The Drydock - Episode 338 (Part 1)

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:33 - Earlier Long range bombers for Coastal Command?

00:04:41 - Historical figures that make you ask "WHY?!"

00:11:17 - Was there a major difference in life expectancy based on where you were station on a ship in the WW1/WW2 era?

00:15:29 - What were the strategic and tactical advantages the Age of Sail Royal Navy due to the large scale copper production in South Wales, which allowed them to put cladding on warship hulls?

00:19:38 - During the Dunkirk evacuations did the Royal Navy or French navy provide offshore fire support to the French and British army and if not why not?

00:23:16 - What was the main bottleneck causing the shortage of Steel in the US in the 1940s?

00:28:15 - Effective combat range of the 20" Rodman gun?

00:30:41 - Maximising the potential of Kentucky and Illinois?

00:35:22 - Admirals who would've done much better in other postings?

00:37:59 - Can you briefly go over the required uniforms and kit for Lieutenants and Midshipmen, roughly comparing the junior officer outfitting costs to equivalent ranks in the British Army during Nelson's time?

00:42:27 - The Peter Principle in the Navy?

00:45:06 - What was the 'Pursers Pound'?

00:50:07 - Legendary naval dressing downs?

00:53:00 - USN 1912 Battlecruiser?

00:58:45 - In the vein of HMS New Zealand at Jutland, can you think of any other instances of seemingly successfully invoking divine/supernatural protection?

01:01:47 - H T Lenton's book series?

01:04:42 - Operation Sealion from a stronger position?

01:09:17 - What were the Americanized potential Nelson refits mentioned in drydock 330 and what made them particularly American in character?

01:11:50 - Rudder positions?

01:14:41 - Independence class list control?

01:16:58 - The Anglo-Portugese Alliance and WW2?

01:18:28 - Dec 2024 issue of Warship International - USS Yorktown speed at Midway

01:24:31 - What if the Axis devloped Torpex?

01:29:36 - Air attacks to support an ongoing battle engagement?

01:34:29 - Officer casualties in the Royal Navy in the Age of Sail?#

01:37:39 - How, if at all, were design speeds for sailing warships calculated, and what sort of power could a full spread of sail be expected to generate?

01:43:00 - Did ships of any size in WWII “pick up their brass” for any caliber of spent ammunition?

01:44:15 - Packing cargo on merchant ships?

01:47:40 - In the time period that the channel covers were submarines used for espionage in peace time?

01:49:16 - Supply route for 40mm and 20mm ammo?

01:51:40 - Did the USN come up with any new designs during the main ironclad period?

01:53:26 - AWACS Zeppelin?

01:55:05 - How many fast battleships should you ideally send to deal with Yamato?

01:58:28 - 'Revolt of the Admirals' circumstances in previous eras?

02:01:52 - What would change in WWII for the Royal Navy had the FAA and Coastal Command been given to them in 1929?

02:04:42 - Germany used commerce raiders (military ships and converted liners/merchant ships) in WW1 and WW2. Did other countries use them as well?

02:07:44 - Redundancy in funnels?

02:10:37 - Super-Heavy vs 'Regular' Weight shells?

02:14:26 - If some generous industrialist donated the SS Great Eastern to the Royal Navy, how would you, as the head of the Royal Navy at the time, militarise the vessel (assuming money for military refit was not an issue)?

02:18:12 - How to replace damaged armour on a capital ship?

02:22:31 - Amphibious Assault Submarines?

02:27:51 - Differences in types of cruiser?

02:31:58 - Lighting on iron ships before electricity?

02:34:19 - Allied Sailors listening to Axis radio stations?

02:37:40 - What was the first ship designed from the outset for trans Atlantic voyages to the new world and what new design changes were present?

02:42:15 - What is your favourite gimmick/quirk/clever mechanic that you've seen in naval wargames and computer games?

02:47:36 - Saving ships from the 1900's?

02:49:14 - If you could preserve any French Pre-Dreadnough, starting with Hoche and ending with Suffern, as a museum ship, which would you chose and why?

02:50:34 - How many Des Moines-class cruisers would it take to be a fair match against each of the last generation battleships from the major WWII navies?

02:56:47 - How much did the use of rams during the American Civil War influence other navies regarding ramming during the ironclad age?

[gwtpictgwtpict]

On the legendary naval dressing down question, thirty plus years ago I was doing a guided tour of HMS Victory. The bloke leading the tour was ex Royal Navy. For those who don't know, on HMS Victory's quarterdeck there is a a highly polished brass plaque mounted on a piece of wood attached to the deck. The plaque simply reads "Here Nelson fell" along with the date of the Battle of Trafalgar.

Having confirmed that there were no French in the tour group the ex RN bloke related the following story. A few years before a fellow tour guide, again ex RN, was leading a tour and getting to the plaque was explaining what it was when a French exchange student on the tour decided to jump onto the plaque, thrust a fist into the air and shout "Vive la France!". The tour guide, a burly ex CPO punched him in the face knocking him to the deck. Much hilarity ensued, apparently you're not supposed to punch the tourists.

Ex CPO finds himself up in front of the commander RN dockyard Portsmouth. As Drach said, details of this sort of thing are generally not recorded but the gist of it was the ex CPO was given a thorough bollocking, being an ex CPO he just stood there and took it. Bollocking delivered the commander RN dockyard Portsmouth stood up and shook the tour guides hand while mumbling about the finest traditions of the Royal Navy. As the story goes the tour guide didn't have to pay for a pint in the pubs around Portsmouth dockyard for several years.

I have no idea how true this story is, the RN have a long reputation of spinning yarns, but I think I can believe it :)

[actiniumanarchy]

I’ll always be amazed how you turn out 5 hour videos a week. That has to be so exhaustive. Thank you for everything Drach

[johnlowe]

Back when I was studying metallurgy in college in the 1980's, one of my professors would occasionally reference the "National Emergency" steel grades that were developed as work-arounds for some alloying elements that were in short supply during WWII.

In the 1990's, I worked at a company in the Los Angeles area that produced steel tube (welded, welded and cold drawn, and cold drawn seamless). Our plant had been built during WWII; 18 months from bare ground to first shipment. There was one overhead bridge crane that dated to around the turn of the 20th century; it had been pulled from a scrap pile and refurbished because new ones were in short supply. Most of the industrial properties in that area had similar histories; built to support the war effort.

[bluelemming]

A major difficulty for any variant on Sea Lion would be unloading supplies. The Allies had specialized ships to do unloading over the beach - for example, the LCT, which had a ramp in the front and could use it's anchors to pull it off the shore. Without such ships, unloading over the beach is really hard, tends to be manpower intensive (especially if you don't have the right equipment) and takes a lot of time. Using a port is much simpler. The same, incidentally, applies in reverse, which is why far more of the troops at Dunkirk were lifted from the pier than from the beaches.

Given what the Germans were able to do to deny ports to the Allies, it's pretty unlikely they in turn would be able to first get such a port from the British, then keep it in working order despite all British efforts to close it. The British had some good examples of how to close ports from their efforts in WW1, and doing that to their own ports would be easier since they would know exactly what the channels for entry into the port looked like.

The Allies also had lots of construction equipment that they could deploy to help move goods over and off the beach. For example, they could build docks or earth/rock berms out to the LCTs to help them unload equipment faster - I seem to recall a picture showing that for at least one invasion beach (Dragoon?). The Germans didn't tend to deploy anywhere near the same amount of such equipment - and probably wouldn't have anticipated how useful it was due to lack of relevant experience, which means critical space would go instead to combat troops making the supply situation worse.

In short, the Allies made a lot of mistakes in the early war with supply issues, but by 1944 they had learned from many of those mistakes - the Germans never had the chance to get comparable experience, with their last amphibious assault being a fairly small one in 1918.

It's worth noting that in cases where the Allies were able to get ports up and running quickly - such as Toulon and Marseilles after the invasion of Southern France - they had the benefit of lots of experience in clearing wreckage quickly, plus help from the Maquis in preventing some of the demolition effort that otherwise would have occurred. Also, by that point the Luftwaffe was no longer a factor so they couldn't try to sink ships in the shallow water channels leading into these ports by air attack to block those channels and hence block the port, which wouldn't be the case for Sea Lion.

[veryoldnavy]

Regarding the question on the ship's carpenters and lighting aboard vessels. Roger all that Drach "illuminated" upon. As a historical reenactor, and as such, I am sure Drach would agree, it is amazing how much a human eye can see by candle or lantern light once a person has had time to adjust to the low light level.
Additionally, experience aboard ships at sea taught me that once the eyes have become accustomed to the low light at night, going about the weather decks by star light is not a particular hazard.
We have all become spoiled by the magnificence of modern lighting.

[KennethCox-cj]

0:50 My week is complete. Drydock is my favorite documentary on maritime history

[GrahamWKidd]

Saturday night. End of the month. Double Drydock whammy. Wonderful!!!

[bryanstephens]

We had to put our dog to sleep this week. A long listen to Drach's soothing voice is a blessing this weekend.

[Rdeboer]

My favourite naval dressing down, while well short of legendary, is the crewman aboard HMS Rodney, who for a prank decided to ambush a fellow shipmate with a brace of pistols, demanding that he 'stick 'em up', only to find himself pointing the weapons at an unamused Admiral Cunningham!
As a reward the joker was tasked with cleaning every firearm in Rodney's armoury, since he clearly liked guns so much.

[Andy_Ross]

Access to copper ore wasn't the only factor in production.
Britain had the advantage of the 'Welsh Process' of copper refining developed in Swansea and reliant on the availability of large amounts of coal.


The Welsh method revolutionised copper and made it available in large quantities and high purity.
It was a major technological shift and transformed Swansea and Britain into the world's most dynamic center of copper smelting.


A good book on the subject is Swansea Copper: A Global History by Chris Evans and Louise Miskell

[briannicholas]

My great uncle, was a very young ensign whose first assignment was aboard USS Missouri as a gunners officer.
Although he didn't talk too much about the war, he did tell us that listening to the Tokyo Rose broadcasts were great entertainment for the sailors and younger officers, plus they played hit music, which was hard to get all the way across the pacific.

[ROBERT-pdr]

Admiral King supposedly asked Goodyear if they could build airships in WW2. The through was huge radar antennae could be mounted inside the envelope and an airship cruising at 10, 000 feet (radar is line of sight, so the higher, the longer range) which is just below when oxygen would be required, could cover a huge area of sea. presumably, it could pick up any interception attempts and run away with a long lead or just stay out of range. Unfortunately, Goodyear replied they had scrapped its zeppelin construction facilities after the USN shut down its program. Would the Navy like some nice license built Corsairs instead? The USN accepted, although most FG's went to the RN. Post WW2, the USN did commission some radar picket airships

"From the mid-1950s to 1961, blimps were used to provide gap filler radar coverage in the North Atlantic Ocean.

A version of the N-class blimp was fitted with AN/APS-20 radar with the antenna installed beneath the gondola. An AN/APS-69 height-finding radar antenna was mounted on top of the blimp. These had the designation ZPG-2.

A later version designated ZPG-3W had its larger (42-foot) radar antenna built inside the helium-filled envelope."

[ReturnoftheNative-wk]

Thank you Drach, & thank you to all the folks who labour to bring this to us.

[jonathaneverett]

One of the most notable "dressing downs" was that of Percy Scott by Charles Beresford in 1907. It was done by Beresford in front of the other Admirals of the Channel Fleet. He then signalled the fleet "Signal, timed x, made by Rear-Admiral First Cruiser Squadron, is contemptuous in tone and insurbordinate in manner, and is to be erased from all signal logs". One of my favourite auto-bios "Flotillas" by Lionel Dawson includes this as he was officer of the watch and witnessed it.

[NF]

Legendary naval dressing downs I'm sure Rozhestvensky would have some right up there in a Top Ten.

[kingleech]

MacArthur is a funny one. In my father’s day he was revered in big parts of the U.S. Army still, largely because of the Inchon landings and the perception of his victories in WWII. By my time, with improved scholarship, more time, and the end of the Cold War, he was pretty much roundly despised, to the point that the way he ran his staff and commands was used as examples of what NOT to do and a cautionary tale of hubris, ambition, and disloyalty. The main holdouts were those individuals who still worshipped Joe McCarthy and the John Birch society. Bradley is another commander whose star has fallen, though not as far.

[gagenater]

On the Tokyo Rose broadcasts - The pacific is a huge place, and in the era of world war II (and even today) there were VERY few radio broadcasts in most of it. The Tokyo Rose channel was often the only station available, and apparently their selection in music was highly popular.

[benwilson]

On cargo packing. Pallets did not appear until the 1960s.
On stealing cargo the culprits were the dockers/longshore men, a regular Ali Baba and the forty thieves all over the world.
Ships crew had no access to the cargo holds at sea, the hatches were closed and trunk ways battened down.
Crew did not access the holds except for exceptional circumstance, e.g. lashing cargo after a storm. If they crew stole cargo they would be sacked!

[rsail-dbzv]

I still have my “Navies of the Second World War” bought used from my city public library as a kid

[dgthe]

I remember annihilating destroyers and light cruisers in Navy Field using my Dido. Could carry descent armour, and I forget what guns I put on it, but a single salvo from 5 turrets of twin somethings would wreck many a ship.