In many ways, Jutland was both the first major naval battle shaped by the development of aviation and the last one unaffected by it. Aviation considerations shaped the time and place of the battle, but despite efforts by both sides, aircraft made no impact on a tactical level. As such, it's worth taking a closer look at the aviation operations surrounding the battle.

By 1916, the Germans had at least the first inklings of a doctrine for the use of the Zeppelins in support of the fleet, and they formed an important part of Scheer's plans in May. As part of his attritional campaign against the British, he would use a raid on Sunderland, in northeastern England, to draw the British fleet past his U-boats, hopefully costing them some ships. Even better would be a chance to catch a detachment of the fleet by itself and defeat it in detail. Zeppelins offered a platform capable of making sure that the High Seas Fleet didn't blunder into the entirety of Jellicoe's force. Unfortunately, by the time his ships were ready to sortie, southwest winds¹ meant that the Zeppelins couldn't participate. Scheer chose to abandon the Sunderland plan and instead send his force to sweep the area around the Skaggerak, the strait separating Denmark and Norway. The British, aware of the German sortie thanks to good intelligence work, sent Beatty and Jellicoe to intercept. Read more...

Greyhound is a movie I really wanted to see in theaters, but didn't get a chance to. Apple picked it up for their streaming service, which really annoyed me, because if it had done well in theaters, it might have inspired some immitators.

On the whole, I liked the movie. This was clearly done by someone who had a better appreciation for the atmosphere of the actions they were portraying than did, say, the people behind Midway, and it stays reasonably true to the book. But I watched it at my computer instead of on the big screen, and that led to some problems.

The biggest was that they clearly used the model of the USS Kidd, a Fletcher preserved in Baton Rouge, where they did a lot of filming. But the movie is set in February 1942, and the first unit of that type didn't commission until June. That wouldn't be the end of the world, but there's a lot of equipment (the Mk 12/22 radar and quad 40mms) that wasn't developed or fitted until much later in the war. There's also some internal stuff that didn't exist at the time, such as the CIC and PPI for the radar. At least the sonar had an A-scope. The whole thing felt a bit off for me, although most people wouldn't notice.

But that aside, it worked about as well as it could have. I don't know how it would have worked for someone who hadn't read The Good Shepard, but we saw as much of Krause the conflicted man as you could reasonably get in a very different medium, along with a decent portrayal of the tension of fighting submarines. My only issue with the last part was the Germans tapping into the TBS (as far as I know, that never actually happened) but I did really like the response of calmly switching channels. On the whole, it worked, but this probably wasn't the best story to make a movie out of, because of how much the book was concerned with Krause as a character, which doesn't make the transition to the screen that well. Still worth a watch if you get a chance, although I really wish I could say to go see it in theaters.

Thinking it over later, I realized I'd missed one of the things that they'd gotten very right, which was that it didn't feel off at all. Most of the time, portrayal of military life is at least a little bit off because it's hard to accurately show the flavor of a military organization if you're not really familiar with it. Hanks (who wrote the screenplay) is familiar enough to pull it off so well that I didn't even notice. So that's a major mark in the movie's favor.

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

I've recently been playing Hearts of Iron 4, a WWII Grand Strategy game from Paradox. I have mixed feelings on it. It's not particularly detailed by the standards of other wargames I've played, and the shipbuilding system is either nonexistent (if you don't have the Man the Guns DLC) or very rudimentary (if you do) but it's quick and reasonably fun. I will say that my favorite bit is probably when you turn off historical AI focus and watch as things go nuts. Italy takes over France in 1938, Mexico tries to invade the US, and Edward VIII becomes an absolute monarch at war with the Commonwealth. And that was just one game.

2018 overhauls are There Seems To Be Something Wrong With Our Bloody Ships Today, Millennium Challenge 2002, Auxiliaries Part 1, Falklands Part 2, The New Maginot Line and Jutland parts one and two. 2019 overhauls are Pictures - My First Museum Ships, Falklands - Glossary, The Montana Class, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Aviation Part 4 and Battleship Aviation Part 2. 2020 overhauls are FFG(X) and Tomahawk parts one, two and three.

When Joseph Stalin decided to build a navy in the 1930s, he planned to build it around battleships. The design process was hampered by lack of experience and by the purges ongoing in the Soviet union, and while the first of the four ships was officially laid down in 1938, it took another year to get the design finalized to the point that construction could begin. Even before the German invasion stopped construction, one ship was cancelled due to bad rivets, and the other three lagged massively.

The incomplete hull of Sovetskii Soiuz in 1944²

But Stalin was already pushing for follow-up ships, and as the original dates for launching were very aggressive, the initial plan was to lay down the follow-on ships to an evolved variant of the Sovetskii Soiuz design. The major objectives were to raise speed from 28 kts to 30 kts, to replace the Puligese torpedo defense system with a more effective multibulkhead design, and to improve AA firepower, which was becoming increasingly important. The designers also worked to simplify the complicated armor scheme of the earlier design, which had used 19 separate thicknesses of armor plate. Read more...

The basic idea behind the gun director is simple enough. Naval guns tend to be unpleasant things to be around, with all the noise and smoke, and it would be nice if the person doing the aiming didn't have to be right next to one where it might interfere with his work. This was not a new idea when the fire-control revolution broke out around 1900, and the first directors had been installed on warships three decades earlier. Given the technology and tactics of the day, it wasn't particularly flexible. Each gun had fixed positions which would converge its fire on a specific point at a specific range, initially dead abeam at a range of 800 or 1100 yards, with later systems having more options for both range and bearing. The director operator would help guide the ship so that the enemy was in that location, then fire all of the guns electrically when the ship was level, helping to mitigate the problems of roll that plagued naval gunnery. This worked well enough with the slow ships of the day, and the short range meant that the danger space was large enough to compensate for errors in rangefinding.

A caricature of Percy Scott

But by 1890 or so, increased speeds and ranges had made the traditional fixed director obsolete, and the increasing size of guns meant that most ships mounted only two turrets, so the duty of gunlaying returned to operators in individual turrets. But this hiatus lasted only 15 years or so before Percy Scott, who had initiated major improvements in British gunnery starting with continuous aim from lighter guns, realized that for best accuracy, he really did need to separate the man doing the aiming from the smoke and shock of the gun firing. There were several reasons for this. Having an individual aimer for each turret worked well enough when there were only two turrets, but the arrival of Dreadnought meant this was no longer the case. Increased ranges meant that if each turret fired when it was ready, spotting would be nearly impossible and the smoke from one turret would likely interfere with its neighbors. Read more...

I recently went on Russell Hogg's Subject to Change podcast to talk about the future of the aircraft carrier (and a bunch of other stuff). This is a topic I've discussed before, primarily looking at the difficulty of killing a carrier, but I thought it was worth turning my attention to the positive case for the carrier.

Theodore Roosevelt leads her battle group

Fundamentally, the reason that aircraft carriers exist today, and will continue to exist far into the future is that they are tremendously versatile platforms, useful in a wide variety of situations. This is characteristic of naval forces more generally, which have the ability to contribute to national power throughout a broad spectrum of operations in ways unmatched by land forces and land-based air. An aircraft carrier combines the flexibility of sea power, the impact of air power and serious diplomatic heft all into one convenient package. Read more...

Even as the Polaris A3 was being developed, thoughts in the Fleet Ballistic Missile community turned to its successor. It would have to fit into the existing SSBNs, but there was still significant room to grow the missile, as the shock protection had been massively over-designed for the 54" diameter Polaris, and all but the first 10 boats could accommodate missiles up to 74". The big question was what this new missile would offer that would make it a good investment so soon after Polaris A3, particularly as the wider Navy was wary of diverting more funds away from its traditional missions.

The ultimate answer was a new technology, Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles (MIRV). Polaris A3 had pioneered a Multiple Reentry Vehicle (MRV) system that placed a trio of small warheads in a triangle around the target, to maximize destruction in an urban area, particularly in the face of the Soviet's new Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) systems. The idea behind MIRV was to fit even more warheads onto a single missile, with a guided bus that would place each on course for a different target before releasing it and adjusting course to the next one. This would not only make the new missile cheaper per target, but also more effectively saturate ABM systems. First, the new technology would separate the warheads more widely, reducing the chance that a single defensive missile could take out more than one. Second, it was pointed out that the most effective decoy was one that was the same weight and shape as a real warhead, which meant it might as well actually be a warhead. Read more...

It is time, once again, for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it's not culture war. Also, a reminder to everyone that our May virtual meetup is tomorrow, 5/16, at 1 PM Central (GMT-5).

2018 overhauls are Main Guns Part 4, my review of Midway, Russian Battleships Part 3, Falklands Part 1, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Strategy Part 2 and the Super-Dreadnoughts. 2019 overhauls are Shells parts three and four, my review of Fort Sill, The Spanish-American War Part 4, Falklands Part 14, Pictures - Mikasa Part 1 and Battleship Aviation Part 1. 2020 overhauls are Coastal Defenses Part 2, Oil Tankers, Nuclear Weapons at Sea - Heavy Attack and my post on the 2004 UFO incident, although that last is less certain thanks to information I've dug up since I wrote it.

It's also the first anniversary of the start of my Aurora tutorial, which coincides with the recent release of C# Aurora V1.13.

After WWI, the US Navy was by far the world leader in naval lighter-than-air aviation. It first attempted to buy airships from Europe, but these plans fell through, and its first rigid airship was the American-built Shenandoah, the first airship to fly from coast to coast. She was joined by the German-built Los Angeles, but broke up in a storm over Ohio in October 1925.

Los Angeles over Manhattan

Despite the disaster, the Navy's lighter-than-air program survived, although it remained on a fiscal shoestring for the rest of its life. Because Shenandoah's loss resulted in most of the program's helium escaping, Los Angeles was grounded until March 1926. But her return to flight, under the command of Charles Rosendahl, the senior survivor of the Shenandoah crash, allowed the USN to begin the practical work of learning how to operate rigid airships. Rosendahl, an aggressive and charismatic officer with a boundless faith in the possibilities of lighter-than-air flight, was the perfect choice for the job. In the early days, the techniques for handling the ship on the ground had been limited to the use of hundreds of men to walk the airships in and out of hangar. Occasionally, things would go wrong, and the airship would lift too early, carrying some of the ground crew with it. They were under strict orders not to let go if this happened, as it would make the problem worse. Later, a rail-mounted stub mast was developed, which would hold the airship at the nose and tail. It would be pulled out of the hangar to a "mooring-out circle", where the nose would be pointed into the wind, and the tail released, allowing it to take to the air gracefully. Read more...

The Littoral Combat Ship was originally developed from proposals in the late 90s for a small, semi-disposable coastal combatant that would allow the USN to access coastal waters that would otherwise be denied to it, relying on high speed and various buzzwords to fulfill its mission. It turned into one of the worst procurement disasters in US history, producing two classes of very fast and rather underarmed ships that don't have any of the modules they were intended to carry. Despite this, a total of 35 ships have been ordered.

Independence, Manchester and Tulsa operate together

This is a particular problem because nobody is quite sure what to do with them. While the idea of a ship specializing in access to waters where enemies would rather we didn't go seems appealing in today's confrontation with China, the original plan was rather short on details of how this would be done. To some extent, its proponents seemed to advocate simply accepting that some of the ships would be lost, a controversial position in the USN, which has never been particularly accepting of disposable warships. Worse, the actual ships currently in service are far too large and expensive to be considered disposable. That means any ship deployed in disputed waters has to be capable of surviving an attack, a task for which the LCS is extremely poorly suited. Both variants are armed only with a handful of RAM point-defense missiles, which are perfectly adequate for self-defense in lower-threat environments³ but would require cover from something like a Burke if operating near China. In theory, the modular nature of the LCS should allow this to be solved, but any serious air-defense capability would probably require a new radar, which seems to have been a deal-breaker.⁴ Read more...