The History and Development of the 5"/38 - Turns out you can take the sky from someone

foreign [Music] [Music] the story of what was to become the finest dual-purpose Naval gun of World War II began in a way all the way back in World War One whilst the US Navy had ended that war in the middle of batch producing the massive swarm of Wicks and glampson-class destroyers they had taken note of a few interesting trends although these latest United States Navy destroyers were at between 1100 and 1200 tons normal displacement somewhat larger than the average World War One Destroyer there were a few larger destroyers out there British flotilla leaders ranged from 1500 to 1700 tons and there were even one or two particularly large ones like HMS Swift which someone had contrived to stick a six-inch gun on and the Germans had just been completing the s-113 class at the end of the war this class was capable of about 37 knots displaced just over 2 000 tons at normal displacement and carried a main battery of four single 5.9 inch guns and four very large 23.6 inch or 600 millimeter torpedoes they were designed to overmatch the latest British modified w-class destroyers which displaced only about 60 percent as much as an s113 but carried four single 4.7 inch guns and half a dozen more normal 21-inch torpedoes it was only further testing mostly by the French navy that would reveal that the s113 class were actually far too lightly built for their massive Armament but that's neither here nor there whilst the new U.S ships that's the wixes and Clemsons had both the British and German vessels combined beaten when it came to torpedo batteries with no less than a dozen 21-inch Torpedoes on each US ship the Armament for the main battery of most of these US destroyers was four single four-inch guns which would potentially leave them at a disadvantage in a firefight against four single 4.7 or 5.9 inch weapons this was combined with the fact that although Germany was now out of the running Naval wise the Royal Navy's destroyers could also count on a plethora of small modern Cruisers such as the arith user and sea classes to lead and support them in battle whilst the latest U.S Cruisers were hopelessly slow as far as Destroyer standards went and the most recent of them had been laid down around the same time as HMS dreadnought and with that said there weren't that many of those either so the US began to look into the idea of merging the small cruiser with the Destroyer leader upgrading from the four inch to the 5-inch 51 caliber gun which was the same gun that you could find on the US Navy's battleships as a secondary battery there was one idea that called for a vessel that was armed with six such weapons and a pair of triple torpedo launchers then there were some design iterations before they finally settled on the idea of a 2200 ton Destroyer with five single five inch guns on the center line and four triple torpedo tube launchers on the wings the wing launchers were at this stage justified by U.S Navy officers who said that the Centerline units apparently tempted commanders to loose all of their Torpedoes early and then not have any left when a better chance to torpedo an enemy ship presented itself later in battle one U.S Navy officer specifically cited some British destroyers at Jutland who had actually done this loosing off all of their Torpedoes early on in the conflict and then finding much better opportunities usually during the night action to torpedo German battleships only to discover that they had no more Torpedoes left but there was an even more ambitious Design This was put forward by Lieutenant Commander Craven he wanted a ship that had three twin 5-inch 51 caliber mounts with a pair superfiring forward and another amount of midships along with three torpedo launchers all on the center line and heading aft with a single 5-inch 25 caliber anti-aircraft gun a then new development also mounted somewhere amid ships however these discussions and believe it or not some even more outlandish designs ultimately went nowhere and the role of fast Cruiser and sometime flota leader was taken up instead by the Omaha class Cruisers fast forward to the end of the 1920s and a new destroyer was being proposed mainly to test out the new high-pressure steam plants that were being developed at the time this one included the novel idea of twin sextuple torpedo tubes what is it with the US Navy and sextuple things on outlandish designs nonetheless the need for these sextable torpedo launchers was so that you could have a 12 torpedo Salvo mounted on the center line along with the main Armament of four single 5-inch 51 caliber guns but there was a lot of argument about the lack of anti-aircraft defense on the design as anti-aircraft defense had started to be considered at the end of world war one and by this point it was now fully in the running the latest U.S Cruisers were using the still new 5-inch 25 caliber anti-aircraft gun in their secondary battery and instead of trying to cram a few of these into an already crowded Destroyer design a lot of officers began to argue that the Destroyer should instead just have a main battery that was composed entirely of these short-barreled 5-inch 25 caliber weapons arguing that the range loss involved in using the 5-inch 25 probably didn't matter anyway because with Fire Control in the state that it was on destroyers in the late 1920s the chances of being able to exploit the 5-inch 51s longer range were fairly marginal anyway the arguments over what this new destroyer should be descended into chaos During the 1927-28 period with design options ranging from a 1400 ton design that had a four single five inch 25s and four triple torpedo launchers all the way up to a 2900 ton design that had four single six-inch guns four single 5 inch 25s and four triple launchers with an option to swap two of the 5-inch 25s in exchange for upgrading all of the triple torpedo launchers to quadruple torpedo launchers with the start of various disarmament conferences such as the Geneva conference that would ultimately lead to the London Naval treaty a couple of years down the line the design that was eventually selected was for a 1850 ton ship armed with five single five-inch 51s and four triple torpedo launchers but then the London Naval treaty came and went and so this design was also not put into production it complete lack of air defense being viewed with some concern and alarm amongst the more aware of the U.S Navy's officers in the meantime however France had decided that they didn't want to sign up to these new destroyer restrictions and so someone decided Well maybe we should follow the same two-stage approach that the Marine National was adopting with their torpiliers and Contra torpiliers thus it was supposed that a slower 2400 ton ship armed with as many 5-inch 51s as you could cram on it could be used to defend the fleet and smaller faster 1100 tonne craft armed mostly with Torpedoes could be used to attack the enemy fleets this proposal ended up being rejected for a very long list of reasons including a belief quite reasonably that Congress wouldn't actually pay for enough of both types and more personally the fact that the 1100 tonne type was so small and fragile that it would have to be towed across the Pacific if they wanted to go and fight Japan and even undertow they'd have to hope they didn't run into typhoons by November 1930 there were three new designs at 1 375 tons 1500 tons and 1850 tons all of these designs proposed the use of four single five inch 25s as the main battery with varying torpedo armaments four triple launchers on the wings three triples on the center line or two quadruples on the center line respectively the largest design also had options for either a fifth five inch gun or replacing the four singles with four twins this was followed as seems to be traditional in into war US Destroyer design by much argument and waving of hands and multiple redesigns over the next couple of years that would eventually see these three options reworked into a 1500 ton design which increased the number of guns from four to five whilst adopting the two center-line quadruple torpedo Launchers from the 1850 ton concept this would become the Farragut class whilst the 1850 ton concept itself would be reworked to incorporate four twin single purpose mounts for eight guns in total and this would become the porter class but once these last changes were being made the gun section of the Bureau of Ordnance which at this point was a generation and to be fair given it's the gun section A whole weapons type away from those officers who would make the Bureau of Ordnance Infamous in World War II had been observing the ongoing discussions and they'd realize that a major point of contention with the proposed Armament was that the 5-inch 25 had a relatively low muzzle velocity for a destroyer grade weapon this was a product of its short barrel and its small propellant charge this in turn limited its Effectiveness as the flight time of the shell was greater which made calculating A Fire Control solution harder and of course the shell also didn't go as far that hadn't been so much of an issue as we mentioned earlier in the early to mid 1920s when Destroyer Fire Control probably to be fair couldn't have exploited the maximum range of the ship's guns anyway but this was much more of an issue now that this technology had been improved this apparent failing of the 5-inch 25 had been accepted during its development because of course it had been designed as a heavy anti-aircraft gun not a dual purpose gun with an anti-surface roll and in its purely anti-aircraft role American anti-aircraft Doctrine at the time called for the laying down of a barrage of shells to disrupt enemy bomber attacks may be damaging or destroying them specific hits on enemy aircraft were not expected from the 5-inch Armament given the still somewhat limited Fire Control that was available as well as the fact the shells at the time if you wanted them to detonate in mid-air had to have a manually set mechanical fuse not the radar proximity fuse of World War II and so the idea was just throw as much metal into the air as possible and to do this a short barrel lower velocity Weapon made sense as it meant The Recoil was considerably less and as we mentioned the weight of the charge was also less this translated into a high rate of fire as the gun crews could fairly rapidly feed the shells compared to the much larger fixed ammunition of the 5-inch 51 caliber gun and they could do this for a considerable time without tiring quite so much the low recoil meant that there was very little time between firing the gun and being able to open the breach again as the gun came stationary and the short barrel also meant that the whole setup was a much lighter weight which meant that it was easier and faster to move about which was quite important when you remember that the 5-inch 25 gun still weighed around a ton and its housing weighed another tonne so you were having to shift two tons around to track a fast-moving aerial Target mostly using muscle power these features gave the 5-inch 25 a rate of fire that was about twice that of the 5-inch 51 assuming that both guns were operating in ideal circumstances but the resulting aforementioned detrimental effects to accuracy in the anti-surface role meant that in an evaluation it turned out that the four inch gun as found on the wixes and Clemsons would actually hit more often than a 5 inch 25 although obviously the fourth shell would do slightly less damage still with nothing better to use various Cruisers had been using their 5-inch 25 caliber guns As dual-purpose Weapons already in various Fleet exercises and preliminary studies for battleships that could be built in the early 1930s had looked into developing a brand new either 5.3 or 5.4 inch dual purpose weapon the London treaty had pushed those particular ideas aside by extending the battleship holiday although the 5.3 and 5.4 inch development ideas did persist for a little while longer the Bureau of Ordnance had also looked at a twin four-inch Dual Purpose mounting and interestingly enough they also looked at an intermediate weapon somewhere between the four inch and the 5-inch 51 with both 4.5 inch and 4.7 inch calibers which would turn out to be the Royal Navy's two main destroy calipers of the 1930s and 1940s being considered for development in the USA however some bright spark at the Bureau of Ordnance decided Well what if we just take the existing five-inch guns and make a new Barrel that's about halfway in length between them that would give us something that surely is about halfway between each of them in capability which is exactly what we're looking for right with a cry of that's an excellent idea I'm glad I thought of it the head of the Bureau of Ordnance is gun section went looking for a design for a 40 caliber weapon with a 2 600 feet per second muzzle velocity with a few tweaks to the design and one large hacksaw applied to a helpless Mark 9 5 inch 51 caliber gun later and a prototype 5-inch 38 caliber gun had been created as the mark 9 was originally intended for use on submarines it also came with semi-fixed ammunition this is where the shell and the propellant charge are separate unlike the existing surface-based guns which used one piece or fixed ammunition which was therefore harder to move around by hand since you had to handle the full weight of the charge and the Shell at the same time and this was why the smaller charge on the 5-inch 25 as compared to the 5 inch 51 was so important to its increased overall rate of fire whilst semi-fixed ammunition would of course need two separate hoists it was suitable still for power ramming and since the propellant charge came in a brass case it allowed the use of a sliding breech block not quite so ideal on larger Battleship guns but on a destroyer grade weapon where it was most usually to be found in a single mounting or in a relatively open twin the actuation of the sliding breech block was faster and simpler than an interrupted screw breach when you were trying to Chuck dozens of rivet rounds downrange every minute although the sacrificial gun for the Prototype had been a 5-inch 51 caliber weapon the revisions that were made to turn this prototype into a production ready gun meant that what emerged at the other end was essentially an enlarged 5-inch 25 but with the aforementioned new features and benefits from the Prototype cut down 5 inch 51. it would be these guns that would then constitute the main battery of the first modern US destroyers of the interwar period the paragut class and indeed every single us gun based Destroyer threw to pass the end of World War II the porter class were rare in the they used a single purpose version of the 5-inch 38 with restricted elevation something that they shared with the later and quite similar Summer's class although the idea of single purpose mounts was to save weight the twin single purpose Mount still ended up weighing a little bit more than the equivalent number of Dual Purpose singles the appreciation that the Imperial Japanese Navy the US Navy's most likely enemy would almost certainly try and wear down the fleet through both air and sea-based Strikes mitigated against further development of the single purpose Mount even if a single purpose Mount might be made a little bit lighter the simple fact was that a destroyer that was able to bring a four or five gun main battery into play against a Japanese destroyer and or a Japanese aircraft was infinitely more valuable than one that could only do one or the other but not both in turn this meant that on the weight limited Destroyer Fleet already somewhat burdened by the necessarily heavier dual-purpose guns a single highly capable Fire Control System would be needed to direct the guns apart from anything a single system would save weight over two separate surface and air Fire Control Systems the interwar Destroyers from the farro guts up to the Bagley class would use the mark 33 a somewhat less Advanced predecessor to the ultimate culmination of the developments of U.S Fire Control in the interval period the Mark 37 which was introduced from The Sims class onwards and would be retrofitted to some older ships later on both of these systems were capable of providing data for the engagement of Air or Surface targets although obviously the Mark 37 could do this somewhat better there was one last hurdle of development to overcome the initial single 5-inch 38s used a pedestal Mount that still needed to be manually slewed the weight of the gun and the mount just about allowed for this but it had to sacrifice a shell hoist to get down to under the weight where the crew could actually manage it thus slightly compromising the theoretical rate of fire as ammunition had to be passed up a fixed hatch then moved around to whichever direction the gun was pointing in placed into the fuse Setters and then picked up again to be placed into the gun starting with the Venom and Gridley classes the 5-inch 38 was therefore given the newly developed base ring Mount which allowed the ammunition to use hoists that took the shell on charge straight to the gun at any angle of train and elevation and the fuse Setter could be built into the Hoist it also allowed the mount to be completely enclosed as there was now no need for direct access to the deck beneath it the downside was that weight now went far beyond what could reasonably be manhandled so powered mounts were required the US Navy was at this stage actually quite low to introduce these to destroyers which might come as a surprise for some since in World War II power directed everything was the standard if at all it could be made the issue at the time was that the powered Mount seemed to be an extra point of vulnerability and in particular for a destroyer which might be hit and lose power even if temporarily it might find itself at that very moment in the most need of its gun battery only to find that those guns were now non-operational but the advantages of the rate of fire increase and the shrapnel protection that were afforded by the enclosed base ring Mount were more than enough to persuade the US Navy to sign on to the power drive installation anyway the development of the twin 5-inch 38 Joule purpose Mount was far more straightforward there was no chance of this thing ever being moved by Manpower alone and so a power drive was built in from the start the mount's origins lay back even before the 5-inch 38 had been formally developed when the U.S Navy was concerned about the open 5-inch 25 mounts on its Cruisers and battleships being vulnerable to strafing and Splinter damage from aircraft and bombs and shells respectively the obvious solution was some form of enclosed and shielded Mount but to do so for every single Mount would incur a significant weight penalty and so a prototype twin 5-inch 25 caliber enclosed Mount was devised and the Cruisers that were being built at the time Wichita Helena and Saint Louis were redesigned slightly to accommodate these but of course Wichita came out somewhat overweight and the 5-inch 38 had enough advantages to it that a single 5 inch 38 which was also somewhat lighter would be installed in place of the twin 5-inch 25 Mount at each projected installation location this then left the other two Cruisers but instead of continuing to develop a special mount for just two ships and since they had some additional weight in their margins unlike Wichita it was decided to just install an early version of the twin 5-inch 38 Dual Purpose Mount the first such mount in the United States Navy which was then modified for use on subsequent Cruisers the US fast battleships and toward the end of World War II the Summoner and gearing class Destroyers there were a number of variations on both the single and twin mounts of varying weights and with different features including different thicknesses of Steel that were used in the enclosed shielding with just the twin mounting ending up having five different marks three of which had multiple variants which ranged from about 43 and a half tons for the lightest Dual Purpose model to over 77 tons for the mark 28 mod 2 which can be found on the Iowa class battleships there was also a special single mounting developed the Mark 37 which was very austere and had no Shield or hoist system this was designed for installation on Merchant ships and auxiliaries so if you visit most of the preserved Victory and Liberty ships that is still in existence such as the red oak Victory or the Jeremiah obrien this is the mounting that you'll see the new gun therefore had become the default primary Armament of U.S auxiliary ships and destroyers as well as the secondary battery of subsequent U.S Cruisers fast battleships and aircraft carriers with a number of older ships being upgraded to have 5-inch 38 secondaries in particular the standard class battleships that were able to be extensively refitted the atlanta-class Cruisers also used the 5-inch 38 but as the main battery by virtue of piling 16 of them in eight twin mounts onto a relatively small Hull at least small as far as Cruisers are concerned as the 1930s Drew on the numbers that were ordered Rose dramatically from orders 420 and then another order for 10 in the first few years to a three-year contract for no less than 700 in 1940 which actually turned out to be well over a thousand built within the first couple of years of the war starting the turning point in 5-inch 38 production was November 1941 the month before Pearl Harbor when production of the 5-inch 38 and its mountings finally began to outpace the requirements that were laid down by ships that were entering the fitting outstage which now meant there were some spares in total 2168 single mounts for warships 3298 simplified single amounts for merchant ships and 1257 twin mounts were built by summer of 1945. for such a popular and influential gun It's Time at the top of the pile was actually remarkably short only six years separated its first installation to the adoption of a successor weapon although the outbreak of World War II meant that this latter gun's entry into service was quite delayed as the existing 5-inch 38 was simply ramped up into production the successor of course was the 5-inch 54 which was a scaled up 5-inch 38 as much as the latter had been scaled up from the 5-inch 25. with a longer range a heavier shell and a higher muzzle velocity it promised a wider engagement envelope against aircraft and greater stopping power against surface ships but the 5-inch 54 Mark 16 would only ever see major Service as the heavy anti-aircraft battery of the Midway class carriers post-war the heavy anti-aircraft field for the U.S Navy in the war would be dominated by the 5-inch 38 with smaller numbers of 5-inch 25s chipping in the 5-inch 54 Mark 16 was also supposed to go on the Montana class of battleships but of course they were canceled now the 5-inch 54 was then developed from The Mark 16 on the midways to the Mark 42 of the Cold War and the mark 45 which can still be found on today's modern U.S Navy ships but the 5-inch 38 remained in active service for quite a considerable time after World War II seeing near continual official service in one form or another until technically speaking 2006 when the last Iowa class was stricken from the naval register and transferred over to being a museum ship or the 1990s if you want to look at which U.S Navy ship in active service carry the 5-inch 38 either way it was a gun that outlasted the Cold War this in turn means that a vast number of them have survived to be seen on preserved Museum ships today granted most of these are in the U.S mounted on everything from Freighters to destroyers to Cruisers battleships and even some of the preserved aircraft carriers but there are also a few 5-inch 38s elsewhere in the world on various preserved vessels such as the Greek Destroyer velos which yet admittedly is a U.S Fletcher so that's a brief developmental history of the 5-inch 38 caliber gun as said at the beginning pretty much the finest Dual Purpose weapon of World War II hope you've enjoyed it and hope to see you again in another video that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 314,986

Keywords: wows, world of warships, 5/38, 5/25, 5/51, WW2, USN, IJN, World War 2

Id: L_UgBCpVCGw

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2023