IJN Taiho - Always Train Your Crew

[Music] [Music] the tae-ho was supposed to be the lead ship in a new type of Japanese aircraft carrier unfortunately for them as it turned out it would be the only ship of its particular class to be built interestingly enough whilst the American Navy had gone for an armored flight tax in its Yorktown and essex-class carriers and the British went the other way with armored flight decks in everything except for the Ark Royal the Japanese although their pre-war carriers were unarmored in much the same manner as the Americans had decided to go down a third path when it came to their late 1930s and wartime construction on the one hand for speed and ease of construction they had ordered over a dozen of the boon Ryu class which were a modified Harry you class design these ships were of the unarmored flight deck type and were basic evolutions of Japanese design philosophies up until that point however tae-ho was a heavily modified shikaku type design perhaps prescient Lee anticipating that their carriers would take a massive amount of battering the tae ho was supposed to take multiple hits and still remain as a fighting unit and for this reason she carried an armored flight deck and an armored belt so the Japanese had decided why not both and were building both armored and an armored carriers at the same time although the greater expense and technical complexity of the Thai hope class meant that only tae ho and five of an improved variant were to be built alongside the 15m Roos just a bit of a sight know I think that Japanese naming conventions do need a little bit more recognition as so most people tae ho just sounds like another Japanese word whereas if you actually look into the translation it means a great Phoenix which is actually a pretty awesome name for a ship to have and when you go back through a lot of Japanese capital ship naming conventions during World War two quite a lot of these ships actually have very cool sounding names as well as the standard let's name a ship after a state or city there a lot of people all across the world seem to like doing with their naval ships compared to the shukaku upon which it was based that heigh-ho sacrificed about one squadron of aircraft in exchange for its armor being able to carry approximately 65 aircraft into combat the armor of the ship consisted of a three-inch thick upper deck and owned lower deck with 1.3 inches of armor plate in addition an armor belt a varying thickness ran along the side of the ship being just over 2 inches thick over the machinery spaces and 6 inches thick over the magazine spaces this kind of heavy side armor was actually in excess of even the British armored carriers and was one of several design flaws present in the tie ho you might notice from the pictures that we've been showing you the tie ho appears to be quite low in the water compared to most other carriers including the British ones which sit quite high above the water and this was as a result of the weight of that side armor the ship impacts that so low in the water that her lower hangar deck was only just above the waterline and her two elevator wells actually ran below the waterline although obviously the elevators themselves being mounted in the wells were just above the waterline which is just as well this factor would come back to haunt her later on additionally whilst the bomb and torpedo magazines as we explained earlier were heavily protected by armor the fuel tanks for the aviation fuel used by her aircraft were only partially protected and this would also come back to haunt her in her last battle with eight boilers generating 160 thousand horsepower she was capable of just over 33 knots which was pretty quick and quite useful for a carrier because obviously they need to be able to maintain a high speed to increase the apparent airspeed over the deck to get aircraft airborne as quickly and as efficiently as possible an effort to further fireproof the ship the flight deck was not covered with wooden planks over the armor but rather with latex this was quicker to apply and easier to repair however it was somewhat less anti-skid and could crack over time especially when exposed to cold weather she was also supposed to be equipped with catapults to help her aircraft take off however a viable catapult design was not ready by the time she was constructed and so instead they stuck a bunch of rockets in the storage areas to help aircraft take off that way I just strap a couple of rockets to the side of the aircraft and like the blue touch paper retire and hope the pilot is good enough to keep the aircraft under control until he can ditch the Rockets for defense the tae-ho would be equipped with a number of radar sets along with a secondary - anti-aircraft battery of 12 3.9 inch anti-aircraft guns in six twin gun turrets three on each side earned a total of fifty one of the rather appalling 25 millimeter anti-aircraft cannons in 17 triple mounts although to be perfectly honest they probably could have just not installed them or maybe exchanged that wait for other anti-aircraft guns literally any other anti-aircraft gun and it would have had a more beneficial effect Tahoe's design was finalized before World War two she was laid down before Japan entered World War two with the attack on Pearl Harbor with her lay down date being 10th of July 1941 she would be launched in April 1943 and commissioned in March 1944 however compared to the fleet she was supposed to come into service with which would have numbered over 20 carriers according to the various plans the Japanese Navy had made by mid-1944 this situation was somewhat different with the United States Navy having had something to say about the number of carriers at the Imperial Japanese Navy still possessed thus only three months after commissioning at the tie who would find itself taking part in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944 on the morning of the 19th of June tae-ho was launching her aircraft to form part of the Japanese second attack wave her fate was not to be attacked by American carrier aircraft but rather by submarines since the USS albacore had spotted the carriers earlier that morning and had been setting itself up for a shot by this point the Bureau of ordnance have been dragged kicking and screaming into reality by various US Navy submarine captains and the albacore fired a spread of six torpedoes at the carrier one of the pilots of tae-ho strike aircraft saw the torpedoes coming and in a great display of devotion to duty flew his aircraft straight down into the sea into the path of one of the torpedoes which caused it to detonate short of its target of the remaining five torpedoes four of them would miss but unfortunately for that pilots brave display the sixth torpedo still found its mark hitting the carrier on the starboard side just forward of the island initially the tae-ho appeared to have whether the impact relatively well although the forward elevator was jammed a Vice Admiral ozawa ordered it planked over so that aircraft operations could resume and the ship had only lost about a knot and a half in speed and this was primarily to reduce the force of water coming through the hole no fires appeared to have started and so the carrier went on to launch two more waves of aircraft unfortunately what was not immediately apparent was that those partially armored fuel tanks and their supply pipes had been ruptured by the impact and aviation gasoline was rapidly accumulating in the forward elevator pit as this subsequently began to evaporate it would permeate the upper and lower hangar decks effectively turning both of them into gigantic fuel air bombs the danger posed by this was not lost on the crew as the smell of evaporating petrol is fairly obvious however with the ship only three months in commission they were not very experienced and so their efforts to counter this increasing danger were somewhat ineffective one of the things an experienced crew would have done would have been to cover the gasoline with foam from the ship's fire suppression system in order to prevent it evaporating or further and obviously the built-up fumes needed to be vented out of the hangar decks but unfortunately due to their inexperience the crew didn't use the fire suppression foam because they thought wasn't a fire and their attempts to ventilate the hangar decks were relatively unsuccessful as well this was in part due to its design as with fully enclosed hangars any ventilation had to come from physically opening holes in the hangar itself to their credit they did try a number of things they tried opening the actual ventilation duct gates that were installed for the purpose they dropped the aft elevator and they even smashed out some of the ship's portholes but none of this was too much of ale and it was at this point that the fatal mistake was made the chief damage control officer ordered the ship's ventilation systems to full and every door and hatch that could be opened to be opened in order to try and get those fumes out of the hangar deck unfortunately this basically just had the result of the ventilation system distributing the fumes evenly throughout the entire ship and whilst the hangar deck crews had been relatively good about keeping that area spark and flame free when you're talking about an entire ship with lots of electrical systems engines boilers etc there are inevitably going to be sparks somewhere in the ship and at about 2:30 in the afternoon one of those sparks coincided with that particular part of the ship being full of gasoline fumes and there was a massive explosion the force of this was such that a surviving officer on the bridge saw the entire flight deck heave up like a wave and the sides of the ship blew out in massive fireballs it was a very clearly doomed at this point although destroyers and the cruiser higer Oh took off as many survivors as they could a second massive explosion blew through the ship about two hours later and she would sink Stern first taking 650 of her complement of 2,150 down with her although flaws in her design had contributed to her downfall most especially the aircraft elevator well decks being solo which had allowed fuel gasoline and seawater to pool in them after the torpedo hit the primary contributing factor to her loss was the poor damage control exhibited by her relatively inexperienced crew this can be said because when you look on paper at the number of damage control systems the tae-ho had an experience damage control crew would have been able to use those systems to relatively easily rid the ship of gasoline fumes although given the outcome of the Battle of the Philippine Sea this will probably only have been delaying the inevitable until a wave of Avengers or dauntless is showed up this contrasts quite significantly with the superb training and effort put in by the damage control crews on American carriers who were able to bring their ships home quite often despite absolutely horrific levels of damage the Franklin and the Bunker Hill are obviously the go-to were watchwords for that particular type of incident but even when you look at the carriers that were lost such as Yorktown or Lexington even on these ships damage control efforts managed to keep the ships afloat for considerable periods of time and resulted in most of their crews being saved ultimately then the tae-ho and her fate bear out one very important lesson that most navies are either forced to learn or are violently reminded of at various points during their history which is that you can have the biggest nastiest most heavily armed most heavily armored most technologically advanced ship but ultimately if your crew isn't up to standard you really don't have anything worth calling a fighting machine so always remember to treat and train your crews well and then both crew and ship will come home at the end of the operation 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 tag your question with Q&A if you want to leave a question for the drydock

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 1,224,440

Keywords: wows, world of warships, IJN, World War 2, Pacific War, Taiho, Hiryu, Shokaku, Unryu, Battle of the Phillipine Sea, USS Albacore, damage control, USS Bunker Hill, USS Franklin, USS Yorktown

Id: fkchsNDmkNc

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/EKmars]

Watch enough Drachinifel and you'll start to think the Pacific War was a bit of a mistake on Japan's part.

[u/Xenon_Raumzeit]

The ship that turned herself into a piloted fuel-air bomb with poor damage control.

[u/BradTofu]

Poor gurl

[u/p_The_Noble_Man_q]

Taiho’s name is ironic