With the post today about HMS Centurion‘s figurehead, this 1877 painting by noted maritime artist James Tissot, entitled “Portsmouth Dockyard” seemed appropriate.
Note, over the amourous Highlander’s shoulders, a then-modern ironclad battleship, and several legacy ships-of-war, with their white painted figureheads prominent.
The 19th century 80-gun third-rate ship HMS Centurion was built in 1844 as one of the last generations of Royal Navy ships-of-the-line. Later converted to steam and reduced in armament, she was sold in 1870 and her name was issued to the leader of a new class of steel battleships in 1892 and then a KGV-class dreadnought in 1911.
However, her 2.5m, 225kg figurehead, “a male bust with a plumed helmet, tooled breastplate and a tailboard with the union flag and weapons,” has recently undergone significant restoration work and is now joining some 20 other vintage figureheads on display at the Portsmouth Royal Dockyard.
As such, it will be on display for the first time.
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, May 15, 2019: Lady Sara Never Looked Better
As I am on the road this week after just getting back from Indy last week, the regular Warship Weds offering is short– but special. We have covered Sara in a past WW, but didn’t have this anniversary spread:
NHHC 19-N-84316
Here we see the beautiful Lexington-class aircraft carrier USS Saratoga (CV-3) in Puget Sound on 15 May 1944 just after a late-WWII refit/repair, 74 years ago today.
“Her flight deck is as it would be seen by a pilot coming in for a landing. Her axial deck is rimmed with gun galleries to both sides and astern; twin 5-inch gun mounts are arranged forward and aft of her prominent island and stack, as in the later Essex-class carriers. Flight decks, at this time, were painted in a dull blue stain with white markings.”
At the time this spread was taken– all of these shots are from the same day– Sara had been the oldest U.S. aircraft carrier since 1942 when both Langley (CV-1) and her sistership Lexington (CV-2) were sunk by the Japanese. Other than Enterprise and Ranger, the latter in the Atlantic, she was the only American flattop to make it through the war.
Laid down on 25 September 1920 as Battle Cruiser #3 by the New York Shipbuilding Co., Camden, N.J.; she converted to an aircraft carrier and reclassified CV-3 in accordance with the Washington Treaty and commissioned on 16 November 1927. Along with Lexington, the two ships were literally the seagoing training school for the U.S. Navy’s 1930s carrier program.
When WWII started, she saw much fighting but battle damage often kept her sidelined from pivotal campaigns. Nonetheless, Saratoga earned 7 battle stars the hard way– for instance, she was in Puget Sound because of six Japanese hits off Chichi Jima in February 1945.
As noted by DANFS, after she left Puget Sound, she accomplished a few records and got two A-bombs for her faithful service:
On 22 May, Saratoga departed Puget Sound fully repaired, and she resumed training pilots at Pearl Harbor on 3 June. She ceased training duty on 6 September, after the Japanese surrender, and sailed from Hawaii on 9 September transporting 3,712 returning naval veterans home to the United States under Operation “Magic Carpet.” By the end of her “Magic Carpet” service, Saratoga had brought home 29,204 Pacific war veterans, more than any other individual ship. At the time, she also held the record for the greatest number of aircraft landed on a carrier, with a lifetime total of 98,549 landings in 17 years.
With the arrival of large numbers of Essex-class carriers, Saratoga was surplus to postwar requirements, and she was assigned to Operation “Crossroads” at Bikini Atoll to test the effect of the atomic bomb on naval vessels. She survived the first blast, an air burst on 1 July, with only minor damage, but was mortally wounded by the second on 25 July, an underwater blast which was detonated under a landing craft 500 yards from the carrier. Salvage efforts were prevented by radioactivity, and seven and one-half hours after the blast, with her funnel collapsed across her deck, Saratoga slipped beneath the surface of the lagoon. She was struck from the Navy list on 15 August 1946.
Her name was recycled by CV-60, the second of four 1950s Forrestal-class supercarriers, which carried the proud moniker until she was struck from the Naval List 20 August 1994.
Hopefully, there will be another Sara in the fleet soon.
If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International
They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.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.
With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
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Here is past Combat Gallery Sunday artist Alex Colville with his haunting painting, Tragic Landscape (oil on canvas 61 x 91 cm, painted in 1945) depicting a fallen German Fallschirmjäger in the tail end of the war, who has already been picked clean of his boots.
Beaverbrook Collection of War Art. Canadian War Museum 19710261-2126
A Canadian military combat artist who landed in France in August 1944 and worked his way into Germany largely on foot, to Buchenwald and beyond, Colville saw the war up close and personal.
“I remember the paratrooper lying in a [Deventer] field,” recalled Colville in a 1980 interview. “He was about twenty. They [the Germans] would fight right to the very end; they had put up a tremendous fight until they were all killed.”
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, May 8, 2019: Vladivostok’s Red Pennant
Here we see the Russian steam gunboat Adm. Zavoyko bobbing around in Shanghai harbor sometime in 1921, as you may observe from the local merchants plying their wares. When this photo was taken, she was perhaps the only seagoing member of a Russian fleet on the Pacific side of the globe. Funny story there.
Built at the Okhta shipyard in St. Petersburg for the Tsar’s government in 1910-11, she was named after the 19th century Imperial Russian Navy VADM Vasily Stepanovich Zavoyko, known for being the first Kamchatka governor and Port of Petropavlovsk commander, the latter of which he famously defended from a larger Anglo-French force during the Crimean War.
This guy:
The riveted steel-hulled modified yacht with an ice-strengthened nose was some 142.7-feet long at the waterline and weighed in at just 700-tons, able to float in just 10 feet of calm water. Powered by a single fire tube boiler, her triple expansion steam engine could propel her at up to 11.5-knots while her schooner-style twin masts could carry an auxiliary sail rig. She was capable of a respectable 3,500 nm range if her bunkers were full of coal and she kept it under 8 knots.
Ostensibly operated by Kamchatka governor and intended for the needs of the local administration along Russia’s remote Siberian coast, carrying mail, passengers and supplies, the government-owned vessel was not meant to be a military ship– but did have weight and space reserved fore and aft for light mounts to turn her into something of an auxiliary cruiser in time of war (more on this later).
Sailing for the Far East in the summer of 1911, when war was declared in August 1914, the white-hulled steamer was transferred to the Siberian Flotilla (the largest Russian naval force in the Pacific after the crushing losses to the Japanese in 1905) and used as a dispatch ship for that fleet.
Now the Siberian Flotilla in 1914, under VADM Maximilian Fedorovich von Schulz– the commander of the cruiser Novik during the war with Japan– was tiny, with just the two cruisers Askold and Zhemchug (the latter of which was soon sunk by the German cruiser Emden) the auxiliary cruisers Orel and Manchu; two dozen assorted destroyers/gunboats/minelayers of limited military value, seven cranky submarines and the icebreakers Taimyr and Vaigach. As many of these were soon transferred to the West and Arctic in 1915 once the Germans had been swept from the Pacific, our little steamer, armed with machine guns and a 40mm popgun, proved an increasingly important asset used to police territorial waters.
ADMIRAL ZAVOYKO 1917
By 1917, with the Siberian Flotilla down to about half the size that it began the war with– and no ships larger than a destroyer– the 6,000 sailors and officers of the force were ripe for revolutionary agitation. As such, Adm. Zavoyko raised a red flag on her masts on 29 November while in Golden Horn Bay, the first such vessel in the Pacific to do so.
She kept her red pennant flying, even as Allies landed intervention forces at Vladivostok.
Japanese marines in a parade of Allied forces in Vladivostok before British, French and American sailors, 1918
As for the rest of the Siberian Flotilla, it largely went on blocks with its crews self-demobilizing and many jacks heading home in Europe. The fleet commander, Von Schulz, was cashiered and left for his home in the Baltics where he was killed on the sidelines of the Civil War in 1919.
By then, it could be argued that the 60 (elected) officers and men of the Adm. Zavoyko formed the only active Russian naval force of any sort in the Pacific.
In early April 1920, with the counter-revolutionary White Russian movement in their last gasps during the Civil War, the lukewarm-to- Moscow/Pro-Japanese Far Eastern Republic was formed with its capital in the Siberian port. It should be noted that the FER kind of wanted to just break away from the whole Russia thing and go its own way, much like the Baltics, Caucuses, Ukraine, Finland, and Poland had done already. Their much-divided 400~ representative Constituent Assembly consisted of about a quarter Bolsheviks with sprinklings of every other political group in Russia including Social Revolutionaries, Cadets (which had long ago grown scarce in Russia proper), Mensheviks, Socialists, and Anarchists. This produced a weak buffer state between Soviet Russia and Imperial Japan.
This thing:
The Far Eastern Republic ran from the Eastern shores of Lake Baikal to Vladivostok and only existed from 1920-23.
Now flying the (still-red) flag of the FER, Adm. Zavoyko was soon dispatched to bring a cache of arms to Red partisans operating against the last armed Whites on the coast of the Okhotsk and Bering Seas.
However, after Adm. Zavoyko left Vladivostok, the local demographics in its homeport changed dramatically. By early 1921, the population of the city had swelled to over 400,000 (up from the 97,000 who had lived there in 1916) as the White Army retreated east. With the blessing of the local Japanese forces– all the other Allies had left the city– the Whites took over the city in a coup on May 26 from the Reds of the Far Eastern Republic. As the Japanese were cool with that as well, it was a situation that was allowed to continue with the Whites in control of Vladivostok and the Reds in control of the rest of the FER, all with the same strings pulled by Tokyo. To consolidate their assets, the Whites ordered Adm. Zavoyko back to Vladivostok to have her crew and flags swapped out.
This put Adm. Zavoyko in the peculiar position of being the sole “navy” of an ostensibly revolutionary Red republic cut off from her country’s primary port. With that, she sailed for Shanghai, China and remained a fleet in being there for the rest of 1921 and into 1922, flying the St. Andrew Flag of the old Russian Navy. There, according to legend, she successfully fended off several plots from foreign actors, Whites, monarchists, and the like to take over the vessel.
By October 25, 1922, the Whites lost their Vladivostok privileges as the Japanese decided to quit their nearly five-year occupation of Eastern Siberia and the Amur region. White Russian RADM Georgii Karlovich Starck, who had held the rank of captain in the old Tsarist Navy and was the nephew of the VADM Starck who was caught napping by the Japanese at Port Arthur in 1904, then somehow managed to scrape together a motley force of 30 ships ranging from fishing smacks and coasters to harbor tugs and even a few of the old gunboats and destroyers of the Siberian Flotilla and sail for Korea with 10,000 White refugees aboard. His pitiful force eventually ended up in Shanghai on 5 December, where it landed its refuges, and then proceeded to sell its vessels (somewhat illegally) in the Philippines the next year, splitting the proceeds with said diaspora. Starck would later die in exile in Paris in 1950. His second in command, White RADM Vasily Viktorovich Bezoire (who in 1917 was only a lieutenant), remained in Shanghai and was later killed by the Japanese in 1941.
As for Adm. Zavoyko, once the FER voted to self-dissolve and become part of Soviet Russia, she lowered her St. Andrew’s flag, raised the Moscow flag, and sailed back home to the now-all-Soviet Vladivostok in March 1923 where became a unit of the Red Banner Fleet– the only one in the Pacific until 1932.
To commemorate her service during the Revolution and Civil War, her old imperialist name was changed to Krasny Vympel (Red Pennant). She was also up-armed, picking up four 75mm guns in shielded mounts, along with a gray scheme to replace her old white one.
For the next several years she was used to fight pockets of anarchists and White guards that persisted along the coast, engage stateless warlords, pirates, and gangs along the Amur, and shuffle government troops across the region as the sole Soviet naval asset in the area. She also helped recover former Russian naval vessels towed by the Japanese to Northern Sakhalin Island (where the Japanese remained in occupation until 1925).
In 1929, she stood to and supported the Northern Pacific leg of the Strana Sovetov (Land of the Soviets) seaplanes which flew from Moscow to New York. After that, with her neighborhood quieting down, she was used for training and coastal survey work but kept her guns installed– just in case.
Tupolev TB-1 Strana Sovyetov floatplane, 1929. The two planes would cover some 21,000 km to include a hop from Petrovavlask to Attu, which our vessel assisted with.
During WWII, with the revitalized Soviet Pacific Fleet much larger, Adm. Zavoyko/Krasny Vympel kept on in her role as an armed surveillance vessel and submarine tender, occasionally running across and destroying random mines sewn by Allied and Japanese alike.
In 1958, after six years of service to the Tsar, five years to various non-Soviet Reds, and 35 to the actual Soviets, she was retired but retained as a floating museum ship in her traditional home of Vladivostok in Golden Horn Bay.
Krasny Vympel 1973, via Fleetphoto.ru
Today, she remains a popular tourist attraction. She was extensively rebuilt in 2014 and, along with the Stalinets-class Red Banner Guards Submarine S-56 and several ashore exhibits, forms the Museum of Military Glory of the Pacific Fleet.
Krasny Vympel 75mm guns and Maxim, via Fleetphoto.ru
She has been the subject of much maritime art:
As well as the cover of calendars, postcards, pins, medals, and buttons.
You can find more photos of the vessel at Fleetphoto.ru (in Russian) and at the Vladivostok City site
Specs:
Archive of the Modelist-Designer magazine, 1977, № 9 Via Hobby Port.ru http://www.hobbyport.ru/ships/krasny_vympel.htm
Displacement — 700 t
Length: 173.2 ft. overall (142.7 ft. waterline)
Beam: 27.88 ft.
Draft: 10 ft.
Engineering: 550 HP on one Triple expansion steam engine, one coal-fired boiler
Speed: 11.5 knots; 3500 nm at 8
Crew: 60
Armament:
(1914)
1 x 40mm Vickers
2 x Maxim machine guns
(1923)
4 x 75-mm low-angle
1 x 40mm Vickers
2 x Maxim machine guns
If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International
They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.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.
With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.
I’m a member, so should you be!
UNIFIL peacekeepers from Italy, Ghana, and Malaysia jointly carried out a live firing exercise with the Lebanese Armed Forces (almost humorously abbreviated as, LAF) in an area about one kilometer south of the UNIFIL Headquarters in Naqoura in March
“The 27 March exercise, codenamed Centauro 2019, sought to enhance interoperability among UNIFIL troops operating under the Mission’s Sector West command and with LAF,” noted the UN.
The “Centauro” portion of the live fire ex’s title likely comes from the fact that the Italian troops were equipped with Fiat/OTO Melara B1 Centauro 8×8 vehicles armed with a 105 mm/52 cal rifled low-recoil gun.
Photos: Staff Sergeant Luca Filardo & Staff Sergeant Franco Graziano / UNIFIL
The Centauro carries 14 ready rounds for the 105mm gun in the turret and another 26 rounds in the hull, giving it the capability, with sabots, to zoink most main battle tanks (especially aging T-55s/72s often found in Third World countries) it is able to get the drop on.
However, the armor on its welded hull is only rated to withstand 14.5 mm bullets and shell fragments, which means RPGs and even well-armed AFVs are hazardous to its health.
UNIFIL currently has some 10,000 UN peacekeepers from something like 45 countries, with Italy providing a reinforced battalion-sized unit. Other than a French contingent with a company of 13 Leclerc heavy tanks, the Italians are the most heavily armed.
On 30 March 1918, during the Battle of Moreuil Wood which helped blunt Ludendorff’s massive Operation Michael spring offensive, the Canadian Cavalry Brigade– which had long been held in strategic reserve in case the Allies were able to break through– galloped into the field.
One of these units, C Sqn of Lord Strathcona’s Horse (Royal Canadians), commanded by Lt. Gordon Flowerdew, wheeled into line, and “with a wild shout, a hundred yards in front of his men, charged down on the long thin column of Germans.”
Alfred Munnings: Charge of Flowerdew’s Squadron, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Memorial
The horsemen charged through the German lines twice and set them to retreat– but lost 70 percent of their effectives in the process. Nonetheless, they held their captured ground until Canadian infantry arrived to reinforce them. Flowerdew later died of his wounds and his family was presented with the VC in his honor.
The Royal Canadians’ Strathcona Mounted Troop recently recreated the charge in France, sans Germans.
“Ships from five Allied navies assigned to Combined Task Force One Five Zero (CTF-150) execute breakaway maneuvers from formation for a photo opportunity while underway in the Gulf of Oman, in support of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM 5/6/2004.”
USN Photo DNSD0610204 by PH1 Bart Bauer, in the collection of the U.S. National Archives #6669991 https://catalog.archives.gov/id/6669991
Pictured foreground-to-background: the US Navy Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS LEYTE GULF (CG 55); the French Navy Georges Leygues-class (Type 70) destroyer, LA MOTTE-PICQUET (D 645); the Pakistan Navy Tariq (Type 21 Amazon) class frigate, PNS (Pakistani Naval Ship) KHAIBAR (D 183) [ex-HMS Arrow (F173)], the Spanish Navy Santa Maria (Oliver Hazard Perry) class frigate NUMANCIA (F 83); an unidentified French Navy Lafayette-class frigate, (likely Surcouf (F711)); Spruance-class destroyer, USS CUSHING (DD 985); and the Royal New Zealand Navy ANZAC (MEKO 200) class frigate HMNZS TE MANA (F 111).
All, save for Cushing, are still on active duty. The oldest of the above is the bonafide slugger Arrow/Khaibar, which commissioned in the RN 28 July 1976 and saw close combat in the Falklands, surviving Argentine aircraft, conducting NGF support, and rescuing most of the surviving crew of stricken HMS Sheffield.
Cushing was disposed of in a sinkex in 2008.
Gibb, Robert; Comrades, the 42nd Highlanders; The Black Watch Castle & Museum; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/comrades-the-42nd-highlanders-128430
The British Army has long included Highland regiments, hardy units recruited in Scotland– that in some cases were established long before the British Army was. Kilt-wearing regiments included such storied outfits as the 42nd Foot/Royal Highlanders/Black Watch, Cameron Highlanders, Gordon Highlanders, the Seaforth Highlanders, and the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders.
Many of these regiments still issued the knee-length pleated uniform kilt for field dress as late as 1942 and Highlanders sent to France with the BEF went to the Continent in 1939 wearing their traditional uniforms.
Today the pipers of the Scots Guards and the Jocks of the Royal Regiment of Scotland as a whole still wear the Type 1A Military Kilt on occasion (although the latter includes several lowland regiments that have been amalgamated) and to keep you straight on how to do that properly, check out the hilarious instruction from CSgt Benson, Master Tailor of 2 Scots, below:
World War II in the Pacific began (unless you ask the Chinese or French) on 2 December 1941 with the famous “Niitakayama Nobore” (Climb Mount Niitaka) signal sent to Nagumo’s flagship to clear the way for Yamamoto Kido Butai force of a half-dozen aircraft carriers to turn towards Hawaii and attack Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th.
Interestingly, the U.S. military has, since the final days of WWII, instituted the common practice of posing warplanes over Mount Fujisan, just outside of Tokyo, which I always took as a bit of historic payback.
Corsairs Fringe Fuji. Painting, Wash and Scratch Board by Standish Backus 1945 NHHC 88-186-AC
Grumman F9F-6 Cougar Jet Fighters Fly in formation over Mount Fuji, Japan, 12 December 1954. They are from USS YORKTOWN’s (CVA-10), VF -153. Plane in the foreground is BU 128209. 80-G-K- 17821
F9F Panthers over Mt. Fuji, c.1957
Formation of VA-22 A4C “Skyhawk” aircraft over Mt. Fuji, Japan, 27 April 1964. NHHC
MOUNT FUJI, Japan (April 12, 2007) – Aircraft assigned to Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 5 perform a formation flight in front of Mount Fuji. CVW-5 is embarked aboard USS Kitty Hawk (CV 63).U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jarod Hodge
Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 267 AH-1Z Viper and UH-1Y Venom helicopters past Mount Fuji, Shizuoka, Japan, March 12, 2017. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Andy Martinez)