A ship at sea is a complex beast, one that needs to be tended at all times. But the crew need to sleep, eat, and even have a little bit of downtime, so a system of watches is used to balance the needs of the ship with those of the crew. The broad system has remained largely intact for centuries, although the details change depending on circumstances. The word watch itself can mean several different things. It's a period of time, a specific duty, and also refers to the group of men who will generally be called to go on watch together.

A bridge watch on the USS Missouri

A day is traditionally divided into six 4-hour watches, starting at 2000 in standard time with the first watch (2000-0000), so called because it was the first watch set at night, when off-duty crew were allowed to sling their hammocks. The next watch was the middle watch, also known as the midwatch (0000-0400). Then comes the morning watch (0400-0800), the forenoon watch (0800-1200) and the afternoon watch (1200-1600). At this point, you'd expect something like "last watch", but in fact, the period from 1600 to 2000 was divided into two "dog watches", first and second.¹ This meant that there were an odd number of watches in a day, and meant that one watch (group of men) didn't end up with an unpleasant schedule (midwatch was particularly disliked) long-term.² Read more...

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

I have a request for help. There's an article from Norman Friedman on the 3T missiles in Warship from the mid-80s. It's collected in Volume VI, and I think was originally in Issue 22. Both are a bit too expensive to just buy, and while I've got an interlibrary loan request out, it may take a while or just not work. If anyone has access to either, I'd really appreciate a copy.

Besides the ongoing USNI sale, I have a non-USNI book recommendation. Tower of Skulls by Richard B. Frank is a history of the opening of the Pacific War, from its beginning of 1937 to May 1942. I'm most of the way through my copy, and it's great. Frank is a good historian and a good writer, and the book came out within the last year, so he's able to take advantage of the latest scholarship on the war in ways that a lot of older books can't. Highly, highly recommended.

2017 overhauls are Iowa parts seven and eight, Mine Warfare Part 2, Ironclads, and my posts on the losses of HMS Victoria and Force Z. For 2018, overhauled posts are G3 and Nelson, Commercial Aviation Part 2, Japanese Battleships in WWII, A Brief History of the Aircraft Carrier and Falklands Part 9. And from 2019, we have Riverine Warfare - Southeast Asia Part 1, Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 4, my review of the National Atomic Museum and Billy Mitchell Part 2.

Also, I have engaged the nuclear option in the war on spam, so any comment containing the word "essay" should hopefully be blocked.

Reader Alsadius visited Belfast in August 2018, and has agreed to share his experiences here.

Website

One of the things I planned to visit on our trip to the UK was the Portsmouth historic dockyard, whose review can be found here. But as we were wandering around London, I noticed a surprisingly large ship in the middle of the Thames. The World War II light cruiser HMS Belfast was preserved as a museum ship in basically the most accessible possible location for a museum, right in the heart of London. Read more...

I've talked a fair bit about the deployment of nuclear weapons at sea, but very little about the actual effects of nuclear weapons when used against ships. It's time to plug this gap as best I can, although only limited information has made it to the unclassified world, mostly drawing on the Crossroads tests.

Ships burn after the Crossroads Able shot

Obviously, it's impossible for any ship ever built to survive a direct hit from a nuclear weapon. But as navies evaluated the new weapons, they realized that there were limits to their power. By adopting dispersed formations, and designing their ships to minimize the effects of a near-miss, it would be possible to limit losses to a single ship, or even avoid them altogether if the weapon wasn't placed properly. New communications technologies could make this feasible, allowing ships to coordinate even over the horizon. Read more...

I've started play proper now, with 1961. It's been a busy year: the grav survey of Sol has finished (unfortunately, only two jump points, and one of those appears to be a dead end another system down the line), we've started further surveys and now know of seven systems, and we've got almost 3 million colonists on Luna. Research and industry are humming along, although they're not going to pay major dividends until next year.

Do note that we still don't have most of our fleet or any ground units built. Hopefully we can get that sorted out soon (we'll bring it up at the virtual meetup) and we can pick up the pace of play. Normally, I'll try for more than a year at a time, but things are still settling down. The new database can be found here.

The oceans cover over 70% of Earth's surface, and as such, are of immense scientific importance. Man has long taken ships to sea to plumb the ocean's mysteries, first charting the surface and then measuring its depths. Today, these are incredibly sophisticated, with equipment for measuring all sorts of parameters in several fields of science.

A portolan chart from 1492

The most basic of ocean sciences is hydrography, the mapping of coastlines and the depths of water, usually to create charts. The first proper navigation charts were probably the medieval Portolan charts. These charts, based entirely on angles and distances between the points in question, were incredibly accurate portrayals of the coasts, allowing mariners navigating by landmarks and compass to find their path. Over time, celestial navigation and latitude and longitude were introduced, and charts became more sophisticated. However, these were privately published, and it wasn't until 1795 that the Royal Navy appointed Alexander Dalrymple as Hydrographer and formalized the collection and publication of hydrographic data. Read more...

Reader Suvorov has contributed another part in his series on Confederate commerce raiding.

While the Confederacy’s brief flirtation with privateers was quickly choked off by the Union blockade, the Confederacy’s long-term plans for dedicated naval commerce raiders continued to move forward. Their domestic program proceeded somewhat haltingly – their first commerce raider, the Sumter, was not ready for action until the summer of 1861, by which point the Union blockade was tightening around the Southern ports, including New Orleans, where the Sumter was being refitted – to the frustration of one Raphael Semmes, who had been placed in command of the vessel towards the end of April and had hoped to escape to sea before the blockade was in place.

CSS Sumter

Semmes was a major exponent of commerce raiding, and the war would give him a chance to put his theories in action. When the steam-powered sloop Brooklyn, assigned to the New Orleans blockade, left its post in pursuit of a quarry, Semmes escaped New Orleans to unleash his “defective little Sumter” on Union shipping. However “defective” the Sumter might have been, it captured eight vessels within a week on its initial cruise between New Orleans and the Cuban port of Cienfuegos—a victory that was significantly dampened when the Spanish authorities, concerned about their perceived neutrality in the conflict, returned most of his prizes to their original owners. (The fact that Semmes had grabbed three of his prizes almost in the mouth of Cienfuegos’ harbor probably did not dispose the Spanish authorities kindly towards Semmes’ attempt to leave his prizes in that port indefinitely.) 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.

Don't have a whole lot to say today. Hope my American readers had a good Thanksgiving. Remember that the USNI sale is still ongoing.

Overhauls for 2017 are Lissa, The Battleships of Pearl Harbor Part 3, Iowa parts five and six, Mine Warfare Part 1 and Russian Battleships Part 1. 2018 overhauls are Falklands Part 8, Commercial Aviation Part 1, Missouri Part 3, Internment, Crew Art aboard Iowa and SYWTBABB - Design Part 2. And for 2019, I looked at Billy Michell Part 1, The Navy and the Space Program, Falklands Part 19 and Harpoon.

Ice has long been a serious problem for shipping. For centuries, northern ports, particularly in the Baltic and Northern Russia, would spend several months of the year icebound and unable to take part in the benefits of maritime trade. In special circumstances, a port might cut a channel through the ice, as Boston did to free the Cunard liner Britannia in 1844, but this was rare due to its difficulty. It wasn't until the dawn of the 20th century that a way was found to reliably break ice and let merchant ships through.³

Britannia leaving Boston

The first modern icebreaker was designed and built in Britain for the Russians, and named Yermak. She entered service in 1899, and served in the Baltic until 1963, a testament to the soundness of her design. Yermak had all of the features common to modern icebreakers: a heavily reinforced, rounded hull; a steep slope to the bottom of the bow to let it ride up on the ice, and lots of power. Icebreakers don't do their job by simply cleaving ice in two. Instead, they take advantage of ice's low flexural strength to ride up on top of the ice and break it with their weight. With extremely thick ice, such as pressure ridges, this can mean essentially beaching the icebreaker on top of the ice, or even having to back off and hit the ice at full power several times. In most cases, though, nothing this violent is needed and the ship simply pushes the ice down under her hull, fracturing it as she goes. Read more...

From the earliest days of the Cold War, there was controversy over the the US Navy's role in fighting the Soviets. Initially, the Air Force tried to cut them out entirely, but they managed to sell the carriers as nuclear strike platforms, retaining the mission into the 60s, when the ballistic missile submarine entered service.

Iowa, reactivated in support of Reagan's strategy, on an exercise

But in the 1970s, with the post-Vietnam drawdown, detente with the Soviets and the Carter Administration, Western leaders began to focus more and more on the Central Front in Germany. Sea power was seen only as important for ensuring the passage of convoys across the Atlantic in the face of Soviet submarines. The carrier force was allowed to run down, and shipbuilding concentrated on ships specialized in ASW. At the same time, the Soviet Navy, under Admiral Sergey Gorshkov, had begun to transform itself from the coastal-defense force it had been under Stalin to a true blue-water fleet, with the ability to hunt ships and submarines anywhere on the seas, a capability reinforced by larger and larger exercises. The Western navies, on the other hand, had scaled back their exercises, preferring to operate well away from Soviet waters. Read more...