HMS Vanguard - Guide 132 (Extended Look)

[Music] [Music] so a slightly more detailed look at HMS Vanguard as we said in the five-minute guide in the late 1930s the Royal Navy had started work on the lion class of battleship but in 1939 at the beginning of the year a document was circulated that proposed the use of old naval heavy guns in storage for a single new construction battleship to try and leapfrog what they perceived as being a significant gap in combat capability opening up due to the increasing possibility of a two-front war against Germany and Japan whilst at least in capital ship terms the German naval building effort wasn't given all that much thought there were a few points raised against the construction of the ship firstly the possibility that constructing another battleship might simply encourage Japan to build another one which kind of lands you back up at square one second there was some question as to the wisdom of putting old guns on a new ship third there was some issue of interoperability as the proposed new ship would have very little in common with the rest of the fleet with the possible exception of hood if she received her own refit fourthly there was also the possibility that although the main guns would be easy to come across the secondary guns which would obviously most likely be 5 point 2 5 inch weapons might be somewhat hard to come across as they were already supply issues experienced in supplying both the King George the fifth and Edo class cruisers lastly of course was manpower because it's all very well having infinite numbers of battleships if you don't have infinite numbers of men yet to put on them nevertheless the director of naval construction replied to the note within a week stating that assuming that everything went well such a ship could be constructed from the beginning to the end in about three and a half years which was pretty good going for a capital ship that's going to tip the scales at well over 35,000 tons three initial designs were prepared 15 a 15 B and 15 C the first two were improvements on the king george v class hull whilst the last was an improvement on the lion class design they ranged in displacement from 38,000 40,000 tonnes and in length from 775 feet to 805 feet with 15 P and 15 C having a beam 1 foot wider than 15a at 105 feet the two latter designs also drew 9-foot more on the draft with the 29 foot and 9 inch draft compared to 15a and required a significantly greater power plant as a result 15a needing 110,000 horsepower for 29 knots 15 be needing 143 thousand horsepower for 29 and 1/4 knots and 15 C somewhere in the middle at 130,000 horsepower but only being able to make 28 and 1/4 knots as a result all of them would have a range of 14,000 nautical miles at 10 knots and have a complement of around 1,600 men a slightly larger revised version called 15 d with a displacement of 40 1,200 tons a maximum length of 809 feet a beam of 105 feet 6 inches a draught of between 30 and 33 feet 130,000 shaft horsepower and a speed of up to 30 and a quarter knots was chosen with the secondary battery rather unsurprisingly being nominated as 16 5.25 inch guns in twin turrets are the same as was planned for lion and had been installed on king george v the rest of 1939 was occupied with looking at further changes to the design including one proposal to fit a bow rudder or at least a rudder fairly near the bow just in case the stern rudders were disabled in some manner a proposal that would actually prove fairly prophetic given the outcome of various ship jewels in the Second World War but this design requirement was dropped after it was showed in hydrodynamic testing that the bow rudders efficiency probably wouldn't be anywhere near as close as what was imagined by net May 1940 it had become clear that design 15 D was the favored one and it was given instructions to proceed and develop further however by June work was temporarily suspended then started again in October over uncertainties as to whether any battleship construction during what was eventually going to become the Second World War would actually be worthwhile when design development resumed further modifications were made including the removal of any and all aircraft equipment and hangars and by April 1941 the final version 15 e was given the go-ahead to start construction 15 e had added 400 tons to overall standard displacement as well as almost four feet to the standard draft with draft now sitting at 33 feet with the bow thirty-two feet six inches above the water thanks to the enhanced shear and flair designed to cope with Atlantic weather after the rather interesting experiences of being in King George the fifths a turret during heavy weather this resulting from an old requirement for the battleships main armament to be able to fire at a negative three degree elevation across the bow the armament planned at this stage was of course the eight 15-inch guns at the sixteen 5.25 inch guns and then a light to medium anti-aircraft armament of 12 20 millimeter Allah Khan's a single 40 millimeter pompom cannon and six octuple pompom mounts although the ship was laid down and work begun work almost immediately slowed to a crawl as demands for light escort ships and minesweepers became paramount in the Royal Navy's vision as summer 1942 rolled around and with the carrier HMS implacable almost finished nearby there was some thought given to converting Vanguard into an aircraft carrier herself however neither the First Sea Lord nor the Prime Minister were especially convinced and where in fact is set exceptionally opposed to the idea and the suggestion was dropped the fact that by mid 1942 the Royal Navy was down five capital ships probably helped with that decision however lessons from the loss of HMS Prince of Wales at the end of the previous year were beginning to filter through and so with Vanguard construction still proceeding as nails pace the opportunity was taken to revise the design again and introduced new and improved features these included converting storerooms into closely subdivided watertight compartments to enhance the underwater protection raising the ammunition transfer positions of some of the five point two five inch turrets to ensure that they would remain operational in the face of considerable underwater and belt level damage protected access passageways to various vital parts of the ship were to be kept within the citadel wherever possible and there was to be a substantial reduction in the number of water ejecting scuttles below the weather deck beyond this a significant number of other additions were made including an increase in the number of diesel generators an increase in the sheer of the boughs the addition of another radar set the omission of all stowage of petrol as this has proven highly flammable with all ships boats to now be diesel driven an increase in the amount of oil fuel that will be carried a redesign of the machinery for most economic performance at higher power this included the deletion of cruising turbines which would simply be deadweight if the ship was going to move at high speeds and most of the time the addition of extra 20-millimeter Oerlikons extra fittings for use as a fleet flagship introduction of directors for Knight firing control of the secondary armament edition of sonar then called as dick increased longitudinal separation of the inner and outer propellers to avoid an incident similar to Prince of Wales more splinter protection on the sides of the magazines moving the sickbay to be well below the armor at least in part an additional breakwater immediately in front of the foremost turret just in case the increased shear wasn't enough to keep the water away from the guns and a significant increase in the amount of anti-aircraft ammunition provided for the light and medium AAA all of these changes were making the battleship even larger with his 1942 configuration now sitting at 42,000 300 tons an increase of 700 tons compared to its authorized design in 1941 the overall length had increased by 4 feet thanks to the increased shear on the bow the free board forwards had gone up just over 4 feet again as a result of the increased bow shear draft had increased by 10 inches and there are another three octuple 40 millimeter guns to be installed eventually after another two years of the 30th of november 1944 would arrive and the Britain's newest battleship was ready to launch the then Princess Elizabeth would undertake the launch duties as her first official engagement using a bottle of red wine instead of the perhaps more traditional champagne and she would say at the time this will always serve to remind me that the first important public duty I ever undertook was a naval occasion despite being a noteworthy and important occasion quite a few strict rules were imposed on reporting for the launch including that press reports could not mention anything regarding the ship's name nothing was to be said about the type or class of the vessel but apart from the fact that she was a battleship and she was being launched in a northern shipyard they could take as many photographs as they liked but that any photo that was taken for immediate release should not include any person that would indicate the location of the shipyard after the launch the Royal guests would pose for photographs but shipyard personnel would not be included again for security purposes and photographs that were taken that showed the ship in significant detail had to be filed away for possible publication at a later date this led to the rather amusing first paragraph in The Times a couple of days later regarding the unknown shipyard saying princesses Elizabeth came here recently to name and launch our newest battleship the greatest battleship yet built here in the British Isles but the ship's name type and class awful the present secret with little else to say the article then went on mainly to describe how important it was for Princess Elizabeth and how nice her new royal pennant was with all the many in various design changes that had occurred both in 1941 and 1942 and even after that Vanguard as completed would displace forty-five thousand one hundred and sixteen tons light load fifty one thousand four hundred and ten tons deep load her overall length was now eight hundred and fourteen feet four inches and an eighth her beam had been increased to one hundred and eight feet to incorporate additional anti-torpedo protection her draft was now 32 feet and 8 inches a free board with thirty six foot eight inches forward 23 foot amidships and twenty five foot six inches aft the armament of course consisted of eight 15-inch 42 calibre guns in four twin turrets to super flying forward and to aft there were sixteen improved 5.25 inch guns in eight twin turrets in four super firing pairs with with two pairs of turrets per side the rest of her anti-aircraft armament had undergone a radical redesign during construction and the ship completed without a single pom-pom Oerlikon in sight instead being equipped with ten six barrel 40 millimeter mark six Bofors mounts these were positioned with two mounts either side of the forward superstructure one mount either side of the second funnel - one mount either side of the aft superstructure one on the end of the aft superstructure and one right at the back of a ship there was a single twin 40-millimeter Bofors mount which sat happily atop of b turret and of course eleven single 40 millimeter mounts with one either side of b turret or mounted on the superstructure to support a to starboard v on the quarterdeck to either side of X turret and three just to the aft of Y turret the main elements of the armor protection consisted of an armor belt that was 14 inches thick over the magazines 13 inches thick over the machinery the armored ends outside the Citadel were 13 inches thick trending down to 11 the bulkheads were 12 inches thick that's the transverse bulkheads protecting fore and aft the turrets had been upgraded to have thirteen inch thick faces with 9 inch sides thinning down to 7 10 inch plate at the rear and a six inch plate on the roof the bar bets had 13 inches of armor with the secondary casements shields and turret mounts for the five point two five inch guns having two and a half inches of armor themselves the horizontal armor consisted of six inches of armor over the magazine's five inches over the machinery and 5 inches trending down to two and a half inches over the rest of the ship eight Admiralty 3 drum boilers produced a hundred and thirty thousand horsepower which in theory gave the ship a top speed of 30 knots these drove all propellers we the inner two propellers having five blades and the outer two propellers having three blades in common with the lion class design and unlike her King George the fifth class predecessors a vanguard would have a flat or transom Stern this removed the drag of any hull that would extend past the rudder post on more conventional designs but also added an additional feature because the stern wave formed by the wake of the ship on both sides meeting again actually traveled faster than the ship itself which is a rather interesting hydrodynamic effect and with a flat Stern this wave actually pushed against the back of the ship helping it to promote even faster through the water the main armament itself had obviously been significantly upgraded as we mentioned earlier the turrets had been given a substantially better protection but in addition to this numerous extra anti-flash precautions had been added the original 15-foot rangefinders equipped on each turret were replaced by much larger 30-foot range finders the gun turret openings for the guns were cut further ha up to allow the guns to elevate to 30 degrees the interior of the turret was completely reworked to make them power controlled and power trained and of course the guns themselves were checked tested and fittings provided to allow the firing of super charges this was all further complicated by the fact that the design for British battleships in the first world war had had the magazine's above of the shell roms and this is what the turrets for glorious and courageous had been built with in mind however the wartime experience had proven that the other way around was in fact better and all subsequent classes of Royal Navy battleship the Nelsons and the King George 2/5 had of course had the magazine's underneath the shell rooms so all of this needed to be changed as well whilst the turrets may have come from courageous and glorious the 15-inch guns themselves were taken from a spare pool that had been built up for the Royal Sovereign and Queen Elizabeth glasses with the ship fitting out at the end of the Second World War numerous wartime lessons were incorporated for example the fire control system for the main turrets consisted of two control towers but where as on previous ships you might have had one forward which controlled the entire main armament and then to secondary controllers which would control the forward or aft guns respectively on Vanguard there were two full director towers complete with radar range finders fire control systems etc each entirely capable of operating the ship's entire main battery so that in the event of the catastrophic destruction of one the ship's ability to fire its guns in reply would not be impaired recognizing excellence where they saw it the Royal Navy bought for mark 37 fire control systems from America and positioned them in a diamond formation to control the five point two five inch heavy a a secondary battery rather unsurprisingly this as well as the modifications to the guns and their turrets turned the Vanguard secondary battery into an excellent long-range effectively anti-aircraft sniper system similar modifications carried out on the existing five point two five inch armament of the King George the fifth class we're having remarkable results even as Vanguard was fitting out in the Pacific Theater with a number of Japanese aircraft who thought they were well clear of the 5-inch 38 umbrella formed by the American Pacific Fleet being somewhat surprised at being blown out of the sky by radar and mark 37 directed five point two five inch fire from the British ships as the one downside of the 5-inch 38 at this point was that it's short barrel which had rendered it much more effective than longer and heavier and more unwieldy anti-aircraft guns for most of the war was now being superseded by the 50 caliber barrel of the five point two five inch and other guns then under development as radar and powered control now meant that these guns could be pointed directly at aircraft and expected to hit as opposed to simply needing to throw out the fastest barrage possible all the 40 millimeter anti-aircraft mounts were fully electrically powered with the twin barrel mount and all of these six barrel mounts additionally carrying a type 262 radar for fire control with the six barrel mounts also carrying a close-range blind fire director which would allow them to operate even if the crew could see nothing this would avoid the problem that had occurred on Prince of Wales and a number of other ships on all sides during the Second World War where a couple of good hits to certain fire control systems could disable the effective fire capability of practically the entire ship's anti-aircraft battery now with Vanguard's fitting you could knock out any single fire control system or gun turret or gun mount that made up the ship's anti-aircraft protection and that was all you would accomplish the rest of the anti-aircraft battery would continue to hammer away at you quite happily under electric power control and radar direction with the armor belt it had been desired to keep protection as per the king george v and lions namely a 15-inch maximum thickness however due to the addition of the extra turret the belt had to be significantly longer and this in turn meant that a reduction at to 14 inches had to be accepted to prevent speed dropping significantly or overall displacement going up ridiculously of the ship's displacement 15,000 265 tons of it was made up of armor plate against her own armament Vanguard was considered proof to deck penetration out to 31,000 yards and proof to side belt penetration down to 15,000 yards just in case of aerial attack the deck was also rated as being able to stop a thousand-pound bomb dropped from 14,000 feet the torpedo defense system was triple layered with various thicknesses of bulkhead running the length of the ship and amidships there was a fourth bulkhead layer designed to prevent water entering the Citadel when under significant torpedo attack the system was tested and rated against a thousand-pound TNT warhead this additional bulkhead was again drawn from the lessons learned from the loss of Prince of Wales designed to prevent any water seepage entering the engine or boiler rooms should a torpedo hit in this location the five bladed propellers on the inner shaft were as a result of an early test run which had showed some rather interesting vibrations at high speed which were eventually traced back to the original three-bladed propellers on the inner shafts hence the replacement with the war over by the time she'd finished preliminary fitting out significant acceptance trials could be conducted and it was found that she could achieve just over her design speed we attaining an amine speed of thirty point three seven nine knots averaged over six runs at a displacement of just over 51,000 tonnes no cheating light loads for this particular ship her ability to turn however was not the best due to the exceptionally long hull involved her tactical diameter was slightly greater than the King George the fifth at nine hundred and forty yards this compared fairly unfavorably with the 565 yard tactical diameter of the North Carolina class USS Washington or the 670 yard tactical diameter of HMS Rodney but compared relatively well with the tactical diameter of the battle cruisers renowned and hood with renowned needing a thousand and two yards to complete a full rotation and hood having needed twelve hundred and forty yards to achieve the same the ship's sensors were quite extensive with a whole array of radar arrays fitted as follows there was a type 960 aircraft warning radar a type 293 target indicator radar a type 277 radar for looking out for surface craft and for finding height of targets a type 2 6 8 radar which was also tasked with finding surface craft 2 type 2 7 for sets for the main 15-inch armament one of each in the director towers a type 930 radar set which spotted full of shot and was tied in with the type 2 7 fours four sets of type 2 7 5 radar each directing a pair of 5.2 5-inch turrets and of course the seven type 2 6 2 Raiders sets associated with each of the sextuple 40-millimeter Bofors mounts and the twin mount a bound board B turret almost immediately however it became known that the vanguard was to be used as a royal yacht for a visit to South Africa in 1947 and so after some trials it was almost immediately back into the dockyard where there were a number of significant changes made to the interior decor of the rear superstructures cabins and with the extra weight that resulted from this as well as the addition of the royal party all its staff and the extra picture fixtures and fittings a number of the 40 millimeter mounts were removed including unfortunately the rather jaunty twin mount aboard B turret which had to make way for a small viewing gallery as time went on over the 1950s further 40 millimeter armament would gradually be removed as it was felt to no longer be useful in the anti-aircraft role with the advances in speed and durability as well of jet aircraft as well as the range of their weapons however the era of the battleship was rapidly drawing to a close in most quarters and Vanguard was used mostly in a training capacity in the early 1950s before being placed in high reserve in at 1955 she was given a partial refit but then basically left to sit side hrs how until by 1959 it was finally decided to scrap her there was however a last-gasp attempt by various people to try and see her preserved as a museum ship led by the First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Frederick Barnum he got very close forcing the director of naval construction to give him a full account as to why it might not be possible unfortunately at the end of his December 1959 said to director pointed out that it would cost about as much to maintain the Vanguard as in operational reserve as it would to keep her running as a museum ship whether or not these estimates were entirely accurate they proved to be the final nail in the coffin over the Vanguard's career despite a significant amount public interest being generated in having her permanently moored alongside HMS victory in Portsmouth which would have to be honest I've been a rather magnificent sight although ultimately destined for break up in fast lane as she was towed out of Portsmouth she would show one last item of defiance in slipping her toe and going aground near South Sea Castle a rather amusing picture exists of Vanguard on its way away from the tug with the anchor deployed in a desperate attempt to slow her down but it didn't quite work unfortunately unlike Warspite she didn't stick fast and they were able to pull her off and take her up to fast lane where should then be broken up over the course of the next year this brought an end to the advent of battleships in the Royal Navy and left the only operational battleships in the world as the iowa-class of the US Navy until their eventual decommissioning in the 1990s and early 2000s 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: 541,686

Keywords: wows, world of warships, HMS Vanguard, Lion class, World War 2, battleship, Cold War, Last Battleship, 15 inch gun, King George V class, Princess Elizabeth

Id: sKx11kxkYww

Length: 27min 17sec (1637 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 20 2019