Life Magazine, the famous news weekly that published from 1936 to 1972, is online. Google books has the entire archive, free of charge. I, of course, went looking for battleship-related content, and came across a real gem. In April 1942, Life published How to Build a Battleship, a look at the construction of the new battleships at Philadelphia Navy Yard.

Washington ready for launch at Philadelphia

I thought I would add commentary, things that Life either didn't know or couldn't say for security reasons.¹ Philadelphia built three battleships in this era, Washington, New Jersey and Wisconsin. Washington was in service when the article was written, while the other two were still on the ways. Read more...

Even after a battleship had been designed, built, launched and fitted out, it still wasn't quite ready to go into service. Anything as large and complex as a warship needs to be thoroughly wrung out before it can be considered ready to go to war.²

Iowa is inclined during her shakedown period

This was the job of sea trials, a joint effort between the builder and the navy to make sure that everything was actually working. These began with machinery trials, first simply running up the engines dockside to make sure they actually worked, and then taking the ship to sea under her own power the first time. After everyone was satisfied that the engines were working, and any deficiencies were corrected, performance trials would begin. There was always some doubt about how a new ship would perform, particularly if it was the first of the class. Several different trials would be run, most notably the 1-hour full-power trial, where the ship would run a measured mile, probably going faster than she ever would again.³ Another important trial was the 8-hour power trial, which was intended to prove that the engines could stand the strain of prolonged use at high power, if not quite so high as the 1-hour trial. Then there were economy trials, intended to give figures on fuel consumption and feedwater usage.⁴ Read more...

It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, as usual.

Something I recently found is the RTW2 wiki. This isn't well-indexed by Google, and it has a lot of good information, particularly for those participating in the RTW2 game who don't own a copy.

Overhauled posts since last time include Yalu River, DismalPseudoscience's review of Mikasa, German Battleships in WWII, The 15" Battleships, Museum Ships - United States, and my pictures from LA Fleet Week 2016.

While everyone has heard of Bismarck and Yamato, almost no one has heard of the battleships of Italy's navy, the Regia Marina. What makes this odd is that the Italian battlefleet might well have had a greater impact on the course of the war than the battleships of the other two Axis powers.

Conte di Cavour

Italy began the war with a mere six battleships, four of them leftovers from WWI. These ships, split between the Conte di Cavour and Andrea Doria classes, had been the beneficiaries of the most extensive reconstruction received by any battleship in the interwar era. Their speed had risen from 21 to 26 kts at the sacrifice of the triple turret previously carried amidships, while the remaining 10 guns were bored out from 12" to 12.6". The deck armor was increased and a Puligese torpedo defense system was installed. All told, only about 40% of the original structure remained unaltered after the reconstruction. Read more...

In 1941, the USN's aviation community was faced with a conundrum. Thousands of new pilots would need to learn the art of taking off from and landing on aircraft carriers, but the previous solution of using an operational carrier would remove a desperately-needed ship from frontline service. Even the new escort carriers, less-capable merchant conversions scheduled to begin entering service in 1942, would be in great demand to fight the Battle of the Atlantic. One enterprising officer came up with a plan to solve this, taking ships and shipbuilding resources otherwise largely useless to the war effort, and turning them into the first decks that thousands of naval aviators would fly from, including future President George H. W. Bush.

Sable

The plan was simple. Instead of training aviators on the ocean, they would be trained on the Great Lakes. These lakes had long supported a flourishing maritime industry, and while canals did connect them to the ocean, many ships had been built that were too big for the locks.⁵ A pair of these, the excursion steamers Seeandbee and Greater Buffalo, were to be purchased and quickly fitted with flight decks. The ships that emerged, Wolverine and Sable, were the world's only fresh-water paddle-wheel coal-burning aircraft carriers. Not the only ships with this combination of characteristics, but the only carriers to have any of those traits.⁶ Read more...

The Japanese decision not to sign the 1936 London Naval Treaty placed the British in a bind. The treaty had been the latest step in a 15-year effort to hold down the size and cost of battleships, which had been working reasonably well. The British had considered the 35,000 ton, 14" gun treaty battleship limits too loose, and now Japanese intransigence would force another step up in gun caliber and tonnage relative to the ships of the King George V class, which were about to be laid down.

Vanguard on trials⁷

As usual, design studies had begun even before the first escalator clause, raising the treaty cap from 14" to 16", was invoked when Japan failed to sign. In some ways, the British were well-positioned for the change, as the King George V had, rather unusually, been designed for protection against 16" gunfire while carrying 14" guns. However, the greater weight of 15" or 16" guns would have meant unacceptable cuts in speed, so it was fortunate that negotiations quickly began for invoking the second escalator clause, which would allow increases in the tonnage limit over the 35,000 tons allowed by the treaty. Read more...

Gentlemen,

Strange times are upon us. The recent instability in Norway has been exploited by Austria to secure control of the country. We weren't even aware their navy was capable of reaching Norway, much less in the strength needed to get their before the force we sent to restore order. As a result, we and the British have declared war on them to preserve Scandinavia's independence from Central European influence. So far, we have been successful in our first battle, sinking the Austrian light cruiser Zenta.

Overall, we aren't too worried about this war. While a direct numerical comparison shows our fleet as currently inferior to the Austrians, we have several mitigating factors. First, the British, possessors of the world's largest fleet, are on our side. They're unlikely to deploy too much firepower into the Mediterranean, but they are a useful counterbalance to Austrian attempts to reach Norway, and to any possible German entry into the war. Second, the war broke out while a large number of our ships were in yard hands, being refitted with Central Firing. Two CAs and two Bs will commission in two months, with another pair of CAs the next month. Third, our ships are larger and more capable than their Austrian equivalents. Read more...

The end of WWII brought new challenges for naval communication. The carriers soon were tasked with the nuclear strike role, which demanded a level of reliability not provided by the existing HF radios. The communications gaps caused by the vagaries of the ionosphere were completely unacceptable when they might have to pass orders for a nuclear strike. Something better would be needed, and the demand only grew throughout the 60s, as the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations attempted to exercise closer control over US forces and fleets in the field.⁸

USS Annapolis, a communications relay ship

Initially, efforts were made to improve the performance of HF radio, most notably by using multiple frequencies. Ships had already maxed out the number of antennas they could carry,⁹ and specialized antennas were developed to handle multiple wavelengths at the same time, such as the discone antenna associated with NTDS. Even when it worked, establishing a connection took a long time. Worse, there were a few gaps in the USN's network of HF stations, and the stations themselves were often vulnerable to the shifting political landscape of the Cold War. An attempt was made to solve this by converting old aircraft carriers into communications relay ships, but only two were completed, and they spent most of their life supporting the fleet on Yankee Station off North Vietnam.¹⁰ A final drawback was the low bandwidth of HF signals. NTDS relied on using 30 different HF signals to pass all of the required information. But higher-frequency signals traveled only in straight lines, so new options would be needed. Read more...

As we've been talking about signalling and communications lately, I thought it appropriate to show off some of my pictures of the facilities aboard Iowa.

Most of Iowa's antennas are visible in this photo¹¹

Unfortunately, radio isn't really my thing, and this post will be less informative than my usual posts on these subjects. If you want more information, I'd encourage you to get in touch with Iowa's very active amateur radio association. There are also some spaces I don't have pictures of, most notably the transmitter room on 3rd deck. It was locked when I went in 2018, and I didn't have time to visit in 2019 or 2021. Pictures can be found here at Nick England's superb website. The visual signalling gear is from the 40s, while I believe all the radios were replaced during the 80s reactivation. Read more...

Radio development continued after the end of the First World War, as transmitters became more powerful, receivers became more sensitive, antennas became smaller and everything became lighter and more reliable. As such, radio found new applications and became more vital than ever before.

Iowa shows her antennas in the 1950s

During the interwar years, vacuum tubes had won out over all other systems for generating radio signals, and they allowed higher frequencies than had been normal during WWI. These bands were known as high frequency (HF), and they could be efficiently transmitted with much smaller antennas. HF radio could also take advantage of skywave propagation, where signals bounced off the ionosphere and could travel thousands of miles. Low and medium frequency signals traveled primarily via groundwave, which was absorbed as it propagated, and thus could not reach nearly as far.

Read more...