Rex’s Hangar
Published 21 Sept 2022Today we’re taking a look at the remarkable Brodie Launch System. This device could be used on land or aboard ships, and it was designed to provide accessibility for light aircraft in extremely remote locations during WW2.
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March 15, 2023
An Aircraft Carrier Without A Deck? | The Remarkable Brodie Landing System
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March 13, 2023
1949: HMS Implacable‘s Last Voyage | BBC Television Newsreel | Retro Transport | BBC Archive
BBC Archive
Published 19 Nov 2022HMS Implacable, a 149 year-old ship of the line — which survived the Battle of Trafalgar — embarks on her final, solemn voyage.
The figurehead, deck and stern cabin of this captured French ship are to be kept at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, but her hulk is to be towed out from Portsmouth dockyard and scuttled.
Originally broadcast 5 December, 1949.
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March 3, 2023
African Opinion in the War, Minor Axis Partners, and Foreign Ships in the British Navy – OOTF 30
World War Two
Published 2 Mar 2023How did the British manage their multinational Merchant Navy who are the non-American operators of Liberty ships? How did Kenyans, South Africans, and others from Britain’s Sub-Saharan empire view the war? And what is going on in Slovakia and Hungary right now? Find out in this episode of Out of the Foxholes.
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February 24, 2023
War of 1812 – Freshwater Edition
Drachinifel
Published 4 Sept 2019Today we take a look at the War of 1812 as it progressed on the Great Lakes.
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February 19, 2023
Flower-Class Corvettes – WW2 Atlantic Defender
Matsimus
Published 29 Jun 2020The Flower-class corvette (also referred to as the Gladiolus class after the lead ship) was a British class of 294 corvettes used during World War II, specifically with the Allied navies as anti-submarine convoy escorts during the Battle of the Atlantic. Royal Navy ships of this class were named after flowers, hence the name of the class.
The majority served during World War II with the Royal Navy (RN) and Royal Canadian Navy (RCN). Several ships built largely in Canada were transferred from the RN to the United States Navy (USN) under the lend-lease programme, seeing service in both navies. Some corvettes transferred to the USN were manned by the US Coast Guard. The vessels serving with the US Navy were known as Temptress and Action-class patrol gunboats. Other Flower-class corvettes served with the Free French Naval Forces, the Royal Netherlands Navy, the Royal Norwegian Navy, the Royal Indian Navy, the Royal Hellenic Navy, the Royal New Zealand Navy, the Royal Yugoslav Navy, and, immediately post-war, the South African Navy.
After World War II many surplus Flower-class vessels saw worldwide use in other navies, as well as civilian use. HMCS Sackville is the only member of the class to be preserved as a museum ship. Flower Class corvettes were originally intended for coastal escort and mine clearing work. Derived from a whaler design, they were simple, highly seaworthy vessels that could be constructed in secondary yards. The dire lack of ocean escorts early in the war necessitated their being used to screen convoys traversing the North Atlantic between Nova Scotia and the UK. This was a role for which they were ill-designed, and their crews suffered accordingly. The Flowers were wet, highly cramped and impossibly lively. Many sailors could not adjust to the exhausting routine. Compounding the misery was the inexperience of the crews, most of whom had never been to sea. But any escort was better than none at all, so the yards continued to turn out corvettes. 120 were built in Canadian yards, and slightly more in the UK.
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February 17, 2023
America’s War on Japanese Shipping – WW2 Special Documentary
World War Two
Published 15 Feb 2023We’ve covered in great depth the Battle of the Atlantic and the war by and against German U-Boats, but what about the other side of the world? Why has the war on Japanese shipping been so much quieter? There are several very specific reasons for that, which we look at today.
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February 10, 2023
When “Taffy 3” kicked the ass of the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy
Chris Bray isn’t a milblogger, but I thought his summary of the Battle of Leyte Gulf was pretty darned good:
In October of 1944, US troops landing on Leyte Island in the Philippines were menaced from the sea by an enormous Japanese naval fleet that was divided into three separate attack forces.
Detail of the West Point Military Atlas: World War II: Asia-Pacific Invasion of Leyte, October 1944 map.
https://www.westpoint.edu/sites/default/files/inline-images/academics/academic_departments/history/WWII%20Asia/ww2%2520asia%2520map%252029.jpgSummarizing aggressively, the American ground forces were protected against an attack from the sea by the US Navy’s Third Fleet, commanded by Bull Halsey. But Halsey suddenly wasn’t there anymore, taking the bait of a decoy attack force [of de-planed Japanese carriers] and chasing it out into the sea. The Third Fleet’s departure uncovered Leyte Gulf, and the largest of the Japanese attack forces sailed in. Disaster became likely.
There were two American naval task forces in the path of the Japanese attack force, Taffy 2 and Taffy 3, but neither were meant for serious naval combat. They were supporting forces, designed to help the troops on the ground: a few escort carriers, a few lightly armed destroyer escorts, a very few destroyers. Aircraft on the American escort carriers were armed with 100-pound bombs to provide close air support to the infantry. The Japanese First Task Force had four battleships, eight cruisers, and eleven destroyers. One of the Japanese battleships was the Yamato, armed with 18-inch guns. The Japanese attack force sailed directly into contact with Taffy 3, which didn’t realize they were about to face the main Japanese attack force until they were already within range of its guns.
Imperial Japanese Navy ships at anchor in Brunei, Borneo shortly before the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Left to right, Musashi, Yamato, an unidentified cruiser, and Nagato.
Photo by Kazutoshi Hando from the US Naval History and Heritage Command collection.The commander of Taffy 3, Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague, saw immediately that his task force couldn’t survive the engagement, so he tried to salvage what he could: He ordered his destroyers and destroyer escorts to attack, to cover the hoped-for withdrawal of the escort carriers. The resulting battle is one of the best-known in naval history — and one of the least plausible, because Taffy 3 kicked the everloving shit out of that much larger Japanese attack force, compelling the Japanese to withdraw in the panicked belief that they’d sailed into the bulk of Halsey’s Third Fleet.
If you haven’t read [the late] James Hornfischer’s magnificent book about the battle, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, you should read it. The details are far beyond anything that could be summarized in a single short piece. But the battle was won by a remarkable combination of disciplined obedience, independent audacity, and a paradoxically disciplined disobedience — by men aggressively refusing to obey orders that threatened their cause.
The Fletcher-class destroyer USS Johnston (DD-557), sunk in the Battle off Samar, 25 October, 1944.
US Navy photo with enhancement work by Wild Surmise via Wikimedia Commons.The battle began with one of the US Navy’s most famous moments. Before Sprague had time to order anyone to do anything, the captain of the Johnston, one of Taffy 3’s few destroyers, turned to attack the Japanese fleet. We have confused and contradictory accounts of the orders given by Cmdr. Ernest Evans, because the man who gave them, and most of the men who heard them, died soon afterward, but he is supposed to have said something like this:
1.) We’re under the guns of a much larger Japanese fleet.
2.) Survival is not to be expected.
3.) Hard left rudder, all ahead flank.
We’re all going to die; attack. The Johnston sank, and Evans died, but his first torpedo run blew the bow off a Japanese cruiser — setting the tone of the fight.
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Water-Cooled .50s: The US Navy Mk22 Pedestal Mount
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Oct 2022In 1942, the US Navy adopted the Mk22 Pedestal mount, which fitted a pair of water-cooled Browning M2 machine guns (one left-hand feed and one right-hand). It was used for antiaircraft use primarily, and was also adopted by the Army as the M46 in 1943. The mount was an update to the previous single-gun MK21.
The gunner was protected by a 3/8″ (9.5mm) hardened steel shield, and the mount could rotate a full 360 degrees, with elevation from -10 degrees to 80 degrees. They were produced by the Heintz Manufacturing company (no relation to the Heinz company that makes ketchup) of Pittsburgh from 1942 until 1945.
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January 2, 2023
An in-depth look at the Type 26 frigate design
Navy Lookout
Published 31 Dec 2022The Type 26 frigates being built for the Royal Navy [and Royal Canadian and Royal Australian navies] are specialist submarine hunters but with a range of other capabilities. This video provides a primer on the overall warship design, its weapons, sensors and decoys.
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December 14, 2022
The Polish Armed Forces in Exile
World War Two
Published 13 Dec 2022The Polish state was the first to fall in this war, yet across the globe Polish soldiers are fighting on land, air, and sea as part of the United Nations alliance. The story of the tens of thousands of men and women fighting for Polish liberation is equal parts hope and hardship as they battle the enemy and even sometimes their own allies.
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December 10, 2022
United States Empire – The Spanish-American War
The Great War
Published 9 Dec 2022The Spanish-American War (fought in Cuba and the Philippines) kickstarted US global ambitions and expanded their influence far beyond the borders of the United States. At the same time the war marked the endpoint of the decline of Spain as a global power.
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December 9, 2022
Canada’s “historic” shift toward the Indo-Pacific is … more marketing than strategy
In The Line, retired Canadian Lieutenant General Mike Day distills down all the airy phrases to see just what the Canadian government is actually going to do in the Indo-Pacific as opposed to merely talking about it:
“Red circle/oval roughly depicts the Indian Ocean region. Blue circle/oval covers the Pacific region. Green oval covers ASEAN. Yellow overlay covers the Indo Pacific.”
Map annotation by Eric Gaba via Wikimedia Commons.
A formal public-policy statement from the Government of Canada is a rare thing. It is even rarer when it is not just a speech but a published written document. The rarest of these is undoubtedly when such a document focuses on foreign policy. When Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly recently pitched her “once-in-a-generation shift” toward the Indo-Pacific, much was made of why Canada was doing it and what it would achieve. No fewer than four cabinet ministers took part in the announcement. Canada will, they announced, step up naval patrols of the region, continue to expand trade with China while also tightening our protections of intellectual property and ownership rules for strategic industries, and use “Team Canada” trade missions to boost commercial links with other growing regional economic powers, including India. We seek also to expand our intelligence and cybersecurity links with allies and partners in the region.
Now that the dust on the rhetoric has settled, closer examination reveals that this might simply be an exercise of branding separate activities into a marketing-friendly bundle, as opposed to a coherent plan focused on achieving specific outcomes.
In examining the document two approaches are equally useful in assessing value: whether the content has some substance and whether the policy framework is sufficiently robust to hang various activities and plans on its body.
Three hints are provided as to why the new plan might not be the cornerstone of Canada’s foreign policy that it portends to be. Firstly, operating in the “National Interest”, a phrase used six separate times over the 26 pages, is given neither form nor function and lacks any definition. It is reminiscent of the Cheshire Cat talking to Alice asking her “where do you want to get to”. When Alice replies that “I don’t much care …” the Cheshire Cat wisely suggests that “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” With no definition of national interests pretty much anything can be hand waved as to being necessary and required, or not, for its achievement.
This leads in turn to the second hint that the plan might be more posturing than substance. Lacking the single aimpoint of operating in the national interest, the “objectives” supposedly fill that gap by providing a set of specific achievements which in combination would be a sufficiently clear aimpoint. But normally objectives can, and should, be thought of as something specific and measurable, allowing plans to be developed to achieve them. “Save 100 dollars this month” or perhaps, in more relevant terms, “Increase our trade in the Indo-Pacific region by 100 per cent over the five years of this policy enactment.” Plans can then be developed to achieve those objectives. But reviewing those objectives reveals that they are themselves actions, not end-states. It appears that the policy is based on “doing, not achieving”. I am reminded of my sons many years ago. When asked if their rooms were clean, they would reply, “I’m cleaning it.” The process was enduring but we most certainly disagreed on the value of the activity as opposed to achieving a measurable result. Under this construct the government can claim that as long as Canada is doing stuff the policy should be considered a success.
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December 7, 2022
Pearl Harbor: Before and After December 7th
Geographics
Published 20 Sep 2022
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December 3, 2022
This Is What A British Sailor Ate In Nelson’s Royal Navy!
History Hit
Published 23 Oct 2021‘This Is What A British Sailor Ate In Nelson’s Royal Navy!’
200 years ago, Britain’s Royal Navy was the most technologically advanced and supremely efficient force in the history of naval warfare.
But what was it like to live and work on board these ships? What did the men eat? How did the ships sail? What were the weapons they used?
In our latest documentary on History Hit TV, to commemorate the Battle of Trafalgar, Dan Snow explores what life would have been like for those whose served in the Nelson’s Navy.
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November 28, 2022
Near Peer: China (Understanding the Chinese Military)
Army University Press
Published 29 Jul 2022This film examines the Chinese military. Subject matter experts discuss Chinese history, current affairs, and military doctrine. Topics range from Mao, to the PLA, to current advances in military technologies. “Near Peer: China” is the first film in a four-part series exploring America’s global competitors.
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