Down to the Battleship's Keel

hi i'm ryan simanski curator for battleship new jersey museum and memorial today we're going to do a little bit of exploration and go and find the one place on the ship where you can see our keel and we're going to talk a little bit about the different structures we find and features of the ship as we go down as you can see we're on second deck just forward of cruise mass so we're just aft of the chow serving line the bar bet for turret number three is right here and you can tell we're at the aft end of the six-inch thick armored deck because of this step right through the door that is the end of the armor where it steps down to uh regular sized metal so we're going to go through the main armored deck and talk about what we find on our way down we're going to go through some of the shaft alleys and take you to the one place on the ship where you can see the keel we've already gone through the shaft alleys and if you've watched that video you may have inadvertently seen the keel but we didn't know what it was at the time anyway iowa class battleships have a triple bottom defense that helps against explosions underwater and the keel ends up between that so it's normally out of sight out of mind but this one place access to the shaft alleys has the keel the aft end of the keel visible for those of you who don't know the keel is basically the spine of the ship it's the first thing that you begin construction with you know if you look at a wikipedia article read any book about a ship it'll say keel laid on this date that's when construction officially starts there's usually a ceremony and then they go from there so we're going to find potentially one of the oldest parts of the ship and as normal with our videos the stuff we're going to see here is mostly off of the tour route so stuff you can only see by slogging through these videos where we are here on this channel serving line and cruise mess is on the tour route but as we go down this hatch to marine corps birthing and below we're leaving the the tour out so come along and watch your step here on the six inch hatch so i feel like i talk about armor a lot but for those of you who are just starting with the channel armor is so heavy that you can't afford to armor your whole battleship so battleship new jersey has an armored citadel and that's where all the important stuff is all of the magazines all of the engineering spaces anything like that is inside the armored citadel unimportant stuff like cruise mass the captain's cabin most of the birthing spaces are outside of the armored citadel the theory is that if the rest of your unarmored ship is shot to pieces you've got enough reserve of buoyancy here in the citadel that you can stay afloat and all the critical functions sailing and gunnery to stay in the fight iowa class battleships use a multi-layered defense throughout their armor scheme so we've got an inch and a half thick main deck above us and then the six inch armored deck and then a splinter deck below that the idea here is the main deck will set off high explosive bombs up there so that it's only the shrapnel hitting the armored deck and it will decap armor piercing explosives bombs or shells coming in at a steep angle so that by the time they hit the main armored deck they're going to have a reduced effectiveness and they probably won't be able to punch through the six-inch class b armor however armor plating is brittle so even though the shell will bounce off and explode harmlessly up here in the galley you'll get what's called spalling which is basically splinters that break off of the inside of the armor from it being so brittle so that's why beneath us there is a super thin super elastic about 5 8 of an inch thick splinter deck which is designed to catch those splinters and bend rather than breaking or shattering and allowing those splinters through to the important stuff underneath so i just talked about how the splinter deck is 30 inches below the armored deck well that's true for all of the area between the gun turrets it's not true when you come aft of turret 3 which is where we're standing now turret 3 is there marine corps birthing on the starboard side is through there so also down here are a series of storage spaces and eventually magazines and to form a splinter protection over those magazines we have the deck here which is approximately an inch or 25 millimeters thick special treatment steel so that'll stop anything that punches through up above us and these storage spaces are crammed into the angles between the bar bet the side of the ship back through there and uh this bulkhead here this is the aft armored bulkhead so on iowa and new jersey it's about 11 inches thick on missouri and wisconsin it's 14 inches thick back aft here the armored bulkhead is only one story tall and then here you can see some of the structure that mounts the deck to it it continues going that way instead of being the roof of third decades and now the roof of fourth deck or the floor of third deck and it is a little bit thicker at seven inches instead of six and it covers all of the refrigeration spaces and half steering so that's the armored box around half steering that just also adds a little bit more buoyancy to the citadel obviously we can't go through there so there's only one way to go down before we do that you'll notice that we've got a ladder and a ladder they're both called ladders but a more traditional stairway and a straight up vertical ladder this hatch is for loading ammunition the 16-inch magazines are beneath us for turret 3. so this ladder is just pinned in place basically the chain railings can be removed the bolts or pins at the top and bottom can be removed and then that's out of the way and you can lower shells straight down you've got a straight shot through the ship and if in the process of loading shells you also have to get some people down there still got a ladder so here we go all right so now we are on fourth deck in the same trunk and let's just go through some of these magazine spaces here because we probably won't come back here anytime soon so first off really cool the idea above my head this is an original world war ii globe type light fixture there's a gasket in here so this is more or less watertight so it can function even if the space is flooded or flooding or because we're in the magazines if that light bulb glass breaks and you still have an arc between your filament in there you're not going to start any fires so there aren't too many of these around most of them were removed when they replaced the incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent fixtures so that's a cool find we've got the counterweight for the hatch overhead all the hatches are supposed to be accessible by one person so the fact that that's an inch thick of armor plate means it's a little heavy for that so it's counterweighted and attached by a greased cable there we'll go into those rooms in a minute but first let's start this way so this room we know for a couple of reasons that it has to be a magazine first off there is a lock on the door you see this box you can put a lock in here nobody can use bolt cutters on it when you come into this space you can see that there is a chill water refrigeration system in the overheads a chill water radiator and then you've got the typical magazine storage brackets in this instance this would be the marines small arms ammunition magazine i'm not sure if it was always that but by the 1980s with the marines living directly ahead above us on third deck a lot of these spaces around terra 3 were converted to or maybe they'd always been that way but at the very least they were converted to marine corps stores of various types also interesting here you can see the radius of the barbette uh which now that we're inside the armored part of the ship has dropped down in thickness and you can see this frame you can't really weld the deck to the bar bat so you've got a frame here around the bar bat it's not attached uh that you can mount all of your decks above too it's got to be pretty beefy because that is a one-inch thick armored deck up there so if we come back out of here and close this door for here so if you are following us on your blueprints where we are the blueprints show this as an unassigned space well there's no freaking thing as an unassigned space on a ship if there's an empty room somebody is going to put stuff in it and in the case of this space it's not set up to be a magazine although we do have a globetype fixture here you can see the watertight gasket i was telling you about they've done an authorized unauthorized shipboard and they've added a pipe here so my guess is this space was taken over by the mardet their magazines right there and used for probably uniform storage so maybe they hung all of their class a uniforms down here there isn't really room for that sort of stuff in their lockers and those have to be pressed and starched and whatnot so you're not going to fold them up somewhere or potentially it's something like their heavy coats rain gear some something like that their uh whatever pattern of m65 jackets they were being uh authorized in the 80s so some sort of uniform storage is my bet for this unauthorized space so if you got your mag your uh blueprints printed out at home scratch that out and write that right in uh what actually was here or wait a little bit until our volunteer john miano prints his book which is going to show you the complete blueprints of the ship as she was at the end of her career with all of these unassigned spaces filled in now let's head over to the other side so behind me is the g4 divisions space it's not a magazine it doesn't have one of those lock boxes on the door it doesn't have a sprinkler system in the overhead it does have more of that support structure under the bar bet so the gunnery divisions on board g one through three were the various 16 inch turrets so g1 was turret one g3 was turret three g4 and five were the port and starboard five inch gun batteries so they each have a storeroom and since this isn't a magazine it was probably spare parts or it might have been personnel equipment uh stuff like that uh so it seems like another unassigned space that the gunnery division claimed because these are magazines down here um and because we're beneath marine corps birthing it makes sense that the various gunnery divisions or marines would be claiming these spaces then we come into this space and we do have one of these lock boxes and we do have the chill water radiators in the overhead so it is another magazine and you can see the storage area here this is where all of the 50 caliber ammunition was stored and it looks like in the 80s the 50 cals were also manned by the g4 division so maybe that space over there was spare parts for the 50 cals and this was where the actual ammunition was stored interestingly when the 50 cals weren't mounted on deck they were not stored in either of these spaces we're not seeing the brackets for that they must have been kept elsewhere oh here's another interesting feature a watchman's key station and this has just been through bolted into the door here open that up room in there for a key when the ship was in mothballs probably from 91 to 99 this would have been added so that whoever the watchman was who had to go around and inspect things would have to take something out of this and mark their checklist saying that they were here or maybe this is where the key was to the locked door so they could stick their head in and make sure none of the plumbing was leaking or anything like that so so that is a vestige of the ship's moth ball time prior to being turned into a museum all right so let's go down again this time from fourth deck to fifth deck going through this door you're in the annular space and through the next door into the base of turret 3 where the powder handling takes place over here is the pyrotechnics locker that is another fourth division storage space and pyrotechnics would be things like signal flares interesting that it's a gunnery division in charge of that and not the signalman that's what that is and then coming in through here we have the 16 inch handling equipment storeroom so here you can see the various carts that are used for moving the 16 inch shelves or the aluminum canisters that would hold the powder bags you can also see the brackets that the shells would be mounted in when they're being lowered you can see the the straps that would have been used and in this big triple wall box over here we've got all of the mounting brackets and hoists that would have gone on the various rails around the ship like this one in the overhead usually they're painted white but the rails that are used to actually sling this stuff up and move it from space to space this is interesting uh there's also some hooks for grabbing things interestingly this space does have the chilled water radiator system in the overhead so it seems like it was originally set up to be a 16 inch magazine and at some point they mounted these aluminum brackets which notice they've got the profile on them for the wheels for these carts to be mounted these carts have been pulled out to be on the tour route so you can actually see them in use with a shell or a powder canister on them which is why they're empty but at some point it was changed into the handling equipment storeroom from a magazine so who knows where this stuff would have lived early on they couldn't do it without it and they definitely didn't make any of this stuff in the 80s it's all original so check out if you guys find some world war ii booklet general plans go through it and see if you can find where this equipment would have been stored so let's head down to sixth deck and we'll actually be in the shaft alleys all right so now we're at the shaft alleys some of this stuff is going to duplicate that video you should definitely go back and watch that video if you haven't seen it yet but we'll cover it briefly first off check out this beautiful watertight door look at all of this gearing here needs to be greased look at that mechanism great depression era technology and this door is three inches thick so the rest of the shaft alley stuff out there is not armored but it seems like this bulkhead leading into number two thrust bearing is why is that because propeller shaft goes through a gland seal in the back of the ship here and passes out into the ocean so if that leaks and this space floods you want a really good watertight bulkhead between yourself and the rest of the ship so here is the number two thrust block uh basically this exists so that the propeller biting into the water and pushing the ship forward is not just pushing the engine block forward a couple hundred feet forward of us in the ship it is transmitted into this thrust block which is bolted into the ship's structure so it is pushing the whole ship and not just its engine here we've got a coupling so the propeller shaft is made in sections uh and those sections can be taken apart if we need if we suffer damage we can take this apart and see we got a pipe vise here that's nice here we are in the bilges bone dry just like i like to see but this is the aft gland seal so this is stuffed with packing and that would be changed periodically usually in dry dock and if it doesn't get changed then it starts to leak here into the bilge you can see some of the modern float switches that we have installed where if this does leak obviously i don't come down here and inspect the space often but if it does leak well then we get a signal about it and we can come down inspect it figure out what's going on it's a nice old vise that's probably been down here all along so where we actually want to go we are on the starboard side of the ship number two thrust is the inboard one so we want to go through that little door right there and i'm gonna have to ride this shaft to get there oh that's not attached all right how did we do this last time first all right so the keel is essentially an i-beam that's about four feet tall down here i'm standing on the bottom of that iv and that is part of the shell plating of the ship it's about an inch thick you can see where the shell plate and going out to the starboard side is riveted right on top of it and the next shell plate is riveted underneath and then they continue alternating like that this center bulkhead forms the spine of the i-beam and then this plate i believe is the tail end of the top of that heel plate you can see it continues right through here before going through that bulkhead and running about 800 feet forward where it is inside of the triple bottom and so inaccessible and this area here is the only place where you can view it it's mirrored on the opposite side and you'll notice all of the walls and oval doors cut into them these tanks or really void spaces do not have doors they're not designed to be separately watertight however because this is holding the entire weight of the stern from the keel up it's heavily subdivided with these approximately half inch steel bulkheads which support all of the structure above it now you're probably going to say oh but ryan the keel are on the sides of the outside of the ship you can see whenever you're in dry dock so those are bilge keels and they help stabilize the ship side to side as she rocks those are not the actual keel the spine of the ship which has all of the load-bearing elements from when the ship is first built thank you guys for watching we're not going to keep you on film for our undignified escape from this void so what's your favorite design element of the iowa class battleships let us know in the comment section down below do you think you could do a tank crawl like this or are you just living vicariously through us battleship new jersey receives operating support from the new jersey department of state also from other businesses and viewers like yourselves and the support from you guys is what has allowed us to make many of these videos prior to your donations we were only making one video a week and now we create up to five videos a week so if you would like to continue to support us so we can keep making this a larger part of our jobs there's a link in the description below for ways you can donate also remember to like share and subscribe so that you're notified when new content goes up thanks for watching

Channel: Battleship New Jersey

Views: 338,809

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Id: R0ci4I-LvLY

Length: 24min 20sec (1460 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021