Naval History Forums

In German fire control of WW2, course and speed were provided to the fire control system automatically by master gyro compass and pitot log. As long as the course changes by own ship did not exceed run time of the analog computers and training speeds of the directors, rangefinders, and mounts, conti...

Terje: I think the best term would be the preceived radar superiority . It seems at this point that Luetjens was possibly giving Suffolk's radar greater capability than it actually had. At this stage of the war the new set on Suffolk was only marginally superior to the sets on Bismarck in terms of a...

Hood's guns were adequately strong and in fact could have taken supercharges if need be. These heavier than the normal service charges and were supplied to such 15in gunned ships which had only 20* elevation and increased the muzzle velocity so as to allow them to shoot to over 30 000 yards. Hood's ...

There were times during the battle when Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were fairly close together due to manouvering and the shell fragments which came aboard were probably from a shell or shells which landed in between the two ships. Just such an occurance can be seen in the famous film clip of the actio...

I believe the radio message you have cited, had to do with intercepting Scharnhorst and Gneisenau during the final stage of Operation Berlin, as the date of the message is 18/3. On 7/3 Malaya had sighted the two battle cruisers off the coast of Africa. Luetjens' ships sank a steamer two days later f...

There were actually three manouvers at different times. The first was an aborted doubling back in order to detach Prinz Eugen; second was the successful detachment during which Bismarck briefly engaged Prince of Wales to distract the British; the third, some hours later, was the successful manouver ...

Would you care to quote the pertinent parts of the document for those of us who do not have a copy of it or a couple of weeks time to get a copy?

Hi Begile, Well I am not quite saying the US handicapped themselves. Perhaps to a slight degree with the 16-in 50s they did, but the lower velocity 16-in 45s of the two preceeding classes would definitely have benifited from the steeper trajectories, at least as far as deck penetration went. While o...

Dave and Karl have some interesting points and I agree. Discussions of range often overlook the ranges at which hits can be predictably achieved, and these are always much shorter than a gun's maximum range. Major factors determining maximum range of a gun (not to be confused with the maximum range ...

USS Texas of the 1890s was known as Old Hoodoo.

They instead in 1939 ordered the conversion of light merchant ships for the job, and this is where my postulation has arisen. The ships used for the most part were not suitable, too old, too slow, fuel inefficient etc. Might I ask where you got the information that the merchant ships chosen were to...

I tend to agree that there has been some unjust criticism based on hindsight regarding Luetjens' apparent lack of concern regarding fuel. One must remember that the layover in Bergen was not a planned stage of the operation. The operational orders were to head straight from the Baltic to the Arctic ...

Lutjens did in fact believe the sortie had been compromised by the encounter with the Gotland and he did not want to run the risk of being caught at sea on the run north towards the arctic by coastal command bombers in daylight. Had he thought otherwise he might have made straight for the Arctic wit...

Refueling in Norway was not in the orders, neither was the stop over. In the first instance Lutjens made use of the time to refuel PE which had the shortest range of the two ships. However, there was only one tanker available for that and after topping off Prinz Eugen it would have taken some time t...

RDF= radio direction finding. If one had two RDF stations they could plot the originating position of the sender by intersecting the lines.