USS Benson - Guide 343

foreign [Music] [Music] although the lessons of the Sims class had yet to be fully appreciated as they were honestly still under construction a number of factors would combine to ensure that their immediate successes would not be quite as badly affected by the overweight and unstable experiences that the early Sims class did primary amongst these factors was that in early 1937 advances in boiler and turbine Machinery used in destroyers meant that it was possible to try a unit system in the next batch of such ships already in use in various larger ships the unit system was designed to address a major weakness in what was theoretically the most efficient Machinery layout that of grouping all of your boilers together and then having them all power the turbines which would be grouped all together as well just a bit further aft the weakness of this was that a single good hit usually a torpedo but also maybe a bomb or a shell or maybe mine might then disable all of your turbines or all of your boilers or both if you're really unlucky which would leave you dead in the water the unit system spread separate boiler and turbine rooms out and tried to alternate them as best it as could be done this meant that a single hit might knock out some of the propulsion and some of the power generation but not all of it previously in the US Navy the Machinery had been just a little bit too large to fit this layout which was slightly less efficient with its use of space into the hull of a treaty compliant destroyer at the power outputs that us needed to achieve the speeds that they wanted with this new slightly smaller Machinery it was possible to do although the spacing of the boilers would mean that their new ships would need two funnels as opposed to one which was a feature that hadn't been seen on US destroyers since the Mayhem class accepting that this would make the total Machinery related weight a little bit higher due to the slightly less efficient layout the US Navy also accepted that the overall displacement would have to therefore rise somewhat the ongoing collapse of the treaty system also meant the Navy was now a bit more concerned with economics and getting ships that worked when it came to what displacement they were going to be as opposed to some fixed rigid number thus along with a somewhat stronger Hull which also helped with stability as the weight of the hull is lower in the ship the overall displacement of the new class has designed would rise to 1620 tons standard this would be driven along to the usual Target speed of US destroyers for the time of about 37 knots or just over by 50 000 shaft horsepower which drove a pair of screws the main battery would start out with five single Dual Purpose 5-inch 38 caliber guns a pair super firing forward and a pair superfiring aft with the fifth gun at the same level as the AFT superfiring unit but just forward of it and also just forward of the world's cutest little main mast these last two guns would be in open or semi-open mounts whilst the other three that's the two forward mounts and the aftmost gun would be in fully enclosed mounts although this would end up changing over the ship's careers weight and stability would also be saved by the use of the quintuple torpedo launcher for the first time two of which gave a 10 torpedo spread on either side as both launchers were mounted on the center line each just after of one of the funnels whilst only US Navy destroyers had torpedo doctrines that didn't mind using Wing launchers as the ships were supposed to launch all of their Torpedoes using gyro steering and then they'd all head out on the same roughly forward direction of travel experience inverse Fleet problems and general testing had shown that this was and would for quite some time remain a difficult and unreliable way of doing things that used up a lot of top weights since you ended up with an awful lot of torpedoes and let's just say the gyro steering system sometimes liked to send Torpedoes back at you assuming they didn't just go off in random directions this all Centerline mounting system only gave up two Torpedoes total compared to the original version in The Sims class but also meant that a more traditional broadside Salvo which was what the US Navy was heading back towards would actually have two additional Torpedoes compared to the Sims maximum of eight Torpedoes on one side four spare Torpedoes for a limited reload were also carried aside from half a dozen 50 cal machine guns and a minimal anti-suppling Warfare element of a pair of small depth charge rails and a couple of Y guns that was it as far as Weapons went being a destroyer there was no armor to speak of the class would be named the Benson class named after the lead ship which itself was named for Admiral Benson the first Chief of Novel operations who had also recently died at the same time another class of virtually identical ships the gleaves class was under construction with the main differences being various details in the machinery and the shape of the funnels but that's the story for another time the ships were built starting in May 1938 and would be constructed through to Mid in 1942 taking an average of two years to get to commissioning in the pre-war period which managed to drop to an average of just over a year during wartime due to the outbreak of World War II 30 ships in total would be built but as they were constructed the increasing focus on anti-aircraft and anti-submarine warfare was already taking hold at the end of 1940 an order was issued to replace the number three gun with a quad 1.1 inch installation in future vessels which was followed by a month later by a revision that ditched the number three gun the reload Torpedoes and the six machine guns in favor of a pair of twin 40 millimeter bofors and four single 20 millimeter Orleans further more depth charges and depth charge launchers were added all of the 5-inch guns were now to be enclosed in fully enclosed mounts regardless of whether the ship had four or five such guns and other ships played around with losing either one torpedo launcher or the number three gun in exchange for a battery of additional 50 Cals as a result of these many experimental and sometimes contradictory orders it can sometimes be difficult to work out exactly which ship is which as their visual Armament changed several times each eventually a new standard would emerge with both the number three gun and one of the torpedo launchers removed in favor of massively upscale depth charge capacity Plus additional charge launchers as well as the additional lighter medium anti-aircraft batteries of bothas and Orleans at one point a scheme was proposed that would also drop the number 4 gun to further upscale these other weapons but that didn't end up going anywhere the class was heavily used in World War II the Original USS laffy and her sister Barton were both lost fighting the Japanese during the night action against hia kiroshima and Friends whilst Lansdale was lost in the Mediterranean in 1944. the others with varying degrees of damage survived the war but as the dramatic drop in main Armament suggests the ships were not really large enough to accommodate all the additional new systems and they mostly decommissioned within a few years of the end of World War II some would then be scrapped in the 60s and 70s but a surprising number were also expended as targets around the same time three ships would be sold in the 1950s to foreign navies Benson and Hillary P Jones becoming the loyang and hang Yang and they served in the Taiwanese Navy until the mid-1970s whilst the Woodworth went to Italy and became the articlieri until she was scrapped also in the early 1970s 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: 45,970

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Benson class, Gleaves class, 5/38, WW2, USN, IJN, USS LAffey

Id: Z74Oyp2Rp3E

Length: 8min 43sec (523 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023