To conclude our look at the history of the units of the Iowa class, let's take a look at Wisconsin,¹ the last American battleship built by hull number.

Wisconsin sliding down the launching ways

Wisconsin's keel, the last for a completed American battleship, was laid at Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, on January 25th, 1941, and she was launched on the second anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. She commissioned only five months later, on April 16th, 1944,² and after some training on the East Coast, departed for the Pacific, where she joined Halsey's 3rd Fleet in early December. Only 9 days later, she found herself in the midst of Typhoon Cobra, which capsized three destroyers and damaged numerous other ships. Read more...

The Public Health Service Commissioned Corps is the larger of the two non-military US uniformed services. Like the NOAA Commissioned Corps, it is composed only of officers, who use naval ranks and uniforms.³ Approximately 6,700 medical personnel, including doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, therapists, veterinarians, scientists, and environmental health professionals, make up the corps, and serve in support of numerous federal and state health projects. Like their counterparts in the NOAA Corps, members of the PHS Corps are given their commissions directly after they complete their education.

The roots of the PHS Corps go back to 1798, when Congress passed an act mandating the creation of hospitals for merchant seaman. In 1870, after a series of scandals surrounding the loosely-controlled marine hospitals, the service was centralized as the aptly-named Marine Hospital Service. John Maynard Woodworth was appointed as the Supervising Surgeon-General of the Service, an office that later evolved into the modern Surgeon General, and quickly established a new model. Physicians would wear military uniforms and were assigned to the Service as a whole, instead of to a specific facility, allowing them to be moved as needed. The next few decades saw the MHS gain more responsibility for public health problems in general, including quarantine of ships that might carry disease, health screening of the tide of immigrants arriving at ports like Ellis Island, handling epidemics ashore, and even running hospitals for Native Americans. In 1902, the MHS became the Public Health Service, the backbone of which was still the commissioned corps of physicians. Read more...

On August 27th, 1943, the sloop HMS Egret was lost in the Bay of Biscay. By itself, this wasn't of particular note, as the Biscay campaign was hard on the ships that fought it. But she was sunk by a new type of weapon, one that would ultimately change the face of naval warfare.

HMS Egret

The early years of WWII had seen a sort of impasse develop between ships and the aircraft that tried to sink them. If the aircraft bombed from high altitude, it was essentially immune to defensive fire, but the moving ship was far too difficult a target to be worth going after. If it approached at low level, it might hit, but it also gave the ship a chance to hit back. This went double for torpedo bombers, which had to attack at such low level that they were vulnerable to even small-arms fire. Dive bombers had found a way to at least partially resolve this problem, but that was restricted to comparatively small aircraft, which did not have the range to operate far from shore. The Germans, driven from the surface of the sea and hunted intensively below it, needed some way to challenge Allied control of the waves from the air without sacrificing too many planes from the dwindling Luftwaffe. Read more...

Once again, it is time for our regular open thread. You're allowed to talk about whatever you wish.

The Naval Institute recently published a very interesting article on the Fat Leonard scandal. While it focuses on the impact on promotion and reassignment of how long things have dragged on, it also gives a good overview of the scandal as a whole.

Since last time, I've overhauled the posts on Pre-Dreadnoughts, Basics of Naval Strategy, the second part of Russian Battleships, So You Want to Build a Battleship - Strategic Background, and the last two installments of Why the Carriers Are Not Doomed.

In the mid-1930s, it was apparent to all that the battleship holiday would soon come to an end. The existing battlefleets were growing increasingly obsolescent, while the other European naval powers had each laid down a pair of new battleships of their own. It was expected that the Second London Naval Conference would allow the major powers to resume construction of capital ships, and the British were faced with the need to build the first battleship since the Nelsons a decade earlier. The final result, while often overlooked in favor of its American, German, and Japanese contemporaries, gave good service in the crucible of war.

King George V in 1945

Work on what became the King George V began in 1933, as the first London Treaty expired on January 1st, 1937, and if ships were to be laid down on that date, orders would have to be placed in mid-1936. A number of sketch designs were prepared to a set of requirements that seem curiously retrograde. The armament was to be in four twin turrets, two forward and two aft,⁴ while the single-purpose secondary battery of 6" guns was to be in casemates for reliability. A speed of 23 kts was requested for compatibility with the existing battleships, as it was thought that the existing battlecruisers would be adequate for a few more years. Great emphasis was placed on protection, as the new battleship might face enemies armed with 15" and 16" guns, as well as the growing threat of the dive bomber, armed with 1,000 or even 2,000 lb bombs. Major changes included an emphasis on aircraft, considered useful for spotting fire, scouting, and torpedo attack,⁵ and the provision of quintuple torpedo tubes on either side for use in a night action. The base specification called for only 12" weapons, in accordance with the British negotiating position at the upcoming London conference, but the result, protected against 16" gunfire, was characterized as being grossly unbalanced.⁶ Read more...

This post was written by my sister during the original run of this series on SSC.

I was reading through what bean had posted on commercial aviation earlier, and I ran across a question about why hubs exist. As much as I love my darling brother, I don’t think the answer he gave did justice to the complex, wonderful world of airports. And yes, I am that person who actually enjoys long layovers, and thinks that the airport textbooks bean has given me for my birthday and Christmas are very good gifts. One of the highlights of my summer was sitting in an airport reading an airport management textbook. It was glorious.⁷

Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, famous as a hub for Delta

Airlines are famously a “pray really hard, cross your fingers, and hope you’ll make enough money to buy a new plane or retrofit old ones” industry. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is expecting airlines across the world to have a near record total net profit of $29.8 billion, with a profit margin of 4.1% in 2017. The $29.8 billion number might sound really great, but that’s the net profit of all of IATA’s 278 member airlines. This works out to about $107 million per airline, which is enough to buy 89.7% of a Boeing 737 MAX9 (list price of $119.2 million as of May 2017). Granted, some of the IATA airlines made more, some made less, and some lost money, but we’ll use averages for simplicity’s sake. It’s important to remember that most airlines don’t pay full price for their planes, ⁸ and the purchase of planes is generally funded by either sale of stock or large loans. Hubs save airlines a lot of money. I’ll leave an in-depth explanation of the costs of a commercial flight to someone else (ahem, bean),⁹ but, in essence, airlines only make money when their planes are in the air, and a plane costs roughly the same to fly whether it’s full or not, because the weight of an additional passenger and their baggage is a drop in the bucket compared to the empty weight of the plane itself. So, airlines make the most money off of full flights, and bleed money on the flights where half the seats are empty. Airlines have a very good incentive to run flights as full as possible. Even though I might want to travel from, say, Lawton, Oklahoma to Lewiston, Idaho, there will never be a direct flight from Lawton to Lewiston because there isn’t enough demand (or really any demand at all- let’s be honest, there’s not much in Lawton,¹⁰ and there’s not much in Lewiston¹¹). This is where hubs come in. Read more...

I've previously mentioned that during the 1950s the Iowas were fitted with a 16" nuclear shell, the Mk 23 "Katie".¹² This is a fascinating device, one of a plethora of nuclear weapons that were developed in the mid-50s. But how did the Katie come about, and what modifications were made to the battleships to allow them to use it?

Me with the Mk 23 at the National Atomic Museum¹³

The Katie has its origins in the Mk 9, the world's first artillery-fired atomic projectile (AFAP). The Mk 9 was the Army's first nuclear weapon, part of its bid to keep itself relevant in an era when atomic weapons were expected to dominate the battlefield of the future.¹⁴ The designers faced serious challenges. An artillery shell is an incredibly difficult environment to put a complicated device like a nuclear warhead. It must withstand normal handling, thousands of Gs of acceleration as it's fired, and the centrifuge of a shell spinning at 10,000 rpm or more. It must be incredibly reliable, as a nuclear shell that doesn't go off is not only a waste of money but might give the target valuable materials or insight. And it needs to be compact, as big artillery pieces are heavy, expensive, and difficult to move. Ideally, a nuclear shell would be for an existing weapon, probably the 240 mm M1 howitzer, the biggest gun in the Army's inventory. Read more...

Strength is one of the main concerns of the naval architect. Supporting the loads of the ship while it moves across the sea, and while the sea moves around it, is not a trivial problem. The structure also needs to be as light as possible, watertight, and cheap to build.

Iowa's structure being assembled at Brooklyn Navy Yard

The most serious loads on a ship come from the uneven distribution of weight and buoyancy. While the total weight and buoyancy will be equal when the ship is at equilibrium,¹⁵ it is common to have weights in the ends of the ship that overwhelm the buoyancy provided by the fine lines there, and are supported from the broad center section. Read more...

I've decided that it would be fun to shed a little light on the lesser-known uniformed services. And no, I don't mean the Coast Guard. While they do a great and generally underappreciated job, the average American has at least heard of them. Today, I tackle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Corps, an organization that is by far the smallest of the uniformed services, with a strength of about 320 commissioned officers, and no warrant officers or enlisted men.

The NOAA Corps provides officers with technical and scientific training for the operations of the NOAA, and for support of other activities of the United States. After getting their degrees, potential members apply for a direct commission into the Corps. They have naval ranks and wear naval uniforms, and the Corps itself only exists due to a strange quirk of history. Read more...

By 1898, Spain's empire in the Americas, once the largest in the world, was a husk of its former self. Revolutions early in the century had seen the Spanish colonies from Chile to Mexico become independent nations, leaving only Cuba and Puerto Rico under the Spanish flag. In the Pacific, they retained the Philippines, Guam, and a scattering of small islands.¹⁶ But even these remnants rested uneasily. Cuba had first revolted against Spanish rule 30 years earlier, and another effort to win independence had broken out in 1895, followed by a similar revolutionary war in the Philippines a year later. The US watched all of this with growing interest. American businesses essentially controlled the Cuban economy, and Cuban revolutionaries staged a very successful propaganda campaign to convince the US to intervene, aided by harsh measures the Spanish used to fight the Cuban guerillas and the famous "Yellow Journalism" of American newspapers. However, President McKinley wanted to end the conflict peacefully, and offered to serve as an intermediary.

USS Maine in Havana Harbor

Into this cauldron was sent the American battleship Maine. The first battleship built for the US Navy, she was by this point obsolescent, with staggered turrets and no protection from QF guns. However, this would not seriously hinder her mission of protecting American citizens and interests in Havana, which depended much more on her status as a US warship than on her combat power. She entered the harbor on January 25th, 1898, and while the Spanish were not particularly friendly, they didn't interfere with the crew. Her Captain, Charles Sigsbee, was not ignorant of the danger that the Spanish would take some action against the ship. In fact, some locals had called for vengeance against the "Yankees" for sending a man-of-war to their waters, and demonstrated against the ship. Sigsbee ordered extra sentries posted, and kept a quarter of the watch on deck near their battle stations. He also made sure that any visitors were carefully monitored for "infernal machines", and that steam was kept up to allow the turrets to operate in an emergency. Unfortunately, his crew was unable to sweep the harbor for mines, or to use Maine's searchlights, which would have been interpreted by the authorities as a hostile gesture. Read more...