When I was at my parents' over Christmas, I took a chance to dig through the family photo archives, and got pictures from a couple museum ships I visited while growing up. These were long enough ago that I don't remember them clearly enough to write reviews, and in one case long enough ago that I don't remember it all.¹

USS Texas

My family visited Texas in 2000. I don't really remember the visit, because I was seven and not that interested in ships yet, but I suppose Texas was my first battleship. She's currently in drydock, and I took the chance to pay her a visit.

Texas, with me in the lower left

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People are often surprised to learn that battleships carried fixed-wing airplanes. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Battleships don't have anywhere for airplanes to take off or land, and that totally leaves aside the thorny question of why. But battleships were deeply tied into the operation of aircraft at sea from the earliest days until the aircraft carrier was available in sufficient numbers towards the end of the Second World War.

Eugene Ely takes off from Birmingham

Surface warships, although admittedly not battleships, provided the stages for the first steps of shipboard aviation. American pilot Eugene Ely took off from a ramp built over the bow of the light cruiser Birmingham on November 14th, 1910, and landed safely ashore. The following January, he landed aboard the armored cruiser Pennsylvania, using a series of hooks on the underside of his airplane to catch ropes tied to sandbags and stretched across a specially-installed landing deck. However, impressive though these achievements were, coming less than a decade after the Wright Brother's first flight at Kitty Hawk, a great deal of work would have to be done to make operational use of aircraft from ships practical. Both flights had required large ramps that blocked the ship's guns, and the vessels had been at anchor, not underway. Read more...

In early April, 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a few desolate rocks in the South Atlantic. The British mobilized their fleet in response. The carriers arrived off the Falklands on May 1st, swiftly defeating the Argentine Air Force. The Argentine Navy tried to interfere the next day, but withdrew after the cruiser General Belgrano was sunk by a submarine. Two days later, the Argentines struck back, sinking the frigate Sheffield with an Exocet missile. Two weeks later, on May 21st, British troops landed at San Carlos Water on the west coast of East Falkland. The Argentine Air Force quickly got wind of this, and launched numerous sorties against the invasion fleet. The morning's score was mostly in favor of the British, with several warships strafed and a single bomb hit, which hadn't gone off,² in exchange for four attackers shot down. But the worst attacks were yet to come.³

HMS Argonaut ablaze after the attack

The afternoon attacks opened at 1330, when a flight of six A-4s burst from around West Falkland and swept in on the frigate Argonaut, near Fanning Head at the entrance to San Carlos Water. The splashes of near-misses shrouded the vessel, and she was clearly on fire when the air cleared. Two bombs had hit, and although neither had detonated, they had done serious damage. One had hit forward, entering the Seacat magazine and setting off two of the missiles stored there. The other came to rest in the engine spaces, knocking out all power and steering. Argonaut was only saved from running into the cliffs of Fanning Head by a quick-thinking officer who got an anchor out, and officers on other ships thought she had actually run aground. Two of her men had been killed, but the crew fought back against both fire and flood, and ultimately saved the ship. Plymouth was dispatched to aid her, and towed her into San Carlos, where she would remain for the next week, while an access route was cut to allow the bomb in the forward magazine to be dumped overboard. Read more...

Lord Nelson was in Japan a few months ago, and took the chance to visit Mikasa. She came back with a plethora of photos, and we decided to collaborate in publishing them. Her comments will be in italics, while mine will be in regular text.

Mikasa in December 2018⁴

I agree with DismalPseudoscience's review, with an additional comment that Mikasa is very accessible to English-speaking foreigners, especially when compared to other Japanese museums. After spending 1.5 weeks visiting various Japanese museums (most of them with only Japanese text on the signs) I was surprised by how much of Mikasa's signage was in English. Most signs included a full translation of the text, not just of the title. Read more...

In the closing years of the 19th century, Spanish attempts to suppress rebellion in Cuba led to increasing tension with the US, tensions that led to war after the battleship Maine was destroyed in Havana Harbor. The Americans declared war a few weeks later and immediately blockaded Cuba, while the Spanish dispatched a fleet to the Caribbean in hopes of breaking the blockade. The fleets first clashed in the Far East, as Admiral Dewey destroyed the Spanish Fleet at Manila Bay. But the main action would be in the Caribbean, where the fate of Spain's empire in the New World hung in the balance.

Oregon about to depart San Francisco for the Caribbean

On paper, the two fleets looked reasonably closely matched, so the Americans called in what reinforcements they could find. In mid-March, orders were given for the battleship Oregon, on the West Coast, to round South America and join the forces in the Caribbean. She departed San Francisco on March 19th, reaching the Straits of Magellan a month later with only a single coaling stop in Peru. On April 30th, she reached Rio de Janeiro, where she learned that Spain and the US were now at war. There were serious fears that the Spanish would intercept the ship, whose progress was followed by the media, potentially dealing a major blow to the USN. Captain Clark of the Oregon took measures to thwart any such interception, including faking a breakdown at the Brazilian port of Bahia, then taking to sea again, but Admiral Cervera, commander of the Spanish fleet, did not even make the attempt. After a final stop in Barbados, she arrived at Jupiter Inlet, Florida, on May 24th, having covered 14,700 nautical miles in only 66 days and an average speed of 11.6 kts while at sea, a remarkable achievement for the time.⁵ Read more...

It's time for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you like.

Reader quanticle found a good article on the development of the Chinese navy. It's well-balanced, and the only real objection is that they lumped diesel and nuclear submarines together.

Overhauled posts include the last three parts on main guns, Life Aboard Iowa, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Strategy Part 1, and my review of Midway and Russian Battleships Part 3.

While the basic shape of naval armor-piercing projectiles was largely set in the years 1905-1920, and most nations entered WWII with projectiles that were improved only in detail over the shells they had used then, two nations made radical departures. The Japanese optimized their shells for underwater hits, a process discussed last time, while the USN developed the most effective armor-piercing (AP) shells the world has ever seen.

A pair of 2,240 lb Mk 5 16" AP target shells at Science Museum Oklahoma⁶

The original shells for the 16"/45 guns of the Colorado class were fairly conventional projectiles of 2,100 lbs. In the 1930s, the Bureau of Ordnance developed a slightly heavier, stronger shell of 2,240 lbs, with a consequent increase in penetration. It also had an improved AP cap, hardened so that it would not be torn off in oblique impacts and would instead crack the face-hardened layer of the armor, digging a hole that kept the projectile's nose in like a center punch. This was the shell that was used to develop the immune zones for the South Dakota and Iowa classes, but before any of those ships were completed, BuOrd had come up with something even better, the amazing 2,700 lb Mk 8, known as the "superheavy" shell.⁷ The 20% increase in shell weight reduced muzzle velocity, to the point that belt penetration stayed largely the same, but deck penetration, more likely to matter at the long ranges the USN planned to fight at, rose by up to 25%, and immune zones collapsed. The zone for the Iowas went from 13,600 yrds to 5,300 yrds against the 16"/45 gun. In late 1944, the improved AP Mk 8 Mod 6 entered service, with improved hardening and an altered shape to increase penetration at long range by another 25%. It was considered so effective that the battleships in the Pacific were ordered to turn in their existing shells and rearm as quickly as possible. In fact, this shell, fired from a 16"/50 gun, was considered broadly equivalent to a conventional 18" weapon.⁸ Read more...

Lord Nelson and I took a trip down to Fort Sill, about an hour and a half southwest of Oklahoma City. Fort Sill is the home of the Army Artillery and Air Defense, as well as an old frontier fort from the Indian Wars. There are three museums on the base, one for each of these roles, and we managed to hit all three of them. I'm going to review them as a group, because it should be possible to hit all three within a day, and because the Field Artillery museum dominates to the point that it's easiest to think of the other two as detached wings.

Me with the Atomic Cannon at Fort Sill⁹

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By the outbreak of war in 1914, heavy naval shells had reached approximately the form they would take for the next three decades. Heavy armor-piercing (AP) shells, equipped with caps designed to prevent them from shattering on impact with face-hardened armor, could carry small quantities of explosives, 1-2% of shell weight, through armor plate and detonate on the other side. Other shells, often known as common, carried much more explosive, but were fuzed to detonate on impact, or possibly after piercing a much thinner armored plate. But there was plenty of room for variation on these themes, and some nations had done a much better job than others at anticipating the demands of war.

A British 15" AP shell of 1943

The British in particular had badly misjudged how their shells would be used in action. They had based much of their doctrine around long-range engagements with common shells, intended to destroy the enemy's unarmored upperworks, start fires and demoralize the crew, with AP shells to be held for finishing off enemy ships at closer range. This was used as a justification for not carrying out oblique impact tests on their AP projectiles, which turned out to be a serious mistake at Jutland, where few projectiles penetrated heavy German armor. Action was quickly taken to address this, and in 1918, a new shell, known as the Greenboy from its paint scheme, was issued to the fleet. It had a new, much harder, AP cap and a redesigned body for better penetration, particularly during oblique impacts, while an improved delay fuze and a new explosive, shellite, would allow it to penetrate armor and reach the ship's vitals in a fit state to burst. Read more...

Even after a battleship's hull had been successfully launched, there was still a great deal of work to do to turn it into a fighting machine. Particularly in the early days of battleship construction, the hull at launch was pretty much just that. All of the other equipment necessary to turn it from a bare mass of steel into a fighting machine still had to be installed, tested, and made ready for sea.¹⁰

Iowa fitting out under the 350-ton crane at New York Navy Yard

This work would be done at a fitting-out dock near the shipyard, which had as its most prominent feature an extremely heavy crane to lift aboard things like boilers and turbines. These were passed through openings left in the deck and covered with bolted plates for strength during launch, then attached to their foundations. Through about 1900, sheerlegs, which were strong and simple, were used to shift loads aboard; these could only move loads directly out from the dock, which meant the ship had to be positioned very precisely. Later, enormous cantilever cranes were installed, some capable of lifting loads up to 350 tons and placing them anywhere within a 100' circle. These cranes were very expensive, and by leaving fitting of the heaviest components until the end of the construction process, the shipbuilders could economize on their use. Astonishingly, a few of these cranes remain in existence today, most notably the Titan Clydebank, having outlasted the ships they originally helped assemble. Read more...