King George V Class Battleships vs Iowa Class

hi i'm ryan samanski curator for battleship new jersey museum and memorial today we've got another video in our ship comparison series this time we're going to compare the iowa class battleships like new jersey to the british king george v class now i could have sworn that we had filmed this video already but uh i can't seem to find it uploaded anywhere so we're going to talk about these ships that we probably should have talked about long before now now you've probably already seen our videos on the nelson class battleships the lion class battleships and the vanguard which the nelsons came before the king georges and the line was projected to come after and vanguard did come after the king george v and i could have sworn we had a king george v there in the midst but anyway here we are so king george the fifth class battleships were a class of five washington naval treaty era battleships uh so they were designed to displace 35 000 tons the five ships were king george v herself which if you're talking about her in the comments just call her kgv prince of wales p.o.w duke of york d-o-y and uh anson and hal which their names are short enough they don't need to be turned into an acronym these five ships were pretty much great britain's only modern battleships during world war ii the nail rods were already 20 years old by the beginning of the war not quite that but they were pretty old by the beginning of the war uh and they were extremely slow well designed though they may have been um the older battleships had all seen service in world war one the r class and the queen elizabeth class as had the renowned battle cruisers and then they had hms hood which just barely predated the nail rods so those uh 15 battleships were the cream of the royal navy so going into the 1930s the royal navy knew they needed to design a new modern type of battleship but they still hadn't fully economically recovered from world war one so they couldn't just build on willy-nilly like they had been in the early 1900s so they started looking at plans for these ships in the late 20s planning to lay them down in 1931 however following the washington naval treaty in 1922 there was the london naval treaty in 1930 and the signatory powers all agreed to delay battleship construction for another couple years so all those plans got shelved and then about 1935 when the first london naval treaty was going to expire they pulled those plans off the shelves again and uh met in london for a second naval treaty a second london naval treaty this new treaty agreed to maintain the displacement of 35 000 tons even though great britain had been trying to get the displacement lowered even lower than that and they agreed to lower the size of main battery guns from 16 inches down to 14 inches the problem is japan never ratified the treaty and there was a clause that if japan didn't ratify this treaty by a certain date that then the 14-inch clause gets knold and void so the united states and great britain are the two countries primarily affected by this and they both need to lay down some new battleships to replace their old ones and they don't want to wait until the mid-1940s to get them so they need to lay them down pretty quickly and gun barrels are one of those long lead items so even though it's relatively simple at the design stage to swap out one size gun for another it's not simple at all but comparatively simple uh that still means you've got to then make those new guns which takes a couple of years which will delay your whole construction program while you wait for them so one of the first things you order when a new ship is authorized is the gun barrels forum so that those are ready to go by the time that you're actually building the ship so this is where the the king george's get into trouble uh and the king george's are contemporaries of the american north carolina class you'll remember from our video on north carolina that uh north carolina was originally designed to the second london naval treaty with 12 14-inch guns in three quadruple turrets when that treaty wasn't ratified they swapped out the triple 14-inch turrets excuse me quadruple 14-inch turrets with triple 16-inch turrets that had the same footprint a relatively simple fix there and meant that our battleships weren't going to be outgunned by anybody else in theory however it meant that those ships did not have an appropriate level of armor plating for the size of guns they carry typically if you're building a battleship with 16-inch guns you want it armored against 16-inch guns because that's what your enemy is building if it's got 14-inch guns you're on against 14-inch guns and so on and so forth so north carolina they didn't upgrade the armor at all they did upgrade the gun size but then instead of building multiple north carolina ship class ships they only built the two that had been authorized and they completely went back to the drawing board for their next 35 000 ton battleships the south dakota class which then had the 16-inch gun included from day one and had a whole redesigned armor scheme the americans had the luxury of delaying completion of north carolina by a year or two by virtue of being separated from our enemies by several oceans and the united states was able to stay out of world war ii for an extra year or two longer than anyone else so by 1942 when north carolina finally makes it into the pacific the united states is just then entering the war great britain didn't have that luxury they're in europe they're in the thick of it so the conscious decision was made that they were going to go forward with their 14-inch gun battleship design um regardless so they had to start that process in 1936 so that they would know that they would have these ships done by late 1940 delaying might have delayed the ship's entry into the war until 1942 which would have been three years into the war for great britain which meant they would have had to fight the war for three years with nothing but world war one leftover designs so they they really made a smart calculated decision in uh launching these ships right away it did mean that the king george v class had the weakest main battery of any of the uh post washington naval treaty battleships uh the european battleships with the exception of scharnhorst and nizer now all had 15 inch turrets uh scharnhorst and eisenhower were built with 11 inch turrets as an expedience and were supposed to be re-gunned with 15-inch turrets later on just so happened that that never transpired but very similar process there we have the 11 inch gun now the 15-inch gun will be a couple years longer let's just build these ships now and deal with the new guns later the british started the king george v process before the washington naval treaty excuse me before the second london naval treaty had been uh ratified so they were initially looking at three triple 15-inch turrets and that would have been pretty comparable with what other european countries were making the italian lattorios with 15 inch guns the german bismarcks with 15 inch guns the french reichelous with 15 inch guns and they would have been able to hold their own against uh the 16-inch armed american battleships and what everybody thought at the time was 16-inch armed japanese battleships uh the british had an excellent 15-inch gun design on hand it was a world war one holdover that needed some work but it could have been quick to implement but with the london naval treaty they decided to go with the 14 inch guns so they were going to do 12 guns just like the north carolinas and three quadruple turrets well that was going to be too heavy they couldn't cut the weight down to 35 000 tons so they decided to use the superimposed turret forward they converted to a twin turn instead of a quadruple turret this saved top white made the ships more stable they are designed to operate in the north atlantic which is much rougher weather than other places and this also shaved a couple hundred tons so that they were able to do the other things they wanted to do so let's look at the the final design for these ships they were designed to be 35 000 tons standard they ended up being about 42 000 tons full load which is pretty comparable to [Music] the french russialu the american north carolina or south dakotas the other treaty built ships they were 745 feet long which is about 140 feet shorter than this vessel they were 103 feet wide which is 5 feet narrower than this vessel and they only drew 33 and a half feet of water fully loaded which is about five feet less than this vessel so all around it is a smaller ship smaller weight smaller size less material investment which is why great britain was able to turn out five of these over the course of a couple of years for propulsion she made 110 000 horsepower which could get the ship up to about 28 knots which again is pretty comparable with other treaty era battleships they all tend to fall between 27 and 30 knots with the exception of the older nail rods which were built before the high speed became as imperative they used 700 degrees steam which got them 400 pounds of pressure and 230 revolutions on the shafts the iowas have 600 pounds steam at 850 degrees and 202 revolutions on the shaft so a little bit different there at 10 knots they could make 15 600 nautical miles which is an extremely good range uh the iowas themselves could make 15 000 nautical miles at 15 knots so the king georges are right there in the same ballpark obviously as you go faster you lose a lot of that economy but the fact that these ships could redeploy halfway around the world on one tank of gas was a huge boon for great britain which had colonies and interests all over the world and you did see these ships operating in the atlantic and mediterranean and in the pacific and indian oceans uh they had a crew of about 1422 guys um in addition to the 10 14 inch guns they had 16 5.25 inch guns as their dual purpose secondary they had as many as 64 octuple two pounders not all those mountings were necessarily octuple but the bulk of them were eight barreled two pounder guns um these were pretty good anti-aircraft gun is designed uh sure focuses a lot of firepower on one aircraft but when you're being swarmed by aircraft having a smaller number of mounts with more barrels means that you can engage fewer targets by the end of the war the surviving ships also had 10 bofors 40 millimeter guns added and as many as 36 20 millimeter guns earlier in the war king george v and prince of wales at least had unrotated projectile mounts which was an idea of you basically shoot up balloons with steel cables on them from fixed positions on the forward and half part of the ship and then that will interfere with dive bombers trying to dive on your ship uh interesting idea didn't really work in practice got replaced with real guns later on uh let's see the 5.25 inch gun i've probably talked about in some of the other british ship videos uh was a pretty decent gun against surface targets it had a longer range and a better uh a heavier projectile if you're shooting at an enemy surface ship however it was a heavier mount than the american 5-inch 38 and it had a much much lower rate of fire again because of the heavier weight of the projectile the five inch 38 fired a 55 pound projectile that could be pretty rapidly manually loaded about one round every four seconds about 15 rounds a minute the british rounds were as much as 90 pounds and you could only load eight or nine of them a minute even though on paper you were supposed to get a high much higher rate of fire it was just a heavy round to be manually loading quickly and the gun mount itself wasn't as quick to train and elevate as its american counterpart and then again to save weight there were only uh eight twin mounts whereas most of the american battleships at the same time had ten twin mounts uh so when you're comparing this vessel to an iowa that gunnery doesn't compare favorably when you're comparing it though to other european uh warships and even japanese warships it's uh it does compare pretty favorably with the anti-aircraft guns most european countries are still using a mixed secondary battery with some that are good for surface vessels and some that are good for aircraft so the fact that the british are using a dual purpose to save weight is really good and again the british are putting less resources into these 35 000 ton ships than the italians are putting into their 40-something thousand ton latorrios or the germans are putting into their 50-something thousand ton bismarcks or the japanese are putting into their 70-something thousand ton yamatos and so the british are able to churn out five of these at the beginning of the war and uh really bolster their fleet by an extra 30 while other countries turn out two or three ships during the same time period um so engineering their middle of the park gunnery their middle of the field armor plating is where these ships excel they had a 14.7 inch armored belt at its thickest and this belt covered an area 23 and a half feet high including 15 feet below the water line tests that the british did during the inner war period showed that many shell hits could be attained from plunging fire hitting the water in front of your ship and then continuing underwater into your ship and sure enough bismarck scored hits on prince of wales under the water line like this and the japanese invested a huge amount of resources in developing projectiles that would maintain their trajectory underwater and so the british had a good armor scheme for this and by extending the belt below the water line it also helped with their torpedo protection the main armored deck was 5.88 inches thick over the magazines which is just a little bit less than the iowas with six inch armored decks but uh that's not telling the whole story the main deck was an inch and a quarter of duckless steel which or doucel i'm not quite sure how d-u-c-e-l or a-l i'm terrible at spelling read it a lot never heard it said out loud british steel for their armor was possibly the best in the world at the time and is used in pretty comparable way to the isle it's an inch and a quarter main deck where the iowa's have an inch and a half of sts steel uh 5.88 inches over the magazines the iowas have six inches uh on the british ships it is about an inch thinner over the engineering plant and the iowa's don't thin out like that and then there was an inch and a half uh splinter deck under that so it comes out to about 9.13 inches in total thickness so in in some ways the king george the fifths have uh better deck armor than the iowas and their belt armor again 14.7 inches the iowas are 12.1 inches thick so on paper their belt covers a broader area and uh is thicker the iowas use an angled internal belt so a shell has to pass through the shell plating and some other layers before it gets to the belt and then because of the angle it's got a greater equivalent thickness than it actually is the king george the fifths go with a exterior belt that's pure vertical on the iowas that 12 inch thickness is only 10 and a half feet deep and it pretty much ends at the water line where it starts to step down to 11 inches and then it tapers even lower and eventually is only about one inch thick at the very very bottom of the ship again the king george fists have a 23 and a half foot high belt that goes 15 feet below the waterline the turret face plates are much lighter only 12 and three-quarters inches whereas the iowa's have 17 inches the the king george the fifths have some of the lightest turret armor of any contemporary battleships and their conning tower has a maximum thickness of only four inches the british were already looking at removing the armored cutting tower because during world war one they found that their officers didn't command from the protection of the armored conic tower they were good english gentlemen and uh they commanded from exposed positions where they could actually see the battlefield around them and where they could put themselves in harm's way in a gentlemanly fashion so the british saved weight high in their superstructures by eliminating that and giving them basically splinter protection and other countries were looking at that at the end of world war ii and uh future u.s navy battleships may well have lost their armored conning towers it still shows up in the designs for the later iowas and the montana class but the rebuilt pearl harbor era battleships also only got four or five inch armor protection to their superstructures so the u.s navy had started to make a switchover and may well have continued that into new battleship construction had any more been built the british are maybe ahead of the curve on this let's see so on paper the 14 inch guns could possibly penetrate the iowa class armor at most ranges uh the 16 inch guns of in iowa could possibly penetrate the british armor at most ranges the uh the british have better armor they're one of the few ships in history that are armored for a caliber greater than their own main battery even though they decided to go with the 14-inch gun they knew that other countries had 15 and 16-inch armed battleships out there at the time and so they protected their ships against what was out there instead of what their own ships were armed with and that was a really good call on their part um they also featured a liar torpedo defense system that was very different from their older ships uh ships like hood had crushing tubes on the inside which was a very complex system that was hard to replace and these ships had something more similar to the american system where you just have a layer of liquid and void loaded spaces that's several feet deep that a torpedo would have to blow through several succeeding bulkheads to get to be inside the ship and their torpedo protection was rated for a thousand pound warhead which was pretty good now all that being said how did these five ships do in combat they all entered service between 1940 and 1942 and so they saw a lot of service during world war ii in fact three of these battleships fought enemy battleships um one prince of wales was sunk december 10th 1941 just after the attack on pearl harbor she was the only member of the class sunk she was the first treaty battleship to enter the pacific ocean and she was basically operating without air cover while the japanese were doing a lot of their early war invasions right after pearl harbor and she was spotted from the air as as she and the world war one era battle cruiser repulse and a couple of destroyers were trying to find uh japanese troop convoys and so the japanese rediverted their convoys in different directions and sent land-based aircraft to attack them primarily with torpedoes although there was at least one bomb hit on prince of wales and prince of wales took a number of torpedo hits uh at the time they believed it was six subsequent surveys of the wreck have only found four hits one on the actual torpedo protection which does not seem like it penetrated the inner holding bulkhead so it looks like their torpedo protection held up even against vaulted japanese torpedoes however three of the hits did hit outside of the torpedo defensive bulkhead so that would be on the forward part of the ship or the aft part of the ship and that caused enough progressive flooding that the ship lost speed and lost buoyancy and eventually rolled over the thing that really did her end was a fluke hit much like the torpedo that hit bismarck earlier a torpedo hit the propeller shaft for her b propeller which i believe is the it's the outboard shaft i believe on the port side uh and it hit in such a way that the mounting bracket that held it to the hall on the outside the ship was completely sheared off this all happened so quick that they didn't have time to shut down the engine so the engine is still spinning the propeller shaft which is no longer held in place so instead of spinning in a tight little circle it starts to pinwheel and so that opened up several bulkheads and gland seals passing through the outside of the hall and then going all the way down the shaft alleys and back to the b engine room and that caused progressive flooding that damage control was not able to fix which eventually led to the loss of the vessel the ship was in a no-win situation the first torpedo that hit her knocked her speed down and essentially mission killed the vessel and at that point the japanese could just throw torpedo planes at her all day long she was going to sing prince of wales had the shortest service life of any british battleship ever she was rushed into service in may of 1941. um specifically to hunt for the bismarck and she was rushed into service so far ahead of schedule that her crew wasn't fully trained and she still had yard workers on board when the ship sorted she and hood engaged bismarck in a denmark strait and uh when hood was sunk prince of wales essentially fought bismarck and prinzogan by herself and managed to score at least two hits on bismarck which mission killed that ship and and caused her to lose enough speed that she would abort her mission and head back to france and eventually be caught and sunk uh prince of wales in return took some fire including one hit that killed everyone on the bridge except killed or incapacitated everyone on the bridge except captain leech himself um so maybe that shows that the ship did need an armored counting tower otherwise the ship had a relatively poor showing in that only 74 of the ordered shots that the ship was supposed to take actually fired there were a number of issues with the gun jamming and some of this can be attributed to the ship being new and still being uh still working up the crew wasn't fully trained the ship hadn't done real gunnery trials yet so that they hadn't done final modifications on the weapon system but part of it was the the 14-inch gun system particularly the quadruple turrets were really complicated and even on the ships that did give the chance to work up there were severe failures but again 74 of failures bismarck herself had 89 or excuse me 74 successful 26 failures bismarck herself only had 89 successes and that was a ship that had gone through trials and done significant training before the battle so you're never going to have 100 of the guns you load being able to fire um different things happen so that uh it takes too long to load the gun so that when the salvo is fired some of the barrels just aren't finished yet mechanical failures happen the gun turrets jam different things happen to happen on on this ship the new jersey in combat as you can see it happened on bismarck but it seemed to happen at a much higher percent on the british ships with their quadruple 14-inch guns so for example uh king george v which entered the war in december 1940 and then participated in the chase for the bismarck as well and was there along with nelson to uh shell bismarck into submission in may of 1941. excuse me not nelson king george v and rodney shelled bismarck into submission in may of 41. by the end of the battle half of king george v 10 guns had jammed and were no longer operable so she was only able to fire five guns by the end of the action granted that was close to two hours of firing so people got tired things heated up and expanded didn't work right anymore there were mechanical failures but again this is a much higher degree than were experienced by say rodney which also had teething issues with her 16-inch guns when she was new built duke of york which was the third ship to enter service and also the third ship to engage german battleships in december of 43 caught the german battleship scharnhorst and during her combat which granted happened in really bad weather at night uh had less than 70 of her uh ordered shots actually able to fire so again this is a ship that has worked up has been in the war for at least two years has done training and they're still experiencing significantly higher rates of failures then should be expected again the complexity of the quadrupole gun turret was probably to blame for a fair percentage of that although a certain percentage of failures are normal and expected so service lives the ships had the major engagements i just described the rest of the time they were escorting convoys across the north atlantic protecting them against german battleships duke of york was supporting a convoy when shawn horst sir uh sortied and she was able to catch her team george v and prince of wales were both directly dispatched to hunt for bismarck but the rest of the time they were escorting convoys wearing out their engines they were uh doing naval gunfire support in the mediterranean when uh the united states and great britain started to invade north africa and italy they some of them were transferred to the pacific by the end of the war and conducted shore bombardments and escorted carriers there and at least three of these ships were in tokyo bay when the japanese surrendered and at least two of them were in hong kong when the japanese surrendered there too and so these ships had a rather active career and uh after world war ii as the united kingdom tried to save money all four surviving ships were decommissioned and mothballed and by 1958 or 1959 they'd all been sold for scrap and cut up within a year of that it would have been great for one of these ships to be saved as a museum but again that was pretty early in the concept of preserving museum ships and it would have been real expensive so in summation these ships are pretty middle of the pack when it comes to the treaty battleships they have maybe the best armor of any of the treaty battleships they're have the weakest gun battery and the most failures and they've got pretty middle of the pack speed and a good any aircraft battery for a european chip but not good when you compare it to an american battleship compared to the iowas again which have almost a quarter more displacement they're significantly slower potentially better armored but significantly less well-armed they proved to be a really good investment for the royal navy who otherwise would not have had fast modern battleships in world war ii and these ships saw a tremendous amount of service and were pretty well worn out by the end of the war thanks for watching if you have any uh questions or comments about the king george v or other ships you would like to see us do in future comparison videos drop them in the comments section down below if you uh like what you see and you would like to support the museum and our youtube channel in particular check the description below for a link to our gofundme campaign anything you donate there comes back into the channel so we can keep producing these videos we do also receive support from the new jersey department of state also remember to like share and subscribe so that you're notified when we put out new content we do try to put out several new videos a week thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Battleship New Jersey

Views: 158,841

Rating: 4.8539386 out of 5

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Id: 3JVnMCi9rOE

Length: 35min 31sec (2131 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020