You really cannot douse the feeble, flickering light of hope with such a cold-water douche of reality. On Tirpitz' trials they clearly did not try dangling an anchor off the bows, or trail a loop of hemp hawser and some will continue to believe these small boat drogue techniques might have given a 50,000 battleship some astern manoeuvrability, when it apparently had none, even with undamaged steering gear. Gale force winds and heavy Atlantic seas might perhaps have helped the situation, rather than hindering, but for those who have experienced such conditions it seems unlikely. They who want to believe will maintain that right, whatever actual evidence is presented.
A S-H's study has some simple diagrams, but tellingly no real-world examples of ships sailing astern for lengthy periods even with fully operational steering gear. Dragging an anchor chain across the sea bed would indeed produce enormous drag and resistance to the bow swinging around due to windage. However an anchor and chain dangling in deep water only has hydrodynamic drag in proportion to speed, and if the speed is slow the drag is low. The only real world example he presents refers to a much smaller ship, with a different rudder configuration and only refers to forward motion in presumably relatively calm conditions. He then extrapolates wildly to a very different ship, in different conditions travelling astern and provides no supporting evidence for his speculative ideas.
Whilst Herr Nilsson is here with us maybe he can detect from the German text whether the numbered references in Kp z See Alfred Schulze-Hinrichs' article (Marine-Offizer-Verband Nachrichten, Vol 17, No. 1, 1968.) refer to to 'Handbuch der Seemannschaft; pub 1967 Wehr and Wissen in Darmstadt. He was the author of this work as well, and of course it never hurts sales to have a contentious and probably irresolvable argument raging when you have a new book out on the subject.
![Angel :angel:](./images/smilies/eusa_angel.gif)
Herr Nilsson:
![Clap :clap:](./images/smilies/eusa_clap.gif)
![Clap :clap:](./images/smilies/eusa_clap.gif)
![Clap :clap:](./images/smilies/eusa_clap.gif)
All the best
wadinga