Vic Dale wrote:I saw plates of that thickness in our engineers workshop and also in the Shipwright's Shop. If the plates are not big enough use two. Or take a door off and weld that in place. Take a torch and cut a plate out of an interior compartment. A structural Engineer was suggesting letting go the anchors - at what cost???
A worthy question, especially in light of Bismarck's flooding and the need to secure the bow against incursion of seawater. Reduced speed, as well (temporarily at minimum). There's a hunt on for your collective arses, your ship is damaged, and the primary task is to raise the bow. Trimming by stern is only a partial solution, and causes further reduction in speed, loss of gM, and increased waterplane area. You need to move quickly.
Which takes longer--shedding the anchors and cabling, or getting into a flooded compartment with divers and large pieces of steel, openings for which I am sure did not exist in the bulkhead(s)? Anchors were of NO benefit to anything
Bismarck needed at that time---they were useless at sea, and potential dead-weight at the time. All possible means of lightening the bow will have been considered. There can have been NO comparison with the Kriegsmarine war procedures and the Royal Navy of your day. The standards and procedures of even the RN were much different in WW2 than when you served.
Just to illustrate the range of spares a warship carries, our electrical stores carried a spare armature and field coils for every electric motor in the ship. We carried spare starters and breakers and electric cable by the mile. We carried cable tray, Wave Guide for the radar and a damage control cable for every possible run in the ship, each was itemised for it's location, length, amperage and the points between which it would run.
Racks and lockers full of pre-fab parts and spares for standardized, swappable components have NOTHING to do with repairing a metre-by-something-plus, irregular hull plating hole. Pure customization and a bit of jury-rig is needed. Those plates would have been hard work and very time-consuming to fabricate. Compromising the integrity of adjacent compartments by cutting bulkheads will have exposed dry areas to further flooding while the repair was being made.
My educated guess (having read something of this many years ago) is that some form of corrugated light steel was used, in conjunction with caulking and collision mats, secured by angle or C-channel stringers welded between frames. Heavy plates of comparable thickness to the original hull, particularly a flared hull and not a flat surface, manhandled by divers, while the ship was moving in a seaway---doesn't add up. Royal Navy or Kriegsmarine, damaged hulls were typically the job of YARDS and drydocking would almost certainly have been required, especially to the area on the side hit by
Victorious' aerial torpedo, causing flooding of a machinery space.
Now translate that to the engineer's and the ship wright's stores. They will have carried spares for each and every possible eventuality based upon many years of continual sea experience and war.
There is NO direct translation.
What "many years of continual sea experience and war" do you mean? The Kriegsmarine was a far more "scratch" organization than most world navies, even years after its birth in 1933. The Kriegsmarine fielded an even more inexperienced Navy than Britain when war came, particularly in its surface fleet. Germany's navy had not been to war for more than two decades, and Germany had no real surface navy to speak of until after The Third Reich had been established. Their great Z-plan was utterly deflated when Hitler sent his troops across the Polish border in 1939.
Contrast this with the RN, which had a great deal of virtual war-conditions experience throughout the years 1936-1939 (Spanish Civil War, Abyssinian crisis, Palestine troubles, China Station, etc.). The tiny Kriegsmarine was not comparable in either its size nor its sea experience as the global Royal Navy had been, even in its deteriorated state by August 1939.
Lutjens radioed Group West that the operation could not continue because he could not oil due to continual shadowing.
Continual shadowing. The perception of which, in itself, contradicts the idea of "permanent repairs" and 100% battle-worthiness being regained. It would surely contradict the nature of Lütjens' run away from the British---it seems apparent that he considered the British were still following him, and to have stopped his ship or even slowed it sufficiently to allow such hull repairs at sea, will have been a far riskier idea than dumping his bower anchors! In your own words:
"...at what cost???"
Which begs another question: Where, in your well-studied timeline and grid-square placements, does
Bismarck STOP at sea, to effect these repairs? I'd like to see a study of such an interruption in
Bismarck's forward progress--it must surely show up in the calculations of the clearly known number of hours and minutes between
Suffolk's loss of contact, and the PBY sighting west of Brest.
Many things don't add up. I'm afraid the calculus presented thus far does not provide the solution.
Let's have another look at these issues: Lütjens' ship is damaged. It leaks oil, which eventually stops. Its bow is down by a few degrees. He is pursued after the DS battle, with a sizeable hole admitting the sea to his ship's forward compartments. His speed is reduced. He needs to effect repairs. He dismisses his sidekick, Brinkmann, at a known "beginning" time; from then on, the British lose contact until the PBY regains it, at the "end" of that time. Lütjens doesn't KNOW that he has shaken the RN, however. So If his ship was repaired, then when and, more importantly, where?