"Crossing the T' at the Surigao Strait

Story about the dye shells. When the US was landing troops in Morocco in '42 the French battleship Jean Bart was under repair, but still fought back. It's dye color was yellow. One shell hit close to the US command ship bathing George S. Patton in yellow. .

 

Jean Bart was assigned orange as her dye color. Sistership Richelieu was assigned yellow.

I wonder, is the story apocryphal, shells from another ship, or was the Jean Bart firing shells meant for her sister.

 

An officer on the Augusta kept a journal in which he said the men topside told him the dye splashes were yellow, but there is no mention of Patton and Hewitt getting splashed. Harry Yeide mentions the incident in Fighting Patton, but I do not know what he referenced it to. Otherwise, there does not appear to be many other sources for this incident.

 

We Americans didn't really cross any T. The Japanese merely provided the leg of it.

 

Welll, yes we did.

The Americans crossed or capped the T. We could fire broadsides(all the big guns), while the Japanese could only fire their forward facing big guns.

 

I think the point is that it was more a matter of geography - the Japanese steaming up the strait - than any specially skillful tactics on our part. The same could be said of Tsushima, and there are probably other examples.