The Battleships - Terror from Above

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for more than 300 years the Battleship ruled the Seas a symbol of national strength and might at the outbreak of World War two it remained the centerpiece of all battle fleets reaching its peak in size speed and firepower but as the war spread to the world's oceans the battleships key role in naval strategy came under threat rapidly evolving technologies were waiting in the wings ready for a dramatic confrontation a battle for control of the Seas dawn on the 1st of September 1939 an old German battleship opened up it's 11 inch guns on fortifications in the Polish harbour of dancing these shot signaled the start of a conflict that would soon escalate into global war two days later the day Britain declared war on Germany Winston Churchill arrived at Admiralty House as Britain's new First Lord of the Admiralty it was a bittersweet moment he'd held the post during the first world war but was forced to relinquish it following disastrous naval and land campaigns against Turkey the Navy Churchill now controlled was a very different force arms limitation treaties of the 1920s and 30s had seriously reduced the Royal Navy's fleet which once numbered 70 battleships and battle cruisers now with only 12 of these large capital ships in service and five under construction the British Empire had never been so vulnerable on the third of September we were at sea I had the pleasure of standing on the direction Tower of hood making by summer for to the fleet commence hostilities against Germany Britain's only comfort was that Germany had scuttled the majority of its warships after the First World War but throughout the 1930s the new Reich Navy built an impressive series of warships including two fast battleships Scharnhorst and gun eyes now and at the shipbuilding centers of Hamburg and bill hems Harvin two of the most powerful battleships ever built Bismarck and Tirpitz were being fitted out but they wouldn't be operational until 1941 indeed Hitler had promised his Admirals that by the mid 1940s they would have the world's most formidable fleet but this was 1939 and there was no prospect of challenging the Royal Navy to a full-scale sea battle because of the problems the Treaty of Versailles had forced upon it the German Navy was not a high sea fleet in the way it had been the Germans were forced therefore to engage in what was effectively a good course a war against trade from day one of the war German submarines targeted merchant ships carrying war supplies to Britain six weeks later a German u-boat strapped right at the heart of the Royal Navy u47 commanded by Gunther Prien made a daring assault on the key British naval base at Scapa Flow the battleship Royal Oak was sunk with the loss of more than 800 crew and officers for Britain it was a disaster the Royal Navy had been humiliated on their triumphant return to Germany the u-boats crew was fated as heroes their success enhanced Hitler's opinion of his Navy it also encouraged him to wage unrestricted war against British and French trade in the South Atlantic the powerful German Raider Admiral Graf Spee was soon creating habit with merchant shipping Ruff's pay quickly rose to the top of Britain's most wanted list in mid-december 1939 the grafts pair was intercepted off the east coast of South America by three British cruisers Ajax Exeter and Achilles and of course all of a sudden off went the alarm Rattlers and the boot was sounded and I was partly undressed and I flew up several letters onto the gun deck with my trousers in one hand and my see boots in the our in the Battle of the River Plate graphs pays powerful 11 inch guns soon found their mark forcing Exeter to retire but Ajax and Achilles closed in scoring direct hits on the rough Spain owl in all I think we've hired over a hundred salvos which is quite a lot of work for the guns they were so hot at the end of the action in fact that all the paint had peeled off them limping into the harbor of Montevideo and Uruguay comes the German pocket battleship Graf Spee to find the wounds you received in combat for the German sailors and the craft space commander captain Hans lonsdorf the first naval battle of the present European war has ended in defeat under international law the German warship could only stay in the neutral port of Montevideo 72 hours as Captain Langsdorf buried his dead and considered his next move British intelligence was working feverishly behind the scenes captain leg Slav had been tricked by the British intelligence service working from the British Embassy in Montevideo in to making him believe that there was a very powerful British force outside the Ruhr the rio plata are waiting for him finally the situation looking hopeless the grafts pay-up anchored and headed for the open sea and what a captain believed was an overwhelming British battle force she got underway and slowly seemed down the plate in fact there was only a skeleton crew on board and then she anchored just off the main Seaway and we were all closed up around our action stations and the voice come on the tenor system which was a loudspeaker system throughout the ship this is a captain speaking our aircraft has just reported the grafts payors blown herself up with the world's press watching the graphs piers crew had opened her sea-cocks and set off demolition charges captain Langsdorf and his crew left the scene by boat and then sought sanctuary in nearby Buenos Aires there under the old Imperial Navy ensign and not the swastika lansdorf shot himself on their return to Britain the veterans of the River Plate were given a hero's welcome we had a March pass through London after being inspected by King George the sixth and then we had luncheon with Winston in the guild hall Winston Churchill a figure is popular with the service as he is with the rest of the nation the brilliant he Pike which shut Admiral Howard conceived and which you executed takes its place in our naval annals and I may add that in a dark cold winter it warmed the cockles of the British box the destruction of the Admiral Graf Spee restored Britain's faith in its Navy but over the coming months further good news was hard to come by on May the 10th 1940 Germany's armies rolled into Holland and Belgium and extended the frontiers of the Third Reich that same day political upheaval forced Prime Minister Chamberlain from power Britain's future now rested with Winston Churchill but within weeks of coming to office German land forces all but overwhelmed France forcing the evacuation of more than 300,000 Allied troops a Dunkirk Hitler was soon standing on a French beach casting his eye across the English Channel and contemplating an invasion of Britain Italy added to Churchill concerns under the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini Italy had joined Germany in the war with the fall of France and the loss of its naval support Britain was now outnumbered in the Mediterranean by a modern Italian battle fleet from his office underground in the cabinet War Rooms Churchill faced a stark reality Britain stood alone and the Navy which he relied upon was stretched to its limits in late June 1940 Churchill received an intelligence report concerning for French battleships that had taken refuge in the Algerian harbor of Iran under the terms of the armistice which France had signed with Germany and Italy her warships were now pledged to neutrality fearing they would be seized and used against Britain Churchill ordered a naval mission unparalleled since the Battle of Trafalgar a mission to confront the French fleet the following day a British naval force set sail for the French colony of Algeria air captain named was a captain Glenny and I used to sing a over the late speakers worked their way through the ship good morning hoods we are now proceeding to Iran to preside the French fleet to Khmer under air protection on arrival at Iran the British dispatched the message to the French commander either join Britain in the fight against Germany and Italy immobilized your ships or be destroyed the French rejected the ultimatum furthermore some of them it could seem standing there very very soon he didn't want to do it nobody wanted to do it he said all right open fire in a matter of minutes three French battleships were destroyed only a single battleship the Strasburg broke through the British Porton accompanied by three destroyers how he fully agreed with the action that we took because if all of those ships had gone over to the Germans or their talons there'd been more ships to attacked us at sea and we de lost more lives in fact I was very pleased that we did sink them more than 11-hundred once allied French sailors perished the Royal Navy considered the mission the success but a failure of diplomacy robbed Britain of for additional battleships with which to fight the Italian Navy in mid 1940 Italy's fast and powerful battle fleet tried to push the Royal Navy from the Mediterranean but early battles between the two forces favored the British in one encounter the Italian flagship Giulio Cesare was hit by a 15-inch shell from the battleship Warspite the distance of nearly ten miles was the greatest range ever achieved against the moving target but in November 1940 the newly built British aircraft carrier illustrious brought a new dimension to distance in the war at sea carriers were a late arrival at the end of the First World War and remained largely untested in battle their chance came late in the evening of November the first when two waves of swordfish aircraft took off from illustrious their target italy's mediterranean battle fleet lying at anchor in the port of toronto a hundred and seventy miles away aerial photographs taken the next day revealed torpedoes and bombs had destroyed three Italian battleships the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean was now in Britain's favor the Battle of Toronto electrified naval strategists around the globe a carrier had destroyed battleships from well beyond the range of their big guns war at sea had entered a new era Adolf Hitler freely admitted that on land he was a hero and at sea a coward he advised his naval High Command to use its capital ships to hunt only merchant vessels and to avoid action with a Royal Navy Hitler's greatest concern was the safety of Germany's newest battleship Bismarck in May 1941 she completed her sea trials and training displacing more than 51,000 tons and mounting eight 15-inch guns bhisma was the world's most powerful battleship in service bismarck was in my view the finest battleship in the world she was also one of the most graceful massive but at the same time beautiful and an enormous feeling of power about her on the 18th of May 1941 Bismarck set sail on her first mission accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz Tigan Bismarck's orders to cruise the North Atlantic and sink merchant ships steaming between America and Britain it was to be the most dramatic maiden voyage since that of the ill-fated ocean liner Titanic three days into the voyage British aerial reconnaissance discovered the two German ships refueling in a Norwegian Fjord the British Admiralty immediately deployed several powerful hunting groups to pursue Bismarck including the new battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Hood the hood was the epitome of British sea power she was a wonderfully looking ship and some people said though she was unsinkable or no ship is unsinkable it's an imposter it's a contradiction in terms the following morning between Iceland and Greenland hood and the Prince of Wales intercepted Bismarck we'd final about half a dozen serve as I suppose before Bismarck replied for a battleship that had never before fired her guns in anger bismarck proved devastatingly accurate I heard no explosion no explosion at all all I saw was a gigantic sheet of flame which seemed to shoot round the side from the very beginning there were only three of us came to the surface there wasn't another so on inside they looked around and there she was like that vertical one about 50 yards away and beat I was just going on I panicked and I turned and swam us as fast as I could away from them when I looked around again she'd gone more than 1,400 men went down with their ship there were only three survivors the shock was so great when the first news of a sinking came through that a lot of people didn't believe it they said this is not service as impossible to sue the pride of the British Navy they the pride of the Empire she can't have gone like that so that it was more than just the loss of one ship it was the loss of you like of the Empire the loss of hood stunned Churchill he dispatched every available warship regardless of the cost or the consequences to sink the Bismarck for British battleships and two carriers sped to the area - Churchill Britain's control of the Seas was at stake if bismarck escaped he said it would be trumpeted around the world - the nation's great detriment and discomfort we all felt that same weird we were all jurors in her own mind then we had to destroyed Bismarck Bismarck could never go on existing we were all saying stinker killem you know gosh it we wanted revenge swordfish aircraft flew from the carrier victorious and discovered Bismarck sailing due south the torpedo attack caused only minor damage but Bismarck sailed for the French port of Brest leaking oil from an earlier encounter with Hood and Prince of Wales soon after Bismarck shook off - shadowing British cruisers and disappeared from their radar screens thirty hours later a British Catalina flying boat spotted Bismarck's oil slick the carrier ark royal flew off a torpedo strike Lackey topia hit the rudder of the Bismarck and jammed it at 15 degrees to port and this meant that the Bismarck was unbelievable and they tried every way they could to steer her breasts but every time they did the bow is swung round into the wind and the wind was where we were coming from and we had a speech by our captain and he said there's no escape because he knew you cannot see a ship and if you cannot see a ship you you can't escape and in the morning of the 27th of May we met the British forces at 9:00 or clock we had so many hits Zep the first officer told us everybody ever done ship and it was rainy and stormy but anyway one tries to live I saw the ship destroyed everything was destroyed of Bismarck's crew of 2,200 men there were only a hundred and ten survivors the destruction of Germany's largest battleship shocked Hitler and was a major setback to his war against British trade it also marked a turning point in the history of the battleship itself instead of the hunter they had become the hunted and prime targets for both the underwater and aerial arms of opposing navies for the crews and officers of the great battleships war at sea was becoming a three-dimensional nightmare and a far more dangerous game than anyone could have conceived throughout 1941 the war edged precariously towards a global conflict earlier that year Japan had signed an axis agreement with Germany and Italy Japan was determined to become the dominant power in Asia but standing in her way was the United States when tough negotiations between the two powers founded the Japanese government embarked on a dramatic plan to force America into submission in the mid-pacific six Japanese aircraft carriers sailed eastward toward Hawaii home of the powerful US Pacific Fleet on the 7th of December 1941 at 10:00 to 8:00 in the morning a faint drone of approaching aircraft was heard over the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor the timing was ideal on a Sunday morning when the fleet was essentially sleeping both literally and figuratively and there was a mindset that it couldn't happen without warning or a declaration of war two waves of Japanese planes more than 350 in total cross the island of Oahu unchallenged when the airplane was coming towards you you can't tell whether they're Japanese or Americans and they look like hours from a distance and we won a one ND heck are they doing training using live torpedoes and then it all of a sudden our first sergeant came up that blew him out of his office he was soaking wet and covered with oil he come up he says get your butt's to your battlespace he says we're under attack by the Japanese now the Arizona was waiting back of us and we were upon a bridge when she exploded the concussion from the explosion blew us into the pilothouse and then we went back out on the up on a bridge and looked at the Arizona and she was just one tremendous ball of fire and I was I'll admit it I was scared I thought this is the end of everything in less than two hours 21 vessels of the Pacific Fleet including eight battleships were destroyed or badly damaged the only compensation for America was that three of her aircraft carriers were at sea on a training exercise and had survived to fight another day after the attack was over with about ten o'clock things got quiet and except for the burning and crackling of the ships that's when it hit me my god we're in a war we're in a war and we lost it and I just sat down cried more than 2,400 men were killed and over a thousand wounded in the attack Japan's objective to immobilize the US Pacific Fleet had succeeded Pearl Harbor is one of the most brilliant military operations ever taken in the history of warfare strategically it was a disaster absolute disaster the possibility of a negotiated settlement went out the window when they attacked Pearl Harbor it was then war to the death for Britain Pearl Harbor brought a powerful new ally and a new determined enemy one she was ill-equipped to fight weeks earlier Churchill had ordered a small squadron of warships to sail to the British base at Singapore the battle cruiser repulse and the battleship prince of wales spearheaded force said included in the force the British force was a full feed carrier but at quite an early stage and the passage out a carrier which was out in the West Indies ran aground amano-san Bank and so no other carrier was forthcoming the ships had arrived at Singapore just five days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Church rubber underestimated Japanese robustness he had said in the late twenties when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and tried to stop Royal Navy building cruisers there will never be a war with Japan in my lifetime and I think that Churchill really thought that these two ships sent out there would act as a very potent deterrent that wasn't the case the day after Pearl Harbor Japan invaded the British colony of Malaya nearby Singapore was in danger Churchill immediately convened a crisis meeting to review naval positions he knew if Singapore fell Japan would be masters of the Pacific Australia New Zealand and all the vital islands in their region would then be open to invasion on their own and without air cover Britain's too capital ships were in a dangerous position I had dinner alone with my father in Prince of Wales I suppose it would have been two nights before she finally sailed and we hadn't seen each other for the inside of a year so he had lots of talk about and he didn't like the situation he asked me what I thought about it in my youthful ignorant I remember saying who let him come let's have a garepe and he's turning a very serious face to me and say I don't think you had any idea of the enormity of the odds were up against late afternoon on the 8th of December 1941 force Zed set sail to intercept a Japanese invasion fleet of Thailand the next evening a message reached the war room the ships were returning to Singapore after being shadowed by enemy aircraft Churchill suggested they sailed to safer waters and later join what was left of the American fleet but the hour was late and the decision was deferred until the next morning as Britain slept Japanese land-based bombers hunted for the British ships the only comfort for Britain was the fact that no capital ship maneuvering at sea had ever been sunk by aircraft but early the next day Churchill received word that the Prince of Wales and repulse had been sunk with the loss of eight hundred and forty men it's not for me to speak with the voice of Winston Churchill I can only suppose he was thinking in terms of deterrence that by sending these two mighty ships out there that would be such a powerful signal to the Japanese that they would not invade whether you regard that as a valid thought a rational thought or whether you regard it as supreme British arrogance is a matter of taste possibly distorted by personal reasons I take the latter view Britain had been humbled in the Pacific but in waters closer to home she was being dogged by surface attacks on her convoys Churchill described the destruction of war supplies bound for Russia as one of them as melancholy aspects of the war indeed Germany's three remaining battleships that become an obsession for Churchill tying up scores of British warships to contain them but one by one they were brought to heel the whole of the action was fought in the dark brilliant work by the destroyer screens slowed up the shine horse which enabled the great guns of the Duke of York the score repeated hits in late 1944 Air Force bombers carrying massive 12,000 pound bombs were dispatched to a Norwegian Fjord their mission to sink the last remaining German battleship the Tirpitz sistership of Bismarck the destruction of Germany's last capital ship was a boost for British morale for the second time in 25 years the core of the German battle fleet had ceased to exist during the first world war the German battle fleet achieved nothing during World War two if we look at the German Navy and its performance in this respect it also achieved more or less nothing what we also should not forget in this respect is the fact that the age of battleships was definitely over in the first months of the Pacific War both America and Japan realized their main strategic naval weapon was no longer the battleship but the aircraft carrier in the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway carrier-borne aircraft proved they could deliver everything a battleship could but over a range of hundreds rather than tens of miles for the first time in naval history ships exchanged blows without being in sight of each other from 1942 on I think it had become clear that there was a new capital ship at sea and that was the aircraft carrier an aircraft carrier with a large complement of strike aircraft was now capable of sinking even the heaviest units of the other side at Midway the Japanese force lost four carriers to America's one the balance of sea power in the Pacific now rested with the United States to maintain her advantage America mobilized her superior industrial capacity to build a massive carrier fleet but this came at the expense of battleship development ten battleships laid down before Pearl Harbor would be completed during the war but seven others including five sixty thousand tons ayats were canceled for 45,000 ton iowa-class super battleships did enter service Oh armed with nine 16-inch guns they were amongst the most formidable battleships ever created but they were destined for a secondary role escorting and protecting the carrier fleet they provide insurance against the Japanese surface attacks the providing aunty decorate firepower a very large scale but they didn't have that interesting war ironically just when the battleship had reached its peak in Armour speed and firepower both American and British naval strategists were beginning seriously to doubt their relevance in modern war he began to be realized the battleship was no longer the supreme queen of the oceans I was meeting at the end of 1942 chaired by Deputy First Sea Lord which came to the conclusion but in future the aircraft carrier will be the core of the future fleet sustained ly good always meeting and directed naval construction notes in his dirt dairy hurrah at last since he'd made his reputation as a battleship designer that was particularly impressive the battleships days were numbered but for Japan they were now her last hope against the advancing Allied forces in the first three years of the Pacific War Japan had lost all but four of her carriers while America's carrier fleet had grown to more than 30 Japan's fake now rested with nine battleships including the 71 thousand tons ayats Musashi and Yamato in size and firepower these were the most formidable battleships ever created the Japanese Navy simply refused to use these warships for anything other than the final showdown these two ships sort of wandered around the Pacific being stationed at various places as the nucleus of what the combined fleet hope would be the strike force that would meet the Americans in this mythical holy grail of the decisive battle at sea with only the Philippines standing in the way of an American attack on Japan her super battleships were finally forced into the cold room Battle of Leyte Gulf in terms of numbers of ships was the largest naval encounter in history it was also the last ever confrontation when battleship faced battleship but in the end it was America's overwhelming carrier numbers and their combined strike power which proved the decisive factor as we approached our skipper told us to make an anvil attack and take the easternmost the Amato type class ship which turned out to be the Musashi Yoga Tunisia open a tribunal case and irritation County Okada Masaki ha should you call it you get enormity tada you're a guardian go home Medea color T on me musashi was one of three Japanese battleships and four carriers lost in the battle it was all but the end for the Japanese Imperial Navy as the Allies made their final thrust towards the Japanese mainland the last super battleship of the Imperial fleet Yamato attempted to reclaim her nations honor with only enough fuel for a one-way voyage Yamato embarked on a suicide mission to attack allied naval forces of Okinawa for two hours 380 American planes from ten carriers pounded the world's largest battleship until she capsized 2,200 men perished along with the dream of a Japanese Empire four months later in August 1945 the Pacific War reached its climax after six long years of global conflict the guns of the great floating fortresses had fallen silent 35 of the world's most famous battleships were destroyed or scuttled more than half had fallen victim to air attack but while the aircraft carrier had dominated the Pacific War the battleships somehow maintained its prestige to the end in Tokyo Bay beneath the imposing 16-inch guns of the battleship Missouri the Japanese Imperial forces offered their unconditional surrender fine the instrument of surrender at the places indicated the Missouri symbolized the power and might of the United States here was a sovereign peace of the United States come to the very doorstep of the conquered nation there could be no doubt which nation was the victor in which was the vanquished post-war battleships gradually disappeared from battle fleets indeed no new battleships left the drawing board only America's most modern battleships the Iowa's would again see action in Korea and Vietnam they pounded the shoreline of communism as the Cold War escalated the Gulf War in 1991 was the swan song of the last two American battleships Missouri and Wisconsin even armed with missiles which extended their range to hundreds of miles there were little more than expensive launching platforms by the turn of the 21st century no battleships remained in commission history we'll look at the battleship and say here was the most fiendish weapon that man could devise at the time battleships were in the end I think worthwhile investments I think nations did get something out of it and what they got out of it was sometimes quite crucial national survival could depend on command at the sea one is tempted to say they also represent the folly of man to construct such enormous eventually useless naval weapons but they seemed at the time that they were conceived to make sense after more than three centuries ruling the oceans the controversial reign of the battleship was over the Knights of the first global arms race had gone the way of the rulers and the empires that had created them

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Channel: Artas1984

Views: 603,649

Rating: 4.7108736 out of 5

Keywords: the, battleships, documentary, battleship, Terror, from, Above

Id: Fs7OkkrOrLQ

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Length: 52min 59sec (3179 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 17 2011

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