Rn vs IJN

[WARSPITER]

There were also two other factors which affected Europe prior to World War 2.

First, World War 1. People were very averse to conflict after WWI so it wasn't politically prudent to push too much
for greater military growth. At the same time it was thought no large conflict would be contemplated again by any
sane person (not so sane people were never going to be allowed to get control anyway - were they?).

Second, the depression. large spending programs on anything were not possible. Again, when politics are involved
along with elections the one thing voters worry about is their situation, not the possible future strategic / diplomatic
possibilities.

These factors combined in part to the point where military production in Britain and also the US were given less priority.
The standing army size of both countries was quite low on the eve of war and the navies were both affected.

 

[Admiral Beez]

These guns were designed in 1922 for the planned but never built G3 Battle Cruisers. This was before the WNT and the restrictions on capital ship construction. Navweaps gives the following explanation:-

"From inadequate firing trials, a mistaken theory was promulgated by the Director of Naval Ordnance (DNO) that held that a high-velocity, low-weight projectile would have superior armor penetration characteristics at large oblique angles of impact, a conclusion which was the opposite of previous findings. This theory was not substantiated by later trials, but these took place too late to affect the decision to use a lightweight APC projectile for new designs. As a result, these guns proved to be only marginally better in terms of armor penetration than the previous 15"/42 (38.1 cm) Mark I and much less satisfactory than those older guns in terms of accuracy and barrel life."

I wonder how a Nelson class would do against a 16" armed Nagato class.

 

[WARSPITER]

I wonder how a Nelson class would do against a 16" armed Nagato class.

Both very close when it comes to penetrating hits at similar ranges and weight of shot. Interesting that the British 15" BL was just as good
as both at some ranges - e.g. 15" - 21700 yards - 12" pen, IJN 16" - 21876 yards - 10.6" pen, RN 16" - 22500 yards - approx 11" pen.

Nelson class cement armour was the best there was and was rated by the USN as +20% (e.g. 12" class A US armour = 10" cement armour).
Both US and British armour was superior to that used on IJN ships which had wide variations in quality from very good to terrible.

Nelson would have a protection advantage against a Nagato type whereas a hit from Nelson would be unknown until it hit due the varying quality
of the Japanese armour.

As an aside, the US class A armour was found to be hardened to a greater thickness on the face than it should have been which made it more
vulnerable to breaking up when hit - this was for the thicker armour as per battleships. It was still superior to most other types anyway.

On cruiser armour this reversed giving USN cruisers one of the best armour types of the war as smaller shells from enemy cruisers didn't
have the weight to cause the shattering effect. This is why physics ain't so popular at schools. It's bloody confusing.

 

[Admiral Beez]

Nelson would have a protection advantage against a Nagato type whereas a hit from Nelson would be unknown until it hit due the varying quality
of the Japanese armour.

It's too bad Nagato wasn't pelted with 16" guns of various type instead of going down (eventually) to the Bomb.

 

[SaparotRob]

Losing so many historically important ships is a shame. Nagato, Prinz Eugin, USS Saratoga, or USS Nevada and USS Pennsylvania. Yeah, I know. $tore and maintain them where? You can't just put them in most rental garages. Still, I guess it's sort of like being sunk by gunfire.
Did the Navy kid the Air Force about missing an orange battleship with an A-bomb?

 

[EwenS]

Losing so many historically important ships is a shame. Nagato, Prinz Eugin, USS Saratoga, or USS Nevada and USS Pennsylvania. Yeah, I know. $tore and maintain them where? You can't just put them in most rental garages. Still, I guess it's sort of like being sunk by gunfire.
Did the Navy kid the Air Force about missing an orange battleship with an A-bomb?

That photo is of the Operation Crossroads Test Baker explosion at Bikini on 25th July 1946. In that case the bomb nicknamed "Helen of Bikini", was suspended 90ft underwater from an LSM. As a result much more damage was done to the assembled ships, and the amount of radioactive fallout was far greater than than expected.

There is plenty of detail in the well referenced Wiki article

Operation Crossroads - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[SaparotRob]

I know. The ships were pretty much rendered combat ineffective after test Able. Although, the livestock in the interior sections of the larger ships might have been capable of operating the ships for a week or so.
I was lamenting the loss of some historically significant ships to both tests. Apologies for not being specific.

 

[Shortround6]

I wonder if the exodus of talent from lack of orders led to the NelRods having the worst 16" guns. Someone thought high velocity, lightweight shells would do the trick.

The thing was that the British of the time were not alone.
The Germans had used high velocity guns during WW I although for a different reason? or crossover reasons?
The NelRods guns didn't use particular high velocity being rather middle of pack although the shell weights were slightly on the low side.
The NelRod 16in guns were only high velocity if you compare them to the British 15in guns.

Gun..........................................Velocity/fps..................................................shell weight/lbs.
NelRod 16in.............................2600...................................................................2048
Nagato 16in.............................2600...................................................................2205
Colorado (E) 16in...................2600...................................................................2110
Colorado (L) 16in...................2525...................................................................2240
Lexington 16in........................2800...................................................................2110
Bismarck 15in..........................2700...................................................................1764
Baden 15in...............................2625...................................................................1653
French 15in..........................2725-2575...........................................................1950
Italian 15in...............................2800...................................................................1951
British 15in (WW I.................2467...................................................................1920


For the smaller guns the Germans were using 2800fps in 12in guns in WW I and 2900fps in 11in guns in WW I. The Italians were using 2725-2750 in the 12-12.6in guns and the French used 2850 in 13in guns of the Dunkerque's.

Not saying there weren't problems. High velocity should not have been one of them.
I have left out the later US 16 guns as their much different shell weights would skew things. French 15in Velocity changed several times and ended in the middle using American powders.

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

Well, Samurai swords of not, the Japanese were not flying around China with old Newport Biplanes from WW I, They were not using French Renault F 17 tanks in China
View attachment 755238
As the caption says. In England in 1937 for the Coronation of KGVI.
Guided tours may not have been given but you don't show up with that and have your enemies expect your torpedoes date from 1912.

You are right, good binoculars are important, but it is fact that most of the time the Allies knew something was out there, roughly where it was and in what direction it was going in well before the Japanese did during most or all of the Night battles around Guadalcanal. The Allies could have had surprise every time. They only managed it once or twice.
At Tassafaronga the Americans not only had radar images, they had visual on one Japanese ship 6 minutes before the Japanese spotted them. Both sides waited before opening fire.
The Japanese were trying to run supply drums to the men on shore. The American squadron was blown out of the water by a supply run so yes, it was a major blunder.
It was a strategic victory for the Americans because the supplies did not reach shore. A high price was paid for shortening the campaign by a few days or a week.
US commander made several errors.
He didn't know the capabilities of his own weapons.
He didn't trust his ship commanders.
He ordered the torpedo launce too late.
He ruined the torpedo attack by opening fire with his cruiser guns about 1 minute after the torpedoes were launched which gave the Japanese warning to start evading. Maybe the MK 15s would have missed anyway or malfunctioned but that does not excuse basic tactical mistake.
American cruisers did not take evasive action of their own (except for one ship) which resulted in four cruisers taking torpedo hits at within US MK 15 torpedo effective range. No extra long range needed. It's the 4th night battle (and 6th night?) and the US is still believing that it is Japanese subs operating in the waters causing them problems??

yes I have hind sight and hind sight says there was some "cover your ass" going on.

Just wanted to say that is a magnificent photo. I'll comment on some other stuff maybe later

 

[Shortround6]

I was reading an analysis of Lee's fight and something popped up that bears on some this stuff about the difference between Night glasses and Radar. Or at least my interpretation.

Lee's starting formation was the destroyers in the lead. Four destroyers spaced 500yds apart. Which is 1500yds from 1st to 4th. There was a 5000yd space from the rear destroyer to the 1st battleship and a 2000yd space to the 2nd battleship.
The Japanese did get first sighting. The US force was steering 150 degrees and the US radar had a blind spot in the rear 60 degrees of the ship. The Japanese light cruiser Sendai (with two destroyers )spotted the BBs at 2313 but misidentified them as cruisers, it took until 2332 to spot the US destroyers out in front (going away from the Japanese). The 3 ship Japanese force continued to shadow while waiting for other Japanese forces which were west of Salvo Island to get closer.

Then at 2352 the US force turned to course 270 about the time a rain squall came through and the Japanese lost contact.
At 0000 The Washington picks up radar contacts at 19,600yds
0005 the Japanese Destroyer Uranami regains visual.
0008 the the South Dakota reports 3 ships at 18,300yds by both radar and visual.
0014 Lee gives the order to open fire via TBS (talk between ships) Radio.

and then things went south on both sides.

The radar was able to allow firing, to some extent, through smokescreens or poor visibility. At least for a few salvos. US radar was not all seeing and all knowing. But visual spotting had problems. Radar could, at times, help keep better track of things although in confused, maneuvering conditions it was far from infallible.
A ship close to a land mass could be invisible to radar. It could also be invisible to US optics. US thought that gun flashes from a Japanese destroyer were actually shore batteries on Salvo Island and they shot up the coast of Salvo Island.

Radar can tell you if a ship is small or large, but only if you have something to compare it to (or very experienced operators) Visual ID also was less than stellar. One Japanese crew identified a US destroyer as a single funnel cruiser at one point.

 

[WARSPITER]

In March 1942 USN radar bulletin No 1 made the following points;

• Trouble from hasty installation; above a basic 50 hours training, many more hours were needed for operator proficiency
• Reduction on operator strain, with two operators to alternate every half hour over two hour watches
• A scarcity of IFF making ship identification difficult. The enemy could pick up radar transmissions at 250 miles and measures should be taken to reduce this risk
• Keeping a good lookout was essential, even though radar was being used
• False contacts may be obtained from ionised layers, most commonly around mid-day, and that at night there would be insufficient time to determine that a signal is false
• The effectiveness of radar relied on data and orders being passed to the ships concerned in a minimum of time.

It was envisaged that each Radar Guard Ship would search an entire 360 degrees and that when a target enters the sector overlap between adjacent sector Guard Ships, the Guard Ship whose sector the target is leaving notifies the Guard Ship whose sector it is entering. It was recognised that Talk Between Ships (TBS) was the only means then available for rapid communication between ships and was to be put in large ships asap. By using low power at 60 mcs the range was anticipated to be 100 miles.

At Savo Island the two destroyers on patrol to the west were not synchronised in their movements. The Japanese ships ended up going straight between them.

 

[Geoffrey Sinclair]

And of those four were clapped out Revenge class. Dark days indeed.

The R class were younger than the Queen Elizabeth class but were slated for replacement.

It's too bad Britain ran down its shipbuilding capability between the wars. One could argue that in those days of post-WW1 naval treaties, government war debt repayments and depression economics that a rundown was inevitable, but it was not in the nation's interest for the government to facilitate the industry's decline. The UK went from a nation that in a span of ten years from 1906 to 1916 could build AND complete thirty-five dreadnought battleships, eleven battlecruisers and over fifty turbine-powered light cruisers (20xTown, 14xC-Class, 8xArethusa, 3xActive, 2xBoadicea, 2xBlonde) to one that struggled from the mid-1930s onwards to build for the new war. For example, Britain needed five and half years (65 months) to complete the carrier HMS Implacable, even though by autumn 1942 Britain had lost five carriers and was desperately short of the type.

As Ewen has pointed out the big bottlenecks were guns, mountings and armour, as well as size growth. The early RN dreadnoughts were about half the displacement of the WWII King George V, with about a fifth the installed power, no directors, no AA capability and minimal underwater protection (see HMS Audacious in 1914). Yes the WWII programs were curtailed by the rise of the aircraft carrier but the pre WWI were largely peace time builds as everyone tried to avoid battleship gaps. The economic strain can be seen in the way the British and Germans largely stopped laying down new dreadnoughts after WWI began.

USN, South Carolina in 1908 to Idaho in 1917, 17 Dreadnoughts, plus 2 more in 1919. 10 in WWII.

IJN Kawachi in 1912 to Mutsu in 1921, 11 Dreadnoughts plus 1 built in Britain. 2 in WWII.

The Kriegsmarine had an even bigger drop off.

Given a 20 year lifetime all the dreadnought construction programs were unsustainable, throw in the 1920's building bans and lots of big gun ship capacity was going to be lost.

The British ship building industry had the post WWI shock and then the great depression shock. At its peak in 1932 there was over 13,500,000 GRT of merchant shipping laid up. The British Empire in 1914 had around 20,500,000 GRT of merchant ships, down slightly to 20,400,000 GRT in 1937, but in percentage terms of the world fleet 47.6% to 32.5%, if the British had kept their percentage of world shipping it would have had another 10,000,000 GRT and a much healthier ship building industry. The US had gone from 2,000,000 GRT (4.7%) to 9,350,000 GRT (14.9%). Though by the late 1930's the Maritime Commission had been created to deal with the size and age of the US fleet and in 1937/38 over half the laid up world merchant ship tonnage was US.

Pre WWI the army made little demands on industry, artillery was hard to destroy, ammunition expenditure low, horse power in use, pre WWII artillery was easy to destroy, ammunition expenditure high, vehicles were replacing horses and "medium" tanks cost about the same as a fighter aircraft, and all those vehicles in turn needed more vehicles for repair and enabling vehicle movement (Bridging for example), horses and men can swim.

Pre WWI the air force demands were non existent, pre WWII they were high. This helped prevent new investment in ship weapons production etc.

If you look at the 1920's and 1930's arrangements almost all the British Empire ships were under the RN, only a handful were being paid for and run by the Dominions. So the British were trying to run a navy bigger than the USN on an economy about half the size. With a government limited by WWI debts.

The Fall of France meant the RN building program had to be radically altered, the big ship building programs abandoned or delayed. Not counting the older destroyers the RN ended up with around 600 ocean going escorts (including US built), after losing 100 or so. The USN ended up with about 100 less ocean going escorts, but more like 200 given the conversions to transports, after losing less than 20 of them. How many cruisers and above could be built and crewed for 200 to 300 Flower to Hunt class ships, including shipyard upgrades.

If you want a hindsight solution for the RN, update the Hood design to Vanguard, which used spare mountings, call in the mountings on the monitors, then as the Vanguard class builds pull in the R class, strip them of guns and armor to use in the Vanguard class, no need for new guns or mountings and much less new armour and have each slip build 2 as repeat ships take less time.

 

[z42]

I was lamenting the loss of some historically significant ships to both tests.

Yes, I also think it would be nice if there were more museums, flying warbirds etc etc, but apart from economics, I can sort of understand that in the immediate post war period, having gone through two devastating world wars in quick succession the populations didn't want to see, hear or think of those infernal death machines ever again.

 

[EwenS]

Except a 15" gunned Vanguard design wasn't a preferred RN option until 1939 given the new construction by the Japanese that the RN was expecting to fight. The KGVs were considered good enough to fight the KM.

1936 London Treaty Escalator clause
The RN was desperate to start its battleship replacement programme ASAP after 31 Dec 1936 to allow early renewal of its battlefleet (note the 1930s reconstructions were not seen as a replacement for new construction but merely a means of prolonging their lives pending new construction coming along). That meant 14" guns as set out in the 1936 London Treaty. The first 2 KGV (of the 1936 Programme) were laid down on 1 Jan 1937. It wasn't clear until the end of March 1937 that the Japanese would not sign up to the 14" limit, which resulted in the gun limit returning to the WNT 16" limit. Redesigning the KGV on 35,000 tons with 16" guns would have caused further delays and produced, in the eyes of the Admiralty, an "unbalanced" ship on the 35,000 ton standard displacement limit (in terms of the mix of speed, guns and protection. By the end of 1936 they had a good idea of what a 16" "balanced" design looked like and it exceeded 35,000 tons). So the RN opted to build another 3 KGV as part of the 1937 Programme with all being laid down by the end of July 1937.

The USN was under less pressure and, having designed the North Carolinas around 3 quad 14", did not sign off on the upgrade to 3 triple 16" until 15 July 1937. The 2 ships were laid down in Oct 1937 and May 1938. They were followed by the 4 slower South Dakotas on 35,000 tons with 9x16" (a trade of reduced speed for increased protection).

Tonnage increase
In light of Japanese position and the belief that they would build ships larger than 35,000 tons, the other Treaty nations had to agree a new tonnage limit. This was effectively set by the US at 45,000 tons with its early 1938 plans for what became the Iowa class and that figure became final on 30 June 1938. That was despite Britain arguing for a lower figure. Britain however opted to limit itself to 9x16" on 40,000 tons, for various reasons (cost, docking facilities etc) leading to the Lion class, the first pair of which were ordered in Feb 1939 with the third in Aug and the fourth planned for Oct (that last didn't happen)..

So you can't begin to design in detail a 40-42,000 ton battleship much before July 1938 because you don't know the outcome of the negotiations.

Vanguard
Vanguard started as a suggested way of speeding up renewal of the battlefleet i.e. getting additional battleships into service by getting around the gun & gun mount production limitations of British industry. It was not meant as a replacement for the proposed Lion class. Various design studies took place from April 1937 onwards that looked at using a stretched KGV with 4 twin 15" or even just 3 twin 15" in place of the 14" turrets. The DNC Sir Stanley Goodall considered a 4 turret design as an "extravagant" ship - more armour being required to cover a ship with 4 turrets compared to 3. Detailed design was ordered in mid-1939. But it was then (i.e. before the outbreak of war and its consequential delays) believed by the shipbuilding industry that it would be about Aug 1940 before it could be laid down with an optimistic build time of 36 months compared to the 42 months for a repeat Lion being considered for the 1940 Programme at the same time.

So the question is, is a ship with less powerful old 15" guns better than a 16" armed ship if the construction time saving is only 6 months, when the most likely enemy (Japan) is believed to be building ships of over 35,000 tons probably armed with at least 9, if not 12, 16" guns (actually 18" but that was not known at the time)?

Those timescales are assuming everything goes to plan with all armour guns etc being delivered on time.

Turret modification
To allow the available 15" turrets to be fitted to new hulls they needed to go through a modernisation process. So that process didn't interfere with production of 14" turrets for the KGV or subsequent 16" turrets for the Lions, that meant refurbishing the Harland & Wolff (ex COW) plant at Scotstoun on the Clyde. Built by COW (jointly owned by Cammell Laird, John Brown & Fairfield) to build big gun turrets for battleships pre-WW1 and break the duopoly of Vickers & Armstrong Whitworth, the gun pits had been filled in interwar while the factory was used for other purposes. In the run up to WW2 it was reopened, and amongst other things built 24x5.25" turrets for the KGVs.

For Vanguard the gun pits had to be dug out and refurbished. Money was allocated to that and it happened at some point in WW2, but I don't know exactly when. Vanguard's turrets were in those pits in 1945.

And the turrets required new thicker armour with more powerful motors to drive the greater revolving weight. The latter would also have been required for the other available turrets in the late 1930s coming from the monitors (Marshall Soult, Terror & Erebus see below) and the remaining spare built for Furious in 1916. And you also have to find a replacement for the Marshall Soult as a turret drill ship (she lost that role anyway in 1940 when the turret was removed to put into the new monitor Roberts). IIRC the time to modify these turrets was expected to be about 12 months (Vanguard's probably took longer as they were also fitted with Remote Power Control for training).

(Note that the turret that had been in the monitor Marshall Ney in WW1 was removed and put into Terror when she was built.)

So, if you intend to use turrets from the old R class, they have to be removed from service as least 12 months before the new hulls of the Vanguard class are ready to accept them late on in the build process. And in so doing you thereby weaken the capital ship strength of the RN in the short term. Try to do that in 1938 or 1939, with 2 QE and Renown already being rebuilt, and you reduce capital ship numbers below what the RN saw as a comfortable level to cope with emergencies. After the outbreak of war it becomes impossible.

Despite having Vanguard in build during WW2, and despite the R class beginning to be withdrawn from service from late 1943, the RN never gave up on the new 16" battleship with the Lion class design being updated during the war and new designs (with only 6x16") being produced in May 1945 and on into the early postwar period.

Note the tonnages referred to above are the "as designed" figures. These were exceeded by the time the ships completed entered service during WW2.

 

[Shortround6]

Two of our members had given impressive answers to this.

The R class were younger than the Queen Elizabeth class but were slated for replacement.

Mr Sinclair has skipped the original problems with the R class which had some bearing on this.

The QEs were designed to do 24-25kts using oil fuel. The Rs were supposed to revert to coal with different boilers, fuel stowage, etc. Also about 1/2 the power and a speed of 21 kts.
Change in administration and policy saw the Rs switched back to oil fuel for a slight gain in power /speed (?). So the Rs were newer, had much less use, but were not as capable in the post 1918 environment.
But the QEs had much larger boiler rooms (24 boilers instead of 18) and were about 20ft longer. This made them better candidates for rebuilding, A, their older machinery did need replacement and/or major repairs anyway. B, They would result in a more capable ship with close the same amount of work.

On the QEs the original 24 boilers were pulled out and replaced by 6 new boilers that could make 80,000hp instead of 75,000. Speed change was just about nil but.......................
The new turbines and boilers allowed for better subdivision. The new power plant dropped fuel consumption at full speed from 41 tons per hour to 26.8 tons and total machinery weight went from 3691 tons to 2300 tons. So no real change in speed but around a 70% increase in range at 10kts, fewer boiler room crew, better damage control (flooding) and almost 1400 tons that could be devoted to increase armor or AA guns.

The R's with their smaller boiler rooms, less machinery weight would not offer the same amount of improvement.
The Renown when she got new engines/boilers saved 2,800 tons and gained over 60% in range at 18kts.

There was only so much money and even rebuilding didn't make much sense if you could build new. Rebuilding the Renown cost about 40% of what a KGV cost.

A lot of things were done in budget years so if you saved 10 million in 1933 it doesn't follow that you have that 10 million to spend in 1938. The admiralty can't "bank" unspent money.

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

Yes, I also think it would be nice if there were more museums, flying warbirds etc etc, but apart from economics, I can sort of understand that in the immediate post war period, having gone through two devastating world wars in quick succession the populations didn't want to see, hear or think of those infernal death machines ever again.

It's an incredible amount of what would seem like valuable resources, metal etc., to just sink to the bottom of the ocean. A lot of effort to mine, to smelt and forge, to temper, etc. etc.

 

[EwenS]

From Moore - "Building for Victory" Appendix Three

Length of Slipways over 600ft in the major naval yards and Royal Dockyards in 1942

>600ft - 21 (incl 1 at Chatham & 1 at Portsmouth)
>650ft - 9
>700ft - 5
>750ft - 3 (incl 1 at Devonport)
>800ft - 9
>900ft - 7
Total - 54

Devonport also had a single slip 400-450ft long and Chatham had a second at 500-550ft long.

Of the 35 battleships and 12 battlecruisers built for or commandeered for use by the RN 1906-1916 only 6 were built by companies that had gone out of business by WW2 (note there were other ships built for export)

Thames Ironworks
The only RN battleship built in this period was Thunderer completed in 1912. The yard went bust at the end of that year as it was not competitive with northern yards and its facilities were outdated.

Beardmore
Built 3 battleships in the period. A victim of the 1920s downturn it was purchased by National Shipbuilders Security Ltd in 1930.

Palmers
Built 2 battleships and 1 battlecruiser. The post WW1 shipbuilding downturn affected it badly and it was purchased by National Shipbuilders Security Ltd in 1933.

Armstrong Whitworth
Built 6 plus the carrier Eagle at its Elswick yard. This was closed in 1920 and repurposed by the company as the increasing size, particularly beam, made it increasingly difficult to build large ships on the site (problem was the swing bridge downstream) so it was closed to shipbuilding in 1920.

Swing Bridge, River Tyne - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Earlier in 1913 the company had opened a Naval Yard at High Walker, so all Elswick's shipbuilding activity moved there. A disasterous investment in the 1920s forced the company to merge with Vickers of Barrow in 1928. The Naval Yard went on to build Nelson, KGV and was the lead yard for the Lion class.

Scotts of Greenock
Built 3 battleships. But it couldn't build anything longer than 700ft so its last battleship was Ajax completed in 1912.

Portsmouth Royal Dockyard
Built 7 battleships in the period, the last being Royal Sovereign completed in May 1916. Future classes were too long for its single 600-650ft slip. Other slips had been repurposed in the early years of the century as they were already too small. Some plans were made in 1920 to enlarge the facilities but came to nothing.

Devonport Royal Dockyard
Built 6 battleships in the period. It only had a single slip suitable for capital ship building which was eventually extended to 750ft (not sure when it reached that length). The longest ship built there was the Majestic class light fleet carrier Terrible (completed as HMAS Sydney - 682ft oa) although a Hermes class (736ft oa) was also planned but never laid down.

Summary
So only 6 capital ships were built by companies driven out of business by the downturn of the 1920s/1930s. Another 22 were built in yards that couldn't cope with the increasing size of capital ships for one reason or another.

 

[EwenS]

It's an incredible amount of what would seem like valuable resources, metal etc., to just sink to the bottom of the ocean. A lot of effort to mine, to smelt and forge, to temper, etc. etc.

And a huge amount of effort would have been required to decontaminate them all after Test Baker.

The CVL Independence for example couldn't be boarded for over 3 weeks and then the time aboard was limited to 5 hours. Over the next 3 days limited numbers of personnel were allowed abord for no more than 4 hours. She was then towed first to Kwajalien, the PH then to San Francisco where she became a guinea pig for decontamination efforts.

USS Independence (CVL 22) and Operation Crossroads | Naval Historical Foundation

By John G. Lambert

navyhistory.org

And the reult of those activities was radioactive pollution of the Bay area.

 

[z42]

And a huge amount of effort would have been required to decontaminate them all after Test Baker.

I think the question was why blow them up with nukes in the first place instead of just sailing to the scrap yards.

My answer is that that was indeed what was done to the majority of surplus military hardware after WWII (after a time in reserve in many cases, but still). Those used for nuke tests were, in the end, relatively few, and I guess the navy had a legitimate reason to see how warships would react to the newfangled nuclear weapons.

 

[Wild_Bill_Kelso]

And a huge amount of effort would have been required to decontaminate them all after Test Baker.

The CVL Independence for example couldn't be boarded for over 3 weeks and then the time aboard was limited to 5 hours. Over the next 3 days limited numbers of personnel were allowed abord for no more than 4 hours. She was then towed first to Kwajalien, the PH then to San Francisco where she became a guinea pig for decontamination efforts.

USS Independence (CVL 22) and Operation Crossroads | Naval Historical Foundation

By John G. Lambert

navyhistory.org

And the reult of those activities was radioactive pollution of the Bay area.

Oh yeah for sure, once you nuke them all bets are off. I'm just a bit shocked at the number of warships which were destroyed this way, given the huge cost, time and amount of labor that went into them, and the investment in raw materials. The latter seems like it could have payed off pretty well, though I'm sure the price of scrap iron etc. went way down in the commodities markets right after the war. Maybe tie them up on a dock as a museum for 5 or 10 years and then scrap them.

Once the nuke has gone off though, it ain't good. Radiation lingers in metal. Scrapping a ship is dangerous work regardless, I wouldn't want that job if it was radioactive!