Almost from the day it was invented, the torpedo was seen as the counter to the battleship. Suddenly, the smallest craft could carry and use a weapon capable of sinking a battleship, a task that had previously required another vessel of the same type. But despite this apparent dichotomy, many battleships did carry torpedoes, and it's worth taking a look at these weapons.

Early Whitehead torpedoes

The British first began to fit their ironclads with torpedoes in 1879, when HMS Devastation was fitted with a torpedo-launching carriage on each side, firing through a port cut in the breastwork armor. At the time, torpedoes were only capable of ranges of a few hundred yards, and speeds of maybe 20 kts, but this wasn't a huge problem. Many officers still thought that the ram would be a major weapon, which meant that their ships would be very close to those of the enemy. The torpedo was seen as an adjunct to the ram, capable of extending its reach to the sides or compensating for a miss. How well the launching gear would have worked in combat is dubious at best. At the time, launching a torpedo from above the water was a tricky business, and the carriages were unlikely to work well at high speeds. To make matters worse, in some cases they were on the exposed decks, which would have made them exciting to use in combat. Read more...

In late 1945, the US Navy was in peril. The threat came not from a foreign power, but from within. The atomic bomb was poised to radically change warfare, and just as they had after WWI, advocates of air power were quick to pounce. The surface ship, they said, was now obsolete, an easy target for the new weapon. Both sides vividly remembered Billy Mitchell's attack on the USN in the wake of WWI, and the effectiveness of his bombing of the Ostfriesland in swaying public opinion. A new set of tests was thus sought, to establish the vulnerability or survivability of the warship under atomic attack, depending on the taste of the advocate.

The iconic image of the Baker shot at Bikini

The Navy won a critical early battle when Vice Admiral William Blandy was selected to head the tests instead of the Army's choice, Leslie Groves, who had run the Manhattan Project. The targets would be some of the massive fleet of obsolete or captured ships left over from the war, everything from battleships to submarines and transports. Three tests were planned: Able, an airburst test; Baker, a shallow underwater burst; and Charlie, a deep underwater test to investigate the efficacy of nuclear depth charges. They would have to be carried out quickly, before the men required returned to civilian life. The site had to be somewhere controlled by the United States, far away from any major population centers and possessed of predictable weather patterns to minimize the danger of radioactive contamination to the men of the Task Force. The location chosen was Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands.¹ Read more...

It's our usual open thread. Talk about whatever you want, even if it's not military/naval.

A recent news story of interest is the decision to name CVN-81 after Dorie Miller, the first African-American to win the Navy Cross for his actions during the Attack on Pearl Harbor. I'm of two minds on this one. On one hand, Miller is far more deserving than most recent recipients of warships, particularly the carriers. On the other, I'd really rather we used the traditional carrier names for carriers. Right now, Lexington, Yorktown, Saratoga and Ranger are all unused. Still, this is one of the better naming decisions to come out of the Navy Department in recent years.

Overhauls for 2018 are Why the Carriers aren't doomed Parts two and three, Stability, Pre-Dreadnoughts, Basics of Naval Strategy and Russian Battleships Part 2. 2019 overhauls are Commercial Aviation Part 5, Falkands Part 10, the Spanish-American War Part 1, The NOAA Commissioned Corps, Ship Structure and Strength and The Mk 23 Katie.

The Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division is primarily known for managing the David Taylor Model Basin, but it has other facilities scattered throughout the country. The most interesting of these is the Acoustic Research Detachment located at Bayview, Idaho. The ARD is the world's leading facility for studying surface ship and submarine acoustics, a surprising thing to find several hundred miles inland. But Lake Pend Oreille,² deep in the mountains of the Idaho panhandle, is the perfect place for such studies. It's over a thousand feet deep, very cold³ and very calm thanks to its isolation and the mild weather of the region, all factors that contribute to a low level of background noise.⁴

LSV-2 Cutthroat alongside the support tug

Bayview's most impressive systems are a trio of large-scale ship models, two submerged and one surfaced, each about a quarter of the size of the vessels they represent. The submarines, LSV-1 Kokanee and LSV-2 Cutthroat, represent the Seawolf and Virginia class submarines respectively, and are capable of autonomous operations, removing the need for noise-inducing tethers as the vessels pass the hydrophone arrays the Navy has placed in the southern end of the lake. Cutthroat, at 110' long, is the largest unmanned submarine on the planet, and her electric motor is capable of delivering 6000 horsepower. The surface ship model, formally the Advanced Electric Ship Demonstrator but more often known as the Sea Jet, is a scale version of the Zumwalt. All three vessels are primarily intended for development of quieter propulsion systems for submarines and surface ships, although they are also used for flow noise studies, handling tests, and investigations into other aspects of the signature. Read more...

The battlegroup is at the core of the modern navy. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the image of sea power has been a capital ship or group of such ships, surrounded by smaller vessels to protect against attack, first by torpedo boats and destroyers, and later by submarines, aircraft and missiles. But the battlegroup and the escort are surprisingly recent innovations, products of a major shift in the nature of naval warfare about 150 years ago.

Before the invention of the torpedo, naval warfare was fundamentally symmetrical. The gun was the only weapon of any importance from at least 1700 onward, and larger ships mounted more and heavier guns. As a result, combat power correlated directly with size,⁵ and it was rare for much smaller ships to overwhelm larger ones.⁶ Smaller ships were useful for missions that prioritized numbers over firepower, such as scouting, patrols, escorting convoys, or commerce raiding. The Line of Battle didn't need frigates to screen it against attack, because anything the frigates could handle, the Ships of the Line could handle more effectively. Frigates accompanying the battlefleet were there to scout and pass signals, not to fight. None of the 13 light ships (6 British and 7 French) present at Trafalgar suffered a single casualty. Read more...

Gentlemen,

So far, the war is going very well. Despite continued trouble from Austrian submarines and raiders, our policy of pursuing big, powerful battlecruisers has been amply justified by recent victories off Syracuse and Sirte, each of which resulted in the destruction of an Austrian battlecruiser. Only three vessels of that type remain in their service now. Moreover, our recent foray into the Adriatic has gravely damaged their military resources and relieved pressure on the British in Dalmatia.

Currently, our biggest challenge is the threat to our commerce. We have recently commissioned a number of anti-submarine trawlers, and have more under construction. The raider threat is harder to handle, as we continue to need modern CLs for fleet duties as well as trade protection. Losses in that category to mines and submarines have not made the problem easier. But we remain optimistic, and hope to bring Austria to the peace table as soon as possible. Read more...

It's been a while since I did a selection from my pictures of the greatest ship ever built. This time, it's pictures of the enlisted quarters aboard ship. Unfortunately, these are all of Iowa in her 80s fit, as the WWII spaces have all been renovated. Restoring one may be on the agenda, but it hasn't happened yet.

Me in one of the bunks. They can be tricky to get in and out of, particularly for first-timers. Note the "coffin rack" on the bottom, open to show one of the major storage spaces for a sailor's gear.⁷

A section of berths deep in the ship. Many of these compartments can be rather labyrinthine. This is a part of the ship where the deckhead is rather low, so only the bottom rack has the "coffin" storage, while the other two have extra lockers elsewhere to compensate for the lack of storage space. In areas with higher decks, all three will have coffins.

Read more...

Deception is as old as warfare. From the Trojan War and its famous horse to the operations to make Hitler think D-Day was a feint, tricking the enemy into thinking they know where you are or what you're doing when they don't is an effective tactic.

A B-52D deploys a Quail decoy

In the 1950s, planners tasked with developing methods for American bombers to penetrate Soviet air defenses came up with a new way of doing this. By building a small unmanned aircraft, basically a cruise missile sans warhead, with the same speed and altitude performance as a bomber, and fitting it with radar reflectors so that it looked like a bomber on radar, they could flood Soviet radar displays with false targets, drawing off their interceptors or at the very least diluting their efforts.⁸ Several decoys were developed, some designed to be launched from aircraft, others from ground bases thousands of miles away, although most of them were cancelled before they entered service. The only exception was the air-launched ADM-20 Quail, designed to replicate a B-52. Quail, which also had a 100 lb payload bay for chaff and a flare to replicate the B-52's IR signature, served from 1960 to 1977, by which point improvements in radar made it easy to distinguish from the B-52 and thus obsolete. Read more...

It's time for our regular biweekly open thread. Talk about whatever you want, even if it's not military/naval-related.

Overhauled from 2017-2018 were Armor Part 4, the Spotter's Guides to modern and early 20th century warships, Why the Carriers aren't Doomed Part 1, my take on the 80s reactivation of the Iowas and my comments on proposals to do so today. The 2018-2019 overhauls are Commercial Aviation Part 4, Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 2, Auxiliaries Part 4, the Stafford Museum in Weatherford (home of Apollo astronaut Tom Stafford), The Great White Fleet Part 3 and Interwar Naval Diplomacy.

Billy Mitchell, pioneering American aviator and proponent of an independent air force, had scored a major PR victory when he sunk the former German battleship Ostfriesland, which he had convinced the public that the Navy believed was impossible. Unfortunately, his grandstanding tactics had made him enemies in Washington, and the new head of the Air Service, Mason Patrick, was appointed with a specific remit to keep Mitchell in line. Mitchell was informed that any public statements would have to be specifically approved by Patrick, and for the next two years, he mostly kept his head down.

Virginia under air attack

In September 1923, the Army Air Service received two more pre-dreadnoughts, New Jersey and Virginia, for use during bombing tests. Despite Michell's insistence that he be delivered the "sturdiest ships to be scrapped with steam up and magazines filled", they were in much the same shape Ostfriesland and Alabama had been, stripped out and with minimal watertight integrity. Both were swiftly sunk, although the Navy managed to convince Pershing to emphasize the obsolete nature of the targets during his statements to the press. Mitchell was furious, but held his tongue and avoided leaking his report to the press. Later that year, Mitchell married again, and he and his new wife headed to the Far East on an inspection tour that lasted more than 7 months. Read more...