King George V class - Design, Service and Myths

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early history there were a few videos on the king george the fifth class battleships but never anything in any particular great length or in any particular great detail at least by the standards of what the channels turned into however we are in luck because we have with us today a special guest matt warwick who is going to educate us all on some of the finer details of the king george v class and also burst a few of the uh myths and misconceptions that have grown up around it so with that said let's go over to our brilliant guest speaker to introduce himself hello uh thanks very much for having me it is a pleasure to be here um unlike some other of your guests i can't claim any books or any particularly illustrious history but i have spent quite a lot of my recent time delving into this class to try and understand you know why are they built the way they are i'm looking forward to going in depth this evening awesome so for those of you who haven't seen this format before basically i have approximately 10 questions which will be asked and um our guest speaker our expert will give us most of the details which is great for me because i don't have to say a lot so i guess we'll lead in with question the first now obviously the king george v developed during the 1930s they're the first british treaty battleships to actually be built at the time that they're actually being designed you could by treaty have a ship with 16-inch guns but the only serious early design options that i've certainly come across were ones that either used three triple 15-inch guns which was a very early to study and they're after various flavors of 14-inch guns and eventually settling on the three quad 14s before some final design revisions so why was there no 16-inch design when they technically could have so i was thinking of the best way of sort of trying to explain why the 14 and 15 inch designs sort of dominate um the history of the class and i thought maybe the easiest thing to do would be to go all the way back to actually 1929 when it was um there were 16-inch designs seriously considered if we look at the first design that we go to 1929 um i just find it's a very interesting contrast uh with what the king george the kids have become so you know we've got 16 inch guns in twin turrets nothing extravagant like the quadrupoles we've got a split secondary battery that persists for quite a long time in british designs it's slow and it has internal inclined belt armor um which again the king josephs are quite well known for not having and so to try and trace how the royal navy gets from something that looks like this to something that looks like the kingdom of this is um in my view a rather interesting process i think it's quite interesting to jump to the 1933 staff requirements because that's when we start seeing what will become the king josh defensive match um and in particular it's the question of speed and size so the hope at this point is still that there'll be a further reduction in tonnage so the royal navy won't have to replace its 15 capital ships like for life with 35 000 tonnes it might be able to get maybe 28 000 um 25 000 if it's lucky so it's sort of drawing up its initial requirements for what become the king josh the fifths and looking around um at what japan are doing or thinking and saying what the french are doing and saying what the germans are doing and saying and the particular thing to note here is that but we've got fast ships um france is building dunkirk's and the germans are building their deutschlands um both these are in the high 20s if not and so there's a consideration there about speed but then in regards to main armament you have to sort of remember how rare guns bigger than 14 inch were outside essentially the royal navy the usa had three 16-inch ships japan had two the rest of those main battle fleets had 14 inch the germans brand new ships were with 11 inch and the french were 13 inch so there isn't in 1933 this great drive to build 15 16 guns and so they start thinking a bit more about you know what kind of ship they need so they still like the four twin turrets here they've been put off triples by the nelsons um and they reckon they can get more from eight four twins than they can from three triples at this stage they're also still thinking that a secondary battery that's separate from the anti-aircraft armament is the way to go uh they think that the requirements for the secondary battery um just make having a combined one sort of sub-optimal so they want six-inch guns for the anti-surface work they're also still not sure what caliber the anti-aircraft armor is going to be so you know they specify six guns but they sort of leave open the caliber question to later it might be 4.7 inch for the bigger shell they might want four inch for the higher rate of fire but they do want at least four pom-poms and as many as eight multiple machine guns um although they are willing to sort of slightly go back on that if it's impossible to fit also at this point they're still looking at torpedo tubes um and this is interesting that every british battleship sits like the 1890s has torpedo tubes and the staff requirements are no different but now they're above water tubes and they want quintuple mountings one either side so you look at the king josh the fist a few years later with no torpedo tubes um and it's quite an interesting contrast to what they were saying just a few years earlier obviously trying to design armor protection is sort of depends on what attack you're gonna face so ideally you know if the limits thirty five thousand tons they want the ship to be able to stand up against 16 inch shell fire um although machinery spaces as set by the nelson's um can be a little bit reduced and even in 1933 you see here 1 000 pound terminal velocity dive bomb attack um so they are starting to show awareness of these sort of new forms of threat they want to jump up with their underwater protection to about a thousand pound charge but speed they're still happy with 23 knots they still think that the battle fleets of japan and the united states are going to be in the low 20s and therefore they don't need to exceed that but their initial sort of approaches to a ship of this sort of requirements was 32 000 tons or more and that wasn't really satisfying the desire to step down seriously but why did they think you know they could step down because looking back in hindsight it seems like you know it's hard to understand why they were certainly looking at 12-inch gun ships or 14-inch at best but you know this it was a meeting held by the first sea lord on the 10th of january 1934 when they were discussing this and there was you know these five factors were written down as to what govern the situation and the uk was proposing 25 000 tons of 12-inch guns um or alternatively a ship with 22 000 tons of 11-inch guns which seems absolutely teeny tiny but they thought that was the minimum required japan apparently made a proposal for a ship of 25 000 times with 14 inch guns they knew the americans wished to keep the current standards but they're also aware that the french had just laid down the ship that was as far as they were concerned about 23 000 tons with 13 inch and a bit guns um and they also knew that germans wanted to build something larger than deutschland but not necessarily the full sort of 35 house in town battleship so during this discussion they thought that they might be able to convince the americans to go down to about 28 000 tons and so that prompted in early 1934 a bit an extensive look at what could you do with 28 000 tonnes and 12-inch guns so you get a whole series of design studies and you know i've put up most of them here and it's still interesting just to see when certain design features sort of kick in um the first couple keep the quintuple torpedo choose but they quickly drop that idea aircraft as well start off maybe one at most on a turret but by the end of the design series opinion has shifted and you start seeing the four that will sort of define the later designs turrets are still almost exclusively you know twins or triples and speeds are still you know 23 knots is fine and it's only when you get to design 12 r that you suddenly start seeing a dual purpose secondary armament which isn't necessarily wanted but it's accepted um the concern is that by trying to stick in 12 6-inch guns 12 4.7 inch guns four pom-poms and eight quadruple machine guns that's a lot of gun arcs are trying to arrange in a very cramped space on a 28 000 township you know trying to get all these guns so they're clear of blast and you can supply them with ammunition effectively um it was challenging uh and another point actually raised is that this was a lot of crew who were exposed and vulnerable um and therefore you know if a share was to land amongst these guns you'd have horrific casualties uh and so the future firstly lord roger backhouse was like you know i'm quite happy to give up this six secondary battery um granted at this point they thought they could fit 24 4.7 inch guns uh later experience would show they could only get about 20 on the torpedoes make a comeback yeah they do um and even greater numbers where they start thinking let's have two triple mounts each side um interestingly they that ripple mount idea comes back in the 1940s for the king george the fifth uh slightly get together myself there but when they remove the aircraft catapult um but they do consider we could put torpedoes here and yeah the conclusion is that we don't need to put torpedoes on our battleships in 1943 but they did consider it they decided actually more anti-aircraft guns was probably the way to go yeah probably someone had watched bismarck versus rodney and decided maybe a few more torpedoes might have been useful yeah what's strange is there's no mention of why they thought it was a good idea they're just like well we've sort of always put torpedoes on our battleships and this occasion we haven't but maybe now we can fair enough um then you move on from sort of 1934 and suddenly you start seeing the 14-inch gun dominate designs the reason for this seems to be um an approach or discussion of the americans so the americans share some design weights they've got of 14-inch battleships and so the royal navy starts thinking well what could we do for a 14-inch battleship they come up with two requirements you have design a which is the if we've got 35 000 tons what can we do with it um it doesn't have to be the full 35 000 tonnes but if we're trying to build a genuine balanced 12 x 14 inch gun battleship this is what we want and then design b is the if we pair it down to the minimum to try and get as close as we can to these requirements on a smaller displacement you know what can we achieve and it's interesting i think to see where they make the sacrifices and the sacrifices are in firepower they're happy to give up a triple turret um to save displacement they slightly pair back the secondary armament um and they can give up the torpedo tubes if they must but the anti-aircraft element needs to stay the same and the armor protection needs to say the same um so they go all right we've got these what can we do with them and they come up with these two designs here on the left one of 34 000 tons and then the paired back one is 30 000 tons so they take these they look at their weights they look at the us designs and they've only got like the weight breakdown and there's also obviously slightly misleading because the way the british characterize or categorize weights and the way the americans categorize weights are different um but they're sort of aware of this and they have a conversation about you know different approaches and ultimately what they're trying to do is convince the americans that they don't need 35 000 tonnes or even necessarily 32 and a half thousand tons um so they start trying to shrink down their design a to the 32 and a half thousand tonne figure as at least a stepping stone towards arms reduction and what makes this interesting is obviously not only is this the first series where we see a 14-inch gun appearing in the 1930s but we also get the quad turret and what's interesting about that is that they think that they can save about 1 200 tons on design a just by going down to three quads rather than four triples yeah so you can see there with the 14 tlax compared to 14q yeah it's the same it's roughly the same displacement but they've brought torpedoes back and bumped the armor up a bit compared to the triple turret layout and got two two extra knots as well yeah so when they look at it they sort of see right how can we bring tla down and they've got two approaches one is to keep we don't know the x essentially gives up two knots you know we don't need twenty three twenty one speed five decades we'll go back to twenty one and they do have to reduce some of the armor over the machinery they have to get rid of torpedo tubes um but mostly the machinery weight suffices and then approach why is we want to keep the 23 knots but that means they need to give out more in the way of armor and then they look at the quad turrets and realize that they can basically have a so the same displacement plus a bit um so they start becoming quite enamored with the weight savings that quad tara offers and now this slide i've shown you is quite a wall of text but i just thought it was quite interesting to see what they're thinking of in early 1935 when it comes to um the designs what are they actually trying to achieve and so the first sort of point i thought worth mentioning is that when you look at almond weights if you exclude the 9 14 inch one as sort of being too small the 9 15 inch is actually the lightest compared to having 9 16 inch or 12 14 inch so when you're on a fixed displacement actually that means if you're going for 9 15 inch over 12 14 inch you've actually got more tonnage to put into machinery and armor and i don't think that's always quite realised it's easy to just go well 14 inch guns are smaller but actually by weight at least the 15 inch option is the lightest armor weight yeah or suppose you're adding three extra three extra guns to the equation and all this extra space you need in the turrets which means the turret armor is going to go up in weight as well so it's all going to add yeah it all adds up um and and so i just sort of thought it was worth noting because in the minute we'll get on to when they start comparing various 12 inch 14 inch designs with 15 designs and realizing that actually the 15 inch one by some standards is the least firepower heavy um so then we have shattering effect and these are all direct quotes from documents at the time and i just thought it was interesting because it does talk about the value of shattering um the sort of soft parts of the ship you know you don't necess there's gonna be times when neither ship can penetrate the other's vitals so it is important that you can you know destroy the soft bits and reduce the other ship's combat power that way um and there is a debate there whether or not you try and do that with more guns you know is it more important to hit in the first place or do you want to make sure your hits have somewhat more of a impact you know the 16-inch has 50 more explosive power in these considerations than the 14 inch which is clearly hugely significant but at the same time the 14 inch in theory hits a third more often because it's got third more guns moving on to the speed question you're it's often asked you know why did the king judge the fish end up with a speed of you know 28 knots or so and the answer is that obviously they preferred 23 at the start and then the european has sort of messed all that up by deciding they needed these 30 knot ships so they go all right we'll have a look at some 30 knot designs uh and the royal name is like well all right we've got these but they look a bit firepower heavy what if we just reduce the speed slightly you know go for something in the middle um because the important point is not the absolute speed you can achieve it's the speed you've got relative to the opponent and if they can only do three knots more than you well how often is that going to make a decisive difference and what i like about this is it sort of shows quite a lot of foresight towards things like the bismarck chase um you know it suggested that a small difference in maximum speed would have put little effect in the plane of strategy here again other factors such as addition of basis intelligence reconnaissance and the disposition of our forces may well outweigh the practical effect of a margin of say three knots on one side and you just sort of see you know how they're trying to balance these factors in their ship design and then on the right here it's just two schools which are schools of thought that are in the navy at the time you've got the decisive range school and the gunpower the gun power school is all about gun power and surprisingly and it's essentially i think the school that the old battle cruiser captains would have been a big fan of it's definitely where jackie fisher would have belonged and this was all about stop trying to keep up with the increase of the power of the shell double down on firepower and essentially yet defend by offense just secure your magazines best you can against enemy hits and put the rest of your way into firepower and just you know hit them first take them down before they have a chance to do too much damage to you they also make the point in the gunpower school that armour tends to stand up better in practice than it does in the testing grounds which as it notes here that's a matter of opinion and it is pointed out that the ships that have withstood attack connection uh mainly the queen elizabeth class did so under a bleak fire which doesn't really tell anything about broadside on no well i suppose the number of actual full-on broadside engagements is relatively small because even when you have the fleet steaming in relative parallel to each other there's usually someone or other who's got a slight lead which turns into a bit of an oblique angle firing sequence yeah um so you can sort of see slightly where they're coming from but i think when you sort of look at the decisive range score you quickly realize which one won and this is all about the need for capital ships to have sufficient armor that they can get into decisive range as it says here to enable them to have a reasonable chance of taking that armament to effective range and ultimately decisive it's they don't want to risk losing a ship to single hits or taking extravagant damage early on um they don't mind having slightly less firepower they want to make sure that firepower can get to where it can do the most damage and for the royal navy that's under 16 000 yards and it comes up again and again they sort of go well it's all well and good that we've got these fancy fire control instruments and we've got these aircraft and yeah we maybe can hit at 25 30 000 yards but in an action are we going to be able to depend on that um and they sort of go well no you know these instruments might be damaged you might not have aircraft available you know the smoke of battle might obscure um the target you might have to take your ship down to 15 000 yards if you want to hit them um and therefore ships should be built so that they can get there reliably interesting yeah because i suppose at that point you're almost having to build a ship more for brawling than than for sniping and and i mean it makes sense because even if you do have brilliant fire control systems with any level of firearms technology the longer range shots if you're just relying on the ballistics of the gun and directing the gun barrel rather than any kind of guided munition it's just a simple fact statistically the longer you you fire from the more there's going to be deviation and the more there's going to be a chance for a miss you get up close and personal it's very difficult to miss yeah um and the other fact of course is that the royal navy wants a decisive battle you know it had quite enough of un you know indecisive engagements during the first of war where it just fired off ammunition at long ranges if it's in action it wants to force a result and that means hitting and that means ships that can get in close not you know we're not talking ridiculously close by the standards of these things but 15 16 000 yards and then i suppose we come to really what your question was asking and why no 16-inch designs um and the answer is there were a couple of them they did look at 16-inch ships in 1935. um i've got 12 here this isn't all of them there are others and this is just a series of design studies where they just essentially look at 23 not ships they look at 27 they look at 30 knots they look at a couple in between they have all sorts of armament combinations um you know one quad two twins in 14d for an eight gun ship and just to try and work out you know how they compare to each other how much weight needs to go into armament how much into firepower what these ships would do you know against each other there's a lot of one-to-one comparisons to sort of evaluate effective ranges um so you do your 16a which is a 30 knots 16 inch design and they look at that armor protection and go uh no thank you that's terrifying yeah um they're very unimpressed by that and they look at the 27.16b and they go we don't want to have mixed turrets they don't like a mixture of odd and even numbered turrets so they go nope we won't release to that one and you've got 16c which is probably the strongest of them where they go all right we'll have three triples 16 inch guns 27 knots um but it's armor still a little bit on the weak side now we're not happy with that ultimately you know the favor and the one that crops up quite often in online discussions is 15c which is the 29.5 knot 15-inch guns one with a belt nearly as thick as what's on the king josh the fifths uh and it is a strong design and the royal navy like him um it is to be emphasized the design study is very high level there's not an actual behind it yet but they do look at it at this stage and go yeah we like that um and then in the top right here i have just included these sort of weights for one inch of armor um that underpins some of these decisions just to show you how much more went into decks than into belts and because i find it quite drastic though one inch on your magazines on decks 420 tons whereas increasing your machinery armor by an inch on the belt 80. gives a sort of an indication of you know how much weight these decks were absorbing yeah and i suppose that's very important because obviously the deck armor is notionally there to protect you against plunging fire at long range if you ever end up experiencing that but by the time that these ships are being designed they're also having to think quite seriously about protection against bombs so the deck armor costs a lot but it's it's protecting against two separate threats whereas the best that your belt arm is ever going to protect you against bombs is maybe it stops splinters from near misses yeah and that comes up again and again it's you sort of see them talk about death armor and it's not often they really care about shell fire the requirements are dictated by bombs and what they need against those and it just so happens to me that the thicknesses required to that means that you're pretty immune to plunging fire at the ranges in questions so generally they want their karma for bombs and that actually drives quite a lot of decision making process later on um when we look at the deck armor in more detail so i thought you know this is just a quick set of conclusions they had based on the three different speeds and you can sort of see they like the 15 inch gun you know for the 30 knot ship the 15 inch gun means they can have a lot better protection and for when you're standing a 15 ship in the line against ships of 16-inch guns and actually well actually it's better to have the slightly lesser arms ship because her armor will stand up a lot better so if we're going to do a 30 knot ship we want to do a 15-inch you know have 15 inch guns and they sort of carry on the same conclusion down to the 27 not ship it's not quite as clear-cut but they still think that if they're going to be standing in the line against 16 inch fire the 15 inch gun is better there's more armor and you'll notice also says and against aircraft so even here they're expecting aircraft to play a significant role in the design and then finally for a 23 knot ship they basically go what's the point in anything but 16-inch guns because we can have it with adequately protect any sort of ship in question be at 9 16 inch 12 14 inch so there's not really much to gain by having the 15 inch armament yeah so at that point you've dropped so much machinery you're saving so much weight you can just start slathering on the yeah you sort of go well we can do something like nelson with an ordinary arrangement and we've got a thousand times we can take off the machinery weights to put into more armor um yeah we don't need to worry about having a 15 inch gun what was interesting though is how they did actually think the 14 inch ship at this stage was worth considering over the 15 inch because it has more guns as it sort of says here and i was alluding to a minute ago you know it may expect to obtain four hits to three just because of its more barrels and some do say that the hit is the important factor and it just matters where that hit is the size of the hit doesn't matter but then they obviously say you know the difference might not be great but the advantage of the 16 inch or more concrete yeah yeah i suppose that makes sense so if you you hit someone with a 16-inch they're gonna feel it wherever it hits you hit someone with a 14-inch they may or may not feel it but then they say the counter-argument well you might hit them a lot more often with the 14 inch so it's kind of a roll of the dice of how if we hit them slightly more often will we eventually buy statistics get lucky enough to hit something that really hurts yeah so at this stage you're looking at you know if they were going to build a 23 knot ship it would have 16 inch guns ignoring treaties on 35 000 tons but they're going to build a fast ship it will have 15 inch this is where sometimes you get lots of debate about how the uk was going to build 15-inch gunships and then the treaty happened and i think what's neat we need to be clear about there was a three-week period where the admiralty was like investigating the 15-inch gunship um very quickly you know it's here the dates 20 september 1935 they decided they should have nine 15-inch guns and 29 knots to match european construction three weeks later they switched to 12 14 inch guns and 28 knots and so that is driven essentially by the americans who having spent years going no we're not going smaller absolutely not no way go well actually we can do 14 14-inch still on 35 000 tons but we can do 14-inch and the the idea of the displacement limit going down was killed by the italians essentially the moment they went actually we're not going to build something like dunkirk we want a 35 000 ton ship with 50 guns and then the french were like well we're not going to go smaller than that are we now and then the germans jump in and go well we're not going to be smaller than that it's like years of work to get smaller guns and ships gone gone yeah meanwhile the japanese are quietly drawing up sketch plans for the yamato yeah but what's funny actually about the japanese is even at this stage the brits still think that actually japan wants to go smaller they sort of look back at that 25 000 ton 14-inch gun proposal and they're going well we think the japanese would go smaller if we could get the americas to go smaller which i'll obviously clearly changes the japanese are sitting there going yes everyone please build build smaller less well-protected battleships please do this yeah it's just an interesting sort of look at how they're thinking um and i just think the choice at the end bottom there sort of encapsulates the thoughts at the end of 1935 in the apple team you know if we're going to build a battle cruiser which we have to do because the europeans are we have to assume that the americas and the japanese will build 16-inch ships and so even if you only limit in a new treaty two ships to 15 16 inch and then everyone goes to 14 inch then you've still got 16 inch ships of new construction in japan that you can't match or option b which is the one they went for is to insist on 14 inch for all future building and it just means they thought they might have to accept the possible inferiority in their battle cruisers at the time yeah and as far as a note for the viewers um when the admiralty is talking about battle cruisers here they're not talking about you know invincible or lion class designs they're still operating by the slightly odd convention the royal navy had in the 1930s that anything faster than 25 knots was a battle cruiser regardless of what you actually fitted it with to the degree that as i've mentioned before on the channel you have this wonderful description of hms vanguard as the fully armored battle cruiser in some of the early designs yeah and the king just the fifth studies their new battle cruiser through to about mid 1936 and then they become the new capital ship where they start looking at all the armor they're throwing at this thing and going um maybe this term doesn't really apply very well yeah and also i think when you're everyone's building fast capital ships you just realize you've actually a kepler ship has to be fast these days it's not that you know the 23-21 not battleship is obsolete and you need to build fast ships so the distinction somewhat goes away so that takes us up essentially until the 14 inches um decided upon which i think is a roundabout way of answering your first question yes designs yes eventually but they weren't ever really looked at because by the time they get to looking at ships that can take 16 inch guns they need fast ships and they don't like fast 60-minute ships yeah they they don't like them being very poorly protected so yeah i mean it makes sense there's a limited limited amount you can put on 35 000 tons i mean you see the same kind of decision making processes going on with things like heavy cruisers across the board where people are they're wedded to the idea of having eight inch guns and a lot of them they're wedded to the idea of having high speed and then if you're the japanese navy and that means you have to put one inch of basically splinter armor on your turrets well so be it whereas obviously the british are kind of looked at and gone hmm yes thinly protected capital ships i think we won't do this one again yeah and they do reference these 16 inch 30 knot ships going basically we'd be doing the counties just on a bigger scale and we we want to do that yes so i guess that that brings us on to question two so they've selected this three quad designs with 12 14 inch guns then you know that we're approaching by this point pretty much we're almost on top of the point where they're actually laying these ships down but they come out the other end with a twin turret in b position so what's going on what why does b turret lose two of its guns pretty much at the last moment so essentially they obviously they've spent months or years looking at the quad going you know 12 14 inch guns compared to 9 15 inch that's acceptable but then they make a couple of changes to the sort of core design that they don't want to give up but they do cost a lot of weight and that is principally the raising of the armored deck from middle deck level to main deck so that obviously moves behind the ship you need more belt armor etcetera etcetera um that adds weight and they also switch from the 4.5 inch secondary gun to the 5.25 inch um there's a few other changes but those probably two big ones and so you can see here on this slide you go design 14n to design 14-0 and they don't like 14-0 much at all so this is got the raised armor deck which they really like it's got the new 5.25 inch gun which they really like but it does mean that the belt armor to essentially go from the middle deck to the main deck has to be rather thin so you know you see that the upper belt there magazine is 13 inch machinery 12 inch they do not like this likewise when they've had the shave half an inch off the deck armor that sort of takes it below what they're comfortable with so they're sort of looking at this design and going we really like these improvements we've just made um but we can't accept this armor can we you know it's just not comfortable and so you see there design 14p which essentially becomes kg5 has laid down and by dropping two of the guns the armor shoots up you know the belt goes from 13 and 14 to 15 and the machinery gets from a 12 or 13 inch belt to a flat 14 um and the deck arm is recovered so you can kind of see the gain in protection um giving up the two guns it does have a lot of debate around it though um and again this is where we get back to the whole decisive range school or gun power school and so they're sort of looking at going you know the ships need to be able to operate when and where they're required you know even in the face of strong air attack and again this is referencing the deck armor they don't like within a deck because of bombs they need to have so security against shell fire to get to below 16 000 yards and to make the most of the national characteristics of our personnel um something that comes up occasionally the royal navy is very uh impressed by its own long service system and its traditions and history and it doesn't like chance it wants to give itself the best chance of winning so it needs that but they also do need to be able to match these european 15-inch ships um although again they note that matching ship for ship might be misleading you know there's more to naval strategy than my battleship's bigger than your battleship um cough cough of germany and so you know other arms of the fleet including air have to play their part and then again air attack the fourth point the ship is required for european waters where she may be frequently subjected to air attack at sierra n harbour and she needs to have the ability to fight at medium and short ranges because the weather conditions might mean you might not see an enemy until 20 000 yards so you can sort of see where they're coming from and the conclusion is that the requirements of armor are absolute you know doesn't matter how fast or so the ship is it's always important that they have the minimum standard of armor not least because armor is mostly fixed you know they can improve the striking power in the future by shell development um but you're not really going to be replacing the belt armor halfway through a ship's life so they go right we need to do more than just have the minimum required standards for today because these ships might be still here in 20 years and the attack won't still be as it is today on the contrary they go well if we drop down to a twin in b position then that will delay the ships by probably nine months and so i sort of included this passage here because you know the delay in the completion of the ships from the spring of 94 to the end of that year though undesirable is unlikely to be vital unless we happen to go to war during that particular year and you do sort of look at that and wins a bit inside um but on the other hand our first seven ships in any case would be complete by the end of 1942 um in other words to get the best design was more important than the delay and you can see the argument from the perspective of 1935 at least yeah it's just slightly ironic they think they're thinking in terms of long long term fleet strategy rather than at that point obviously they don't really no one appreciates they're going to be at war in four years time yeah yeah they want to make sure they get the right ships and ships and again the air power theme comes up all the time um you know even chatfield in 1934 i was reading this document you know if they have to sacrifice other parts of the ship design to make sure the ship can operate under air attack they will do so you know that it's a vital requirement even with 1934 biplanes um which i find quite interesting you know you get all this thing about battleship animals and bits of pieces but the air attack is always at the forefront of these designs um so that essentially takes us through you know to why the ships have ten guns yeah and then that my next sort of set of slides is moving on to design choices and to go into a bit more detail about why the navy did what they did yes that really fit to the questions yeah well i mean that's kind of question three isn't it so what what are the so we know now why why they've got the 14 inch guns why they've gone down to 10 guns so that's your kind of your offensive fire systems taken care of at least for the surface actions but then you've got the defensive systems where the enemy's chucking shells and torpedoes back at you and you know getting the ability to move around so what are the main reasons then for the choices behind the defensive systems armor torpedo defense etc etc yeah well there's a few interesting things um because it's you know it gets talked about a lot you know vertical slab armor you know rubbish slab so i see it all the time it sort of drives me nuts um you have to remember you know the navy did adopt inclined armor on the nelson's it had inclined armor internally on its 1929 designs so why did it decide actually for the kindred fist will go vertical um so yeah you can see here the progression you know nelson you've got quite a narrow belt but it's inclined and it's internal and then that evolves somewhat by the time you get to 1929 where they add a lower belt um the thicknesses here on the belt are a bit thinner because they've gone to four twins so has less weight for protection um not quite so efficient but they do increase the incline but they go right we've got to protect against diving shells so we'll stick in a four inch lower belt looks somewhat similar to what we find on the south dakotas in my opinion um and the eye was you know it's that same kind of big thick upper belt and then the lower belt um to protect below but they move away from that they don't actually like that when they think about it some more so in 1933 um they're still looking at 12-inch designs at this stage but they start trying to work out how they can combine the torpedoes defense system they've just developed the sort of sandwich one with the belt other and so the first option they look at is the swaps on the left where they go right we've got a inclined belt we've got a small lower belt to protect against diving shells and we can sort of get our sandwich system to work but they don't really like that very much because it's a bit awkward it needs a wider ship it needs 106 feet of beam and that means more deck armor um and they don't really like having the incline um they like they like having these voids outboard of the belt armor that can be easily pierced and they don't like having this three-inch lower belt because they worry that if it's hit by a torpedo um it will blast these splinters into the ship which incidentally is what happens to indomitable in the mediterranean in 1943. um they want to avoid that so they come with option b which is the vertex we sort of know it means it's a narrower ship which is better for docking less depth armor maybe slightly faster for the same length um it does require a thicker belt and they acknowledge this you know they'll need more weight in the belt but they think the advantage of that you know offset needing that extra weight so in about october you know they sit down and choose option b they also don't like the internal belt because when it gets to the end of the ships they think it will have to be taken to the edge anyway so it's difficult to work um you get these sort of voids they're easily flooded it doesn't mean the wider ship more deck it just becomes quite difficult and they're not convinced that saving an inch in thickness is really worth it but it can slightly make the actual main belt slightly deeper so you see on the left they've got a 10 feet of above the waterline bit then there's the eight feet thickness below and then it's a little six feet three inch bit they get rid of the three inch bit um that's just a danger but they managed to slightly increase the height of the overall vertical slab which is interesting because at that point the uh there's almost as much armor underwater than as there is above water so they're clearly they've clearly appreciated the results of things like the emperor of india test trials which showed that shells could dive under water yeah they're very conscious of that um they want to maximize protection but they also don't want to leave bits of metal that can act as bullets hit by torpedo so it's quite the compromise and they also find that if they mount the belt externally it provides more of an umbrella shading effect so it's less likely for a shell to get under it so they made the decision and what surprised me sort of how early that was you know that was october 33 um and that's that lessons you've made that's not revisited and then this again is just sort of comparing option b we just looked at with the final key georgia hit design um and you can sort of see the similarities the vertical belt is still there i wouldn't worry too much about the thicknesses because the 1933 options were for 12-inch ships um but you can see how in the actual final kingdom of design they decided to taper the lower belt because of the reduced need underwater for the full thickness and they have also raised the armor from the middle deck to the main deck which is a key feature of the ships so i touched on that a minute ago when they were talking about dropping down from you know 12 to 10 guns and this is probably the defining reason for that yeah i mean it's interesting sorry so it's it's interesting there because you've got this um by having the the armor much higher you're creating a much larger volume within your citadel which allows you to retain buoyancy and also avoid free surface effect when you start flooding glare up yeah they're big fan of this um and they've actually got in the ship's cover a stability curve drawn to show if the ship's riddled at the ends very damaged how stable is it if the armor deck is at the main deck compared to the middle deck and it is very different so i wish i could reproduce it because it's very striking just how much it contributes to a more stable ship in the damaged state so you can see why they like it from that respect the initial drive there was probably actually bombs again they want bombs that are exploding on the armor deck to be well away from the waterline which is not something people tend to think of too much i don't think but what their fear was that if the ship was for every reason already low in the water because of damage or lifting or turning and if a bomb hit the armor deck near the sea and you open up inside the ship then suddenly you can get flooding above your armor deck and clearly that's not great for stability either yes so they don't like that at all um and they also like how you've got a greater distance between the deck and the magazine so if you get any spawning coming out the bottom of the deck it's got a long way to travel to hit anything disastrous and also gives you more area for you know internal communications and damage control so the ship just in general is a lot less vulnerable to non-penetrating hits and what's interesting here is that they know actually the idea was to have the armor deck at upper deck level now they can't go that far that's far too much weight um but that's what they sort of think at this stage is the best solution and it's always interesting never get to it with capital ship designs but some of the cruiser designs you sort of wonder why they look so heavy for their displacement compared to foreign contemporaries and because for some of them they have started putting the main arbor deck at upper deck level i see which is an interesting approach i find yeah well i mean it kind of works for some of the armored carriers yeah yeah that's true um but yeah so that's sort of how belt and depth uh combine you know why they wanted the vertical then why they lifted up the main deck so high then the next bit of the protection which is worth considering is torpedo defense and this is always interesting one because as you can see it's a relatively narrow system compared to its contemporaries and therefore it gets quite a lot of stick sometimes and it's fair you know you can't deny that it's depth compared to others is quite narrow but it was tested at the full scale and it passed the test and it was never breached in practice although it was never fully tested but there's a few other features i think that is worth noting about how they put to defend against torpedoes and it's not just to the torpedo the pulp header then they stop as you can see by this plan view at the bottom blue are the main machinery spaces red are your main magazines and your 5.25 inch magazines you can see there's a gap between the torpedo bulkhead and these spaces pretty much all the way around with the wing engine rooms where they have to be a bit further towards the side of the ship they have an additional holding bulkhead to try and stop any flooding coming through so it's a compromise um i think we'd all like uh the widest possible system but i think it's worth highlighting that just because in these ships you can get past the torpedo bulkheads you know you might rupture it or you might strain it and it might flood you're not immediately flooding your main magazines or your main machinery spaces you know if a bit of flash gets through your torpedo bulkhead it's still got to get through another compartment to endanger the ship so do you want to lose these outboard spaces that's like no they've clearly not you know they are useful spaces but losing an eighth of your electricity generation is a lot less damaging than losing a quarter of your boilers or having something reach your main magazines so i think it's always worth highlighting the design and how they've tried to maximize the protection while having a relatively narrow defense system which of course doesn't mean that they don't try and make that narrow defense system as good as they possibly can they do all sorts of model trials they do full scale trials um they refine it best they can you know people look simply at width quite often but there's all sorts of things that the navy looked at when it was designing this particularly how it supported the bulkhead um you know you look at the job 74 conclusions and it's mostly talking about how they've supported the bulkhead what supports failed how could they improve never weld these these deals because they'll fail quite quickly um and it's just a lot more went into it than we need to make the system as wide as possible yeah and i suppose this is the thing there's depth has a value of its own but as you point out that consideration yeah yeah there's there's other ways of stopping it and there's it's it's as you say and this will cover later on it's it's still a system it's a system that functions very well as you're not going to find many if any uh torpedo defense systems in the run-up to world war two they're rated against a thousand pounds of explosives going off right next to it yeah um and i think i just find it gets a lot of criticism purely based on it being thin and you still know it's still 10 to 13 feet mostly you know maximum 14 feet um you still got your out of a void compartment to let the blast dissipate you then you've got your liquid to catch any splinters and distribute the force you know they leave a two foot gap at the top of that liquid layer so the liquid can go upwards to get rid of some more force then you've got another void compartment and only then if you've got the bulkhead and in the citadel you know this is framed every two feet i think um and they put a lot of thought into how this bulk had supported it can deflect a line before rupturing when they do the job 74 tests i think it passed but it still deflected the best part of three feet inwards which is partly why they wanted these compartments between the top of their bulkhead and the absolute vitals because just because your torpedo bulkhead holds doesn't mean you're not you're going to stop all the flooding or any damage at all yeah so you put a lot of you know thought into how can they maximize the underwater protection okay well i suppose that that covers the the basic of the protect protective systems um now of course there is one other treaty battleship that's originally designed with the 14-inch gun in three quadruple mounts which is what the u.s was planning to build the north carolinas as before they made a last-minute change with the collapse of the treaty system and the introduction of the escalator clause so how do the two how do the north carolinas as designed with three quad 14s compare to the king george v either as designed or as built i think it's quite interesting um because if you go sort of far enough back in the queue george the fifth design history you actually get ships that look very similar um in some ways they still got the differences um also you've got the three quad 14 inch but you go back to the kg5s when they had 24 and a half inch secondaries and you're going well they've got 24 and a half inch secondaries firing a shadow of about 55 pounds and the north carolinas have 25 in secondaries fire each other about 55 pounds um they're both about 27 knots this is before you get the increased speed um up to 20 the kingdom of the pits so as originally designed it was 28 knots for them in the standard but they'd also then in action have about 2 000 tons of water in their torpedo defense system and therefore their actual speed was about 27 one of the design changes they make later on gets rid of that water and puts fuel there instead so they save about 2000 knots and they can do 28 knots even when deeply loaded um but so at that point you know 27 knots 27 knots 12 14 inch 14 inch you've got 20 secondaries versus 20 secondaries so there are you can sort of see the similarities there um but on the other hand they sort of also diverge you know north carolina still have the incline bell albeit external um whereas also by this point the kg5s are very firmly going we'll have the external belt um and then as you sort of get further along you sort of see them diverge a bit more with the heavier secondaries and the raising of the armored deck in the king just the fifths so it is an interesting comparison because this you should you can take some of the 14-inch north carolina designs and take some of the 14-inch kindle clip designs and go these ships on paper look very similar um then equally take them to the end of their processes and they've diverged quite a lot yeah i suppose that i mean we've partly covered it but yes suppose it does also raise the follow-on question of once the escalator clause gets invoked the us takes the north carolinas in for quick redesign and basically swaps out quad 14s for triple 16s but they don't they well don't and can't change anything else at that stage so you end up with the north carolina's not following the general rule of thumb with battleships of being proof against their own main armament the royal navy doesn't it presses on with the 14-inch gun so did they think at any point of doing a similar north carolina style swap once the escalator clause was invoked and popping 16-inch guns in instead there was a single line in the ship's cover which references this um and the answer was apparently that they did um but they didn't proceed with it because it would have involved a bigger ship to start with um and that's it there's just a single line so how seriously it was considered i'm not sure um i think there's a lot of pressure on sort of the draftsman who designed these guns at the time and just going down to the twin was a big change but i suspect it was briefly considered in late 35 early 36 that what they you know could they what would it require and they quickly decided that actually no it wasn't a very good idea yeah because to make it big enough they would have had to sacrifice something else and i suppose they're also under a little bit more time pressure because the first king george the fifth get ordered a little bit sooner than the north carolinas so north carolina has a little bit more time for them to play with the design as opposed to with the as you mentioned earlier the king draws this already delayed somewhat compared to where they'd ideally like them to be in service so holding it up at the very last minute he's more of a pressure on them yeah there's just no willingness to sort of delay it any more than they have to um and then you get this note when they're looking at the 1937 program which was the second three kingdoms of the fields and it's like well in real in reality we're committed to 14 inch to these ships as well because if we don't um they'll be delayed by at least a year and if not 18 months just to you know stick a 50 minute run on it'll be a new design but you know yeah they want those ships to be up arm now the escalator course has taken effect it will delay them yeah 18 months and they can't do that um and you have to remember that i think if i recall quietly all five king george the fifth would lay down before the first north carolina um yeah yeah they just got strung out coming into service because of the war yeah it was a very rapid you know first of january the first one was laid down and by july or five were um and then they got a bit delayed later on when some got bombed and some would pause for a bit and all that yeah the pressure was on to get them in the water as soon as possible yeah and i suppose that that brings us on to um one of the big myths misconceptions call it what you will with regards to the king george v and their quad turrets because people some people tell you they're absolutely awful um and of course the language goes on and on and on um left and right about with the quad turrets of you know some people say the quad turret was poor other people say the quark the gun itself was poor other people point to the the shell hoist and handling systems um all of which are actually completely different systems completely different design specs completely different levels of reliability so i mean we do know obviously um king george v does have some issues against uh bismarck in the final fight prince of wales is infamous for her her issues at denmark straight perhaps unfairly so and even duke of york has some loss of its firepower output at the battle of north cape so what's going on what's the yeah it's a very fair question um and the first thing to say is that yes there absolutely were troubles with the guns at first um and i always feel a bit sorry for prince of wales because actually off the three you know the kingdom of the fifth and duke of york her output over her couple of days fighting bismarck was probably the best um so you can bring up on this slide here you know overall she actually did about 79 across three engagements granted the third was a single two salvos um whereas king george the fifth while she started very strongly you know in the first half an hour he fired probably 200 shells of no problems mentioned that i found by the end of the battle you know she had experienced humongous problems um apparently for seven minutes she was down to just two guns so you can't sort of turn around and say oh it's all problems are overblown because clearly they were there um but this wasn't a surprise to the royal navy they had problems introducing the eight inch guns on the cruisers they had problems with the 16 inch on the nelsons it was an accepted part of introducing a new turret that there would be difficulties at first it was just the great misfortune for the kingdoms the fierce that they had to discover these essentially in combat um but i just find it's useful to get a bit of perspective so yeah prince of wales she went in against bismarck and she had all sorts of problems but she probably shouldn't have been there um she still had vicar's technicians on board trying to solve her issues uh and compared to the peacetime standard of six months to work up the full efficiency she'd had about three weeks so i think with prince of wales i tend to give her a bit of leeway because actually she had problems yes but they were not unexpected nor particularly bad compared to what they might have been and then king george v is a very interesting one because as i mentioned half now basically faultless output um you know her first 40 to 50 salvos no problems worth recording uh and then there were loads and there's you know i've thought about listing them all out but he sort of mentioned everything to the guns in some description uh but she still managed to fire 339 uh in about an hour and a half so yeah there were problems and it revealed them but for that first half an hour in the most important phase she was fine and how many metal ships do we know that fired for an hour and a half not many and then with duke of york's output her output was actually quite poor at just 66 but again if you look at the first half now you know the first 31 broadsides he had 91 for that time and it's only as the battle gets on longer and longer these other flaws start kicking in so you sort of start thinking well all right how many other ships fired 80 broadsides in an arctic storm in rolling seas um it's a very short list and again 446 shells in about two hours i mean those are there's a lot of shells thrown at the enemy um and the gold standard being held up tends to be really short engagements i think i think i'm thinking of surrogate straight and you've got a engagement that lasts about 10 minutes and duke of york fires more shells that aren't horsed than the entire american battle line does and i just find it's not really like like comparison is it no and you know a nice time pacific evening versus a single ship in the arctic storm rolling extravagantly yeah and and i i think that's that also also bears out in as you've done looking through all the records uh and an awful lot of the issues that crop up are not the guns jammed it's not even necessarily the shell hoist general though we'll come on to that in a second a lot of it is just error in drill i.e if you're in a 35 000 ton steel can being chucked around the arctic ocean and you're being asked to manhandle a shell that weighs as much as a small car shockingly enough occasionally you're not gonna get 100 right and they they want to send those shells downrange so they're not going to sit there and go well you know you know what guys we're going to delay our salvo by five to 10 seconds while you sort yourselves out they're just gonna go okay we'll fire with three guns this time and then that goes down as error and drill missed salvo yeah and those often don't you know don't mention them they just fire you know four guns fired not five no there's no error it just took a bit longer for one crew to load maybe because they had to get a shell from the bottom of the shell bin because it was nearly empty or something um i think it's easy to assume that these things are all automated mechanical perfection and not people having to grab showers from the back of the tight compartments that are rolling about and then feed them up into these machines so i think that's always worth bearing in mind and then in practice firings i actually came across a couple of documents in the last week which had the results of some practice firings you know the highly regarded 15-inch twin what we think of being exceptionally reliable probably averaged about 90 output in the piece 1930s and then you look at the 14 inch and go well between 1942 and 1944 it did about 16 um practice firings 96.1 output so if it's doing better during you know wartime exercises than the 15 inch between us and the peace conditions is it that unreliable or are other guns just not tested the same way yeah and i suppose it's in in some ways you know like you say thickest technicians on prince of wales it's still it it basically hasn't had a ship proper shakedown cruise yet so in a lot of ways it would be kind of it'd be like say again looking at the north carolinas because they're uh those of the comparable ships you'd be like taking a north carolina fresh out of the shipyard and then trying to chase down something like bismarck in the north sea and then everyone ragging on it because you know the propellers don't really work and the backs fishtailing and vibrating and all of a sudden the poor thing stuck down at 24 25 knots and then it forever being tainted as the ship with the terrible engines when it's actually a shakedown cruise problem which that's what shakedown cruisers are for yeah and it's just you know needs must and it's better to have a ship that can find most of us most the time than it is to let an enemy battleship romp amongst your trade routes yeah as well as the other thing to mention is of course as we mentioned at the start of this particular question the shellhoist system the guns and the turrets themselves are all three very independent systems and one of the other apart from errors and drill one of the other issues they have is that you know the guns work the turrets work but the shellhoist system is actually working too well because they've made it so flash tight they've made the tolerances so close that the ship just the ship flexing as it proceeds at high speed in moderate to rough swells that little flex is just enough to cause little jams and and and just small delays and snags which again can your ability to get shells up to the turrets fast enough so weirdly enough they've done one part too well which is resulting in problems elsewhere and as i understand it sort of mid-war someone i think they just turned around said guys you you can back off slightly on the like one thirty second of an inch tolerances um and suddenly all as you mentioned with the test firings in the mid to late war period all of a sudden the at the reliability level goes way way way up yeah um and it doesn't the tolerances are a thing you know they the handbook for the 14 inch mount says they allowed one inch um i think it's been suggested that one inch might not have been enough in the worst seas which i quite understand here i've noted down a couple of faults on this slide just as a example um i couldn't tell you what the number 11 interlock was so i'm not going to get too much detail there uh but just to give you an idea that these the faults that happened most of the time were relatively minor um the problem was they kept reoccurring so you look at kingdom switching that a gun white jam they might clear it it would happen a bit later because the rammers were too tight or too worn or whatever um the big failures were probably with the shell ring on occasion when while it's a great idea in theory or when it's working because you can ensure a steady supply of ammunition if it gets buckled at all suddenly it doesn't rotate and then you're not getting any shells into the ammunition feed system and this struck prince of wales quite famously in that as she turned to dodge hood's wreckage um one of the shells in the shell rooms slid and it fouled um the shell ring that was sort of rotating with the turret and so that basically jammed the entire system uh a bit of a problem took a few hours to clear that likewise you look at duke of york and her issue wasn't the shell ring itself getting jammed but one of the main things was that the shell arresters failed so as you sort of ram a shell into the system you've got these sort of arresters to keep it in place to stop it going too far now unfortunately what happened in duke of york's case is obvi being in the store they were being very careful but at one point as the ship suddenly lurched that happened just as they were trying to ram the shells in and the arresters couldn't take the force so they collapsed and then so for three of her four guns and white turret um the shells surged right past the stops and jammed the loading system and it only took about 15 minutes to clear but for that 15 minutes they fired 17 salvos on broadsides and that's about a quarter of duke of york's entire missed output at north cape that only happened because of the weather and some spectacularly bad timing yeah now you know clearly the fourth gun was all right because they had slightly timed it differently maybe a bit faster a bit slow but that gun stayed in action um so you know it's these sort of things if you step away you take the weather out a bit a large number not all i don't want to give the wrong impression but a large number of the faults particularly those in duke of york disappear um and the rest of just what you might expect if you fired 60 salvos in an hour things are going to start breaking um there's a lot of force going through these another fault that happened in duke of york was a washer basically it just fractured and so the lubricating tank kit was on leaked and they had to top that up now these are little things that you can't be surprised to happen after 40 50 60 shots um but they do cause you to miss salvo so they go down in the book and you're then looking at the centuries at the end of the battle going hang on a minute it's all well and good if matt sits there and says in peace time fires they got 96 but in the middle of that they went to fight and got 66. what's going on um and it's just long battles but overall the royal navy was quite happy with the turrets um you know they acknowledge the problems but they go you know modification is to overcome the weaknesses revealed have since been carried out and the prospects of these turrets soon becoming thoroughly reliable appear to be good uh duke of york's gun an extra report the 14 inch mountings behaved very satisfactorily on the whole all guns and mountings were in action at the time shigan has sank after brexit brought incredible exertion on the path of the orphan staff and clearing several very awkward gems so you look at that and go well if the royal navy who has quite a lot of experience with heavy gun turrets thinks that actually they're not that bad you know it doesn't necessarily jail was what you hear today about how rubbish and unreliable they were yeah yeah and i think it's important to to get that get that straight because as we've said you know there's there's all sorts of myths and legends going around about to the ship and it it doesn't help discussion when people stick to you know tired old tropes that aren't actually any way accurate but i suppose that does bring us on to one of the other big misconceptions about the class when poor prince of wales ends up meeting its demise at the hands of the japanese torpedo bombers um does that loss indicate either a major failing or failings with the design of the ship itself um as as a battleship as opposed to you know a ship that's just having large amounts of explosives chucked at it yeah and that's an interesting question because i think lots depends on how you define major failings because there were some major failings the question is to me would other ships have done any better i'm not entirely convinced they would have done but i don't know enough about them to say for sure um and of course there were improvements made afterwards you know no ship is perfect and every time you lose one you learn lessons i think there's a couple of myths though about the ship that and prince willis has lost that i would like to sort of stamp on when i get the chance um and that is that the anti-aircraft fire was rubbish i mean yeah there were some jams in the pom-poms i think that's on record you can't get around that um it is noted in one of the reports i read that they may not have been cleaned as well as they should do them and that contributed of course that might just be people back in the uk trying to protect themselves when they just lost a brand new battleship um but this quote here from the japanese official history which says you know even when prince of wales was down to six knots and sinking and she had about three of her 5.25 inch gun still in action it was still extremely fierce and five of the eight aircraft in one particular attack were hit um you can't boil everything down to how many aircraft did you completely shoot down um that's more than that i think you have to remember that prince of wales was hit ridiculously early on um she didn't really get a chance to show everything he was capable of doing because in the first torpedo attack you know she lost half her power which brings on to the other kind of myth that torpedo defense system was rubbish um i just sort of like to point out that she took four torpedo hits only one of those was on her torpedo defense system that did not breach it it held successfully um above it there was some damage because by this point this system had been counterflooded and so all the force went upwards into the wash places for the crew but the actual torpedo bulkhead itself held there was no flooding in board of that which is expected because you know they were aerial torpedoes not anywhere near what the ship would be designed to take but where this myth has come about is that for many many years it was thought that she had taken five torpedo hits one of which was about midship's port abreast the forward engine rooms we now know having looked at the wreck that this hit never happened and this was flooding from the hit right aft spreading along the shaft alley but it didn't mean for decades we had people trying to work out how a system designed for a thousand pound warhead failed to a 405 pound warhead or whatever that it was meant to be and the answer is well it didn't fail so there's nothing really to answer there as for the crippling damage the ship did suffer it's hard to say if a different design would have done any better just because there's not been any research that i've seen into how that could have been minimized um or sort of prevented so what happened is that the torpedo struck the hull near where the outer port shaft exited the hull um so this had sort of two negative effects one it was mostly below the hole rather than next to it so the force of that explosion try to lift up the stand um obviously why turret is one and a half thousand tons isn't going anywhere so you've got sort of a whiplash motion through the ship which broke a lot of the electrical circuits the other factor is that it essentially blew away the straw strut that held the shaft in line obviously the shaft was still turning it was now however no longer turning centrally and it was oscillating which had the very unfortunate effect of damaging the watertight integrity along half the ship's length if you look at these plans here the red areas shows you the extent of the flooding from this one hit and how they spread you know from hit right aft all the way into the heart of the ship um clearly very undesirable and so it's one of those hits that i don't know how you protect against it essentially um you know when you've got a shaft that runs half like the ship spinning out of center that's gonna damage any ship would the skeg have helped you know would that have stopped the shaft rotating if it was hit it might have done but also it might have transferred more force into the shaft and made it worse we just don't know um so it's hard to hold or see an obvious why didn't they do this um because it's just such an unlucky hit yeah i mean the only the only similar case i can think of was when vittorio veneto was torpedoed by swordfish in the mediterranean not quite the same but almost the same hit and in actual fact she basically came to a dead stop which um prince of wales didn't do initially actually kept going um but the difference there being that although although prince willis didn't come to a dead stop immediately she was slowed and she was subjected to continued repeated torpedo attack thereafter which obviously you know opened more holes in the ship whereas vitoria veneto gets hit by a torpedo at the tail end of a torpedo strike and she's able to sit there in if it's dead in the water or operating extremely slow speed and make good all the damage in a relatively calm and controlled manner before then gradually picking up speed and motoring off because she's not under continuous attack so as far as on the one hand it's it's a similar on the surface attack but with very different circumstances which kind of makes it not quite applicable but at the same time the initial circumstance of the attack of this torpedo hitting the propuls in the stern around the propellers it does show that you know it's not just the king george v that are vulnerable to this kind of strike yeah it's hard to think of any ship that wouldn't be seriously inconvenienced at the very least by this sort of hit and i think opinion varies whether or not to this one hit alone was fatal um some people think you know this hit was that that was it you know everything else was sort of immaterial um there was enough flooding enough damage here uh to see the ship sunk others think that it wasn't she might have been saved had she just had this torpedo here and that was it she might be able to limp back to singapore um had the crew a be able to shut off the engines not worried about further attack um and b be able to put their full efforts into damage control you know maybe they could have stopped the flooding sufficiently uh obviously the problem was is that ship was still under attack and when from the point of view of those in the engine room there was no reason to stop the shaft but so they sort of they stopped it and went what you know does it seem to be any damage to it so we'll start it again and you spin it up to 20 plus knots and then you do yet more damage um but it's impossible to sort of know that when you're the one making decision in the engine room um and also you've got the follow-on torpedo hits particularly the one right aft on the starboard side that essentially goes well you've made all these efforts to establish the flooding boundary bam gone um completely destroyed so i'm not sure to be honest if i think that first hit was fatal i think it was very unlucky because it did essentially take out half her electricity generation it's that you know her entire half ring main failed and now you can probably argue that that's a major failing but again whether or not you could have done anything to mitigate this particular hit i'm not sure it can be out of the i suppose i've generally taken the view of its given the circumstances given how many torpedo bombers were around there and they were coming back for more i've always sent it as a kind of in and of itself probably not fatal it just in in isolation but also also a fatal hitting context in much the same way as kind of like you know if you're running away from a medieval battlefield if someone shoots you in the leg with an arrow tears to your hamstring probably not going to kill you but it slowed you down to the point that the cavalry coming up behind you definitely will kill you so it's not not strictly fatal but very definitely a somewhat important contributory factor to what happens to you in the end yeah when when that takes out half her anti-aircraft armor as well yeah you are up the creek without a paddle um you know as the other quote said that she never really got a chance to show what she could do because the first hit took out half an hour um and so yes you can always improve you know parts of design but whether or not you could have mitigated against that kind of explosion or damage i'm not sure i mean they learned plenty of lessons from it um you know i've named a few here you know from the cable routes to the 5.25 inch mountings more watertight bulkheads after than the crew wash places side scuttles getting blanked more watertight doors um getting blanked off they extended the pumping system in later ships um they removed the ship's lining so they could do damage control easily they added battery fee to emergency lighting instead of oil duplicated some power leads sleeping accommodation that was below the water line got moved higher in the ship um they put a provision room off which i always found interesting that they hadn't done that from the start but yeah as designed all the food was kept forward so if you were damaged there you went hungry um so yeah there's always improvements to these ships and i would never want to give the impression that i think these ships are wonderfully perfect but i just think you need to be very aware of where they failed and what caused it and how typical was it yeah yeah which is fair enough yeah because no no no ship is perfect every ship is a design compromise especially the treaty ships but even the ones that were built not restricted by treaty are still limited by things like size of dockyard infrastructure and how much money do you want to spend on on it because i'm sure you can build the perfect battleship if you want to use your country's entire gdp but um yeah so as that leads us on so we've covered some of the more famous stuff you know prince of wales and king george vs bismarck prince of wales and for said um scharnhorst versus duke of york what did the ship spend the rest of the war doing because very few people even realized that anson and how even existed let alone that they did anything but obviously king george v didn't just go into quiet retirement after bismarck was sunk nor did duke of york do that when it's after it said shawn or so what else are they doing yeah and that's the thing that's not particularly dramatic at least particularly compared to things like the bismarck action or north cape um but it's very necessary so anson and howe are commissioned in 1942 and they mostly spend their times up in scarpa flow keeping an eye on the germans in norway um covering arctic convoys and just making sure that those ships up north the germans have aren't a threat to either the arctic supply lines or the north atlantic supply lights um and it does involve a lot of steaming around not actually firing anything um in 1943 they do a bit more um sunnier stuff when a couple of them came towards the fifth herself and howe go to the mediterranean they spend a few months there to cover against the italians um sorting against the british or the allied landings in sicily and then italy itself but they never actually see much action and then the american ships that are being moved to skype a float to cover for them have to go back to the united states so they get taken back up north because you've got pit steel and child horse a couple of heavy cruisers and so they want to have two or three ships around just to be sure so it's not yeah dramatic or exciting but it's very necessary and then obviously by the time you get to early 1944 you're looking towards the far east um and the pacific and so they take them two at a time for modernization for service out east which the well-known get rid of the catapult give them lots of anti-aircraft guns then give them a few more into aircraft guns just to be sure and then you also get the ventilation discussions which i find very amusing because there's lots of criticism made at the time and since that the ventilation of the air within the ships was rubbish and then you've got the designers responses going we have given these ships more ventilation than any ship we've ever built in the history of britain there is no no we can't do any more it's got 50 more than any other ship what are you expecting and i'm particularly amused at when they point to renown who had been out there and they go look you've got more ventilation than renown renown's not complaining not anything from her so um get on with it [Laughter] through decades is quite entertaining yeah i mean there's a there's especially with the 1940s technology if you're in the middle of the western pacific in the you know between the tropics there is only a limp there is a limit to how much the technology could do is if it's if it's 35 plus degrees out outside you know short go to the going and standing in the ship's refrigerator it's it's always hot everywhere um but it was just a problem that came up again and again throughout their service lives and they did try to address it and obviously you can't judge from this distance if they were successful but they made an effort so i suppose that then all leads onto questions you know we've talked about some of the the myths and misconceptions some of the reasons why some of the design choices were made but given all of that what design features do you think could reasonably have been changed for the better maybe things they they might have seen if they'd if they'd give them a second pass and conversely what features do you think of the ships were outstanding and and so pretty much top of their class it's an interesting one yeah you want to sort of stay away from these questions with like oh give them bigger guns because that's a easy and be impossible but there are things that you look at and go yeah if you were starting again or looking at it again what would you change um and one of the things that springs to mind the comments on the ship's wetness now i've got a couple of tables here and that show that actually freeboard wise midships the class was absolutely fine compared to their contemporaries you know they don't look bad in terms of freeboards for most of their length but what they don't have is very much shear forward um they do have some contrary to what some people tell you it's only about five feet though uh so they are wet forward and this is particularly so as the war goes on and they get heavier and heavier you know they're designed to be a deep displacement of 41 000 tons um and in 1945 they're at about 45 000 tons so they sit lower they're wetter as built they're not too bad um one of the constructors goes on king george of this trial and says actually it was fine you know the breakwaters did what their job was but i think in hindsight you can say there's a good argument that you would have given a vanguard s shear to their bowel um the requirements to shoot at low elevations forward never actually happened and by the time you got anywhere you know you had radar coming into the war and suddenly the situations where you might need to do that kind of low elevation firing directly forward were basically gone um and that would have been a fairly straightforward thing to do so i think that's sort of definitely up there on my list um turret armor barber armor i think you could make a case should have been improved they do have quite thin turret faces um interestingly enough they are vertical to increase their protection um this is when they were first looking at new turret designs about 1933 the sketches all sort of showed the nelson s turret shape and they went well that's all right um but we think that a vertical face will be better than having one sort of sloped away from the incoming shell obvious reasons and so that's why you get the metal thing it is a protection feature not a we just felt like having vertical faces for x y or z um yeah but it even so it is still 13 inches uh likewise bar bets are maximum of 13 inches so if you hit were hit flush on the barbette um that could be a problem at certain ranges so i don't think it would have cost too much to increase that you know we're not saying it's not significant we need several hundred tonnes but that compared to their belt armor and death karma which stands out a bit that the main armor if hit directly was perhaps more vulnerable than others whether or not if you take a direct hit to the turret it actually matters um too much you know the shock might jog the mounting and jam it put out action who knows but that's something i thought that you know if i was to go back i might try and add an extra inch to it um and interesting enough that does come up in the lines you see the lines have 15-inch barbettes and 15-inch tablet faces so it that's something the royal navy does see as a worthwhile improvement um and then finally i would say endurance could be improved um but the myth here i want to step on is that it's not because their engines were inefficient it's more they just had small fuel tanks so it's always fun to bring out this particular graph because the red line is the drastically inefficient so it goes king george the fit based on war experience and that blue line is the north carolinas one of those wonderfully efficient engine ships and as you can see after you get to about 23 knots um your north carolina is using a lot more fuel than the king just defeats um but obviously the north airlines does a lot more endurance because it has much bigger fuel tanks uh you know the king george the theater are similar to the latorio's in practice which isn't very much um compared to something like bismarck or north carolina or richelieu even um so i think you could add a few hundred tons of fuel give her an extra thousand miles of endurance and probably the reputation goes away because it only really comes up in the bismarck chase it's a humongous floor everything else is workable um and you know if you say king josh defeat would have had an extra thousand miles in the tank on the 27th of may against bismarck well this whole maybe we'll have to tow her back never needs to be said that you don't get that same reputation so yeah i think giving them a bit more fuel would have been a good idea fair enough uh it obviously has its costs you know regarding overall displacement and hold weight but i do think it is useful particularly when you realize they spent the end of the war traveling around the pacific for endless weeks bigger fuel tanks would have been an improvement that could have been made at the design stage as for strength um i do like the high armored deck i think that's important um i think that gets enough appreciation either it's not an obvious thing if you just look in a book necessarily but i think it's protection against bombs it's additional stability um would it be very valuable in don't say the right circumstances because they would have been really bad for the ship but you know what i mean uh if the ship came under heavy punishment i think the high armor deck would have proved its worth um i also do like their general sort of setup um with the second armament i think it's a strength i like having the four separate batteries almost in the secondary island they did set up the fire control that you could sort of fire each side from either forward or r5 control positions each position also had both a anti-aircraft fireplace computer and an anti-surface one so you could be sort of as flexible as you wished and you know it was brought up in sort of war experience documents saying the ability to deal with four aircraft at once was very useful and we'll try and extend that to as many chips as possible in the future um so i like how you've got your four distinct secondary batteries in that four corner arrangement unlike many i do like that they put serious thought into aircraft it didn't it is again one of those features that in hindsight you could have done away with um but they weren't to know that in 1936 and i think you look at the theoretical hitting rates at least that air spotting provided and you go well if you did get into that kind of battle in an alternate universe it would have been very useful for the ship to have had its own spotting aircraft um likewise for reconnaissance in slightly better conditions i think reconnaissance to try and track down something like this mark would be useful um so i like the aircraft i see why people don't and also even the navy at the time was saying do we really need aircraft um i think probably one of the big changes that would have happened um after the lines that were laid down the sort of the evolved successor lions they would have lost their aircraft facilities quite quickly um because even for the king just to fist they're going we don't necessarily want them on the ship and now the london naval treaty isn't limiting how many carriers we can have um in the long term we won't need them on the ships but in the short term we need to still build new carriers so we do need them on the ships uh so that's an interesting feature i find okay well with all of that said how do we think in the round do you think the kgvs are stacking up considered alongside other contemporary battleships and obviously we are talking about contemporaries not ships that were designed half a decade or more after they were they were put in service um it's an interesting one because you can look at i look at all of them of these sort of so-called thirty five thousand tenders um none of which actually weren't that low but that's another story um and i like bits of all of them um i think they're all in their own ways solid designs and it just depends what you prioritize most so and again things like richelieu never got the chance to show really what they could do i think they're quite an efficient design i think you get a lot of fighting power for your tonnage compared to say looking at a notorious or a bismarck in particular um i think you know that you can't get away from the fact that they've got smaller guns than the others um i think in hindsight that clearly didn't matter the 14 inch was more than sufficient whatever it was called upon to do but when you sort of do a light for like comparison um it is a factor granted look at this table it's um not necessarily as one-sided as it may seem they've got a big bursting charge in their shells they've got a reasonable amount of both belt and deck penetration and in terms of broadside weight actually they're higher than the bismarck and the richelieus so there is more than just caliber speed wise again they're not the fastest but i don't look at them and wish they necessarily had had more speed um you know 28 29 knots as built was very respectable and the extra knot or two some of their contemporaries had i mean it's nice but it's not decisive uh and then you just sort of look at armor and then there's so many different approaches to how you protect a battleship it's hard to sort of say anyone in particular is right or wrong i do like the fact that they've got as i mentioned before the higher the deck i think that's strong i think they've got a nice thick armor deck as well some of the other ships i think are not as thick as i would like um and i am a fan of the external belt i mean it would be nice if you could incline it and it should be pointed out that we think of it as vertical but it does follow the whole contours so actually for half of its length it is slightly inclined um and the breast wide turret points it's nearly 15 degrees so you know a 15 inch belt with 15 degrees in that particular spot it's quite handy but yeah i just i think they're a solid design they're well-rounded um i think they're well protected and they were there when they needed to be there and that's you know the most important thing fair enough and i suppose that that wraps up all our questions for today um i know there is a bit more information um that we could go into talking about more details of the 14-inch gun and the the choice of shells and such like um so if you'd be happy to come back we could uh do a bit of a deep dive into the the gun the guns themselves and you know the big hitting sticks as i like to call them sometimes of the ship um i i'm fairly sure there's a lot of people who want to know a nice in-depth detail breakdown of uh various naval naval guns and we might as well start with the king george the fifth since um there's probably just as many uh misconceptions about the guns themselves as they are about the rest of the ships yes i suspect there are um and from my opinion i just wanted to finish with this slide just because i found a couple of quotes in the files that used me and the first was you know this was a paper written in 1940 going in any case um the angry board preferred a well-balanced ship and were not deterred by a slight disadvantaging gun caliber any more than their forefathers were deterred from fighting and winning their battles against frenchmen who in general had more powerful ships so that's i may amuse me even when the french are allies they're still still poking fun at them and it also gets to the heart of the ship's design right you know with the smaller caliber [Music] and then we're referenced at the slightly slower pace of the us ships and having the time to you know up gun them to 16 inch and build more and test them before i had to throw them in you know the usa not having any real need for a navy was able to wait in the critical years and we had to lay down 14 inch ships or nothing at all um and i again that just the idea that the usa had no real need for navy what's an interesting take yes as far as someone probably somewhat dedicated to the concept of empire had added up how many colonies the uk had versus how many colonies the us hadn't concluded that clearly the us had no absolutely no need for a navy because they had no qualities to maintain with no colonies that were an island of lots who needed more oh well well it was a great pleasure uh speaking to you and thank you very much for sharing those the insights and of course um as people can see with the slides they've gone up you'll notice on quite a number of them this little reference numbers adm whatever etc so for those of you who are not aware those are references to the original admiralty document files which if you happen to be in the uk you can go down to the q national archives and and have a look or if you're not in the uk or to be honest if you're not in london and you don't want to go into london which i can understand to a certain degree then um nowadays the national archives have actually reopened their digital um download and scanning service so if there's anything in particular you want wherever you are admittedly they do charge for the service but you can get those documents scanned and sent to you so you can have a look over all those wonderful details and try and decipher 1940s ship ship designer handwriting when they sketch random notes in this on on the sides which is um fun at times so yeah um we'll wrap up there thank you very much everyone for listening watching whatever it is you happen to be doing and see you again in another video bye-bye 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 dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 411,475

Keywords: wows, world of warships, King George V class, Bismarck, Scharnhorst, WW2, HMS King George V, HMS Prince of Wales, Force Z, HMS Anson, HMS Howe, HMS Duke of York

Id: 6ch-uFbRErc

Length: 111min 33sec (6693 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 24 2021