How Well Does the Battleship Do in a Storm?

hi i'm ryan samanski curator for battleship new jersey museum and memorial and today we're going to talk a little bit about the various typhoons that the ship sailed through and also about sea keeping how well were the iowa class battleships out at it and what are some things that affect it this video was specifically requested by a viewer and again we we don't uh use the names in this video for privacy's sake but you know who you are uh it costs us roughly fifty dollars to shoot a video so if you've got an idea that you would like us to see made let us know uh you can email us you can drop in the comments section uh if you don't donate odds are if you've got a good idea or even a question that that isn't even related to this we'll cover it in a future video at some point we tend to plan our videos about a month out so if you make a request it could be a couple months before you see one air if you would like us to bump it up in the order of priority feel free to make that donation originally we were going to post this video in december at the anniversary of typhoon cobra but we're bumping it up now and it's a little bit nicer sitting out here on deck than it would be in december uh first i'm going to give you a brief overview of halsey's typhoons during world war ii battleship new jersey and the rest of third fleet under admiral halsey sailed through a couple of typhoons storm tracking was not as good as it is today the whole concept of picking up storms on radar was brand new and in peace time you might have had shore stations or ships further out at sea to be able to radio in hey we just got hit by a storm heading east to west so it's probably going to hit you guys out west in x amount of time it's pretty rough maybe you want to stay in port or maybe if you stay in port you're going to get damaged you want to sort out the sea and avoid this storm world war ii with the japanese controlling half of the pacific australia british even some french colonies the dutch they all had possessions around here different people controlling different areas and not wanting to send out radio messages that the enemy can intercept and find your location these sorts of detection methods were not used believe it or not the coast guard started their first ocean weather stations just before the united states entered world war ii during the war these were discontinued so there was very primitive weather detection and coordination systems in place pacific can be a brutal place we're all familiar with kamikazes the japanese aircraft named after the divine wind that were used late in the war what we're maybe less familiar with as at least western viewers is the original kamikaze the original divine win the mongols attempted to invade japan in the 1200s on two separate occasions and in both occasions huge typhoons blew up around japan and wrecked the mongol invasion fleet so the japanese said that this was an act of god if it was an act of god then the various storm commies were still protecting japan during world war ii because in late 1944 and uh throughout 1945 the typhoon season in the western pacific around japan was really really rough halsey without proper information sailed through two separate typhoons one in december of 1944 and another one in june of 1945 and then in october of 1945 the biggest typhoon of them all hit the us fleet fortunately by october because of the atomic bombs japan had agreed to surrender and the united states was already occupying japan peacefully and this meant that a number of ships that would have been operating off the coast of japan were actually import safe but the storm hit the island of okinawa and absolutely trashed it and that's where the united states was preparing for the invasion of japan which would have been held in november operation downfall so if the u.s fleet had had to conduct an invasion of japan it is possible that a divine wind would have absolutely decimated the fleet so let's look at these storms the first one was called typhoon cobra this is the one in december of 44. there's a link in the description to a video we did about six months ago on this so that's got some specific details about it i won't rehash it in too much detail here but basically third fleet was refueling they had just won the battle of the philippine sea and they were still operating in the area supporting the american invasion efforts there third fleet had made it through that battle virtually unscathed and had made it so that the japanese fleet would never sortie and mass again and yet this storm was able to absolutely trash the american fleet sink three ships damaged dozens other and destroy well over a hundred aircraft uh admiral nimitz himself remarked that it was as if third fleet had just gotten back from a major engagement so uh why was this such an issue these ships are obviously designed to operate in stormy weather well one halsey's meteorologists uh plotted the storm going in the opposite direction so halsey made some decisions that he probably would not have if he had an accurate storm plot two because he was operating a major fleet he tried to keep the fleet in formation throughout the storm he probably should have ordered them to break up so that every ship could take its best course in the storm earlier than he did and if he had known the intensity of the storm i suspect he would have halsey was a destroyer man from way back from the age of the flush deck destroyers which really rocked and rolled so i am sure if he had complete information he would have made better decisions and three third fleet had just finished conducting conducting major operations so they were in the middle of refueling as the sea state was getting worse during this storm some of these ships were trying to refuel off of the iowa class battleships and in those days the refueling rig was near the bow of the ship and because the iowa class battleships have a narrow bow that comes back and then flares out that causes bowel waves to come out and flare out as well which makes holding your position as a ship trying to refuel very difficult it's continuously trying to push you away so you're trying to navigate back and could slam into the side of a ship wouldn't be an issue for the battleship but for the small tin can destroyer refueling from us that's extremely hazardous in the 1980s they corrected this by adding adding a refueling boom at the after end of the superstructure where you've got a long straight run of hull that made it better but not perfect so over the course of this storm several of the ships were damaged and three were lost with a huge loss of life obviously getting into a lifeboat in a typhoon is not the best for your health so uh what led to the loss of these ships top weight primarily basically during the war we had been adding more electronics to ships radars radios those sorts of things as newer and more modern devices were invented also to protect against aircraft more and more anti-aircraft equipment had been added the iowa class battleships have a huge reserve of buoyancy and they were able to take these changes pretty well but even so if you look at these ships during world war ii you'll see that there's a lot of unused deck space that could have been used for anti-aircraft guns and they weren't it's because they couldn't add too much weight and the higher up in the ship you're adding that weight the more of a top weight issue it causes and the more likely it is to make the ship roll if that's a problem for a 57 000 ton battleship it's a huge problem for a destroyer designed before the war to be 1500 tons and fit inside treaty regulations and these ships were built right up to the treaty regulations so as they add anti-aircraft guns and radar you're just adding more and more top light top weight so some of these early gold plated destroyers such as the farragut class ships were severely overweight even though they removed some of their five-inch guns to save weight and that caused the loss of some of these ships others it was because they didn't have full fuel tanks the fuel is a lot of weight deep inside the ship on iowa class battleships we've got a triple bottom so those two layers of void spaces underneath basically the whole length of the ship are filled with liquids boiler feed water and fuel primarily and so there is always weight down in the bottom of the ship to counter out counteract the top weight above these destroyers that were low on fuel did not have weight there what you would normally do is fill those fuel tanks with seawater to add the weight back in but then that contaminates your fuel tanks with seawater and you can use some of it the oil will float on the seawater so the top of it won't be contaminated but especially in high sea states that liquid is sloshing around so you might end up with a mixture of fuel and salt water in your fuel oil lines which is going to blow out your boilers and in the instance of the ships that were lost all of them lost power before they were sunk if you can turn your ship into the storm you can take those waves bow on and that's how a ship is designed to take them the ships have breakwaters at the bow to break those waves and send them over to the sides of the ship where the gunnels are the channels that are designed to shed that however if a ship is being hit continuously broadside onto the waves she'll start to roll and with a couple of the destroyers that were lost it was due to sea water going down the funnel getting into the boilers and putting out the fires that knocks out all of your power and then you've got no no propulsion to make headway and so the storm just pushes you wherever it wants and you roll over eventually and that's what happened with with the three ships that were lost new jersey made it through these storms uh welted relatively unscathed in fact uh the fact that halsey was commanding from new jersey may have prevented him from knowing the full severity of the situation the storm clouds made it very dark so he couldn't see his ships which were operating over dozens of miles of ocean so he couldn't necessarily see the destroyers at the outer ring of the picket uh rolling the heaviest all he could see were his battleships and carriers taking the waves and he could certainly feel the waves rocking it it's reported in the ship's deck log but it was nowhere near as severe as other vessels some ships particularly the light aircraft carriers took severe damage and their aircraft which are normally tied down on deck were breaking free and then slamming into each other and starting fires so ships like the monterey took severe damage as if they'd been hit by a bomb other ships just took damage because the waves were washing aircraft off of the deck battleships don't have hangers for their aircraft and american carriers notoriously operate more aircraft than they have hangar space for thanks to deck parking and other things like radars and radio antennas on the main deck get swept away as do sailors when we hit the storm on the 17th i was on watch on the bridge and general general yeah lieutenant gerald ford was the duty officer that night so i spent four hours beginning part of the storm on the bridge with gerald ford as duty officer that night which watch was that that was at 12 to four and at four uh we were starting to head into the storm and the seas were starting to kick up enough so that when you went below and got in your bunk you strapped yourself in uh we never got to our bunk part way down they decided to call general quarters now uh during the storm everything we had on the flight back went over the side because at one point we took a 39 degree rule and uh everything we had top side went over and that's when that included the planes that was the planes the tow motors uh bomb carriers uh luckily the planes on the flight back had been defueled and their ammo had been their armament had been put below that's when gerald ford almost lost it because we took that 39 degree roll he slipped and went across the flight deck and the only thing that saved him was uh the our flight deck was wood railroad ties and what they had was a metal edging and below that is a catwalk well the catwalks were only like 24 inches wide but when we took that roll he fell slipped and went across the flight deck and the only thing that saved him was he grabbed that metal edging and was able to put his feet down on the catwalk that's the only thing kept him from going over the side beginning of the storm but what happened to make us go to general quarters as i said we lost everything top side seven planes went over the side i believe from the flight deck well we had more than that on the flight deck uh so you lost more than seven okay the official uh the official word i'm here to tell you from my personal observation the official word on the losses in the whole typhoon were only done for the benefit of tokyo rose so she could broadcast it 150 planes now we lost much more than that 700 and i don't i forget the change count of personnel 790. we lost more than that uh the one thing i don't understand i know i saw a light cruiser go down that day and there's no mention of it in any of the history books and i don't even know the name of it but go down i watched it from my gunman typhoon cobra was only the first of the typhoons typhoon connie better known as typhoon viper was a typhoon that the third fleet again sailed through in 1945 this would have been in june near the beginning of typhoon season and this one although there were only six casualties again wrecked well over a hundred aircraft and did significant damage to the cruisers and carriers in particular the typhoon was so bad that we hatched down all the hatches on the ship and no one was on left out on the main deck and the water was coming up over the bow of the front of the ship and over the main deck and it wasn't nobody allowed out on there and it was everything was just about secured on the ship and uh we was really looked almost like a submarine sometimes it was so bad several of the carriers had their forward flight decks collapse there's some really interesting pictures of these and you see immediately post-war all of these carriers have what's called hurricane enclosed bow built around the flight deck so they no longer go out over the front of the ship and overhang an open area these hurricane enclosed valves are quite common on the essex class carriers that are still open as museum ships today so if you want to see intrepid in new york lexington and corpus christi yorktown in charleston south carolina or hornet and alameda california you can see these post-war hurricane enclosed bows it wasn't just the bows of the carriers though the uh heavy cruisers such as the baltimore class cruiser pittsburgh suffered damage the armored belt stops just forward of turret number one at the forward bulkhead everything forward of that is basically just for hydrodynamic efficiency bolted on and it's significantly thinner and because it's so narrow it's got a completely different buoyancy than when you get to the wide part of the ship that's supporting the turrets and engines so during this storm pittsburgh was thrown so severely with say the front of the ship being on a wave the back of the ship being on the wave and a trowel being in the middle because she's well over 600 feet long that uh the the different buoyancy issues and differences in thicknesses of metal caused the entire bow of the ship to break free she earned the nickname as the longest ship in the navy because pittsburgh was towed back to guam and her bow was still in the middle of the central pacific pittsburgh's bow was eventually recovered and she did have she was reconstructed and returned to service but not until post-war so some of the damage that these american ships took during the storms knocked them out of the war entirely other ships were knocked out for months at a time so we've talked about other vessels let's talk about iowa class battleships now the iowas have a particularly high length to beam ratio which means they are very long and they're narrow for their width a wider ship is going to have better sea keeping it's going to roll less but a narrower ship is going to be able to attain a higher speed and these battleships were designed to go fast particularly to get the most hydrodynamic efficiency possible we've already talked about how the bowel narrows in a very very uncommon hall form and this means that there is very little buoyancy at the bow and the bow is very lightly attached to the armored bulkhead at high speed this bow part of the ship was known to vibrate severely and we know that it flexed as well sailors have reported they could feel it twisting as it was cutting through the waves and we can doubly confirm that because a known class issue on these ships was cracking along one of the bulkheads that separated the forward part of the ship from the more buoyant aft part of the ship so those vibrations and that twisting was translating into cracking that allowed fuel oil to leak out of some of those tanks because of the the size of the cracks and those were repaired in the 80s and we are aware of them and continue to inspect them today because today the bow of the ship is unloaded it would normally be full of stores so the bow is about 10 feet higher in the water than it should be compared to the stern which does have a ton of armored weight over top of it which means that even though it doesn't have any stores it's still sitting lower in the water another issue was the forward gun turrets during typhoon cobra and other storms that the ship sailed through during her career it was noted that green water was breaking over the bridge while the bridge is 40 feet above us and probably 70 feet above sea level and green water as opposed to white water the foam on top means that it was going significantly higher than that it was deep water over the bridge so obviously things like turret one the lowest mounted of the ship's three turrets are in the way of that a number of you guys have asked about these black bags on the turrets they're commonly called bloomers and they're basically a rubberized canvas on some ships you'll see them in white on new jersey they're almost always black and the reason they're there is because there's a huge opening in the face of the turret that allows the barrel to elevate in the press that huge opening would let water right inside that's obviously bad when you are working with gun powder in there which is rendered inert by water and when you've got all sorts of sensitive electronics in there for operating these turrets they have to be heavily greased so the bloomers are installed uh the bloomers like i said they're just rubberized canvas they're pretty darn heavy and difficult to replace but it's possible to do in a shipyard and our volunteers were able to do it manually elevating and depressing the turrets when the ship was opened up as a museum so it's not impossible our bloomers were stored in the officer's wardroom battleship iowa's bloomers disappeared and so they replaced it with a rubber that a company was willing to donate and so if you look at her bloomers they look pretty accurate but they're a much lighter material that they were able to get over the barrels iowa also blew off her bloomers on at least one occasion in the 1980s they were doing what's called a john wayne shoot which is one of those rare occasions where you fire both guns forward and this would have been a test shoot it's not something that you would normally do but firing turret two over top of turret one blew the bloomers off of turret number one battleship new jersey sees a similar blast effect during the korean war in 1951 when we took damage it damaged the bloomers and they had to be replaced so like i said they're completely replaceable uh what do we do today if they start to leak because obviously we don't want to replace these old things flex seal you guys saw it it turned a screen door in the bottom of a boat into a watertight seal it's perfectly fine for rubber like uh the bloomers and the expansion joint first off uh you'll notice that we've got very unbattleship like tables and chairs around here this is one of several event spaces you can rent on board the ship for events we do weddings reenlistment ceremonies retirement ceremonies we've been doing proms recently somebody came on and asked about a comedy show recently so there's all sorts of things you can do on board we've hosted sporting events on board and we've got a number of different spaces based on the number of guests you have you have a birthday party with 20 kids we've got a space that'll fit you and a price point that'll that'll work for that if you want to bring 50 people or so up here under the awning on the bow is a good place and then we've got the tents on the fan tail if you've got high numbers of people like like an entire high school prom but the reason we've repositioned here is you can see the side of turret one behind me this big gray wall and you might see that there is a welded patch the back of the side here that's where originally there was an optical rangefinder sticking out as built all three of battleship new jersey's turrets have an optical rangefinder in the 1950s they removed the turret one rangefinders from all four iowas they did this for two reasons one uh the turret one rangefinder was different from turret two and three it had some night vision stuff in it as opposed to the regular optical rangefinders and so by removing it from all four ships you're removing another item from the navy's inventory the battleships already have three main battery fire control positions in the superstructure four secondary battery fire control positions in the superstructure that can be cross connected for the main battery and each turret had its own range finder so knocking out one rangefinder did not in any way reduce the combat capability of these ships so being able to reduce the inventory in that way made sense and you don't need night vision when you've got radar now each of the turrets does have its own radar mounted on top the other reason and the one that's actually relevant to the video we've been shooting today is uh the rangefinder has optical viewports built into it and that would allow water in heavy seas to get into it and into the turret this was only an issue with turret 1 which is the lowest mounted of them turret two is two stories higher basically and so it's less of an issue and turret three at the back of the ship isn't taking waves like turret one and two are but even that is raised up a little bit higher than turret one because of the it's sitting above the propeller shafts and other propulsion equipment so it made sense to remove that and just weld a blank over it essentially another issue uh where the forward 40 millimeter gun positions and the forward 20 millimeter gun positions on uh the iowa and new jersey as built there is just an open railing at the bow and they quickly have that plated in and so all four iowas now have plating around the bow to help break up that water the forward 40 millimeter positions were awash quite often and so on iowa they're removed earlier than any of the other positions this wasn't done on any of the other iowas as far as i know but likely would have been had they served later into the 80s the 20 millimeter positions on the bow had a really enclosed tub built around them and they were still very wet positions but they were probably the last 20 millimeters on board because they were retained in case the north koreans laid mines you could see them and engage them with the guns from that position but by 1951 late 1951 early 1952 all of the 20 millimeter guns had been removed and by the time the iowas are brought back in the 1960s all of the 40 millimeter guns are removed as well i've seen some designs for bringing back the iowas in the 80s that included seawiz or other missile launchers at the bow and ultimately this was never done for two reasons one is the blast effect from the main guns would shred the electronics in those too much shock effect and so you see the sea was actually mounted pretty far back and high up in the superstructure other missile systems like the sea sparrow were not included at all because these guns would damage them even though like i said earlier there's plenty of deck space so uh talking about the battleship going through storms all the time we get asked pretty often do sailors get seasick well when you're up here on deck and you can see the horizon it doesn't really happen that much but during a storm you're probably going to be inside the ship and war built ships like the iowas particularly war-built ships that have multiple layers of steel do not have portholes in most of the interior spaces we've got none in the hall at all tell me whether you've ever been in a men's locker but it's very huge and smelly now you take and mix that with seasickness i walked into this compartment and that's the smell that i got hit with i went around with my work my bunk was supposed to be and there was a guy flattened his face with his face in his vomit on the thing i'd be [Music] so the enlisted guys did not have any way to see the horizon in most of their duty stations unless they're working on the bridge and so we've got tons of stories of sailors getting seasick even highly experienced chiefs and it's pretty frequent when a ship goes out to sea the first couple of days sailors especially green sailors get sick on board and then eventually you get used to the constant rocking and rolling of the ship modern ships have in many instances thrusters on them so that they will only rock to a certain degree before they stop abruptly and the thrusters kick them back in the other direction world war ii ships do not have this so i've been told they have a much easier role to them you go the full course of the roll and come back but it does mean for ships like those lost during typhoon cobra if you reach a certain degree more than 45 or 50 degrees your weight is now too high up over the water and you cannot recover from that roll you can only continue so this video has covered a broad number of topics pretty shallowly if you want to hear more about the typhoon that the ship went through there's a link in the description of that previous video if you would like to see future videos on how to design a ship for better sea keeping things like that we briefly touched about a number of those topics in this video but let us know in the comments section down below if that's something you'd like to see in a future video and we'll make it in the coming months if you've been to cb4 did you ever get seasick let us know in the comment section down below battleship new jersey receives operating support from the new jersey department of state and also from a number of businesses and viewers like you in particular the support from viewers like you has allowed us to make way more videos than we were before and so if you would like to support us there's a link in the description below and remember if there's something you would specifically like to see and you'd like to make a donation shoot us a message saying that you donated and and what topic you'd like to see again it cost us about 50 bucks to make each of these videos another way to support us is by liking sharing and subscribing that will show other people that we're making videos and it'll let you know when we're releasing new content five days a week thanks for watching

Channel: Battleship New Jersey

Views: 965,506

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Id: KSKCPbGVc1E

Length: 32min 26sec (1946 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 22 2021