What the Navy Doesn't Like About the Iowas

hi I'm Ryan Szymanski curator from battleship New Jersey Museum and memorial the iowa-class battleships were the largest and best battleships ever built by the United States arguably the best battleships ever built in the world by the 1980s there was nothing else in the world that could seriously threaten them however the Navy didn't like everything about the iowa-class videos this video we're going to talk about some of the things that they didn't like and we're gonna use plans they had for future battleship construction plans they had for modifying the Iowas that existed and plans they had for modifying iowa's that were still on construction under construction at the end of World War two we have to remember the nineteen eighties there were no other battleships in the world these were the best there were but in the 1940s when these ships were built and originally operated they were seeing hard combat and there were a number of enemy battleships out there and if you've been watching our ship comparison videos that we tend to release on Mondays you'll see that while the Iowas compare very favorably to a lot of these battleships that were built or under designed during World War two they often more bested in individual areas while they may be the fastest they're certainly not the best armor well the Navy loved their guns and their sheer size for the reserve of buoyancy that allowed them to keep adding more and more and stuff onto them there are other things that the Navy didn't like so first off let's talk about the bridge Iowa and New Jersey were originally dealt with an open bridge like earlier battleships pretty early on New Jersey's was enclosed with a rounded bridge baby didn't like that much either when Wisconsin and Missouri were completed and when Iowa and New Jersey went into the Puget Sound Navy Yard 1945 their bridge was replaced with the squarish bridge you see behind me inside of that bridge is an armored conning tower it's a single thickest piece of armor on the ship seventeen point three inches thick it's a lot of weight very high up in the superstructure which affects the center of buoyancy because that weight is so high and it's not all that functional it's a fairly small armored tube if it takes a hit it will stop the shell from coming through but the concussion might not stop that from turning the bridge crew and the officers inside into jelly when the Pearl Harbor battleships California Tennessee and West Virginia were refitted with modern super structures they had their conning towers deleted instead of being a Class A of armor plate it was replaced with four or five inches of special treatment steel the debate for the succeeding Montana class battleships would come after the Iowas I went back and forth from under that have a calming power were just a small splinter protected to save weight Illinois in Kentucky probably would not have had their conning tower all their battleships around the world had already made this transition rule maybe in particular which was the first to adopt the modern Citadel style superstructure had already full lead in the armor conic travel and this did not affect negatively their battleships in combat during World War two although Prince of Wales in her fight with Bismarck had her bridge hit the bridge crew were killed the ship was still on from the bridge for the duration of that another thing the Navy didn't like about the superstructure was how much of the ship it took up wife why's this limited the arcs of fire for the anti-aircraft guns in the extreme late war era 1945 ish there's a room with an ethical King and Admiral Nimitz meant and wrote down on the back of a napkin at a restaurant a new design for the iowa-class battleships which would have includes I included talking the two funnels need to a single funnel moving the superstructure back slightly this would have improved the aar sapphire and it would have been in line with updates that were made to Baltimore and Cleveland class cruisers with their success in heavy and light cruisers built after the war having all the superstructure condensed and Trump together so if you looking at ships like the Fargo class which succeeded the Cleveland or Oregon City and Des Moines classes which succeeded the Baltimore's you see that this superstructure the other thing that the Navy was constantly updating and changing about the Iowa's was their mast configurations they were built with a pole for mast coming out of the forward superstructure and a single pole main mast coming out of the second fun on top of these a progressive number of radars and progressively larger radars were added so throughout the ship's career you see the pole masts being replaced by tripods or even dual pods or Quadra model masts that can hold bigger radar antennas had Illinois and Kentucky men built future battleships afterwards which were planned to have more electronics they would have undoubtedly had sturdier masts the Iowa's were made extremely full and narrowed to achieve their high speed of 33 knots they were designed to be the fastest battleships ever built and they were however with this high speed and this narrow bow it meant that there wasn't much buoyancy in the bow and it wasn't very wide because it's narrow and just have a bunch of air and therefore buoyancy it means that the bow of the ship would have gone into the waves significantly these ships were strictly went forward in heavy weather and at high speeds you see that's why they have an extreme shear on the bow where it angles up try and shed that water if that weight stays on the bow it's so narrow there is enough buoyancy to pop it back up so it's got to shed it after British battleships built around the same time had a completely flat deck forward so that they could fire their guns straight ahead the US Navy even though older battleships were designed like that intentionally decided this was better this year forward and retained that with the succeeding Montana class one thing they didn't like though is how narrow it's got there this limits the depth of the computer defense and it causes some weird wave formations as the hall gets wider around the turrets here the waves are coming down the long narrow brush and they push down by the wider Hall this makes it incredibly difficult when these ships are doing unrest whether they're taking one oil or more frequently when they're refueling the destroyers that are escalating now the destroyers don't have the same range as the battleships New Jersey can sail 15,000 nautical miles and can hold close to two and a half million gallons of fuel so these ships were frequently used to refuel the other ships around them there were even some designs to turn played our iowa-class battleships into refueling ships but the shape of the haul didn't really work with that and the refueling stations here were constantly being enlarged to pump fuel faster and being moved further and further aft where the hole gets straighter and the wave formations are less dangerous to the smaller ships refueling the thing that the Navy was constantly updating the iowa-class battleships was the anti-aircraft armament they absolutely loved the main guns the 16-inch guns and so much so that they were going to maintain that 16-inch 50 caliber gun in future battleship designs rather than switch over to an 18 inch gun which had been tested but for the smaller guns they were constantly trying to improve them the 5-inch 38 were easily the best full purpose gun of world war ii maybe of all time maybe like their range mount nine miles and look to replace them with the 5-inch 54 in future in future battles of construction such as the Montana's the Iowa's would have probably never had them replaced that even Illinois Kentucky built later would have probably anything discussed however the placement would have changed the Iowa's have their five not have five twin turrets on each side of the ship this means you can fire five to each broadside and to four enact American cruisers featuring a 5-inch gun at the bow and stern ends of the superstructure super firing over the turrets that meant that they had an extra barrel on each broadside for an extra gun mouth on his broadside and an extra one for a nap so Illinois Kentucky if they had have had the superstructure condense into a single funnel they would have probably also had the 5-inch guns some of them moved around the cruisers that got this modification and the Montana's also had all their 5-inch guns drop a story New Jersey's 5-inch guns are on the Oh wanna know to level because they sit on top of their own handling rooms this puts weight higher in the superstructure and since we're adding more and more electronics high in the superstructure these these medium post warships had the guns dropped two main deck no.1 level and had those handling rooms move inside the skin of the ship this protects them better and saves you on top weight the Iowas are saving a tremendous amount of weight if they delete the conning towers there's 100 tons right there and well the original for iowa-class battleships were partially riveted and partially welded because this was a new technology Illinois and Kentucky were going to be 100% welded Welding saves approximately ten percent weight so for a ship with a steel hull that's about 40,000 tons that's saving 4,000 tons of weight that's about the weight of 2 of the triple 16-inch turrets so these ships are getting a lot more reserve of buoyancy it's unclear what the Navy would have done with that they wouldn't necessarily have used it all four or more electronics that's weighing high up in the superstructure but it's not a tremendous amount of weight in total they may have added it for more fuel the Iowas have about 300 void spaces only about a third of that is used for fuel oil so the ship could have easily taken more fuel and increase its range and that gives it even more utility otherwise it's kind of unclear they do the Navy does increase the armor of later Iowa class ships Iowa and New Jersey trying to maintain the 45,000 tons of the London Naval Treaty escalator clause only had a little over 11 inches of armor plating on their Balkans on this Ora Wisconsin and Kentucky which had enough time between when the treaty expired when they were ordering the armor plates were able to increase that by a couple of inches and several hundred tons possibly Armour could have been strengthened elsewhere but that's a really long lead time item and Kentucky at least had her ball mostly completed to second deck at least now going back to be any aircraft guns the 20 millimeter gun was a great addition to the u.s. arsenal 1942 but the single barreled mounts didn't have enough stopping power length faster moving heavier armored aircraft came out and when kamikazes entered the scene so in the immediate post-war years you see them deleted during the war you see single mounts being replaced by twin mounts in theory this can be done on a one-for-one basis because you're saving weight in gun crew but in practice the twin mount isn't quite as effective it vibrates too much to be very accurate and the mount itself is heavier even if you're replacing the weight of sailors so you're seeing three single mounts being replaced by a twin map and you're not seeing all of the single mounts replaced also at the extreme end of the war the US Navy came up with a 20 millimeter weapon system called the thunderbolt this was designed for the PT boats up armor of gun them but some of the older battleships started getting experimental Thunderbolt mouths these are powertrain for barrel 20 millimeter mounts so you could replace an entire battery with a single thunderbolt and I think it's reasonable to assume that if we were to had continued if the atomic bombs hadn't worked and the invasion of Japan kind of happened operation downfall with the number of kamikazes that would have been attacking the fleet I think it's reasonable to expect that modern ships being built would have had to Thunderbolt and older ships would have been retrofitted well likewise the 40 millimeters were a great addition to the fleet but by the end of the war lack stopping power there were plans to rearm the amethyst battleships with 3-inch guns instead of 40 millimeter guns New Jersey was originally built with 16 quad mouths and the extra four were added during the war mizura in Wisconsin were built with those four from day one the plans that were drawn up showed the twenty quad 40 mounts being replaced by twelve twin three-inch mounts he's French mounts for automatic loaders like we're featured on des moines-class heavy cruisers in theory a single quad 40 could be replaced by a twin 3-inch mount in practice with all the associated equipment magazines and the fire-control radar guided fire control and power train systems for these mouths I was really to twin 3-inch mounts would replace three by 40 melts so 12 of those mounts for twenty four barrels total but with the radar fire control in their great stopping power and their high rate of fire they would have been able to put a similar amount of explosives in the air and there would have been BT views of veritably timed fuse unlike the quad 40s World War two so the only thing that maybe didn't like about the Iowas was both howling arrangements initially like older battleships the boats were going to be carried amidships between the funnels it would have been large cranes then the original plans for the Iowas showed this in practice this was never completed and the step-up structure which had three wide 40 mounts was placed between models instead has greatly increased the anti-aircraft battery interesting lis on new jersey the original boat mounting points can be seen inside of that structure so it wasn't just something that was planned and and deleted they actually built part of it before switching over to the 40 millimeter mouth because of this ships didn't carry many boats during World War two probably for the best American cruisers old model canal with boats and aircraft stored amidships when they were hit they tended to burn and do a lot of damage whew one of them would up the Iowas eventually had their boat scary Fanta spent that when the 16-inch guns were fired they had to be manhandled around with rolling Donnelly's one side of the ship to the other initially the aviation crane at the stern was being used to move these into the water all over media post-war aviation facilities were removed and the ship started operating helicopters the crane and the Creek Way had to be retained for a number of years to operate the boats and in the 1980s it was finally deleted the helipad could be expanded a boat boom behind this boat was added still not ideal maybe you've never really found a system they were happy with without a doubt the thing that the maybe hated most about ships where there's repeater defense I'm standing between the holding bulkhead and the armor format for her because the whole mirrors are much forward to get that high speed there is only enough room for a limited death of two-litre defense the US Navy probably had an investigator defense system in the world however deep relies on depth and width guy it was it was just seventeen and a half feet deep people Lord North Carolina class had a much bigger death as did the California Tennessee West Virginia when people rebuild after Pearl Harbor many of the modifications to the Isle class focused around this repeated offense because these ships have an internal belt that belt forms one of the five layers of defense because the belt is so rigid by design to staff shells it is also rigid my console torpedoes for Peter defense system wants to be able to absorb the explosion that not shattered because of how pretty the belt was a torpedo hit woman because it to shear open up a leak that would allow what are three another issue was the knuckles holding this in place with an ankle in the first floor iowa-class battleships Illinois and Kentucky had this turned into a 90 degree angle which would have given it as much as 20% more effectiveness against poor views many of the plans that looked at the other vest battleships included widening them some by his little six feet some my closer to 10 or 20 feet to add more depth to the torpedo defense this could have been a bolt-on upgrade to existing mile class ships again the Oliv objects Tennessee and West Virginia received this upgrade and got really deep repeated offenses by adding blisters to the outside of the hull those blisters are not entirely watertight and it would become on preservation love now but more importantly they would prevent the ships and going through the padlock now New Jersey Transit the padlock now ten different times during her life usually transiting from a home port to a war zone by adding the entire length of South America around that we create problems the ships could not transit and redeploy quickly enough especially since New Jersey was often the only one in commission earlier there were large numbers of bachelors from US Navy and some were just in and I'm on the Pacific and you know we were just transitioning all the other but you make these years to white and then there's stuff alone one goes with the other effectively they're limited to the facilities one coast where the other East Coast is gets through gloom or should building and repair facilities than the west coast and it really limits the ability of the chef's and also Manning with with decrease from the speed of the ships so at least one upgrades bishops a little bit cutting off before word something like sixty feet maybe just 40 feet or 20 feet out the back making it wider and adding six feet of width 30 feet to appear defense on each side this would have dropped the speed from 33 knots to 30 ones and restricting the ability to use to pack it out now what some of these plans were made there were also plans in place to increase the width of the pad so ships like mid lane and Montana with her because I had in mind that the canal could be white and these upgrades might've been with the same fall mine another upgrade that was proposed for the Iowa's was increasing the subdivision particular engineering spaces the Iowa's hadn't significantly upgraded subdivision Hoover the earlier classes of past panels but less than older standard type battleships and significantly less than the following classes like Montana or Midway so these plants look at adding additional diesel generators to create more emergency pepper remember they're adding more electronics to these shows and the Iowa's when we have to as it stands and it looks at dropping the boilers 11 and putting each boiler and engine and turbo generator set compartment so that it's flooded smaller proportion Alysha and so that I hit it was only going to knock out one boiler or one engine or 1 turbo generator what do you think about these plans to change the iowa-class battleships what you think about the Isles what would you change let us know in the comment section down below if you've liked the content we're producing check the description below for ways that you can support the museum youtube channel remember the like share and subscribe so that you get notifications when we put out new videos and keep in mind despite all these things I've said that the baby didn't like about the analysis I do really love the iowa-class battleships and these are probably the best battle fits ever built

Channel: Battleship New Jersey

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Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2020