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Warship Wednesday, June 12, 2019: The End of l’Ancien Régime, Beginning of Another

Posted on June 12, 2019 by laststandonzombieisland 4 comments

Here at LSOZI, we will 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, June 12, 2019: The End of l’Ancien Régime, Beginning of Another

Naval History and Heritage Command Photo NH 93575

Here we see the first French dreadnought, Courbet, class leader of a four-ship group of mighty warships built for the French Third Republic. She is the largest ship to the far left, seen at Villefranche during late 1938 or early 1939. She gave her last full measure some 75 years ago this week but left an interesting legacy.

When built, Courbet and her sisters were the Republic’s answer to the growing trend of all-big-gun battleships that started with the launch of the Royal Navy’s HMS Dreadnought in 1906.

French Battleship COURBET was Build in 1911

Part of the 1909 Naval Plan, these big French battlewagons went nearly 26,000 tons (FL) and carried an impressive main battery of a dozen new design 12-inch (305mm) 45 Modèle 1906 guns. These big boys, in six twin turrets, were comparable to the U.S. Navy’s 12″/45 caliber Mark 5 gun on five classes of American battleships (Connecticut, Mississippi, South Carolina, Delaware, and Florida) as well as the British BL 12-inch Mk X naval guns which were mounted on not only Dreadnought herself but also a dozen other RN battleships and battlecruisers of the day.

Courbet, forward turrets photographed by Robert W. Neeser, probably at Toulon, France, circa 1919. Note the triplex rangefinder on the conning tower. She carried 100 rounds per gun in her magazines, which interestingly were refrigerated to 77 degrees, a bonus on a steel ship designed to operate in the Med. NH 42849

Courbet 12-inch and 5.5-inch (138mm) guns photographed by Robert W. Neeser. These ships carried an impressive 22 of the latter, each with 225 shells. NH 42848

Laid down at Arsenal de Brest, our 21-knot beastie, named after famed French Admiral Amédée Courbet of Indochina fame, was soon followed by sister ship Jean Bart, constructed at the same time by the same yard. Two other sisters, France and Paris, were built by A C de la Loire, St-Nazaire, and F C de la Méditerranée, La Seyne.

French battleship Paris, the trial at full steam from the 1 August 1914 issue of L’Illustration

Courbet was commissioned in November 1913 and the entire class was all at sea by the time the lamps went out across Europe in August 1914. Their design was essentially recycled to create the follow-on Bretagne (Brittany)-class dreadnoughts who were up-armed with 13.5-inch guns.

Courbet entered the Great War monitoring the Otranto Canal, a vital sea route connecting the Adriatic with the Ionian while keeping an eye peeled for the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben. She served at the time as flagship for Vice Admiral Boue de Lapeyrère, who led a force that comprised most of France’s battle fleet along with two British cruisers.

Courbet

On 16 August 1914, the fresh new battleship and her task force came across the small (2,500-ton) Austro-Hungarian protected cruiser SMS Zenta and a companion destroyer, SMS Ulan, off the coast of Bar, Montenegro. The ensuing action, remembered today as the Battle of Antivari, was brief, with Ulan escaping destruction and Zenta, her guns far outranged by the French, destroyed, taking 173 of the Austrian Kaiser’s men to the bottom of the Adriatic with her. The war was just two weeks old.

Painting showing SMS Zenta and SMS Ulan in action on 16 August 1914, with Courbet and company in the distance, by Harry Heusser via Illustrirte Zeitung 1915, wiki

When the Italians entered the conflict on the Allied side in May 1915, the Austrian fleet was bottled up for the rest of the war, and Courbet, along with most of the French capital ships, were likewise sidelined, waiting the next four years just in case for a fleet action that would never come. After 1916, most of her crew was pulled and detailed to submarines and small craft, a common occurrence with the French navy at the time.

Remaining rusting in Corfu until April 1919, Courbet returned to Toulon where she became the nominal flagship of the West Mediterranean Fleet while she conducted extensive repairs through 1923.

Put back into service, she suffered a major electrical fire at the French North African port of Mers El Kebir which required further extensive repairs at FCM in La Seyne Sur Mer through 1924. Courbet was a member of an unlucky class perhaps, as sister ship France foundered at sea and was lost at about the same time.

In 1927, with Courbet‘s original design increasingly dated, she was hauled out of the water and given a three-year rebuild and modernization. This included returning into two funnels, down from three, and updating her propulsion plant by taking her old coal boilers and direct drive turbines with oil-burning small-tube boilers and new geared turbines which provided 43,000 shp (up from 29,250). She lost her torpedo tubes (like battleships really used them) and reinforced her anti-air defenses in the form of 76mm high-angle pieces and a smattering of 13.2mm machine guns. Jean Bart and Paris were given similar overhauls.

She emerged looking very different:

Courbet original, top, and postmodernization, bottom

In 1934, she was made a full-time gunnery school ship, her place in the French battle line going to the new 26,000-ton Dunkerque-class of fast (29.5-knot) battleships ordered for the French Navy the same year. Likewise, her sister Jean Bart, renamed Ocean, was made a training hulk at about the same time while Paris was used as a school ship for signals rates.

Courbet and Jean Bart in Algeria

With World War II on the horizon, Courbet and Paris were taken from their taskings on the training roster in June 1939 and placed in the French Navy’s 3eme Division de Ligne, fleshing out their ranks, taking on power and shell, and installing more AAA guns.

Reportedly, the ships had troublesome engineering suites, only capable of making about 15 knots and even that speed could not be sustained.

Tasked with coastal defense, Courbet was moved to Cherbourg on the English Channel in May 1940. From there, she engaged German aircraft poking their nose over the harbor and helped support the withdrawal from the beaches of Dunkirk. Later, as the German Army broke through and swept towards Paris, Courbet fired on advancing Boche columns of Rommel’s 7. Panzerdivision outside of Cherbourg before she raised steam and headed across the Channel to Portsmouth on June 19/20. Her sister Paris, damaged by German bombs, likewise left Brest for Plymouth, England at about the same time.

With France officially dropping out of WWII and the Third Republic voting to give full powers to Philippe Petain, the elderly battleships Paris and Courbet were seized and disarmed at their British moorings by Royal Marines on the order of Churchill on 3 July as part of Operation Catapult.

On 18 July 1940, De Gaulle addressed France, and Frenchmen everywhere, with his famous “Report to me” speech in which he specifically mentioned French sailors. (“J’invite les chefs, les soldats, les marins, les aviateurs des forces françaises de terre, de mer, de l’air, où qu’ils se trouvent actuellement, à se mettre en rapport avec moi.”)

Courbet-class battleship Paris in British hands, 1940, note the Union Jack on her bow and false bow wave. IWM

Paris, in bad condition, had her crew totally removed– who largely decided to return to France. She would be turned over to the Free Polish Navy who would use her as a dockside trainer and clubhouse until 1945 when she was returned to French custody and scrapped.

As for Courbet, she was turned over to the brand-new Forces Navales Françaises Libres (Free French Naval Forces) forces under Admiral Emile Muselier, allied with then-renegade Maj Gen. Charles de Gaulle, on 10 July, becoming the largest and arguably most effective French warship, not under Vichy control. Meanwhile, hulked sister Jean Bart remained in Vichy’s hands in Toulon on the Med, along with the bulk of the French Navy that wasn’t hiding out in Africa or the Caribbean.

Cuirassé Courbet à Portsmouth 1940, note the false bow wave painted on her bow.

Rearmed in August 1940, Courbet‘s AAA gunners managed to splash five German bombers over Portsmouth during the Battle of Britain. She continued her role as a floating symbol for De Gaulle and receiving ship for the rapidly forming Free French Navy for the next four years but sadly never left port under her own steam again.

Some of her crew found themselves in North Africa, fighting Rommel.

A British Bofors 40mm manned by the Free French 1er bataillon de fusilier de marine, Bir Hakeim, 1942. Note the combination of British Army tropical uniforms and traditional French “Bachi” sailor’s berets.

Others went in different directions.

Enter Monsieur Philippe Kieffer, stage left.

This guy.

The day after World War II started with the German invasion of Poland, Kieffer, a 40-year-old Haitian-born Alsatian bank executive in New York City, presented himself at the French consulate in Manhattan and signed up for the Navy. Having been schooled as a reserve naval officer in university but graduating too late in 1918 to fight in the Great War, the skilled financial analyst was given a sub-lieutenant’s commission and assigned to help flesh out Courbet‘s ranks, where he was assigned as an interpreter and cipher officer. Still aboard her when she left for England, he volunteered for the Free French Forces on 1 July 1940 and remained on her during the Battle of Britain.

In Portsmouth in May 1941, he formed a group of 40 volunteers, largely drawn from Courbet and Paris’s remaining crew who chose to not be repatriated to Vichy France, dubbed the 1re Compagnie de Fusiliers Marins (1st Company of Naval Rifles). Soon, his handful of bluejackets was wearing British uniforms and learning from the likes of former Shanghai Police Inspectors William Fairbairn and Eric Sykes at the commando training center in Achnacarry, Scotland. There, they picked up the general tricks of the dirty-deeds–done-dirt-cheap trade.

Free French Navy commandos parade at Wellington Barracks on Bastille Day, 1943. They were issued British uniforms, Pattern 34 kit, and .303 caliber SMLEs but maintained elements of their distinctively French heraldry and kit, including French Navy blue berets with red pompons. Also note the toggle rope, an essential bit of kit issued to British commando types during this period, which could be used as both a weapon or for climbing/lashing.

French marines of No. 1 Troop, No. 10 Commando. Note the British kit, to include No. 1 MK III Enfields. The officer at the left wears French sub-lieutenant naval insignia– likely Keiffer — and carries a Great War-era Mle 1892 8mm revolver.

His force became the No. 1 Troop and, No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando. Taking part in the Dieppe Raid in August 1942, his forces were expanded to include a second troop, No. 8, and his men were often used in small-scale raids and intelligence ops along the coasts of occupied Holland and Belgium for the next two years.

In early 1944, Kieffer’s two troops, along with a smattering of new recruits (including a few Belgians and at least four Luxembourgers) were carved off from No. 10 Commando and formed the new 1re Compagnie du Bataillon de Fusiliers-Marins Commandos (1st Company of the Battalion of Marine Fusilier Commandos, or just BFMC). Geared up for Operation Overlord, they were part of British No 4 Commando of Lord Lovat’s 1st Special Service Brigade and landed on Sword Beach on D-Day, some 177 men strong, for their official return to France, Tommy guns in hand.

Philippe Kieffer, in commando garb, meets Monty, along with early BFMC legends Augustin Hubert (glasses) and Charles Trépel (making friends with the pointy thing.) The dashing Trepel would be killed in a commando raid off the Dutch coast in 1944 while Hubert was fatally shot on D-Day by a German sniper near the Ouistreham casino.

Kieffer’s Bérets Verts (Green Berets) would soon push from the beach to link up with the 6th Parachute Division at Pegasus Bridge and go on to suffer 21 killed and 93 wounded in the days that were to follow, with the latter including Kieffer.

French villagers welcome BFMC French Naval Commandos who D-Day landings. Near Amfreville, Calvados, Lower Normandy, France. 17 June 1944. Note the green beret’s M1928 Thompson and Fairbairn-Sykes Commando knife.

Before the war was out, his men were the first unformed members of the Free French to enter Paris, see the elephant again at Walcheren, liberate Flessinge, help capture the port of Antwerp, and carry out raids along the Dutch Coast. Not bad for a banker.

As for Courbet, she was at Sword Beach as well, just a few days behind Kieffer’s famed 177.

By 1944 she was old news. The Free French Navy, after the collapse of Vichy France in November 1942, had picked up the scratch and dent but much newer fast battleships Jean Bart and Richelieu, which were given extensive refits in America, as well as the still (somewhat), combat-effective Bretagne-class dreadnought Lorraine, the latter of which was soon to see combat in the Operation Dragoon landings in the Med.

With her marginalization as De Gaulle’s unneeded 4th battleship, Courbet‘s bunker oil was pumped out and replaced with concrete as her crew removed their possessions. She was towed out of Portsmouth by HMRT Growler and HMRT Samsonia with her remaining French skeleton crew along for the ride on 9 June, bound for the invasion beaches of Normandy with TF 128.

Stopping some 3,360 meters in front of Hermanville near Ouistreham, her crew was evacuated at 13:15, and 10 minutes later her skipper, Capt. Wertzel, triggered the detonation of a series of installed scuttling charges that soon sent France’s first dreadnought 33 feet to the bottom, still flying her tricolor flag adorned with De Gaulle’s Cross of Lorraine, to give the impression that she was still in some form of service.

French Battleship Courbet was sunk as part of Gooseberry 5 on D+3. Note her decks are almost awash, the benefit of having a 29-foot draft in 33 feet of water.

Courbet was part of a line of blockships laid off the beaches to form a reef before the rest of the Mulberry dock system was assembled to bring supplies to the beach.

There were to be five “Gooseberry” breakwaters, one for each beach:
No. 1 Utah Beach at Varreville
No. 2 Omaha Beach at St. Laurent (Part of MULBERRY A)
No. 3 Gold Beach at Arromanches (Part of MULBERRY B)
No. 4 Juno Beach at Courseulles
No. 5 Sword Beach at Oistreham

In all, the breakwaters were to be formed by about 60 blockships (approximately 12 in each Gooseberry) which were all merchant vessels except the disarmed King George V-class battleship HMS Centurion, Free Dutch Java-class light cruiser HNLMS Sumatra, Danae-class light cruiser HMS Durban and our Courbet.

A typical Gooseberry breakwater

The sinking of blockships was to commence p.m. D+1 and the Gooseberries were to be completed by D+3, with Courbet being one of the final pieces of the puzzle at Sword Beach (Gooseberry 5), which was to include the merchant ships Becheville, Dover Hill, Empire Defiance, Empire Tamar, Empire Tana, and Forbin along with the old cruisers Durban and Sumatra.

Gooseberry 5 off the beaches at Ouistreham, showing Sumatra and Durban

Courbet, still with her war flag flying, was one of the few blockships to be “manned” with generators supplying power to her eight searchlights and a radio. A crew of 35 men from the Royal Artillery was left in charge of her AAA guns for the next several weeks to draw away Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine attacks on the vulnerable beachhead while at the same time possibly splashing a couple of raiders.

The concept worked, as reportedly the very grounded Courbet was hit by German Neger human torpedoes (Einmann-Torpedo) of K-Flottille 361 during the nights of both August 15/16 to 16/17, without effect.

As the breakout occurred and the fighting moved inland, her British gunners were withdrawn in September, and Courbet‘s flag was hauled down, and presented to De Gaulle’s government with honors.

On 14 February 1951, the wrecks in Gooseberry 5 were auctioned by the French government to be salvaged and slowly scrapped, a process that took until 1970 to be completed. By coincidence, Jean Bart, the last French (or European for that matter) battleship afloat, was scrapped the same year at Brégaillon near Toulon, making Courbet and Big Jean something of bookends on the tale of French dreadnoughts.

As for Kieffer, Courbet‘s star, he would die at age 63 in 1962, a Commandeur du Légion d’Honneur.

Of the current seven French Commando battalions today, three bear the name of officers of the WWII 1st BFMC: Augustin Hubert, Charles Trépel, and Kieffer. Meanwhile, French marine commandos still wear the badge Kieffer designed and issue the Fairbairn-Sykes.

In the seven decades since the 1st BFMC, more than 8,300 French commandos have followed in their footsteps. To say they have been extremely busy in the past 70 years is an understatement.

French heartthrob Christian Marquand would portray Kieffer in 1962’s The Longest Day, correctly wearing BFMC-badged green berets during the seizure of the Ouistreham casino (which had actually been destroyed before the landing). If Marquand looks familiar, he also played the holdout French plantation owner in Apocalypse Now Redux. Notably, Kieffer served on the film as a technical adviser just before he died.

Last week, on the 75th Anniversary of D-Day, a monument to Kieffer and his 177 commandos was unveiled on Sword Beach, with Commando Kieffer frogmen and past veterans in attendance. A piece of salvaged steel plate from Courbet is incorporated into the display.

Specs:

Courbet class, 1914 Jane’s

Displacement:
23,475 t (23,104 long tons) (normal)
25,579 t (25,175 long tons) (full load)
Length: 544 ft 7 in (o/a)
Beam: 88 ft 7 in
Draught: 29 ft 8 in
Machinery (1913)
24 Niclausse coal-fired boilers with Bellville oil spray systems
4 shafts; 4 × Parsons direct-drive steam turbine sets
28,000 PS (20,594 kW; 27,617 shp)
2,700 tons coal/1,000 tons oil.
Range of 8,400nm at 10 knots
Machinery (1934)
16 oil-fired boilers
4 shafts; 4 × Geared steam turbine sets
43,000 PS
Speed: 21 knots (designed) only 20.74 on trials in 1913. 16 knots by 1940
Complement: 1,115 (1,187 as flagship)
Armor:
Waterline belt: 140–250 mm (5.5–9.8 in)
Deck: 40–70 mm (1.6–2.8 in)
Turrets: 250 mm (9.8 in)
Conning tower: 266 mm (10.5 in)
Armament: (1913)
6 × twin 305 mm (12 in) 45 cal guns
22 × single 138 mm (5.4 in) 45 guns
4 × single 47 mm (1.9 in) M1902 3-pdr AAA guns
4 × 450 mm (17.7 in) Model 1909 submerged torpedo tubes with 12 torpedoes
30 Blockade mines
Armament: (1940)
6 × twin 305 mm (12 in) 45 cal guns
14 × single 138 mm (5.4 in) 45 guns
8 x 75mm/50cal M1922 AAA guns
14 x 13.2mm machine guns

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Warship Wednesday, June 5, 2019: Overlord’s First Loss, now 75 years on

Posted on June 5, 2019 by laststandonzombieisland 3 comments

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, June 5, 2019: Overlord’s First Loss

NHHC 1969-232-A

Here we see a British Admiralty chart entitled “Iles St Marcouf to Cap Manvieux,” covering a span of the Normandy Coast in France. This chart was used by the venerable New York-class battleship USS Texas (BB-35) during her bombardment operations in support of the Operation Neptune landings, 6 June 1944, the seaside part of Operation Overlord. If you note in the top right-hand quarter of the chart is a set of two parallel lines marked with dan buoys marking a 900-meter-wide channel that was swept of mines immediately prior to and on D-Day.

In short, if it hadn’t had been for those minecraft that cleared the aforementioned path, the whole invasion would have gone a good bit different. With that, today’s Warship Wednesday is on the loss of the Raven-class minesweeper USS Osprey (AM-56), which sunk 75 years ago on 5 June 1944. As noted by military historian and D-Day guru Stephen Ambrose, the six bluejackets killed on Osprey that day were the first Allied casualties of Overlord.

The two ships of the Raven-class were basically all-diesel predecessors of the later Auk-class minesweepers (which had diesel-electric drives) and came in a tad lighter, giving them a draft that was almost two feet shallower.

Osprey and Raven in Drydock 2 at Norfolk Navy Yard Aug 23 1940 NHHC

USS Raven (AM-55), Osprey’s sole sister, off Rockland, Maine, 19 March 1941, while running trials 19-N-24352

Built side-by-side in 1939-40 at the Norfolk Navy Yard as AM-55 and AM-56, the much more prolific (95 hull) Auks followed them with hull numbers that started at AM-57.

Named for the large, hawk-like bird with a dark brown back and a white breast, Osprey was the second such warship for the Navy with that moniker, with the first being the Lapwing-class minesweeper AM-29 which was commissioned in 1919 then soon transferred to the US Coast and Geodetic Survey as USC&GS Pioneer.

USS Osprey (AM-56) soon after her completion. Note her hull numbers and two-part scheme. USN Photo 120-15

Commissioned 16 December 1940, by mid-1941 Osprey was detailed with coastal patrol duties off the U.S. Eastern seaboard and, once America got more active in the European war after Pearl Harbor, soon found herself in England.

USS Osprey (AM-56) underway with a bone in her teeth, circa April 1941, probably while running trials. Note that her bow numbers have been freshly painted out and she wears an all-over dark scheme. The photograph was received from the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1972. NH 84026

Osprey Off the Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia, 19 April 1941. Note she has been freshly fitted with depth charge racks on her stern. 19-N-23990

By November 1942, she convoyed with the USS Texas and company and later helped direct and protect the waves of landing craft moving shoreward at Port Lyautey, Morocco for the Allies Torch Landings.

North Africa Operation, November 1942 Invasion convoy en route to Morocco, circa early November 1942. Ships include more than twenty transports, with USS TEXAS (BB-35) and USS AUGUSTA (CA-31) in the distance. Photographed from an SBD off one of the invasion force aircraft carriers. Catalog #: 80-G-1032486

After completing anti-submarine patrols off Casablanca, Osprey returned to Norfolk for a year of coastal escort assignments aimed at helping to curb the German U-boat threat off Hampton Roads. With other minesweepers, she escorted convoys from Norfolk and New York to ports in the Caribbean and along the Gulf Coast.

Raven photographed in camouflage paint in 1943 with filled depth charge rack at the stern and additional AAA weapons. Also, note her false bow-wave and smaller but visible hull numbers. Osprey had a similar scheme at the time. NH 43519

By April 1944, Osprey was back across the pond and assigned to the growing invasion flotilla heading for Normandy. Rommel, who had wanted to sow millions of landmines in France to seal off the beaches from invasion, was also a fan of their seagoing variants.

“The Generalfeldmarschall himself had quickly grasped the value of naval mines in his system of defense. He continually requested an increased use of this weapon,” notes a U.S. Navy history.

Dropping mines from a German minelayer during World War II. The Seemine looks to be an EMC-type contact type which used a charge of 551-pounds. The Germans were fans of contact (with both Hertz and switch horns) and magnetic influence mines in moored and drifting flavors and used them liberally during the war from Greece to Norway, often with anti-sweep obstructors. NH 71333

German sea mines in a railroad car, abandoned in the railway station at Cherbourg, France, 3 July 1944. 80-G-254312

The German naval minefield facing the Overlord invasion stretched 120 km across the Bay of Normandy and was 16 km deep.

The Allied plan was to use 255 vessels to clear 10 channels through the mine barrage– two channels per beach– in the immediate predawn hours of D-Day, with each sweeper ship, such as Osprey, clearing paths by cutting the moored contact mines. Specially equipped trawlers would follow on the search for magnetic mines while dan-laying launches would mark the swept zone. The channels were to be from 400 to 1,200 yards in width depending on their route.

The danger of mines in inshore waters was to be disregarded during the assault, but the areas were to be searched as soon as sweepers were available.

British Admiral Bertram Ramsay noted that “There is no doubt that the mine is our greatest obstacle to success,” when discussing the Cross-Channel attack. “And if we manage to reach the enemy coast without being disorganized and suffering serious losses, we should be fortunate.”

After months of intensive practice in combined sweeping operations with MinRon 7 off Torbay, England, en route to the Normandy invasion beaches on 5 June, Osprey soon struck an enemy mine. The crew put out the resultant fires but could not save their vessel. She sank that evening.

Early on the 6th, the mine division started sweeping the coast of France in assault and check sweeps to assure safe passage channels for the landing craft and the primary naval gunfire support for the beaches.

The only loss to mines on 5 June, Osprey was soon joined by numerous other craft who could not stay in the same cleared channel as the battleships or were hit by floating contact mines, cut free in the initial sweeping. This was later compounded by the Germans air-dropping mines and sowing them at night from E-boats and coasters.

On 6 June, the landing craft USS LCI(L)-85, LCI(L)-91, LCI(L)-497, LCT-197, LCT-294, LCT-305, LCT-332, LCT-364, LCT-397, LCT-555, LCT-703 and destroyer HMS Wrestler all struck mines just off the beachhead and were lost.

The next day saw the loss of the Army transport ship USAT Francis C. Harrington, Navy transport USS Susan B. Anthony, landing craft LCI(L)-416, LCI(L)-436, LCI(L)-458, LCI(L)-489, LCI(L)-586, and the Auk-class minesweeper USS Tide (AM-125), all to the infernal devices. Meanwhile, the Allen Sumner-class destroyer USS Meredith (DD-726) was damaged by a mine and sunk the next day by a Luftwaffe bombing which split her in two.

Auk-class minesweeper USS Tide (AM-125) sinking off Utah Beach after striking a mine during the Normandy invasion, 7 June 1944. USS PT-509 and USS Pheasant (AM-61) are standing by. Photographed from USS Threat (AM-124). 80-G-651677

On 8 June, the net layer HMS Minster was sunk by a mine off Utah Beach while the Buckley-class destroyer escort USS Rich (DE-695) struck two mines and sank in the English Channel off Normandy.

The U.S. Navy destroyer escort USS Rich (DE-695) strikes a mine, amidships, while operating off Normandy, France, on 8 June 1944. She had previously hit another mine, which blew off her stern. NH 44312

Through the end of the month, mines off Normandy would continue to claim another dozen landing craft and steamers, as well as the British RN destroyers HMS Fury and HMS Swift along with the Dido-class cruiser HMS Scylla, proving just how hazardous the belt laid by the Germans, had been. It is easy to forget, with the scale of Overlord, but mines caused one hell of a butcher’s bill in June 1944 off the French coast.

As for Osprey‘s sister ship, Raven would sweep at least 21 German and Italian naval mines on D-Day alone. She would survive the war and pass into mothballs with three battle stars to her credit.

Raven seen flanked in the 1946-47 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships, shown as a single outlier among 63 Auk-class and 106 Admirable-class minesweepers in U.S. service.

Struck in 1967, she was sunk as a target in deep water off the coast of southern California.

As noted by DANFS, the name Osprey was assigned to AM-406 on 17 May 1945, but the construction of that ship was canceled just three months later with the end of the war.

Osprey would go on to grace the hulls of two later U.S. Navy minecraft: AMS-28, a small YMS-1-class minesweeper which served in Korea where she prepared a firing base anchorage for the big guns of the battleship USS Missouri (BB-63) at the Inchon landings– a true namesake to her predecessor– and MHC-51, the lead ship of late Cold War Osprey-class coastal mine hunters.

Four U.S. Navy minesweepers (AMS) tied up at Yokosuka, Japan, following mine clearance activities off Korea. The original photo is dated 30 November 1950. These four ships, all units of Mine Division 31, are (from left to right): USS Merganser (AMS-26); USS Osprey (AMS-28); USS Chatterer (AMS-40) and USS Mockingbird (AMS-27). Ship in the extreme left background is USS Wantuck (APD-125). Official U.S. Navy Photograph 80-G-424597, now in the collections of the National Archives.

USS Osprey (MHC-51), a coastal minehunter in commission from 1993 to 2006. Of note, one of her sister ships was USS Raven (MHC-61), a familiar name on her family tree. NHHC L45-221.03.01

As for our D-Day Osprey, her bell surfaced some time ago, but I believe is in private hands in the UK.

USS Osprey ships bell, via Ivan Warren Michelle Mary Fishing & Diving Charters in 2007, via wrecksite.eu

Still, if it had not been for Osprey and those like her, the Longest Day could have proved even longer.

Specs:

USS Osprey (AM-56) Off the Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia, 19 April 194119-N-23989

Displacement: 810 tons, 1040 tons full load
Length: 220 ft 6 in overall, 215 w.l.
Beam: 32 ft 2 in
Draft: 9 ft 4 in mean
Machinery: Diesel, 2 shafts, 1,800 BHP
Speed: 18 knots
Complement:105 officers and men
Armament:
2 × 3″/50 caliber guns
2 × 40 mm AA guns
8 × 20 mm Oerlikon cannons (added 1942)
2 × depth charge tracks (added 1941)

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

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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Weapons free (a little late)

Posted on May 31, 2019 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Always nice to see an MK75 76mm OTO Melara guns in action. The U.S. military only has like 15 of these left– all on Coast Guard Cutters. Back in the 1980s, there were nearly 100 of these Italian rapids floating around in the fleet between shoreside spares, 25 cutters, 51 FFG-7s, and six PHMs.

Coast Guard Cutter Harriet Lane fired a commemorative shot Thursday to honor the 158th anniversary of its namesake’s action near Fort Sumter, 30 May 2019. Although the anniversary was actually in April, Lane was in the midst of an 80-day patrol and thus out of pocket. She caught Charleston on the way back home to Virginia (USCG Photo)

From the Coast Guard (bold mine):

CHARLESTON, S.C. — The crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Harriet Lane fired a commemorative shot Thursday to honor the 158^th anniversary of its namesake’s action near Fort Sumter.

On April 11, 1861, United States Revenue Cutter Harriet Lane made history by firing the first naval shot of the Civil War. Cutter Lane fired across the bow of the merchant steamship Nashville. Nashville was attempting to enter Charleston Harbor without displaying a flag indicating its nationality. Congress merged the Revenue Cutter Service with the United States Lifesaving Service in 1915 to form today’s United States Coast Guard.

The cutter Harriet Lane, a 270-foot medium endurance cutter, is returning to its homeport of Portsmouth, Virginia after conducting a successful 80-day counter-narcotics patrol of the Caribbean Sea. The cutter saved the lives of two mariners in distress, conducted several boardings on the high seas, and seized 2,069 pounds of cocaine valued at $27 million.

Of note, we covered the original Harriett Lane, a very active steam powered Revenue Cutter that saw lots of Civil War service, in a past Warship Wednesday.

Warship Wednesday, May 29, 2019: About that new Marker in Times Square

Posted on May 29, 2019 by laststandonzombieisland One comment

Warship Wednesday, May 29, 2019: About that new Marker in Times Square

Naval History and Heritage Command Photo NH 66738

Here we see the beautiful Pennsylvania-class heavy cruiser USS California (Armored Cruiser No. 6, later CA-6) with a bone her mouth and three pipes belching smoke, sometime between 1907 and 1909. Sadly, although she was likely still on her original coat of lead-based paint in the above image, she was already largely obsolete and would only see 11 years’ service before she met with disaster.

The Pennsylvanias, a class of six armored cruisers named, like battleships, after states, were big 15,000-ton/504-foot long bruisers built immediately after the lessons learned in the summer of sharp fleet actions and naval blockades that made up the Spanish American War. Larger than many of pre-dreadnought battleships of their day (for comparison, the three-ship Illinois-class battlewagons laid down in 1897 were only 12,500-ton/375-ft. vessels) they had lighter armor (4 to 9 inches rather than up to 16 inches on Illinois) and a lighter armament (8-inch guns rather than 13-inchers) but were much faster, with the cruisers capable of 22-knots while the battleships lumbered along at 16 knots. Several European powers of the day– notably England, Germany, and Russia– were also building such very large armored cruisers with an eye to protecting far-flung overseas possessions that did not require a battleship in times of peace and aggressively raiding their enemies’ merchant fleets once war was declared.

The Pennsylvanias‘ main battery consisted of two pairs of 8″/40 cal (203mm) Mark 5 guns in fore and aft turrets, which in turn were more powerful than the older but still very effective 8″/35 Mark 3s such as those used with terrific success against the Spanish at Manila Bay. These were later upgraded to even better 8″/45 Mark 6s after 1907. They could fire a 260-pound shell over 98.5-pounds of propellant out to 22,500 yards.

Admiral William B. Caperton, USN Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet (center) With members of his staff on board USS California/San Diego (Armored Cruiser No. 6) at San Diego, California, circa 1916-17. The ship’s after 8″/45 twin gun turret is behind them. Those present are (from left to right): Lieutenant (Junior Grade) H.M. Lammers, USN; Captain R.M. Cutts, USMC; Medical Inspector E.S. Bogert, USN; Admiral Caperton; Pay Inspector J. Fyffe, USN; Lieutenant A.T. Beauregard, USN; and Paymaster C.S. Baker, USN. Courtesy of the Naval Historical Foundation. Collection of Adm. W.B. Caperton. NH 83793

USS California/San Diego (CA-6) Breech of one of her 8″/45 guns, taken circa 1916. Her magazine carried 125 shells for each of the four tubes. These latter guns proved capable enough for the Army to use surplus examples in the 1920s for Coastal Defense purposes. Courtesy of Chief Watch Officer James B. Dofflemeyer, 1972. NH 82995

As a very impressive secondary, these ships carried 14 6 “/50 cal Mark 6 breechloaders in casemated broadside, seven on each side. Add to this were 30 torpedo-boat busting 3″/50s and 47mm 3-pounders.

USS California/San Diego (Armored Cruiser No. 6) Crew exercising one of the ship’s 6″/50cal broadside guns, circa 1916. Note gunsight in use; items posted on the bulkhead in the upper right, including safety orders, pennant bearing the ship’s name, and Modern Girl/Stingy Thing poster. Notably, these guns would be stripped from the cruiser in 1917 and used to arm merchant ships. Collection of Chief Warrant Officer J.B. Dofflemeyer, 1972. NH 82997

Then of course, as with every cruiser, battleship, and destroyer of the time, they also had torpedoes. This amounted to a pair of submerged 18-inch tubes firing Bliss-Leavitt type torpedoes.

USS California/San Diego (CA-6) View in the torpedo tube room, with a torpedo tube at right, and torpedo afterbodies at left, circa 1916. Courtesy of Chief Watch Officer James B. Dofflemeyer, 1972. NH 82999

Constructed alongside her sister ship USS South Dakota at San Francisco’s Union Iron Works– their four classmates were built on the East Coast– USS California was only the second such ship with that name in the Navy, the first being a post-Civil War wooden steam frigates that proved to be made of improperly treated wood and, condemned, had to be scrapped after just five years of service.

Ordered in 1899, our more modern steel-hulled California commissioned 1 August 1907 at San Francisco’s Mare Island Navy Yard. Ironically, the exhibition of naval battles that made up the bulk of the Russo-Japanese War and the commissioning of HMS Dreadnought, during California‘s gestation period, largely showed that armored cruisers lacked a lot of value in modern warfare with a near-peer adversary. In short, Dreadnought-style battleships were fast enough to catch them and pummel them flat while new cruiser and destroyer designs of 1907 were also fast enough to elude them.

Still, upon commission, California promptly joined the Pacific Fleet where she spent her early life in a series of extended shakedowns and coastal cruises to seaside ports along the West coast “for exhibition purposes.”

USS California (Armored Cruiser No. 6) Photographed circa 1908. NH 55011

The year 1909 saw what we would consider a West Pac cruise today, with stops in the Philippine Islands and China, and Christmas spent in Yokohama, Japan. The same year, the Navy ditched their gleaming white and buff scheme in favor of haze gray, which saw California‘s profile change drastically. Likewise, she landed most of her small 47mm guns, as the age of torpedo boat defense with such popguns had largely come and gone.

USS California (Armored Cruiser No. 6) Underway in San Pablo Bay, California, 1909. Collection of Rear Admiral Ammen Farenholt, USN(MC). NH 55009

The next few years were spent in standardization cruises, target practice, maneuvers and the like, spread out from San Diego to Hawaii and Alaska, interrupted by another West Pac jaunt in 1912 and a bit of gunboat diplomacy off the Pacific coast of Nicaragua where she landed the First Provisional Regiment of Marines – 29 officers, 4 naval officers and 744 enlisted men under the command of Col. Joseph H. Pendleton, augmented by her own naval landing force.

California in San Diego harbor, California, circa about 1910 to 1914. Arcade View Company stereo card. Note she has ditched her front pole mast for a lattice mast. Courtesy of Captain Don Fink, 1983. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 94938

California was re-named USS San Diego on 1 September 1914 to clear her original name for assignment to Dreadnought-style Battleship No. 44, a similar fate which befell all her five sisters.

As such, she lost her presentation silver service, which had been presented by the state when she was christened. This service went on to live on BB-44 and, removed in 1940 and stored ashore, are part of the U.S. Navy Museum’s Steel Navy exhibit today:

Back to our ship:

Notably, the rechristening of California to San Diego was the first use of the name “San Diego” for a naval vessel. She then became the flagship of the Pacific Fleet and participated in the opening of the Panama-California Exposition on 1 January 1915.

USS SAN DIEGO (CA-6) Caption: Engraving issued for the Panama-Pacific Exposition, 1915. Courtesy of the US Army Military History Institute Catalog #: NH 91732

Admiral Thomas B. Howard (USNA 1873), Commander, Pacific Fleet, in his cabin aboard USS SAN DIEGO (CA-6), circa 1915. At the time he was only the fifth full admiral in the history of the U.S. Navy– after Farragut, Porter, Dewey and Frank F. Fletcher. More than 220 have followed, somewhat diluting the brand. Courtesy of D.M. McPherson, 1976 NH 84403

USS San Diego (Armored Cruiser No. 6) Off Guaymas, Mexico, 26 December 1915. Starting in 1913 and continuing through 1915, California was a common sight in Mexico’s Pacific waters where was “observing conditions” brought about by the Mexican revolution and civil war. Photographed by Hopkins. Note Christmas tree mounted on her forecastle. Collection of Thomas P. Naughton, 1973. NH 92174

A deadly 1915 boiler room fire sent San Diego to Mare Island for extensive repairs and refit followed by a period in reserve in San Diego during which most of her crew was reassigned. During this time, she was able to squeeze in a rescue of 48 passengers from the sinking SS Fort Bragg.

USS San Diego (Armored Cruiser No. 6) Photographed from an airplane in San Diego harbor, California, 28 March 1916. Note her extensive awnings. Collection of Thomas P. Naughton, 1973. NH 92175

USS SAN DIEGO (CA-6) Display illumination circa 1916. Courtesy of Chief Warrant Officer J.B. Dofflemeyer, 1972 NH 83106

USS SAN DIEGO (CA-6) As seen by Rear Admiral Francis Taylor, USN, from the living room window at 127 Riverside Drive, San Diego, in 1916. Description: Courtesy of Mrs. Francis Taylor. NH 70288

When the U.S. entered WWI in April 1917, San Diego‘s skeleton crew was fleshed out with a mix of some 400 new recruits straight from NTS San Francisco and Great Lakes as well as more experienced salts from California’s Naval Militia. After workups and training, she stood out on 18 July 1918 for the Atlantic and the Great War.

Arriving in New York in August, by 23 September she was the flagship of St. Nazaire, France-bound Troop Convoy Group Eight then in November did the same for Troop Convoy Group Eleven. February 1918 saw her as part of Britain-bound Convoy HK-26, followed by HX-32 and HX-37 by May, all of which made it across the pond successfully.

USS SAN DIEGO (CA-6) View taken during the winter of 1917-18, while on patrol in the North Atlantic during World War I. During this period San Diego landed most of her casemated 6-inch guns as they tended to ship water in heavy seas. NH 83727

USS SAN DIEGO (CA-6) View taken in the winter of 1917-18, looking forward from the bridge while on patrol in the North Atlantic during World War I. Note snow on the deck. NH 83728

Then, tragedy struck the mighty cruiser. While zigzagging off Fire Island, New York, she came across a mine sowed by the large German Deutschland-class “U‑Kreuzer” submarine SM U-156, the latter skippered by Kapitänleutnant Richard Feldt.

From DANFS:

At about 11:05 a.m. on 19 July 1918, San Diego hit a mine, the explosion sounding like “a dull heavy thud,” lifting the stern slightly and shaking the ship “moderately fore and aft.” The warship assumed an immediate six to eight-degree list, and she lost headway. The mine had exploded on the port side about frame 78, well below the waterline, rupturing the skin of the ship and deforming the bulkhead at that location, opening watertight door no.142 between the port engine room and no. 8 fireroom. Flooding occurred in the port engine room, adjacent compartments, as well as no. 8 fireroom, and San Diego then took on a 17½ degree list, water entering through an open gun port for 6-inch gun no.10.

At the outset, “the behavior of the ship did not convince me she was in much danger of sinking,” Capt. Harley H. Christy later wrote, but he soon received the report from the engineer officer that the ship had lost power in both engines. Loss of motive power “precluded any maneuvering to combat a submarine.” The list increased. “When I was convinced that there was no hope of her holding and that she would capsize,” Christy gave the order to abandon ship, the gun crews remaining at their stations “until they could no longer fire,” and the depth charges being “secured so that they would be innocuous.” San Diego’s sailors launched life rafts, whaleboats, dinghies and punts by hand, as well as mess tables, benches, hammocks and lumber – “ample material to support the crew” – “an evolution…performed in an orderly manner without confusion,” while the broadside gun crews fired about 30 to 40 rounds “at possible periscopes.”

With San Diego nearly on her beam ends, Capt. Christy, along with his executive officer, Cmdr. Gerard Bradford were the last to leave the ship. Bradford went down the port side, the commanding officer went over the starboard side by a rope, swinging down to the bilge keel then the docking keel before going overboard. Christy then watched his ship turn turtle, “in a symmetrical position with the keel inclined about ten degrees to the horizontal, the forward end elevated” before gradually sinking.

USS San Diego (Armored Cruiser No. 6) Painting by Francis Muller, 1920. It depicts the ship sinking off Fire Island, New York, 19 July 1918. The cruiser sank in 28 minutes, the only major warship lost by the United States in World War I. Courtesy of the Navy Art Collection, Washington, D.C. NH 55012-KN

While almost all her 1,183 crew successfully made it off, six, largely from below deck engineering divisions, were claimed by Neptune and never recovered:

Fireman First Class, Clyde C. Blaine of Lomita, CA
Engineman 2nd Class, Thomas E. Davis of South Mansfield, LA
Seaman 2nd Class, Paul J. Harris, Cincinnati, OH
Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class, Andrew Munson, St. Paul, MN
Engineman 2nd Class, James F. Rochet of Blue Lake, CA
Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class, Frazier O. Thomas of Charleston, WV

Excerpt from the map “Summary of Enemy Mining Activities on the U.S. Atlantic Coast” showing locations of mines found off the coast of Long Island, New York through 17 February 1919. U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office Map, now housed at the National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 37.

As for U-156, just two months after San Diego met her end at the hands of one of the submarine’s mines, the German raider was fittingly sunk in the Allied-laid Northern Barrage minefield on 25 September 1918, lost with all hands. She earned a bit of infamy for her attack on the small New England town of Orleans, Massachusetts, and several nearby merchant vessels.

Of San Diego‘s five sisters, all were sold for scrap in 1930–1931 in compliance with the limits of the London Naval Treaty. Speaking of scrap, in 1957 the Navy sold the rights to San Diego‘s wreck to a New York-based salvage company but six years later, after little work was done other than to loot small relics from her interior, the Navy canceled the award and reclaimed rights to the ship.

Located in shallow water, with the expanded use of SCUBA systems San Diego became a target for both skin divers and weekend unlicensed salvage operations. In 1965, her port propeller was removed without approval and subsequently lost. In 1973, her starboard prop was found to be detached.

As noted by the Navy, “Due to a combination of recreational divers going to extremes to secure artifacts (at least six people have died diving on the site) and professional rivalries between dive boat operators, the Navy was prompted to revisit the site and pursue further action to protect San Diego and other Navy wrecks being exploited.”

In 1992, the Coast Guard implemented an exclusion zone around the wreck due to reports of live ordnance being salvaged from the site, making it effectively off-limits. In 1995, the Navy performed the first of several extensive surveys of the wreck and three years later the San Diego was added to the National Register of Historic Places. A 2004 law protected her from desecration as a war grave. In 2017, the USS San Diego Project was kicked off to extensively survey and protect the wreck.

Side scan sonar image of the wreck site of USS San Diego collected by Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 2 in June 2017 as part of a training operation. The ship rests upside down on the seabed, and the starboard side is shown, with the bow to the right of the image.

There are currently some 229 artifacts within the San Diego Collection under the management of NHHC ranging from ceramics, electrical light fixtures and pieces of the ship’s silver service to an M1892 brass bugle, USN-marked brass padlocks, Mameluke sword and even wooden pistol grips for a Colt 1911. Almost all were recovered illegally by recreational– and in some cases commercial divers– going as far back as the 1950s and later surrendered to the Navy. Many are on display at the USS San Diego Exhibit in the National Museum of the US Navy, which opened last year.

Caption: 181108-N-GK939-0049 WASHINGTON (NNS) (Nov. 8, 2018) Guests look at artifacts in the USS San Diego exhibit at the National Museum of the U.S. Navy. Bugles were used aboard U.S. Navy ships to issue commands intended for the entire ship’s company. The bugle recovered from the wreck may have been used to call San Diego’s crew to General Quarters and then to abandon ship in the last thirty minutes of the cruiser’s life. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Lindsay A. Preston/Released)

In 2018, it was confirmed that the cruiser was sunk by a mine laid by U-156, putting persistent theories that she had been lost due to a coal bunker explosion or sabotage to rest. The event coincided with the 100th anniversary of San Diego’s sinking.

Retired Rear Admiral Samuel Cox, Director, Naval History and Heritage Command, speaks to Sailors aboard the USNS Grasp (T-ARS-51) during a wreath-laying ceremony to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the USS San Diego (ACR 6).

Finally, over the recent Memorial Day Weekend, U.S. Navy officials in conjunction with the city of New York and the United War Veterans Council, unveiled the USS San Diego plaque in Times Square in front of Father Duffy’s statue. The plaque features the names of the 6 sailors lost on that fateful day along with a profile of the ship, the largest U.S. Naval vessel lost in the Great War.

Photo: UWVC

Specs:

Jane’s 1914 entry on Pennsylvania class armored cruisers, California included

Displacement:
13,680 long tons (13,900 t) (standard)
15,138 long tons (15,381 t) (full load)
Length:
503 ft 11 in oa
502 ft pp
Beam: 69 ft 6 in
Draft: 24 ft 1 in (mean) 26 ft. 6 in (max)
Installed power:
16 × Babcock & Wilcox boilers
23,000 ihp (17,000 kW)
2075 tons of coal
Propulsion:
2 × vertical triple expansion reciprocating engines
2 × screws
Speed:
22 kn, range 5000(10)
Complement: 80 officers, 745, enlisted, 64 Marines as designed (1,200 in 1918)
Armor: All Krupp and Harvey steel
Belt: 6 in (152 mm) (top & waterline)
5 in (127 mm) (bottom)
Deck: 1 1⁄2 in (38 mm) – 6 in (amidships)
4 in (102 mm) (forward & aft)
Barbettes: 6 in
Turrets: 6 – 6 1⁄2 in (165 mm)
Conning Tower: 9 in (229 mm)
Armament:
(as built)
4 × 8 in (203 mm)/40 caliber Mark 5 breech-loading rifles (BL)(2×2)
14 × 6 in (152 mm)/50 cal Mark 6 BL rifles
18 × 3 in (76 mm)/50 cal rapid-fire guns
12 × 3-pounder (47 mm (1.9 in)) Driggs-Schroeder guns
2 × 1-pounder (37 mm (1.5 in)) Driggs-Schroeder saluting guns
2 × 18 inch (450 mm) torpedo tubes (submerged)
(1918)
4 × 8 in/45 cal Mark 6 BL rifles (2×2)
18 × 3 in/50 cal rapid-fire guns
2 x 1 76/52 Mk X AAA

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Warship Wednesday, May 22, 2019: The Defiant Bicyclist

Posted on May 22, 2019 by laststandonzombieisland 2 comments

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off 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 22, 2019: The Defiant Bicyclist

Here we see the Balilla-class diesel submarine Enrico Toti of the Italian Regia Marina around 1933, dressed to impressed. Although many of Il Duce’s undersea boats met grim ends at the hands of the Allies in World War II and had little to show for their career, Toti had a much higher degree of success on both accounts.

While British, American and German submarines are given a lot of press for their storied achievements during the conflict, it should be noted that Italy was no slouch in the submersible department, historically speaking. The first Italian “sottomarino,” Delfino, was designed by marine engineer Giacinto Pullino at the La Spezia Navy Yard back in 1889, predating John Philip Holland’s designs for the U.S. and Royal Navy by a decade.

Over the next four decades, the Italians produced more than 100 subs, including some for the King of Sweden, the Kaiser of Germany and the Tsar of Russia, while in turn adopting a modicum of contemporary British designs to learn from. During World War I, the Italian submarine force counted some of the few Allied “kills” in the northern Adriatic when the Regia Marina’s F-12 torpedoed the Austro-Hungarian U-boat SM U-20 in 1918. Importantly, after the war, Italy received the relatively low-mileage German Type UE II long-range submarine SM U-120 as reparations, which the country’s designers apparently learned a good deal from.

In 1927, with an increasingly fascist Italy on track to build the fourth largest navy in the world, Rome ordered a new class of four Balilla-class “cruiser” type submarines, large enough to operate independently in the Indian Ocean and around Italy’s African colonies which at the time included Italian Somaliland and Eritrea on the strategically important (Red Sea/Suez Canal) Horn of Africa.

The country’s first post-WWI submarine design, the big Balillas went 1,900-tons and ran 284-feet long, capable of making 17-knots in a surface attack. Capable of diving to 400 feet– which was deep for subs of the 1920s, they could travel 13,000 nm on their economical diesel engines. Able to carry 16 torpedoes for their six tubes as well as a 120mm deck gun, the design rivaled the U.S. Navy’s later Porpoise-class subs (1900-tons/289-feet/18-knots/16 torpedoes) of the early 1930s, which in turn was the forerunner of the USN’s WWII fleet boats. A fifth Balilla was constructed for Brazil, which in turn triggered Argentina to order three later Cavallini-class subs from Italy in the 1930s

Built by OTO at Muggiano, largely side-by-side, Italian Navy sisters Balilla, Domenico Millelire, Amatore Sciesa, and Enrico Toti were all in service by 1928.

Balilla class member Domenico Millelire, note her conning tower-mounted short-barreled 120mm gun. This was later replaced by a longer gun mounted on the deck.

All the vessels were named after famous Italian heroes:

–Balilla was the nickname of one Giovanni Battista Perasso, a Genoese youth who is credited with a revolt against the Austrians in 1746.

-Millelire was an officer in the Sardinian Royal Navy who reportedly gave the first defeat to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1793.

–Sciesa was an Italian patriot hung by the Austrians in 1851.

As for Toti, the namesake of our sub, he was a one-legged bicyclist who was allowed to join the elite Bersaglieri in the Great War and was killed by the Austro-German forces at the horrific waste that was the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo in 1916, famously throwing his crutch at the enemy lines and remaining defiant to the last.

The 1 October 1916 cover of La Domenica del Corriere, a popular 20th Century Italian weekly newspaper famous for its cover drawings akin in many ways to the American Saturday Evening Post, on Toti’s deed

The class soon engaged in a series of long-range peacetime cruises, waving the Italian tricolor around the globe. Boston photojournalist Leslie Jones documented Balilla off the Boston lightship on her way to Charlestown Navy Yard in May 1933.

Leslie Jones Collection, Boston Public Library

Note how large the sail is on these boats. Leslie Jones Collection, Boston Public Library

In September 1933, Toti, in conjunction with her sister Sciesa, set sail from La Spezia to circumnavigate the African continent East-to-West, passing through the Suez, and calling at Mogadishu, Chisimaio, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Dar-es-Salaam, Diego Suarez, Lourenço Marques, Durban, Cape Town, Walvis Bay, Lobito, São Tomé, Takoradi, Dakar, Praia, Las Palma, Gibraltar and Barcelona before making it back to Italy in February 1934. In short, visiting every important British, French, Portuguese and Spanish port in Africa and the Med.

Il sommergibile Enrico Toti

In 1934, the class was updated with a more modern 120mm/45 cal gun (from the old 27cal weapon) mounted on the deck rather than the conning tower, while Breda M31 13.2mm twin machine guns on innovative pressured disappearing mounts replaced the older Hotchkiss singles.

Images of Toti in March 1935, showing her new configuration, via Association Venus :

Deck mounted 120mm gun

Images of the internals of WWII Italian submarines are hard to come by

At sea, note the new conning tower profile

One of the few pictures I’ve ever seen of the twin submarine mount Breda M31 AAA machine guns. It could reportedly telescope in and out of the pressure hull like a periscope.

Starting in 1936, Toti and her sisters became heavily involved in the Spanish Civil War, semi-secretly supporting Franco’s forces without any (published) successes.

When Mussolini finally joined WWII proper in June 1940, just in time to deal a death blow to France, the Balilla class were no longer the best subs the Italians had in their fleet, as a staggering 150~ follow-on large submarines were either in commission or on the drawing board. With this, the four Balillas were largely relegated to training use although they did undertake a few war patrols early in the conflict. Toti was the only one that was successful.

Just after midnight on 15 October 1940, off the Italian central Mediterranean town of Calabria, Toti, commanded by LCDR Bandino Bandini, encountered the British Royal Navy T-class submarine HMS Triad (N53) at a distance of about 1,000 meters.

HMS Triad (N53)

Toti, like the British sub, was operating on the surface and moved to close at flank speed, managing to hit Triad with her 120mm deck gun as the vessel was submerging. RN LCDR George S. Salt, the skipper of Triad, went to the bottom with the vessel’s entire 52-man crew. Salt and Triad did not go down without a fight. Her own deck gun hit Toti‘s pressure hull and injured two Italian sailors, while a torpedo from the British boat reportedly came within just a few feet of her opponent.

Once Bandini and the crew of the Toti made it back to port, they were celebrated as heroes. After all, they had sunk a British submarine (and would be the only Italian boat to do so, although HM Submarine Force would scratch 17 Italian subs). However, there would be enduring confusion over just which RN ship they should be credited for. The Italian press was initially told it was HMS Perseus (N36), a British Parthian-class submarine which in fact would only be sunk by an Italian mine in the Ionian Sea on 6 December 1941.

A 22 October 1940 Domenica del Corriere cover depicting Toti’s deck crew splashing a British submarine in a night action, incorrectly identified as Perseus.

For decades, both the Italians and the British mistakenly thought Toti sank the submarine HMS Rainbow (N16), which had actually been lost off Albania at about the same time after she struck a submerged object.

It was only in 1988 that Triad, which had been listed as missing for 48 years, was positively tied to the Italian boat that sunk her. In a twist of fate, Triad‘s lost commander was the father of British RADM James Frederick Thomas George “Sam” Salt, who was captain of the destroyer HMS Sheffield during the Falklands when that ship was lost to an Argentine Exocet– the first sinking of a Royal Navy ship since WWII. The junior Salt was only six months old at the time of his father’s disappearance in the Med.

By 1941, the obsolete Balillas were removed from frontline service. Of the quartet, Millelire and Balilla were soon hulked and used as floating battery charging vessels. Sciesa was disarmed and hit by an air attack in Benghazi in 1942 while running resupply missions to the Afrika Korps then later scuttled in place as the Americans advanced on the city.

Toti, true to her past, remained more active than her sisters.

From March to June 1942 she carried out a reported 93 training missions at the Italian submarine school of Pula, which saw her very active.

Enrico Toti submarine at the submarine school in Pula

She was then was used for four short-run supply missions across the Med to Italian forces in North Africa, landing her torpedoes and instead carrying some 200 tons of medicine and high-value materials as well as transferring most of the diesel fuel in her bunkers ashore for use by panzers and trucks.

Enrico Toti returns to Pola June 42, note her newly supplied camo scheme applied to run supplies to Italy Via Lavrentio /WarshipP reddit

Submarine blockade runners in North Africa: Enrico Toti (left) with the smaller Bandiera-class submarine Santorre Santarosa (in the center) and the Foca-class minelaying submarine Atropo (right) in Ras Hilal, Libya on 10-7-42. Of these, Santarosa would be grounded and scuttled in place 20th January 1943 while Atropo would be used to supply isolated British forces in the Dodecanese after the 1943 armistice and scrapped after the war. Via Lavrentio/WarshipP reddit

By April 1943, Toti was hulked and used to charge batteries, a role she continued through the end of the war.

The Italians lost over 90 subs during the war, almost one per week, with little bought with their loss. This figure is made even more considerable once you figure the Italians were only an active Axis ally from June 1940 to Sept 1943. By 1945, the country could only count about a dozen semi-submersible vessels and most of those had been laid up/disarmed for months.

On 18 October 1946, Toti was retired for good, along with the last of the Italian submarines. You see, the Regia Marina was dissolved with the end of the monarchy and the Treaty of Paris in 1947 banned Italy from operating submarines. With that, Toti and the last few Italian boats were scrapped or given away to victorious Allies as war reparations.

Jane’s 1946-47 edition does not list Italy with a single submarine of any kind.

Italy, with her navy rebranded as the Marina Militare, was only allowed out of the Treaty restrictions after the country joined NATO in 1949, effectively refraining from submarine operations until 1954 when the Gato-class submarines USS Barb (SS-220) and USS Dace (SS-247) were transferred to Italian service, where they became Enrico Tazzoli and Leonardo da Vinci, respectively. Through the 1970s, the Italians went on to acquire nine former WWII U.S. fleet boats.

The first of a new class of domestically made Italian submarine since WWII was laid down in 1965 by Fincantieri and commissioned in 1968 with the name of one of Italy’s most succesful boats, Enrico Toti (S 506). She went on on to provide nearly 25 years of service to the Italian Navy, much of it during the Cold War spent keeping tabs of the Soviet Mediterranean Fleet

This newer Toti has been preserved at the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan since 2005.

The latter Toti, via the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan

Today, the Italian Navy fields eight very modern SSKs of the Todaro and Sauro-classes, with two more of the former on order.

Italian submarine Salvatore Todaro (S 526) passing the Castello Aragonese di Taranto by Alberto Angela

Specs:
Displacement: 1464 tons (1927 submerged)
Length: 284 ft.
Beam: 26 ft.
Draft: 15 feet.
Operating depth 100 m
Propulsion:
2 4,000 hp Fiat diesel engines, twin shafts
2 Savigliano electric motors, 240 cell battery
Submerged speed, max: 9 knots
Surfaced speed, max: 17 knots
Range: 3,000 miles at 17 knots or 13,000 nm at 7 knots; 8 miles at 9 knots underwater
Crew: 5 officers, 47 enlisted. Given as 77 in wartime.
Armament:
(1928)
1 120mm/27cal Mod. 1924 gun (150 shells)
2 single Hotchkiss 13.2 mm machine guns
6 torpedo tubes (4 front, 2 rear) of 533 mm, 16 torpedoes
4 mines in dedicated tube
(1934)
1 120mm/45cal Mod. 1931 gun (150 shells)
2 twin Breda M1931 13.2mm machine guns on disappearing mounts (3000 rounds per machine gunner)
6 torpedo tubes (4 front, 2 rear) of 533 mm, 16 torpedoes
4 mines in dedicated tube

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Warship Wednesday, May 15, 2019: Lady Sara Never Looked Better

Posted on May 15, 2019 by laststandonzombieisland One comment

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

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Warship Wednesday, May 8, 2019: Vladivostok’s Red Pennant

Posted on May 8, 2019 by laststandonzombieisland 2 comments

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

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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Warship Wednesday, May 1, 2019: Indy Radio (on May Day)

Posted on May 1, 2019 by laststandonzombieisland One comment

Warship Wednesday, May 1, 2019: Indy Radio (on May Day)

(All photos: Chris Eger)

Here we see an immense– and operational— vacuum tube of a General Electric Model TAJ-19 radio complete with its original 1942 U.S. Navy Bu Ships data plates. The location? The entry level of the Indiana War Memorial, home to the USS Indy Radio Exhibit which is dedicated not only to the famous heavy cruiser of the same name but also to all WWII U.S. Navy radiomen and radio techs.

The radio room exhibit, which I stumbled on last Sunday while in town for the NRA Annual Meetings while on the job with Guns.com, was manned by four big-hearted gentlemen who lovingly cared for the very well maintained cabinets. Their ham call sign is WW2IND for you guys looking for QSL cards.

The TAJ-19 is a 500-watt CW and 250-watt MCW transmitter that operated from 175kc up to 600kc and was used on just about everything the Navy had in WWII that was bigger than a destroyer escort. This one is still operational…

Over 32 volunteers worked since 2008 to establish the radio room, sourcing some 174 items from across the country to include surplus equipment from the period battleships USS Iowa and USS Alabama.

Bravo Zulu, gentlemen!

As for the War Memorial itself, they have an amazing collection which I will get to more in future posts including extensive space dedicated to the USS Vincennes, to both modern USS Indiana‘s (Battleships No. 1 and 58), as well as the above-mentioned cruiser, and the more modern attack sub that shares her same name.

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

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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Warship Wednesday, April 24, 2019: The Tiger with 17 Battle Stars to Prove It

Posted on April 24, 2019 by laststandonzombieisland One comment

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, April 24, 2019: The Tiger with 17 Battle Stars to Prove It

Official U.S. Navy Photographs, from the collections of the Naval History and Heritage Command, NH 97488-KN and NH 92237

Here we see the Essex-class fleet carrier USS Ticonderoga (CV-14) off Hampton Roads, Virginia, 26 June 1944 and two rebuilds later, as CVS-14 with her rails manned, circa 1970, following conversion to an anti-submarine warfare support aircraft carrier. What a difference 26 years makes!

To put into perspective the degree of change this was, look at these two shots of aircraft operating from her decks during her career. These blend Grumman F6F-5N Hellcat night fighters preparing to take off for strikes against targets in Manila Bay during the 5-6 November 1944 attacks (80-G-305244) and an A-4 Skyhawk landing on board, after a simulated strike on enemy forces during an operational readiness inspection, 18 January 1963 with an A-3B Sky Warrior and F-3 Demon are parked on the carrier’s after flight deck.

Ticonderoga was one of 24 Essex-class fleet carriers started during World War II that was completed. Another eight sister-ships never were. We have covered the Essex class before, with the Mighty Oriskany and the “Happy Valley” aka USS Valley Forge, but hey, these were some great ships and the Ticonderoga has one hell of a story.

Like many of the class, Ticonderoga owes her name to a Revolutionary War action, namely, the seizing of Fort Ticonderoga from the British on 10 May 1775, by Ethan Allen and his “Green Mountain Boys” who held it for two years.

Three previous ships before our carrier shared the moniker:

Catalog #: NH 42415 NH 45373 NH 2258

During the War of 1812, Lt. Stephen Cassin’s 17-gun schooner Ticonderoga was in the battle line at the Naval Battle of Plattsburgh where the ship “played an important role in the victory. Her guns engaged nearly every British vessel on the line and raked the British flagship at a critical juncture in the battle,” according to NHHC. Cassin was awarded a gold medal for bravery by Congress and went on to become a Commodore with two later destroyers (DD-43 & DD-372) named after him.

Commissioned during the Civil War, the 2,500-ton Lackawanna-class screw sloop-of-war USS Ticonderoga went on to wave the flag in virtually all the world’s oceans and seas, only being sold for scrap in 1887.

In April 1917, the U.S. government seized the interned German flag merchant steamer Kamilla Rickmers and renamed her Ticonderoga (ID # 1958) in January 1918. Sadly, she was sunk after an epic two-hour gun battle, with the loss of 213 lives, by the German submarine U-152 on 30 September 1918, one of the most significant blows to the U.S. Navy in the Great War. Just 22 survivors spent four days in one lifeboat until a passing ship rescued them. Her skipper, LCDR James J. Madison, USNRF, received the Medal of Honor and the USS Madison (DD-425) was later named after him.

Laid down originally as Hancock on 1 February 1943 at Newport News, Va., by the Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. our subject was renamed Ticonderoga before she was even launched and commissioned at the Norfolk Navy Yard on 8 May 1944, CPT. Dixie Kiefer (USNA 1918) in command.

Kiefer was a carrier man through-and-through having made the first ever night take-off from a warship in 1924 and gone on to become the carrier Yorktown (CV-5)‘s XO, picking up the DSO at the Coral Sea and a Navy Cross at Midway. When Yorktown was during that battle, Kiefer shattered his right leg while escaping the doomed ship. He was a fighter and would go on to command a fighting ship.

USS Ticonderoga (CV-14) being pushed by tugboats at Naval Air Station Hampton Roads, Virginia (USA) on 30 May 1944, shortly after delivery to the Navy by Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company. She is wearing camouflage Measure 33, Design 10A. Note the cut-out space on the port side of the flight deck forward of the elevator where a third Mk 37 gun director should have been placed. It was omitted from the design as its antenna protruded above the level of the flight deck. U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation photo No. 1996.488.039.014

USS TICONDEROGA (CV-14) In Hampton Roads, Virginia, 26 June 1944. NH 92239

Same view day, different view, NH 92238

She soon sailed for the Pacific, an ocean she would call home for 30 years and two lengthy, bitter wars during which her crew invariably labeled the ship Tyco or Tico and themselves Tigers. As such, she arrived at Ulithi Atoll in the Western Carolines on the 29 October and embarked RADM A. W. Radford, Commander, Carrier Division 6, joining TF-38, and was part of the famed “Murderers Row ” photo.

“Murderers’ Row” Third Fleet aircraft carriers at anchor in Ulithi Atoll, 8 December 1944, during a break from operations in the Philippines area. The carriers are (from front to back): USS Wasp (CV-18), USS Yorktown (CV-10), USS Hornet (CV-12), USS Hancock (CV-19) and USS Ticonderoga (CV-14). Wasp, Yorktown, and Ticonderoga are all painted in camouflage Measure 33, Design 10a. Photographed from a USS Ticonderoga plane. 80-G-294131

USS TICONDEROGA (CV-14) at Ulithi Fleet Anchorage, 8 December 1944, while part of “Murderer’s Row” 80-G-K-2589

She was soon pounding the Philippines, providing extended air cover for the ground forces capturing Leyte. DANFS notes that “Her planes bombed and strafed the airfields at Zablan, Mandaluyong, and Pasig. They also joined those of other carriers in sending the heavy cruiser Nachi to a watery resting place. In addition, Ticonderoga pilots claimed six Japanese aircraft shot down and one destroyed on the ground, as well as 23 others, damaged.”

US aerial attack on Manila Bay, Philippines, by planes from USS Ticonderoga (CV 14), 13 November 1944 80-G-272702

80-G-272703

Of course, being so close enough to strike Japanese targets meant that Japanese targets could also strike back at Tico.

During air action off Luzon, the Philippines, Japanese Zero fighter in a suicide crash dive registers a near miss on USS Ticonderoga (CV 14) November 5, 1944 80-G-289986

She would soon come to raid Japanese ships and bases in occupied French Indochina (Vietnam), a region she would later come to know very well. “There, on the 12th [of January], they launched their approximately 850 planes and made a series of anti-shipping sweeps during which they sank a whopping 44 ships, totaling over 130,000 tons.”

Saigon River Front, French Indochina, Caption: Ships and installations afire after aerial attack by carrier-based planes of US Pacific fleet, 12 January 1945. Taken by plane from USS TICONDEROGA (CV-14) #: 80-G-301944

Less than two weeks later, while attacking Japanese positions on Formosa, our carrier ran out of luck.

On 21 January 1945, Ticonderoga was hit by not one but two back-to-back Japanese kamikazes, suffering 144 killed and at least another 200 injured. The first plane crashed through the ship’s flight deck abreast of the No. 2 5-inch mount, and its bomb exploded just above her hangar deck. Kiefer responded by ordering flooding to put a 10-degree list on the ship, causing the flaming wreckage to slip overboard.

USS Ticonderoga (CV 14) afire after a bomb hit by Japanese suicide plane at Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands. As seen from USS Vincennes (CL 14), 21 January 1945. 80-G-343576

The second kamikaze smashed into carrier’s starboard side near the island, setting more planes on fire as the carrier was still recovering from the first. The resulting explosion injured Kiefer, with 65 wounds from bomb shrapnel and a broken arm, but the Captain who stuck it through until Yorktown went down remained on the bridge for another 11 hours. He would later receive the Distinguished Service Cross from Navy Secretary Forrestal who called him the “Indestructible Man.”

USS Ticonderoga (CV 14). Shown Damage to island structure from Japanese kamikaze dive from the night of 20-21 January 1945 80-G-264996

USS Ticonderoga (CV 14). Shown: Damage to the flight deck from Japanese kamikaze dive from the night of 20-21 January 1945. Photographed by PHOM Peters and PHOM Quillinan, January 22, 1945. 80-G-264995

Bomb hole in flight deck from dropped by a Kamikaze plane that hit the ship’s forward elevator, off Formosa, 21 January 1945. Crewmen in the background are cleaning up debris from the hit. 80-G-273223

Wrecked plane on the hangar deck, after fires where the first Kamikaze hit received off Formosa, 21 January 1945. 80-G-273213

USS Ticonderoga (CV 14). Damage to hangar deck from Japanese kamikaze dive from the night of 20-21 January 1945 80-G-264994

Bomb penetration in the gallery deck, looking up and aft from the hanger deck. The bomb dropped by the first of two Kamikaze planes which hit the ship off Formosa, 21 January 1945, passed through the flight deck to enter the gallery deck here. 80-G-273226

Still, Tico was soon underway under her own power with all fires out.

Ticonderoga Underway with “all fires out”, after being hit twice by Kamikazes of Formosa, 21 January 1945. Note: fire damage to her island. Photographed from USS ESSEX (CV-9) #: 80-G-373726

She headed back to the West Coast under her own steam, arriving at Puget Sound Navy Yard on 15 February. She would remain there for repairs, only heading back to Ulithi in May. There, she rejoined TF-38 and by June Ticonderoga‘s fighters were strafing airfields on Kyushu.

In July, “her planes joined those of other fast carriers in striking ships in the Inland Sea and airfields at Nagoya, Osaka, and Miko. During those raids, TF 38 planes found the sad remnants of the once-mighty Japanese Fleet and bagged battleships Ise, Hyuga, and Haruna as well as an escort carrier, Kaiyo, and two heavy cruisers. On 28 July, her aircraft directed their efforts toward the Kure Naval Base, where they pounded an aircraft carrier, three cruisers, a destroyer, and a submarine.”

Early August saw raids on Tokyo and she entered the Bay there at peace on 6 September. After a series of Magic Carpet missions taking returning GIs home to the states, she was placed out of commission on 9 January 1947 and berthed with the Bremerton Group of the Pacific Reserve Fleet.

USS Ticonderoga (CV-14) San Francisco Bay, California, following the end of World War II, circa late 1945 or early 1946. A blimp is in the background. Courtesy of Donald M. McPherson, 1973 NH 77366

The war was the end of Dixie Kiefer. The hard-to-kill carrier man died at age 49 on 11 November 1945 in the crash of a transport plane on Mount Beacon, New York. He is buried at Arlington.

After a period in mothballs, Tico was returned to service during the Korean War and sent for an SCB-27C conversion to better suit the new jet planes that filled the Navy’s hangars, installing catapults and better aircraft handling systems. On 11 September 1954, Ticonderoga recommissioned but was soon further converted to SCB-125 format– one of just 14 such Essex-class carriers given the angled deck/hurricane bow improvements. This earned her a new designation, as an attack carrier (CVA 14).

By late 1957, she was on her first West Pac deployment since 1945. She would make six more by 1964.

80-G-1010802 USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14), full stern view, March 1957.

USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) moored at a pier, probably at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. On deck are various aircraft of Carrier Air Group 5 (CVG-5) which had been assigned to the Ticonderoga for a deployment to the Western Pacific from 10 May 1961 to 15 January 1962. U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation photo No. 1996.488.039.045

In the first U.S. naval action off Vietnam, the Tonkin Gulf Incident, Tico was there. On 2 August 1964, she sent rocket-armed F-8E Crusaders to respond to urgent calls from the destroyer Maddox (DD-731), who had reported being attacked by North Vietnamese Navy PT boats, leaving one boat dead in the water and damaging the other two. A few days later her planes reportedly destroyed another 25 boats at dock in a retaliatory strike.

When she would return to Vietnam in 1965, it would be as a full-time warfighter, delivering some 10,000 combat sorties from her position on Dixie and Yankee Stations, losing 16 planes to enemy fire and accident.

Just days after the first major U.S. engagement in Vietnam, at the of Ia Drang Valley, near Christmas 1965, Bob Hope and his cast of supporting acts landed on Tico and entertained her 2,000-man crew, famously hitting golf balls off her deck.

Entertainer Bob Hope tees-off on the flight deck aboard the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) during his visit to the carrier off the coast of Vietnam on 26 December 1965. USN Photo 030728-N-0000X-001

Bob Hope during the 1965 Christmas show aboard the USS Ticonderoga back when the Navy was hairier. GARY COOPER STARS AND STRIPES

As reported by Stars and Stripes “Some of the men, exhausted from launching strike after strike recently, were almost too tired to watch the show. One rolled over and mumbled to a buddy, ‘wake me when the broads come on.’

The 2-hour long Christmas Special was broadcast at home on NBC for the country to get a soda straw window into Vietnam through the carefully controlled lens.

USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) Refueling from USS Ashtabula (AO-51), while operating off the coast of Vietnam, circa early 1966. Although seas were running very high, the ships completed replenishment and Ticonderoga received 175,000 gallons of black oil. The original print was received by the All Hands magazine Editorial Department on 14 February 1966. NH 97487

Back to Yankee Station in 1966-67, her airwing would run another 11,650 combat sorties, earning a Navy Unit Commendation, her second. Her 1968 deployment saw 13,000 sorties. By early 1969, Tico was on her fifth consecutive combat deployment (third Navy Unit Commendation) to Southeast Asia.

Caption: At sea, the Attack Carrier USS TICONDEROGA (CVA-14) is underway in November 1968. Note her A-3, A-4, and F-8 airwing. USN 1129290

A U.S. Navy Vought F-8H Crusader from Fighter Squadron 111 (VF-111) Sundowners on the forward elevator of the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14), 1969.

In 1970, she would be given a reprieve from operating A-4s, F-8s and the like off Vietnam and Ticonderoga was re-designated (CVS-14), tasked with ASW combat for which she carried SH-3 sub-hunting helicopters and S-2 Tracker patrol planes. Her next two West Pac cruises were spent in exercises with allied nations and in the quieter past-time that was keeping tabs on Soviet subs.

USS Ticonderoga (CVS-14) lit up for Christmas at Naval Air Station North Island, California in December 1971. U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation photo No. 1996.488.039.067

USS Ticonderoga (CVS-14) underway off San Diego, California, after departing Naval Air Station, North Island, for her final Western Pacific deployment, 17 May 1972. USN 1152586

It was during this time she came to be loaned out to support NASA on three different, but noteworthy occasions.

In April 1972, HC-1 Sea Kings from USS Ticonderoga (CVS-14) recovered Apollo 16, returning from an 11-day mission to the moon that brought back 213 lbs. of lunar material.

The Pacific Ocean. A view of the recovery carrier for the Apollo 16, USS Ticonderoga (CVS 14) with Apollo 16 spelled out on the flight deck. Photographed by PH1 Carl R. Begy on April 29, 1972. 428-GX-USN 1152791

The mission was repeated in December 1972 with Apollo 17. Then, HC-1 was used about 200 miles east of Pago Pago in the South Pacific to recover the last manned mission to the moon (a footnote that still stands).

A U.S. Navy Sikorsky SH-3G Sea King (BuNo 149930) of Helicopter Combat Support Squadron 1 (HC-1) “Pacific Fleet Angels” recovers an Apollo 17 astronaut on 19 December 1972, with the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga (CVS-14) in the background. NASA Photo ap17-S72-55974.

A water-level view of the Apollo 17 Command Module (CM) floating in the Pacific Ocean following splashdown and prior to recovery. The prime recovery ship, the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga (CVS-14), is in the background. When this picture was taken, the three-man crew of astronauts Eugene A. Cernan, Ronald E. Evans and Harrison H. Schmitt, had already been picked up by helicopter and flown to the deck of the recovery ship. The spacecraft was later hoisted aboard the USS Ticonderoga. A United States Navy UDT swimmer stands on the flotation collar. Apollo 17 splashdown occurred at 13:24:59 (CST), 19 December 1972, about 350 nautical miles southeast of Samoa. NASA photo: S72-56147

Another key facet of Apollo 17 was the space vessel’s Command Module Pilot, CAPT. Ronald E. Evans, USN, established a record of more time in lunar orbit than anyone else in the world, a record that stands to this day. As a happy coincidence, Evans was flying Vietnam combat operations with VF-51 in F-8 Crusaders aboard Ticonderoga when he heard of his selection to NASA in 1966.

Evans, as a Tiger. He died in 1990.

In June 1973, Tico was tapped again to support NASA and picked up the three-man all-Navy crew (CAPT Charles Conrad Jr., CDR Joseph P. Kerwin, and CDR Paul J. Weitz, USN) of Skylab 2, the first U.S. manned orbiting space station after they had completed 404 orbits.

22 June 1973 The Skylab 2 Command Module, with astronauts Charles Conrad Jr., Joseph P. Kerwin and Paul J. Weitz still inside, floats in the Pacific Ocean following successful splashdown about 835 miles southwest of San Diego, California. The prime recovery ship, USS Ticonderoga, approaches from the left background. A recovery helicopter hovers in the foreground. The three Skylab 2 crewmen had just completed a 28-day stay with the Skylab 1 space station in Earth orbit conducting numerous medical, scientific and technological experiments. NASA Photo S73-29147

On 1 September 1973, the old carrier, which had picked up 17 battle stars (5 WWII, 12 Vietnam) was found to be unfit for further naval service. Her name was struck from the Navy List on 16 November 1973 and she was sold for scrap the next year to Zidell Explorations Corp. for a bid of $601,999.99 (she had originally cost Uncle $78 million in 1944 dollars to build).

USS TICONDEROGA (CVA-14) Being scrapped at Tacoma, Washington, 1975. NH 89301

Her bell is preserved aboard Naval Station North Island.

USS Ticonderoga Veterans’ Association

As for her sisters, only four (of 24) remained with the fleet longer than Tico did– Intrepid (decommissioned 1974), Hancock (1976), Oriskany (1976) and Lexington (1990). Today, four Essex-class carriers are semi-preserved (Intrepid, Lexington, Yorktown, and Hornet) as floating museums.

Tico is remembered in several works of maritime art in the public collection.

USS TICONDEROGA (CVS-14) Port side view showing the launching of S-2 and SH-3 units of HELISUPRON-1. NH 78896-KN

USS Ticonderoga at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. “After nearly thirty years of service to the Navy starting in World War II, one of USS Ticonderoga’s last missions was the recovery of the astronauts of Apollo 17. The artwork shows the ship waiting at Pearl Harbor for orders to go on station near American Samoa.” Painting, Watercolor on Paper; by Paul D. Ortlip; 1972; Framed Dimensions 25H X 31W Accession #: 88-162-OZ

“Back from the Moon, The press conference given by the astronauts” Painting, Oil on Canvas; by Paul D. Ortlip; 1972; Framed Dimensions 57H X 76W Accession #: 88-162-OR Apollo 17 was the sixth and final manned mission to the moon. Captain Eugene Cernan, USN, Captain Ronald Evans, USN, and Harrison Schmidt are greeted by dignitaries, the press and crew of USS TICONDEROGA upon their return.

After Tico‘s removal from the fleet, a new class of guided missile cruisers was commissioned, beginning with the lead ship (CG-47) named Ticonderoga.

USS Ticonderoga (CG-47) Transiting the Suez Canal en route to the Mediterranean Sea, following a deployment in support of Operation Desert Shield, 22 August 1990. Photographer: PH3 Frank A. Marquart. NH 106516-KN

Both the carrier and cruiser’s flames are kept alive by the well-organized USS Ticonderoga Veterans’ Association who are actively requesting a new warship be named after their vessels.

And of course, all the former Ticos are remembered and celebrated at the New York town of the same name and by the Fort Ticonderoga Museum, where a display of artifacts to the ships exists.

Of the men Tico brought back home from space, Navy CAPT. Eugene Andrew Cernan, the last man to walk on the lunar surface, died in 2017, aged 82. The former Skylab 2 crew, Kerwin- Conrad-Weitz, have all since joined their friends on the wall. This leaves just Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, and Charles “Charlie” Duke, both 83, of Apollo 16 and 17, respectively, still on this side of the wall.

Specs:

USS Ticonderoga (CV-14) At sea off the Philippines, just prior to her first strike against the Japanese, 5 November 1944. The ship is painted in camouflage Measure 33, Design 10a. NH 92243

Displacement: As built:
27,100 tons standard
Length: As built:
888 feet (271 m) overall
Beam: As built:
93 feet (28 m) waterline
Draft: As built:
28 feet 7 inches (8.71 m) light
Propulsion: As designed:
8 × boilers
4 × Westinghouse geared steam turbines
4 × shafts
150,000 shp (110 MW)
Speed: 33 knots (61 km/h)
Complement: 3448 officers and enlisted
Armament: As built:
4 × twin 5 inch (127 mm)/38 caliber guns
4 × single 5 inch (127 mm)/38 caliber guns
8 × quadruple Bofors 40 mm guns
46 × single Oerlikon 20 mm cannons
Armor: As built:
4-inch (100 mm) belt
2.5-inch (60 mm) hangar deck
1.5-inch (40 mm) protective decks
1.5-inch (40 mm) conning tower
Aircraft carried: As built:
90–100 aircraft

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Vindictive Lamp, 101 years ago today

Posted on April 23, 2019 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

We have covered the HMS Vindictive, a British Arrogant-class cruiser, in a past Warship Wednesday (Big Vincent and the Seagoing Pyro Party). Some 101-years ago, the obsolete vessel gave her all as the centerpiece of the Zeebrugge Raid on 23rd April 1918 in an attempt to block the Belgian port of Bruges-Zeebrugge. She was in the eye of a lead-filled hurricane as the Germans strongly objected to the move.

Via the Royal Marines Museum:

We have a brass lamp, which was taken from the bridge of HMS Vindictive following the Raid on Zeebrugge, up for adoption as part of our campaign to raise money for the museum.

The Zeebrugge Raid is one of the most significant Royal Marines commemorations every year.

This lamp was presented to Corporal G Moyse, in 1958 in respect of his work on Hon Sec of the Zeebrugge Association by Vice Admiral Carpenter, who was Captain of Vindictive during the raid.
Get involved and read more here > http://bit.ly/BrassLamp

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laststandonzombieisland

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

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