USS Olympia - Pint-size battleship in a cruisers skin

[Music] [Music] following on from the dawn of the protected cruisers in the form of the Elswick cruisers now it's probably as good a time as any to talk about one of the few surviving ships from that era the USS Olympia which happily also happens to be a protected Cruiser to understand her layout and mission one must first understand the position of the US Navy at the time of her construction unlike the US Navy that we usually talk about and definitely unlike the US Navy we think about these days the Navy of the 1880s was small underfunded and largely composed of some extremely long suffering paddle and screw steam frigates that were on the verge of needing scrapping and interesting if highly obsolete and mostly rusting collection of various types of monitor in different stages of degradation and with a variety of capabilities and a few early attempts at protected cruisers America was in one of its isolationist phases and the primary purpose of the Navy aside from coastal defense of some description was a degree of Commerce rating it designed to cause disproportionate irritation to an attacking nation in hindsight assuming that they were actually serious about defense one can see the immediate flaw in this situation in that any nation with a Navy large enough to send a serious armed force over the Atlantic to the Pacific for that matter to the continental United States would also have a far more extensive fleet of cruisers and the like and so a few armed merchant raiders and three slow protected cruisers we're not going to leave anybody quaking in their boots of course the Navy itself would have preferred to have some actual meaningful modern combat capability but hey Congress with all that said some politicians were actually beginning to wake up to all this and a modernization program was just about starting to get underway including the rather wonderful dynamite cruiser USS Vesuvius which will be covered separately another part of this program would consist of the construction of a pair of coastal defense battleships USS Texas which to a certain degree was a miniaturized form of what would soon develop into the pre-dreadnought battleships and USS Maine which being significantly less capable teated between armored Cruiser and second class battleship but we'll come back to feature in this story a little later on the part of the program we are interested in also switched focus from commerce rating to more specifically going off to n enemy fleets supply train which would of course be better protected than random merchant shipping and thus the Olympia was authorized as the 1880's drew to a close along with a number of other vessels with her mission profile in mind she would have to be substantially superior to the average protected Cruiser since she would be guaranteed to be meeting them in combat and given the overall size of the United States Navy at the time was also near enough guaranteed to be significantly outnumbered she was to have been the first of a group of similar ships but yet another radical realignment of naval thinking shortly after her authorization saw the United States Navy shift once more from a defense and raiding force towards a navy to be built along the lines of Alfred Thayer Mahan 'he's decisive battle doctrine a policy that would eventually culminate in the Great White Fleet as a result she would be substantially more powerful than any other US protected Cruiser before or after her until the dawn of the dreadnought era where as we saw last week the typical protected Cruiser carried a pair of heavy guns in single mounts olympia would actually carry no less than four 8-inch guns in a pair of twin turrets one Ford and one aft a secondary battery of 10 5-inch guns in single casements five two aside was built into the ship's superstructure along with a wide variety of anti torpedo boat weapons and no less than fourteen 57-millimeter guns in hull sponsons and 637 millimeter guns on deck with six hull mounted above water torpedo tubes one at each end and two on each side rounding out of the weapons loadout at some point relatively soon into her career the crew would also acquire several Gatling guns and what was described at the time as a substantial collection of personal weapons consisting primarily of numerous rifles and revolvers such as to suggest the intention to form a naval brigade or substantial boarding party from her crew when called upon the number and variety of which would appear at first to be somewhat excessive even for a ship of war a great quantity of ammunition likewise being in evidence because of course they did all this was protected by a single low mounted armored deck two inches thick on the flat with the slopes increasing to four point seven five inches at the maximum the turrets carrying three and a half inch thick armor we're that the secondary battery amusingly actually having slightly more protection with four inch thick gun shields it's important to note that all this was Harvey steel armor which was new at the time and was the immediate predecessor to the Krupp shield of the 1900s so whilst direct comparison with more familiar World War 1 ships can't be made comparison with contemporary ships of the period shows the Olympia to have carried a considerable amount of protection indeed her armor slopes were actually superior in protection to the Italia class ironclad battleships which were only just coming into service simply by thickness and this advantage increased even more substantially once the superior material qualities of the new steel being used was taken into account her speed requirements were also quite high since for all this gun power if she was too badly outnumbered she would have to outrun other protected cruisers this led to a design speed of 20 knots with the power fed from a pair of Coal Fired triple-expansion engines rated for thirteen and a half thousand horsepower through a pair of screws in the event her powerplant proved capable of almost a third more than this on trials with a maximum speed reached of just over twenty one and a half knots well in excess of the 18 knot average speed of most protected cruisers at the time all this would leave her as one of the most powerful protected cruisers in the world about her only disadvantage being her somewhat shorter range compared to a few other rival contemporary protected cruisers the twin turrets and overall heavy armament also lent her the appearance of a small battleship she would be laid down in June 1891 launched in November 1892 and was out on trials by November 1893 finally commissioning into the Navy in February 1895 after drills and gunnery practice the ship would sail in July 1895 to become the flagship of the Asiatic squadron then based in China and would spend the next couple of years training and showing the flag in various Asian ports as 1898 dawned tensions with the Spanish Empire were increasing and the ship would be anchored in Hong Kong awaiting orders under the flag of the newly arrived Commodore George Dewey following the catastrophic destruction of the USS Maine in Cuba war became almost inevitable substantially helped along by the press in the form of William Randolph Hearst who Stokes the tensions mercilessly for his own profit blaming the ships destruction on a Spanish remote-detonated mine although nowadays it seems more likely that an internal fire or defective ammunition was responsible whar Julie came about in April and the squadron moved to China where it received orders to take Manila in the Philippines which was then under Spanish control and destroy any Spanish warships present US media reports were amping up fears about a new Spanish Armada descending on the u.s. west coast and whilst it was technically true that the forces in Manila Bay outnumbered the Asiatic squadron they were all small and hopelessly obsolete consisting of five unprotected cruisers one of which was currently disarmed and under repair - tiny protective cruisers that were actually out masked by one of the u.s. squadrons gunboats and four gunboats of their own only one of which was serviceable the incoming US squadron left behind a supply ship a Collier and a Revenue Cutter even though the latter actually out massed and outgunned a number of the Spanish warships and Dewey entered the harbor in the Olympia which on its own out massed the two largest Spanish vessels combined leading three other protected cruisers and the Baltimore which out massed all of the remaining active Spanish combatants put together along with the Raleigh and Boston and finally two gunboats Concord and petrol the Spanish having anchored outside the range of their own force and gun batteries arranging shots were fired at 0-5 15 hours on the 1st of May and Dewey issued the order you may fire when ready Gridley at zero 541 to commence the main battle the squadron then began something of a procession sailing past the Spanish line firing all guns that could be brought to bear to port then turning around and coming back firing all guns that could be brought to bear to starboard then back again to port and so on a total of five times with each turn bringing them closer and therefore closing the range a bit like a game of 1890 space invaders as the Spanish fleet was overwhelmed the flagship Reina Kristina charged to the closing American forces intending to ram but the ship was forced to shore by a furious close-range barrage of fire that pretty much took the ship apart by oh 7:45 with some of the Spanish ships in flames Dewey was told only 15 rounds of ammunition remained for each of his 5-inch guns and so he broke off the action to reconsider telling the crew for morale purposes that it was time for breakfast the remaining Spanish ships took the opportunity to relocate where they could and it turned out that the message had been substantially garbled as it had been supposed to say that the 5-inch guns had only expended 15 rounds each with breakfast interspersed by the sounds of ammunition exploding on some of the Spanish ships still nearby action was resumed at 10:40 but this was very much a clearing up action with Spanish ships scuttling themselves or being sunk with minimal resistance and the battle over with Spanish colors struck just after lunchtime overall the battle was a decisive victory with minimal damage and casualties to the American forces however it also provided a salutary lesson in naval gunnery guns had advanced substantially in size and power over the past few decades but the fire control of ranging systems were still largely a matter of gun sights and human eyeballs with the occasional basic rangefinder and between this and the sheer variety of gun calibers making spotting a specific gun the shell splash is exceedingly difficult accuracy on both sides had been abysmal with nearly 6,000 shells fired by the u.s. squadron which is substantially more than either sides much larger fleets would fire during the entire Battle of Jutland that ranges from 5,000 down to about 2,000 yards the number of hits scored once the point-blank savaging of the spanish flagship is removed from the equation equates to around a 1% accuracy which is a third worse than beetee's battle cruisers at Jutland there were some positives to consider though accuracy was actually quite good edging towards superb for the 8 inch main guns on Olympia and the overall accuracy level was still far superior to the US squadron sent to deal with its counterpart in Cuba whose gunnery was even worse especially in the heavy gun Department and of course as bad as this was Spanish gunnery was even more terrible as a direct result of these engagements the United States Navy would rapidly introduce much more sophisticated fire control and ranging equipment and double the amount of gunnery practice in the fleet compared to pre-war levels which would help the situation substantially and also allow battles to move out to a range where the tertiary battery was not as likely to be used which happily left sailors only having to work out the difference between three or four different calibers of shells instead of six to eight the Spanish response was actually to send their most powerful ships including a battleship and an armored Cruiser to counter-attack but the aforementioned battle in Cuba caused them to be recalled before they managed to reach Huey's squadron olimpio would then see further action supporting the landing of US Marines before accepting the surrender of the city as well as the Spanish naval units she would then go on to support US Army forces invading the Philippines before heading back to China in May 1899 and then back to the US later in the year having become quite famous as the flagship of the United States Navy's first major naval battle against a foreign power since the war of 1812 the crew and the ship itself received a lot of attention and praise with a good coat of paint and a rather lovely gilded bow decoration awarded to the Olympia herself she would then be placed briefly in reserve before being brought back into service three years later in 1902 first as flagship of the Caribbean division and then patrolling across the Atlantic and Mediterranean before becoming a training ship in 1906 where she would alternate between summer training cruises and winters in reserve then becoming a barrack ship in 1912 but the Olympia wasn't a ship to stay idle for long and she was soon back in service as by 1916 it was becoming clear that the USA would become involved in World War one actively sooner or later and with the declaration of war she was put to work escorting transports and patrolling the East Coast against German Raiders being as famous as any battleship than in service she would augment this dooty by joining the rather battleship populated American warships who run aground in their own waters Club which as we've seen before was quite a popular institution in her case choosing Long Island Sound for her own particular encounter with the seafloor repairs would also see her entire main and secondary battery replaced with more modern 5-inch 51 caliber weapons and she would end up in the Mediterranean again after the war again as a flagship policing some of the numerous spats and relocations of people's that characterize the Adriatic and Balkans regions during this period 1921 would see a return to the Atlantic Fleet where she would become an interested observer at the sinking of the German battleships Austria's land and Frankfurt during tests that included Billy Mitchell's bombing runs part from its final training cruise her last major action would be to bring the remains of the Unknown Soldier home from France to Arlington Cemetery she would then go into reserve for the final time in 1922 and was reclassified as a relic in 1931 thus freeing up the name to be used by other ships the preservation process would begin in 1957 as she was restored to her 1898 I'd be keeping up with the dates configuration and became a museum ship although as the 8-inch guns and their turrets had long ago been scrapped so replicas had to be developed and were installed instead whilst she should have received a regular drydocking every two decades or so for maintenance due to a lack of funds the ship has missed a total of three major dry dockings and been in the water continuously since the close of the Second World War the deterioration of the ship had became so advanced that by the 21st century several serious considerations were given including US Navy permission to sink the ship as an artificial reef and searches for a new organization to take over and maintain the ship were largely fruitless happily though as far as I can tell in more recent years some substantial work appears to have been done to keep the ship afloat including the use of a mobile cofferdam to repair and strengthen weakened portions of the hull with a funding campaign launched recently to raise enough money for the ship to be drydock and receive a full and a long overdue repair so with any luck USS Olympia will remain with us for a good long time to come 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 pin post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 571,060

Keywords: wows, world of warships, World War 1, World War 2, Spanish-American War, Battle of Manilla Bay, Admiral Dewey, USS Olympia, USS Maine, USS Texas, Great White Fleet, United States Navy

Id: WlfZrT8Rh8o

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/TerranRanger]

Wanted this one as a T2 or maybe T3 is premium for a long time. Heck, the museum needs money, they could do a fund raiser similar to Texas. Give the ship away or sell it for cheap (like all low tiers) and then sell a special camo as the fund raiser, or sell the ship for a little more and donate some of the extra profit.