American and Japanese Damage Control in WW2

[Music] [Music] so the other patreon subject for the month of January that was selected was Japanese versus American damage-control a much is said about this in various circles both in print and online and so this video is going to attempt to try and clear up a few of the more common myths explain why there was such a substantial difference at least four significant parts of the war and going to a little bit of the background as to what drove these differences so a little bit of myth dispersion first US damage control was very good but it was not godlike and it was not absolutely impossible for a ship to be lost regardless of the best of it efforts of her crew the u.s. damage control also going into the war still had a number of flaws in it and this would be revised during the war which was actually one of the things that we'll come to when we talk about the strengths of US damage control with that said going to the other side Japanese at damage control was not completely and utterly awful they didn't lose every single ship that got badly damaged but again there were weaknesses in their system law perhaps larger weaknesses but maybe not by much at least initially but the resolution to those weaknesses was somewhat substandard which again we'll come to when we talk about the two systems in a little bit more detail but basically the purpose of this first couple of minutes is to just dispel that notion that somehow Japanese the Japanese Navy had absolutely no idea how to perform damage control on their ships and the American damage control entered World War one on December 8th 1941 with absolutely pitch perfect if they couldn't do it no one else could levels of repair capability so with that said let's go on with our analysis one of the things that has to be borne in mind on both sides is the fact that damage control in and of itself is only one part of an overall whole when it comes to whether or not your ship is going to be lost the two of the other major components to this are just how much damage have you actually taken and where is it these two things kind of go together because well to put it bluntly if you've had a bomb detonate high up in the ship and it's maybe a 500 pounder chances other ship is probably not imperil and damage control is more about casualty reduction outside of really really bad luck conversely if you've been hit by five torpedoes and half of your underwater hull is missing it doesn't matter how good your damage control is you are going down the other very important factor is the design of the ship that you happen to be on and this is a huge multiplier when it comes to whether or not the damage control crews will be able to save the ship because a ship that has a fundamental flaw in its design if that flaw is picked up and exploited by the kind of damage that the ship has suffered is going to put you in a much much worse situation compared to a ship that has been either well designed or perhaps a ship that has design flaws but the particular weapon in question has impacted somewhere far away where that design flaw doesn't actually matter stepping away from the Japanese and American examples for a minute a good example of this would be to consider the Bismark design that Bismarck's torpedo defense system around its Citadel was very very good and stood up pretty well to aerial torpedo strike exactly as designed so as long as the torpedoes were slamming a home their Bismarck was largely uninvaded unfortunately as hopefully most of you know there was this small design flaw with the rudders and propeller system which meant that a torpedo hit in that location basically sealed the fate of Bismarck and it really didn't matter all the other torpedo hit said suffered up until that point that one hit on its weak spot and that was pretty much it similarly albeit that there was more internal factors to take into account as well the torpedo hit that bent the shaft of Prince of Wales again that in and of itself almost certainly killed the ship irregardless of what affect any of the other torpedoes the Japanese hit the ship with actually did so with that in mind just remember that not every ship that the Japanese lost was lost because of poor damage control but equally not every ship that the u.s. Navy managed to save was purely as a result of heroic efforts by its crew in some cases it was the design of the ship that was the either faith weakness or the saving grace one way or the other and that applied to both navies however when we start looking at the actual damage control systems themselves bearing in mind that this is made up of both equipment and crew as well as procedure we can basically look at this comparison using those three particular categories so we'll start off with looking at the human factors then we'll move on to the procedural factors and then finally the technological factors and then we'll have a brief summation of a couple of incidents that illustrate the point so the first subject as I said is the human factor now the human factor is actually one of if not the most important parts of the entire damage control effort because at the end of the day your damage control parties are made up of humans we have not yet reached Skynet so don't expect any kind of mechanical assistance in World War two and the level of education and the familiarity with equipment that your crew comes to the ship with is going to have a huge influence on how much your crew is going to be able to use the equipment that you give them and how well they're going to be able to use it and how much they might be able to improvise with equipment that they either haven't been trained on or in quipment them have been trained on but they might be called on to use in a different manner to that in which you have actually trained them now this comes from the simple fact that maybe 60 70 years before the outbreak of World War 2 Japan had been in the middle of a crash course of modernization a process that was still quite significantly ongoing even during the First World War bearing in mind that many of the most advanced Japanese warships in the 1900 and 1910 s were still being built overseas and then the Japanese were then catching up and adapting so for example like the battle cruiser Kongo was built in the UK and her three sisters would then be built in Japan and so on and so forth what that means is that for the average Japanese person the man in the street as it were their familiarity with and the availability of more advanced sort machine tools and other kinds of equipment was very much more limited than somewhere like say the USA which had obviously been in an industrialized country for a significantly longer period of time and where widespread use of advanced manufactured tools and equipment was significantly more common now that's not to say that the Japanese sailors aboard the ships didn't have a clue what a wrench or a spanner was they definitely did and after all they're apart from anything else that they're humans it's not exactly the world's most difficult thing to figure out but what it did mean was this base level familiarity of this kind of machine will probably do this because I've worked with machines similar to it before that part wasn't there so if you had let's say a small petrol powered pump for example if you as a u.s. Navy crewman was suddenly had to get this thing working because it was labeled water pump then there was a reasonable chance that you might have had some idea of what it was what it might do based on a pump or an engine or something along those lines that you might have used when you were a kid when you're a teenager when you're a young adult or something else you might have come across elsewhere in your naval service and so the idea of operating it it might take you a little bit to figure out but people tend to be quick learners under under stress and pressure whereas something like that a piece of damage control equipment that Japanese crewmen came up came across if he'd been trained in such a thing and if he'd been instructed in his use then he would know what he was doing but if he was generic Japanese crewmen he might never have come across this particular kind of mechanical technology before except maybe in passing and so he wouldn't necessarily actually really understand what it was or how it worked the labeling might tell him that this was a pump for outside that it might as well be a magic black box and again although people are human and people can read instructions and they learn fast in the emergency circumstances like I don't know your ship being on fire that little bit of extra time can be the difference between getting a pump working and thus having some kind of ability to fight the fire or the fire overtaking you and forcing you away or again under the stress of combat just panicking and going you know what I actually don't have any idea how this works I'm gonna go somewhere else and either get away from the fire or try and find somebody who does know how it works ideally both and to emphasize again the kind of underlying familiarity that is required in in these circumstances it can even be reflected today if you look at servicemen in the three major arms of Armed Forces today a person on a ship would if say a fire broke out their first instinct would be to fight the fire and their training would inform them of about firefighting equipment so if they found a bit of equipment that perhaps they hadn't been trained on or and seen for a long time they will probably figure out how to use it because they have a generic familiarity with this stuff whereas if you are say an Air Force pilot and something catches fire on your plane well depending on the size of plane and the seriousness of fire your options are basically either get out of there very quickly or shut system's down and hope that puts the fire out there's not a tremendous amount of training to do with actually hand fighting fires aboard an aircraft while it's in mid-flight unless perhaps you're particularly unlucky crewmen aboard a c-17 or c5 or c-130 or something of that nature and even then your training is going to be limited to mostly handheld fire extinguishers you're not going to be trained on a large petrol powered portable pump for example and so compared to your average Navy crewman if you're both put in the same situation what you're familiar with and what you're able to pick up and learn in the next few minutes while your life depends on it is going to be very very different and then obviously if you're say a tank crewman or a jeep driver or an APC driver if something's on fire again your first instinct is probably well the vehicles on fire I need to leave at the space something that is not really possible on a ship when you're surrounded by ocean or indeed ideal when you're on a plane when leaving the plane usually means the plane is going to crash so this kind of emphasizes the difference in perspective and the difference in familiarity with the equipment so just going into it with your basic enlisted crewman on either side the US Navy was already going in with an advantage there because it was much more likely that their crew would be able to adapt on the fly to various bits of relatively technologically advanced damage control equipment the other major human factor to consider was initiative and how much initiative the crew would take the Japanese Navy was famously very hierarchical and there's a fine line between marshal discipline and corporal punishment with a lot of Japanese vessels and indeed the Naval Academy's during more towards the corporal punishment side of things rather than the discipline side so crew beatings were not uncommon I mean they weren't happening every single day but the idea of step out of line and someone will literally hit you with a stick possibly until you need to be hospitalized was not something that would be an unfamiliar concept to adapt the average Japanese crewman whereas in the US Navy of that kind of behavior was shall we say generally frowned upon and this in turn would affect the manner in which crew would react to a situation where as Japanese crewmen generally would see a situation and thinkwell am i trained for this situation is that situation my job if not then I'm going to wait until somebody tells me to either go and do it or I'm going to leave it to the specialist who is trained in that position because if I step out of line and try and do something that I'm technically not supposed to do there's a chance I might well get a stick over the back of the head for my efforts which I don't particularly like obviously that's not say that if the bit of the ship behind him is on fire Japanese crewman is just going to sit his se anti-aircraft gun station and let himself burn to death they're not stupid but he is a going to be a significant factor in hesitation if say you're standing on your duty and anti-aircraft gun and you're will say a third of the way back from the bow of the ship and the ship 2/3 of the way back is on fire you're not in an immediate danger but your first instinct is going to be someone else will handle it I will stay at my gun post whereas in the slightly less rigid hierarchy of the u.s. Navy somebody who sees that happening and realizes we'll hang on a minute the air attack appears to be over might be significantly more willing to take the initiative and go right maybe I should go over there and offer a hand and quite often especially in World War what - given the relative lack of automation compared to the one day just sheer number of hands available to fight fires plug damage that had caused flooding etc all of this could be vital in those first few opening minutes the next section is procedural now procedural is probably the single largest difference between the two navies because ultimately at the end of the day with all the human factors we described before you could actually have a somewhat more sane Japanese captain and officer cadre on a Japanese ship you might have a really really tightly regimented and captain and officer Cartwright on a u.s. ship and equally you might have an influx of newly enlisted men who'd and come in from somewhere and what I guess what today would be called the flyover States with relative little familiarity with modern technology and you might have a Japanese crew whose recruit intake for that particular cruise had been taken from say the industrial sector of a Japanese city and therefore might be actually more familiar with mechanical equipment everything we described in the button in the previous bit is general trends procedure however is much much more widespread and followed across both fleets and you'll see in a minute why this particular aspect of things was so critical to so many ships both being saved and being lost now within this procedure it describes in a part for anything else in who gets trained in damage control now the Japanese relied on a specialist set of men and officers particularly mostly officers to be trained in damage control so the idea was that if you were a generic engineering crewman you would just learn how to do your generic engineering if you were an anti-aircraft gunner you learned how to do that if you were a bridge crewman who did signals you learned to do that if you were a more senior officer like say one of the chief engineering officers on the ship then as well as looking after the engines and machinery you might be taught how to run the damage control for if the engine rooms of immediate vicinity have been flooded or the engines have been damaged or knocked out by impacts etc hopefully a lot of that will be building on and knowledge that you already have but you will be the one in charge and then there will be a relatively small cadre of people that you will pass this knowledge on to along with the damage control training groups of ashore and that will be your damage control team if something goes wrong you and those men will go and fix it the bulk of the crew in the engine compartment will be expected to just stay at their post and do their jobs and so they will not receive anything much in the way of damage control training now you contrast this to us practice where starting right at the start of the war the job of damage control was much more widely distributed yes obviously senior officers of various descriptions had particular roles in leading damage control and the u.s. did also have deaded dedicated damage control teams and men who were at the when they're at their battle stations their battle stations were explicitly you are here to fix any damage the ship has suffered but in addition to this it would be expected that near enough everyone would have been trained in some form of damage control and obviously this could also mean a degree of cross-training because at the end of the day a hole in the ship is a hole in the ship so it doesn't really matter if that hole is in the engineering compartments or if it's right at the front end of the ship and similarly if there's a fire it doesn't particularly matter if that fire is somewhere at midships somewhere in the middle decks or if it's for at the fore end of the ship or at the aft end of the ship on the flight deck a fire is a fire now obviously with fire it can have different fuel sources in terms of things it like it could be the wooden parts of the ship it could be gasoline it could be parts of aircraft could be an electrical fire but the different types of fire you can well pop in the electrical ones um which you definitely don't want to fight with water but you can train most people to recognize the various types of fire relatively easy I mean this is something most of us learn when it comes to dealing with fires that we hope won't occur in our own house or where our places of work but we need to know how to fight regardless if they do happen and a lot of these procedural issues combined with the human factors and this we can insert a fairly good example of in the Battle of Midway when various Japanese carriers were hit and lost with the carga the hits that set kaga on fire also happened to kill most of the major officers who were in charge of damage control which meant that the lowered ranking officers who survived a initially had no idea that they were the ones who were actually now in charge of damage control efforts and be even if they had known about it they wouldn't have known exactly what the policies procedures and damage control trained men were outside of their little group which had massive knock-on consequences for cargo not only in the terms of the fact that she was lost as many of the OA karat Japanese carriers were at the time but also she suffered such ridiculously high crew casualties because as I said that there was effectively a decapitation of most of the Japanese train damage control specialists which left the ship very vulnerable to the damage that she'd suffered spreading both in terms of fire and flooding now conversely on the ACOG II which was also hit and would also eventually be lost with the chief damage control officer did manage to survive and managed to find his way to an area where many of the crew could be directed from and so a car jeez death was actually significantly longer and drawn-out because what damage control party members had survived were able to be semi effectively directed now akagi's damage due to various issues including some of design faults was such that she was gonna go down but the damage control efforts did keep her up long enough for reasonable numbers of crew to escape and also she came within well not a hair's breadth because it was not-- and it was never that close but she came to within a few steps of possibly being able to be saved but again this was also let down by the compartmentalization of damage control efforts because one of the things that possibly could have saved a corgi would have been if they'd managed to get the ship moving again but poor old damage control officer who was stuck in the temporary command area trying to fight all the fires could not get in contact with the people down at the in the whole of the ship who might be able to get the engine start again to tell them to actually try and this comes back to the procedural part a there were limited numbers of those men still alive and be because everything was so rigidly hierarchical without those orders from above they were relatively unlikely to try that is the survivors whereas in a u.s. ship at the same time even if they'd been mostly cut off realizing that well a ship with no power is probably going to die very quickly it's much more likely that a u.s. engineering crew would have turned around and just gone right well some of the senior officers are dead we've got no idea what's going on above us apart from the fact it sounds like burning but let's try and get this ship mobile or at least get some power back into the ship because at the end of the day power is what provided it's the energy to most of the more complicated and more effective damage control equipment this procedural part where damage control was very much the realms of specialists on the Japanese ships as opposed to on the American ships were practically everyone and anyone could pitch in also affected the ongoing advances in damage control on both sides and again this is not so that the Japanese did not advance that they did they did make a number of advances in both policy procedure and technology when it came to damage control efforts on their ships later in the war albeit it was somewhat slower and more limited than what the Americans were able to come up with which is is another aspect that we're going to cover a bit later on in more detail but for the moment at this point in the video a good example is the loss of USS Lexington now USS Lexington lost at the Battle of Coral Sea in part due to a number of missteps in its damage control policies and procedures this being the early part of war but having seen what happened to the Lexington one of the crewmen aboard USS Yorktown seeing that these aviation gasoline explosions had occurred and had pretty much been the thing that doomed the ship came up with his own idea of instead of just shutting off the valves on the aircraft fueling system once the aircraft had been fueled he came up with this idea that maybe when these systems are not in use they should instead be purged and filled with an inert gas in this case carbon dioxide because then if they were ruptured by an attack whether that be torpedoes or bombs then all that would escape from those systems would be co2 gas which would be not the most pleasant of things to breathe but not a particular danger to life or the ship in the quantities that it was in as opposed to gradually vaporizing aviation gasoline which was a very major threat to life limb and the ship structural integrity and then well as had been seen with lexing now he was not part of the damage control crew of Yorktown in as a bunch of the specialists he was part of Yorktown screws so therefore he was expected to do damage control but he wasn't in the Japanese sense of the word a damage control man and moreover he was not the head of a major polish he wasn't the head of engineering he wasn't the head of gunnery he wasn't the head of the Aviation Group but because of again going back to those human factors because of the slightly less we will beat you with sticks if you dare to step out of line method of management in the US Navy he felt confident enough to go to Yorktown's captain and say actually I think I have an idea and the Yorktown's captain was happy to say ok develop her idea and see if it will work and it did and it was then deployed across the other carriers in the US fleet and although ultimately Yorktown herself would be lost lost it did save both Yorktown initially from other damage and quite a lot of other American aircraft carriers from various grisly fates that it would otherwise have visited been visited upon them for example the two most famous heavily damaged essex-class carriers Bunker Hill and Franklin both of which had fires both of which were very badly damaged but neither of which had the kind of colossal fire damage and explosions that characterized the loss of Lexington and characterized the loss of a number of Japanese carriers up to an including tae-ho precisely because of this system that's not say they weren't aviation gasoline fires aboard those ships there were but they were nowhere near as bad as they could have been and the loss of USS Wasp is perhaps another example of what happens when a bit too much aviation fuel begins to evaporate in a confined space the procedural difference is also extended to what those damage control officers if we're looking at the specialists in both cases actually knew about the ships in the US the and this moves little intership design but is still procedural but in the u.s. there was quite the obsession with making everything redundant with the idea that well rather sensibly as you might imagine if the part of the ship over there has gone in bang and there's bits of it raining down all around you probably the damage control equipment in that area has also gone bang and is probably also raining down in total pieces all around you at which point is not generally that useful however if the bits of the damage control system that are raining down on your deck were say the foam firefighting pump system or the main lines for the water for your hoses you might be in a bit of trouble but if the system is redundant then yes you've lost that section that's fine close a few valves this section still works and this became something of a major difference between the two navies the Japanese had very intricate very comprehensive firefighting systems but they were much more vulnerable to a small piece of damage taking out the whole system whereas the American systems were a lot more redundant and I think well now we are getting heavily into technology note and not procedure but procedure still plays a part because the Japanese system was not one entire sort of unbroken set series of pipes let's say for firefighting there were areas where you could potentially close off valves and suchlike but in the American system all of this was codified this was analyzed this was put in books and manuals and procedures that lots of people were trained in so at the end of the day if you did lose part of your system there were a significant number of people on board who immediately would know right we need to close here here here in here and there were set conditions aboard the US ships that closed the ships down for action at varying stages and isolated various parts of the ship's damage control system and so if everyone knew right we're at this condition it was able and Baker for ships with they had two conditions and three conditions that were at the other end of the alphabet for ships or three conditions but that's a minor detail anyway so if you were at one condition you knew which parts of the ship were open which parts were closed which parts of your damage control system were connected to the others and which was shut off and so if a section was of the ship was lost you knew exactly where you needed to go and what you needed to do in order to completely isolate what was left of your damage control system to allow you to fight the damage whether that be the pumps for to deal with flooding or the other pumps to deal with pumping seawater up to help fight the fires or foam or whatever else you needed to do even where the supplies of wood might be to help shore up leaks meanwhile in the Japanese Navy if you were one of the lucky ones who'd been designated as one of the primary damage control officers you would be told right or welcome aboard the ship you may now wander around the ship and look through the manuals for the ship and familiarize yourself with the ship and what do you mean standardize damage control procedures across the fleet get used to the ship every ship is different I'm sure you'll learn it sooner or later so there's slight exaggeration there but you get the general gist of things it was a lot more bespoke and there was there was actually genuinely a lot of you had to get used to your own vessel this of course meant that not only did this concentrate an awful lot of valuable knowledge in the heads of very few people which of course again like with cargo you might end up losing in battle but it also meant that a single humans oversight or error could lead to every single part of that sections damage control team even if they were all still alive being given completely the wrong instructions and the fact that you had to learn all of this pretty much by yourself men that you the your ability to cross train would also be significantly diminished so if you were a u.s. Navy damage control officer you might have learned everything there is to know about plugging leaks in the event of flooding and shoring up bulkheads and you might think hmm okay well that's all well and good but what happens if we're not flooding what happens if we're on fire well this handy manual tells me what to do now that might not make you a specialist firefighting officer but it means that if one day your ship is on fire you think ah hang on the manual said we need to do this this and this which in turn means that if you're in a section of the ship that's been isolated and cut off from the firefighting specialists or perhaps the ones in your area are otherwise engaged either fighting the fires or being in several pieces across the floor you're able to at least give a some degree of semi trained resistance to the fire which is a heck of a lot better than ah fire this is bad I really wish someone had told me what to do about this because you have the time because of these standardized training manuals and a good example of this would be the loss of tae-ho where the ship although it taken damage had almost managed to recover from it when one of the lead damage control officers made a mistake he knew that he needed to get the fuel fumes out of the ship and he thought the best way of doing this was to turn on the ventilators which it was he also thought that to disperse the fumes as quickly as possible he should order many bulkheads and other such blocking devices to be opened so that the fumes could be vented more quickly away from where they were to somewhere else wherever that happened to be which was not such a good idea because that went from turning in ty hoes hangar deck to a potential danger zone to turning most of the ship into a gigantic armored fuel air bomb and yeah eventually a spark went off and so did the ship so yes whereas if that had been a u.s. ship someone somewhere in the infinite wisdom would have written into a training manual under no circumstances are you to ever open all of the bulkheads and lost hatches in the rest in the lower part of the ship to try and disperse explosive fumes get them out of the ship not further into the ship and hopefully people would actually pay attention to that so again and it's a difference which turns into an advantage on the US side this procedural issue also extended beyond the ships themselves and across the Navy so one of the more familiar aspects of differences in procedure that for his historians and people who are students of world war ii pity in particular is how people were rotated and how things were changed according to operational needs so in Germany and Japan generally speaking if you were a really good pilot they would keep you on the frontlines basically until either the war ended or you got shot down because logically if you were a really good pilot the best place you can be is to be on the frontlines shooting down lots of enemy planes whereas the British and Americans took the approach that if this guy's a really good pilot yes he has shot down an fair number of planes and he might go on to shoot down several dozen more but if we lose him he won't do that and if we pull him back from the front lines after he shot down a few dozen planes if he can then pass on those tricks to the next generation of air cadets who are currently coming up and are going to be the pilots in six months to a year time then if all of them can absorb even a tenth of what he's taught them and they can each shoot down say half a dozen enemy aircraft well several hundred pilots each shooting down half a dozen aircraft is a heck of a lot more enemy aircraft destroyed then one pilot who manages to shoot down three or four dozen aircraft even though he'll have a massively higher kill count than any single one of them now again this seems obvious in hindsight but oh well now that applied as much to naval personnel as anything else so in the US and British navies you would have a system of people serving on a ship and then they might be transferred to another ship whether that be because the ship they were on how it was paying off into refit and needed so go into refit and thus you would just redeployed elsewhere or just as much general crew transfers or because another ship desperately needed crew and your ship wasn't seen as quite as vital on the front lines as theirs was at immediate point in time or if you just wanted to move you could also request a transfer whereas the Japanese were a lot more rigid in this and it this was to the point that after one of the early naval battles you actually ended up with a circumstance where they would deploy for the next big carrier engagement short of one carrier not because they didn't have that carrier but because two of the carrier's had taken two different kinds of damage one carrier had been quite badly battered and needed to go in for repairs but most of its Air Group was intact another carrier had lost most of its air group but itself could be made operational pretty quickly now you might think the logical thing to do and indeed what was done in a number of cases in the US and well and in the Royal Navy but would mainly talk about the SOS us so we'll focus on them was to go okay you lot the intact air we're gonna move you over to this other ship and now we have a ship with a mostly intact air group and a mostly intact ship so we can send you out and fight so great we're only effectively down one our group and one ship whereas for the Japanese it was no this is the air group for the ship this is the a group for this ship so if this air group is can't go anyway because it ship is not operational well sucks to be us but I guess we're just gonna have to wait till that ships fixed whereas this mostly operational ship well it's gonna have to wait until we can get a bunch more pilots and aircraft go on board it and when you extend this kind of idea to the rest of the Japanese Navy's crewman then lessons can't really be spread around because you can't end up with circumstances of wealth let's say I was on USS yorktown or Coral Sea I saw what happened to Lexington if this if that kind of thing happens to us again now that we I'm on USS Saratoga with you loss let's make sure that that doesn't happen again here's how to do it though a lot whereas on the Japanese ships that that generally wouldn't have happened and so again procedural advantage to the US and this kind of sharing of knowledge and learning from experience was pretty vital I mean we've already covered well that's that there's a generic hypothetical example we've covered the specific example of the people aboard USS Yorktown but this kind of thing this learning and developing developing both from observing what happened to other ships and what happened to your own when your ship survived or possibly even just identifying where things had gone wrong if you survived your ship being lost this learning development redeployment etc was much more widespread amongst the US Navy so every battle where ships came back damaged or ships were lost but survivors came back the u.s. Navy would take on board the lessons generally of what happened and incorporate those lessons into revisions to its policies procedures and training for all the other ships so hopefully what happened to that ship wouldn't happen to the next ship if it was at all avoidable and this meant that although the damage control efforts on both sides were somewhat different and there was definitely an advantage in some sectors and an advantage in others depending on which Navy you were in the divide wasn't massively great at the start of the second world war but as it went on the US Navy learned very quickly so they had a small initial advantage but they built on it very very fast whereas the Japanese it took them until Midway to realize they might have to make some changes and it wasn't really until maybe a year and a half two years after that at which point it was too late really to do much of anything that the any kind of significant movement actually started to occur and so we come into our final section which is the technological part the fitting of the ship's we've mentioned already the very redundant distributed nature of the u.s. damage control systems and the fact that everything was known and tabulated so changes could be made very quickly at least after the first few lessons of the war were were learned but more generally speaking there were just a lot more smaller back up and man-portable bits of damage control equipment aboard a u.s. ship primary among these were relatively decent breathing apparatus it was flat-out better than the Japanese equivalent and there was a lot more of it which meant in turn if there was a fire by not only were you more likely to be able to see and breathe in your breathing apparatus but it was much more likely there'd be several dozen of your friends behind you waiting in turn holding the hose and if you did become overcome by heat or exhaustion they could pull you out not so much on the Japanese so things and also it meant that because of this preponderance of in this case breathing apparatus it meant that you weren't likely to lose a major chunk of your ships breathing apparatus if a section of the ship was blown up because yes that might have destroyed several dozen kit sets of it but there might be several dozen sets over there several dozen sets over there a few dozen more up on the bridge and so on as opposed to well that's 80% of our breathing apparatus gone up in smoke this could be a problem now there are other smaller aspects to this as well so again mentioned in passing previously hand portable or at least man portable petrol powered pumps now a small petrol powered pump no matter how enthusiastically it's used is not going to put out a massive fire when you've had a couple of hundred pounds of explosive go off on your ship however several of them working in concert when the main damage control system is knocked out hopefully temporarily might just buy you enough time to do the bypassing and re routing and starting up of larger generators deeper in the ship that you need to get the bigger pumps working and the bigger hoses going and the fate of the USS of Franklin is a case study here in that this is exactly what happened the initial hits knocked out pretty much all power disabled even the generators that were powering the main damage control systems and initially it was down to these hand and man portable pumps just to keep the the bow of the ship from not turning into a raging inferno if they hadn't been there and on Japanese ships they generally until the latter part of the war weren't the Franklin would have just burnt end to end and that would have been it and that would have a probably then would have been the first essex-class lost in combat they might have been me might not even have been the first if this kind of equipment wasn't there but it definitely would have been lost whereas with this equipment in place the crew were able to hold back the flames or at least [ __ ] their advance long enough for some enterprising individuals to go down and get one of the main diesel generators started up again which in then enabled part of the main damage result system to come back online which gave them a bit more of a fighting chance so add all of this together and what do you get well in very brief summary and again speaking in broad generalities that are largely correct but not absolutes please bear this in mind nothing about naval warfare is generally an absolute so there are always going to be examples of poor damage control effort on the US Navy's part there's going to be examples of very good damage control efforts on the Japanese Navy's part but in both cases they're going to be outliers but anyway in general the reason that the US Navy had superior damage control efforts can be summed up by their crew were generally more familiar with a more advanced technological equipment which allowed a much more widespread understanding of how to fix things and how to use equipment in extreme circumstances the whole crew would be trained in damage control and so whilst the loss of senior damage control officers might impede their ability to fight fire or counter flooding it would not seem he would not badly impede it to the point that the efforts to fight that fire or control that flood would effectively be almost not worth much at all the damage control equipment aboard was a lot more redundant and the people who were supposed to know were trained in how to quickly and rapidly isolate and reroute sections of this damage control equipment to ensure that parts of it still remained functional the crews were expected to show initiative to a certain degree and all pitch in in the case of damage control being needed and as we said they were all trained to at least some degree in how to actually do that and simply at the end of the day the US Navy was much quicker to learn from its mistakes and also from its successes and distribute those lessons throughout the rest of the fleet to prevent the same thing happening again now as we said this doesn't cover things like flaws in their ships designs that could contribute to the loss of the ship regardless of any other efforts and it also doesn't take into account that some ships simply were battered significantly more than others for example taking three or four torpedo strike simultaneously is going to generally be a lot more damaging to a ship than taking a single 250 pound or 500 pound bomb hit but as we have seen through sighting various examples of ships that were hit and damaged during the war you can see the general trend that was going on as we said this isn't to imply that Japanese damage control was completely useless a number of Japanese carriers were damaged survived made it back were patched up and sent back out again most of them only then to be bombed and sunk later on but that's a minor detail whereas whilst various US carriers were lost Yorktown Hornet wasp Lexington etc other carriers survived damage that by any and all account should have put them in the ground we've talked about Franklin and we have there is another video completely separate Leon frankly in itself we mentioned Bunker Hill but of course no mention of damage control in the US Navy would be complete without mentioning good old cv6 USS Enterprise if you look back through its history as I said in the video on enterprise itself and you're never quite sure whether to say the ship was incredibly lucky or incredibly unlucky because on the one hand it survived a huge amount of punishment over time and a lot of that was down to magnificent efforts by the damage control crews on the other hand a heck of a lot of a battering over the course of its career in the Second World War which kind of makes you wonder if there was a somewhat angry and vengeful if somewhat inaccurate and low powered deity desperately trying to take the thing out because yeah take a look through a detailed history of the USS Enterprise at some point and you'll see numerous cases where you'd be thinking that that should have killed the ship including at one point an entire elevator going skywards and be tempting to join its airborne brethren but yeah enterprise took a lot a lot a lot of damage and I know we focused largely on carriers in this video because one well that's partly what people were asking about and two carriers are one of those areas where both because some of them survived and others were sunken it was all relatively well chronicled it's much easier to point out the various differences and changes because they're very large ships I mean with the destroyer it doesn't matter to a fantastic extent if you are an American or Japanese destroyer outside of very very lucky circumstances if you get hit by a heavyweight torpedo you dead it's just a matter of when reality catches up with you and to and to a certain extent when you're looking at cruisers and battleships well battleships only tend to go down when you really hit them with pretty much everything that's going and so yeah that the chances for damage control aboard a battleship to make a significant difference are generally fairly slim it takes really specialist incidents like Kirishima versus south dakota for that to come to the fore cruisers are a little bit of a midway point no pun intended cruisers are just about big enough that they can reasonably survive certain amounts of damage that are thrown at them whilst also not tending to end up so much in the massive knock-down and drag-out fights that the battleships enter to end up in so we can look in those in a bit more detail in some of their respective videos but it's in perfectly honest just because of the sheer numbers and in some cases the sheer spectacular nature of the damage carries are much more easy to reference now if you want to look into this a bit or yourself there are a few pages of reference material and accounts that you can find in the book shattered sword which I highly recommend you should read anyway it's mostly an account of Midway but it provides a lot of thought a case study in a snapshot in time of the differences between the two ship sets of damage control there's a fair bit of reference material in there for damage control and some of this video was taken from that so definitely have a look at that there's also the rather wonderful handbook of damage control which is a fairly extensive text but published by the US Navy in May 1945 now obviously that's not going to tell you what - how much control procedures were like at the beginning of the Second World War but it does basically represent the culmination of US Navy thinking on damage control when you got up to the end of the Second World War and what I would then recommend is if you do have the time to read through that is to also read the reports into the loss of USS Lexington pretty much near the start of the war and then you can contrast the two and see where lessons there are in this the handbook of damage control if applied would have saved Lexington and that'll give you some idea of the sort of the major advances that were made in the wartime period by the US Navy so with that I hope you've enjoyed this video and thanks very much for listening if indeed as they say you still are that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 555,185

Keywords: wows, world of warships, WW2, USN, IJN, Damage Control, Kaga, Akagi, Lexington, Yorktown, Wasp, Franklin

Id: iC6LN3U5ELk

Length: 55min 21sec (3321 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020