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Warship Wednesday June 11, The other battleship New Jersey

Posted on June 11, 2014 by laststandonzombieisland 2 comments

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off 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. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday June 11, The other battleship New Jersey

Here we see the early Virginia-class pre-dreadnought battleship USS New Jersey (BB-16) in 1907, on the eve of that ship’s voyage as part of Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet. Most often when people think of a battleship named for the Garden State, the classic Iowa-class BB-62 ship comes to mind immediately. However, there was also BB-16, and her story, which saw a lot less action than the ship that would later carry on the name, is no less intriguing.

The Virginia class was one of the first ocean-going battleships of the newly emergent sea-power that was the United States Navy, built on earlier experience with the Kearsarge, Illinois, and Maine classes. Like the Kearsarge, they were given superimposed main and secondary armament turrets, which cut down on weight but hampered both batteries when in action and limited their range. Some 441-feet long and with a 15,000-ton displacement, they were of average size for pre-dreadnought battleships and are comparable to a large destroyer today (paging the Zumwalt…). She was fast for her time, able to touch 20-knots with her 12-boiler steam plant pushing twin engines/shafts/screws. At the time of the class design, they were the first U.S-made ships to carry Krupp armor, and they had up to 12-inches of it in the turrets.

She was a New England-made ship through and through, being built at Fore River Shipbuilding Company, Quincy, Massachusetts. She was commissioned 11 May 1906 and soon joined the fleet. After a brief tour of the Caribbean, including laying at anchor in Havana as a reminder of who controlled the purse strings of that country at the time, New Jersey became part of the 15-month epic voyage that was the Great White Fleet.

She, and three of her Virginia-class sister-ships, made up the Second Division of that fleet which was commanded by Rear Admiral William H. Emory (yes, the same guy that the destroyer tender was named after). The combined force of 16 battleships, supported by nearly forty coalers and a host of auxiliary craft, left Hampton Roads 16 Dec 1907, then, 43,000 nautical miles and twenty port calls on six continents later, arrived back there on 22 February 1909, just in time to be join the International fleet review as part of the 1909 Hudson-Fulton exhibition.

USS New Jersey (BB-16) In a China Sea typhoon, during the “Great White Fleet’s” cruise around the World, 1908. Courtesy of Donald M. McPherson, 1967.

Of course, this placed most of the U.S. fleet out of service and away from the continent for over a year, but it taught the growing steam navy how to operate on a global basis.

New Jersey at the 1909 Hudson-Fulton International Fleet review in New York. Note the more warlike haze gray scheme the navy switched to after the return of the Great White Fleet

After spending most of 1910 out of commission, her crew being sent to man new, more modern battleships coming down the ways. Recommissioned 15 July 1911, she was soon landing naval parties in Mexico in 1914 during the Tampico incident and from there to support US Marines in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

When the US entered WWI in 1917, she spent the conflict escorting the occasional coastal convoy, camouflaged in a special pattern. However her main contribution was in training gunnery crews. Once the conflict ended, she made no less than four trips to Europe to carry dough boys back home from ‘over there’, transporting no less than 5000 US Army troops.

At the end of the war, the Navy deemed her surplus, decommissioning the mighty NJ 6 August 1920. Once the various series of Naval Limitations treaties started to be negotiated, she was stricken from the Navy List so that her tonnage could not be counted against precious battleship totals.

Turned over to the War Department for use by the Army, both New Jersey and her sister ship Virginia were towed to Diamond Shoals, off Cape Hatteras NC in Sept. 1923. There, lumbering Army Air Corps MB-2 bombers under Brig. Gen Billy Mitchell subjected New Jersey to a series of bombing runs of 600 lb bombs that left the ship damaged and taking on water. Focus was then shifted to Virginia and, after she was sunk, returned to New Jersey. The ship was subjected to further attacks until she took what is likely a fatal bomb hit just aft her main mast and sank in the afternoon.

Infograph of New Jersey, from the Courier-Post Online

The wreck lies upside down in a section of ocean where currents keep her scoured clean of marine life 355 feet down.

Specs:

Displacement: 14,948 tons (13,561 tonnes)
Length: 441 ft 3 in (134.49 m)
Beam: 76 ft 3 in (23.24 m)
Draft: 23 ft 9 in (7.24 m)
Speed: 19 kn (22 mph; 35 km/h)
Complement: 812 officers and men
Armament:

4 × 12 in (300 mm)/40 cal guns
8 × 8 in (200 mm)/45 cal guns
12 × 6 in (150 mm)/50 cal guns
4 × 21 in (530 mm) torpedo tubes

Armor:

Belt: 6–11 in (152–279 mm)
Barbettes: 6–10 in (152–254 mm)
Turrets (main): 6–12 in (152–305 mm)
Turrets (secondary): 4–12 in (102–305 mm)
Conning tower: 9 in (229 mm)
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/

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!

Warship Wednesday June 4, the guardian angel of Omaha Beach

Posted on June 4, 2014 by laststandonzombieisland 4 comments

Here at LSOZI, we will take off every Wednesday to look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday, June 4, the guardian angel of Omaha Beach

“The Battle for Fox Green Beach,” watercolor by Dwight Shepler, showing the Gleaves class destroyer USS Emmons(DD 457) foreground and her sister-ship, the USS Doyle, to the right, within a few hundred yards of the landing beach, mixing it up with German shore batteries on D-Day

Here we see the Gleaves-class destroyer USS Doyle (DD-494/DMS-34) along Fox Green landing area on Omaha Beach on D-Day. The Gleaves class is an unsung group of some 62 destroyers who began construction pre-WWII and completed into the first stage of the war. With the huge building of the follow-on Fletcher- and Sumner-class destroyers, the Gleaves are often forgotten. What should never be forgotten is the sacrifice these ships made, with no less than 11 of the class lost during WWII.

Built by Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation, Doyle was laid down six months before Pearl Harbor and commissioned 27 January 1943, at the height of both the Battle of the Atlantic and the war in the Pacific. It was decided that the ship, with her 11-foot draft, was desperately needed in the Atlantic for something the brass had brewing, and she arrived, after a stint in anti-submarine patrols, in British waters in early 1944. There, on June 5, 1944, she found herself sailing across the channel as part of the biggest amphibious invasion ever.

On D-Day, 70-years ago this week, the Doyle, was part of DESRON 18, under the overall command of Captain Harry Sanders. Consisting of the destroyers USS Frankfort (with Sanders aboard), USS Carmick, USS McCook, USS Emmons, and USS Thompson along with Doyle, these six hardy ships stood close by as the troops of the 29th Infantry Division and Big Red One, as depicted in the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan, moved ashore in their landing craft on Omaha Beach.

The idea was that specially equipped tanks would come ashore and roll over the German positions. However, just a handful of these amphibious equipped tanks made it ashore. To make matters worse, some of the coxswains of the landing craft missed got turned around in the smoke and haze, and landed their troops at the wrong points. Some of the scariest moments were on Dog Beach, where the exits from the beachhead, Dog 1, the Vierville draw, were in fierce defilade of the German positions along the bluff overlooking the water.

It was murder.

Doyle‘s day started with this log entry,

0630: “‘H’ hour. Commenced indirect fire on target … to aid in clearing beach exit now completely obscured by smoke and dust.”

Soon the squadron was ordered to ceasefire for fear of hitting US forces moving ashore.

At 0830, violating a cease-fire order, USS Carmick opened up on the German positions with her 5-inch guns and within thirty minutes, the other ships of DESRON 18, under Sanders’ order, closed in as close as they could with the beachhead to plaster the lines. Among the ships that made it closest to shore, almost scraping bottom, was USS Doyle. She made it so close inshore, in fact, that her light AAA guns were able to pepper the German positions as well.

Doyle, as with the other destroyers, moved along Omaha, working her way where she was needed. These are selections from her log entries that day:

1100: “Stopped 800 yards off beach Easy Red. Observed enemy machine gun emplacement on side of steep hill at west end of beach Fox Red, enfilading landing beach. Fired two half [two-gun] salvos. Target destroyed. Shifted fire to casemate at top of hill, fired two half salvos, target destroyed. Army troops begin slow advance uphill from beach. Maneuvering ship to stay in position against current which is running west at 2.8 knots. Flood tide.”

With this, Doyle reported that Exit F-1 from Fox Red beach was open.

Can you imagine a 1,600-ton, 348-foot long ship just 800 yards offshore? Spitting fire from everything that could be manned…

1355: “Observed guns firing from trees on hill-top to eastward of landing area [Fox Red] …. Fired four full salvos. All shots burst in vicinity of target area.”

1957: “Observed enemy soldiers manning abandoned machine gun nest on hill to eastward of landing beaches. Fired three salvos, men and gun emplacement destroyed.”

2109: “Splashes, probably from 75MM shells, seen on both bows close aboard, about 25 to 50 yards. Gun flashes seen from German Patrol boat inside [Port-en-Bessin] breakwater previously fired on. Opened fire with full salvos, covered area around boat. Direct hits impossible because of sea wall. … Enemy troops … in vicinity of boat seen abandoning positions.”

In all that day the little destroyer fired: “558 rounds of 5″ A.A. common, 156 rounds of 5″ common dye loaded ammunition [projectiles carrying a colored dye for use in spotting fall of shot]. No casualties to personnel or to any of ship’s equipment.”

For the next 64 hours, as retold in a period piece in Yank, Doyle pounded shore batteries, targets of opportunity, filled fire support requests from naval shore parties inland, dodged near misses from Messerschmitt Me 110s and torpedoes from unseen enemies while recovering 37 survivors from shot up landing craft.

Not all the destroyers on D-Day were as lucky. Doyle‘s sister ship, USS Corry (DD-463), was sunk off Utah Beach by German shore batteries in dramatic action.

Another unsung hero of D-Day was the USS Emmons, who fired nearly twice the ammunition that Doyle did that day. Emmons would meet her end within a year at the hands of a Japanese kamikaze.

In a postwar essay written by William B. Kirkland Jr., the WWII gunnery officer on Doyle, the following was noted:

“DESRON 18 never failed in its duty at Normandy or Omaha beach might have been lost, and it wasn’t. It is hard to say how many more graves would have been filled, and how the invasion of Fortress Europe would have fared, without the efficient and effective performance of these nine destroyers. There is no doubt that DESRON 18 cracked the German wall at Omaha Beach in actions above and beyond the call of duty. The ships and sailors who manned them deserve to be better remembered.”

Force O’s ammo consumption on D-Day, note that the destroyers at the bottom were producing the same volume of fire as much larger cruisers

Nevertheless, Doyle had more history to make and was on the move again just days after D-Day.

Within short order, she found herself covering the landings in Southern France and finished the war in Europe by escorting convoys.

Converted to a fast minesweeper (any ship can be a minesweeper at least once!) in June 1945, she was transferred to the Pacific to take part in the coming epic invasion of the Japanese home islands. This conversion removed one of her 5-inch mounts, the torpedo tubes, took her depth charge racks, and repositioned forward from the stern and angled outboard, and saw her stern modified to support minesweeping gear including a myriad of davits, winches, paravanes, extra generators, and kites.

However, by the time she made it, the war had ended. For the next several years she quietly performed occupation duty and saw much of the now-quiet Pacific.

Then came 1950.

When the North Koreans came screaming across the 38th Parallel into South Korea in June 1950, Doyle was immediately dispatched. She was visions of D-Day when she helped cover landings by ROK forces along the peninsula as well as supporting covert operations by commando units. As a minesweeper she helped clear invasion landings near Wonsan and Hungnam, remaining in Korean waters until the
end of open hostilities in 1953. A very busy ship, she earned six battle stars in Korea.

She was decommissioned in the states on 19 May 1955, the Navy having enough of the more modern Fletcher-class destroyers that the slightly smaller and older Gleaves-class were no longer needed. Retained in mothballs for 25 years, she was struck from the Navy List 1 December 1970 and broken up two years later for the value of her scrap.

Specs:

(As built)
Displacement:    1,630 tons
Length:    348 ft 3 in (106.15 m)
Beam:       36 ft 1 in (11.00 m)
Draft:       13 ft 2 in (4.01 m)
Propulsion:    50,000 shp (37,000 kW) (37 MW);
4 boilers;
2 propellers
Speed:    37.4 knots (69 km/h)
Range:    6,500 nautical miles at 12 kt
(12,000 km at 22 km/h)
Complement:    16 officers, 260 enlisted
Armament:
4 × 5 in/38 cal guns (1 deleted in 1945)
4 x 40mm Bofors in two twin mounts.
7 x 20mm Oerlikon in single mounts.
Torpedo Tubes: 5 x 21-inch in one quintuple mount. (deleted in 1945)
ASW: 2 tracks for 600-lb. charges; 6 “K”-gun projectors for 300-lb. charges.

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/

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!

Warship Wednesday May 28, The Great Italian Count

Posted on May 29, 2014 by laststandonzombieisland 2 comments

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday May 28, The Great Italian Count

Here we see the pride of the 20th Century Royal Italian Navy (the Regia Marina), His Majesty’s battleship Conte di Cavour. Named after the first Prime Minister of a unified modern Italy, Camillo Paolo Filippo Giulio Benso, Count of Cavour, of Isolabella and of Leri, who was also the first Italian Minister of the Navy, the ship was to be the Regia Marina’s notice to all that the country was a legitimate naval power.

The good Camillo Paolo Filippo Giulio Benso, Count of Cavour.

Laid down 10 August 1910 at the La Spezia Arsenale, she was the lead ship of a class of new dreadnought-style ships for Italy. With a 25,000-ton displacement, 577-foot length, and 21-knot speed, she was comparable in size to battleships of the day. Equipped with good British Parsons steam turbines, and 20 boilers, she was reliable underway. Her armament of a baker’s dozen 12-inch guns, was designed with the help of Armstrong Whitworth and Vickers.

These were arranged in an odd five turret plan of three triple-gun turrets and two twin-gun turrets, was formidable while her 5-11 inches of locally made Terni cemented armor (crafted from U.S. steel and nickel) was sufficient for all but close combat from the most modern battleships.

At the time she was constructed, Italy’s biggest rival in the Med was France, who had just built a series of Courbet-class battleships of some 25,000 tons with up to 11-inches of armor, a 21-knot speed (also powered by British Parsons steam turbines), and 12x12-inch guns– which could be why the Italians insisted on having 13!

Delayed by the Italo-Turkish war, she took nearly a half decade to complete, being commissioned 1 April 1915, just in time for Italy’s entrance into World War One– as an ally of France. Nevertheless, she spent that war as the flagship of the Navy, calmly waiting for the Austrian fleet to sortie out into the Adriatic, which never happened. Two sisters, Leonardo da Vinci and Giulio Cesare would soon follow her down the ways although da Vinci suffered a catastrophic accidental magazine explosion in 1916 that destroyed her.

When the war ended, Cavour was something of a happy ambassador, embarking King Emmanuel III and his family on occasion and conducting extended sorties to the United States . She did however fire her guns in anger during the 1923 Corfu Incident, in which her tertiary battery bombarded the island during an Italian occupation. You see good old Mussolini was in power by then, and looking for trouble.

Laid up from 1927 until 1937 at Trieste (recently seized from the scraps of the Austrian empire), Cavour was extensively rebuilt under the orders of Generale del Genio navale Francesco Rotundi.

When she emerged from this decade of slumber, she had a thoroughly new look, as well as a new power-plant of eight superheated Yarrow oil-fired boilers (fueled by Libyan oil wells Italy had wrested away from the Ottomans in 1911). This made the old ship new aging, extending her range by a factor of 50 percent while increasing her speed to over 27-knots at a full clip. To accommodate the weight of more armor, the center triple 12-inch turret was removed, bringing her broadside down to 10 guns rather than 13. She was recommissioned 1 June 1937.

Soon, Mussolini had her clocking in to pay for all the recent improvements by covering the Italian invasion of hapless Albania in 1938. That same year, the Cavour served as the reviewing stand for both the chubby Benito and his stubby homie Adolf in a grand review of the Regina Marina at Naples.

Conte di Cavour, with the Duce and Hitler on the stern in Naples watching the torpediniera Cassiopea pass close in review.

When Italy entered WWII on the side of Hitler in 1940, both Cavour and her similarly rebuilt sister Cesare were soon mixing it up with the British Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet with the two trading long-range shots with HMS Malaya and HMS Warsprite at the Battle of Punto Stilo.

This uneventful combat was to be her greatest moment, as the Brits soon decided to make sure the Italian surface fleet was marginalized.

Then late on the night of 11 November 1940, a group of just 21 British Swordfish torpedo bombers penetrated the Italian anchorage at Taranto and sank Cavour along with three other battleships with well-placed torpedoes. Note that this was a full year before Pearl Harbor.

‘Taranto Harbour, Swordfish from Illustrious Cripple the Italian Fleet, 11 November 1940′ by Charles David Cobb. Painting in collection of National Museum

She spent the rest of the war in a state of salvage and repair but was never returned to service. During this time first the Germans then the Americans captured the derelict ship which was finally scrapped in 1946.
Specs:

Note the center turret

(As built)
Displacement: 23,088 long tons (23,458 t) (standard)
25,086 long tons (25,489 t) (deep load)
Length: 176 m (577 ft 5 in) (o/a)
Beam: 28 m (91 ft 10 in)
Draught: 9.3 m (30 ft 6 in)
Installed power: 30,700–32,800 shp (22,900–24,500 kW)
20 × Water-tube boilers
Propulsion: 4 × Shafts
4 × Steam turbines
Speed: 21.5 knots (39.8 km/h; 24.7 mph)
Range: 4,800 nmi (8,900 km; 5,500 mi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph)
Complement: 31 officers and 969 enlisted men
Armament:

3 × triple, 2 × twin 305 mm (12 in) guns
18 × single 120 mm (4.7 in) guns
14 × single 76.2 mm (3 in) guns
3 × 450 mm (17.7 in) torpedo tubes

Armor:

Waterline belt: 250–130 mm (9.8–5.1 in)
Deck: 24–40 mm (0.9–1.6 in)
Gun turrets: 280–240 mm (11.0–9.4 in)
Barbettes: 230–130 mm (9.1–5.1 in)
Conning towers: 280–180 mm (11.0–7.1 in)

….and no center turret

(after reconstruction)
Displacement: 29,100 long tons (29,600 t) (deep load)
Length: 186.4 m (611 ft 7 in)
Beam: 33.1 m (108 ft 7 in)
Installed power: 75,000 shp (56,000 kW)
8 × Yarrow boilers
Propulsion: 2 × Shafts
2 × Geared steam turbines
Speed: 27 knots (50 km/h; 31 mph)
Range: 6,400 nmi (11,900 km; 7,400 mi) at 13 knots (24 km/h; 15 mph)
Complement: 1,260
Armament:

2 × triple, 2 × twin 320 mm (12.6 in)
6 × twin 120 mm (4.7 in)
4 × twin 100 mm (3.9 in) AA guns

Armor: Deck: 166–135 mm (6.5–5.3 in)
Barbettes: 280–130 mm (11.0–5.1 in)
Aircraft: 1-2 Macchi M.18 seaplanes

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/

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!

Warship Wednesday May 21, Alexander’s Polar Star

Posted on May 21, 2014 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday May 21, Alexander’s Polar Star

Here we see a beautiful rendering by the noted Russian artist Alexander Beggrow in 1892 of His Russian Imperial Highness’s Ship Polyarnaya zvezda (Polar Star). This painting is currently in the Central Naval Museum, St.-Petersburg, Russia and is one of the few artifacts remaining of the craft.

The yacht/auxiliary cruiser Polar Star was built at the Baltic Shipyard in St. Petersburg under commission for the Tsar of all the Russias, Alexander Alexandrovitch Romanov III, as a gift for his wife, the Danish-born Tsarina Marie. Designed by the Navy’s shipbuilding plans group, she was laid out by Admiral I. Shestakova who used inspirational plans of the fast British second-class cruisers Iris and Mercury – who when she was completed was the fastest ship in the Royal Navy –as a base line for the Tsar’s fast new ship.

She was laid down at the Baltic shipyard May 20, 1888, in the presence of the Imperial couple and top officials of the Ministry of the Navy, she was launched on May 19, 1890. After mooring and sea trials in March 1891, the ship was adopted in the ships of the Baltic fleet and listed as part of the Imperial Guards.

She was thoroughly modern. Built of good German Siemens-Martin steel, she had full-length watertight doors, electric lighting throughout, a
double-bottom hull, and a modern steam plant that consisted of two vertical triple expansion steam engines with designed capacity of 3000 HP each and 10 boilers. She had fully redundant systems including two sets of emergency steering wheels, one above deck and another below. Polar Star was outfitted it precious woods and furniture, as fitting the Imperial family.

Dozens of sketches by Nabokov and Prokofiev decorated the salons of the ship. For going ashore in style, she carried 8 away boats, including two mahogany-constructed steam launches for the royals.

The Polar Star was built with four 47mm Gatling guns, very similar to this 37mm Hotchkiss shown here in Russian service. Note the bare feet. Thats gonna suck when the hot brass starts flying.

As she was to carry the Tsar, whose father had been assassinated just ten years before, the ship was heavily armed with a quartet of rather well hidden Hotchkiss 5-barreled Gatling-type 47 mm guns which were considered just the thing to smother an incoming anarchists controlled terrorist ship with hot lead, capable of spitting 30 rounds per minute out past 2000-meters. Called “Gockisa guns”, this armament, as well as an entire platoon of heavily armed Imperial Marines, quartered below deck, provided a formidable force.

Besides the Marines, the ships 313-man crew was extensively vetted and cleared by the Tsarist secret police, the dreaded Okhrana, and its members were thought salted among them as seemingly innocent stewards and stokers just to keep everyone honest.

Firing a salute in Copenhagen harbor while on a state visit

Further, whenever the yacht traveled with the Tsar aboard, she was accompanied by an escort that included at least a couple torpedo boats and a cruiser.

Whenever the ship anchored in isolated Finnish jetties, the local harbors and towns would carry the following message:

“Notice to all mariners concerning seafaring regulations when the Russian Imperial Yacht is in Finnish waters: Fire will be opened on all commercial shipping and all yachts–whether motor, sail or steam-that approach the line of guard ships. All ships wishing to put to sea must seek permission not less than six hours in advance. Between sundown and sunrise, all ships underway may expect to be fired upon.”

All of this security allowed the targeted royals to relax and enjoy themselves.

The yacht served the Imperial family for 26 years. After Tsar Alexander died in 1894, it was passed to his son who soon had his own super yacht, Standart, built in Denmark (to roughly the same plan as Polar Star only bigger– to confuse terrorists as to which yacht was carrying the royals.) Nevertheless the Polar Star stayed in the family and was used not only by Nicholas but by his mother, uncles, and others.

It sailed to England, Germany, and all points in between, serving as a safe refuge for the Imperial family as they visited friends and relatives in Europe.

A Smith and Wesson .44-Russian caliber No3 revolver presented by the Tsar to the retiring Captain of the Polar Star in 1895. It was good to be close to the Tsar!

Two sailors from the Imperial yachts were even chosen to be the new Tsarvitch Alexis’s nannies in 1905.

Alexei with Andrei Derevenko, one of the two sailor-nannies from the Royal yachts who would remain by his side for more than a decade. While Derevenko would desert the family after the Revolution, the second sailor, Klementy Nagorny would remain with them until they were executed in Siberia in 1918. Taken from the Imperial family days before the final act, his final fate is uncertain.

Speaking of 1905, the Polar Star almost changed history when Nicholas, traveling alone, met Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany on his own yacht at the remote Finnish inlet named Bjorko. There, Willy got Nicholas, his cousin, to sign a non-aggression treaty with Germany. The problem was that the Tsar’s father had already in 1894 signed one with France, Germany’s clear and present danger. Long story short, and after a good bit of bad blood between the Tsar, the Kaiser, Paris and London, this treaty was discarded. If it hadn’t, the First World War could have been very different.

Speaking of war, when it finally came in 1914, the days of slow peaceful cruises were done. Both Standart and Polar Star were placed dockside and largely forgotten.

When the Russian Revolution found Polar Star in March of 1917, she was iced in Helsinki (then-Helsingfors) with units of the Baltic Fleet. Her Marine Guard long since sent to the front and her crew raided to man other warships, she was no longer full of the spit-and-polish Russian jacks that had doted on the Tsar and his family.

In fact, on April 28, 1917, the ship was made the headquarter of the Revolutionary Central Committee of the Baltic fleet (CENTROBALT) in Finland. Her Captain at the time, Lyalin, was very popular in the fleet and was elected the first Red fleet commander. The coming spring, Polar Star made steam and sortied across the Gulf of Finland in the epic Ice Crossing to Kronstadt, just days ahead of being seized by the Germans.

She sat out the Russian Civil War there and, relatively undamaged by British raids in 1919, and the harsh Red Army reprisals during the 1921 Kronstadt Uprising, she was left swinging at her anchor lines with her crew largely taking up residence aboard the old yacht. In 1930, after a review of available hulls, the Soviet Red Banner Fleet decided to refit Polar Star for further use. Considering she was nearly 40 years old, its a testament that she was constructed so well as to still be useful.

Her old steam plant was removed as was one of her funnels and she had installed a new low-speed diesel plant that could propel her at 10-knots. Armed with a number of old 3-inch guns, she was used as a submarine tender and troop transport during both the Finnish Winter War (1939-40) where she blockaded the Finnish Coast and later took troops into Tallin after Estonia was occupied. Then came World War Two, where she spent her time dodging German and Finnish bombs, mines, and torpedoes. In 1942 she was made the headquarters of the 3rd Submarine Division and by 1944 moved forward to Turku, which enabled a more rapid turn around for war patrols of the Soviet U-boats she supported.

By 1954 her new engineering plant was unreliable but her hull was still sound even at age 63 and as such she was made a static accommodation ship, with new sailors and officers assigned to ship’s bunks spent their time smoking cigarettes on the same decks as Kaisers, Kings, and Tsars once tread.

By December 1968, the old Polar Star was sent to the scrappers, her service done, although some reports mention that she may have been used to test anti-ship missiles as late as the early 1970s and was expended as a target hulk. Nevertheless, both the sovereign and later the Party got their ruble’s worth out of the old girl.

Specs:

Displacement: 3949-tons
Length 349.4-feet
Beam: 45.28-feet
draft: 17-feet
Speed: 17 knots (1891), 10 knots (1930)
Powerplant: 2 × vertical triple expansion steam engines, 2 bronze screws, 10 boilers (as commissioned) Two 625hp diesels after 1930.
Crew: 313 ships crew, 36 marines, 50 persons in Imperial suite. Post 1930, unknown
Armament:

4 x 47mm guns Gockisa (1891),
(1930)
3 × 76mm,
3 × 45mm
2 × 12,7mm HMG

(1944)
4 × 76mm
4 × 37mm

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/

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!

Warship Wednesday May 14, the lightning of the Atlantic

Posted on May 14, 2014 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off 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. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday May 14, the lightning of the Atlantic

(click to embiggen)

Here we see the exceptionally fast oceangoing yacht Atlantic. This 227-foot three-masted steel-hulled schooner had an exceptionally narrow beam (29-feet), giving her a length to beam ration of a very racy 1:8. Designed by famous naval architect William Gardner for industrial magnet Wilson Marshall, she was built at Townsend & Downey on Shooter’s Island, New York in 1903 to be two things: elegant and fast.

She had heating, refrigeration, and water heaters. The lobby was executed in marble and the interior was fitted out with the finest mahogany paneling. There were large and luxurious tiled bathrooms (with bath tub) and a large galley– and in a pinch could do over 17 knots.

More importantly, she was faster and better than the yard’s own previous creation: Meteor III, for Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. That Teutonic craft’s launch in February 1902 was attended by many hundreds of spectators, including Pres. Theodore Roosevelt and Prince Henry of Prussia. Alice Roosevelt, the president’s daughter, christened the boat.

Painting of the original Schooner Atlantic by A D Blake

In 1905, Atlantic was entered into the Kaiser’s Cup race, which would travel 3006-miles from New Jersey to the UK for the win of a solid gold cup donated by Kaiser Wilhelm. The American yachts enjoyed sponsorships from various industrialists such as J.P.Morgan, the Kaiser Wilhelm II backed the German team and the British were backed by Sir Thomas Lipton, the tea and grocery magnate.

Famously on one occasion, the Kaiser was asked as to whether his uncle King Edward VII would be attending a state function with some dry humor he replied “No, he has gone boating with his grocer.”

Well the Atlantic, captained by Charles Barr, now a member of the Sailing Hall of Fame, finished in first place with a time of 12d 4h 1min 19s, including some 341 nautical mikes in a single 24 hour period, which is a very fast 14+ knots on that period and 10.2 on average. While this doesn’t seem fast by today’s standards, the record held for sail-powered mono-hulls for nearly a century, only falling in 2002. She was so fast that the German Blitz-class gunboat SMS Pfeil (1600-tons, c.1882), sent as the timekeeper by the Kaiser, was caught napping and had to build steam up to meet the incoming New Yorker with the Naval attaché and ADC Captain (later Adm) Carl von Coerper aboard.

Barr

This feat made Barr a superstar of his time and on his death in 1911 Sir Thomas Lipton attended while the pall bearers were members of the British challenge team and from Lipton’s own luxury yacht.

In 1914, with the opening of WWI, the days of racing yachts across the Atlantic had faded. When the US entered the war in 1917, she was acquired by the Navy 10 June 1917 and commissioned as the section patrol boat USS Atlantic II (SP 651). Armed with a trio of 3″/23 cal guns, she was used as a guardship in the Hampton Roads/Yorktown area as well as a tender for smaller, faster subchasers looking, ironically, for the Kaiser’s submarines (whose cup she still held).

Speaking of the cup, the Atlantic’s owner donated the garish gold bauble to the American Red Cross who auctioned it off for a total of $175,000 in donations in 1918. The successful winner of the piece then found that it was simply a base pot-metal cup with a thin sheet of gold, rather than solid as had been advertised. What else did they expect from Willy?

At the end of the war she was decommissioned in 1919 and returned to civilian life. Then twenty years later, war came again.

Her owner gifted Atlantic to the US Coast Guard on 1 April 1941, a full eight months before Pearl Harbor. Commissioned as an auxiliary sail training ship, USCGC Atlantic (WIX-271) she served alongside the exiled Danish training ship Danmark at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, helping to train thousands of guardsmen during the war. Following the end of the conflict, Atlantic was decommissioned by Uncle Sam a second time and disposed of in 1948.

Going back to civilian life for the second time was hard on the old ship and by the 1980s she had fallen into disrepair. By 1982 she had sadly settled to the bottom of Norfolk harbor and her steel hull was later raised and scrapped.

Her original records including log books are preserved at Mystic Seaport, but a full size replica was built at the Dutch Van der Graaf yard for owner Ed Kastelein. She competed in the 2005 Rolex Transatlantic and is a faithful rendition of the beautiful old Atlantic– sans WWI bluejackets, 3-inch guns, and dizzy WWII coastie trainees.

Specs:

Displacement: 303 tonnes
Length:    69.40 m (227.7 ft) overall, 185-ft at waterline.
Beam:    8.85 m (29.0 ft)
Draught:    4.90 m (16.1 ft)
Installed power: steam and sail
Sail plan:    11,058 square feet of sail (18,000 when racing), one 150shp Seaburg vertical triple-expansion engine, one shaft.
Complement (1917-19) 66 US Navy crew,
Armament(1917-19) 3×3″/23cal. (1941-47) small-arms

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/

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!

Warship Wednesday May 7: Archer the giant killer and her pink sistership.

Posted on May 7, 2014 by laststandonzombieisland 15 comments

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off 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, May 7. Archer the giant killer and her pink sister ship.

Here we see the United States Ship Archerfish, SS-311, a diesel-electric fleet submarine of the USS Balao-class with a bone in her mouth in open waters. The Archerfish had a safe and happy life, with an earned a reputation as the Jack the Giant Killer of the US WWII sub force.

A member of the 128-ship Balao class, she was one of the most mature US navy diesel designs of the World War Two era, constructed with knowledge gained from the earlier Gato-class. US subs, unlike those of many navies of the day, were ‘fleet’ boats, capable of unsupported operations in deep water far from home. Able to range 11,000 nautical miles on their reliable diesel engines, they could undertake 75-day patrols that could span the immensity of the Pacific. Carrying 24 (often unreliable) Mk14 Torpedoes, thee subs often sank anything short of a 5000-ton Maru or warship by surfacing and using their 4-inch/50 caliber and 40mm/20mm AAA’s. They also served as the firetrucks of the fleet, rescuing downed naval aviators from right under the noses of Japanese warships.

Laid down at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Kittery, Maine 22 JAN 1943, she was commissioned just over eight months later on 4 September and promptly sailed for the Pacific to join the fray. She left Pearl Harbor two days before Christmas, 1943 on her first of seven war patrols. Her first four patrols were entirely uneventful, detailed to scan regions of the Pacific that were largely devoid of Japanese activity by 1944. Her fifth one, however, struck pay-dirt.

Standing off Tokyo Bay in November 1944, she was positioned to rescue downed B-29 crews who were bombing the Japanese Home Islands in preparation for the huge planned invasions in 1945-46. Then on the evening of November 28th, she was what appeared to be a huge naval tanker with a strong destroyer escort nudge out of the bay. This ‘tanker’ soon picked up 23-knots and started to zig-zag, which meant she was something altogether different.

Following closely, Archerfish worked her way through the screen of escorts, aligned her six forward tubes amidships of the immense target, and let rip a half-dozen improved Mk14 torpedoes, four of which found purchase on the hull of the largest aircraft carrier ever built in the world up until that time– the 73,000-ton, 872-foot long Imperial Japanese Naval ship Shinano. Capable of carrying up to 120 aircraft, including 47 in an armored hangar, she was the largest warship built until the USS Forrestal was completed in the 1950s.

Originally laid down as a super-battleship of the Yamato-class, she was converted following Japanese losses at Midway Island to a flattop. She had just been commissioned nine days before and was, when Archerfish found her, on her sea trials before entering service. Her existence was a secret and she was being moved in the middle of the night to Kure to complete her fitting out (she didn’t even have most of her watertight hatches installed). She was such a secret, in fact, she is the only major warship built in the 20th century to have avoided being officially photographed during its construction, with just two known photos, taken by chance, existing of her.

The Japanese didn’t even send radio messages about her sailing, much less her sinking.

Since the US Navy didn’t even think she existed, Archerfish and her skipper, Commander Joseph F. Enright, were not recognized for the feat of killing the huge carrier– which to this day is the largest ship ever sunk by a submarine in warfare– until after the war ended and post-war analysis of Japanese records. It was then that Enright picked up the Navy Cross and Archerfish was given the Presidential Unit Citation.

Her citation reads:

“For extraordinary heroism in action during the Fifth War Patrol against enemy Japanese combatant units in restricted waters of the Pacific. Relentless in tracking an alert and powerful hostile force which constituted a potential threat to our vital operations in the Philippine area, the Archerfish (SS-311) culminated a dogged six and one-half-hour pursuit by closing her high-speed target, daringly penetrated the strong destroyer escort screen, and struck fiercely at a large Japanese aircraft carrier Shinano with all six of her torpedoes finding their mark to sink this extremely vital enemy ship. Subjected to devastating air and surface anti-submarine measures, the Archerfish skillfully evaded her attackers by deep submergence and returned to port in safety. Handled with superb seamanship, she responded gallantly to the fighting determination of the officers and men and dealt a fatal blow to one of the enemy’s major Fleet units despite the most merciless Japanese opposition and rendered valiant service toward the ultimate destruction of a crafty and fanatic enemy.”

After this her sixth and seventh war patrols were back to being much less exciting, performing lifeguard duty for pilots and watching the almost-empty sea lanes for the occasional ship. U.S. submarines rescued 504 downed airmen– to include future President George Bush– during WWII lifeguard duty.

Archerfish was part of the US Fleet anchored in Tokyo Bay on Sept 2, 1945, for the Japanese surrender and end of WWII.

(Above) Archerfish and the rest of Subron 20 in Tokyo Bay at the surrender of Japan being nursed by the Fulton-class submarine tender, USS Proteus (AS-19). The hard-serving Proteus would remain as a submarine tender as late as 1992 and used as a berthing ship for sub crews for another decade after that, only being scrapped in 2007.

Future actor Tony Curtis, who was then a bluejacket by the name of Bernard Schwartz, had been inspired by Cary Grant’s role as a submarine skipper in the film Destination Tokyo to join the navy, was aboard Proteus at the time. Archerfish, Curtis, and Grant would all meet again 14-years later.

Decommissioned soon after World War Two, she sat in mothballs until Korea when she was reactivated. Unlike more than 90 WWII-era US diesel subs, she was not updated in the Guppy program with a new sail, snorkels, and improved batteries and fire control systems, keeping her old retro look until the end of the career– which helped make her a movie star.

Archerfish (inboard) and Balao (outboard), Key West 1959.

She was famously used in 1959 along with two of her sisters to simulate the fictional USS Sea Tiger in the Cary Grant/Tony Curtis film Operation Petticoat. USS Balao SS-285 was painted pink and was used for exterior shots in and around Key West while USS Queenfish SS-393 was used in opening and closing scenes, and was used for the “at sea” shots filmed in and around San Diego. Archerfish herself retained her standard haze grey and black trim and was used for interior and exterior shots in and around Key West.

It was at Key West, loaned out to the hydro-graphic command, that Archerfish was visited by then 44-year old Dr. George “Papa Topside” Bond who, along with EMC C. Tuckerfield ascended to the surface from a depth of over 322-feet over a 52-second time period, testing emergency escape protocols from the sub while she was bottomed on the Gulf of Mexico. Bond later grew famous for his work with the Sealab program in the 1960s and is considered the father of saturation diving techniques used today.

Finding further use for her, the Navy kept Archerfish around as an auxiliary submarine (AGSS-311), and, trading in her deck-guns and torpedoes for hydro-graphic gear and naval scientists, she conducted a series of ‘sea-scan‘ cruises around in the Atlantic and Pacific through 1968.

Balao Class Submarine USS Archerfish pictured at Hammerfest, Norway in 1960.

Then, on 1 May of that year, at the age of just under 25 years, she was condemned, decommissioned, and struck from the Navy List. She was one of the last unconverted WWII diesel boats in service in the US Navy.

On October 19th, stripped of anything useful, she was towed out to sea and sunk by the new Pascagoula-built Skipjack-class nuclear submarine USS Snook (SSN-592).

Archerfish survived the first two torpedoes until sunk appropriately by an old-school WWII-era Mk 14-5 in 52 seconds.

The ship still has a very active veterans association at ussarcherfish.com. Although she is no longer afloat, eight Balao-class submarines are preserved as museum ships across the country.

Please visit one of these fine ships and keep the legacy alive:

USS Batfish (SS-310) at War Memorial Park in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
USS Becuna (SS-319) at Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
USS Bowfin (SS-287) at USS Bowfin Submarine Museum & Park in Honolulu, Hawaii.
USS Clamagore (SS-343) at Patriot’s Point in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
USS Ling (SS-297) at New Jersey Naval Museum in Hackensack, New Jersey.
USS Lionfish (SS-298) at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts.
USS Pampanito (SS-383) at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park in San Francisco, California, (which played the part of the fictional USS Stingray in the movie Down Periscope).
USS Razorback (SS-394) at Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum in North Little Rock, Arkansas.

Specs:

Displacement, Surfaced: 1,526 t., Submerged: 2,424 t.
Length 311′ 10″
Beam 27′ 3″
Draft 15′ 3″
Speed, Surfaced 20.25 kts, Submerged 8.75 kts
Cruising Range, 11,000 miles surfaced at 10kts; Submerged Endurance, 48 hours at 2kts
Operating Depth Limit, 400 ft
Complement 6 Officers 60 Enlisted
Armament, ten 21″ torpedo tubes, six forward, four aft, 24 torpedoes, one 4″/50 caliber deck gun, one 40mm gun, two .50 cal. machine guns
Patrol Endurance 75 days
Propulsion: diesels-electric reduction gear with four Fairbanks-Morse main generator engines., 5,400 hp, four Elliot Motor Co., main motors with 2,740 hp, two 126-cell main storage batteries, two propellers.
Fuel Capacity: 94,400 gal.

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/

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!

Warship Wednesday April 30. Of Great Repairs and Shallow Waters: the USS Monadnock

Posted on April 30, 2014 by laststandonzombieisland 3 comments

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 April 30. Of Great Repairs and Shallow Waters: the USS Monadnock

Click to embiggen

Here we see the USS Monadnock, (BM-3), sitting in calm waters off the Chinese coast in 1901. Yes, that is really how low a freeboard this ship had.

During the Civil War, the twin turreted ironclad USS Monadnock was built 1863-64 by the Boston Navy yard as a 250-ft, 3300-ton,
Miantonomoh-class monitor. Completed just seven months before the end of the war, she didn’t see much action as soon afterward was sent (very slowly) to the West Coast all the way around South America (as there was no Panama Canal). Arriving there at Vallejo, California and entered the Mare Island Navy Yard where she decommissioned 30 June 1866 due to lack of funds.

The original wooden‑hull, double-turreted, 1863 ironclad monitor USS Monadnock, complete with a Ericsson vibrating lever engine and pair of Civil war standard 15-inch smoothbore Dahlgren guns, circa 1866 in the Mare Island channel. USN photo courtesy of Darryl L.
Baker.

Well, the fresh young ship was allowed to rot at her moorings and by 1874 was nothing but semi-submerged junk.

Then she was ‘repaired.’

Robeson: When I say repair, I do mean, ‘scrap and rebuild from scratch’

You see, then Secretary of the Navy George Robeson knew that the service was a mere specter of its former self by 1874, and war with Spain was looming in one form or another (although did not materialize fully until 1898). With no money for new ships, he set about ‘repairing’ the old monitors USS Puritan and the four Miantonomoh-class vessels (including Monadnock). Of course, the repairs started with selling the ships along with nine other hulks to scrappers and using the money to pay four private shipbuilders to make new ones under the old names with a smile and a wink, but hey, you have to get it done somehow, right?

Well the ‘new‘ monitor Monadnock was laid down again right there in Vallejo as her namesake was scrapped and recycled very near her. With money tight even for ‘repairs,’ the ship languished in the new works of one Mr. Phineas Burgess of whose Continental Iron Works had one ship clogging the ways– Monadnock. With checks from the Navy few and far between, the yard closed, some $120,000 in debt. It was then in 1883 that the Navy finally agreed to get the long-building ironclad off the builder’s way and in 1883 she was quietly and without ceremony launched and towed to the Mare Island Naval shipyard– (again) if you go with the premise that the was still the old Monadnock.

The new monitor being fitted out in the historic dry-dock at Mare Island. This dock still exists and may soon house the old cruiser relic (and Dewey’s flagship) Olympia.

The new ship and her three sisters were extremely close in size to the ironclad monitors they replaced– some 262-feet long and 3990-tons (due to more armor). The fact that these ships often incorporated re-purposed amenities from the old Civil War monitors proved a further nice touch.

USS Mondanancok 1896 San Fransisco in her gleaming white scheme. Click to embiggen

Her teeth were four of the new and very modern for their time 10″/30 (25.4 cm) Mark 2 guns, the same type used on all of her class as well as the follow-on Monterey class monitor M-6) and the famously ill-fated armored cruiser USS Maine (1895). These 25-ton guns, some 27.4-feet long, could fire a 510-pound shell out past 20,000 yards at about 2-3 rounds per minute (although that was with a very well rehearsed crew). With her 14-foot draft, she could stick to the shallows and avoid larger battleships while her guns, capable of penetrating up to 7-inches of steel armor at close range, were thought capable of sinking any smaller ship that could breach those shallows.

Naval cutlass practice under the monitors guns.

Monadnock and her sisters carried some 360 shells for their large guns as well as some 17-tons of rather smokey ‘brown powder’ propellant charges to fire them. To keep torpedo boats away, the monitor carried a pair of 4-inch breech-loaders as well as numerous small deck guns and machine-guns that changed over time. Even if they did get close, she had up to 11.5-inches of steel armor plate.

In short, she was a fire-breathing turtle.

Finally completed 20 February 1896, after just 22-years of ‘repair’, the Monadnock had a unique set of twin triple expansion steam engines that gave the ship a speed of 11.6-knots, a full knot and change faster than her three sisters. When war broke out with Spain in 1898, she was ordered to reinforce the small squadron of Commodore Dewey in the Far East.

Stern shot of the monitor USS Monadnock off the Mare Island Navy Yard, CA, June 1898, ready for her voyage to the Philippines. The old monitor 800-ton Passaic-class monitor USS Camanche (1864-1899), at the time training ship for the California Naval Militia, is visible beyond Monadnock‘s after turret. (Photograph courtesy of the US Navy Historical Center)

Leaving California on 23 June, towed by the new and efficient coaler USS Nero (AC-17), the pair made the journey from Mare Island to Manila Bay in just seven weeks. Her near-sister, the monitor USS Monterey (BM-6), left fully two weeks before her towed by the coaler USS Brutus (AC-15) yet only beat Monadnock/Nero by a single day.

Doesn’t that look fun? They probably had a long line of volunteers who would rather have been in the rowboat than the monitor.

Considering the low free-board, row-boat like beam to length ratio, and the fact that monitors were never designed to operate at sea (the original USS Monitor foundered just after her commissioning), the 8000-mile trip was epic. With their cramped and overheated engine-room (in which temperatures measured over 140-degrees on a thermometer suspended from a fishing pole on deck) these ships were miserable for the stokers and water tenders.

Once in Philippine waters, (Dewey had already captured Manila without Monadnock or Monterery), the two monitor were very busy. Too late to fight the Spanish, they did however, fire their guns in several battles supporting the US troops in hot actions across the wild archipelago including notably the 1899 Battle of Caloocan, where Monadnock was credited largely with transforming that rebel stronghold as “What was once a prosperous town was in a few minutes wiped out of existence.”

Unexploded 10″ (25.4 cm) shell fired by USS Monadnock during her service in Philippine waters. Original caption read “Unexploded ten-inch shell after penetrating a six-foot trench and killing three of the enemy” Photograph copyrighted by Perley Fremont Rockett of San Francisco Library of Congress Photograph ID LC-USZ62-118717

Both Monadnock and Monterey, with the luxury of their low free board and ability to burn crap coal, found themselves often in Chinese waters, patrolling the wild Yangtze all the way to Shanghai. She watched the interned Russian fleet including the damaged cruisers Zhemchug, Aurora, and Oleg in 1905 that only narrowly escaped Adm Togo and made sure that they sat out the rest of the Russo-Japanese war. When the Russian battleship Potemkin erupted in mutiny that summer, the Monadnock and her crew paid extra close attention to prevent the glum sailors of the Tsar, under the unpopular but politically connected Rear-Admiral Oskar Enkvist, from spreading the banner of the Red Flag to Manila harbor.

The three Tsarist protected cruisers, with their 28 rapid fire 4.7 and 6-inch guns, could have smothered the heavily armored Monadnock in medium caliber shells, but each of the American monitor’s 10-inchers could have effected enough of a beating on the very lightly armored Russian ships to have made it a good fight. It should be noted that two of the Russian cruisers were sunk during World War One in very one-sided fights against lesser craft, while the Aurora is preserved as a monument ship in St. Petersburg today.

A French image of her in Chinese waters. Note the extensive canvas awnings and small boats.

Largely replaced in this role by purpose-built river gunboats in China who needed a much smaller crew, the monitors were taken off of patrol duties by 1912. There Monterey languished and was eventually towed to Pearl Harbor while Monadnock served as a tender for submarines at Cavite harbor until 24 March 1919 when she was decommissioned. There is evidence her hulk was used as a receiving ship of sorts for a few more years until she was struck from the Navy list 2 February 1923, and her hull was sold for scrap on the Asiatic Station, 24 August 1923 at a still young age of just 27.

Seems a waste for a vessel that took 22 years to construct, but then again, she was much more at home in the 1860’s than the 1920’s.

Specs:

Displacement: 3,990 tons
Length:    262 ft 3 in (79.93 m)
Beam:    55 ft 5 in (16.89 m)
Draft:    14 ft 6 in (4.42 m)
Propulsion:    2 × Triple expansion generating 1,600 hp., 2 screws (Monadnock only)
Her sisters had 2 × Compound
Speed:    Monadnock: 11.63 knots, rest of class 10.1
Range:    1,370nm @ 10 kn (19 km/h) with 250-tons coal
Complement: 156 officers and enlisted
Armament:
Four 10 inch (254 mm) breechloading guns
Two 4 inch (100 mm) rapid fire guns
Two 6 pounder (57 mm) rapid fire guns
Two 3 pounder (47 mm) rapid fire guns
Two 37 mm Hocthkiss guns
Seven one pounder gun
One Colt revolving guns
Armor:
Armor belt – 180 mm, iron..
Conning Tower – 190 mm
Chimneys and ventilators – 100 mm to height of .9 m
Deck – 40 mm
Turrets – 292 mm (fixed portion) and 190 mm (movable portion)
Double bottom under boilers and engines.

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/

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!

Warship Wednesday April 23. The Hard Life of the Dorsetshire

Posted on April 23, 2014 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

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 April 23. The Hard Life of the Dorsetshire

HMS ‘Dorsetshire’
by Raymond Henderson painted 1972 in the Midlothian Council collection

Here we see the hard-living heavy cruiser of His Majesty’s Navy, the HMS Dorsetshire (Pennant 40). A heavy cruiser of the County class, her and her 12 sisters were all 1920s-era 10,000 ton treaty cruisers designed with experience gained from the naval battles of WWI. Although ostensibly within limits, their wartime displacement shot up to well over 14,000-tons and with a 31.5-knot speed, 8000-nm range, and 8 × BL 8-inch (203 mm L/50) Mk.VIII guns in twin mounts alongside another eight deck-mounted torpedo tubes, the class were bruisers capable of taking on just about any cruiser in the world and able to run away from any 1920s era battleship on the waves.

One of the last of her class completed, Dorsetshire was finished to an improved design that included a lowered bridge and after superstructure, improved MkII turrets, a different secondary gunnery plan, and the ability to make 32.25-knots, which is always appreciated. Like the rest of her sisters, she was also one of the first ships in the British navy with a functional surface-search radar. But more on this later.

Laid down at Portsmouth in 1927, she was commissioned 30 September 1930, assigned as flagship of the 2nd Cruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet before moving on to the China station in the Far East. When World War Two erupted in Europe, she sailed for the South Atlantic to join the hunt for German surface raiders including the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. For the first twenty months of the war she crashed sortied around the Atlantic and Mediterranean looking for one Axis capital ship after another, never actually finding one. Then in May 1941, that all changed.

The lucky cruiser soon joined the hunt for Hitler’s newest toy, the 55,000-ton ton SMS Bismarck, then loose in the cold North Atlantic near Iceland. The German brawler soon found herself cornered on May 24th by the largest British ship, HMS Hood, which she sank, and the new and incomplete battleship HMS Prince of Wales, which broke off the engagement.

Dorsetshire, along with her earlier sisters HMS Norfolk and Suffolk, used their 25-kw Type 284 radar to good advantage when they shadowed the Bismarck during the RN’s attempts to hunt her down after the sinking of HMS Hood. Then on 27 May the hunt was over. Dorsetshire joined in the kill of the mighty German ship alongside a combined British Task Force. During the one-sided engagement, the cruiser fired 254 rounds of 8-inch shells and no less than three torpedoes into the stricken battlewagon, with her fish being one of the main reasons for the warship’s ultimate sinking.

HMS Dorsetshire (The End of the Bismarck) by Ivan Berryman. Photo credit: Cranston Fine Arts

Of the 110 German sailors rescued from the Bismarck, most of these were picked up by the Dorsetshire. After this engagement, her skipper became the noted WWI VC winner Augustus Agar (the cheeky fellow who torpedoed half the Bolshevik fleet in 1919 from a little Coastal Motor Torpedo boat).

Another view of Bismarck with Dorsetshire behind her to deliver to coup de grace.

The ship then counted a more solitary coup on the SMS Atlantis, a 7800-ton converted freighter-turned merchant raider. Encountering the disguised ship in the Atlantic on 22 November 1941, it was an easy kill, and Atlantis was sent to the bottom after zapping her with salvos from 9-miles out.

Then came the war in the Pacific just six months later. This sent the big D to the Indian Ocean to protect His Majesty’s sea lanes between Australia and India. In March 1942, she became part of Force A, under the command of Admiral James Somerville, which was composed of the old battleship Warspite and the carriers Indomitable and Formidable. Forced to leave the task force to return to port to refuel as there were to tankers assigned to the group, Dorsetshire and her sister Cornwall were caught in the open on April 5 by more than 40 Japanese aircraft. With her anti-aircraft armament marginal, the cruiser was effectively as sitting duck.

Dorsetshire left ablaze, Cornwall right. Photo by Japanese bombers

In the span of about eight minutes, Dorsetshire was hit by ten 250 lb and 550 lb bombs and several near misses; she sank stern first at about 13:50. One of the bombs detonated one of her ammunition magazines and contributed to her rapid sinking. The Cornwall was sunk as well.

Agar was wounded and drug down so deep by his sinking ship that he suffered from the bends when he finally made it to the surface. Some 500 crew, including the Captain, survived in the water until rescue 32 hours later. Only 16 of the men who went into the water died, a testament to crew discipline and the leadership of Agar and the other officers and petty officers.

Of the 13 County-class heavy cruisers, besides Cornwall and Dorsetshire who were lost in the war, and both nearly side by side each other on the same day by grim irony, only HMAS Canberra was sunk in combat. The 10 remaining sister-ships were retired and scrapped between 1948-1959.

Specs:

Displacement:    10,035 long tons (10,196 t) (standard)
13,420 long tons (13,640 t) (full load) (Some sisters went nearly 15,000)
Length:    632 ft 9 in (192.86 m)
Beam:    66 ft (20 m)
Draught:    18 ft (5.5 m)
Installed power:    80,000 shp (60,000 kW)
Propulsion:    4 × Parsons geared or Brown Curtis steam turbines
8 × boilers
4 × shafts
Speed:    31.5 kn (58.3 km/h; 36.2 mph)
Range:    12,000 nmi (22,000 km; 14,000 mi) at 12 kn (22 km/h; 14 mph)
Complement:    653
Armament:    8 × 8 in (200 mm) Mk VIII guns
8 × 4 in (100 mm) dual purpose guns
24 × 2-pounder pom-pom anti-aircraft guns
8 × 24 in (610 mm) torpedo tubes
numerous light anti-aircraft guns
Aircraft carried:    2 × Supermarine Walrus floatplanes (operated by 700 Naval Air Squadron)
Aviation facilities:    1 × catapult

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/

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!

Warship Wednesday April 16. The Odd Case of the Stono.

Posted on April 16, 2014 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

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 April 16. The Odd Case of the Stono.

A depiction of the commercial steamer Isaac Smith, a 453-ton (burden), 171-foot long screw steamer built at Nyack, New Jersey, in 1861. The hardy little craft was built by the Lawrence and Foulks company for the Hamilton & Smith steamship company who wanted the craft to ply the Hudson river with both passengers and cargo. He draft, just 9 feet, and her steam engine allowed her to navigate the river with ease. She was named Isaac Smith after one of that firm’s founding members.

Well in September 1861, the US Navy came a callin on her owners, it seemed that they were in need of as many steamships as they could find to blockade the newly formed Confederate nation’s ports. A quick military addition of a 30-pounder Parrott rifle and eight 8-inch Dahlgren smoothbores brought her the title of USS Isaac Smith on 17 Oct, 1861.

Smith at far right in 1861 with the fleet

She soon sailed south and joined DuPont’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Within days of her commissioning she was fighting off rebel gunboats, chasing blockade runners, and assisted in the seizure of Port Royal, South Carolina. Sailing for Florida waters she was refitted in New York then took up station in the shallow tidal channel located southwest of Charleston, South Carolina known as the Stono River to wait for blockade runners creeping towards that city from the Bahamas.

Impression of her loss to the Confederates on the Stono river

On 30 Jan, 1863, in a sharp action, she was engaged by rebel batteries in a crossfire. Under the orders of Brig Gen Roswell Ripley (recently sent back home from the Army of North Virgina after being criticized for his performance at Antietam) and the blessing of PGT Beauregard, five 24-pounder guns in two camouflaged batteries were set up along the river to ambushed the little steamer once she was at point blank range. Three guns manned by Captain John Gary and men of the 15th South Carolina Heavy Artillery set up near Grimball’s plantation, while the remaining two, manned by Major J. Welsman Brown, and men of the 2nd South Carolina Artillery and 8th Georgia Volunteers battalion were set up on John’s Island.

From Gary’s report:

“Between the hours of 3 and 4 o’clock on the afternoon of the 30th ultimo the gunboat Isaac Smith made her appearance and anchored off Mr. Thomas Grimball’s, some 500 yards distant from my batteries. After waiting some twenty minutes and the Abolitionists showing no disposition to land I ordered my batteries to open fire, which they did in handsome style and apparently with great precision.”

Her path of escape blocked, the steamer surrendered, her stack shot away and her engine room choking on its own cloud of exhaust. Eight men were dead and 17 were wounded, amounting to half of her crew. One of her crew earned the MOH that day, Landsman Richard Stout. His citation read:

“Serving on board the U.S.S. Isaac Smith, Stono River, 30 January 1863. While reconnoitering on the Stono River on this date, the U.S.S. Isaac Smith became trapped in a rebel ambush. Fired on from 2 sides, she fought her guns until disabled. Suffering heavy casualties and at the mercy of the enemy who was delivering a raking fire from every side, she struck her colors out of regard for the wounded aboard, and all aboard were taken prisoners. Carrying out his duties bravely through this action, STOUT was severely wounded and lost his right arm while returning the rebel fire.”

Her former captain, Acting Lieutenant Francis S. Conover, reported to the Navy after he was exchanged that “we were obliged to receive the raking fire of between twenty and thirty guns.” (Srsly?)

With most of her armament being taken ashore to use in the siege train around Charleston, the rebels renamed the now-much lighter steamship the CSS Stono and, after replacing her shot away stack, pressed her into service as a blockade runner. She would have a brief career of it.

Taking a load of cotton to Bermuda, she returned with a cargo of war materials but was forced aground near Fort Moultre just off Charleston’s waterfront on 5 June 1863. The Confederates saved what they could over the next 18 months and then fired the ship in 1865, burning her to the waterline.

Over the years her hull remained just off the waterfront, hidden by a growing blanket of sand and silt.

Rediscovered in the 1980s, she has yielded an incredible store of artifacts from her buried hull. This included a full case of 20 Enfield .577 Caliber Tower-marked rifled muskets that, made in England, never reached the Confederacy.

Archivists are in the process of preserving the finds.

Specs:

Displacement: 453 tons
Length: 171 ft 6 in (52.27 m)
Beam: 31 ft 4 in (9.55 m)
Draught: 9 ft (2.7 m)
Propulsion: steam engine
screw-propelled
Speed: not known
Complement: 56
Armament: one 30-pounder Parrott rifle
eight 8″ Dahlgren smoothbores (In US service 1861-63) unknown in Confederate.

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/

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!

Warship Wednesday April 9, The Last Ride of the Yamato

Posted on April 9, 2014 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

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 April 9, The Last Ride of the Yamato

Here we see the massive mega battleship Yamato of the Imperial Japanese Navy fitting out at Kure DY in 1941. Up until 1934 the Japanese paid lip service to the various Naval Treaties that limited the size and number of warships in the world’s navies. For instance, the huge cruisers designed in this period were ‘officially’ under 10,000-tons (although they rose to almost twice this amount when fully armed, loaded, and armored in WWII). The official limit on battleship size was 35,000-tons and Western ships, such as the new USS Washington class in the US and the HMS King George V-class battleships in the UK.

Well in 1934 Japan dropped out of the agreement and the gloves came off. They soon designed the largest battle-wagon in the world.

Ever.

At full load these ships would top out at 72,000-tons. The next closest rival in size was the US Iowa class, which at their heaviest displacement pushed some 50,000-tons on a hull that was about twenty feet shorter. However the Yamato was twenty feet *wider* and as such was a very beamy girl. She also drew more than 35-feet of seawater under her hull, which limited her moorings considerably.

On sea trials Oct 1941

These ships were amazingly armored, more so than any ship before or since. This included :

650 mm (26 in) on face of main turrets (YES, 26-inches!)
410 mm (16 in) side armor belt
200 mm (7.9 in) central(75%) armored deck
226.5 mm (8.92 in) outer(25%) armored deck

As point of reference the second place winner for the most armor carried was on the USS Iowa class battlewagons, which had some 19.7-inches on turret faces and a 12-inch belt.

Port side shot sea trials

These ships could put up some lead, carrying an amazing 205 pieces of artillery from the giant 18.1-inch main guns (the largest in the world)
to a huge array of AAA weapons. This included (in 1945):

9 × 46 cm (18.1 in) (3×3) (firing 3,000-lb shells)
6 × 155 mm (6.1 in) (2×3)
24 × 127 mm (5.0 in)
162 × 25 mm (0.98 in) Anti-Aircraft (52×3, 6×1)
4 × 13.2 mm (0.52 in) AA (2×2)

In short, these ships were massive war-engines and are seen by many as the pinnacle of battleship design (no offense to the Iowas). I mean 18-inch guns, 26-inches of armor, come on. As further protection against aircraft, her 18-inch guns could fire special “Common Type 3” anti-aircraft shells, known to the Japanese as “Sanshiki“. These shells contained over 900 incendiary tubes each capable of shooting 16-foot flames in all directions once the shell exploded. Not something you would want to fly into.

Five of the class, Yamato, Musahsi, and Shinano (along with two hulls, “Warships No 111″, and “797“) were envisioned for the Combined Fleet, with Yamato being laid down in 1937. The last two never were never finished while Shinano was converted to an aircraft carrier.

Commissioned 16 December 1941, Yamato came out of the yard a week too late for Pearl Harbor. As flagship of the fleet until 1943 when her sister ship Musashi was completed, she spent the first part of the war in such duty appropriate for such a large ship– being the primary ride of Adm. Yamamoto, from which he lost the Battle of Midway from her decks.

After 1943 she was relegated to a high-speed, heavily armored transport, running troops and valuables from island to island just ahead of Adm Nimitz’s oncoming horde that was the US Navy. Ironically her giant guns were useless to the Japanese at Guadalcanal as only armored piercing shells, made for sinking ships, and not HE shells for shore bombardment were in use at the time. If there had been, the Marines on Henderson Field may have had a very different outcome.

She dodged several torpedoes from US submarines until the end of 1943 when USS Skate (SS-305) pumped a fish into her. Damaged but not sunk (I mean come on she was 72,000-tons!), she next appeared in the pivotal battles in the Philippines in 1944. There she helped escort Ozawa’s Mobile Fleet during the Battle of the Philippine Sea, then caught up with the half-dozen small US Jeep carriers of Taffy 3, firing at the 7800-ton Casablanca-class escort carrier USS Gambier Bay on 25 October 1944.

It was during that engagement that, while firing shells marked with dye to better call shot from individual guns, an American sailor called out “They are shooting at us in Technicolor!”

The stricken Gambier Bay on fire, left, with Yamato, circled, right

The Yamato closed to within point-blank distance of Gambier Bay, now dead in the water, and shelled the tiny flat top until she sank with great loss of life. It was one of the few recorded instances of a battleship sinking a carrier in warfare. Carriers, however had already had their way with the class, sinking Yamato‘s sister ship Musashi the previous day during the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, taking 17 bomb and 19 torpedo hits, with the loss of 1,023 of her 2,399-man crew. This left Yamato an orphan of her class, as Shinano, converted to an aircraft carrier, had been sunk earlier that month, the largest naval vessel to have been sunk by a submarine.

Retiring from the Philippines, Yamato was almost all that was left of the Japanese fleet that was still battle worthy, forming a reserve with the old WWI-era battleship Nagato and the fast battleship Kongo. Well, Kongo was sunk by USS Sealion (SS-315) on 21 November, leaving just Nagoto who was soon to be relegated to coast defense only, and Yamato as the IJN’s last capital ships.

In April 1945, with the US invasion of Okinawa, the Emperor demanded action from what was left of the Navy. This led Vice Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff, and Chief of Staff of the Combined Fleet, Vice Admiral Seiichi Ito to scrape together all he could to sail against the Americans.

This meant the Yamato.

Her battle fleet was simply the 6000-ton Agano-class light cruiser Yahagi and 8 destroyers. Since it was to be a one-way mission, the naval kamikaze strike against a fleet that outnumbered it by a factor of at least 6:1, Ito would personally command it.

Dubbed “Operation Ten-Go” (Heaven One), the fleet sortied on 7 April directly towards Okinawa. There it was soon confronted by over 400 carrier based strike planes of Adm. Marc Mitscher’s fleet of 11 flattops, more than the Japanese had at Pearl Harbor against eight battleships.

It was not a long engagement.

By 1200 the first aircraft appeared over Yamato. By 1400 the cruiser Yahagi, riddled with bombs and torpedoes, sank along with half of the destroyer screen. By 1420, Yamato was dead in the water, her rudder shot away, her superstructure ablaze.

She has suffered more than 11 torpedo hits and six bomb hits. At 1423, one of the two bow magazines detonated in a tremendous explosion. The resulting mushroom cloud—over 3 miles high—was seen 180 miles away on Kyushu and was the funeral pyre for some 3000 of her crew, more than was lost by the US Navy in all of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

Although the undamaged half of the destroyer screen stood by to pick up the crew from Yamato, Admiral Ito, still alive, chose to go down with the ship.

Just ten U.S. aircraft were shot down by anti-aircraft fire from the Japanese ships; with 12 airmen killed. The Japanese suffered over 4000 casualties proving the last surface engagement by battleships versus carriers at sea and closing an era in Naval warfare forever.

This massive waste of such a magnificent ship for little conceivable gain helped ensure the future use of the Atomic Bombs on Japan, as the US felt that further resistance in the Home Islands, even if obviously futile, would be expected.

Meanwhile, the Japanese navy then went about the act of destroying all the information they had on the huge battleships including models, plans and images, so that it could not fall into US hands after the war. That is why few wartime images exist of this ship, other than those taken by US Navy fliers.

Her wreck was found in 1982, broken into two large pieces much like the Titanic was, at rest under 1100 feet of seawater.

The Japanese have a particular affinity for this ship. The word Yamato, since it harkens back to old feudal Japan, has great significance. This makes Yamato akin to the names Plymouth, Philadelphia, or Washington in the US. A huge (and we mean huge) 1:10 scale model of the Yamato has been constructed in Japan and is a very popular attraction there. ‘

A recent book and film on the vessel proved hugely successful in Japan.

Then there is the whole Space Battleship Yamato series of manga, based extremely loosely on the ship.

It seems after all that the Yamato is very far indeed from her last ride.

Specs:

Displacement: 65,027 tonnes (64,000 long tons)
71,659 tonnes (70,527 long tons) (full load)
Length:    256 m (839 ft 11 in) (waterline)
263 m (862 ft 10 in) (overall)
Beam:    38.9 m (127 ft 7 in)
Draft:    11 m (36 ft 1 in)
Installed power: 150,000 shp (111,855 kW)
Propulsion:    12 Kampon boilers, driving four steam turbines
Four three-bladed propellers

Speed: 27 knots (50 km/h; 31 mph)
Range: 7,200 nmi (13,334 km; 8,286 mi) at 16 knots (30 km/h; 18 mph)
Complement: 2,500–2,800
Armament:
(1941) 9 × 46 cm (18.1 in) (3×3)
12 × 155 mm (6.1 in) (4×3)
12 × 127 mm (5.0 in) (6×2)
24 × 25 mm (0.98 in) (8×3)
4 × 13.2 mm (0.52 in) AA (2×2)

(1945) 9 × 46 cm (18.1 in) (3×3)
6 × 155 mm (6.1 in) (2×3)
24 × 127 mm (5.0 in) (12×2)
162 × 25 mm (0.98 in) Anti-Aircraft (52×3, 6×1)
4 × 13.2 mm (0.52 in) AA (2×2)

Armor:    650 mm (26 in) on face of main turrets
410 mm (16 in) side armor
200 mm (7.9 in) central(75%) armored deck
226.5 mm (8.92 in) outer(25%) armored deck
Aircraft carried:    7
Aviation facilities:    2 aircraft catapults

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/

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!

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laststandonzombieisland

Weapons, Wars, Preparation and Security from a recovering gun nut turned bad writer

Tag Archives: battleship

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