Naval History Forums

It is very difficult to hit Bismarck's citadel at 3 km. There is a very small space in which to hit the belt without the shell entering the water. If the shell enters the water at that range it will tend to re-emerge and hit Bismarck's superstructure. As Bismarck settles this becomes even more of a ...

I'm sure there was a lot of testing done by the US or there wouldn't have been a Mark 8 shell, or the many mods to it which appeared as the war progressed. I believe Nathan Okun used a lot of test data as he developed his "facehard" formulas, but I don't know where he got it. He has mentio...

The bombing had a tremendous effect on German production simply by forcing it's dispersal, the building of underground facilities, the diversion of industry to producing defensive armament, personnel to man the flak, etc.

I'm curious ... the most recent article was called "Fast Battleship Gunnery during World War II: A Gunnery Revolution" and was divided into Part I and Part II.

Part I was in Warship International Vol. 42 Issue 2.
Part II was in Warship International Vol. 43 Issue 1.

NM.

I don't think the British cruisers at DS chose to stand off. The Germans were going very fast and were difficult to catch.

The loading clock for the Iowa class shows 29 seconds between salvos and includes approx 2.5 seconds for elevation of the gun and approx 2.5 seconds for return to loading position. Loading angle is +5 degrees and elevation rate is 12 degrees per second. I assumed firing cycles for major caliber guns...

I would suggest that one of the reasons the old 15-inch gunned ships fired faster than their more modern 14 and 16-in gunned successors was due in part to the ability to load at any angle of elevation up to 20*, whereas the 16s and 14s had fixed loading angles the guns had to be returned to after f...

Reliability was obviously an issue with PoW at DS, but what makes you think Hood's guns were faster firing than PoW's?

It wasn't that the aluminum burned... it melted. So did the superstructure of USS Belknap.

There was fuel in the missiles which hit Stark as well.

Yes, I believe if Holland had not made the final 20 deg turn, the Hood would have probably survived. Before the turn, Bismarck was 37 deg forward of the Hood's beam and there should have been no problem with the after turrets being in action (drawings show them as training up to 60 deg forward of t...

USS Stark, which I believe also used Aluminum in her construction and was hit by two Exocets, survived. I think luck plays a role, and that damage control competence varies a lot within the same navy. I have no doubt that the heavy use of Aluminum represented the belief that modern weapons were so d...

Leyte Gulf was certainly planned by the Japanese as a single coordinated operation. I suppose you could argue that Midway wasn't a single battle, and claim that each of several separate air attacks by the USN and the IJN were each a separate battle.

The inability of most women to move around heavy weights is another issue. you'd be surprised how many things like that there are on a submarine. Has the rest of the navy had problems with this? What about Canada, or any of the other countries that have already integrated the submarine fleet. Hell,...

It also demonstrates the danger of having large outboard voids and not ballasting partly full fuel tanks.