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ORIGINAL: Tankerace

YOu mean Fisher acknowledged the submarine as a weapon? I thought that was back when the submarine "was not a gentleman's weapon, as it did not fight in plain view." Gotta love the British.

Not quite as goods as Beatty saying "There is something wrong with our ships" at Jutland or the British officer complaining that the German use of the 88-mm flak gun against tanks was not very sporting.

Very true. Don't know about you, but if I just saw 3 of my battlecruisers explode with a very heavy loss of life, I wouldn't be remarking "Oh, there is something wron with out bloody ships today."

I am a Canadian and I have seen the British blame Arnhem failure on the Americans.

I also forgot Doug Haig great comment that The German will run out of ammo before we run out of Troop at the Battle of the Somme. It does help your military career when you wife is a lady in waiting to the Queen.

ORIGINAL: madmickey

I also forgot Doug Haig great comment that The German will run out of ammo before we run out of Troop at the Battle of the Somme. It does help your military career when you wife is a lady in waiting to the Queen.

hahaha, yeah. You can get away with anyting.

One achievement credited to Hood is striking two different battleships with a single shell.

GAH... if I knew about this it would have made a perfect quiz!!

F.

Fisher was actually very enthusiastic about the submarine. Its not well known but at the start of WWI, the navy with the largest sub fleet was......Britian [:)]

the navy with the largest sub fleet was......Britian

The Navy with the largest number of everything was British...

In this case it proves that the navy with most underutilized submarines was the Royal Navy.. [:D]

F.

But, they didn't know how to use it. To them, the submarine was a scout for the battleline.

Not true. First off you have to remember that for all navies, UK included, a substantial portion of these submarines were coastal types only and were not suited for offensive ops away from shore. 2ndly, the UK was aggressive with their submarines, using them both in the North Sea and in the Baltic for offensive ops against ships and even enemy Uboats.

They didn't need to fight a commerce war by prize rules because they had their navy and geography to help control the seas and institute a complete blockade of Germany. Germany on the other hand had little other option but to insitute Kleinkrieg as well as try to use their Uboats as scouts and interceptors of RN warships.

"But I thought the Hood was sunk by a lucky shot from the Prinz Eugen?"
Ack! Where are my heart pills...?

ORIGINAL: madmickey

ORIGINAL: Tankerace

YOu mean Fisher acknowledged the submarine as a weapon? I thought that was back when the submarine "was not a gentleman's weapon, as it did not fight in plain view." Gotta love the British.

Not quite as goods as Beatty saying "There is something wrong with our ships" at Jutland or the British officer complaining that the German use of the 88-mm flak gun against tanks was not very sporting.

According to a documentary I saw on the BBC the other day, apparently all those battlecruiser of Beatty's that were blown away were destroyed by ammunition fires flashing from the turrets and handling rooms to the magazines. That was theorised for some time now.

But a bit more interesting, apparently at the time it was thought that ships wouldn't carry enough ammunition to cause a decisive blow the enemy - ie, they would run out of ammo before the battle was conclusively decided. A bit like how the ironclads of the American Civil War emptied their magazines into each other with minimal effect, I suppose.

Apparently Beatty's battlecruisers were carrying 110% or so of their designed ammunition capacity because of this, trying to squeeze in as much ammo and propellant as they could. Also, the British gunnery focused on rate of fire, to try and fire as many shells as they could in as short a time as possible. As a result of these policies, those battlecruisers had bags of cordite and shells lying around in the handling rooms, to speed reloading times and allow more ammo to be physically packed into the ships.

Needless to say, a spark in the turret caused by a penetrating shell hit didn't do this arrangement much good at all.

This documentary included some divers going down to the wrecks, and finding shell cases lying around in the handling rooms which shouldn't be there, which supports this theory.

You gotta love it when the operators disable the safety features in the interest of efficiency, then evolve their shortcuts into SOP. Chernobyl, anyone?

I hadn't heard about the oversupply of ammo. I had read that the British had wired some of the anti-flash features out of the way (and disabling them) so that they could increase their rate of fire.

OSHA missed this in their inspections.[:'(]

Cordite powder seemed to be a bigger ship killer than the shells they propelled.... Look at Mutsu, she just blew up for no reason (attributed to unsafe propellant, IIRC Cordite).

EUBanana
I saw the same stuff from BBC, calling anything from BBC a documentary is very questionable.

There were plenty of ships lost to accidental magazine explosions during WWI and the period leading up to it. But it's hard to say if Mutsu belongs in the same category because there has been no satisfactory explanation for her loss. The official conclusion was that a crewman did something to cause the blast, and there was suspicion about sabotage by a disgruntled sailor. (Caramba! Does this sound familiar?)
Japanese propellant in WWII did have a fair amount of NG and some resemblance to Cordite. I won't try to comment on the comparative chemistry.

I suppose its one of those we'll never know type of things. But still, it has to be pretty disheartening, you loose 2 fast BBs at Guadalcanal, you converted 2 to hybrid abominations, and now you loose another one. That's 5 BBs kaput or reduced in firepower.

The Japanese had similar problems in WWI. Settsu's sister Kawachi was lost to a magazine explosion in 1918, and I thought they lost at least one other ship as well, but my references are in NZ and I'm in Afghanistan. [:(]

I have read the reasoning about the PE and Hood, but I never thought it stood up.[:-]

There were a couple of other battleships that blew up supposedly due to "cordite" deterioration. Alas, I got rid of most of my books before leaving, so I can't remember who or what nations they belonged to... French? Italian? Russian? I think they are mentioned in passing in The World's Worst Warships. This has lots of fascinating stuff, prime material for quizzes.