The PCU USS Gerald R. Ford is now in the water, having had her immense dry dock filled this week at the builder’s yard. CVN-78 is to be the lead ship of its class of United States Navy super-carriers. When finished in 2016 she will be 112,000 tons and over 1100 feet long, making her the largest warship ever completed.
She will fill the hole left in the fleet when USS Enterprise (CVN-65) decommissioned without replacement last year.
Congratulations US Navy, you have the first new floating tumblehome hull battleship since the Battle of Tsushima in 1905!
October 28th, 2013, — The 87% complete Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyer PCU USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) is floated out of dry dock at the General Dynamics Bath Iron Works shipyard. The ship, the first of three Zumwalt-class destroyers, will provide independent forward presence and deterrence, support special operations forces and operate as part of joint and combined expeditionary forces. The lead ship and class are named in honor of former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Elmo R. “Bud” Zumwalt Jr., who served as chief of naval operations from 1970-1974. (U.S. Navy photo courtesy of General Dynamics/Released)
Above is not the Zumwalt but the 12,300-ton (only 700-tons lighter than the Mighty Z-boat!) French battleship Charles Martel with her tumblehome hull. Construction date: 1891. Incidentally, the great graveyard of tumblehome battleships is in the waters between Japan and China. There in May of 1905, an upstart Asian naval force with borrowed technology sank a modern European one and made it look simple.
Now if the the US Navy can just get the magic guns to work on their new 13,000 ton ‘destroyer’ that has 20% fewer VLS cells than the current 1980s technology Burke class destroyers, and 40% fewer cells than the 1970s technology Ticonderoga-class cruisers in a larger hull, things will start to look a lot better and less like 1905.
Mine?
No, its underwater sculpture by Jason deCaires Taylor. Pretty crazy slideshow here
As a bonus, they all become reefs overtime.
“PORTSMOUTH, Va. — The crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Smilax worked with personnel from the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources to recover five cannons and multiple barrel hoops from the Queen Anne’s Revenge in Beaufort Inlet, N.C., Monday.
The Queen Anne’s Revenge was the ship of the pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, for more than a year before the ship ran aground on the shoals in the inlet. The crew of the Smilax, a 100-foot inland construction tender, worked with NCDCR divers to lift the approximately one-ton cannons aboard the Smilax using a combination of flotation bags and the ship’s crane.”
Not bad for the grand old Cosmos-class inland construction tender USCGC Smilax (WLIC-315). She is the Coast Guard’s “Queen of the Fleet”.
Smilax was built by Dubuque Boat & Boiler Works in Dubuque, Iowa. Her keel was laid on 26 November 1943, she was launched on 18 August 1944, and commissioned 1 November 1944. Her first mission included watching out for German U-boats while stationed at Fort Pierce, Florida. Since 2011 she has been the oldest ship in the US Coast Guard and is possibly the last active US military vessel left from World War Two. As an honor, she is the only US military ship with her hull numbers painted in gold and her motto was changed to Natu Maximus Mandatum Traba (Oldest Commissioned Ship).
Homeported in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, she is responsible for maintaining 1,226 fixed aids to navigation such as lights and range markers.
…And salvaging the occasional pirate cannon.
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.- Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, October 30 Mr. Holland’s toy
Here we see what started off originally as the Holland VI, a small submersible invented by Mr. John Philip Holland in 1896. The ship was built at Lewis Nixon’s Crescent Shipyard of Elizabeth, New Jersey for Mr. Holland as his sixth personal submarine (as the name implies).
Mr. Holland showing off his boat for the media. Nothing says 1900 submarines like bowler hats…
Just 53-feet long, she was the forerunner of every submarine today. Yes, there had been dozens of earlier experimental boats that had been produced in the US and Europe from the 1700s on, but the Holland VI had several unique features that are now standard on underwater boats. These included both an internal combustion engine (in Hollands case a 45hp Otto gas engine) for running on the surface, and a 56kW electric motor for submerged operation. She had a re-loadable torpedo tube and a topside deck gun (a pneumatic dynamite gun!). There was a conning tower from which the boat and her weapons could be directed. Finally, she had all the necessary ballast and trim tanks to make precise changes in-depth and attitude underwater.
What more could you ask for?
After running around the US coast and several interested (and very international ) parties popping in to take a look at it, the US Navy bought the little boat for $150-grand in 1900. This was about $3.5-million today. She was placed in commissioned six months later as USS Holland (SS-1) on 12 OCT 1900. The US promptly ordered six larger boats from Holland’s Electric Boat Company as did the Tsar. It was Holland boats sold to the Russians that saw limited use in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, itself a dress-rehearsal for most of the technology used in the First World War.
Holland (SS-01), at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD., summer of 1905. The crew on deck are, L to R: Harry Wahab, chief gunner’s mate; Kane; Richard O. Williams, chief electrician; Chief Gunner Owen Hill, commanding; Igoe; Michael Malone; Barnett Bowie, Simpson, chief machinist mate, and Rhinelander. The two vessels on the right are monitors. The inboard vessel has only one turret and is probably one of 3 monitors: Arkansas (M-7), Nevada(M-8) or Florida (M-9). The outboard 2 turreted monitor is also one of 3 probables: Amphitrite (BM-2), Terror (M-4) or Miantonomah (BM-5).
Made quickly obsolete by very rapid developments in submarine design not only in the US but in Russia, Germany, the UK, and France, she was decommissioned in 1905.
The Navy kept her for eight years in mothballs then sold her as scrap to Henry A. Hitner & Sons, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 18 June 1913 for $100. Within just a few months of her being sold as scrap, British shipping was being sunk at amazing rates by German U-boats in WWI.
The breaker, with that in mind, held onto the ex-Holland through WWI, then passed her onto a local museum who held onto her for 15 years, only cutting her up in 1932 when the Depression dictated it was worth more in scrap iron regardless of sentimental attachment.
A small chunk of her is still in the National Museum of the Navy in Washington.
Nameplate of submarine Holland Exhibited in the “Dive, Dive, Dive!” display area in Bldg. 76
Today the Electric Boat Company still makes boats as part of GenDyn but Holland is largely forgotten.
Specs:
Displacement: 64 long tons (65 t) surfaced
74 long tons (75 t) submerged
Length: 53 ft 10 in (16.41 m) LOA
Beam: 10 ft 4 in (3.15 m) extreme
Draft: 8 ft 6 in (2.59 m)
Installed power: 45 bhp (34 kW) (gasoline engine), later upgraded to 160hp
75 bhp (56 kW) (electric motor)
66 Exide batteries
1 × screw
Speed: First 3knots then later 8 knots (15 km/h; 9.2 mph) surfaced
5 knots (9.3 km/h; 5.8 mph) submerged
Complement: 6
Armament: 1 × 18 in (460 mm) torpedo tube forward
1 ‘Aerial torpedo tube’ (experimental)
1 × 8.4 in (210 mm) dynamite gun (removed in US Naval service)
If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO)
They are possibly one of the best sources of naval lore http://www.warship.org/naval.htm
The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.
Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
I’m a member, so should you be!
A team of four Italian Gruppo Operativo Incurson (Operational Raider Group) combat swimmers emerging from a Salvatore Todaro (S526)-class diesel attack submarine. The Salvatore Todaro (S526) is a German Type 212 class 1800-ton advanced SSK. These boats are able to transit up to two weeks without surfacing or snorkeling, which is huge for a non-nuclear boat. Manned by just a 27 man crew, one of these boats can float in 20-feet of water and carry up to 13 DM2A4, A184 Mod.3, Black Shark Torpedo, or IDAS missiles and 24 external naval mines. Oh yeah, and naval swimmers. Note the ease of leaving the sub by the front door. Their weapons of choice are M4-type rifles with the swimmer on the far right carrying one possibly in 7.62x51mm NATO (judging from the straight box mag and longer barrel) which could make it a Mk110 type.
The Operational Raider Group is a unit of just 150-200 hardcore operators inside the more well-known COMSUBIN that are comparable to the US Navy Seals, Royal Marine SBS, or Danish Frogmen corps. They trace their lineage back to the MAS units and X MAS units of World War One and Two, meaning they have more sunken battleships to their record than any other combat swimmers on the market.
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. – Christopher Eger
Here we see a rendering of a very interesting boat in the Italian Naval service during World War One. Part tank, part torpedo boat, it was designed to crawl over the nets protecting enemy naval bases, then punch holes in the bad guy’s ships, sending them to the bottom and taking them out of the war.
When the Great War started, Italy, which was officially an ally of Germany and Austria, flung its hands in the air and proclaimed its official neutrality. You see Italy bordered France to the west, faced the might of the combined British and French fleets in the Mediterranean, and had very little to gain for coming into the war for the two Kaisers, with everything to lose. After eight months of wooing the Allies, Italy double-crossed their buddies and cast their lot with the West. Although the Italian Army found itself in a bloody stalemate in the Alps against the Austrian army that brought nothing but misery, their navy served a genuine purpose in bottling up the rather large Austrian fleet in the Adriatic. This freed up the British and French forces in the Med to move into the Atlantic to face the Germans.
Just look at all of those pretty Austrian battleships at anchor in Pula harbor. Here you see Austro-Hungarian dreadnought battleships ( Tegetthoff class ) at the roadstead in Pula Croatia , Which Was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
For most of 1915, 1916, and 1917 the Italian Navy, (Regia Marina) was content with holding the line across the Adriatic and keeping the Austrians in their ports. Then in 1918, they decided to go north and sink the Kaiser’s battleships where they slept. Two Italian torpedo boats made it into the lightly defended harbor at Trieste and sank the old battleship, Wien. The problem was, the Austrians had years to fortify their largest naval base at Pola (now Pula in Croatia) with anti-submarine nets, anti-torpedo nets, underwater obstacles, coastal artillery, and naval mines. To penetrate these harbors, the Italians had to come up with something different.
They came up with the “Barchino Salvatore” or “punt jumper”. These fifty-foot-long wooden hulled boats had a flat bottom and two tracks along each side of the hull, port, and starboard. Each track held a series of metal crampon hooks and was turned by a set of pulleys fore and aft, propelled by a pair of 5hp electric motors. This unusual boat 8-ton could literally crawl over the rows of torpedo nets and anti-submarine nets that separated the Adriatic from the protected harbor. Once over the nets, the boat would drop into the inner harbor, where it would transit, using its spinning tracks to move like a side-mounted paddle wheel, at 4 knots. Then, lining up with an Austrian battleship at anchor, it would send two torpedoes into its side before beating feet (err, tracks) back out to sea. Of course, this required the punt jumper to be towed to Pola and back by a larger ship, but once there, it was good to go.
The Italians built four of these boats and named them the Cavalletta (Grasshopper), Locusta (Locust), Pulce (Flea), and Grillo (Cricket). The were made a part of MAS 95 and 96 squadrons, which became famous for irregular naval actions in the war.
Four times in early May 1918, two Italian destroyers, two torpedo boats, and the punt jumper Grillo left the Italian side of the Adriatic and made their way in convoy to Pula. On the first three of those attempts, conditions were less than ideal Then on the night of May 13-14, 1918, the Grillo made a go of it with a mission to make it through Pola harbor. Crewed by Stoker Giuseppe Corrias, Seaman Angelino Berardinelli, and commanded by Lieutenant CC Pellegrini, the Grillo made it through four of the five Austrian obstruction nets but got caught on the last one. These obstacles were rows of timber balks and wire hawsers six feet apart.
Four out of five doesn’t count in harbor defenses and the Austrians opened fire on the helpless Grillo when it was caught in the searchlights, which sunk.
Italian crawling MTB Grillo after the attack on Pola on 13 May 1918
Pellegrini
Her three-man crew was captured and ended the war as POWs, winning the Italian Gold Medal for Military Valor.
The Austrians’ Grillo clone
The Austrians thought it interesting enough to make one of their own as a testbed to make sure the Italians couldn’t get successful using one of these tank-boats in the future.
With that in mind, the Italians shelved the other three and concentrated on human torpedoes, which they used to penetrate Pola in November and sink the battleship Viribus Unitis (20,000 t) and the nearby steamer Wien (7,400 t) in the last days of the war.
Specs:
Displacement 8 tons
Length 16.0 m (52.29ft)
Width 3,10 m (10.17 ft)
Draft 0.75 m (2.46ft)
Propulsion 2 electric motors on the axis for 10 HP total
Speed 4 knots
Range 30 mn at 4 knots
Crew 4
Armament 2x 450mm torpedoes
If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO)
They are possibly one of the best sources of naval lore http://www.warship.org/naval.htm
The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.
Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
I’m a member, so should you be!
Since World War 2, the United States Navy has owned the oceans and will likely continue to do so for the near future. Although the Navy has thousands of missiles, modern jet attack aircraft, nuclear powered submarines, and advanced torpedoes, most surface combatants still carry a big gun up front as a hood ornament.
Ever since 1363, when cannon fired from a ship at sea killed a Danish king on another; naval ships have carried large caliber guns. The United States only became a world power in 1898 after the proper application of the US Navy’s big guns on its battleships and cruisers against Spanish fleets in the Caribbean and Pacific during the Spanish American War. The First World War started after a naval arms race over building large-gunned battleships increased tensions to a point of no return. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor at the start of World War 2, they did so to target Battleship Row, to take America’s big guns out of the fight.
Although the number of battleships at sea has dropped to zero from then to now, the US Navy is one of the few forces in the world that still has cruisers and destroyers. Moreover, all of these ships still carry 5-inch (127mm) Mk 45 naval rifles. Moreover, these guns are far from obsolete.
Read the rest in my column at Firearms Talk.com
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.
– Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday October 16, The Ship that Wouldnt Die
Here we see the USS Franklin (CV-13), one of the 24 Essex class fleet carriers that were completed. Laid down a year to the
day after Pearl Harbor, the 800+ foot long ship was built in just over 400-days, commissioned 31 January 1944.
She rushed out to sea, did her shake down cruise, and was almost immediately in combat. Among her crew was bandleader Horace Kirby “Saxie” Dowell, who had just had one of the largest hits in the country before the War started with “Three Little Fishes”, which was famously covered by the Andrews Sisters. Saxie at 37 was one of the oldest of the 2600 men on the boat. But like Saxie, most of the rank and file had only a year before been a civilian.
By June 1944 she was neck-deep in Japanese disputed waters, sending sorties into Bonin and Mariana Islands, Peleliu, and other islands on the final push towards the Empire. Then came the Philippines in October where Franklin and her escorts fought in the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea in which her planes helped drop ordnance on the Japanese battleships Musashi, Fuso, and Yamashiro. This was followed by the Battle off Cape Engano where her planes helped scratch the Emperor’s carriers Zuiho and Chiyoda.
Then by March 1945, she was the closest US carrier to the Japanese coast, lying just 50 miles offshore. It was then on 19 March that a single Japanese aircraft came in low and slow on Franklin and dropped two 550-pound bombs right on to her deck. There she had 31 fully armed and fueled aircraft ready to take off for strikes against the home islands. The resulting explosions and fires led to an amazing struggle between men and flame. This left the ship dead in the water, charred, and listing at 13-degrees. Suffering 807 killed and more than 487 wounded, half of the ship’s crew had been killed or seriously injured. Cumulatively on the magazine explosion on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor caused more loss of life in US Navy history.
Well within a day she had made enough repairs to make it off to Ulithi Atoll at 14-knots. Within six weeks she had steamed across the Pacific, through the Canal, and into Brooklyn Naval Yard. Her war over, she spent months being restored to near-new condition. Unneeded after the war, she was decommissioned 17 February 1947, having spent just over three years in service. Her condition kept her in mothballs for almost two decades but unlike her sisters, she was never converted to the post war Essex-type pattern with an angled flight deck.
On 1 August 1966 she was sold for scrap.
A monument to the ship is at Bremerton Washington.
Specs:
Displacement: As built:
27,100 tons standard
36,380 tons full load
Length: As built:
820 feet (250 m) waterline
872 feet (266 m) overall
Beam: As built:
93 feet (28 m) waterline
147 feet 6 inches (45 m) overall
Draft: As built:
28 feet 5 inches (8.66 m) light
34 feet 2 inches (10.41 m) full load
Propulsion: As designed:
8 × boilers 565 psi (3,900 kPa) 850 °F (450 °C)
4 × Westinghouse geared steam turbines
4 × shafts
150,000 shp (110 MW)
Speed: 33 knots (61 km/h)
Range: 20,000 nautical miles (37,000 km) at 15 knots (28 km/h)
Complement: As built:
2,600 officers and enlisted
Armament: As built:
4 × twin 5 inch (127 mm) 38 caliber guns
4 × single 5 inch (127 mm) 38 caliber guns
8 × quadruple 40 mm 56 caliber guns
46 × single 20 mm 78 caliber guns
Armor: As built:
2.5 to 4 inch (60 to 100 mm) belt
1.5 inch (40 mm) hangar and protective decks
4 inch (100 mm) bulkheads
1.5 inch (40 mm) STS top and sides of pilot house
2.5 inch (60 mm) top of steering gear
Aircraft carried: As built:
90–100 aircraft
1 × deck-edge elevator
2 × centerline elevators
If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO)
They are possibly one of the best sources of naval lore http://www.warship.org/naval.htm
The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval
vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide
information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.
Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of
which are unique in their sweep and subject.
I’m a member, so should you be!
After a recent series of raids along the coastline of the Horn of Africa, local jihadist rebels have been spouting about lost equipment supposedly captured from Navy Seals. We give our take on this.
Along the Eastern coast of Africa, where the ‘horn’ of the continent reaches out towards the Indian Ocean, lays the confusing country that is Somalia. Divided and mired in a civil war that has been raging off and on over the past quarter century, American involvement has been off and on in the area. Blackhawk Down was twenty years ago this week, pirates are often blown out of the water there with the help of the US Navy, and a combined task force, Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa is based at Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti– just a stone’s throw away.
Its CJTF-HOA’s mission to combat terrorists in the area. Namely against Al-Shabaab, a fundamentalist group with Al-Qaeda ties. That’s where the raid comes in.
In of Barawe, a coastal town in Somalia on October 5, 2013, a group of commandos crept in during the dark of night. These frogmen were looking for one Somali ideas man who worked for al-Shabab. After making contact with the shibabist terrorist foot soldiers, the small group of allied troops broke contact and withdrew….and apparently left some stuff behind.
Read the rest in my column at Firearms Talk.com
