Rottnest Island - The worlds most adorable coastal defence emplacement!

[Music] [Music] so continuing with the Australia trip you've already seen Albany uh now we're going to be in Perth or more accurately as you can see from this or actually leaving Perth almost immediately for the happiest Little Island yes this is rot Nest Island rather more famously in The Wider World known as the home of the quaca which is this wonderful little creature here rotness Island sits just to the west of Perth and freem manle and constitutes the first part of the Perth freem manle areas Maritime Heritage that we're going to look at look at his happy little face now upon arriving there's the fer in question just leaving leaving us on rot Nest Island perhaps we need to explain quite why the British Empire and the Australian government decided it was time to put a bunch of heavy artillery on an island full of tiny marsupial the answer was three-fold firstly there were were some existing Shore batteries in the Perth fre mantle area but as you can see from this they didn't exactly cover a particularly huge amount additionally ships had gotten somewhat more capable and so these relatively small short-range Victorian era guns probably wouldn't hurt them even if they did get close enough to be hit on top of that the Australian Navy whilst it still existed and had a number of capable ships in it did not possess any Capital ships anymore with the demise of the the battle cruiser hmas Australia and finally the threat had evolved back in the 19th and very early 20th centuries the only real threat to Australian ports was Russia and Russia's specific Fleet well let's just say they didn't come to a particularly good end in 1905 twice over and even before that the Pacific had never been Russia's main area of focus so a few Shore batteries to deter the occasional small Raider were fine but by the 1930s the primary threat was Japan and Japan did have Capital ships and of course being where it was the Western Pacific was Japan's major if not only major focal area and so it was decided that although in the event of war the Royal Navy would come and assist it wasn't necessarily guaranteed that the Royal Navy would be able to make it to a specific area that was being targeted by the Japanese Fleet before they actually got there and so so bigger guns were needed and so in 1935 they started construction not on guns but on a light Railway as you can see here this is one of the two light diesel locomotives they brought in to run on said Railway having chosen rot Nest Island as the particular location where they're going to establish the gun battery because as I said it was out to the west and therefore the distance from Perth afforded the guns a little bit more effective range to reach out at Targets might be approaching Perth before their guns could be in range of Perth and free manle themselves but with no infrastructure to move anything heavier than what you could carry with a man or a mule they needed this to be built first and of course it wasn't just about taking stuff up to the areas where they were going to put heavy guns you also had to take stuff back down like all the Earth and rock that you were moving out of the way because of course you aren't going to have just guns and ammunition lying out in the open apart from anything between the rain and the heat that you get in Perth everything would Decay very quickly but it would also be a fairly obvious Target for anything you engaging and well as you can see here there were some fairly Hefty guns being brought in cuz they were expecting some very Hefty Targets this is a 9.2 in gun in transit up the little Railway system now why a 9.2 in because of course you might be thinking this is the mid 193s the Royal Navy scrapped 12 in and 13.5 in armed ships relatively recently why not use some of those well firstly there are limits to even the light Railway can transport and those guns would be considerably heavier but also bear in mind that the 12in ships had pretty much all been scrapped in the early 1920s and the very last of the 13.5 in ships like the battle cruiser tiger had still gone to the breakers considerably before 1935 and it was very unlikely that any of those guns or many would be found intact certainly after the breakers yards had gotten to them whereas the 9.2 in guns for various reasons had already been used in coastal defense batteries and stuck away in various stashes around the Empire and so they were available they were fairly powerful and they could be moved relatively easily now when the gun batteries were all decommissioned as they would be in the early 1960s they discovered that compared to the scrap value of the bigger guns because there were some small 6in batteries as well the big guns it just was not coste efficient to Dismount them truck them all the way across rot Nest even using the light raway system back onto a ship and take it back to Perth for scrapping the entire cost of that operation would be more than the scrap value of the guns were worth and so they were left in place which meant that in the 1990s when they decided to redevelop the whole area as a tourist attraction the railway bed and the big gun batteries were still there and could be relatively speaking easily reconditioned and with the light Railway reconditioned and a couple of Passenger cars introduced you can make your way relatively easily and in Comfort all the way up to the top of the hill in roughly the middle of the island where the gun batteries are in fact based there is as you can also see just behind the car there a path if you want to cycle or walk up there I don't know who would but we saw some people who did mad as they might be I mean there's a perfectly good r way here apparently it's something to do with Fitness but I thought exercise involved charging around in suits of armor swinging swords but shows what I know and swinging around you can see to the left the rise of the last bit of the Hill that goes up to the main gun battery and the view out kind of to the northwes is of rot Ness Island so you can see there's not really much in the way of Hills past this point and also having this fairly central location is quite useful because it means that if an enemy Fleet does show up and they are perhaps going to try and land troops to silence the guns well then they've got to land a relative distance further out which means that the Garrison can make ready a ground defense against incoming incursions whilst obviously the main guns can continue to engage shipping which is a little bit better perhaps than having the guns right on the edge of the island which is obviously where they could be engaged immediately by Landing troops which would suppress them earlier and here is the surviving battery itself as you can see it is partially recessed into a big essentially concrete bar bet and has a rather nice boxy turret appearance albeit that this is not particularly thick steel this is more of a weather shielding and Splinter proofing box as opposed to if you look at some of the turrets that the similar guns were mounted in in the pre-World War I and World War I periods you'll see that those are somewhat differently shaped because they have considerably better protection and that's not necessarily as mad as you might think because whilst those of you have watched the channel for a while will know that I'm not the world's biggest fan of coastal fortifications as thoroughly effective weapons the one thing they do have going for them is that because they just have to be the gun and the turret or the mounting they are very very small targets when they're set up like this as opposed to in big Forts and that makes them quite hard to hit because even a relatively accurate Battleship Salvo is accurate in terms of hitting a battleship that might be several hundred meters or quite a few hundred feet long as opposed to you know something 20 or 30 foot across like this and around here at the back is part of the loading mechanism this is in fact a combination rammer and shell Dash ammunition tray but don't worry we're not talking about cordite charges sitting right out here under this rather Nice metal sunroof this bit that's actually fully out the back of the turret is in fact mostly the ramama so the Hoist that brings up the ammunition is on the left hand side of the turret that would bring the ammunition up it would then be fed backwards sitting on the rammer and then the rammer the tray Etc the whole thing swings on this big arm as you can see heads over to the right and then that will engage with the gun the rammer then actuates shoving the charge or the shell or whatever it is that happens to be in front of it into the gun and then can repeat the process for the remaining sections of the ammunition obviously you feed the shell in first followed by the two bagged charges the whole thing is supposed to be hydraulically powered and the electrical motors that drive the hydraulic pumps are below however once you get into the interior you'll see that there are plenty of hand cranks in all sorts of positions which allow you to actually manually operate the entire gun platform if you need to if for whatever reason electrical power or the Hydraulics themselves have failed in some way shape or whether that be shrapnel damage someone's hit the generator somewhere else or just general mechanical failure all of which could happen just when you don't want them to but since we've seen the two interesting things that are poking out either end of the Big Green metal box let's go inside and have a look at some of the more interesting contents I've said big green metal box fluorescent lamp by the way that you can see there not from original feature you can however see why it's needed because apart from the door in the side this little vision hatch on the right is pretty much the only other consistent source of lighting now one of the first things you'll see is this dinky little thing and yeah this really is a very very small shell this is not a 9.2 in Shell by any stretch of the imagination but it is used or was used in this particular gun because the 9.2 in Shell weighs about 380 which is just over 170 kilos for those of you working in metric but obviously to test fire the gun there would be a lot of wear and tear caused by this and unlike ships you can't take rot Nest Island into Harbor to get the gun reigned or replaced and so they took a Hotchkiss gun milled it very carefully so it fitted precisely inside the 9.2 in barrel and they use that for most of the practice shoots that the gun did not all of them but the majority of them and this hotus B just so happened to be a six pounder and thus this is a six pounder shell so this is the kind of shell that you would fire from the 9.2 in gun but only as a practice round around for General training you could also fire a fulls sizee 9.2 in Shell but use a half charge because this particular type of 9.2 in gun in common with many others used two bagged charges to make up a full charge so you could just use the one which would result in lower pressure the shell wouldn't go as far but if you needed to practice loading a full-size shell and so forth but you didn't want to put as much wear and tear on the gun as a full charge would than the half charge would do now you can see here the breach end of the gun itself now you may recall from the Albany get that right video that it was actually raining when I got to Australia and the rain was still coming and going when we went visit rotness that's why in The Wider pictures you've seen there were a fair bit of clouds although it did stay mostly dry and occasionally Sunny while we're on the island and that's why there's this tarp in there because they were using that to obviously cover the areas that water could get into the turret to make sure they didn't have to do too much cleaning and maintenance every single day fortunately this particular part of the gun as you can see where the paint has worn off is mostly bronze so very unlikely to rust anyway but there's plenty of steel parts you can see in the background as well and taking a slightly wider view you can see in the middle left there that's the other end of that big swinging arm loading mechanism that you saw sticking out the back earlier on just to the top right you can see there's that Al viewing window we'll have a bit of a closer look up there in a minute and at the moment there's a 9.2 in armor piercing shell sitting there ready to be loaded as soon as the rammer can be engaged you can also see the driving band of the shell down there at the base and this perhaps shows the best interior shot of how that loading mechanism works you can see there's a hoist there so ammunition comes up feeds in whole thing swings down to engage with the tray and then everything could be rammed up into the gun so this area on the left where you can just about see somebody's arm poking through this is the area you don't want to be because that's where this arm is going to swing down in normal operation for the gun and this is looking up the gun barrel if it wasn't obvious if you just look to the bottom left you can see a little bit of the interrupted screw engagement section which tells you that we are in fact at the breach end then you of course you've got this smooth area so this is the breach where the charge is going to sit and then you can just see at the very core of the picture the rifling beginning further up the gun barrel so that's where the Shell's going to be when the driving bands are going to engage Etc and so on that transition point is obviously somewhere in this little black area but the sunlight pouring down from the other end of the Gun Barrel H and put a little bit of contrast between light and Shadow there and this is a marking you'll find all over this particular gun mounting as you can see it means BL so it's breach loading 9.2 inch and then you'll see you've got Mark 10 mark x Roman numeral and then you've got x with an uppercase of V or Roman 5 and then another X and although you can't quite see in this you will see on a lot of the other markings around the gun that should be the x i Mark 10 star or Mark 10 with a little x on it in case of the asterisk so this means that you're looking at a breach that can service various versions of the Mark 10 gun which means it's a 9.2 in 47 caliber weapon you can see this particular section has been made by EOC that's the elzik ordinance company in 1901 so it's a pretty old gun even by the time it's being installed at rot nest and you can see that this was originally number 185 but it's been scratched out and reamped with a 177 which again is common either in scratched out form or in whole form across various markings in the gun I suspect this has something to do with the liner because almost everywhere has this scratch out of 18 185 with 177 on it except for the gun liner itself which says breach loading 9.2 in wire 10 number l-77 EOC so I think when they've reigned the gun it's been also renumbered now working our way forward this is the business end of the gun as you can see looking out through our little forward viewing point and you might notice of course there's no big Rangefinder stick out of the sides of the turret the way you would find on on Battleship guns and so forth so you'd be relying on local spotting and rangef finding elsewhere there are in fact the remains some of the remains of a depression Rangefinder elsewhere in the museum but this is also where you could look out and spot if you were actually within the turret itself and the turret would have its own fire control equipment if the separate spotting stations took a hit but this gives you an idea of what the mark one human eyeball can see looking out to the west of rot Nest Island and this is what the station immediately behind that viewport looks like so you can see there's the receiving element for a telescope to be mounted here obviously they taking the telescope away that's on the top middle portion of the picture and in the middle middle right you can see these sort of half completed areas this is where the receiver dials for the Fire Control System would normally come through assuming that you were using the spotting and Fire Control station for the gun battery itself as opposed to local control but of course those mechanisms were lost at some point during the gun's inactivity in the 60s 7s and 80s more specifically the right hand side is where bearing information comes in because roughly where I'm standing to take this picture is the manual Traverse wheel whereas on the left hand side of the gun that's where the elevation details come in and on the left hand side is the corresponding elevation wheel and just to the left of the picture left bottom you can see an element of the hydraulic controls so this is why the data is coming in at two points because you'd have a man reading the data and then he would be relaying it to the person behind him who would then be making the corrections obviously initially with hydraulic power using levers and buttons to get the gun to go where it needs to go and if that fails he can take a step back to the manual backup mechanism but these days this is what passes for the turret's crew but if you go down through a hatch in the floor or if you're a bit lazy you can go out the side of the turret down and round into the normal entrance of the concrete Bar B you actually get a pretty good view of the workings of the gun below so these are bits that you wouldn't normally see even on a museum ship unless you're really lucky and sometimes not even then because these parts on ship mounted guns are usually quite difficult to access whereas here they're just kind of in a big concrete and steel roofed shed here you can see there is obviously a 9.2 in Shell being moved around and a cordite charge so we're at one level below so this is the lower part of the Hoist mechanism that you saw the top end of back up in the turret and you can see roughly where it's positioned compared to the turntable the whole thing turns on so charges as you can see the toite charge here and the shell which you saw in the previous picture they're loaded in and then this box assembly takes them up to the gun and once again I have to emphasize this is a near unrivaled opportunity to easily look at the rotation mechanisms of a g heavy Naval gun turret because whilst these mechanisms in and of themselves are nothing particularly special you know rack and pinion Cog and tooth whatever you want to call it exists on loads of preserved Museum ships in most of them this would be sitting just inside a very heavy armored barbette so actually getting access to see this would be difficult and once you do get to see it if you're lucky enough to do so you have to light the thing and you'll only going to see part of it because there'll be other bits and pieces in the way whereas here this is probably the easiest part of the entire mountainy because you're in a nice big open space in the concrete portion of the implacement and so for any Naval historian or Naval History Enthusiast definitely worth a look to see how it all works or to be honest if you're researching the 9.2 in gun itself this is pretty much the best place to see how the rotation mechanism is actually going to function here for example are some of the valves that you can use to control the flow of pressure to various portions of the gun so on the left you have the rammer pressure the upper valve there is not actually labeled so I'm not sure what it connects to entirely then the next one is the gun wash out system then you've got the elevating mechanism which has lost its key and then the Hoist system so you can close all of those down and everything's nice and inert but once you want want to bring everything up to speed you can individually set these systems which of course also means if there's a fault in any one of these systems you can isolate it without necessarily crippling the rest of the gun so for example since it's lost its key let's say the elevating hydraulic system has taken some kind of hit May a bit of shrapnel so the hydraulic system is not going to work anymore fine we'll we'll shut that off but that doesn't mean we can't use the Hydraulics to wash the gun out after every shot air or water depending on what mechanisms installed we can still use hydraulic power to get ammunition to the gun and we can still use hydraulic power to Ram the ammunition into the gun it just means for elevation someone's going to be cranking on a wheel now because you're talking about concrete and rock immediately below the gun you can't have a freely rotating Hoist the way you might have in certain types of Warship you have a magazine hoist which is fixed off to one side and then you have that final hoist that we saw earlier taking the ammunition up to the gun itself this is how you get the shells in particular from the Hoist over to the gun cuz the charges you can probably carry them that's not a problem the shells on the other hand well we already established they weigh a little bit over 170 kilos you're not moving that by hand very easily so you have this little trackway and this little cart shell goes on cart and you chase the final hoist around and Slot it in to the Hoist so it can go up and be fired and whilst obviously these are inert rounds they do weigh pretty much as much as The Originals do you know I had to find out so yes you can rotate and roll them but they are not moving if you try and lift them in any way shape yes I'm one- handing it but using the principle of levers if that thing weighed anything close to a liftable weight it would have shifted upwards somewhat here's another transport trolley and this is in the side of the implacement this is where the actual hoist up from the magazines is coming so is a little bit of an in complex and involved procedure because the little cart you saw earlier that runs around on the rails that go around the implacement so you'd have the magazine sending the shell up on the Hoist that arrives up here then that moves onto this thing which you can see which doesn't need to run on the rails which can then be moved over to the little rail cart or suppose if the gun is really nearby you could try loading it directly and here's a cache of cordite charges obviously these are all inert but these are stored in their cases and the cases which obviously help prevent them from decaying and also prevent flash getting to them they are stored in a box which you can see is partly there and that box is then stored in this little concrete section which has metal doors so there although they are there ready to be used if the gun is called into action without having to draw up more charges from the magazine immediately they are still pretty safe from Flash in everyday use and as you can see because you have two of these per shot you have five shots worth of charges here and as with the ready charges you also have ready shells albeit in this case the ready shells are stored just on a very simple concrete lip inside this part of the implacement because of course shells are much much less sensitive than the charges so just storing them out in the rela of open is fine although as you can see these two are replicas the paint's flaked off a little bit I believe they cast out of plaster and what all that added up to was this so you can see the various shorter range Coastal installations around Perth freemantle and other relevant areas all there on the right and then you have rot Nest Island the 6-in gun battery at Bley is in the orange circle and then this big red circle that actually goes slightly below and Above This picture shows the range of the 9.2 in guns on Oliver Hill which is you know what we've been looking at so you can see the benefit of this installation means that it can cover Perth freem manle all the approaches around it and a lot of the approach to the West in a very very broad Arc and of course being where it is it can turn 360 so a fleet that's coming in from the west north or south can be engaged but if the fleet chooses for whatever reason to try and ignore the BR Ness Island installations and move directly in to attack the harbor they're still going to be well within range of this 9.2 in gun now this is a gun battery so there were multiple guns there were in fact two installations and you can see this is how it all works for the installation as a whole so we've just been up in the gun you can see there at the top right and the immediate area just below the gunhouse but as you can see the shell stores and the magazines are even further down and then there's a long tunnel which goes all the way down to an engine room which is well away from the gun platform and as you can see has a concrete Shield over it now that's partly to isolate it so that the power can be supplied to the gun and to other parts of the battery even if the gun itself takes Direct Hit and partly also because as you can see it's in the base of the valley between the two guns so it's equidistance able to supply power to both guns at once and of course all of that means that it's time to go and have a look into some of the even deeper parts of the facility so you can see by the time we actually left the gun the weather had cleared to be fair the clouds were moving fairly quickly so it was a lovely little day and we're going to head down the stairs which are just to the bottom right to re-enter the facility a level further down because unfortunately we are neither 9.2 in shells nor 9.2 in Chargers so we won't fit in the hoists so as you head down through the tunnels you can see there on the left there is a shelter area for the crew this isn't the actual crew shelter where they could be if everything was under heavy bombardment this is I think just outside the casualty clearing station so that would be just to the left ahead of us and if there were any casualties they could be brought in and laid out on this bench which folds out or if there aren't any casualties this is a very good way of passing each other cuz this is a fairly narrow tunnel but as you continue along you can see we are in fact approaching the shell room so let's go inside there now the shell room is unfortunately rather bereft of shells these days there's just a few replicas sitting around in the racks instead of the several hundred there would have been originally and it was after putting this one down that I discovered that they were plaster replicas but what this section lacks in quantity of shells it makes up for in quality this is actually one of the most educational shell rooms I've seen in almost any Museum and that includes a lot of Museum ships because as you can see here they've got this diagram which is annotated with modern text but the actual layout is taken pretty much from the operational manuals of the time showing you all the different kinds of shell that could be found in here when this was operational and a fairly detailed description of how they work you can see the fusing mechanism the total shell size Etc and you can see we've got two different kinds of high explosive shell the one with the green band uses TNT then in the middle you've got the very pointy yellow APC shell so that's the armor piercing capped shell then the first of the black shells is the CPC or common pointed capped in later periods this might be known as a semi armor piercing shell so it combines some of the armor piercing capability of the APC round with a considerably larger payload in terms of explosive closer to an H round than an AP round as a general rule of thumb at least when the gun was designed in the 1900s it was held that a AP round should be able to penetrate roughly its diameter in armor at the expected battle ranges so around 9 in a CPC round was about a third to 1 half its diameter in armor and so you can immediately see why the CPC round might have held a fair bit of Attraction because against a Target using a 9.2 in gun that meant you could expect to penetrate somewhere between 3 and 4 and 1/2 in of armor which was more than most Cruisers outside some of the better armored armored Cruisers actually possessed which meant you had the potential to do catastrophic damage to almost anything that was smaller than an armored Cruiser or some of the less well armored ones on and then for battleships if you have a 12 or 13.5 in CPC shell then you could reasonably expect six seven inches of penetration which meant that you could use your CPC to do huge damage to anything that wasn't another Battleship even you know the vast majority of armed Cruisers wouldn't be able to resist it with that huge amount of explosive the CPC carries and even against other battleships pretty much anything that wasn't the main armor belt so your distributed armor scheme would be very vulnerable to CPC shells whereas the distributed arm scheme was obviously designed to repel h fire and the h fire would Splash harmlessly on a 3 four five 6 in distributed armor belt CPC shell would go straight through but the All or Nothing scheme kind of also saw the end of the CPC round but since this is an older gun even though this is the 1930s CPC technically speaking still available in some old stocks and then on the right hand section of that shell rack you've also got shrapnel shells because you know you might need to use those against troop transports troop Landings etc etc they've also got this cut through which shows you one to one what the internal layout of an AP shell is actually like so you've got the bid in red that's the pointy end that's the ballistic cap that's purely there for aerodynamic purposes it basically has zilch effect when it comes to actually penetrating armor you then have the armor piercing that's the bit in light gray that's really the bit that helps you punch through the enemy armor belt itself and then finally you have the core and this is also part of the armor piercing section so this is the sort of dark gray green bit of the bottom so this works with the cap to help you penetrate enemy armor and then any explosive charge is going to be in the base that's not shown on this cut through but is a really really useful thing and not something as I say that you see every day further on they've got a kind of mini Museum made up of various artifacts from the Imp placement that they've salvaged and restored and they've also got this again a mockup of a cordite charge but it shows you the silk bag lining and also shows you what cordite looks like now most of you probably will know cordite comes in sticks of various thicknesses depending on what size of charge you're using but again to help teach people whove probably never heard about this before or looked at it before and they maybe thinking of you know old school black powder or something it's a really useful educational tool to point out now this this is what cordite looks like it is a series of sticks of propellant they have the charge magazines as well which obviously they have have all the charges up on racks the various cases you can see one's been open to show you what the charge looks likees inside its case and youve got the little viewing window there with its little glass pane and they've obviously put a modern light to help shed light onto the whole situation but this shows just how sensitive magazine security was taken even with relatively speaking stable propellants I know cordite and stable propellant might not seem to go together but compared to Black Powder it was much much more stable but you still have the old pained viewing window to allow you to check in on how your propellant is doing as opposed to the Shell rooms where you can just kind of walk in because it doesn't really matter too much and this is the engine room- generator room so this is where power was made so obviously this would provide Electric power for lighting and also electrical po as we mentioned earlier to power the hydraulic motors in the gun mounts but the actual engines themselves were taken away and scrapped long ago so all you've got is the mountings where they used to be but they've turned this into a very nice museum space where you've got as I mentioned before the various artifacts they've managed to recover and restore and nearby is a door which leads you out of the bunker complex and to an abandoned section of the light Railway so so this is where they would have brought up food Fuel and other supplies to the central portion of the overall implacement from which obviously it could then be moved into the engine room or to the two gun batteries as in when you liked obviously you do also have the railways running directly up to the gun batteries which is what we used to get up there in the first place and that pretty much wraps up our look at rot Nest Island we'll take a quick span around so you get an idea of the total view from the top of the remaining gun battery and I can highly encourage a visit if you happen to be in Western Australia and if you have family or a significant other to persuade to come with you to an island off the western coast of Australia to look at a bunch of old Naval guns you do of course have the quackers as well which are kind of the main tourist attraction for rot nest if we're totally honest amongst the general population they're very cute this was my favorite one he or she decided it was going to sit on the park bench and happily eat a leaf and allowed me to film it quite up close a bit I was using a zoom CA camera because of course you don't want to disturb them while they're at rest or in this case at eat I suppose it would be anyway thanks for watching 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 Pinn post for dry do questions there you going you're not afraid of humans at all are you

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 67,009

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Australia, Perth, Fremantle, Coastal Defence, WW2

Id: qwZSJ-BXlr8

Length: 35min 30sec (2130 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024