As soon as a .50-caliber round hits water, typically it ricochets. So it's highly unlikely
that that would penetrate any kind of steel hull. My name is Adm. Jamie Foggo, and I served in the Navy
for almost 40 years. When I retired, I took over as dean of the Center for Maritime
Strategy of the Navy League here in Washington, DC. Today, we're going to be looking at warship scenes from movies and judging how realistic they are. King Kong covers his
ears, not unexpectedly. Hearing protection and
hearing conservation is a big deal in the United States Navy. And if you're a gunner's mate or anybody that's been on a ship firing a small-caliber weapon to a 5-inch gun, it's loud. So no doubt the only
damage we did to King Kong was probably rupture his eardrums. Now, a US aircraft carrier displaces 90,000 tons. According to Google, King
Kong weighs 50,000 tons. Now that's a heck of a lot of weight, half the weight of the
carrier, dropping on its deck. But we make our aircraft carriers to be battle-ready and battle-hardened. So my money's on the carrier as far as King Kong and his 50,000 tons landing and not breaking
through that deck. It's not part of our
tactical training in the Navy to fight either one of
those two creatures. A lot of weapons used. I see deck guns, I see anti-submarine rockets, more or less realistic. Now, when they launch
something called a Hedgehog from the starboard side
of one of the ships, we don't have those anymore, but some of our allies
and partners do in Europe. This is a weapon that's typically
used against submarines. We have a more sophisticated
and modern method. It's an anti-submarine rocket. So typically a Mark 54
lightweight torpedo. It's launched into the air. When it hits the water, it separates, and that torpedo behaves
then just like a torpedo. And the reason you do that
is to go after a submarine, not necessarily to go after Godzilla. Godzilla grabs one of the
ships and rolls it over. That's pretty hard to do
when you're talking about tens of thousands of tons of displacement and a hull form that is
designed to take bad weather. Now, for an aircraft carrier that displaces 90,000
tons, highly unlikely. For realism, pretty fictional here. 1 out of 10. Cradle lowered. All right, now ram the projectile. Easy. When you ram that powder, you ram it easy. Real easy. This is one of the most accurate movies on how you load a 16-inch
projectile into a 16-inch barrel. That projectile weighs 2,000 pounds. So you're essentially
loading a Volkswagen Beetle into the breech of that gun
and firing it at the enemy. And you notice that the projectile, it's followed by these powder charges. This was a very accurate representation of how you load that gun. There are spark-proof tools, and everybody is very
careful, because, you know, that powder is obviously
explosive and volatile, and any mistake or any spark or any flame could set it off and blow up that turret. 204 degrees, Calloway. Sailor 1: 204 degrees. Sailor 2: 204 degrees. This very shiny brass
device, that's a gun sight. And that's to allow the gun
captain to take a look out and see the direction that he's firing in. That's the way that we used to do it, before we had these very
sophisticated fire-control radars and gun directors that are
on top of the turrets today. All right, fire in the hole. I got a chuckle out of the
fact that Tommy Lee Jones runs toward the 16-inch gun
turret just before it's fired. We had on the battleships procedures to prevent sailors from being topside in proximity to those turrets
when they fired the guns, because the overpressure of the blast blew him back, you know,
a dozen or so feet. And that's probably fairly accurate. Even today, with our missile systems, if you're launching from
the foredeck of a destroyer, nobody's up there when you're launching, because there's going to
be a lot of flash to bang as the weapon comes out of the tube, and you don't want anybody to get hurt. I'd give it a 7 out of 10. "Battleship" happens to be
one of my favorite movies. These are World War II-era ships. They're not part of the
active fleet anymore, but these ships are made to fight. And when you're on one
of those battleships and you have a belt of armor around you 12 to 17 inches thick and 50,000 tons of steel to protect you, that's pretty reassuring. Drop forward anchor. What? The officer of the deck on the bridge uses the anchor on the battleship to avoid getting hit by
some of the aliens' weapons. Frankly, that's pretty hokey. The amount of chain on a
battleship or an aircraft carrier connected to the anchor is pretty long. It's probably at least 1,000 feet. But we don't use anchors for that reason. We use anchors to moor the ship in port. And this is in the Pacific
Ocean, which is really deep. One thing that the
viewers might not notice is it's so powerful that the ship actually moves sideways several yards. When you fire a broadside,
it can move significantly, and you have to do a
course correction there. I'd probably give it a 2. I think Hollywood took
a little poetic license on the anchor in this case. Torpedo! This clip is tough to watch. Probably the greatest
fear that any sailor has is being stuck in a
compartment filling with water and being unable to get out. The ship is rolling over. Ordnance is exploding on board. And if you get out, that's great, but then you're going to jump into the freezing waters of the Atlantic. And you're still wearing
your boots and your kit, which is, if you're not a good swimmer, it's pretty hard not to sink. One of the enemies
against their escape route are these watertight doors. The watertight doors are heavy, and they're created to contain the water that might be leaking into a compartment. Or, if there was some kind
of a catastrophic explosion, the reason that they're heavy is to contain that blast
overpressure in the compartment. Now, most doors on ships or submarines have two kinds of latching mechanisms. There's something called a latch or a dog. We call it a dog. And when you're in a normal steaming, you just push the door shut, and it latches the same
way a screen door does. In the event that you're at a heightened readiness condition, you will crank that
wheel to lock that door. And the only way to get it open is to open it counterclockwise. So you can imagine, you're
at an awkward angle, your hands are slippery because there might be
oil in the compartment, there's water in the compartment,
and you're panicking. You know, it's a life-and-death situation. You're trying to get out. I think the realism factor
here is a 10 out of 10. Second torpedo to starboard beam! Bearing 120! Right hard rudder, hard over! "Greyhound" is an
absolutely phenomenal movie. It tells and depicts with
great historical accuracy. The Germans are depicted in the movie as deploying the wolfpack tactics, and you see two torpedoes coming
from different directions. You know, that's more
than one submarine firing, and these tactics were
extremely effective. Belay that, belay that! Meet her. Meet her! Belay, meet her, meet her! So, what you see on the bridge of the ship is an attack on the destroyer. You know, I think that was very realistic. And you see the wake of the
torpedo coming towards you. The propellers do
something we call cavitate. They create bubbles as they're
going through the water, and that creates a trail
behind the torpedo. And so a sharp lookout
can pick that up early, and it gives the commanding
officer an advantage to conduct those drastic
evasive maneuvers. If it was nighttime, a lot of times it's even
easier to see the torpedo because of the
phosphorescence in the water. It kind of glows as it's coming at you. A lot of these torpedoes
were electric-powered. They had batteries and
electric motors in them, and they would go towards the target. Nowadays, we have torpedoes
that are propelled by fuel and have a very long range. And so it was a different game back then, but in this case, absolutely accurate. As far as the maneuverability is concerned of that destroyer, you
have to keep in mind, this is not a battleship
that displaces 50,000 tons. These are lighter ships. Nowadays a heavy destroyer
in the United States Navy's about 7,800, 8,000 tons. The propulsion systems
on these destroyers, the engines and the
propellers and the rudders, are made for speed and maneuverability, particularly because in the
second battle of the Atlantic, they were not only going
after surface ships, they were going after submarines. And that means you've got to
be able to turn on a dime. The rounds that actually hit the water or penetrate the water, whether or not they actually
do any damage, it depends. As soon as a .50-caliber round hits water, typically it ricochets. If it does go beneath the waterline, you'll lose velocity very quickly. So it's highly unlikely
that that would penetrate any kind of steel hull. But again, you never know. So, he has to surface,
because water's coming in. And then while he's on the surface, they finish him off in
pretty much a brutal manner. But you see what looks
like anti-aircraft guns that are lowered to the deck-plate level. As this projectile went in and it blew up, it may have caused secondary explosions. First there's an initial
boom, and then a massive boom. There's so much oil and fuel and weapons on board that submarine that, you know, once it took that initial
penetration of the hull and those shaped charges
went in, it exploded. This movie gets absolutely
top marks from me. As far as realism, 10 out of 10. Are we absolutely sure of our position? Yes, sir. An exact satellite fix. It's Her Majesty's Ship Devonshire that thinks she is operating
in international waters. The bad guys have somehow interfered with the navigation system of that ship, and she's actually
operating one mile inside Chinese territorial waters. Devonshire doesn't know that. Now, that's not unrealistic
in digital warfare today. We just had a situation in the Black Sea where somebody spoofed the automatic information system of a couple of NATO
warships and depicted them off the coast of Sevastopol in the Crimea, where there's a Russian naval base. That's dangerous activity. This scenario is fairly realistic. English is the international
language for communication in airspace or sea space. But many times somebody
on the bridge of a ship may not speak English, so we have other methods
for communication. We have flashing lights, we have signal flags, and we have agreements to avoid mistakes. Sound the general alarm. [alarm blaring]
The ship has been overflown by two Chinese planes. We believe they have hostile intent. The commanding officer
directs a general alarm. So that is a call to action
stations, battle stations. There's also a series of
red lights that go off. Typically on a surface ship at night, you are in a darkened-ship status, so there's very low light in compartments. There are key points
throughout the passageways that are lit, but not
necessarily red lights. So there's a little bit of
Hollywood poetic license here. The unrealistic part of this scenario is this thing that looks like a drill. Penetrating the hull
of a warship like that will not sink the warship. Now, in this case, the
bad guys figured out that by boring through
the hull at a weak point and going in along the length
or along the keel of the ship to go through several compartments, and by that time, HMS Devonshire was overwhelmed
with displacement of water, and it sunk. So as far as realism, a 1 out of 10. Sir, I'm picking up mobile bandwidth low-latency transmissions.
Could be a UAV data link. You know, "The Last Ship" is a show that I'm very familiar with. In the clip, they talk about a UAV. It stands for unmanned aerial vehicle. So it's a intelligence surveillance
and reconnaissance tool. In the last decade, we've seen UAVs evolve
from just being a sensor that takes a video or a picture and sends it back to the mothership to UAVs with real weapons on board. Enable spy radar. But sir, if the Russians pick it up, they'll track our bearing. We've got 30 seconds,
then we shut it down. Sir? I gave an order. The spy radar, that is part
of the Aegis weapon system or radar system on the ship. And the radar that is
looking out on the horizon, over the horizon, in the air, and on land for 100-plus miles is the SPY-1 radar. That's the best radar in the world, and it gives us essentially
100% situational awareness. I had four of these
destroyers at my disposal when I served in Europe, and they were absolutely terrific. There's really two areas of the ship that are areas where
the ship is controlled. One is the bridge. So that's where you drive the ship. That's where you control speed and rudder and course and direction. The real heart of the ship for fighting is in the combat information center. You see the sailors taking
direction from their skipper and carrying out that
direction effectively. What I like about the series and what I like about the scene is it's the calm professionalism
that you would expect. I give it high marks. I give it, for realism
and professionalism, I give it a 9 out of 10. General quarters. Sound general quarters. All engines ahead full. Aye aye, sir. [whistling] You know, you hear whistle
signals from the bridge. In this particular case, these
guys are at battle stations. They want to get people's attention. And in the Surface Navy today,
tradition will have it that when somebody wants to address the crew over the general announcing system, oftentimes the boatswain
will blow his pipe to get the attention of everybody. Stand by to roll depth charges. It speeds towards the submarine,
the submarine submerges, it drops a series of depth charges. So those depth charges are in canisters, they look like 50-gallon drums,
on the stern of the ship, and they were actually rolled off the ship after a gunner's mate
set the charge to explode and set the depth that
it would explode at. You had to estimate at how deep you thought
that submarine had dove after she went from the surface
down to try to evade you. And it was a bit of a
guessing game, but, you know, there are limits to how
deep the submarine can go. For historical accuracy, 10 out of 10. Thanks for watching. And if you enjoyed the video,
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