Berthing On the Battleship

hi i'm ryan samanski curator for battleship new jersey museum and memorial today we are going to be looking at the various types of birthing spaces on the battleship we're currently in a pretty typical junior officer state room there are some that have more than two bunks in them but most of them are two bunks there are also some officer staterooms that are a single bunk for more senior officers we're going to look at the captains and the admirals staterooms and then we'll look at some of the enlisted birthing spaces on the ship and you'll be able to compare how they all are this is pretty middle of the road you only have to share your space with one other person hopefully they're not a snorer and you have your own fold out desk which comes with a cabinet with drawers and another cabinet for clothing and then you've got some below bed storage here as well and there's one of these uh wardrobe setups for each officer and then there's also a more full length cabinet for things like overcoats and that sort of stuff so the officers get an amount of privacy there are sheet metal partitions here to block out the passageway and the other officer's birthing spaces on either side they are not floor to ceiling there there is a gap at the top these are not considered separate spaces by the navy it's not its own separate watertight compartment it is part of the passageway technically as built the ship was designed to have joiner doors for all these spaces but as a wartime expedient they just put in curtain rods and at some point post-war they they went in and they actually added all the doors and so in the configuration you see the ship in now each state room has its own door which is able to be locked the officers each also have their own safe which is able to be locked many uh officer state rooms also have at least one porthole associated with them as a war built ship there are no portholes in the hall of the vessel but there are some in the superstructure and the officers birthing spaces are all on at least the main deck or up now the porthole in this space is how we know that these are not the original world war ii beds at some point it seems like they they swapped out some of the stuff in here some spaces still have their original world war ii outfit other ones like this one has the original world war ii sink but for whatever reason the beds are a more modern type how do we know that well you literally can't use the porthole because of the bed there is an older style double bed with a more of a pipe rack which will show you some of the unlisted pipe racks later that but that bed could be folded up so if it's say peace time and the ship doesn't have its full complement of sailors on board this might be a single use stateroom and then in wartime when you add a flag staff and all these other officers and people get bumped around then you would fold down that pipe mattress and it becomes a double use bed but at some point possibly the 1980s they decided it was just going to be a permanent two-bed stateroom and they installed the bed and completely blocked out the the porthole and you can see that also illustrates just how little room there is in here this bed is maybe seven feet and there's maybe an extra foot here so so the space is maybe a hole eight feet wide and maybe 10 or 12 feet deep but it's private and that's more than what some people get this is the late 80s admiral state room again it is part of a larger suite and this isn't the space that uh what's originally designed on this ship to be for admirals that space like we've said in the past was gutted in the early 80s and turned into the combat engagement and sscs spaces cec and sscs which have a lot of the modern 80s when the ship received an admiral again in the late 80s they took what had been a series of guest officer cabins right next to the captain's import cabin and they basically knocked out some barriers and turned it into the admiral state room this space that we're in was probably a complete guest officer cabin that was just turned into the admiral's cabinet part of his stateroom suite we've discussed the captain's cabin before in other videos so i'll be brief here this is the captain's stateroom so this is where his actual bed is his bathroom uh and specifically it is one of two that the ship currently has and three that the ship was built with so the ship has an at-sea cabin next to the bridge which is closer in size and appointment to a traditional officer's stateroom and then it has the import cabin which is where we are right now there's an actual sitting room outside of this that has a table and a silver service and its own pantry mess space attached but this is the captain's bedroom this is where he would be when the ship was in port and it's probably where he stored most of his clothes or other features uh some important things to point out here he's got significantly more uh drawer space than other staterooms he probably had more dress uniforms than the average officer even though it is the captain's cabin and was designed like this from day one it's still designed around ship required features like this 40 millimeter ammunition hoist and this was part of the original design and the space had to be built around it wood grain furnishings these are the normal sheet metal type cabinetry that you see in other spaces but rather than being painted equipment gray like everywhere else they're painted wood grain traditionally a space like this would be more lavishly appointed than other spaces on the ship this is where the captain would be entertaining foreign dignitaries maybe not in his bedroom but in the rest of the state room out there and so traditionally it would be pretty fancy on old sailing ships the captain would provide their own furnishings for the space by the time we get into modern ships the furnishings tend to be built specifically to the space available so for example if you go over to the cruiser olympia on the other side of the river from us she has wooden furnishings they weren't provided by each captain they were cut into the shape of the ship so they could fit in the various alcoves and whatnot so there you see the tradition start to evolve world war ii era ships the pre-war ones still tended to be equipped with a lot of wooden furnishings that were nice and fancy and we found out at both pearl harbor and guadalcanal that those furnishings burn so by the time new jersey enters service they've gotten rid of the wood furniture metal uh but you never let progress get in the way of tradition they're still painted with the fancy wood grain uh and it actually looks pretty convincing until you look at the pop rivets the other officer who has a large amount of space in addition to the admiral and the captain is the ship's executive officer this is his stateroom and he's also got another area aft of this which was more of an office space the executive officer was second in charge on the ship and he was in charge of the ship's crew and the ward room the other officers on board and so he uh dealt with a lot of disciplinarian stuff and often had to call sailors to his space so because of that and because by the 1980s at the end of the ship's career the executive officer was often a captain in his own right just like the commanding officer of the ship their space is pretty large and well appointed enlisted birthing is very different now than it was when the ship was built as built there were what are called pipe racks like these suspended from the overhead these have a wire mesh box spring in them the world war ii ones may have had a canvas sheet stretched out there instead it really depended on where and and what model of these they were these are not original to the ship they were stripped off of another vessel so that we could have something to put on display through world war ii korea and vietnam the period when we were drafting sailors onto the ship these were the types of beds we used they can be folded up so you can stuff more into spaces there may have even been some in the mess deck spaces for when the ship's crew was really large and they could be stacked really high here we've got a row of three but it wouldn't be uncommon in spaces to see four or five stack together a common anecdote from world war ii is there isn't enough room for a sailor to roll over onto their side they have to get out of the bunk flip 180 and then get back into the bunk if they need to roll over at night because these accommodations are fairly spartan in the 1980s by the point we have in all volunteer military they get rid of a lot of these or they get rid of all of these pipe racks on the ship they reconfigure all the birthing spaces to have what are called the coffin racks that we'll see later that have both more room for storing personal effects and um believe it or not more room for the sailor and a little bit more privacy in addition to these racks which have no storage on them there was also a large approximately three foot cubed aluminum locker that each sailor would have some examples of those are still on board this ship it seems like when they were being stripped off in the 1980s some departments grabbed a couple to continue to use in new ways but there aren't any in the birthing spaces anymore as you can see in the 1980s when the coffin racks were installed individual sailors had more space and slightly more privacy than when uh the pipe racks were here the ship's crew had also been reduced by at least 25 by that point uh so there was more room for each sailor but as you can see much like the captain's cabin this five-inch dredger hoist cuts right through the middle of space and everything has to be worked in around it the coffin rack is still in use on some contemporary ships today and is about the amount of space you could expect if you were a sailor joining the navy today living on board a ship in the modern navy tends to be slightly less communal than today on new jersey the entire f or the entire gm division which uh involves a lot of the fire control men for the five inch guns i believe would have been birthed in and around this space at least the lower ratings people like chief petty officers might have had other spaces and the first class fcs might have had another space around here but all of your second and third class and non-rates would have been birthed in this big room on modern ships they tend to be closer to state rooms that would just have six or eight people in them as opposed to this huge communal living area this lack of privacy may also be one of the reasons why even though the navy started to transition into mixed genders assigned to ships that the battleships were never modified to receive female crew members uh early on individual birthing spaces were converted to females and each birthing space tends to have a head associated with it so that became the female head on these ships the birthing space is right in the middle of a passageway there there's no way to divide it off particularly well there are certainly spaces that can be divided on here but it wasn't worth the trouble on this ship especially since female serving on board was a fairly new thing that hadn't been entirely uh rolled out yet for the broader navy it was just beginning to be rolled out had these ships served into the 2000s you might have seen a massive reworking of the inside of these vessels to accommodate for that uh but that's a big if you'll notice the coffin racks are enclosed on three sides and most of them have a roof or relatively protected on the top protected in terms of privacy and light not necessarily armor protection of any sort it's all sheet metal and they also have a pair of curtains that these racks do not have but could be used to enclose the inside they all have their own light so that you could do reading they tend to have a towel rack they also can be opened up there's storage space inside there's a drawer inside and in addition to this storage space there are also lockers like these so each sailor gets both by the 1980s uh sailors were allowed to bring civilian clothes onto their vessels for when they're on liberty during world war ii that was not allowed so they didn't need as much storage space but all volunteer military you get some of this it's interesting these racks are slightly different on battleship new jersey than say even battleship wisconsin which was reactivated about six years after new jersey on new jersey eebd's like these things right here emergency escape breathing devices were added by basically just bolting them on anywhere you could find room on wisconsin they're built into the racks so each bed comes with its own eebd the eebd or emergency escape breathing device was installed aboard american navy ships following british experience during the falklands war in the early 80s in which the massive amounts of plastics and polyesters on board modern vessels tended to when they ignited create fumes smoke uh even to a greater extent than the insulation and paint and other stuff that can burn on the ship like this and uh so sailors a number of sailors on those british ships asphyxiated in their birthing compartments unable to get out so the eebd has about 15 minutes worth of air in it and it's a hood you put on that should be just enough to get you out of your birthing space and into fresh air or another safe part of the ship after that british experience the united states very much looked the lessons learned during that war and incorporated into our own ships which in the case of this one which was already in commission they just bolted those metal boxes all over the place for future ships like the battleship wisconsin which had not been put into the commission yet they built them right into the racks another cool feature about the racks on this ship is we have managed to preserve the stenciling from the original crew in this case these are the final crew the sailors who were assigned these racks in 1991 when the ship was decommissioned many places throughout the ship you'll be able to see their names stenciled or taped on there and you might even see some of the stickers and things that they left on their space if you want to try out one of these coffin racks make sure you schedule an encampment on board right now we're filming this in january 2021 we aren't currently doing any but keep checking our website our encampment program is huge sometimes somewhere around 10 000 scouts every year spend the night on board and you get to sleep in racks like this one original to the ship if you'd like to support the restoration of this vessel we're always looking for donations to get new blankets pillows curtains for these racks these are some of the ones that are on the tour route and you can see and you can test out when you come and visit and they're dressed up pretty nicely but not all of them are if you would like to donate to that there's a link in the description you can go to and specifically mention with your donation that that's what you'd like the money to go to as always remember to leave any comments or questions in the comments section down below we're pretty good about getting back to you the battleship receives operating support from the new jersey department of state but also from viewers like yourselves if you would like to donate to the museum and to our youtube channel in particular there's a link in the description your donations allow us to make multiple videos per week so remember to like share and subscribe so you're notified when all those videos come out thanks for watching

Channel: Battleship New Jersey

Views: 225,564

Rating: 4.8905859 out of 5

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Id: ZGflmXIzmxU

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021