On April 9th, 1940, Hitler unleashed his military machine on Norway, breaking that country's neutrality and overwhelming the unprepared defenders at cities including Oslo, Kristiansand, Stavangar and Bergen. But the biggest threat to the plan was not the Norwegians. It was the British, and most of the Royal Navy's ships in home waters were in the North and Norwegian seas when the attack was launched. The bulk of Home Fleet had sailed on the 7th and as information about the attack trickled in, it was steaming in the gap between the Orkney Islands and Norway, well-placed to respond. Further north, a force led by the battlecruiser Renown had been tasked with covering minelaying operations on the 8th, and while they had missed the Germans headed for Narvik under cover of a storm, they would be the first to see action.

Renown

The destroyers headed for Narvik had been covered by battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, who had headed out into the Norwegian Sea, straight into the teeth of a major storm. Both ships took a pounding, with Scharnhorst having to shut down one shaft temporarily after a broken ventilator let water contaminate several fuel tanks. The British fared slightly better, although conditions aboard the nine destroyers escorting Renown were as bad as anything the old hands could remember, and as the storm began to calm at daybreak, they turned southeast, back towards the entrance to Narvik. The Germans were ahead of them, on the opposite course, and Renown sighted the first of them at 0337, ten miles to the east and silhouetted against the dawn sky. Admiral William Whitworth, commanding the British force, ordered Renown to match course with the German ships, as his position gave him a major tactical advantage. Read more...

April of 1940 began with the war in Europe at a stalemate, as both sides stared at each other across the Franco-German border. The first action of the war in the West was the German invasion of Norway, in the hopes of securing iron ore supplies and opening a new flank on the war at sea, outside the British blockade. The Norwegians largely expected their neutrality to hold, and while the forces available generally fought back, they were confused and aimless, leading to a number of German victories across the southern half of the country.

A gun at Kvarven Fortress

One of the German targets was Bergen, the second-largest city in the country.¹ It was the headquarters of Admiral Carsten Tank-Nielsen, who was responsible for the section of coast stretching from Stavanger to Trondheim, and who, unusually among Norwegian senior officers, took the threat of attack seriously. On April 8th, he ordered his ships to full readiness, although this wasn't communicated clearly to the coastal defenses that guarded Bergen. As was the case elsewhere in Norway, these dated back to the turn of the century, and hadn't really been modernized. The main defense of the city rested with Kvarven Fort, armed with a trio each of 21 cm guns and 24 cm howitzers. A second fort at Hellen had another three 21 cm guns, and various outer forts had lighter guns, although they were considered useless without their protective minefields, which couldn't be laid without authorization from Oslo. Another heavy battery was completely unmanned, and a torpedo battery similar to the one that guarded the entrance to Oslo was inexplicably overlooked in the preparations. Read more...

Data Secrets Lox is having a meetup in DC on October 23rd and 24th that Lord Nelson and I will be attending, and I would like to do something with Naval Gazing readers in the area. I was hoping to put together a trip to David Taylor Model Basin, but due to COVID, only the two of us will be going. So I need something else. Because of the DSL meetup, Friday evening and Saturday afternoon are both taken. The current plan is to hit the National Museum of the US Navy on Friday. We'll meet up at the Navy Yard entrance at 11 AM. I will be wearing a USS Iowa hat and shirt.

I've previously showed pictures of Iowa's Main Battery Plot, and now it's time for the follow-up of the Secondary Battery Plot.

This space contains two Mk 1A computers along with their associated Stable Verticals, set up to control the 5" guns. This required dealing with targets that are both very fast and moving in 3D, a truly incredible achievement. Read more...

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

First, apologies for not doing a meetup in September. I've been busy, but we'll do one next Saturday (October 9th) at 1 PM Central.

Second, the blog's 4th anniversary is approaching, and I'm finding myself getting burned out. So I'm going to put it on hiatus during November, and maybe into December. I'll still do the regular OTs, but if there's to be other content, it's going to have to come from you guys. Email me at battleshipbean at gmail if you want to contribute a museum review, book review or other naval/military related thing.

2018 overhauls are Secondary Armament parts one, two and three, Battlecruisers Part 3 and my reviews of Mystic Seaport and Albacore. 2019 overhauls are Fouling, Naval Ranks - Warrant and Enlisted, my account of my first visit to Iowa, River Warfare - China Part 1, the McKinley Climatic Laboratory and HMS Warrior. 2020 overhauls are the Arleigh Burke class, Territorial and International Waters, Falklands Part 24 and my pictures of Iowa's aft living spaces.

It's finally time for our long-running photo tour of Iowa to reach my favorite space, the plotting rooms. The main and secondary battery computers are in separate, adjoining spaces, and can be visited on special tours. I'm usually too busy with certain activities (seen below) to take many pictures, so these were taken over half a dozen visits.

Despite this, I ended up with enough pictures to split this into separate posts for the main and secondary battery plots. This will cover the main battery plot. For a full explanation of how everything works, see here. Read more...

In only four years from the launch of the first Liberty Ship, Patrick Henry, 2,708 vessels of that type were launched. The vast majority were simple general cargo ships, boxes capable of carrying 10,000 tons of material across the oceans at 11 kts. These formed the backbone of the Allied merchant fleet that carried 203,522,000 tons of dry cargo from the United States overseas during the period between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese surrender. But break-bulk cargo was far from the only thing that needed to be moved overseas.

USS Porcupine, a Liberty Tanker

The second-largest category of cargo that needed to be moved was liquid in the form of petroleum products, a total of 64,730,000 tons during the war.² Tankers were a favorite target of the U-boats, and it took until February 1943 for construction to consistently outpace losses. The Maritime Commission preferred the fast T2 tanker, but in late 1942, necessity forced the conversion of Liberty Ships to tankers. To disguise them, they retained dummy cargo-handling gear, and often carried deck cargo such as vehicles. All of the plumbing for the tanker role was hidden underneath the deck, with bulkheads built into the cargo holds to form 18 tanks. Ultimately, 62 of these tankers were built at New Orleans and California Shipbuilding, and gave good service, although most were converted back to dry cargo duties postwar. 18 of these were taken over by the Navy as the Armadillo class, used to carry fuel to rear areas, mostly airbases in the Pacific. Read more...

One of the great battles of the Second World War was fought in the shipyards. Moving the products of American industry to where they were needed to support the war effort would take ships, and when the US entered the war, those were in short supply. The centerpiece of this effort was a new design of freighter, intended to be easy to build and operate, dubbed the Liberty Ship. Existing shipbuilding capacity was insufficient, and through several waves of expansion, US industry geared up to produce 24 million tons of shipping capacity throughout 1942-1943.³ Ultimately, they would produce 2,708 Liberty Ships, in addition to about 3,000 other vessels built for the Maritime Commission, the agency charged with supply merchant ships for the war effort.

Day 2: Keel plates are welded on the slip at Bethlehem Steel's Fairfield yard

Building the vast fleet of Liberty Ships, by far the largest number of major seagoing vessels ever built to a single design, required a radically new approach to the problems of shipbuilding. Traditional methods relied on skilled labor and built high-quality vessels in small numbers. But the name of the game for the Liberties was multiple production, as builders raced to send ships down the ways as fast as possible, minimizing the time each had to remain on the slip before launch, as that was usually the bottleneck. From the first round⁴ of ships to the tenth in a given yard, average time on the ways fell by 80%. The overall victor in this contest was Oregon Shipbuilding, who managed to maintain a pace of 17 days per round in mid-1943. A few ships were built much faster as propaganda exercises, the record-holder being Robert E Peary at Richmond, launched 4 days, 15 hours and 29 minutes after her keel was laid, thanks to extensive prefabrication and massive use of resources. Three days later, she was completed and handed over to the Maritime Commission. But while this was a one-off, the average Liberty delivered in the last third of 1943 had had her keel laid only 41-42 days previously. Read more...

In late 1941, the US was gearing up for war. The nation's vast industrial might, idled by the Great Depression, was harnessed to produce material both for Britain and for America's own defense. But the biggest problem would be getting the products of the Arsenal of Democracy overseas, as the fighting fronts were far from American shores, and to do that, merchant ships were required. Efforts to rebuild the nation's merchant marine had been ongoing since 1936, but were not far enough along to bridge the gap, particularly in the face of the depredations of German U-boats. The answer was an emergency shipbuilding program of 9 yards to produce vast numbers of vessels capable of carrying 10,000 tons of cargo at reasonable speed. The first was launched on September 27th, 1941, and the type was dubbed the Liberty Ship.

But even the prewar program, scheduled to deliver 267 Liberty ships in 1942, was rendered instantly inadequate by the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the subsequent U-boat campaign along America's coast. 6.4 million tons⁵ of merchant shipping would be lost in the first half of the year, eclipsing the 5 million tons planned for completion by the Maritime Commission that year. That January, the target was raised to 8 million tons, with the target for 1943 set at 10 million. Expanding the yards to meet these targets, as had been done in 1941, was probably impractical. Instead, construction would have to be sped up, with the 250 day construction times of the first batch of ships falling to 105 days, with ships going from keel-laying to launch in only 60. That would allow six ships per way per year, a 50% increase over the pre-war schedule. Read more...

It is time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want even if it isn't naval/military related.

The big naval news in the last few days is that Australia has torn up the agreement with France to build 12 new conventional submarines, and is instead pursuing SSNs, with aid being provided by the US and Britain. On the whole, this is a good thing, as SSNs are vastly more capable than conventionally-powered submarines, particularly in operations far from base, which is a major concern for the RAN. It's only the second time the US has allowed this kind of tech transfer, with the first being our deal with the British, started in the late 50s and still ongoing today. (Russia and France developed the technology independently, and have exported it to India and Brazil respectively.)

The only fly in the ointment is that the subs are to be built in Australia, because the government there has apparently not learned that treating defense primarily as a jobs program is a great way to run up the budget and delay the schedule. I initially expected them to get Astutes from the UK production line, but that would make too much sense. The announced detail doesn't say where the UK comes into the submarine program, but I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up with an Astute-based sub given how much strain the US nuclear shipbuilding industry is under.

Biden felt the need to clarify that while the submarines will use nuclear power, they won't be nuclear-armed, and I can see why he felt that way and despair about what it says for humanity. It appears that the highly-enriched uranium required for the reactor will come from the US, with appropriate safeguards to keep the Australians from misappropriating it for bombs.

2018 overhauls are the reviews of Salem and Nautilus, SYWTBAMN - Strategy Part 3, Falklands Part 6, the Nimrod Saga and Auxiliaries Part 3. 2019 overhauls are Riverine Warfare in Africa and South America, the 2019 Tinker Airshow, Falklands Part 18, Fire Control Transmission and Naval Ranks - Officers. 2020 overhauls are Operation K, Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 5, my first tests of missile defense in Command and Falklands Part 23.