A Bad Day, 70 Years Ago.

The USS Indianapolis was torpedoed and sunk.

The officer in charge of monitoring her movements never reported that she was late. Of the three stations that received her distress call, one commander was drunk, one had ordered his men not to wake him up and the third thought it was a Jap deception.

The men were in the water for nearly four days before they were spotted by a patrol plane. Other airplanes came. One PBY pilot disregarded orders and landed to rescue survivors. The USS Cecil J. Doyle came, shining a searchlight against the clouds, to give the survivors in the water hope that they would be rescued.

Fully two-thirds of the men who had survived the sinking perished while awaiting rescue. Everyone expected to lose ships during wartime and, if rescue had been prompt, the loss of the Indianapolis would have been filed under "shit happens during war". But to not know she was lost and to have the survivors in the water to be feasted upon by sharks for days was beyond horror.

The Navy revamped the MOVREP system.

The CO of the Indianapolis, Captain McVay, was court-martialed in a Navy cover-up of a type that was not seen until the turret explosion on the USS Iowa. He was eventually exonerated, though that finally happened decades after he took his own life.

Night Witches

One of the last of the Red Air Force's "Night Witches", Nadezhda Popova, died earlier this month. She was 91. She was one of the first women to serve in the Soviet Air Force, she flew over 800 missions

"Night Witches" was the German term for the. The Russian pilots adopted it as a badge of honor. They flew Po-2 biplanes over German lines at night, engaging in harassment and interdiction missions to disrupt the sleep of the German soldiers. The Po-2 flew so slowly that enemy fighters trying to pace them would stall and crash (the Po-2s flew rather low). They also flew supply missions to drop supplies to Soviet troops who were cut off at Malaya Zemlya and Stalingrad.

The debate over whether women are capable of serving in combat should have been settled in 1945.

Seventy Years Ago Today

The Four Chaplains gave their life jackets away so that other men aboard the SS Dorchester would stand a chance of surviving the sinking of the ship from a torpedo that had been fired from a German U-Boat.

Time Passes on WW2 Sub Vets

The New London Day ran a story today that the U.S. Submarine Veterans of World War II disbanded at the end of this year's convention. Thousands of subvets once came to their convention, the last convention was attended by 62 vets.

The youngest subvet in the group is 86 years old. The consensus seemed to be that it was getting too depressing to go to a convention and just be reminded that more of their old shipmates had died. Add to that the effort it took to keep a nationally-chartered volunteer group functioning when all the members are pushing or into their 90s and it was probably time for the group to fold.

The chapter in Connecticut is pushing on, though.

(The Day is subscription-only, a link to the story won't do you much good.)

Seventy Years Ago

By this time (8 EST), America had been at war for several hours.

Albert Brown, R.I.P.

He was the oldest survivor of the Bataan Death March. Born in Nebraska, he was Buffalo Bill Cody's godson and Henry Fonda's cousin. He was 36 when the Death March occurred.

USS Monitor

This is the inside of the turret (inverted):

A lot of details about the Monitor's design are in this article in the NY Times.

This is what I found fascinating: The War Department in 1861 opened a public competition to design a new class of warships. The designs had to be submitted in a month. They built the ship in four months. From one end to the other, it was a ship with new technologies and it was in combat a month after that.

The closest thing that I've heard to that was the first class of LSTs, which went from the beginning of design at BuShips to sea trials in less than a year. Over a thousand were built during the war. One of them is still working for a living.

Last Pilot From the Doolittle Raid.

The last surviving pilot from the Doolittle Raid has died.

Col. William Marsh "Bill" Bower was 93.

69 Years Ago- The Second Happy Time

69 years ago today, the first of five German U-Boats sailed to begin commerce-raiding operations off the east coast of the United States.

The U-boats were able to sink so many ships with so few German losses that the period from the arrival of the U-boats to about August of 1942 became known as the "Second Happy Time".

The reaction of the US Navy to the U-boat campaign, as well as the local governments in coastal cities, bordered on criminal neglect and dereliction of duty.

The Navy fought the institution of a coastal convoy system, despite the lessons learned during both the First World War and the high losses the British suffered at the onset of the Second World War. The Navy was extremely slow to react and resisted the formation of civilian aerial antisubmarine patrols (a measure that proved to be an extremely effective countermeasure). Until the Navy pulled its collective thumb out of its ass, many merchant vessels were sunk, most with the loss of their crews.

Merchant ships sailing independently tried hopping from anchorage to anchorage, sailing only in darkness. The U-boats were able to see ships operating inshore silhouetted by the lights of towns and cities. Civilian governments resisted the institution of a coastal blackout, because the local governments feared the impact of a blackout on their merchants, preferring to see ships on the horizon burning from U-boat attacks.

Keep in mind that although the film stock from the war shows the U-boats executing torpedo attacks, U-boats sank a lot of ships by surfacing and firing on those ships with their deck guns, because submarines of the day carried maybe 12-20 torpedoes. Surfaced U-boats were vulnerable to air attack; the later formation of the Civil Air Patrol, light aircraft armed with small bombs, forced the U-boats to discontinue surface attacks.

Between the CAP flights, convoying and Navy blimp patrols, merchant sinkings went down and U-boat losses climbed, making operations off the U.S. coast a lot more hazardous for the U-boat crews.

Volunteering the Army Way

I posted this over on one of my other blogs, but it seems a shame not to have it here.

The Battle of the Atlantic

From "Morning Joe":


The book being flogged there is "a Measureless Peril.

"The Battle of the Atlantic" by Terry Hughes is long out of print, but it is an excellent work on the longest battle of the Second World War.

Vernon Baker, R.I.P

Vernon Baker, Medal of Honor recipient, has died. He was 90.

Almost 20 years ago, the Army began investigating why no African-Americans had been awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II. Based on the work of historians and then an Army screening board, they found ten men who should have been considered for the award. Seven men were deemed to have acted with bravery above and beyond the call of duty. Four had been killed in combat, two had died after the war. Only Mr. Baker was left alive by the time his bravery was recognized for what it was.

A Fitness Report

This is a fitness report on Rear Admiral Spruance following the Battle of Midway.

Note that it is not fully "left-justified", in that Admiral Spruance had five marks that were 3.9s. Times were different then.

Admiral Spruance was one of the greatest commanders in the history of the US Navy, though there has been the inevitable sniping by the chairborne naval historians.

Two destroyers have been named in his honor.

Victory at Sea

The music, in MP3 format, from the 1952 TV series. If you have never seen the series, it is worth trying to track down a copy of the DVD set. (I found mine in the $5 bin at Wally-World.)

Or you can watch them here.

The End of the Beginning

(N.B.: I posted this at my home blog. On further reflection, I should have posted it here, so I am cross-posting it.)
------------------------------------------------------
Today is the 67th anniversary of the Battle of Midway. The battle marked the turning point of the war against Japan. The Japanese sent a large force to invade Midway Island, spearheaded by four carriers. The US Navy had three carriers and, thanks to the Navy's code breakers, some knowledge of what the Japanese plan was.

The Japanese carriers launched strikes against the island, only to be found and attacked.


USN divebombers badly damaged three of the carriers on the morning of June 4th. All three were out of the fight, they were all abandoned and scuttled.




The fourth Japanese carrier struck back. Her planes badly damaged the USS Yorktown, which was later sunk by a Japanese submarine while under tow. This photo shows the Yorktown under attack.


The fourth Japanese carrier was sunk that afternoon.

Turning points to a war are only apparent long after they happen. At this point, the US and her allies in the Pacific had been at war with Japan for six months, the war would continue on for three more years.

The person who saw this most clearly, though, was Admiral Yamamoto, who, in 1940, was quoted as saying this about the prospect of a general war in the Pacific: "In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success."

He was right and he was proven to be so 67 years ago today.

ASW Weapons; Part III

As I discussed in Part I and Part II, depth charges had several drawbacks. Chief among the drawbacks was the requirement that an escort prosecuting a submarine contact had to lose contact prior to launching her depth charges.

The Royal Navy had the lead on this problem, once again. They developed a "spigot mortar" that would launch a pattern of mortar bombs, each of which had a warhead of approximately 35lbs of high explosive. This became known as the Hedgehog. The mortar bombs were loaded onto rods; the bombs each had a cylindrical well along its center axis so that the bombs slid down and rested on the rods.


The early Hedgehog mounts were roll-compensated, but they could not be trained more than a few degrees to either side (moved from left to right) by tilting the mount, so the ship herself had to be aimed at the submarine. Later mounts were fully trainable. The mortar bombs themselves were launched in pairs at very short intervals, back to front, so that the bombs that fired at higher arcs were launched first (they had a longer flight time) and thus all of the mortar bombs would hit the water nearly simultaneously. The launchers' rods were set so that the bombs hit in a pattern, usually oval or circular, at a distance of 200 yards. The bombs would sink fairly rapidly.

Unlike depth charges, Hedgehog mortar bombs were contact weapons. Unless the submarine could hear the sound of the bombs being launched, she would not know that an attack run was underway, as escorts would also make non-firing runs to refine their targeting solutions. The time it took to reload the Hedgehog mount was usually less than it took to reposition for another firing run.

Hedgehog did have some of the same drawbacks as depth charges, in that the ships had quantities of high explosives on the weather decks. The launcher crews had to work topside, sometimes in far less than ideal conditions. At least one warship was lost when the stored Hedgehog bombs blew up because of faulty fuzing. They were also dumb weapons with a fairly long time between firing and impact, often close to half a minute or more, depending on the depth of the submarine.

Hedgehog nonetheless was a very lethal weapon when employed by a skilled crew. The USS England (DE-635) sank six Japanese submarines in 1944 in a period of 12 days.



Hedgehog was effective, but it still required that the escort close to the submarine's position in order to attack it. World War II sonars operated on sound frequencies around 14-30 KHz; many were "searchlight" sonars, such as the QGB sonar that transmitted a beam on one bearing; the sonar head was steered by the operator. The high frequency meant that the sonar head was small, it could be mounted on smallish ships, but because it was a searchlight system, searching for submarines was a matter of luck. The high frequency also limited the range.

Sonars developed into true search sonars that could transmit an omnidirectional beam. The QHB sonar transmitted an omnidirectional beam, but because it operated between 20 and 26 KHz, its range was limited. The early 1950s-vintage AN/SQS-23 sonar operated at 5 KHz, which greatly increased the detection range, but which also required a much larger sonar dome. The increased detection range of sonar sets like the SQS-23 meant that the escorts could track submarines far outside of the range of Hedgehog.

Clearly a longer range weapon was needed.

Do You Have a Spare 16 Minutes

Then watch this newly discovered footage from World War II:

ASW Weapons; Part II

(Part 1)

To understand depth charges, you need to know that active sonar (the Brits called it ASDIC, for some obscure reason) did not exist in World War I. The British and American navies had been working on it for years, but it was not ready by Armistice Day. The ASW escorts charged the datum and began putting depth charges into the water. As submarines could not go very fast on batteries, if a destroyer got to the last known position fast enough, it was possible to catch the sub.

When active sonar was installed on ships between the world wars, the sets were at what now would be regarded as very high frequencies. That permitted small lightweight sonar domes, but also meant limited range. Those sonars were probably not good submarine detection sets; they had to know about where the submarine was.

There are four basic stages in ASW: Search, localize, track and attack. World War I destroyers were pretty deficient in the first and third stages, as they had no sensors, other than the Mk 1 eyeball, to detect submarines and no way to track them after they submerged. The early sonar sets were not much better on the search aspect, but once the crew knew where to look and got close enough, they could localize and track.

Depth charges had huge deficiencies. First off, they were horribly unsafe. They were often stored in racks on the weather decks, so each ship had thousands of pounds of high explosives just sitting on deck. They were vulnerable to shipboard fires, enemy fire and for getting loose in heavy seas.

Second, they were dangerous in use. If a depth charge that was rolled off the fantail detonated early, it could blow the stern off the ship. Even if it didn't do that, the shock could blow out the stern tube seals around the propeller shafts and sink the ship by flooding the engine rooms.

Third, blowing up a number of depth charges created a lot of regions of disturbed water, which obscured the sonar signals.

Fourth, sonars could not look straight down or to the rear. When the destroyer which was tracking the submarine commenced its depth charge run, it lost track of the submarine just before it got into position to launch the depth charges.

Imagine, if you will, that you are at a trap or skeet shooting range. You call "pull" and a clay bird is launched. You swing your shotgun towards the clay bird and just as the barrels start to swing into alignment, you close both eyes, try to maintain your swing and then fire.

Now imagine that the clay bird has the ability to alter its flight path and that the clay bird knows that just before you fire, you are going to be blind. The sub commanders knew that a depth charge run was underway and, as the destroyer came into position, the sub commanders would order a sharp turn. The destroyer commanders had to guess which way the sub might go and try to compensate. The sub might alter its speed, anything to mess up the depth charge run.

Something that was not known early in World War II was that the German boats could dive deeper than American or British submarines, in some cases, three times as deep. The Germans could go below the maximum setting of the early depth charges. Even when depth charges would detonate that far down, it took a bit of time for them to sink that far, which meant that actually hitting a deep sub was more a matter of sheer-assed luck.

Something had to be done.

The Fuze that Saved A Battle

In my last post, I mentioned the VT fuze. Before I get to the VT fuze and its importance, a short discussion of fuses is in order.

The earliest cannon projectiles were round shot. They were solid balls, first of stone, then of iron. Somewhere along the way, some enterprising person wondered if there was a way to combine the heavy throwing capability of a cannon with the blast effects of a hand grenade. Hand grenades, back then, were little more than containers packed with gunpowder. The grenadier would light a fuze on the grenade and throw it towards the enemy.

Obviously, stuffing a projectile with a lit fuze into a cannon barrel that has gunpowder at the other end is not a good idea. The early fuzes were little more than just that, the fuze would be lit by the combustion of the propellant charge, with the time to detonation determined by the length of the fuze. This had its drawbacks, so the impact fuze was developed. Depending on whether the shell was fuzed at the nose or at the base and how impact-resistant the fuze was, a projectile could be fuzed so that it detonated on impact or afterwards, to allow for penetration. Clockwork fuzes (also known as "mechanical timed fuzes") were also used to set projectiles to go off prior to impact, in order to spray shrapnel over a wide area. (In a throwback term to earlier days, setting a MT fuze is called "cutting the fuse").

This was about the state of fuze technology during the First World War. Still, fuzing was unreliable, I have seen estimates that a third of the shells fired on the Western Front did not detonate. As a result, the "Iron Harvest" continues to this day. Old shells, even from as far back as the Civil War, can still kill, as their fuzes have deteriorated and can be very unstable.

Timed fuzes were used against aircraft; the gunners would set the timers to go off at a set altitude. If the setting was wrong, the fuze would detonate the shell too high or too low. The Germans addressed this problem by having an airplane fly parallel to the Allied bomber formations and radio back the altitudes.

Timed fuzes were fine against level bombing attacks carried out at medium and high altitude, but they were useless against dive bombers. For a mechanical timed fuze to work. the gunner would have to estimate at what altitude the dive bomber would be when the shell reached the dive bomber, a near impossible task.

The answer was what was known as a "variable time fuze" or "VT fuze," which was a code name that did not reveal the true nature of the fuze, as every nation with antiaircraft artillery had timed fuzes. The VT fuze was a proximity fuze.

The VT fuze was a miniaturized radar set. That may sound like not so much of a big deal, but this was in the days before transistors had been invented. It was a huge advance to that point to have a radar set that was small enough to be installed in an airplane the size of a bomber. What the Navy's scientists and engineers had to do was develop a vacuum-tube range-only radar set that could not only fit in the fuze of a 5" shell, it would survive the massive G-force of being shot out of a cannon. And then, having solved all of those problems, they had to mass-produce them.

The only project that was deemed to be more critical than the development and production of the VT fuze was the development of the atomic bomb (a version of the VT fuze was used in the atomic bomb).

VT fuzes were used to shoot down Kamikazes and V-1 missiles. Without the VT fuze, the American death toll from Kamikazes would have been far higher. As it was, during the Battle of Okinawa, 34 ships were sunk, most by Kamikazes. The Navy had 5,000 sailors killed (the Army and Marines lost 8,000).

Whether the Kamikazes would have been able to cripple the Okinawa and Iwo Jima landing forces if the Navy did not have the VT fuze is a debate best left to the alternate history folks. But there is no doubt that VT fuzes saved thousands of American lives.