The initial German deployment of guided bombs in the Bay of Biscay was worrying for Allied naval commanders, but the focus of the German bomber groups soon shifted to the Mediterranean. There, the Allies had recently taken control of Sicily, and it was only a matter of time until they landed in Italy. Germany would be ready to oppose them with their new weapons, and it was in the waters of the Med that the Hs 293 and Fritz X would have their day in the sun.

Fritz X

Fritz X was first used on July 21st, 1943, in a raid on the Sicilian harbor of Augusta. This raid, and several later raids through the end of August, were so ineffective that the Allies didn't even realize that a new weapon was being used against them.¹ But events were moving swiftly that would soon provide the new weapon with an ideal target. Four days after that first raid, the Grand Council of Fascism overthrew Mussolini, opening the way for Italy to try to leave the war. On September 3rd, an armistice was signed, although it wasn't to be made public until the Allies began landing. Read more...

I've shared a few photos of the engineering spaces of Iowa before, most notably when I discussed her propulsion system, but I thought it was high time to break out more of them. Let's take an in-depth look at the various systems inside the boiler room. I'd recommend reviewing the post on Iowa's propulsion system first, as I'm not going to go into detail on the mechanics of a steam plant here.

You enter the room from the top, onto the catwalk at the top of one of the boilers. The first thing you see is the steam drum and the water level controls for the boiler.

The controls for the water level in the boiler. Too much water, and it gets into the turbines, which is bad. Too little, and the boiler melts, which is really bad.²

Read more...

So what was actually needed to build a battleship? How was a pile of metal turned into a vessel capable of ruling the waves?³

Iowa takes shape on the building slip at Brooklyn Naval Yard

It all started with a piece of land. This land needed to be firm enough to support the vessel as it was being built, and next to a body of water into which the vessel could be safely launched. It also needed good access to the sources of building materials, and to skilled workers. Once the land was secured, a building slip was constructed. This sloped gently towards the water, usually at about 3°, to make it possible to launch the ship when it came time for that. The ways, the main supports for the ship under construction and the rails which she would slide down at launch, were then laid. These were built primarily of timber, and for a battleship were approximately 8' wide and 30' apart. In the center, a line of wooden building blocks was placed to provide the primary support for the vessel as it was assembled. These allowed men to work underneath the ship, and provided clearance for the launching cradle when it was installed. Read more...

It's time once again for our open thread, where you are allowed to talk about anything you want.

If you want to play around with modern air and naval warfare, look no further than Command: Modern Air and Naval Operations (CMANO). CMANO is the sort of thing I would make if I could program and had unlimited time. The systems database alone is worth the price, particularly if you get it on sale, and it can be a lot of fun, at least for the right person. But it's definitely closer to a simulation than a game, so be warned.

Overhauled posts since last time are Early US Battleships, Aegis, the first three parts of my series on amphibious warfare, and my tale of military software development.

In early April, 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a few desolate rocks in the South Atlantic. The British mobilized their fleet in response. On the 25th, a force retook South Georgia, a even smaller and more desolate island that Argentina had also captured, while the main task force closed in on the Falklands. May 1st saw the British launch their attack. 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. Both sides settled in for a siege while the British waited for the amphibious force to arrive.⁴

HMS Brilliant

On May 12th, the weather had improved, and Hermes was able to fly her first CAP mission since the 9th. The Harriers were fitted with 1000 lb bombs to be dropped from high altitude, the first level-bombing attacks from the Fleet Air Arm since 1940. These added to the ongoing bombardment from the fleet, supplied on the 12th by Brilliant and Glasgow. Shortly after noon, Brilliant detected an inbound raid, and the CAP was out of position to intercept. Fortunately, the group was about 15 miles out to sea, resting between bombardments and giving plenty of space for the missiles to engage. But when Glasgow's Sea Dart was ordered to fire on the attackers, it detected a problem and refused. The destroyer opened fire with her 4.5" gun, which jammed after 8 rounds. The Sea Wolf, though, functioned perfectly. Brilliant launched three missiles, two of which struck the incoming A-4 Skyhawks, blowing them apart. The third target dodged the missile by flying into the sea, and while it was too late to engage the last Skyhawk, its bomb skipped over Glasgow instead of hitting. Read more...

A couple of installments ago, when I discussed safety, I talked about the standard procedure for addressing airplane-level structural problems found before they cause a crash. But the majority of aviation incidents today are more complicated, mostly because of how good we are at finding purely mechanical problems before they bring down a plane. I’m going to neglect terrorism and other outside factors throughout, as that’s a rather different discussion.

A rare crash with a happy ending

When people think of plane crashes, they tend to think of the plane slamming into the ground, and everyone onboard being killed immediately. While this does happen, it’s actually fairly rare. All of 2017 passed without an incident of this type, although there were three in 2018, most notably the Lion Air crash, and another in 2019. In the US, the last mainline crash where everyone onboard was killed was that of American Flight 587, in November of 2001. That crash was due to structural failure after the co-pilot overused the rudder to counter wake turbulence from the plane taking off ahead of them. Read more...

When I first talked about fire control, I briefly mentioned the problems of rangekeeping. This is the practice of turning the ranges produced by rangefinders into values that can be used for gunnery. I'll expand on them, and look at the early mechanisms used to solve these problems.

The first problem is that rangefinders do not produce the ranges that the guns need to be aimed at. A good rangefinder will produce a close approximation of the current (geometric) range to the target,⁵ and this is adequate at short ranges. As range increases, the shell falls more steeply, which decreases the "danger space", where the shell falling long or short will still hit. Even worse, long-range fire takes longer to reach the target. Even if rangefinder range is accurate and can be transmitted instantly to the guns, the target will have moved by the time the shells reach it. The obvious solution is to predict where the target will be, and to aim there, but this is harder than it looks, because both the ship and the target are moving, and the solution changes as the ships move. Solving any specific case might not be that difficult on paper, but solving the problem in real time is a very different matter. Read more...

To conclude our look at the history of the units of the Iowa class, let's take a look at Wisconsin,⁶ 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, 1944,⁷ 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.⁸ 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...