Naval History Forums

There may be evidence of an actual hit by Yamato on White Plains according to http://warships1discussionboards.yuku.c ... -Oldendorf. Yamato may also have hit Johnston at fairly long range according to the same post.

It took me some effort to find again the page where Google had found the dubious image. It was on a forum associated with a game called Pacific Storm (http://www.pacificstorm.net). The Wikipedia article on the game said “This game has been criticized by many gamers due to some historical inaccuracie...

Were there backing plates, presumably of ST 52, underneath the armoured decks of Bismarck and Tirpitz? Most discussions do not mention any but several such as http://www.kbismarck.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2908&hilit=backing+armor+armour+deck&start=15#p29652 explicitly only list armo...

Thank you John for your posting on USS Stingray. As reported, Stingray picked up four Japanese prisoners from a cruiser, which had been torpedoed by another submarine. The cruiser's name was Natori, which had been sunk by USS Hardhead. If you have any vouchers or book tokens left over after Christma...

What if there had been a battleship encounter at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944? This allows us to offer various alternative scenarios but I think that the American knowledge of the Japanese battleships was sufficiently limited that we can imagine a variety of Japanese forces approach...

The difficulty is trying to understand the problems of the dispersion of salvos from Vittorio Veneto and perhaps Littorio. There is a photograph of a salvo falling near HMAS Perth at Matapan at http://www.perthone.com/pmat.html which shows the dispersion. However, Littorio was much more effective at...

I am not sure if any Type 93 torpedoes were fired during the Second Battle of Guadalcanal except for those fired by Tanaka's two ships, Kagero and Oyashio, which only arived at the end of the battle. Washington evaded those by a perhaps fortunate change of course. The only destroyers with Kondo's fo...

Let me put it this way: In may 1941, what would you rather have if you were admiral Raeder: One 50000 ton battleship and one 20000 ton cruiser ready for action or 70 additional 1000 ton submarines ready for action? Note that this is twice the number of German uboats operational at that time. Battle...

Thank you for the FTP 218 reference. It gives a range of rates of fuel consumption at 27 knots of 11,988-15,200 gallons per hour. I took the figure of 272 gallons per ton for crude oil from Wikipedia and that conversion gives that the best consumption was 44.07 tons/hr., which is close to the websit...

I took the data about USS Washington from a web page at http://usswashington.com/fuel.htm which references it to "BATTLESHIP AT WAR" by Ivan Musicant which I have not read. The Yamato data is in the report on IJN boilers and also repeated in “IJN Yamato” by W. David Dickson (so I believe i...

There is a very critical description of Japanese WW2 boilers at http://www.fischer-tropsch.org/primary_documents/gvt_reports/USNAVY/USNTMJ%20Reports/USNTMJ-200H-0416-0521%20Report%20S-01-12.pdf. I am sure that the boilers were inferior to those of the USN. However, the inferiority is perhaps less dr...

Not only did the Luftwaffe know that Bismarck was heading for France but a Luftwaffe signal was decoded at Bletchley on May 25th also informing the British http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9wqkVBuiCgEC&pg=PA162&lpg=PA162&dq=bismarck+luftwaffe+enigma&source=bl&ots=o85Sanw-Da&...

My reply is rather late as I have only just seen this but it might be interesting to compare the Flamn design with the Dutch Dolfijn class http://www.dutchsubmarines.com/classes/ ... potvis.htm

I am going to suggest the Battle of Red Cliffs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Red_Cliffs as another possibility for the poll. This is just because it wins the prize for a battle on a river even if it cannot compare to such critical events as the Battle of Valcour Island.

The new build Fw 190s are powered by a derivative of the Shvetsov ASh-82 http://www.flugwerk.de/html/page.php?GID=19&SID=4. I very much doubt if a bigger engine such as a R-2800 would fit. I don't see why it shouldn't fit; the R2800 is only an inch or two larger in diameter. It made more power ...