both begun to build fleets of proper ironclad battleships (and not just coastal vessels like Monitor and Virginia) and events at Sinop and Kinburn had shown both the vulnerability of wooden warships and the durability of the ironclads. But we don't talk about Crimea, so that's all overlooked. Read more...

The oceans are notoriously opaque, providing the submarine with a strong veil of stealth. The only thing that oceans don't effectively block is sound, which is transmitted more effectively through water than it is through air. As a result, sonar remains the main method of detecting submarines, either in active form, producing sound that bounces off the target and is reflected back, or in passive form, listening for noise from the target. But sound doesn't travel through the ocean in a straightforward way, and as sonar has grown more sophisticated, its operators have had to contend with effects that either attenuate the sound, drown it out or bend it in surprising ways.

The Deep Scattering Layer (green) on a sonar scan

Attenuation can come from a number of sources. Obviously, the intensity of a sound weakens as it spreads out from its source, and in an infinite ocean, this would follow the inverse square law. In practice, it's often lower than this, thanks to effects discussed later, but the ocean doesn't transmit sound perfectly. Some is absorbed and turned into heat, a process that occurs more strongly at higher frequency. Some is scattered when it runs into discontinuities, which can be the surface and bottom of the sea or solid objects in the ocean, usually marine life. Most notable is the deep scattering layer, composed of deep-sea fish and the plankton they feed on that tend to cluster a thousand feet or so below the surface. Scattering is a particular problem for active sonar, as the reverberations from the surface/bottom/creatures can make it hard to pick up the actual return. Read more...

British successes against German ciphers in WWII are reasonably well-known, but far less known was the work done by their predecessors during the First World War against German naval ciphers. This group, known as Room 40 after the room it was assigned at the Admiralty, started from nothing at the beginning of the war and thanks to a combination of skill and an unreasonable amount of luck, soon played a vital role in the war at sea.

Alfred Ewing

When war broke out, the Admiralty acted quickly to cut the undersea cables linking Germany to the rest of the world, forcing Germany to rely on interceptable radio messages. But no organization was in place to intercept said radio messages, and the British were forced to rely on a combination of amateur radio operators, the Post Office and the Marconi Company for this function. Nor was analysis in any better shape, and the task of setting up an organization fell to physicist Alfred Ewing, the Director of Naval Education. He, with the help of various professors from the Royal Naval Colleges, began to set up a team to deal with the flood of traffic. Read more...

It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.

It's been a slow two weeks on the book, which currently stands at 88,000 words. I am interested in getting another reader or two to look over the draft, so email me if you're interested.

2018 overhauls are SYWTBAMN Strategy Parts one and two, Main Guns Part 4, my review of Midway, Russian Battleships Part 3, Falklands Part 1 and the Super-Dreadnoughts. 2019 overhauls are Shells Parts three and four, my review of Fort Sill, Spanish-American War Part 4, Pictures - Mikasa Part 1 and Falklands Part 14. 2020 overhauls are Coastal Defenses Part 2, Oil Tankers, the Navy UFO Incident and Nuclear Weapons at Sea - Heavy Attack. 2021 overhauls are Naval Airships Part 6 and all three parts on the Littoral Combat Ship.

In the aftermath of the British victory at Heligoland Bight, the Kaiser chose to keep the High Seas Fleet immobile, relying instead on submarines. These first struck on September 22nd, when U-9 came across three obsolescent British armored cruisers on patrol off the Dutch coast, Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy. These ships, part of what was known as the the "Live Bait Squadron", were moving at relatively low speed when Aboukir was torpedoed. Hogue and Cressy hove to to recover survivors, but they were swiftly torpedoed in turn. All told, only 837 of the 2,296 men aboard the three cruisers survived, and the British swiftly withdrew anything bigger than a light cruiser from the waters near Germany.

Aboukir sinking

Even this wasn't enough, as the primitive submarines of 1914 could reach across the North Sea, as demonstrated when U-9 added armored cruiser Hawke to her score on October 15th. Jellicoe became increasingly concerned with the security of the Grand Fleet's base at Scapa Flow, and began to keep his ships at sea as much as possible. This quickly wore out ships and men and forced them to spend a lot of time coaling, so he decided to withdraw to Lough Swilly in Ireland. But while this was enough to deal with the submarine threat, the Germans had other weapons they could make use of. Read more...

A great deal of ink has been spilled around nuclear strategy, and most of it has vastly overcomplicated the issue. The most basic principle is that nuclear weapons raise the cost of war to the point where it is completely obvious that there is no way that war could pay. Note that the importance of nuclear weapons here is more in perception than in reality, because while through most of human history, war was very profitable, by the start of the 20th century, the destructiveness of military force had reached the point where a war would cost more than you could gain unless you got very lucky. Both world wars showed this quite clearly,¹ but millennia of cultural memory of war paying (because, among other things, the cultures that did war were the dominant ones) meant that this wasn't particularly clear.

Nuclear weapons short-circuited all of this. Their destructiveness is unquestioned, and if they are likely to be involved it's extremely hard to make the case that war will pay, even to yourself. This is the major reason we are currently experiencing the longest period of great-power peace in recorded history. So long as nuclear weapons remain in play, there's a very strong incentive for even the most reckless regime to not push things too far. This is deterrence, and Bret Deveraux has laid out a fair bit of the history here. Read more...

Apologies that our regular open thread is a bit late, but overhauls ran late. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.

Book update: 85,000 words. Working through WWI, and starting on the postwar years.

2018 overhauls are British Battleships in WWII, Sea Stories - The Swimming Pool and the Fuzes, Main Guns Parts one, two and three and Life Aboard Iowa. 2019 overhauls are Shells Part 2, The Four Chaplains, Continuous At Sea Deterrent, Megasilverfists's review of Polly Woodside and SYWTBABB Construction Part 3. 2020 overhauls are my review of Historic Flight Spokane, Falklands Part 21 and Merchant Ships - Bulk Carriers. 2021 overhauls are Naval Airships Parts four and five, Battle Stations and A Brief Overview of the Chinese Fleet.

When I took a broad overview of how destructive nuclear weapons are, one of the areas I looked at was nuclear winter, but I only dealt with it briefly. As such, it was something worth circling back to for a more in-depth look at the science involved.

First, as my opponent here, I'm going to take What the science says: Could humans survive a nuclear war between NATO and Russia? from the prestigious-sounding "Alliance For Science", affiliated with Cornell University, and the papers it cites in hopes of being fair to the other side. Things don't start off well, as they claim that we're closer to nuclear war than any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is clearly nonsense given Able Archer 83 among others. This is followed with the following gem: "Many scientists have investigated this question already. Their work is surprisingly little known, likely because in peacetime no one wants to think the unthinkable. But we are no longer in peacetime and the shadows of multiple mushroom clouds are looming once again over our planet." Clearly, I must have hallucinated the big PR push around nuclear winter back in the mid-80s. Well, I didn't because I wasn't born yet, but everyone else must have. Read more...