The Guns & Armaments of the USS Alabama | History Traveler Episode 167

[Music] well if you have watched this channel for any amount of time you know that we are big fans of visiting world war ii sites and learning as much about the history of world war ii uh first hand as we can well we've been to the beaches of normandy we've been to the the forest outside of bastogne and saint vic where the battle of the bulge took place we've been to the the coastal defenses up in maine and one question that i often get is when are you going to go and visit some sites in the pacific theater well the answer to that is not today uh one of these days i i will but until then we're gonna have to bring the pacific theater to us in places like this right here with this behemoth i am in mobile alabama and this is the uss alabama which saw service in the atlantic and the pacific and today we're going gonna go on board and do a little bit of exploring [Music] [Music] [Music] all right well here it is the uss alabama uh standing in front of this thing is honestly humbling uh this ship is way bigger than what you might think just a few quick facts it was commissioned in august of 1942 it's a south dakota class battleship the overall length of this thing is 680 feet which is absolutely stunning what's even more stunning is that at its full load this thing is over 45 000 tons so it had a speed of just over 30 miles per hour its crew whenever it was fully crewed in wartime is 2500 officers and enlisted men uh had a belt armor so around the the outer edge of just over 12 inches uh deck armor of six inches so so this thing is an absolute beast so we're going to go ahead and get up there and start taking a little bit closer look at the alabama okay now before we get started here on the alabama i want to make one thing clear there is no way that i'm going to be able to show everything on this ship like i said this is kind of like a floating city so to be able to cover like the engine room and the galley and the crew quarters and this that and the other would be simply impossible as a matter of fact the alabama has their own youtube page that i would recommend going to where you can really get some in-depth looks at the goings-on of of this ship what we are going to focus on are the armaments here on the uss alabama so everything with this ship goes to support the guns on the deck this ship exists for one purpose that is to shoot guns and break stuff so we're going to focus on the armaments here on the uss alabama [Music] okay i'm uh starting off on the aft part of the alabama with the big guns uh if you look here on this rotating turret we have three giant 16-inch guns which are designed to do some heavy damage either to enemy ships or to targets on shore so just to give you an idea of what a beast this thing is each barrel weighs 90 tons and the the turret alone weighs more than a world war ii destroyer which is crazy to me so so these were the big boys of the uss alabama and uh there were three of these three gun turrets on the alabama uh one here on the aft and then two on the forward side so uh yeah the these things are something else [Music] okay and here's the the projectile that the old big gun would throw out so again i said this is a 16 inch gun uh a this is a mark viii 2700 pound armor piercing round so this is one that would be used against enemy ships and they would get a high explosive round if they were shooting at targets on shore but my gosh just look at that thing [Music] all right so i'm up here on the deck of the uss alabama right now now as far as like world war ii naval stuff i know a little bit but i don't know everything which is why i have chip with me uh chip is a volunteer here on the uss alabama has a lot more knowledge and a cool pipe which automatically qualifies him uh to be an expert here so we're going to kind of go through and talk about some of the armaments here on the [Music] alabama okay so the main battery armament for a south dakota battleship would be the 16 inch 45 caliber uh guns uh mabel rifles are designated by the bore of the gun and the calibers of barrel length so 16 inch 45 means that the diameter of the shell is 16 inches and the length of the barrel is 45 times the diameter of the bore so 16 times 45 gives you the length of the barrel some of our later battleships the iowas had a heavier main battery gun they were 16 inch 50 caliber means they had a little longer range because the barrels were longer so our 16-inch 45s had a at a range of 20.6 miles so we're talking about shooting beyond the horizon with assists from radar and range finding equipment state-of-the-art back in 1939 1940 when the ship was designed so each round of armor piercing ammunition for 16 inch 45 weight 2 700 pounds that's one shell of armor piercing ammunition each round required six bags of powder to fire that one round each bag of powder weighs 90 pounds so we're talking about 540 pounds of powder to fire one round of 16 inch ammunition the ship had nine guns so we could fire a broadside of dying rounds at one time if we're firing rapid fire with our main battery guns those big two thousand seven hundred pound shells could be loaded rammed and fired two rounds a minute you think about the work goes into loading and handling two thousand seven hundred pound rounds and fire two rounds a minute that's pretty incredible [Music] i do want to point something out real quick look at the chain on this thing i mean this is just insane to me that people built this so let me let me put my boot up there okay if you look that's a size 11 and a half boot and it is just dwarfed by just one link on this chain simply amazing that people built this okay so that's the 16-inch guns up here uh on on the top deck but there was so much more that was going on behind the scenes below deck to get these massive shells up here and ready to be fired so we're going to go down below deck and and take a look at what was going on kind of behind the scenes here on the alabama all right we just got inside the alabama and this is kind of a the museum portion of the ship now the alabama earned nine battle stars during its service during world war ii and they have the places where the alabama earned each one of its battle stars mapped out here on this map so you can see uh there's one there around tarawa the marshall islands here off of the coast of new guinea probably one of the more well-known engagements that the alabama was in was in the philippines campaign also okinawa and then all the way up to tokyo bay they have a display here talking a little bit about the service of the uss alabama in the atlantic so whenever it first was deployed the uss alabama was helping to guard convoys that were taking supplies to the soviet union obviously that's going to be a pretty cold job which they have you know illustrated here with uh some of the cold weather gear on this mannequin and of course one of the biggest threats in the atlantic was the u-boats so here they have it's pretty neat a u-boat clock that was retrieved from a german pow and also the uniform of an individual that would have been in the kriegsmarine all right now if you watched the video of my tour with the mine sweeper you saw where i cracked my head well here on the alabama look they've like installed some padding just for me okay i'm kind of making my way through the ship right now and as you can see this is the galley so this is where all of the food would have been prepared and served up they also had these little hooks here where they could uh hang hammocks uh for you know the the crew to sleep in okay now as i mentioned before uh this this video is mainly about the armaments of the uss alabama it would be impossible for me to cover everything but we'll try and hit a few things here and there that that might be of interest [Music] so my girls just found their favorite part of the ship where they sell the snacks that is absolutely right [Music] we're now inside the number two barbette the barbette is a cylinder of armor plating that protects the inside workings of the main battery guns this is one of the shell decks where the 16 inch shells were stored now as you look back over here you can see brackets and some of the shells that are still being stored here now [Music] right here would be the hoist that would be used to send the shell up to the gun deck to the gun house up inside the number two barbell number two uh tour itself so explain to me how these shells would get loaded okay all right now believe it or not these 2 700 pound shells would be manually handled in here so what these gunners mates would do you unlatch this bracket here and this shell would be loose from its bracket on the bulkhead here and then this capstan is turning continuously when this turret is in motion this is a cap stand that's rotating and what would happen is when this gunners mate unlatched this shell from the bulkhead he would lay a chain around the bottom of it and then turn the chain around that cap stand it's called a par buckler and that thing was rotating after about two turns you'd pull on the chain and that part buckler would start gathering that chain pulling it toward itself that would move the bottom of that shell and then one of these guys would be actually rolling that shell like this to move the shell around on this deck to be able to put it in that hoist to be taken up to the gun to be loaded and fired here they have a picture of some of the shellmen operating in this room look at this guy look at the hoss that you'd have to be to be pushing these shells around huh okay so i've moved into the room where they would hoist the powder up for the 16 inch guns you can see that chute there uh so that is a 90 pound bag of powder that would be coming out of that chute into this room whoops it would get loaded onto this hoist so you can imagine the guys that were doing this must have been hosses to be lugging these 90 pound powder bags around and i don't know if i can quite get the angle yeah you can kind of see there on the left side of my screen it's a little bit difficult from here but those are little barrels of water in case there was a spark that got onto one of the powder bags well you would drop it in there so that it didn't explode in here so definitely a no smoking zone here now to get down into these different handling rooms these guys would have to go down these ladders so there's no really easy access which is kind of scary because if something happens to the ship these guys were going to be in a bad shape it's also how they would load these big 16 inch rounds which we've already talked about are over a ton well then they would go on to this bracket up here with this chain hoist so they could be you know moved around instead of having to waddle around well if they fell you can imagine something over two thousand pounds look at the dent that it's going to make and it's going to make one heck of a dent in your toe if it uh happens to fall on you but man this thing is an engineering marvel [Music] all right now we're down in the plotting room now and this is one of the analog computers that were used to stabilize and aim the main battery guns it's mind-boggling to think that every variable that goes into solving a gunnery problem has to be dialed into each one of these things separately by somebody listening to targeting information from radar and lookouts and and spotters and all these dials are being set to make that first shot at your enemy target to be sure that the range is right and then they have to re set everything for the next shot because now your target has moved your ship is moved uh you have to continue setting all this stuff all the time uh it's it's just fascinating when you stop and think how many variables there are in a gunnery problem and i can't tell you all of them because i don't know them all but you figure it's the speed of your target the speed of your ship the direction of your target the direction of your ship uh the wind velocity the direction of wind the barometric pressure of the curvature of the earth it's so many many different variables have to be addressed before you can accurately aim and fire these weapons [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay i've moved up into the 16 inch turret now and man this is a complex looking operation and plenty of spaces to completely smoke the top of your head but as you can see this is the area where the crew would have been to manually work these guns and it looks like i can maybe go over here and go in this little hole oh okay yeah and then right down there maybe a little bit hard to see because my access is limited but down there is where those big 16 inch projectile rounds would have been loaded up man this is something [Music] all right so those are the big guns here on the uss alabama so big gun for a big target if you had a slightly smaller target whether it was in the air or on the surface well then that's a job that would go to the five inch guns [Music] this is our secondary battery they're 5 inch 38 caliber dual purpose weapons all right like i said about the 16 inch guns 5 inch 38 caliber is a designation of the navy rifle it fires a 5 inch diameter shell weighs about 55 pounds is propelled by a powder charge but this large five inch diameter it's a brass casing full powder weighs about 40 pounds so it's a semi-fixed round which means it's a separate projectile and powder charge now 5-inch 38 caliber dual purpose means that the weapon could be used for any aircraft work or for uh bombarding surface targets ships or uh an island structure that they're trying to destroy now the five-inch guns normally were fired remotely through the controls of the radar and rangefinder that device right up there that would be used for any aircraft fire or for surface targets [Music] all right now we're inside uh the gun house of one of our five inch 38 caliber mounts this is where uh the action took place when they were firing ant aircraft problems uh during battle uh you had between 12 and 14 men occupied this small space here so if you look around you see what close quarters we have imagine 12 to 14 men working in here in very close quarters working very rapidly to load and fire these weapons now uh this compartment here would have been occupied by two guys who would be the site setter and fuse setter their jobs were to take targeting information from radar and plotting and dial these levers here to put in the information that they need to set the fuses now those levers [Music] are connected to all those drive shafts down there in the bottom and all those drive shafts are turning machinery that feeds into this ammunition hoist this hoist would be used to bring the projectiles from down in the handling room up to the gun house here to be loaded and fired now you had a gunner's mate here his job was to take that shell out of that hoist drop it into the tray here there's another fellow who would be standing just behind him his job would be to pick up that 40 pound casing of powder and drop it in the tray so now you've got your tray holding a powder charge and a projectile then this guy would ram the thing and this would ram the ammunition into the bridge of the gun then the bridge block would come up through here and put the gun in battery ready to fire the way to fire this weapon in rapid fire like in any aircraft work these guys would be loading and firing these weapons between 12 and 15 rounds a minute all right do the math 12 rounds a minute is every 5 seconds so it every 5 seconds or less this guy has picked up that powder charge and dropped it in the tray this guy has grabbed a 55 pound shell dropped it in the tray he's run the rammer the rammer has closed the bridge block is closed weapons fire the shell ejects and this guy is ready to start loading again so every five seconds or less these guys are handling all this weight and you think about what it takes to pick up a 55 pound shell every 12 sec every five seconds to load this weapon here [Music] another thing about this gun is that it could be elevated to 85 degrees or depressed to 15 degrees so there's a lot of movement that is going on here during a battle and if you take into account the number of people that were in here uh there is a lot going on and i i'm not doing anything right now i'm just holding a camera and i am sweating i can't imagine being in the south pacific in here with you know another crew of guys everybody's moving and the guns are blazing it had to have been just terribly uncomfortable in here okay another kind of interesting thing before we get out of this hot box there was another guy in here who would be called the hot brass man and every once in a while the brass wouldn't completely eject out of here so you know this this gun is moving up and down and the hot brass is designed to go out that little ejection port right there well if it didn't you would have this hot piece of metal flopping around on the floor so there was one guy in here with asbestos gloves whose sole job it was to pick up spent brass that didn't go out of this port and he would have it of course at waist height so he would kick it out right here everybody had a job though we've moved down now into the 5 inch magazine you can look at this storage area here all of what you're looking at are these forty pound powder rounds and then right here are the five inch ordinance rounds so it is quite shocking to think about all of the ammunition and powder that was stored down here in one of these magazines and chip was telling me that there were ten of these on the ship okay now when they would be handling this ammunition this scuttle would be open these guys would be dogged down behind these glass doors and they would be handling these 55 pound shells manually coming out with these shelves to haul them to the hoist over here same thing with the powder will be coming out over here and these guys will be handling the powder charges in those brass casings to load in the hoists now this is one of the hoists here when it was operating the machine was running [Music] this would open the doors to allow you to put that shell in here to load it and it's a continuous chain driven hoist that's going on running up and coming down and turning and keeping these shells going up to that handling room got a powder charge going in here same thing is going up to be loaded uh into the hoists uh and uh taken out of the hoist and loaded into the uh the hoist going up to the gun house so a lot of activity going on down here when these guys are running in rotation back and forth these 55 pound shells and 40 pound power charges running to keep these guns loaded and in operation [Music] now every once in a while you might see these structures here on the alabama and you might think that it's like a support structure for the ship so i'm talking about this right here these are actually the elevators for the powder and projectiles that were coming from down below all right i realized that i keep getting distracted here from the the main thing that i'm wanting to show in this video but i had to come down to the engine room and this this thing is is just crazy one thing that that just continues to amaze me as i'm going through here is that people built this ship there were people who designed it there were people who worked together to uh to manufacture it and then you would have a crew during wartime of about 2500 officers and enlisted men all who knew how to operate this stuff it really is an example of cooperation and teamwork and all of them were throwing it together both on the home front and abroad to help fight tyranny but man i this this is just stunning to me to look at all this stuff [Music] here's something that is pretty amazing that just got added on to the alabama a few days ago i mentioned that the alabama had nine battle stars well this is one of the flags that flew over the alabama during one of those battles pretty amazing what we're looking at right now is the birthing area for the chief petty officers on the uss alabama so this is where they would have all been bunked up uh kind of a fun fact about the uss alabama bob feller who was a famous pitcher for the cleveland indians in the 40s and 50s served on the alabama and this is the area where he would have slept hey so i just mentioned bob feller a little bit ago uh here they have a few things related to bob feller apparently he was on the uss alabama baseball team which uh he would be a good one to have on there and then if you look closely here here's a baseball that was signed by the baseball team here on the alabama you can see bob feller's name there and also a bat that he signed yeah very interesting here's something kind of interesting that i didn't know the enlisted men uh not including the chief petty officers aboard the alabama were required to wear buttons to indicate what section and division they were assigned to and then of course they have different numbers and patterns so for example uh somebody wearing this button right here would be in the first section on turret three of the 16-inch guns yeah always learning something new [Music] okay so let's say you have enemy aircraft coming in obviously they're too small for the 16-inch guns uh perhaps they've moved in closer than what is necessary for the five-inch guns well your next line of defense is going to be this right here your 40 millimeter guns [Music] all right this is another one of our anti-aircraft guns this is a 40 millimeter bofors i think they have a gun now these were designed in sweden this was a weapon that the united states bought early in the war to outfit their warships when they bought the contract a lot of american companies started building these weapons and they changed the design enough to facilitate our type of manufacturing process so these 40s were rapid fire anti-aircraft guns with a range of about 6 000 yards effective range would be 4 000 yards or less and they were aimed and fired two different ways they could either be aimed and fired with local controls by the gunners on the mount but they were most often fired from the gun director which was a mark 51 gun directory which was a remote control device [Applause] okay so these weapons could have been fired manually or remotely like i said before uh you had a couple of gunners mates here that were pointers and trainers the pointer elevated the guns and the trainer traversed the guns and they would turn these handles here to move the guns left to right and up and down if they were being fired remotely there was a lever down here that was switched from local to remote and that's when the gun director could fire it's a gun captain for each one of these mounts and he could actually aim and fire the guns from a remote site now when the guns were being fired the loaders stood here and dropped clips of shells into these shoots here four loaders one here there and behind you for the other two guns they were continuously dropping these rounds in uh you had assistant loaders that would be passing up the four round clips to the to the loaders and those guys were busy handling these big clips of 40 millimeter ammunition so the guns were rapid fire and uh they were very accurate especially when they were being used uh fired by remote control [Music] so here's something else that i just learned that is pretty interesting if you look carefully whenever you come up here to the 40 millimeter gun you can kind of see what are called maybe witness marks i guess you could say well this is where racks used to be mounted where they would hold the clips for the forty millimeter so forty millimeter clips would be fed through this door right here they would be put into the rack and then you would have a guy who was stationed right here a couple guys that would feed it up to the loader that chip was talking about and then fire it off and then the spent brass would get kicked out down here when these guns were in manual mode this fellow here he's the trunk the pointer he would be elevating the guns or they can also use a joystick which is an electric control just like your old video game you could move the gun very rapidly with this joist stick control and to manually fire he actually depressed this pedal right here with his right foot [Music] all right so we've talked about the 16-inch guns we've talked about the the 5-inch guns and the 40-millimeter if you had exhausted all of those options well then this gun right here was going to be your friend this is the last line of defense against an enemy air attack the 20 millimeter gun [Music] okay these are 20 millimeter horlicon machine guns these weapons were the last line of defense against uh aircraft as far as a 20 millimeter round uh it shoots from a 60 round drum magazine the effective range was less than a thousand yards the gun could probably shoot in an excessive 2000 yards but about about a thousand yards or less would be the effective range for this weapon okay i feel a little bit embarrassed doing this but can i possibly call myself a stereotypical male and not get in here and uh shoulder the old uh the whole 20 millimeter gun i don't think so [Music] all right so that was just a little bit here at the uss alabama honestly if you're ever in mobile you have to come to this place it is simply amazing to be able to walk on this historic ship and have the access that they grant the public here uh to to walk on this battleship that saw everything i mean service in the atlantic service in the pacific at places like the the marshall islands and leyte gulf and okinawa all the way to the surrender signing in tokyo bay the uss alabama saw it all and they also have a youtube page where you can go and check out interviews from the veterans who served on here they have all kinds of different things that they show that go way more in depth than what i was able to go on here but anyway come to this place the uss alabama in mobile alabama [Music] all right heading back up top side now and oh i thought that i was gonna bump my head they have padding here just for me [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 46,533

Rating: 4.976223 out of 5

Keywords: history, history travel, history traveler, mobile alabama, alabama, uss alabama, wwii navy, uss alabama tour, uss alabama battleship, uss alabama history, wwii, pacific battles, wwii naval battles, wwii battleship gun size, history underground, naval warfare

Id: uJR4Mixs4qQ

Length: 38min 59sec (2339 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 26 2021