The idea of hiding under the water to strike at a superior enemy is not a new one. Inventors over the centuries have sketched craft that would allow them to approach in secret, then do violence to their opponents. Problems of propulsion, of endurance, and of weaponry thwarted them, and the first serious attempt wasn't made until 1776, when an American named David Bushnell devised the Turtle, a wooden submersible that would be piloted by a single man underneath a British warship, attach an explosive charge, and then run away. When a volunteer, Sgt. Ezra Lee of the Continental Army, attempted to do just that to HMS Eagle on September 6th, he was unable to attach the charge and had to abandon the effort. Turtle was later destroyed to keep her from falling into British hands.

A model of Turtle at the Submarine Force Museum, Groton, CT¹

It took another 88 years for a submarine to actually manage to sink an enemy ship. The pressure of the Union blockade during the American Civil War forced the Confederacy to search for asymmetric advantages, and an inventor named Horace Hunley built a submarine that could carry a spar torpedo, a charge on the end of a long boom. A crew of eight drove the propeller through a crank. The submarine, named after Hunley, was not a spectacular success, sinking twice in testing and killing 13 men in the process, including her inventor. Despite these setbacks, the Confederates persevered, and on February 17, 1864, Hunley managed to attack the sloop Housatonic, sinking her and killing five Union sailors. However, the victory proved Pyrrhic, as Hunley was sunk by the same blast.² Read more...

It's once again time for our regular Open Thread. Talk about anything you want, even if it's not defense-related.

Following on from last OT, it seems there's definite interest in an RTW2 community game. Some reminders: you will be the general staff of whatever nation you pick, making shipbuilding decisions and providing strategic direction. The game plays at one turn/month and theoretically can last 50 years, so I'm going to have to implement a lot of decisions independently. I plan to play 1 year/week, and do a summary post every Monday (this will alternate with the OT, with the OT-week post going into the RTW2 thread from the previous week). I'll give you guys a couple of days to make decisions, probably until Thursday or Friday. I don't plan to restrict who can contribute to decision-making, as the community here is pretty small and congenial, but I might revisit this if there are problems.

So this OT, I'll let you guys decide on what nation you want to play. Options are the US, Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Japan and Austria-Hungary. Some of these will definitely be easier to win wars with than others, but that's up to you. I'm going to say 1900 start and Very Large fleet size, because this should give the easiest ramp in and a big fleet to play with.

Recently overhauled posts include The Falklands War Part 2, Learning From History - The New Maginot Line, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Coast Guard Part 1 and all seven parts of the Jutland series:

• Part 1 - Background, Forces, and Commanders
• Part 2 - Preliminaries and Run to the South
• Part 3 - Run to the North and Deployment
• Part 4 - The Main Fleet Action
• Part 5 - The Night Action
• Part 6 - Aftermath and Analysis
• Part 7 - Alternate History

I've discussed the development of fixed-wing battleship aviation from the earliest days through WWII. But when people learn about the subject for the first time, the biggest question is usually about how it worked. As such, I'm going to look in more detail at the techniques involved.³ I'm going to focus mostly on American practices, and discuss where those of the RN differed.

An OS2U is launched from Missouri, 1944

Battleship seaplanes lacked wheels, so they had to be stored on special trolleys. Each catapult had one, which supported the airplane during both storage and launch. Wheeled dummy trolleys were used when there were more airplanes than catapults or when seaplanes had to be moved around on land. When it came time to launch, the seaplane was secured to the trolley by a set of hooks that would keep it on the catapult during the stroke, then release it at the end. The plane would be checked over, fueled, and the engine started up. Read more...

May 31st, 1916 saw the Battle of Jutland, the greatest clash of battleships in history and the only time the British and German main fleets fought each other. As befits such an interesting and pivotal battle, I've written a long series on it, but for the benefit of those who don't want to wade through all seven parts, I thought it appropriate to write a single-part summary.

In the runup to WWI, the British and the Germans had built huge fleets of battleships, spurred on by the Kaiser's love of shiny toys and the British understanding that the loss of maritime supremacy would be catastrophic. In 1914, the British, who had outbuilt their rivals, instituted a blockade of Germany, plugging up the exits to the North Sea with the Scotland-based Grand Fleet. The Germans, hoping to wear the larger fleet down, attempted to use raids to draw out detached elements and crush them with the High Seas Fleet. By mid-1916, the only result had been a few indecisive battlecruiser engagements, and both sides wanted action. Read more...

One of the great scandals to come out of the Battle of Jutland was the relative ineffectiveness of the British armor-piercing shells. For a variety of reasons, the British had been well behind the other European powers in shell design for at least a decade, and at Jutland, only one of the 17 heavy shells that struck thick German armor penetrated successfully.

Shells being loaded on HMS Lion, February 1917

But how did Britain, the world's leading maritime power, and an early proponent of most technological advances during this time, end up with ships full of shells that didn't work? The answer is a tangled mix of learning the wrong lessons from war and trials, problems with organizational structure, and the unusual way British procurement took place in the early years of the 20th century. Read more...

World War I had shown the importance of operating aircraft with the battlefleet, and all of the major navies continued to work on this integration in the postwar years. While the aircraft carrier was obviously the best way to take planes to sea, it wasn't seen as completely sufficient, and battleships continued to play host to aviation detachments, although the operating methods changed dramatically.

An OS2U Kingfisher is catapulted off of Iowa

There were two main problems with the methods used to take aircraft to sea in WWI. First, the flying-off platforms were limited to fairly light airplanes with a low stall speed, and it was obvious that the future of aviation was in heavier planes with higher speeds, including stall speeds. Second, ditching the airplane in the sea after every sortie was obviously impractical in peacetime, and dubious even in a war where the fleet might be operating far from its bases. The obvious solution to the second was the seaplane, an airplane fitted with floats so it could take off from and land on the water.⁴ This was obviously not a novel idea, but attempts to use seaplanes during the war had been flummoxed by fragility, vulnerability to sea conditions and lack of performance compared to land planes. Improvements in aeronautical engineering had helped mitigate the first two problems, while the third was largely solved by changes in tactical doctrine. With the development of the aircraft carrier, the roles that required high performance could now be filled by carrier-based aircraft not penalized by floats, leaving seaplanes to fill a few specialized niches. The most important of these were scouting and spotting for the battle line. The airplane offered the fleet commander an opportunity to expand his view of the battlefield far beyond the horizon, and placing the scouts on the battleships freed up space on the carriers for fighters and bombers. The ability to deliver a man with a radio to arbitrary points was also seen as a useful way of overcoming the problems posed to fire control by increasing battle ranges. The spotter could call back corrections to the ship's fire, which might also allow ships to engage in conditions where visibility from the surface was poor, due to either weather or manmade smoke. Read more...

This is the last part in "So You Want to Build a Modern Navy". I have a bit more in the archives, but it's probably not worth publishing. The following is based on discussions in Aviation Part 2.

John Schilling: I hadn’t thought about my proposal as a recreation of the Light Fleet Carrier, but given the incredible success of the Light Fleet Carrier program over half a century or so, I’ll own it. I’m proposing the Light Fleet Carrier of the 21st century; how can you possibly refuse something with that winning track record. Read more...

Battleships were the pinnacle of warship engineering during WWII, and as a result, they took a very long time to build. So long, in fact, that almost all of the major powers had battleship classes that were stillborn on the slipway during the war. Battleships that were not already far along at the outbreak of the fighting were usually suspended to free men and material for other priorities - submarines, aircraft carriers, escorts, transports and landing craft. And then, when peace came, they were cancelled altogether, viewed as relics in the age of missiles and jets.

An artist's impression of Montana

But there are fascinating vessels among these last, unfinished chapters of the story of the battleship. Unhampered by the naval treaties, these vessels could grow to the constraints set by the physical infrastructure of drydocks, harbors and canals, or even a bit beyond. But we'll begin with one of the relatively moderate examples of the breed, the American Montana class, the last battleships ordered by the United States. Read more...

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

Rule the Waves II was released on Saturday, much to my delight and Lord Nelson's chagrin. Much like the first game, it makes you Grand Admiral, in charge of building an entire fleet and leading it in war. Unlike the first game, which ran through about 1925 and pretty much ignored air power, this one goes through the dawn of the missile age. Early on, it's very similar to the first game, although a lot of the systems have been subtly tweaked. Overall, it's an improvement in terms of realism. The air operations system isn't documented all that well, so I'm still trying to figure that out, and my one game so far didn't make it past 1940 before I got tired of it and restarted.

My one serious criticism would be that the fiscal end of the game seems seriously out of wack. In my first game as the Americans I found myself unable to afford more than about one capital ship at a time. In my second game, playing as the British, I found myself blockaded by the Germans in 1910. Their budget was almost as big as mine, and their fleet might have been larger. This was seriously wrong for obvious reasons. Also, the tendency of the AI to design ships that can't be built is annoying, particularly when it then builds them for itself anyway. I can't tell you how many enemy ships I've encountered in ~1910 toting dual-purpose guns. Despite all that, it's a very enjoyable game, and I'd recommend at least downloading the demo.

We've reached the first anniversary of the Falklands War series, and the first part has been overhauled. I think we're past the halfway point, but I've been wrong on such things before. Other updates are to So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Strategy Part 2, the Super-Dreadnoughts, There Seems To Be Something Wrong With Our Bloody Ships Today, Millennium Challenge 2002 and Auxiliaries Part 1.

As the Falklands War series has now been going on for two years, I've put together a glossary, listing the ships, airplanes, weapons, and so on. I usually try to link to wiki when I introduce something new, but it's easy for me to forget that the last time I talked about something was 6 months ago. Hopefully this will close some of the gap. For those wanting to catch up on the series, the full list of posts is here.

• Ships
  • British Warships
  • British Auxiliaries
  • Argentinian Warships
  • Argentinian Auxiliaries
• Aircraft
  • British Aircraft
  • Argentinian Aircraft
• Weapons
  • British Weapons
  • Argentinian Weapons
• Other

Ships

I have only listed major weapons systems for the ships, primarily good surface-to-air missiles.⁵ Almost all British ships had at least one 4.5" gun and a helicopter, but the presence of these should be obvious from context, and full lists are available in the relevant wiki articles. I've mentioned and linked to significant events regarding some ships, but only those that have come up in the narrative so far. Read more...