IJN Fubuki - Guide 165

[Music] [Music] the ink on the Washington Naval Treaty was barely dry and Imperial Japanese Navy High Command was well annoyed would be pushing it rather mildly and they'd gone into the negotiations hoping to be treated like an equal and instead they've been forced to discontinue a treaty that had previously placed the world's largest Navy and indeed the Navy they'd used as their template on its side and now brought its most likely opponent for the Pacific domination the USA into parity with their erstwhile Ally whilst also limiting the Japanese Navy to 60% of the displacement of either the new Tosa and Amagi classes would need to be scrapped or converted and the mutsu had only just scraped in as a permitted vessel still simmering at the limits imposed the Imperial Japanese Navy Admiralty decided that if they couldn't beat the other powers at their own game of battleships and they'd simply have to outdo them in a field they'd foolishly left unlimited thus began the design of the Japanese special type destroyers they had previously been large destroys fast destroyers heavily gun armed destroyers and heavily torpedo armed destroyers before but now the General Staff demanded an ultra-fast large heavily armed destroyer with plenty of both guns and torpedoes these would become the Taku gutta or special type at destroyers what would eventually emerge from a somewhat protracted design process was a ship of seventeen hundred and fifty tons standard displacement capable of 35 knots using 50,000 shaft horsepower from four boilers which drove a pair of screws this was faster than almost all previous destroyers but it was the armament that really stood out six dual purpose 5-inch guns in three twin turrets one forward and a pair super firing aft this was complemented by a nine torpedo tubes in three triple launches two just forward of the aft guns and one position between the funnels and this latter having been moved there at a late stage in the design process when its original position just forward of the bridge was calculated as being too often immersed in sea spray this was already a considerable amount firepower but each launcher was effectively a small torpedo turret which allowed for a full set of reloads to be carried by e18 torpedoes additionally the torpedoes themselves were 24-inch weapons which were considerably more capable and deadly than the standard 21 inch and 18 inch versions that were found on other destroyers other weaponry had originally been planned as a mix of 3-inch 40 millimeter and rifle caliber guns but this was rationalized down to just a pair of heavy machine guns on the basis of weight saving and the fact that the main guns were dual purpose thus in theory meaning the rest of the anti-aircraft armament was unnecessary now with all that said things didn't start out particularly brilliantly the first 10 units received main guns that could only elevate to 40 degrees instead of the 75 degrees that were originally planned and which later ships would in fact receive all so it turned out they didn't actually have enough heavy machine guns around and so initial deployments had to use the rifle caliber machine guns instead until more heavy weapons could be acquired it also turned out that the rate of fire and tracking capability of the main 5-inch guns wasn't quite as fast as they first hoped which limited their anti-aircraft capability somewhat nonetheless the remaining capabilities were still leaps and bounds ahead of anything else in the water at that size when they began to appear in the late 1920s the first route were laid down in 1926 and 27 and would start to enter service in 1928 and 29 the second group with full elevation to their guns was mostly laid down in 1928 and 29 and began entering service in 1331 a final group the type threes were laid down in 1930 and entered service in 1932 as designed the ships were only supposed to have had whole numbers but in 1928 this decision was reversed and they began to receive names thus becoming what we now know to be the fubuki class the type twos sometimes called the Ayanami subclass due to their slightly better elevation of their guns and improved fire control systems whilst the type 3s are considered to be the Akatsuki subclass as they used a new higher pressure boiler to allow for the same amount of power with three boilers as opposed to the four present in previous ships as well as having yet another turret type this one much lighter than that on the type twos but only capable of 55 degree elevation in all 24 ships across the three types would be built with various minor additions accreting weight on the ship's upper works this combined with a number of weight saving measures taken during construction would come back to bite them in two incidents in the early 1930s first the neutral pedo boot boat tomorrow Tsuru was on its first major exercises in 1934 when it encountered heavy weather and promptly rolled over and sank the investigation pointed to the overly heavy upper works but before anyone could do much to change this on other ships the 4th fleet was caught in a typhoon and almost every ship took damage in large part due to overly light construction this would lead to a crash program of changes the bridges and funnels were all trimmed down magazine stowage was reduced and the reloads on the aft most and foremost torpedo launchers were also removed a fuel bunkers were increased in capacity as this meant that there was more weight lower down in the ship and extra plating and riveting was added for strength and also to ensure that even more weight was present closer to the keel this dramatically improved the stability and strength of the ships although it did push their displacement to just over 2,000 tons and would drop speed by about or not a number of ships of the type 2 sub class would also receive the newer and lighter turrets that had been designed for the type threes although this did drop the main gun elevation back down to 55 degrees but as we've seen that wasn't exactly a huge loss shortly before all this had kicked off the older torpedoes had in fact been replaced with the newer type 93 or long lance torpedoes which improved their lethality somewhat the outbreak of World War two would find 23 ships in service as Miyuki had been lost in a collision and as the war progressed more and more anti-aircraft guns would be added which was good unfortunately they were almost entirely type 96 weapons the infamous 25 millimeter which was not so good even to the point of replacing one of the aft turrets with a pair of triple 25 millimeter mounts on some ships that had managed to make it to the latter half of the war these lucky survivors would also begin to receive basic radar in 1944 stuck in the thick of the action almost the entire class would be lost with only the badly damaged Ushio a type 2 ship surviving from the entire first two batches and one of the four type threes the Hibiki make made it through mostly intact in the course of the conflict they did however manage to make some account of themselves being responsible for sinking quite a few Allied merchantman and warships as well as assisting in the destruction of others and damaging still more with one particular instance seeing the type 2a McGary sink pt-109 with a certain John F Kennedy aboard by ramming it clean in two of the two survivors Ushio would never be repaired and was scrapped in 1948 but Hibiki under a new name would end up in Soviet service for a few years before becoming a barrack ship also in Soviet service and then eventually being sunk as a target at some point in the 1970s with her wreck near Vladivostok still available for draw diving if you happen to be in the area 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: 116,692

Rating: 4.968287 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, amagiri, fubuki, akatsuki, Special Type, destroyer, WW2, Pacific Campaign, IJN, USN

Id: moqs12lsCzU

Length: 9min 8sec (548 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/CajunWhy]

Good ole Drach videos, thanks for reminding me to go watch it.