Strange battleship features?

Mid way through WW2 the British Admirality ordered its destroyer captains to try to avoid ramming attacks on subs since it always resulted in a destroyer needing its bows repaired. Potentially a destroyer could cripple itself if it rode over a sub completely and damaged its prop shafts. Read the account of one escort captain once. He mentioned seeing this happen once and seeing the destroyer get torpedoed while still crippled.

Back on the subject of battleships HMS Dreadnought is the only battleship to have sunk an enemy sub. Quite a few battleships have accidently sunk friendly subs. The Sub sunk in the second battle of Navik wasn't sunk by HMS Warspite as Tiornu suggested but a Swordfish floatplane launch from Warspite.

Ram bows for some reason hung on for an insanely long time but eventually people realised they were useless in war time and dangerous in peace time.

 

I believe it was Lissa that inspired the faith in ramming more than the American Civil War.
To say that Warspite did not sink a U-boat is tantamount to saying that aircraft carriers never sank anything.

 

2 questions:

1) what is Lissa?

2) do aircraft carriers get credited for 'kills', or do the Squadrons based on them get credited? If the ship does, that is like crediting Biggin Hill for all the BoB 'kills'

3) (yes, I know I said 2! ) Warspite had a Swordfish floatplane!?

 

1) Battle of Lissa July 20, 1866 Between Austria and Italy

2) Err... pass

3) Yes Warspite at that point had a Swordfish floatplane. The floatplane version of the Swordfish wasn't that widely used to the best of my knowledge but at that time Warspite had one.

 

1) Lissa is an island (known today as Vis) at Adriatic Sea. 1866 there was naval battle bethween Austrian and Italian forces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lissa_(1866)
I dont know much about it, only what that link tells me.

2) and 3) no clue.

Edit: Hah, having same source with Ebar!

 

Yes, that's it! And in doing so, the battleship unwittingly got a nice piece of payback for the Royal Navy. U-29 was commanded by Otto Weddigen, who had sunk the British armored cruisers ABOUKIR, HOGUE, AND CRESSY in 1914 while in command of U-9, all within an hour and a half, IIRC.

Ramming sank a handful of vessels during the Civil War; four in all, to the best of my knowledge.

 

Didn't know about that peculiar thing about U-9 and U-29 having same captain.

 

Oh, yes, they had the same commander. He did not survive his encounter with HMS DREADNOUGHT, BTW.

 

Nor any other crewmember of U-29. All 32 died.
Nice page about U-boats

 

Getting sunk by a battleship was, no doubt, a distinction they would have preferred to avoid.

 

U-9 (as the number suggests) was one of the Germans older subs and ran on paraffin (or some oddball fuel) not surprisingly a captain who racked up three armoured cruisers received a ship upgrade.

 

Oh, yes, Weddigen definitely got promoted; decorated, too, IIRC. U-9, BTW, burned kerosene according to the sources I've read.

 

Briefly returning to the subject of ramming both the US and the British actually built dedicated rammer ships. The British ship was probably very briefly viable before the introduction of quick firing guns. The American ship was built about ten years later and really was obsolete before it got off the design board.

 

I take it these were WWI designs?

 

The last warships that I know of that featured a ram bow were built by the Italians just after WWI. These were destroyers, so you can guess what they were intended to ram.
The ram bow involves some hydrodynamics in common with a bulbous bow, so the concept was not a lost cause.

 

According to Whitley's 'Battleships of World War 2' one of the initial proposals for the RN's Royal Sovereign class had triple 15" in the A and Y position and twin 15" in the B and X position while an early proposal for the Hood had 4 triple 15".

 

Not surprisingly, the US was planning to build the successor to the Iowa class: the Montana class. It was suppose to carry 12 x 16inc guns, also in four triplets. Imagine the fire power.
The Japanese were also planning to build an even bigger version of the Yamato class that were to carry 12 of the gigantic 18-inch guns. Vow, talk about packing a punch.

Down goes the curse of the Bambino.

 

Montana would have been the most powerful battleship ever built, stronger even than Yamato.
There were no prospects for Japan's building a ship much larger than Yamato due to a lack of suitable infrastructure. The most probable follow-up would therefore have been similar in size but with larger guns. My own opinion is that this ship would have been inferior to Yamato. While it would have carried 20.1in guns firing 4409-lb shells, it would have carried only six of them, providing a smaller broadside than Yamato's.

 

How about this strange battleship feature: the "pagoda masts" which so many Japanese BBs sported. The bloody things seem to epitomize the term "topheavy". When Bob Ballard found HIEI at the bottom of Ironbottom Sound back in the 90s, she was upside down, unlike BISMARK, which had righted herself on the way to the bottom. Dr. Ballard believes that it was the extra weight of the pagoda mast which kept the Japanese ship from righting herself in the same situation.

 

The higher you mount your rangefinder, the farther it can see.