The battleship had emerged from the First World War with two separate batteries of medium-caliber gun, one for shooting at surface targets, and one for air targets. Some nations embraced this, but elsewhere the obvious inefficiency of having to carry two separate sets of guns of approximately the same size prompted a search for a gun, and a mounting, which could fulfill both roles. Both destroyers and aircraft were getting larger, tougher and faster, and countering them required a gun with reasonably high muzzle velocity, a large shell, and a high rate of fire. The US and Britain both installed these weapons on their treaty battleships, and refitted their older battleships with similar batteries where possible.

Iowa's starboard DP mounts¹

Another major driver of DP guns was improved AA fire control. The first generation of AA guns had relied on barrage fire, attempting to saturate a patch of sky the target airplane would fly through. During the interwar period, however, systems like the British High-Angle Control System and the American Mk 37 director² were developed which would theoretically allow accurate engagement of aerial targets. However, this method required high muzzle velocity, as the target could maneuver in the dead time between aiming and the shell reaching the target. This fit well with the need for higher muzzle velocity to reduce the dead space for anti-destroyer fire. Read more...

On the morning of my last day in New England, I headed north to New Hampshire to see USS Albacore, the second of the vital forerunners of the modern submarine. Sister Bean had to go back to work, so I was on my own. While Nautilus had pioneered nuclear propulsion, she had retained the general hull design of previous submarines, only partially optimized for underwater operations. Albacore, while propelled by diesels and batteries, was the first to be fully designed for performance underwater.³

Me at the control panel, for real this time

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The airplane entered the world only a few years before Dreadnought, but its immediate impact was much smaller. The slow, short-ranged aircraft of the first decade of heavier-than-air flight were incapable of meaningful contribution to naval warfare. However, this was to change radically over the next few decades, and navies were not slow to realize this.

QF 3" 20 cwt onboard HMS Royal Oak

The first battleships to carry AA guns were the British Iron Dukes, who received a pair of 3"/45 guns upon completion in 1913. These weapons were mounted in open high-angle mountings, designed exclusively for AA fire. They proved to be excellent weapons, well-suited to the demands of shooting at aircraft, a very different challenge from the usual problems of surface gunnery. Airplanes were small and fragile, but moved much more quickly than surface ships, and in three dimensions. This meant that the most prized features in AA weapons were handiness, so that the gun could be brought on target quickly and kept there, and a high rate of fire.⁴ Time fuzes were used to make the shells explode near the predicted target position, greatly increasing the lethal area, but the target could maneuver while the shell was in flight, so a high muzzle velocity was also desired. However, this required a long barrel, so larger-caliber weapons tended to be short and low-velocity.⁵ Read more...

It's time for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.

I've found a strong contender for the Naval Gazing Award for Excellence in Defense Journalism Failure. The Military's Addiction to Oil, an effort to quantify the military's impact on global warming. It's from 2007, but it was so bad that HuffPo actually pulled the rest of the series. The man has clearly never been near a member of the military, except maybe during a protest. Favorite points include his mention of the "B-52 Stratocruiser" (merely one of many misunderstood aircraft), a claim that the "Seals" have a philosophy of "spray and pray" (a statement I would not like to make near actual SEALs), random shots at defense contractors unrelated to the article's thesis, an assumption that the military doesn't care about fuel economy (fuel logistics are a big concern, and if they could cut the amount of effort devoted to it, they would), and the claim that the Abraham Lincoln "fired 1.6 million pounds of ordnance from its guns" during the early stages of Iraqi Freedom (all three CIWS would have had to fire for almost 9 hours straight to do this). Read more...

When war broke out in 1914, it was assumed that the fighting would be over quickly, well before any new capital ships could be completed. The ships of the British 1914-1915 building program, three Revenges and a Queen Elizabeth, had yet to be laid down. One of the Revenges and the Queen Elizabeth were being constructed at the Royal Dockyards, and were promptly cancelled, freeing capacity for other, more urgent, vessels. However, the last two ships, Renown and Repulse, were being built under contract in private yards, Palmers and Fairfield respectively. Cancelling these ships would incur significant penalties, and work on them was allowed to proceed.

HMS Repulse shortly after being completed

Into this picture came Jackie Fisher, who had invented the battlecruiser and continued to believe it would one day displace the battleship.⁶ After the Battle of the Falklands in December 1914, where Invincible and Inflexible performed well, running down a German squadron that had been attacking British trade, Fisher proposed that Repulse and Renown be redesigned as battlecruisers. His initial proposal was for a 32-kt ship with two twin 15" turrets, 4" secondary armament, intended to save weight relative to the 6" weapons used on the most recent capital ships, and armored like Indefatigable. He soon added a third turret to his requirements, along with a pair of torpedo tubes, and the Director of Naval Construction, Eustace Tennyson D'Eyncourt, produced a design that matched these specifications within three days. This design was swiftly approved, and detail work began only 9 days after Fisher had issued his specification. This urgency carried into the production program, and Fisher planned to complete the ships within 15 months of authorization, by March 1916. Read more...

After visiting Nautilus, Sister Bean and I drove over to Mystic Seaport. Mystic Seaport is the nation's largest maritime museum, including a collection of historical ships, mostly sailing vessels, and a recreation of a 19th-century port. It was all meticulously detailed and lovingly cared for.

Charles W. Morgan⁷

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Mystic has a massive collection of vessels, so many that it's rather overwhelming. The most impressive is the Charles W. Morgan, the last surviving American whaling ship built of wood and the oldest merchant ship afloat. She, and all of the other ships in the collection, have been painstakingly restored, and made as operational as possible. This means that the guides, who are fairly numerous, are pretty knowledgeable and often have insights that those of us in the more traditional museum ship world don't get. Read more...

While the quick-firing batteries of the pre-dreadnought were eliminated with the arrival of Dreadnought, the secondary gun was not dead. Torpedo boats remained a threat, and one that could not be countered by the main guns, because they trained and fired too slowly.

12-pounder guns atop one of Dreadnought's turrets

Dreadnought herself had a light secondary armament, 27 single 12-pounder (3") guns, designed around the threat of independent attack by torpedo boats at night. This meant that the guns would not have to be manned during a fleet action, when the main guns were firing, and thus did not need armor. In fact, it was thought that widely dispersing them would provide greater protection than grouping them and providing light armor. However, they did need to be handy, quick-firing, and have positions with wide arcs of fire. As such, guns were mounted in the open on the main deck and on top of the turrets. Both positions had drawbacks. The ones on the main deck were vulnerable to damage from gun blast when the main guns were fired, although some of them could retract into the deck to mitigate this, while the turret-top guns couldn't easily be supplied with ammunition. Guns at night were useless without searchlights, which had problems of their own. Read more...

As the US Navy prepared to battle its way across the Pacific in the years leading up to World War II, it realized that it would not have the benefit of extensive forward bases to support the fleet on the road to Tokyo. The Japanese controlled most of the islands in the Central Pacific, and the Washington Naval Treaty prohibited fortification of the few the US did own, so they would probably be lost early in the war. Refueling at sea could help this, but many services couldn't be performed while the ship was underway. Instead, the US would have to figure out how to quickly turn a coral atoll lacking even reliable fresh water and lying several thousand miles from the nearest major permanent base into a forward anchorage where the fleet could rearm, resupply, and launch itself again into the Japanese defenses.

Destroyer Tender Dixie with her charges near Leyte

When the war began, most of the ships available for the advance bases were quite similar to those that had supported the fleet in World War I. Submarines and destroyers were supported by their type-specific tenders. While both types of ship had grown larger, more capable, and more self-sufficient in the interwar years, they still needed the support of tenders, with their extensive workshops, skilled technicians, and supplies of spare parts, ammunition, and food. Larger ships tied up alongside repair ships when they were unable to cope with problems using their internal resources. And hospital ships treated the sick and wounded, and evacuated them to the mainland. Read more...

For all of the disasters that bedevil American military procurement, we can always look to our closest ally, the UK, when we need to feel better about our ability to buy weapons. Twice in the last 40 years, the British have poured enormous sums of money into an airplane, and walked away empty-handed. To make matters worse, it was the same airplane both times, the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod.⁸ I thus feel confident awarding the Naval Gazing Worst Procurement Ever trophy to the Nimrod.

The Nimrod MRA4

The Nimrod⁹ was developed in the 60s from the De Havilland Comet, the world's first jet airliner, an airplane most famous for a series of crashes caused by fatigue cracking early in its career.¹⁰ But the Nimrod was based on a later Comet where they'd fixed that problem, and initially proved to be a reasonably good aircraft, being upgraded from the initial MR1 variant to the later MR2 maritime patrol and R1 signals intelligence versions. Read more...

While visiting Sister Bean in Boston, we drove down to see the USS Nautilus and the attached Submarine Force Museum in Groton, Connecticut. It was a bit of a drive, but what we found when we arrived proved that we'd made the right decision. The entire complex joined the list of the great military museums I've been to, instead of the merely good.

Me at a mockup control panel¹¹

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The sail of NR-1

I suspect that many of you are surprised that I'm rating Nautilus above both Massachusetts and Midway. I am too, but they earned it. Even as we were walking towards the front doors, I was starting to see cool stuff I hadn't expected to run across. In that particular case, it was the sail and manipulator arm of NR-1, a nuclear-powered research submarine specializing in fine work deep underwater. It's impossible not to love a submarine that had wheels. Read more...