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BattleMoose posted:I am going to UK/France soon. Part of my trip I certainly plan on going through the Normandy beaches and maybe spending a night in Caen and so forth. Have people here been through that area before? Can you tell me if there are anything specific I should go to/do? Even if its a little out of the way and worth it, very interested. Will also be in Paris. I'm just finishing my trip to Normandy for that purpose tommorrow, I'll let you know when im sober and back home Friday.
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Aug 3, 2016 22:24
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PittTheElder posted:Someone from the forces once told me that a 25mm round from a Bushmaster will kill someone from overpressure or some poo poo on a near miss, which doesn't seem right. Anyone c/d? That gentleman is talking crap, it's really really hard to create enough overpressure to do real damage outside of an enclosed space without using a large bomb. People don't die from grenade overpressure in open spaces but from fragmentation, and the explosive force of those is much more than the effect of a cannon round passing by, otherwise you'd see more ground effect along their flight path. Hell you don't see honest to God tank rounds doing much other than kicking up dust on a miss.
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Aug 5, 2016 07:14
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BattleMoose posted:I am going to UK/France soon. Part of my trip I certainly plan on going through the Normandy beaches and maybe spending a night in Caen and so forth. Have people here been through that area before? Can you tell me if there are anything specific I should go to/do? Even if its a little out of the way and worth it, very interested. Will also be in Paris. Im just gonna run through the places i went. Best place to go is the Caen Memorial, its slightly misleadingly named because its a big museum as opposed to a memorial with a great section on Vichy France which i didnt know much about till wandering round beyond Petain is a little bit of a fascist, they also have a full scale typhoon hung in the lobby. The audio guide is really good so I'd advise getting it, if you are in Cane then the tram system is both good and cheap. The way they have organised it is that its a load of small museums, other than that one, each one being a couple hours to wander through at a comfortable pace, i would not try to do large amounts of it without renting a car because getting around the Normandy countryside just does not work without that or an organised bus tour, if you have a particular interest in an area of operations there is probably a small museum on the site of it dedicated to that particular part of the campaign which is nice. Pegasus bridge i really enoyed but it is purely about the British gliderborne operations on D-Day, they have a full scale reproduction of one of the gliders along with some cool stuff like a centaur tank and a 17 and a 25 pounder in the grounds of the place. The film they have in the center is pretty cool. No. 4 Commando Museum at Ouistreham is small but great to look around. The Overlord museum at Omaha is one of the larger ones, and it is also right next to the largest american cemetary if you want to visit both, its more of an artifacts museum than an explanation museum which isnt so much my thing, but theres lots of interesting period stuff in there. One thing that i particularly liked, though i think its because i have a particular interest in it, is at Douvre there is a survivng German Wurzberg radar and a neat little museum about its history. I didnt get a chance to look at the Mount-Ormel memorial and the attached Falaise pocket museum but i hear its got some good stuff from a friend of mine.
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Aug 5, 2016 13:30
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SeanBeansShako posted:At last, a UK version of Shaving Private Ryan! Surely you mean Shaving Ryan's privates?
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Aug 5, 2016 13:33
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Jobbo_Fett posted:The problem is that the train of thought that led to Cruiser Tanks came to the conclusion that they had to sacrifice firepower and defense to achieve speed. Im glad to know that Jackie Fisher still found work after his retirement from the RN.
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Aug 12, 2016 12:02
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This is going to be a series of effort posts about mines and mine warfare. I’m going to try to cover the technical development of mines and their biggest uses; so the War of Independence, the US Civil war, Crimean War, Russo-Japanese war, the First World War, the Second World War, Korean War, Vietnam War and the Iran-Iraq War. Mines specifically are very interesting because they were the single most effective weapon against both military and civilian ships in WW1, and in WW2 was the US’s greatest weapon against the Japanese commercial fleet, and arguably had the greatest effect on the Russo-Japanese war at sea, and its not something that I see a whole lot written about despite its incredible impact on the wars mentioned. The origins of the Sea Mine and its early development. The first mines in War of Independence. The first thing we would recognise as a mine today was created by an American student called David Bushnell during the War of Independence in 1777, he was studying the effects of underwater explosions at the time. One of the reasons that mines are so effective is that unlike air water is an incompressible medium, in an explosion in air the gas will compress and absorb part the explosive force which will have an exponential effect as the explosive effect expands, whereas in water there is no such effect so much more of the explosive force is retained to impact the ship. This is in addition to the fact that ships didn't really start having what we would regard as good underwater protection until nearly WW1, and even then Bushnell’s mine was what was called a drift mine, which as the name neatly describes he set upriver and then let drift down with the current onto the anchored British ships. Bushnell referred to his mines as “Torpedo”, this being before the time that mines and torpedoes were differentiated. The design of his mine was a large keg of gunpowder underwater suspended from a large float, it had a rudimentary contact fuse which was a flintlock mechanism that on contact with an enemy ship would trigger and blow up the keg.  He released the mines on Christmas day but due to the very icy state of the Delaware they took over a week to actually reach the anchorage, and indeed due to the ice the British had brought their ships in closer to the shore so the mines sailed merrily down the centre of the river and missed. The only casualties that were inflicted were of a small boat that was sent out to investigate what they were, they messed with it and triggered the mine and blew themselves up, this alerted the RN to what was going on, leading to what was called The Battle Of The Kegs, where the moored British ships volleyed into the river to sink the kegs. Bushnells mines were very crude things and drifting mines in general wouldn’t see much effective use throughout history, they were unreliable weapons in general and were going to be regulated by the Hague convention in 1907 because of the danger to shipping, but they were the first real identifiable use of mines in sea warfare. Fulton and Colt’s development of the mine. Robert Fulton was the next big name to take a crack at building mines, he was active from 1797 to around 1815, he was an American who sailed to Britain with a recommendation from Benjamin Franklin to become a painter, however he gave up painting after a few years to focus on being an inventor and marine engineer, he worked on the canal network and early concepts of submarines. He proposed to the RN the concept of a mine, but the Navy weren’t that keen on the idea, in general the British were not interested in mine warfare for a long time because they thought it foolish to encourage this mode of sea warfare which was at its most effective against the person with command of the seas, the concept of an offensive minefield, or indeed a minefield at all didn’t really exist so the idea of a weapon that would inhibit clear navigation of the seas for understandable reasons did not appeal to the RN at all, given that the British thought at the time was to sweep the seas of enemy shipping, so the only shipping that would hit a mine would be neutral or friendly. Undeterred Fulton went over to France, who were a lot more interested in the idea of using mines to deprive Britain of control of the sea, this was during the Napoleonic era where the naval question was of huge import, this was just before Britain declared war on France in 1803 where tensions were running quite high, the French gave him a sloop which he proved the concept by blowing it to bits with a 20 pound mine. While working in France he also built the Nautilus, which was the first practical submarine, in early 1803 the French declined to fund him anymore and just in time the British offered him a salaried position to develop mines there and so he left the continent just before the British-French portion of the Napoleonic wars took off. It is interesting to think what would have happened had Fulton remained in France, I don’t think that mines were really a practical weapon for the French to use because they were still working on Drift mines which were more suited to attacking ships at anchor and the French were blockaded in their ports so they would have had issues actually getting to a suitable point to launch. Attempts were made to attack the anchored French fleet at Boulogne with clockwork fused mines with a 5 or 10 minute fuse, this was defeated because the small boats used were fired on and released the mines too early. A second attempt was made with a bolo type arrangement, where there were two explosive charges at either end of a long cable that floated down, the cable would catch and bring the charges into contact with the ship which would then explode.  The cable design seems to be purely to increase the probability of actually hitting with a drift mine and it’s quite an interesting idea, and a successful hit was scored on a French frigate with this design, however it failed to cause any significant damage, why that is was debated at the time with the RN feeling that it was because underwater explosions were not as effective as they had been promised, Fulton because the mine was not properly submerged, Fulton’s is the more convincing explanation in hindsight because we know that underwater explosions are effective. Further experiments took place where Fulton blew a brig in two in a RN sponsored test which alarmed them quite a lot, it was also one of the first recorded incidents of breaking a ships back, the explosion beneath the ship destroying the main longitudinal strength spars and causing it to snap in two; but shortly after this Trafalgar happened and the RN decided they had no further use for Fulton’s experiments so packed him off back to America.  Fulton kept working with American government funding and tried many other methods, during these experiments we see the first use of anti mine/torpedo net as a defence mechanism. He tried harpoons and developments of his bolo idea from the attack on Boulogne but most interestingly he created the first incarnation of what most people would recognise as a mine, a moored mine. He created a mine that floated just below the surface of the water anchored to the sea bed, which a ship would sail into, trip the contact detonator and blow up, but given the unreliability of his other experiments the US government declined to fund him. Fulton worked right up until his death in 1815 attempting to develop his ideas and attempted to persuade the US government to use them in the war of 1812, but nothing came of it. Sam Colt and the electric mine. Sam Colt of revolver fame started experimenting with mines in 1842 and the technique he developed would last in one capacity or another well into WW1, rather than relying on contact detonation he started to investigate remote detonation, where moored mines are left to defend a harbour and a watchman on the shore waits till an enemy ship is over it then triggers it, he successfully blew up a ship 5 miles off shore but as with Fulton the government declined to fund it further and he created a minor kerfuffle by creating an artificial sandbar with the wreck from his experiment that proved a hazard to navigation for the next 20 years which rendered him none too popular with the people that had to use the sea. The concept he developed would be used quite a lot in the defence of harbors but it was never too effective, largely because harbor attack in that form fell out of favour quite quickly, ironically in part because the same effect could be achieved with less risk by the use of another type of mine, plus the ever increasing range of naval guns meant that attacks would take place from longer range where it would be a lot more effective to fight them from land based weapon emplacements, long underwater cables neccesary to have a minefield out that far come with their own set of problems and large expense and upkeep. These early mines were largely very crude devices and were not that popular or well-funded in their development, they started as something of a weapon of desperation to attempt to break British control of the sea, at this stage they were used more like what I would consider torpedos and indeed were called such until the development of the motorised torpedo late in the 1800’s, the idea of a minefield as we would know it was developed during the US civil war and the Crimean war and hinged a lot on the development of a reliable detonating device, while Fulton’s moored mine was the first execution of the concept its detonation mechanism was not hugely reliable, it was basically a musket flash-pan and flint assembly, in the turbulence of the sea the powder spilled and it often failed to detonate, it would take the arrival of fulminate of mercury to really create a reliable enough detonation mechanism to work. Next time: The US Civil War, the Crimean war, the Russo-Japanese war and the Hague convention on ethical use of mines. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Aug 15, 2016 |
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Aug 15, 2016 15:42
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Mines from 1844 – 1907 The Russians and mines The Russians were early enthusiasts for the idea of the mine, they had home ports vulnerable to blockade and an intense rivalry with Great Britain, however during the Crimean was they made one key mistake which was that their mines were too small to have any effect, but the Russians were the first to successfully develop the idea of a chemical detonator (as opposed to a mechanical one) mechanical detonators were far less reliable than chemical or electrical ones and so would fall out of favour quickly in most quarters once the two new types were developed. A Prussian named Moritz-Herman Jacobi was employed by Nicholas I to develop his idea and what he came up with was a chemical detonator. A glass tube of sulphuric acid was laid at the top of the mine and when a ship contacted it it would deform the soft metal and shatter the glass, the acid would then run down onto a mixture of potassium chlorate and sugar creating an exothermic reaction which detonated the gunpowder. The Russians also used a competing design from Immanuel Nobel (The father of Alfred Nobel) which used a mechanical detonator. While British ships were never more than minorly damaged the Russians extensively laid mines around St. Petersburg to stop any naval interference and most critically covered the area with the naval defence guns of the city, this meant that the Royal Navy was kept at arms length and never managed to support the much feared push for the russian heartland through the city. The Russians would later repeat this effort in the First World War to great effect against the Germans. Most notably with this experience under their belts the war with the Ottomans in 1877 the Russians engaged in the first instance of offensive mining, which is where you lay mines aggressively outside enemy ports and in shipping lanes, they are typically harder to get results out of because they can be much more easily swept because they are in enemy territory so you only really have the initial suprise factor to sink a ship before your enemy takes steps to remove them, but the Russians successfully mined the Danube river, sinking a Turkish ironclad but most notably keeping the Turkish fleet penned up and ceding control of the seas to Russia and her allies. Unfortunately for Russia the Ottomans would learn from this and return the favour in 1914. The US Civil War and the contact mine. During the Civil war the mine was the single most effective weapon that the CSA had against the Federals, they sunk 27 Federal vessels using mines but only sunk 7 using gunfire, it is also interesting because we start to see the divergence between what we now think of as mines and what we think of as torpedoes, the spar torpedo was used extensively by the CSA alongside their most successful moored mine, the Singer mine. The Union side also used mines but because they had the stronger navy they had much less of a use for them and I dont believe achieved any notable success. The concept of offensive minefields had not yet really been explored, one of the big reasons for this is that the technology to lay a minefield quickly in water of unknown depth had not yet been developed (I will cover this later but it is the plummet and sinker system), so laying a minefield took a long time and knowledge of the current state of the area and so it was just impractical to lay a minefield outside the enemy harbour to blockade him in there. While the CSA used many mines similar to Bushnell and Fultons drift type mines they never had any great effect, notably during the defence of Charleston whenever the Union navy was out they would set off drifting keg mines which did very little, they used them throughout the war most notably in the mouth of the Savanah river where they attempted to mirror Bushnell’s first experiment by drifting mines down the river to attack the fleet at anchor, but the admiral of that fleet stationed a line of small boats which sunk all the incoming mines with musket fire, the fear of the moored mine types did stop the Union navy from getting in close to Charleston harbour and so defeated a Union navy attempt to silence Fort Sumter, (at the time of that attack the CSA had few mines and were unlikely to do anything with them). Ultimately in a large part due to the fear of mines at the start and the presence of lots of mines later on the navy never succeeded in having a major effect on retaking Charleston and it was left to General Sherman and the army to do so.  One interesting type of mine we see in this war and not really in any other is the Frame Mine, it was essentially an array of spar torpedoes dug into the bottom of the harbour with the explosive charge on a long bar at an angle sticking up. They were only used in shallow areas and were next to impossible to force through, that reason however is the reason I think that we don’t see them again, combat in the shallow waters and rivers of the American coast was a somewhat unique circumstance that didn’t really repeat itself in other wars, I can only really think of the various conflicts in china that would present a similar opportunity in similar waters and the Chinese to my knowledge did not employ similar tactics.  The most useful CSA mine of the period however was the Singer Mine. The Singer Mine The Singer Mine was the most successful confederate mine, its basic operation was that it was anchored at a set depth and had a 60 pound charge of black powder, it had a heavy cap on the top of it that when a ship contacted it would be knocked off, this released a spring which dropped a hammer onto the fulminate charge which ignited the gunpowder, It was a good mine design given the technical limitations of the period, it had one major flaw however which was that because it was not fully watertight in the firing mechanism saltwater would enter the area where the spring was which would corrode the spring and render the mine useless. This is particularly relevant because it was one of the larger contributing factors that saved Admiral Farragut in his attack on Mobile bay.  drat the torpedoes, full speed ahead. The battle of Mobile bay was part of the Federal assault on the city of Mobile which was the last major port that the CSA controlled on the Gulf of Mexico near the Mississippi river. The city was defended by a field or around 90 mines, one of the larger fields laid during the civil war, Farragut was attempting to get his ships past the coastal fortifications of Fort Gaines, Morgan and Powell in order to sink the Confederate ships in the bay. His initial plan was to use the clear channel which was marked for the use of blockade runners using his ironclads to shield the wooden ships from the guns of the fort that overlooked that channel, the monitor Tecumseh was part of a squadron commanded by Captain Craven who deviated from that channel to engage the CSS Tennessee and struck a mine and she sank very quickly, believing that the mines had been submerged too long Farragut kept his nerve and moved his ship up to the front of the formation to raise the faltering morale of his ships and pressed on through to attack the CSA ships on the other side, investigation after the fact proved that he was correct in his gamble, of the 90 mines in the original field 68 had sunk and 20 were inoperable, the one that struck the Tecumseh and one that detonated when clearing the minefield were the only ones that had not been made inoperable by corrosion or water. Ultimately the CSA fell short on two counts, the first being the unreliability over a long period of the singer mine, the second is that in leaving a marked clear channel they allowed the federal fleet to enter the bay unmolested, the ironclads could shield the wooden ships without running the risk of hitting a mine, what was demonstrated there was something that will be demonstrated a lot, if you want a static minefield to have any effect then you have to cover it with fire, like any obstacle, had the mines been across the entire bay then I don’t think that Farragut would have risked running it in the first place, and the two forts could have kept away the light draft ships that were used for minesweeping at that time. The CSA had proven that they were capable of laying minefields overnight in anticipation of attack and with the stopping of the blockade runners and imminent attack from the union fleet it seems strange that they did not do so, especially given that they made explicit plans to do so given their knowledge of the unreliability of the Singer mine.  That battle is the last time that ignoring a minefield went well for a naval commander, the increasing reliability of mines as time went on meant that future attempts to breeze past a minefield ended in disaster for the Russians at Port Arthur and for the British and French at the Dardanelles. Minesweeping operations. The US Civil war was, along with the Crimean war, the start of organised minesweeping efforts, the countermeasures against the keg mines were mentioned earlier but the civil war saw the first incarnation of two technologies that would be used extensively for dealing with moored mines, the Drag and the Rake. Dragging is the technique that you use if you want to get anything off the bottom of a river and while there are many variants of it they all share many similarities, two shallow draft boats move up the river or other body of water with a weighted cable between them, this runs along the bottom of the water and catches the mooring lines of the mines, these are then dragged behind the boat to a safe location where they can be sunk. The rake is the first incarnation of what will later be developed in WW1 as something called the Paravane, it’s an array of metal off the front of a boat that is designed to catch mines and either push them along or detonate them far enough away from the hull that no significant damage is done to the boat itself. I don’t know if one concept directly lead from the other but they both share a similar operating principle of sticking a thing out front of the boat to stop the mine hitting it. Minesweeping is an inherently very dangerous task and many of the ships used for it were destroyed or damaged by the mines they were meant to be clearing, though i will be going into minesweping techniques in more detail later, they didnt develop a whole lot beyond the very basic level here until the First World War. Technological Development of the mine after the Civil war. There were three major developments in mine technology between about 1865 and the next major use of mines in 1904, those were the Hertz horn, the automatic anchor and the replacing of gunpowder with guncotton. So far most of the mines have worked on some variant of essentially a firearm action, either flintlock or percussion cap, the first chemical detonator was developed by Jacobi but it wasn’t his design that was to eventually become the standard, that would be the Hertz Horn which is one of the two most enduring features of a mine. The Hertz Horn. The Hertz horn was developed after the Austro-German war of 1866, it is not named after Heinrich Hertz the physicist who was only 9 at the time but after Dr. Albert Hertz, the basic principle of the Hertz horn is that there is an incomplete electrical circuit that runs to the detonator at the base of the horn, the horn is made of a soft metal like lead with a glass tube which contains an electrolytic solution of potassium dichromate. When a ship hit the horn the horn would deform, break the tube, the electrolyte would flow down to the base of the horn and complete the electrical circuit thus triggering the mine. This development was especially good for mines because it was stable, immune to sea turbulence and allowed a completely sealed unit which meant that the contents would not be corroded, it also worked well for guncotton as an explosive which had different thermal characteristics to the gunpowder used for Jacobi’s design. The hertz horn would remain in use from its inception right up until the current day because of its reliability and simplicity.   Iranian mines captured in 1987 from the Iran Ajr showing the distinctive hertz horn shape. The Automatic Anchor. The automatic anchor was Britain’s first major contribution to mine warfare, it was developed at the Mine Warfare Establishment of HMS Vernon and what it did was to create the technology necessary to quickly and accurately lay mines at a predetermined depth without knowledge of the exact sea floor depth at which you were laying. The basic principle of operation involves 3 components, a plummet, an anchor and the mine itself. The plummet is set at the desired depth below the surface and the whole mine is rolled into the water, the plummet descends to the bottom of the sea, when it contacts the bottom of the sea it locks off the mooring cable at that length, then the anchor descends dragging the mine with it until it hits the bottom too, hence leaving the mine at the desired distance below the surface of the sea. What this development allowed was the creation of fast minelayers who were capable of laying minefields stealthily outside the enemy harbour to catch them as they sortie, as it wasn’t necessary to take depth soundings and manually set the mines which laid you open to being caught and the minefield swept before damage could be caused, the effectiveness of this strategy would start to be shown in the Russo-Japanese war.  Guncotton Guncotton is more commonly known as Nitrocellulose, it was discovered in the mid 1800’s and was very popularly used as a propellant in military applications, it would remain the most common explosive used in mines throughout the First World War, its greater energy release on combustion meant that naval mines could become powerful enough to sink the new generation of ships while remaining small and cheap thus avoiding the problems that the Russians had with their mines just not sinking the RN’s ships. The Russo-Japanese war. The Russo-Japanese war was the first time really that mining changed the course of a war, beforehand mines had only delayed the inevitable but in this war it caused a massive swing to one side and then the other in quite short order. Both Japan and Russia had investigated mines quite heavily with the Russians being the world leaders at the time. The death of Admiral Makaroff and the sinking of the Petropavlovsk The Russian navy was on the face of it very strong indeed coming up to the 1904 war, but it suffered from a crippling lack of leadership and heavy morale issues, the Pacific fleet was stationed at Port Arthur and was by itself the equal of the Japanese fleet on paper, hence the Japanese had been looking into ways to tilt the odds, they had attempted without success to attack using torpedo boats while the fleet was in harbour but the Russians remained safe. Makaroff was the famous exception to the fleet being largely poorly lead at a high level, he was dispatched to take command in order to make the Pacific Fleet actually do something, up until that point it had remained in harbour and not interfered with Japanese troop landings. He arrived and immediately made arrangements to sortie with his fleet of 5 Battleships and supporting craft, his plan was to draw the Japanese into range of the coastal guns. What happened next is somewhat incomprehensible, the Russians had seen the Japanese lay a minefield but Makaroff disregarded it, so when the Japanese fleet responded he retired close to the shore and his flagship, the Petropavlovsk, hit a mine, sinking in minutes taking the Admiral and most of the crew with her, a second battleship the Pobeida also hit a mine but was able to be towed to safety, with the death of Admiral Makaroff and the loss of two battleships (effectively) the Russian Pacific fleet spent the rest of the war with its heavy ships at dock until they were sunk by the IJA with land based artillery, the Japanese effectively used an offensive minefield in this instance to grant themselves control of the sea, helped by the arrogance of Admiral Makaroff and the general poor state of the Russian navy as a whole, we do not know what Makaroff was thinking given his death but it seems that he gravely underestimated or disregarded the effectiveness of mines. Sinking of the Yashima and the Hatsuse. After this victory however the Japanese soon were on the receiving end, the Russian minelayers were unusually aggressively commanded, many of the lower rank officers of the Russian fleet were capable of cunning and aggressive action that their Admirals were not. A Russian minelayer observed the patrol pattern of the Japanese fleet and went out to lay mines in its path, the Japanese did not spot the minefield and sailed two of their battleships, the Yashima and Hatsuse into the minefield, they both struck one mine, then the Hatsuse struck another and sunk quickly, the Yashima sunk under tow shortly after. This cut the Japanese battleship force by a third in the space of about an hour and tipped the naval balance back in favour of the Russians, but they failed to take advantage of it and sat in port. The Japanese made efforts to sweep the minefields around Port Arthur and placed marker buoys around it, however the Russians snuck back out during the night and moved the marker buoys which lead to the Japanese losing two more light cruisers to minefields to what i can only imagine was uproarious laughter from the shore. Over the course of the war the Japanese lost 2 battleships, 2 cruisers and 11 destroyers and gunboats to Russian mines, whereas the Russians lost one battleship, one cruiser and four destroyers and gunboats, but the fear of mines allowed the numerically inferior Japanese navy to keep the Russian fleet bottled up and gave them free hand to support their land campaign until they took Port Arthur and sunk or took the Russian fleet. The Russians lost one of their most capable Admirals who was a man who was aggressive enough to take advantage of the loss of two Japanese battleships to wrest control of the sea back which would have seriously impacted Japanese capability to supply their troops and prosecute the war. The Hague convention of 1907. The Hague established a set of rules for mines, The US and Britain both went in with a disapproving attitude towards mine warfare in general, understandably given they were both essentially large naval powers who relied on the sea being open to run trade, both had far more to lose from mine warfare than they had to gain, while Britain entertained a fanciful notion much like they later did with submarines of banning it but they had to settle for a set of six main rules: 1: Any unanchored mine must become harmless after one hour 2: Anchored mines must be rendered safe if they break loose 3: No mines laid off enemy coasts with the intention of intercepting commercial traffic 4: Every precaution taken to ensure the safety of peaceful navigation 5: Belligerents remove mines at the end of conflict 6: Conversion of all existing mine stocks to match these requirements. The rules didn’t work terribly well for a number of reasons, in the First World War the Germans invoked the article which stated that the rules only apply if all belligerents are parties to the convention, (Russia was not). The third rule is almost impossible to prove intent for and in practice the fourth rule just meant that each power declared a blockade of the other, which while sticking to the letter of the rules didn’t really do a whole lot for the safety of neutral shipping. The only real limits on mine warfare were the first two, drift mines were fitted with soluble plugs which would dissolve and flood the casing after a certain time delay to render them harmless, but the day of the drift mine was pretty much over at this point. No power really made more than a token effort to enforce the second, there were efforts to put long delay timers that would sink mines after a certain period of time but as total war started this very quickly became much less of a relevant feature, the North sea was an excellent area for mining due to its opacity and relative shallowness and in the First World War the British and the Germans both made extensive use of mines, and for the first time we will see naval mines being used to attempt to interdict commercial shipping and to defeat the U-Boat threat. Next time: The First World War.
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Aug 16, 2016 12:52
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Mine warfare 1907-1918 Pretty much all of this will deal with the RN and the Kriegsmarine as the major naval participants in mining with guest appearances from the USN and the Ottoman Navy, there was a significant Russian mining effort in the Baltic Sea but unfortunately I don’t know a whole lot about it. Calculation of the threat of a minefield. The calculation of roughly how effective a minefield will be is a simple set of calculations though it differs for surface ships and submarines travelling submerged, this is why in an integrated submarine defence system it was usual to employ nets and mines to prevent a submarine penetrating a harbour.  The calculation I’m going to go through is for submarines but the same calculation works for surface ships if you just consider it as a 2D plane so you ignore the vertical components, the calculation assumes that a row of mines is made up of oblongs that contain one mine that covers a certain area. (Diameter of the Sub * (Area of Detonation of the mine / Total area assigned to that mine)) ^ Number of rows in the minefield. So essentially the size of the sub multiplied by the percentage of area covered by a mine, to take Northern Barrage as an example (I’ll cover what it was in more detail later but it was a large mine barrage laid from the Orkneys to Norway to stop U-Boats reaching the Atlantic). In this minefield the mines were laid 30 per mile with 14 rows at varying depth to catch submerged U-Boats, this meant each mine covered an area of 200 foot in breadth and 300 foot in depth, the mines used in this field were of a contact antenna type, where a long wire stretches out to a float and if a metal hull touches it a current is induced and it detonates the mine, so the threat height of the mine is the length of the wire which was 100ft, assuming a diameter of 25 feet of the submarine the calculation becomes: (25*(100/200*300))^14 = 0.55 or 55%, this means that the chance of a submarine passing safely through the Northern Barrage is 55%, but its probability of making it out and back is only 30%. (Ignoring dud rates). This serves to illustrate how high the casualties a well-placed minefield can have on a vessel trying to pass through it. Mines in the lead up to the First World War I think that the RN in general gets a bit more flak than it deserves for being resistant to change, some of it is earned but a lot of actions they took they took for good reasons at the time, but mine warfare was an area where they really did lag behind. The RN mine establishment at HMS Vernon was very good at their job but they had trouble getting funding or approval for their work, the argument went that because Britain was the dominant sea power it would be mad to do anything to restrict the passage of sea traffic as it could effectively dictate that via the power of its surface fleet. In 1903 the RN decided to stop mining altogether, this decision lasted about two years before the impact of mines in the Russo-Japanese war made it obvious that mines were here to stay. The RN broadly had four choices of detonating system to choose from, a mechanical detonator similar to the Singer mine, a pendulum based mine which when hit the pendulum moves relative to the mine casing and triggers the detonation, a mercury based mine where a mercury bead inside a tube that moves with the mine and if it moves sufficiently completes a circuit which detonates the mine and finally the Hertz horn type electrochemical detonator. They rejected pendulum and mercury on the basis that in the rough seas that they would be laid that they would be subject to accidental detonation, which is reasonable. They rejected the Hertz horn officially because they wanted to avoid electrical systems at sea if at all possible and were afraid that the detonation of another mine in the field would cause the glass to crack and setting off the mine in a chain reaction called sympathetic detonation, what I suspect was the actual reason is that a Hertz horn detonated mine was two to five times the price of a mechanical detonator. Going into the first world war the British developed what they called the Naval Spherical Mine, it was a mechanical mine where contact with the firing arm released the spring loaded striker which detonated the explosive charge. In practice however this was an unreliable system that often failed to detonate when struck and really hurt British mining efforts for a long time until they refined their design, the other main design was the Elia mine, which was originally a hertz horn design purchased from Italy but was modified to a mechanical type to Royal Navy specification and suffered the same problems as the Spherical mine. The Russians would help out by shipping a boat full of the Carbonit design early in the war, Carbonit had sold their weapons commercially before the outbreak of war so despite being based in Germany their designs got around a fair bit, being employed by Germany, Austro-Hungary, Turkey, Russia and Britain.  This is contrasted with the Kriegsmarine who saw the Russo Japanese war and immediately took the lesson to heart and stockpiled a supply of effective modern Hertz horn operated mines before the outbreak of WW1, the North Sea and the British Cost are particularly suitable for mining and they rightly saw that Britain was uniquely vulnerable to attacks on its trade and fleet, the Germans would begin their first mine sortie the first night of the war using their very competently designed Carbonit mine.  Mines in the North Sea.  USN and RN minefields in hatched colors, german minefields in black. 1914 German efforts. I mentioned that the Germans put to sea early, they sent out a converted mail steamer on the 2nd August 1914, (2 days before Britain declared war) which they had repainted to look like a Great Eastern Railways steamer, it carried 180 Carbonit mines, they were spotted on the 4th by a fisherman throwing things over the side inside a major shipping lane off the coast of Southwold and were intercepted by the light cruiser Amphion and sunk, the Captain of the Amphion placed the rescued Germans in the prow so that in his words “If we go on one of your mines you go first”, and it attempted to make its way back to Harwich. During this trip the Amphion nearly opened fire on another ship painted in the Great Eastern Railways colours who was flying a German ensign but they got the message just in time that it was transporting the German Ambassador back home. Unfortunately for the Amphion it struck a pair of mines laid by the German ship it had sunk and sunk quickly with the loss of 130 Sailors and 27 German prisoners. The Germans made concerted efforts to mine the north sea using fast minelayers and caused significant damage to civilian shipping and the royal navy, the most prolific minelayer being the light cruiser Kolberg that accompanied Germanies battlecruiser raids on the East Anglian coast, it was at this point that the Royal Naval Minesweeper Reserve started to be heavily employed, I will cover them later on in a dedicated section about minesweeping but they were civilian seamen, usually but not always fishermen who were trained by the Royal Navy for times of war and were a very ballsy and competent group of men. The RN decided that it was pointless to sweep the German minefields in their entirety, and instead adopted a system of shipping lanes, where they would sweep regularly to keep it clear and leave the other mines in place marked by buoys, it was a good decision at the time because once a minefield is laid it can serve as a British defensive minefield as much as a German offensive one and to sweep mines other than ones that you absolutely have too invites unnecessary casualties.  It was towards the end of 1914 that three of the great pieces of luck that the British had took place, a minelaying set of four German destroyers was intercepted and sunk off the East Anglian coast, and soon after a fishing trawler was operating in that area and found a bag in its nets, the skipper took it ashore and gave it to the RN who recognised it as the code books for German diplomatic and Inter service communication, the German light cruiser Magdeburg ran aground off Estonia and was captured intact by a pair of Russian cruisers who retrieved the German naval codes for fleet communications and finally the merchant codes were captured from a German liner off Australia, these three finds allowed the RN to anticipate German minelaying and direct sweepers to keep the safe channels open for merchant shipping, these channels were maintained very well throughout the war. Until late 1914 the Admiralty attempted to keep to the Hague convention, they laid defensive minefields around their own ports and made the first attempt to mine the Dover strait to stop interference with cross channel traffic, but in November on the grounds that the Germans had been laying unrestricted minefields they announced that the whole of the North Sea was subject to British mining, the Admiralty advised ships to approach via the Dover strait and kept this policy throughout the war. The RN, lacking fast minelayers requisitioned several fast merchant ships to conduct mine raids into the Heligoland Bight, however at this early stage there were too few ships which were too slow to do this safely and their efforts were largely for nought due to the already covered poor design of the Naval Spherical Mine and the inadequacies of the ships used. 1915 The Flower class sloop was ordered in 1914 when it became obvious that the RN had very poor fleet minesweeping capability, they were designed with triple spacing at the bow and to be as simple as possible with single screw propulsion and coal burning engines, they had a speed of 17 knots and a build time of around 20 weeks, their hull design gave them excellent survivability to mine strikes and served very well in their job as minesweeper, they would later be adapted to serve as ASW ships. It was also during 1915 that the RN created the Racecourse type of minesweeper which is interesting to note because it is a paddle steamer. In 1914 the Admiralty requisitioned a number of paddle steamers used to carry tourists around the British coast and crewed them with the Royal Naval Minesweeping Reserve, In the open sea the RNMR used fishing trawlers but given their deep draught they were not suitable for operations close to the coast so the paddle steamers were pressed into service, these boats were excellent at their job with shallow draught and good manueverability and were so successful that the RN ordered the Racecourse type built, the ships were so well built that they survived mine strikes much better than many RN service vessels, being able to be towed into port and repaired.  Peacetime steamer "Mavis"  Wartime Racecourse Steamer "Banbury" 1915 is very notable however for the winding down of the German surface minelayers and the emergence of the U-Boat minelayer. The first sign of this new danger was in July of 1915, a British coastal vessel the Cottingham was off Yarmouth when it sighted a submarine and then proceeded to run it down and sink it by ramming, the next day the Admiralty salvaged it and discovered it was a new type of U-boat, the UC.I, a cheap slow and small submarine only being around 160 tons and 110 feet long they could go around 6 knots surfaced, but they carried 12 mines in six vertical tubes, they were conceived in 1914 and were very quickly replaced by the UC.II as pictured below. The UC.II was probably the most successful naval weapon of the war, they were a 500 ton submarine that carried 18 mines and were credited with 1800 allied and neutral ship sinking’s throughout the war.  Upper image is the UC.II, lower the UC.III  The mine they carried is interesting, they dropped out the bottom of the sub and then a soluble plug dissolved to release the mine to float up to its set depth, in practice this was an imperfect arrangement as there are some cases of submarines lost by their own mines deploying underneath them, the Germans were to eventually solve this with the UE.II class submarine who deployed out the back and were designed to be oceangoing with a torpedo armament in addition to the mines but that did not come into service until the end of 1917, it is also interesting that the UE3 caused the only USN battleship casualty of the war, the USS Minnesota, a pre-dreadnought struck a mine off the eastern seaboard in 1918, she didn’t sink but was out of service for the rest of the war. 1915 also marked the time that the RN got serious about designing a good mine, they captured one of the new German models which got stuck in the sands off the coast which was disarmed and recovered, its features were incorporated into a new line of RN mines, the H.II class pictured below. They also started employing their new E class submarine as a minelayer and laid design of a new class of fast minelayers to serve as Destroyer Leaders, the Abidiel class. 1916 A large part of the fencing between the German High Seas Fleet and the Home Fleet were attempts to draw each other onto minefields mainly by using battlecruiser forces, but Jellicoe and Scheer both exercised more sense than Makaroff and stayed clear of each others traps, the Home fleet was accompanied by Paravane equipped fast minesweepers which I will cover in the minesweeping section which served excellently in keeping it safe. It was during this fencing however that two major casualties happened, first was the German battlecruiser Seydlitz, one of the HSF’s most modern struck a Spherical mine and was put out of action for four months, the excellent subdivision and design of the German ships stopped her sinking entirely. The other was the sinking of the cruiser Hampshire who was carrying Lord Kitchener at this time, this was just after Jutland and so the germans had laid several offensive minefields which the RN had not yet found and swept so despite urging from Jellicoe Kitchener insisted on travelling to Russia on a diplomatic mission, the Hampshire strayed out of the normal lanes and her escorting destroyers were unable to keep up in the heavy seas so were sent home and struck a U-Boat laid mine sinking with all hands. Jutland itself was an interesting use of tactical minelaying, the RN had embraced the fast minelayer and had built a new class of destroyers capable of 34 Knots armed with a quartet of 4 inch guns it was fast and capable of outfighting anything that could catch it. One of these vessels, the Abdiel, circumvented the battle and laid mines across the HSF’s retreat route next to Denmark, it laid 90 mines and retreated unseen, and during the retreat the Ostfriesland, a German dreadnought hit one of these mines and suffered 40 by 12 foot gash in her side, she managed to limp home and was laid up for 2 months for repair, it is very unusual that mines laid during a battle have any effect, there was a lot of fear of it but it just didn’t come to pass. In 1916 we see the start of a concentrated effort to use mines to combat the U-Boat threat, there was an integration of nets and electrically detonated mines in an extensive barrage along the Belgian coast between Ostend and the mouth of the river Scheldt, if a submarine contacted the nets it would trigger the firing of a nearby mine in an effort to increase the threat of the minefield. There was also a backup set of contact mines of varying depth.  1917-18 1917 marks the peak of the effort of the KM to win the war of the Atlantic, they especially tried to catch US troops crossing the Atlantic but were largely unsuccessful, but they repeatedly re-laid minefields in shipping lanes and caused many casualties. 1917 marked the turning point of the war in the north sea, the RN had become very practiced at sweeps by this point, starting to employ high speed motor boats whose draught was too shallow to hit a mine, this combined with the more effective ability to hunt U-Boats meant that the Germans started to suffer unsustainable attritition in U-Boats and crews. This year does also contain one of my favourite stories of mine warfare of the war, sweepers operating off the south of Ireland noticed that their area kept having the same field replenished, so the leader of this flotilla ordered his men to look busy but not to actually sweep any mines, UC.44 observed them and believed that the field had been swept, and returned to lay a new field, unfortunately for that boat he struck one of his own mines, most of his crew escaped and was rescued by the minesweeping flotilla, the Captain of UC.44 was reported to be complaining vociferously about the inefficiency of British minesweeping as he was rescued. 1917 also sees the start of the truly mad undertaking, the HSF was confined to port but the U-Boat threat was growing, and so the creation of two barrages was planned, the Dover barrage and the North Sea barrage. The Dover barrage was not completed by the end of the war but was a plan to create a integrated defence comprised of mines of both shore triggered and contact types, hydrophones, 4 inch guns, nets and patrolling blimps with spotlights  The North Sea barrage was created in order to stop U-Boats breaching the North Atlantic, it was selected over smaller barrages closer to Heligoland and the mouth of the Baltic largely because it was far enough away that it could not be swept and that it did not restrict Grand Fleet operations, it was planned for 70’000 mines covering 240 miles of sea from the Orkneys across to Norway, the USN would play a very large part in laying this, the type of mine used was mentioned in the Minefield Threat section but the diagram below gives a better idea of how it functioned, the type was called the antenna mine with the mode of operation being a metal hull touching the antenna at the top and causing a detonation, it is specifically an anti-submarine mine with the antenna increasing the threat area and allowing it to catch submerged vessels much more easily.  Despite the scale of the undertaking it is thought that only six U-Boats were destroyed in the barrage, the water was too deep and it was impossible to patrol meaning U-Boats could pass easily on the surface, the cost of the barrage was around £30 million but as pointed out by the Secretary of the Navy Joseph Daniels, the war was costing that quantity per day, if it shortened it by even a day it was worth it. Ultimately I don’t believe that it did, or that the mines and money would have been better employed elsewhere but it was a staggering undertaking. 1918 was also the year that mining operations in the Heligoland Bight came to a head, with the new classes of high speed mine layers and two particularly nasty new types of mines: The oscillator mine which used a hydrostat and adjustable ballast to change its depth in a cycle to make it harder to sweep, and the delayed release mine, where it would sit on the bottom and parts of the field would come up at different times presenting a much more persistent danger, there was also the first incarnation of a mine that would play a huge part in WW2, the magnetic mine, I won’t cover this here because it is more suitable to cover in the context of WW2, but this was its first appearance.  British mining operations in the Bight destroyed 28 destroyers, at least 4 U-Boats and 70 other craft along with damaging several battleships and cruisers. During the course of WW2 the Germans laid 43’000 mines, the British laid 128’000 and the USN 57’000 (mostly in the Northern barrage).The Germans lost 150 warships to mines, including at least 40 U-Boats (U-Boat casualty figures are very hard to determine cause for obvious reasons), the German minelayers sunk 46 British warships but also 439 auxiliaries and minesweepers, both sides lost more warships to mine warfare than the combination of gunfire and torpedo attack. Gallipoli. I’m sure you are mostly familiar with the plan that lead up to the Gallipoli campaign, but just to briefly summarise it, originally the plan was a naval one, it was to force the dardanelles straight using battleships and threaten Constantinople with the large guns of the combined allied fleets, and at the same time sink the Goeben and the Breslau who had been absorbed into the Turkish navy. However, the Dardenelles straight is probably one of the most suitable places to defend with mines in the world, less than a mile wide at its narrowest point it was extensively covered by forts and any minefield laid was able to be well covered by fire to stop any sweeping efforts, and without sweeping it would be suicide to send the big dreadnoughts into the strait, on top of that the tide is up to 4 knots in places making it very challenging to make headway in the typically slow minesweeping trawlers and paddlers available to the RN.  The Ottoman forces had three types of mines, drift mines which were small rafts under which a mine was slung, these were about as effective as any other drift mine in history, not at all, they had lots of Carbonit mines imported from Germany and a free-floating mine called a Leon type, this was a powered mine that kept station via a hydrostat and an electric propeller, they were almost impossible to sweep as they had no mooring cable, we don’t know how the Leon would have performed as the allied fleets never penetrated far enough for the Ottomans to consider using them. The Allies knew about the mines and made efforts to clear them, working mainly at night they attempted their first sweep with the RNMR crews, they were very quickly bombarded by the forts and turned back, they tried many combinations including battleship support but the conditions were almost unworkable, with their drag nets deployed the trawlers could make little headway against the strong current, this was the source of a lot of resentment between the RN crews and the RNMR crews with the RN muttering about lack of moral fiber on the part of the volunteer civilian crews with no training under fire. The night tactics were proven not to work and Admiral Carden the commander was under immense pressure from Churchill to make progress, he however fell extremely ill and was replaced by his subordinate, Admiral de Roebeck who decided to sweep the minefield at day while employing his whole force of 18 battleships to silence the shore guns, they had pretty much charted the minefields and were confident of success. However the night before a small ship under an Ottoman Colonel Geehl had steamed down the night before and laid a field of 20 Carbonit mines, this field accounted for 2 battleship sinkings and a third crippled, the Bouvet, Irresistible and the Ocean respectively, a fourth, Inflexible, was crippled by gunfire. At this stage Admiral Roebeck lost his nerve and stopped the operation despite the assurances of his subordinate Commander Keyes that only the mines stood between them an Constantinople he called off the operation and it was essentially abandoned in favour of the doomed land campaign. Minesweeping Technology. Minesweeping developed at a rapid pace in the RN during the First World War, I have covered some of the purpose built minesweepers but this section will cover the various minesweeping technologies and techniques of WW1. Countermining. Countermining was one of the two main techniques employed by the RN in the lead up to WW1, it employs the principle of sympathetic detonation where the shockwaves of an explosion will trigger mines and create a chain reaction that blows the minefield up, sympathetic detonation is the main reason that minefields were spaced at around 200 feet to stop one mine explosion from detonating the entire field. The principle was that a fast launch laid a line of charges on a timer then hightailed It out of there, the charges would go off and destroy the minefield, as you may imagine this was dangerous and unpopular work and there was probably a considerable sigh of relief when it was abandoned in 1914. Sweep A sweep works by a heavy cable being towed between weighted kites behind two boats, the cable would become entangled in the mooring cable and either be cut by serrations or be successfully dragged into shallower water where it can be disarmed, usually by shooting it with a Vickers gun to hole the case and sink it. This is the reason that trawlers were often used because along with their crews they were equipped and trained to handle big heavy cables and had the heavy duty davets necessary to hold them, it was also the case that the crews of fishing trawlers were intimately familiar with their stretch of water and the conditions of the north sea.  The trawlers employed began to be armed with 6 pounder guns and would often tenaciously charge and ram U-Boats that they saw near the surface, this being the cause of one of the first sinkings of the U-Boat, a trawler saw a U-Boat trying to enter Scapa flow and rammed it damaging the hydroplanes and rendering the boat unpilotable, a gunboat came alongside and got off most of her crew before the submarine sank, the trawler in question being given a reward of £500. The most impressive instance for me was when an unknown U.139 class, one of the giant cruiser type submarines built by the Germans armed with a pair of 6 inch deck guns surfaced near a sweeping team with the intent of sinking them, the trawlers formed up and blazed away at the surfaced U-Boat, losing one of their number to a 6 inch shell, but a lucky shot from one of the trawlers disabled the forward gun and damaged her hull causing her to dive quickly and run.  U.139 shown bottom with standard U-Boat for scale. Paravane. The paravane was two long metal bars whick were controlled by a hydraulic plane system that protruded either side of the bow of a ship, they ended in a sharp cutting jaw and the idea was that a mooring cable would slide down the bar and into the cutting jaw where it would be severed and could then float to the surface to be sunk safely. These were the critical component of fleet minesweepers that allowed the battlefleet to move at a useful speed and be reasonably sure of not striking a mine, eventually all merchant ships were issued with paravanes in 1917 which meant that in 1918 only 27 ships were lost in British waters to mine strikes.  High Speed Sweep This is an interesting development of the paravane idea, a fast ship would tow a pair of paravanes connected by a sweep wire, the paravanes would keep the wire at a set depth with a float pulling the assembly out to the side of the ship and meant that the ship could effectively sideswipe a minefield in layers, working its way safely down in slices until the fioeld had been cleared, this had the advantage over paravanes of not requiring extensive refitting and could operate at high speed for fleet minesweeping duties.  Oropesa Sweep This was the final and most effective type developed, it was essentially a towed paravane array, the lead ship in a flotilla would enter the minefield and sweep a wide path using the paravane principle described earlier, then a pair of ships would follow, either using the same technique of the HSS technique, keeping their hulls inside the area swept by the first Oropesa sweep which is known to be clear, they would expand the swept path while in relative safety,  This is a huge topic area and as I wrote it up I realised I’d have to leave some of it out for the sake of my fingers, if you want to know more about something I touched on I will be more than happy to expand but I hope I have managed to catch all the major areas of mines in WW1. Next time: The cleanup, inter war developments and WW2. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 21:22
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Mines from 1918-1945. Cleanup Cleanup is probably the most infamous thing about landmines, and the cleanup from WW1 naval mines was the single largest minesweeping effort ever carried out, the Northern barrage in particular was a huge quantity of mines, but there was also the vast amount of mines in Heligoland Bight and off the coast of the UK. There were 240’000 mines at least and 40’000 square miles of sea in which they could lie at the end of WW1 and to sweep these the International Mine Clearance Committee was formed comprised of 26 countries, the belligerents in WW1 on both sides, each country was assigned an area of sea to clear, the largest allotment going to RN who were responsible for the UK coast and the channel outside the French allotted zone along with the Mediterranean, the second largest to the USN who were given the Northern Barrage, third largest to the Kriegsmarine who were responsible for Heligoland Bight and the fourth to the French who were responsible for the Belgian and French coast. Minesweeping is an activity fraught with difficulty, as minefields decay they may drag their moorings and go outside their assigned fields or you have dangers of hang firing mines which can explode unpredictably and of countermining, while mines can sink or become inactive, during WW1 the belligerents had gotten very good at making ones that could survive long term so there was no such luck as was enjoyed by Farragut when he came to sweep the field at Mobile Bay. To illustrate one of the largest dangers, that of countermining, I’m going to recount a story from the sweeping of a dense anti-submarine minefield off the Isle of Skye, usually anti-submarine minefields were left till last because they were laid deep and ships would pass over them, but this had been laid poorly so mines were at the wrong height and breaking their moorings, the flotilla of sweepers ran a shallow drag to clear the incorrectly laid mines then to start to deal with the deep mines, however a mine caught the sweep wire and detonated, this started a chain reaction of countermining explosions that caused the entire field to detonate over the course of 4 minutes of constant rippling explosions, luckily for the flotilla no mines were directly underneath them when they blew and so nobody was killed though all ships were severely damaged, but certainly I would not have liked to have been on one of those ships while those detonations were going on. The RN was also responsible for sweeping the Dardanelles, this was very difficult because there were no charts on the mines laid by either the Ottomans or the RN, though it is interesting to note that the Goeben and the Breslau, the German Battlecruiser and Light Cruiser (Renamed the Yavuz and the Midilli) who had played so much a part in Turkish entry into the war both struck British mines in the closing weeks of WW1, sinking the Breslau and crippling the Goeben. The problems with sweeping in the Dardanelles I touched on already, high current speed making the slow minesweepers even slower and badly affecting manoeuvrability. But here we see the RAF engaging in support for minesweeping, the waters were relatively clear so they would fly planes and airships and drop buoys over detected mines to warn the sweepers on the sea. Eventually 3’000 mines were removed from the Dardanelles with the loss of fifty lives and three sweepers, the biggest hazard they faced was dragging a mooring then the mine breaking loose from the sweep, it would then drift down with the current and hit either mines in a previous row or a sweeper coming up. The second and slightly surprising realisation was that the Germans had mined the Belgian rivers and canals, the way this was dealt with was a pair of canal towing horses were brought in who dragged a sweep between then, these mines had to be exploded safely as there was no way to safely let them sink to the bottom so once the horses were clear they were detonated with an explosive charge. The USN had the incredibly difficult task of clearing the Northern Barrage, this was the single most sophisticated minefield laid, with varying depths and terrible conditions, the Antenna mines used to catch submarines were detonated by contact with a hull, so the USN borrowed wooden fishing smacks from the locals of Scotland for their initial survey of the minefields, they nearly came to grief when their trawl wire which was metal started setting off the mines and were just about able to limp back into harbour without sinking, I find it astonishing that they recognised the danger of metal hulls, took steps to counter it but didn’t consider their metal sweep wire. However into 1919 they were properly supplied with wooden kites and non-conductive cables and so sweeping was able to continue in earnest. Eventually they swept 21’000 mines with the rest having sunk with the cost of nine lives and twenty three ships.  Traditional fishing Smack. It was at this time that the USN put into place a policy that would last until 1945, that the US would never lay a mine that it itself was not capable of sweeping, in the last days of WW2 they would break that rule and bring Japan to its knees completely in a very dramatic fashion. Interesting facts. For want of a better place to put it I’m going to include a few interesting facts here that got left out from earlier sections or didn’t fit elsewhere. At the start of the war, the RN had the capability to lay around 700 mines in a reasonable stretch of time, at the end of the war it had the capability to lay 60’000 mines. The minesweeping paravane being fitted to military ships is believed to have saved sixty eight warships including 7 battleships and 2 battlecruisers, in civilian service it is thought to have saved around 240’000 tons of merchant shipping. The total investment to the USN in mine warfare (mainly comprised in the Northern Barrage) was around $79 million and included the purchase of 110’000 mines, the value of shipping lost to enemy submarine activity which the barrage was designed to prevent was around $70 million a month. At the height of minelaying activity in the Northern Barrage the rate exceeded 1000 mines a day, a dedicated factory was built in St. Julian’s Creek VA in just under 4 months and it delivered mines at a rate of 6000 a week to Scotland. The only British dreadnought lost in the war was lost to a mine strike off the coast of Ireland in October 1914, it was the HMS Audacious a KGV class super-dreadnought which had been launched in 1912, at the time of its sinking the RN only had two more modern battleships than the HSF making any engagement that happened at that time more uncertain than at any other point in the war.  Sinking Audacious as photographed from passing US liner Olympic. Inter War developments. Mine warfare was hit like all other areas of military spending hard by cuts after the end of WW1, but as WW2 approached navies in general recognised the importance of mines and stepped up research as the start of war approached, mines became far more technically advanced, while the hertz horn remained the most popular detonation type many efforts were made to create mines that were “safer”, these included devices like electrolytic switches which rendered it much easier to set a mine to sink after a given length of time, there were also devices like vibrators developed which allowed acoustic mines, but acoustic mines remained an imperfect product until late in WW2, and the belligerent that employed them the most was the US. Royal Navy in the inter-war: Herbert Taylor and his inventions.  I am not overstating the achievements of Herbert Taylor when I say he was one of the single most important innovators for the RN that ever lived, he was a civilian inventor that was taken on board by the Admiral and worked for them from 1915 through to 1945, he somewhat presciently invented the hydrostatic pistol in 1914, before the point that the U-Boat was considered a truly major threat by mainstream thought. The hydrostatic pistol is the key component in the depth charge that allows it to trigger a detonator at a certain depth, he alongside Alban Gwynne created the key technology involved. However depth charges aside, Taylor also had a huge influence on mine warfare he lead the RN mine research team at HMS Vernon after the first world war and worked extensively in it during that tine, he created the first counter-paravane mine design, where a secondary electrical detonator was included, when the paravane hit the mooring line it triggered the mine which then exploded and destroyed the paravane, this was a precursor to his most important work that I mentioned in the title, the coiled rod or CR unit, though he did also develop several other improvements that I will also cover. The coil rod was a magnetic field detection device, when a ship passed overhead it induced a current in this rod which triggered the detonation, and it was the device which made the magnetic ground mine plausible, the magnetic ground mine was the most dangerous mine of the Second World War and was the first incarnation of the contactless ground mine, a type which due to its lack of mooring cable became significantly more difficult to sweep, most sweep methods so far have relied on entangling the mooring cable and as it sits on the sea bed it is both much harder to find and harder to sweep when you find it.  The basic operation of a magnetic mine is that a ship made of metal has an inherent static magnetic field that it projects, as a magnetic field moves through a coil it induces a current, this motion is caused by the ship sailing over the top of the mine which detonates the mine, delay circuits had also been perfected which allowed the mine to wait until the ship was directly on top of it before detonating, creating a much more dangerous mine. It is especially worth noting that this type of mine was very effective against U-Boats, rather than the antenna arrangement of the Northern Barrage this covered a much wider area and was a far more deadly ASW weapon. While the principle of induction had been well understood for a very long time and was experimented with before it was not before improvement in battery technology allowed a constant electrical circuit to be run reliably, the Hertz horn had the advantage that it did not draw power until the point of detonation, which is part of its high reliability, but now more sophisticated mines could be created. I have touched on countermining before, one important development was the creation of an anti-countermining device, the device in question was an armature which linked the detonation circuit and the explosive charge, this was held in place by a permanent magnet, a shock to the unit would detach the armature from the magnet and break the circuit, rendering the mine inert. This meant that there would be no chain reactions through the field, if a mine detonated it may render its neighbours inert but it would not obliterate the entire field. It also rendered sweeping of mines far less reliable, especially given the difficulty of sweeping ground mines rendering them immune to countermining created far more uncertainty, no captain was going to risk sailing his ship through a minefield that only might be fully swept, mines are an exceptional effective terror weapon and a lot of their value is in the inhibition of enemy shipping as well as straight sinking. One very simple but important creation was Taylors creation of the MK 14 surface laid mine, this mine was able to be laid at a depth of up to 1000 fathoms, (around 1800 meters), for context in WW1 the maximum depth layable was typically around 45 fathoms or 80 meters, this enabled mining to take place at almost any point in the ocean.   He and his team at HMS Vernon also made improvements in mine safety, before this point a soluble plug was employed that flooded after a certain time, but that had proven to be unreliable, a reliable clock and fuse was created that after a certain time set off a small explosive charge that flooded the case. There were many other developments made by Taylor and his team that I will omit for the sake of length, they are largely developments of existing ideas such as sinkers and counter sweep designs, but as a result of his developments, the RN went into WW2 far better prepared than they did in WW1, they had one of the best magnetic mines in the world, a highly developed submarine and surface minelaying that enabled British minelaying in WW2 to sink 1 enemy ship for every 47 mines laid, as opposed to WW1 where that number was around 1 ship for every 880 mines laid.  Taylors timer and fuse for flooding a mine. US Development. U.S mine development didn’t really start in earnest until general rearmament started in 1940-41, however they made excellent progress in a very short stretch of time and as I will outline later conducted probably the single most devastating mining campaign against Japan. The USN started with a copy of the German Magnetic Aerial mine, and they were active in development of acoustic, pressure and magnetic mines that could be deployed by submarine or air. In WW2 we see the demise of surface based offensive minelaying in the USN, and the Pacific is a great case as to why, ships were too vulnerable, too slow and had to traverse great distances to get into position, with reliable development by all combatants of air dropped mines and the vast air fleets at the disposal of the Allied powers there was no real compelling reason to employ the fast raiders we saw in WW1 for offensive purposes. German development. The Germans learned the lessons of WW1 as well as the British did, they established a separate mine warfare command in 1920 who was tasked with developing technology and strategy for the employment of mines in any future war, and this establishment prepared them equally well for mine warfare in WW2 as did HMS Vernon for the RN. The Germans developed independently magnetic mines, and most importantly for them they developed a successful air deliverable magnetic mine, standard moored mines were less desirable for delivery by air, they were large, bulky, had poor aerodynamics and the sudden impact of the water would knock one of the many mechanical components necessary for them to work askew it was possible and indeed done but far less widely so than magnetic, acoustic or pressure mines. It is also the case that magnetic mines were necessary as the impact would likely shatter a Hertz horn and cause the mine to detonate, the Germans placed a great importance on this type of mine going into the Second World War, they assumed that Britain would be defenceless against it and that an intensive campaign of mining would reap much more dramatic results than in even WW1, they were partially right but the assumption that the British would not develop a countermeasure in time was short-sighted to say the least and they would be proven very badly wrong. Mine warfare in the European Theatre. German mining in 1939-1940. During the course of WW2, the Germans would sink around 1.4 million tons of civilian shipping with mines, the vast majority of this was sunk in the period of 1939-1940, due in part to their strategy but also due to the fact that they just did not have the resources to lay the big fields of WW1 only 10 warships were sunk by German mines, all of which were destroyers. (The largest warship on the allied side sunk by a mine was the HMS Neptune, which struck an Italian mine in the Med). The problem that the Germans would encounter is that their minelaying strategy was very inflexible, they relied almost exclusively on the air dropped magnetic mine, their surface raiders carried mines but as in WW1 they were very quickly swept from the seas by the RN without having done any appreciable damage. The fast surface ships of the KM did achieve some success dashing in and out of British coastal waters, but the advent of radar and the complete inferiority of the KM surface forces meant that it was risky business, the fields they laid were typically found very quickly and swept and they never really received the priority in material, money or men to make a meaningful impact. They seemed to disregard the effectiveness of minelaying U-Boats, they only developed one type, the XB, and only completed 8 of them, 6 of which were sunk, they performed quite poorly and the strategy of minelaying didn’t enjoy Donitz favour, he was a devotee of the torpedo through and through. This essentially left only one option, which was the magnetic ground mine delivered by the Luftwaffe, this enjoyed fantastic success for a short period of time, they dropped them aggressively in harbour mouths and in the early years of the war inflicted significant losses, this tailed off sharply after 1940 with the establishment of air superiority over the British Isles, however most important was the fact that the British had done what the Germans thought they would never do, they learned how to sweep the magnetic mine. Sweeping and evasion of the Magnetic Mine. HMS Vernon as mentioned had been working hard on magnetic mines before WW2, they were familiar with their operation and given the fortuitous capture of an intact German mine that was misdropped onto a mud-flat in 1939 meant that the RN knew what the Germans were up too and already had an idea as to how to counter it. This was the start of degaussing as a defensive measure, the basic principle of which is that by running an electromagnetic field over the metal hull of a boat you induce a new magnetic alignment in the constituent atoms of the hull with the ultimate aim of creating a neutral magnetic field, (crudely speaking, if half the fields are aligned pointing up and half pointing down then the ship has a neutral magnetic field, while the orientation can in reality be anything in a 360 degree sphere the principle is the same). This was usually achieved by dragging a large cable carrying around 2KA of current across the hull, this would induce a neutral field for a period of a few months, during which the ship was functionally immune to magnetic mines. The USN would deploy several ships equipped with this equipment while the RN did it in shipyard, but with this practice in place losses to german mines dropped incredibly quickly, and the swift implementation of this is probably a large part of the reason we saw almost zero military ship losses in WW2. It is also interesting to note that degaussing continued for years after WW2 because of the residual danger of sea mines.  The degaussing band is clearly visible along the side of the HMS Queen Mary. However they didn’t just ignore them, the RN developed a magnetic sweep system, they would have a tugboat pull a long buoyant stretch of wire with a current running through it which induced a large magnetic field which would trip the detonators, it was functionally very similar to the standard sweeping of mines with mooring cables but the sweep line floated on the surface rather than under it. The Germans took this approach as well, using large coils mounted on flying boats, by inducing a large magnetic field they hoped to trip the detonators, in general they were quite successful and one of the few times in history that naval mines have been swept from the air.  The Japanese and Germans would never develop a fully satisfactory minesweeping technology for the mixture of magnetic acoustic and pressure mines, they typically took at least 2 months to find a method of sweeping a modified or new mine type which badly hurt them. It is interesting to note that the USN delayed deploying its more advanced magnetic mines because it was US policy not to drop a mine they could not sweep, the USN developed a very good series of mines that moved beyond the simple up/down axis that the early German mines used, but measured lateral magnetic shift as well, making degaussing less effective as a counter. German mining of Cape Juminda and the evacuation of Tallinn.  Mine area off the Cape circled. In 1941 with the Germans storming through the Baltic Republics the Red Army found itself outflanked in the port of Tallinn and was forced to evacuate by sea, the Russians knew the Germans had been mining their escape route and Russian fleet minesweepers did their best to try and clear an evacuation route, but bad weather and constant attacks from Ju88 bombers, the Finnish 2nd MTB flotilla, the German 3rd E-Boat flotilla and 6 inch coastal artillery set up on the cape of Juminda meant that they were unable to clear the area, so the Russians had to send their evacuation ships straight through the centre of a minefield, casualty reports from the eastern front being what they are it is unlikely that we know the true extent of the human cost. However from the fleet that left Talinn 25 out of 29 transports were sunk by mines or shelling, the Soviet Baltic fleet lost five destroyers, two submarines and four smaller boats, estimates of the dead range between 4’000 and 13’000, sources are not consistent over whether they include evacuation from the beaches of Tallinn and it’s unlikely that losses will be ever definitely established, but they were certainly very heavy indeed, the event itself was suppressed by the Russians for decades after the fact. This is the most famous of the German mining efforts but they did extensively employ mines in the black sea and deeper towards Leningrad, but largely speaking they did not employ mines to attempt to intercept arctic convoys, I believe this is because they did not have enough deep water mines to cover that area of the ocean, the British had significant stocks of their 1000 fathom mines but the Germans did not, which was a misstep on their part, those convoys were ideal targets for mining, relatively predictable routes, far from friendly support meaning that sweeping would be hazardous under the auspices of the Luftwaffe could have done significant damage to the Arctic convoys. In the European theatre the Germans suffered from a lack of flexibility and didn’t focus on mine warfare the same way they had in WW1, which I think cost them significantly in the Battle of the Atlantic. Damage inflicted. During the war, British mining took an incredibly heavy toll on German shipping, 17’500 mines were laid by surface ships, which destroyed 124 German ships, damaged 50 which were returned to service. 3’000 mines were laid by submarine destroying 59 vessels and damaging 8, but most critically 55’000 mines were laid by air, destroying 864 vessels, and damaging 483. German mining would sink around 500 British merchant ships during the course of WW2, sadly I cannot find a more detailed source than that, sadly the numbers for U-Boats lost to mines are also unreliable, largely because it is very difficult to determine exactly how a U-Boat sank, estimates vary from mid-thirties up to nearly a hundred. The Pacific War. The mine warfare campaign against Japan is very interesting, in that it showed in the short few months it was intensely prosecuted that it was likely the most potent weapon that the US could have employed, but it was not employed due to various logistical and political concerns until after the war was a certainty. Early efforts. The first minefields were laid in the Hainan straight and around the approaches to Bangkok, 420 mines were laid in 21 fields, over the course of the war these fields would sink 27 ships and damage 27 more, one strike for every eight mines laid, the Japanese made no proper effort to sweep these field, submarines operating from Australia would continue to lay minefields throughout the Pacific, and when long range American submarines started to operate from other bases they would usually bring a small number of mines with them to lay at the end of their patrol. Aerial mining of japan and Operation Starvation. By 1944 the American war machine had spun up to such an extent that thousands of mines were available to be airdropped, Nimitz and Arnold planned a large series of extensive mining raids to choke off Japanese trade. This was the first large scale deployment of the 3 newest types of mines in the US arsenal, Magnetic, Acoustic and Pressure mines. This was pushed through in a large part because it was still the time that the USAAF was jockeying for status, much like the bombing raids and the B-29 they needed to show they were making a credible contribution to the defeat of Japan, the USAAF were committed to strategic bombardment and it took a significant amount of arm-twisting from the USN to convince them to divert resources for the blockade via mining route, but it delayed the campaign from when the navy wanted it to start in late 1944 to early 1945. Mining began on March 27th 1945, four days before the assault on Okinawa, the USAAF dropped 5500 magnetic, 3500 acoustic and 3000 pressure mines in the shipping lanes in Japan, taking 1500 sorties involving around 100 planes, around 6% of total. This campaign had an incredible effect on Japanese shipping as shown below, the width of the arrows represents relative throughput.  As shown, the eastern coast ports were pretty much entirely shut down and every single port on the western coast was subject to massive reductions in traffic, it is especially worth noting that the traffic into the Inland sea and as a result the Kobe docks was cut to almost nil, the Inland sea was a major artery of Japanese logistics, but because of its narrow approaches an ideal target for mine blockade.  Japan in early 1945 was bringing in 90% of her iron ore, 25% of her coal, 80% of her oil and 20% of her food from abroad, 75% of all freight traffic was seaborn due to the underdeveloped nature of the Japanese rail system, in 1945 the Japanese had around 1.8 million tons of shipping left, the mining campaign destroyed or seriously damaged 431 ships totalling around 1 million tons, The effect on War industry was even more dramatic than that, in the tables below you can see that far more shipping as a proportion had to be allocated to moving food as compared to the necessary materials to make weapons after the start of the mine campaign, this was to stop people starving, the average Japanese intake was around 1600 calories per day at this stage, had the mining campaign continued it was very likely that food would not have been able to be moved inside Japan and a mass famine would have been certain to occur while food rotted in the fields of Japan, unable to be collected or shifted to people who needed to be fed because there was simply no means of doing so left.  The mining campaign against Japan was the most cost effective campaign of the war for the USA. Had it been planned and executed earlier in accordance with the USN plans it is extremely likely that Japanese defence on Okinawa would have been badly impaired with the Japanese completely unable to reinforce their garrison there with food, bullets and reinforcements. Next Time – Korea, Vietnam, Persian gulf and Gadaffi. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Aug 20, 2016 |
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Aug 20, 2016 00:00
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I'm glad people are enjoying them  .
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Aug 20, 2016 19:30
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Tias posted:Why are the sibirian troops experienced? Civil war deployment, or is it khalkin gol or something? They were involved in the border skirmishes with the Japanese under Zhukov during the 30's which went on for around 5 years leading up to Khalkin Gol, they were top of the pile for deployment of good troops for quite a while because of that, Japan was russias historic enemy and on their borders.
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Aug 21, 2016 18:19
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Mine warfare, 1945 – 1975. I’m afraid that my knowledge on technological mine development stops around 1945 and picks up again around 1991 with the quickstrike mine, I will do a little bit on current USN mine capability in another post along with the three wars in the Persian gulf, but I can’t really tell you anything about the development of mines in the modern military before that point beyond what you can read on the internet. Mine strikes have been overwhelmingly the biggest source of naval casualties for the USN since the end of WW2, they have sunk or damaged three times more ships in that time than every other type of attack combined. Mines – 15 ships. Missiles – 1 Ship. Air attack – 2 ships. Torpedo – 1 Ship Small boat attack – 1 Ship.  This excludes the attack by boat on the USS Cole as it happens outside the timescale of the chart. Korea. “We have lost control of the seas to a nation without a navy, using pre-WW1 weapons laid by vessels that were utilized at the time of the birth of Christ.” - Rear Admiral Allen Smith, task force commander of the Wonsan amphibious assault. “When you can’t go where you want to, when you want to, you haven’t got command of the sea. And command of the sea is a rock-bottom foundation for all our war plans. We’ve been plenty submarine-conscious and air-conscious. Now we’re going to get mine conscious starting last week.” – Admiral Forrest P. Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations Admirals Sherman and Smith were both commenting on the same debacle, that was the bungled major amphibious landing attempted at Wonsan in 1950. At the end of WW2 the USN had over 500 mine countermeasure ships in its inventory, by the time of the start of the Korean war, this had withered away to just 15; in addition to this 99% of all mine warfare officers in WW2 were reservists, this pool of trained men just evaporated taking with them the institutional experience for dealing with mines and leaving the USN almost helpless against mines. The reason for this was that with the advent of the Atomic bomb, the US reasoned that because it was now too dangerous to let a plan within reach of your borders because it may be carrying an atomic bomb that air defences would develop such that it was impossible, hence it was foolish to pursue air-dropped mines and the use of mines in warfare would die out. This is a mistake that the USN would make three times during the course of the cold war, first in Korea, then in the Persian gulf during the Iran-Iraq war and then again during Gulf 1, letting the mine warfare branch wither away to the point of irrelevance and paying for that in ships and lives. This despite the problem being very well summed up by Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy, Commander Naval Forces Far East – “The main lesson of the Wonsan operation is that no subsidiary branch of the naval service, such as mine warfare, should ever be neglected or relegated to a minor role in the future. Wonsan also taught us that we could be denied freedom of movement to an enemy objective through the intelligent use of mines by an alert foe.” The Wonsan operations was the effort by General Macarthur repeat the success of the landings at Inchon, the successful campaign to cut the Korean lines of communications and break their siege of the enclave of UN troops in the south east in the Pusan Peninsular. Wonsan is circled in red, the original landings at Incheon in black. The plan was to conduct landings at Wonsan in concert with a push by the SK 1st corps to the port in order to break the NK front lines and reach the Yalu river.  Wonsan and Inchon  Ground offensive map Wonsan was an excepllent target to the eyes of the planners as it had intact and large port facilities, good rail and road links to Seoul and and Pyongyang and had a large and developed airfield. The admiral in charge of planning was Admiral Struble, a veteran of the landings in the Phillipines, he had also been commander of Mine Forces Pacific at the end of WW2, he anticipated mines as the NK forces had used them before, but they had not shown large scale competence in their using of them. A sweeping operation was conducted and had some success, they employed helicopter scouts to spot mine areas for sweeping and had a force of six minesweepers tasked to the job. Wonsan was defended by the North Koreans via the use of a varied minefield covered by fire, it was a classic setup that we have seen many times before, it was largely comprised of mines of Russian design dating back to 1904, the Russians offloaded a lot of their equipment to NK as is well known, but the effectiveness of these mines was not diminished by the age of their design. They mixed the standard contact moored mine with newer ground influence types and covered the whole affair using shore artillery. The basic principle being that the shore artillery shoots the MCM vessels, the mines stop the supporting ships getting in close to neutralise the shore artillery and the varied types of mine make it very hazardous to sweep the whole field at once. Most of the minefield was laid by wooden sailing sampans and similar coastal fishing ships whose designs did indeed date back to somewhere around the time of Christ. The first problem they had was October 11th, Captain Spofford, the commander of the minesweepers had decided to shift his sweeping channel up north to avoid a large concentration of mines spotted by aerial reconnaissance. Early into the sweep the minesweeper Pirate struck a mine, shortly after the Pledge cut her sweeping gear and went to assist but started taking coastline fire from Sin-Do island complicating operations, Pledge recovered 43 of the 49 crew of the Pirate and then withdrew, attempting to leave via what he believed was swept water the Pledge struck a mine and sunk in short order, with another 5 fatalities, the remaining crew were retrieved and the shore batteries flattened by carrier aviation. But in the second day of sweeping the USN had lost a third of its sweeping capacity in the area, and 13% of its total sweeping capacity, not a good start.  Sweeping plan. The mines struck were magnetic ground mines, up until this point it was believed that the NK had only employed contact mines in large numbers, so the minesweepers were operating with standard sweeps from the WW1 era, totally ineffective against the magnetic mines. The Japanese sent a force of 8 minesweepers to assist and they started to make progress, sweeping successfully from the 14th to the 17th, on the 17th and 18th two Japanese minesweepers were lost to mines. The 18th was the point that magnetic mines were finally proven to exist, an ROK minesweeper detonated a mine under her keel, causing it to disintegrate with the loss of all hands, but the entire ocean started to erupt around the sweeping flotilla from a USN magnetic influence sweep. This was very bad news because it meant 2 days before the landing the whole minesweeping effort would have to be restarted, they had not until this time swept for magnetic mines.  A USN raiding party was put ashore who penetrated a storage warehouse finding that the NK only had reserves of magnetic mines, which was the first lucky break because had there been a mix of pressure and magnetic mines then sweeping would be a virtual impossibility. Pressure mines are the most difficult type of mine to sweep and even in the modern day there is not a reliable method of doing so. Independently the intelligence services confirmed that the Russians had sent 3000 mines of varied types and advisors to assist the NK in laying the minefield to defend Wonsan. The strategy employed was a textbook Russian strategy, the contact mines are placed at the edges with the more rudimentary magnetic mines to create a convincing deception and be a general nuisance, once the enemy believed them swept they would run straight into the more sophisticated and modern magnetic types laid close to the harbour which was intended to create maximum damage among the minesweepers. It took the combined naval forces of the UN a further seven days to sweep a landing channel to Wonsan, delaying the operation by 5 days and costing 200 lives and five ships, the USN brought in acoustic sweeping gear in a sensible move to make sure that there were no more surprises waiting for them.  The Hammer Box acoustic mine countermeasure device, essentially a large pneumatic hammer than smacks into a large metal diaphragm. The USN forgot everything it had learned about mine warfare during WW2, its two biggest failings were: Failure to scout out and neutralise supporting batteries until after sweeping had begun. Low number of minesweeping vessels meant that the enemy was forewarned of attempted amphibious landing because of the long time it took to clear the mines. For the Normandy landings over 300 minesweepers were employed, they swept very quickly and efficiently giving the enemy the least possible notice, the only reason that it did not become a very bloody affair indeed was that while the amphibious forces were delayed by the minefield the ROK 1st Corps had taken Wonsan from the sea, but use of its port facilities for logistical purposes was delayed for many weeks while sweeping efforts took place. The Wonsan debacle was the point that mines most delayed the UN in the Korean war, but throughout the war there was a huge quantity of casualties among minesweeping forces that could have been avoided had they been better equipped, supported and prepared They accounted for just two percent of all naval forces but suffered twenty percent of all naval casualties. It did however spur, under the leadership of Admiral Sherman a huge effort in mine development and sweeping which lead directly into… Vietnam. By the time of Vietnam the US had built up large stockpiles of MK 36, 40 and 41 Destructor mines, these were converted from GP bombs and were interesting in that they are useable as either ground or sea air dropped mines. It is a 1’000 pound GP bomb with a tail kit added, they are airdropped and strike the ground or sea floor, burying themselves deep and detonating with a magnetic influence detector with a ship or a tank rolls over the top of them. Over 11’000 of these mines were seeded in Vietnam’s shores and jungle pathways during the course of the Vietnam War.  The most major mining operation of the war was in 1972, the USN mines Haiphong harbour in Operation Pocket Money, using the Mk 40 Destructor mine, Mk 52 Magnetic mine and Mk 36 acoustic mines dropped from A-6 Intruders and A-7 Corsairs flying from the USS Coral Sea. At the time 85% of all naval freight into NV came through the Port of Haiphong. The operation itself took place at very low altitude to evade SAM fire, with air cover being given by two CG’s, the USS Long Beach and the USS Chicago who had free fire over any aircraft in their missile envelope to keep MiG’s away from the minelayers.  Haiphongs general geographic location showing major transport links.  Mining plans of Haiphong.  Mk 52 Magnetic mine.  MK36 Acoustic mine. At the time of dropping there were 37 foreign ships in Haiphong harbour, the mines were set with a 3 day activation fuse to allow them time to leave, and a 180 day deactivation fuse. Only 4 ships managed to leave the harbour in that time before the harbour was completely closed. NV had no minesweeping capability to speak off and no real prospect of developing any to combat the very sophisticated US mines and so the largest harbour of NV was closed. There were multiple other operations that took place which essentially cut off NV from all water born trade. Eventually the US would take responsibility for clearing the mines during the Paris peace talks as part of a larger bargain for returning prisoners of war, the mines to my knowledge did not cause large quantities of casualties but they inflicted a near 100% tonnage blockade of NV badly affecting its ability to receive replacement equipment, especially combined with the US bombardment of all of NV’s land based infrastructure during the Linebacker offensives. Next time – 1967 Arab Israeli war, Yom Kippur war, Iran-Iraq war, Gadaffi in the red sea and Gulf 1.
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Aug 21, 2016 20:03
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I'm working on the last post about mines now, i may split it up into two depending on how much i feel like typing tommorrow evening but i wanted to ask if people would want to read another series of posts in a while when im done reading about the topic. Would people be interested in an industrial overview of production in the World Wars? I got very excited today when i found the US and UK official histories of wartime production and a book by a professor at my university about WW1 industry, it can get a little dry as a topic but if people are i will read them with a view to coming back and writing about them,
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Aug 21, 2016 22:47
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Mines from 1967 to 1991. I left out the smaller conflicts from my post last time just because I thought that Korea and Vietnam tied together quite nicely in a single post, this is pretty much going to be a clean-up post about other areas in the 20th century. 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the 1971 Yom Kippur war. The 1967 war or the six day war was largely too short for mines to really be effective, but nonetheless we saw the mining of the Suez Canal by both Egypt and Israel, Egypt employing a mixture of Soviet supplied contact, magnetic and acoustic mines, and Israel indigenous and US supplied contact and pressure mines, these was employed alongside blockships (ships deliberately sunk to obstruct traffic) and closed the Suez canal to all traffic. What is genuinely interesting is that as a result of these actions the Suez Canal was closed to all shipping from 1967 through to 1975. This is the origin of the Yellow Fleet, ships which were in the Great Bitter Lake at anchor when the canal was closed that were trapped there for 8 years, an interesting story in of itself but not one I can cover. As a result of this mine blockade the Egyptian navy had to send its ships out and around the Cape of Good Hope in order to get to their Red Sea bases. Israel lacked both minesweepers and minesweeping expertise and hence were very vulnerable to mines, the Egyptians laid defensive minefields which protected the Bala’eem oil fields and other areas around the Gulfs of Suez and Aqaba, south of the Suez Canal, and also to cut off traffic to the Israeli port of Eilat in the northern Gulf of Aqaba. Military operations were not significantly impeded by these minefields, trade and resupply was, though the increase in air haulage capacity was a significant part in countering this and enabling Israel to keep fighting through the longer 1973 war, operation Nickel Grass in the Yom Kippur war being an example of this.  Eventually the mines laid around the south end of the Suez canal were swept by the USN at the request of Egypt, their own sweeping capacity being insufficient. Gadaffi and the mining of the red sea – 1984. Gadaffi was a strong supporter of Iran in its war with Iraq, and Iran was at this point an international pariah, they had been making themselves generally unpopular with everybody, Egypt had been on the side of Iraq and as had Saudi Arabia giving assistance in the form of loans and expertise. A Soviet tanker struck a mine in the Red Sea in August 1984, followed by 13 other ships, the area of the sea was especially busy at this time because large numbers of Muslims were taking the boat to Mecca and Medina for the Hajj. It was never proven but it seems very likely that with the timing of the minelaying that it was intended to catch one of these boats carrying pilgrims and cause massive loss of life. Indeed the pilgrimage to Mecca was to be targeted again by the Iranians in 1987 where Iran send a large group of agents undercover as pilgrims to launch a bloody attack against the crowds of Mecca and were gunned down by the Saudi security forces. Of the 16 ships struck none of them were sunk, but the Egyptian government immediately requested help from the RN, USN and the French Navy to sweep the Red Sea, the RN recovered one of the mines which had soviet export markings, upon quizzing the Russians about this they condemned the minelaying but didn’t help further in finding who exactly they exported it too, however strong circumstantial evidence pointed to the Libyan regime. A Libyan ship, the Ghat, entered the canal, travelled to Ethiopia then turned and returned, it took 15 days to complete this trip rather than the usual 8 days, and also reports from Egyptian intelligence that the ship changed crews at Tripoli, taking aboard the head of the Libyan minelaying division, seem to point to Gadaffi. The Soviets had also sold mines to Libya in the past. The reason the mines did not cause any sinking’s was that they only had a quarter of their designed explosive charge for this day unknown reasons. This event caused the Egyptians to beef up their mine warfare branch, twice they had to request help from the West in clearing their shores and their most important national asset, this was probably the start of the concept of terrorist mining, mines are an excellent terror weapon because of their stealthy nature, cheapness and simplicity and the incredible damage they can inflict on large targets. While a rouge group of extremists in Iran claimed responsibility, though later to be castigated for it by the Ayatollah, Iran was watching and saw the effect that the Libyan actions had and took it to heart. Iran-Iraq and operation Earnest Will. Iranian development of capabilities, and the withering of US capabilities. The Iranian war in the straits of Hormuz was described as a Guerrilla war at sea, their main weapons were fast attack boats, known as Boghammers, armed with recoilless rifles and heavy machine guns and sometimes missile racks were used to attack tanker traffic quickly, causing damage and casualties then running before enemy forces could respond, they also employed mines laid from Dhows an converted civilian ships, (the most infamous being a converted landing craft called the Iran Ajr). The US did consider mining Bandar Abbas, which would certainly have had the same effect as it did at Haiphong, Iran stood no chance of acquiring the necessary equipment or expertise to clear the sophisticated US mines and so would have been subjected to a 100% naval blockade, however the US laid no mines in the war. The context for this mine offensive was that neutral shipping was being hit by both Iran and Iraq in the Persian gulf, so the Kuwaiti government reflagged its transports as American and requested US naval escort to keep their trade open, this was what was known as Operation Earnest Will, so the US made a major naval commitment to escort these ships in and out of the Gulf.  Iran Ajr, mines visible port side. The Iranians had laid mines in the gulf from 1986, mainly hitting Kuwaiti and Iraqi oil tankers, causing little damage due to the massive bulk of the ships in question. These incidents however were scattered and minor. The original Iranian plan involved using silkworm missiles bought from China, but the US delivered an ultimatum about their use near the straits of Hormuz, while they did not respond not a single missile was fired into the Straits, the Straits were so important because they were the only sea route out of the Persian gulf for oil tankers to take, it was also right next to the major Iranian naval base at Bandar Abbas. While I don’t have any direct evidence for this its my belief that robbed of the ability to use the Silkworms the Iranians took a route which was more deniable and in their estimation less likely to provoke a massive US response in starting to mine the straits, after all the Libyans suffered no overt retaliation for their mining of international waters, why should Iran?  The US had let their mine warfare branch wither away again and they did not take the threat of Iranian mines seriously, a briefing delivered shortly before the start of Earnest Will in 1987 read as follows, “We do not believe that Iran possesses a major mine threat at this time, they are capable of small scale minelaying but do not have the capability to lay and maintain systematic minefields. They lack the training and dedicated equipment necessary to lay minefields and so are limited to small scale imprecise mining operations.” This briefing forgot the lesson of Wonsan, where the North Koreans laid a 3000 mine minefield using wooden barges and fishing vessels. In 1981 Iran bought a number of mines from North Korea, they bought a small 44 pound charge mine called the Myam, and a larger one called the M-08, or the M 1908 mine to give it its full name, a mine designed in 1908 for the Tsar’s navy to fight japan a simple hertz horn detonated moored mine, still as effective in 1988 as they were 80 years previous when they sunk two Japanese battleships. And the Straits of Hormuz were ideally shallow which allowed for the laying of these devices. The Iranians reverse engineered these mines and by 1985 were producing around 30 mines a week from a dedicated plant north of Tehran. They planned to stockpile 3000 of these mines.  Russian M - 08 mine from which the Iranians derived their design. Iranian mines on the deck of the Iran Ajr. First actions of the mine Campaign. In 1986 the Special Boat Service of the Iranian Marines started mining the shallows of the Iraqi coast, soon they were joined by the Revolutionary Guards and working from small speedboats they shut down shipping to Iraqs main port of Umm Qasr. They started to develop a plan known as Ghadir, named for a significant event in the Qur’an, which was to completely close the straits of Hormuz to all but Iranian bound traffic and to subject any mine clearing efforts by the US to vigorous attack from their small boats. Somehow in defiance of intelligence estimates the Iranian navy went from a small number of imported mines in 1985 to a credible capability to close one of the most vital waterways in the world in 1987 without anyone noticing. The first time this was really brought to the attention of the world was when two dhows left Iran and mingled with civilian traffic and mined the entrance of the Kuwaiti harbour Mina al-Ahmadi. The first ship to hit a mine was a Soviet tanker, the Marshal Chuikov, an eight by six meter hole was blown in her flank and she required months of repair, three more ships met the same fate at the hands of the fourteen mines the Iranians laid. This was an effort to intimidate the Emir of Kuwait into reversing his decision to flag his countries tankers as American. US minesweeping helicopters were flown in and they retrieved a mine and confirmed it with intelligence gathered by MI6 that it had been manufactured in Iran by its serial number. Nobody wanted to believe the Iranians would act any more aggressively than this and it was considered that the US helicopter teams should be sent home to avoid offending the Kuwaitis. Nobody was taking the threat of Iranian mines seriously despite the reams of historical evidence saying that you take the threats of mines seriously or you will end up deeply embarrassed or possibly dead. First casualty under US protection – SS Bridgeton. Emboldened by the success of this the Iranians decided that covert mining could inflict enough casualties on the US to drive them out of the gulf, Ayatollah Khomeini ordered that covert mining take place but that direct contact be avoided, (This order chafed on the Revolutionary Guard who were notoriously much more zealous than the Iranian navy and prone to going off half cocked). The first convoy passed Farsi Island early on the 24th of July, the previous night using small fiberglass bots a line of 20 mines had been laid in its path. The tanker Bridgeton struck a mine and started to flood, but due to its large construction and natural subdivision of the empty cargo bays it was in no danger of sinking despite the 9m long hole in its flank. This caused the escorting US warships to assume formation behind the Bridgeton as if one of them hit a mine they would certainly suffer casualties and heavy damage. This quite naturally was a source of embarrassment for the USN as the ships assigned to guard the tanker had to be guarded by it and was the cause of a significant amount of ribald headlines at the time.  The US considered retaliation but eventually concluded that the last thing they wanted to do was galvanise the Iranian population to continue the war by bombing the Iranian homeland. (War weariness was starting to bite hard by 1987-88). The speaker of Iran’s parliament remarked after the fact, “Gods angels descended and did what was necessary”, with the prime minister saying, “The US schemes were foiled by invisible hands. It was proved how vulnerable the Americans are despite their huge and unprecedented military operation.” They were right, the US was negligently unprepared for the Iranian campaign and it was bloody fortunate that nobody was killed in the first mining attack. It also showed how the Iranians were trying to retain the fig leaf of plausible deniability, everybody knew it was them but they just couldn’t quite prove it enough. For the second time in the 20th century the most powerful navy ever to float had been stopped by wooden boats dropping mines developed at the turn of the last century. US Scrambles to respond. The first action that was taken was to attempt to find a way to sweep the mines, the helicopters of Mine Countermeasure Squadron 14 lacked an airbase to operate from and there were no USN minesweeping vessels in the area, indeed the US had barely any minesweeping capability at all, it had been delegated to specialist units elsewhere in NATO and the US MCM capability had withered away to nothing once more. Admiral Crowe sought help first from the Saudis, who had 4 minesweepers, but after fighting their bureaucratic obstruction they eventually sent one vessel, who steamed around and went nowhere near a mine before returning home. The Saudis did not want to be seen to be giving help to the US for internal political reasons and so remained largely useless. The Europeans were about as helpful refusing to help with what was termed “A unilateral American Mission,” personally my view is that they were afraid of oil embargo from the Arab states, as happened in 1973. Refusing to assist in what was essentially a humanitarian protection mission with the capability they had developed was an act of moral cowardice, the French offered to sell the US two minehunters but the US had no interest in buying French ships for what would doubtless have been outrageous prices. The eventual US response was to load every mine hunting helicopter they possessed aboard the USS Guadalcanal while the US worked to ready its stock of minesweepers, they had 19 wooden hulled minesweepers with reservist crews but the crews were woefully undertrained, as put by one of the crewmembers, “Our training has been sailing one weekend a month and two weeks a year around the Puget sound dodging logs, why the hell are they sending us off to war?” Indeed the boats they were using were the last boats made of wood in the US navy, (Excluding the USS Constitution). Their passage across the ocean was noticeably unpleasant, 170 foot long and with only enough freshwater for 20 minutes of shower water a day for their 77 crewmen there was an industrial attitude taken to the whole affair, everyone shuffled through to wet themselves, stepped out to lather and then went to the back of the line to rinse and hoped the person in front wasn’t slow. Food consisted almost entirely of spam or canned ravioli.  Aggressive Class MSO's, not a boat i want to sail any ocean in. The first response however was to return to the technology of WW1, two tugs were bought from Bahrain and they were fitted with paravanes, it was not safe work but it was the only countermeasure really available until the arrival of the MSO’s. Iranian Response and escalation. The Iranians on the other hand were delighted, they were emboldened by the lack of serious US response and resolved to try again, but this time it would not go quite so well. The Americans were ready. They divined Iranian intentions to mine the anchorage of Khor Fakkan under the cover of a large military exercise on the 9th of August. The USN diverted its convoy away from the anchorage and were vindicated when on the 10th of August the tanker Texaco Caribbean carrying a load of Iranian crude oil pulled into the anchorage and struck a mine, spilling 2.5 million barrels of crude oil into the sea, a UAE supply vessel was making her rounds four days later when it struck a mine, blowing it to smithereens and causing the first European casualty, its British captain along with the five Arab crewmen. It might be cynical of me but I think the death of a Briton did far more to galvanise European support than any other action taken up until then, but possibly I am being too harsh.  This galvanised European support at last and they send a bevy of minesweepers down, four British minesweepers, two Dutch and Belgian, three Italian minesweepers and three French ones. The British also started escorting UK flagged vessels and the French dispatched the carrier Clemenceau to escort the minesweepers and to join in any US air strikes on the Iranian mainland. Interestingly the Iranians offered the services of their minesweepers while attempting to cast the blame for the mining on the USA, while making veiled threats, saying, “If we intended to plant mines, well it is a different story… This is fully within our means. You can send 27 or 28 ships to the Gulf, each one is a target for us, there used to be four targets, now there are 27.” His meaning however was quite clear, Iran still believed that the US would not react substantively and retaliated by laying more minefields near Farsi Island, set at a shallow depth to target the minesweepers.  Iranians caught red handed – Iran Ajr To counter Iranian small boat warfare the US established a floating base built out of large barges from which they based a team of specialist night-fighting little bird helicopters using the brand new IR equipment along with teams of SEAL’s, their job was to watch Iranian movements especially with a view to minelaying. The Iran Ajr was a logistics ship, converted to a landing ship by the Shah’s navy, then converted to a minelayer by the Islamic Republic, it was leaving Bandar Abbas on September 20th to lay mines in the strait of Hormuz, however intelligence had forewarned the US of this move and they were waiting and watching as during the night of the 21st it deviated from its route and went towards Bahrain. Radio traffic referring to a special unit was filling the Iranian airwaves and hence the ears of US SIGINT. The three helicopters that were shadowing the Iran Ajr observed her starting to roll minelike objects off the side of the ship and immediately attacked, they strafed the ship with minigun and flechette rocket fire setting her ablaze, they returned to rearm and when they returned saw that the Iranians had got the ship underway and were continuing to lay mines, so they attacked again and the Iranians abandoned ship but failed to scuttle it. The USN decided to seize the boat and immediately woke up the SEALs to storm the boat, nobody decided to stay to defend it and the SEALs recovered mines with serial numbers that would match the range used to mine the Samuel B Roberts, a map detaining all of Iran’s covert mining operations and from the dysfunctional and overflowing toilet a hastily concealed code book containing all the Iranian naval codes. This was the moment that the Invisible hand of god so touted by the Iranians was tied to them, they had been caught red handed laying mines in neutral water and no matter how much they denied it nobody would believe them. As a result of this evidence the Iranians would cease mining operations until April 1988, unfortunately they would immediately get results.  The multinational sweeping effort.  Before the next convoy the USN MSO’s finally arrived, and the multinational effort got underway, though I would like to take a moment to credit the fortitude of the US crews, they were in old boats comprised of wood and steel with no air conditioning working in 130 degree heat, no water for showers and poorly functioning refrigerators on their boats. Helicopters flew in ice vests and the Saudis even segregated an area for them to rest at one of their ports, a large step for them at that time. Their job was complicated by the vast amount of litter that the Persian gulf contained, oil drums, old buoys, everything looked like a mine, though especially problematic was the refuse from Australian sheep transports, a fair few sheep died enroute to their destinations in the middle east and the crew just pitched them over the side, unfortunately the corpses floated and tended to roll onto their backs, and the black belly of the sheep and the four legs stuck out in rigor-mortis resembled very closely the Hertz horns of a contact mine. However none of them were struck by the mines laid to catch them and they successfully swept the fields laid by the Iranians, they were somewhat helped by the Iranian habit of laying mines sequentially In serial number order, on several occasions they noticed a skip in the serial numbers of mines found and went back to find a missing mine. The majority of minesweeping was done by a diver going up to the mine and planting an explosive charge or shooting a hole in the casing so it sunk, the fields laid were small so the additional risk of sweep wires were not necessary. The gulf was quiet for the next few months as with the aid of the map recovered from the Iran Ajr they conducted a quick and efficient sweeping campaign. Samuel B. Roberts incident. The Iranians did not sit idle, they were watching the US patterns of convoy routes, and on April 13th 1988 they laid a pair of circular patterns of mines along a US tanker route that had not been used for a while. April the 14th saw the Samuel Roberts sailing through the straits of Hormuz, a watchmen spotted what turned out to be a set of Iranian mines, three of the pattern of 12 that had been laid, the captain ordered the ship to reverse out the way it had come, reasoning that gave him the best chance of evading the field and sounded general quarters. Unfortunately manoeuvring a 4000 ton Perry frigate straight backwards is significantly difficult, and she struck a mine in her stern, blowing a seven meter hole in her stern, rupturing two fuel tanks and exploding a 45 meter tall fireball high into the air.  Hole in the bottom of the USS Roberts.  USS Roberts fighting to stay afloat. Several acts of insane bravery saved the Roberts from sinking, power is essential for a ship to stay afloat, it powers the lights, the communications and the pumps and fire suppression systems, however the mine strike had damaged one engine and stalled the other, Petty Officer Tilley conducted a suicide start of the engine while seated on it, a process which is ram starting an engine by forcing high pressure air into it to start its rotation and get it spinning, similar in principle to a jump start. It’s called a suicide start because if it doesn’t work then the engine had a tendency to explode under the overpressure and shower the room in metal. Support was quick to arrive, first in the form of helicopters and then further US ships and civilian salvage tugs, during the day long battle to save the ship it rather curiously never lost its ability to fight, the CIC remained manned and the forward guns, radar and missile remained serviceable, it’s an excellent example of very competent damage control but I won’t go into it beyond those couple of anecdotes. The attack on the Roberts however was the final straw and it caused the US to launch Operation Praying Mantis, where they systematically took the Iranian navy to pieces, this combined with refreshed Iraqi attacks and the shooting down of the Iran Air 655 by the USS Vincennes spelled the start of the peace process. It would also be remiss of me to not mention that the Iraqis were also laying naval mines along the Iranian coast, however they did not attempt to mine neutral shipping as the Iranians did, it is however also true that due to the fact that all neutral shipping outside Iranian waters was supporting them or their allies that they didn’t need to. As a result of the risks and catastrophes of Operation Enduring Will the USN established and maintains to this day a significant mine warfare presence in the Persian gulf. The last hurrah of mines – Gulf 1. You would think that given only three years had passed since the incidents of the Iran-Iraq war the USN would have learned to take mines seriously and not forgotten it. The Iraqis laid 1300 mines in defence of their coastline using modern multiple influence mines (Mines that detonate under a mixture of magnetic, acoustic or pressure sensors), this scuppered plans for an amphibious assault on Kuwait city by the USMC, indeed the two ships that struck a mine, the USS Princeton, a guided missile cruiser and the USS Tripoli, an Iwo-Jima class assault ship assigned as the flagship of the countermine force, both struck mines and were forced to retire and the amphibious landing was wisely scrapped. This is also the last time that the US has deployed mines in combat, A-6 intruders delivered a large quantity of quickstrike mines to the northern gulf and successfully closed the Iraqi ports in that area. Concluding remarks. The naval mine is one of the weapons that has caused the most ship casualties in the entirety of the 20th century, in terms of tonnage it is a tossup between it and the Torpedo, ultimately it’s a technology that hasn’t really evolved that much, a surprise mining by small boats has remained a potent weapon from 1904 right through to 1991, a single mine can sink a ship, though with modern subdivision and ship design it is less likely, though had Iran and Iraq employed larger mines with bigger payloads it would have been very likely that some of the ships that survived mining would not have done so. The presence of mines mandates that a waterway is shut until they are swept, it is the most potent weapon that weak navies have to fight back against the strong, especially in shallow environments, they remain probably the best way of inflicting a 100% blockade on an enemy port. The best way to stop the enemy leaving port is to make him not want to do so, and a danger that he cannot sea but could still sink and kill him is probably the most effective way of carrying that out.
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Aug 22, 2016 19:20
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I have been reading a great book on the Economics of WW1, and it gave birth to this post: (I am sorry that this is very much a doom monolith of text, there were no appropriate pictures to break up the text  )Why did countries starve in WW1? The major countries that suffered widespread starvation were Germany, Austro Hungary, Russia and to a lesser extent the Ottoman Empire. While its commonly known that the Central Powers ended WW1 by being starved out, most things I have read on the subject say that it was because of the Entente blockade, but there is a little bit more to it than that, why did Russia also suffer widespread food problems despite being open to sea trade and being a net exporter of food before the war? The answer to that question, the question of the Central Powers and indeed to a major part of the German war economy in WW2, (they suffered the same issue and never fixed it) lies in the way that these countries’ economies operated, they suffered not only because of blockade but also because of a series of inherent weaknesses in their government infrastructure and society that combined with the fact that they were not able to patch the problem with imports meant that they very quickly started to suffer acute food shortage. All the countries that suffered starvation in WW1 shared the same quality: They had a largely peasant based agricultural structure. I’m going to go through the countries and talk about why they particularly ran out of food in WW1. Germany – Inefficiency, manpower and shortages. Germanys Achilles heel in WW1 industry was its Agriculture sector, this was also its weakness in WW2, why this is is actually fairly simple: The German agricultural sector was a very manpower intensive inefficient sector of the economy, it used a lot of small family holding farms and had a very low degree of mechanisation, it hadn’t moved on in a historical sense, the way that German farms worked in 1914 would have been largely recognisable to a German from 1814 or even 1414, and the same is true in 1939, this is distinctly untrue of countries like the UK and the US. The German Agricultural sector was protected by its government from international trade and as a result ended up as a very inefficient beast and had no real reason to develop and innovate. The high manpower usage in German farming meant that when that manpower suddenly went off to fight a war there was an immediate and sharp drop for the first 3 years of the war where production dropped by 35%, while a lot of the slack in actual employment was taken up by women, children and POW’s, their efficiency was significantly reduced, they quite understandably were not as good at the job of essentially manual labour farming as the experienced young men that went off to war. Productivity in German non war industries fell by around 35-40%, which accounts significantly for the drop in agricultural production of around 35-40% throughout the war.  German output throughout the war. Another critical reason as to why German productivity went off a cliff is that the blockade stopped their import of one critically important set of materials – The components for Nitrate based fertiliser came from outside Europe and this supply was completely cut off, the Germans did create artificial nitrate plants but these and any import that managed to get in were snatched up by war production to make explosives, so Germany was unable to fertilise its fields which was another large component of German woes in agriculture. The net upshot of all of this is that Germany towards the end of the war was suffering badly from Urban famine, despite being one of the richest countries in Europe it suffered just the same as the very poorest and for similar reasons, it had a huge amount of manpower tied up in farming which combined with the drop in fertility caused a heavy drop in domestic food production alongside the significant drop in imports. This was a large part of Germany’s uninterrupted economic contraction throughout the entirety of WW1.  Specific food output and imports of Germany. Austria-Hungary – Disorganisation and National Splits. Austria Hungary was significantly poorer than its counterpart in the Central Powers, it had around 60% of the GDP per head of Germany or France and 40% of the UK. It was the country that suffered the most and the most quickly from food shortage in WW1, despite the fact that it was self-sufficient before the war in food. One problem Austria Hungary had was that it had a significantly higher female labour participation at the start of the war, it shared the German style of peasant agriculture, at the start of the war around 45% of women were employed and 66% of those employed were employed in agriculture, that meant that there was little scope to increase female participation in agriculture as the men left to fight because you start butting into the hard limit of people who are physically unable to work the demanding tasks needed for agriculture. 8 million men were mobilised in AH throughout the war, and there was no way that they were able to make up for that shortfall. The table below is for all sectors of the economy, but it would have been more pronounced than that table shows given that the female increase for specifically the agricultural sector was much lower than it was for urban based manufacture. (Total A is total workforce, total B is total workforce plus POW labour.)  Total AH workforce as a % of 1913. The chaos of the AH railway network is relatively well known, differing national rail gauges and general poor development meant that its strategic transport network was an utter mess, this combined with the stresses placed on it by mobilisation meant that it spent the entire war on the verge of meltdown. This is especially detrimental to food, as the only way to transport large amounts of food from the countryside to the city before mass heavy road freight was either by river or by train, AH didn’t have a river network so it had to rely on its very shoddy rail network. By 1917 the railways were only able to meet half the demands placed on it, AH was relatively poorly industrialised and so could not produce rolling stock fast enough to make up the losses suffered in Galicia in 1914 and the losses from poor maintenance which lead to them wearing out their rolling stock very quickly. In 1914 the AH railway had around 12’000 locomotives, by the end despite a massive increase in production they ended the war with just under 7000, many of which were unfit for service. It also suffered from coal shortage, the rail network couldn’t transport enough coal to its central distribution depots to fuel its locomotives, and given that military transport always took a high priority it lead to an isolation of where food was produced, the countryside, from where it was consumed, the town. Galicia was an early casualty of the Russian advance, and it contained about a third of Hungary’s arable land, and also a large depot and distribution part of their rail network caused shortages early on, even after the Russians were pushed out the AH empire was never able to restore Galicia to full production. Organisational chaos is also a familiar refrain when talking about anything that AH did, given the two major blocs of Austria and Hungary the government was split into two, the governments of Austria and Hungary duplicated efforts and worked at solving the food problem from different ends, working frequently at cross purposes. The two different Austrian and Hungarian Ministries of Trade and Agriculture were working to maximise their own output rather than the empires output. They also made several poor decisions, they instituted price controls and compulsory purchase to try and keep the agriculture running, but they did it poorly and inconsistently, many farmers responded to this by moving out of crops and into livestock and using their grains as animal feed which produced much less overall calorific and nutritional content, output of grains and potatoes to between 30 and 50% of pre-war levels in Austria and 45 to 65% in Hungary. There was also widespread under-reporting of harvests in order for farmers to sell on the black market, this caused incredibly variable food distribution, with areas local to the farms being relatively well fed but approaching famine in the cities, the first food riots broke out in Vienna in 1915. Perhaps most interesting of all is that with the two different agencies managing food in the two different major parts of the empire, grain imports to Austria from Hungary fell from 1.4 million tons in 1913, to just 28’000 tons in 1917, with other crops suffering similar falls. Austria suffered much worse than Hungary and caused significant governmental infighting. Hungary’s reasons for doing this were largely political, its government was largely from a Magyar ethnicity, but the population of the country was significantly Slavic, so they saw food riots as the start of an end to their political domination, they were also deeply displeased with the government in Vienna’s conscription of large quantities of Hungarian peasants into the army, they sold a significant amount of food to Germany in exchange for currency and other war materials.  Austrian output.  Hungarian output. The ration supplied to the population of Vienna was from 1917 around 165 grams a day of poor quality flour, less than half the prewar average consumption, this was halved in 1918 and it got to such a stage that in April of 1918 the Austrian authorities seized dozens of barges carrying Romanian grain to Germany, by October 1918 there was at most two weeks food left in some areas of the empire, with zero at others. Galicia, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia cut off trade to the rest of the country in order to desperately try to feed their own people. Austro Hungary had in an absolutely literal sense run out of food and could not continue to wage war in 1918. Ottoman Empire – Doing the best with what they had. The Ottoman empire was the poorest major participant in WW1, they had significant concessions to the European powers in the industrial sectors but their agriculture sector was still largely Ottoman, their output fell slightly to a similar extent to Germany and Austria Hungary, around a 40% drop in total, but their relative drop was lower, only losing about 22% of total efficiency, losses of farming land accounting for the other 18% of drop, as compared to Germany who lost no land but fell by around 40%.  Ottoman farm land utilisation, Yield and total output. As a much less developed country the Ottomans had much less scope to adapt, usually the reaction to losing manpower is to increase mechanisation, but they did not have the money or the degree of industrial advancement in order to achieve that. So you would expect the Ottomans to suffer similar problems to Germany and AH, and for a long time they did, with major urban centers having food shortage problems throughout the war, but it was most serious interestingly in 1916 and early 1917. The Ottoman transport network was not developed enough to fight a war and move food, so that caused similar problems to AH, it was very decentralised so the black market thrived and the anticipation of shortages caused many people to start hoarding, which caused exacerbation of the food situation. All of this lead in similar ways to AH and Germany to urban hunger, the government tried several efforts to deal with this. They relied on the market at first to run the agriculture sector, they believed the war would be short and so saw no need to intervene, when it became clear it would not however they started to regulate as shortages started and price inflation started. Late 1916 they mandated cereal producers could not stockpile, they could only retain enough for seeding and their own household, they had to surrender the rest at fixed prices significantly below the market prices of the time. However the government did not have the administrative clout to enforce this. Producers hid crops and bribed officials to sell as much on the black market for as much profit as they could, or just in order to eat themselves. This measure actually caused food imports to urban centres to decline. The government responded by cracking down and pressuring agricultural areas near the cities excessively hard, this caused a mass exodus of peasants to other areas of the empires, they fled to the interior of their countries, especially in modern day Syria they fled into the domain of the Druze sheikhs who gave them land and seed to start anew. Tribal chiefs all over the empire refused to sell to the main government or demanded payment in gold, famine struck in Lebanon and Syria killing around half a million people and this threatened to spread elsewhere. In 1917 the government did something unique, it significantly changed its policy, it adopted a tax in kind policy, producers were taxed a fixed proportion of their produce delivered directly to the government the rest they could sell as they wished, this policy encouraged higher production and removed the reason to sell to the black market, so production soared and the supply situation dramatically improved, there was still hunger but it was significantly ameliorated by this policy. It did disproportionately hit small producers however, but the government viewed that as a necessary evil. Russia – Starving with a full larder Russia mobilised vast quantities of men throughout WW1, around 18.5 million men served in the Russian army throughout the war out of a population of around 140 million. From the rural population 50.7% of all men of working age (18-60) were conscripted, the corresponding figure for urban areas was 24.0%, their workforce fell dramatically, this caused a relatively small drop in the production as many of the refugees and POWs were put to work to remedy this and Russia had vast reserves of unploughed land which was ploughed up to feed the increased demand from the Army and the refugee exodus. So why did Russia suffer food problems to the point where in Russian heavy industry where workers were not getting enough calories to work their arduous jobs?  Russian output of Grains. The Russian food production varied throughout the war going to +/- 15% of 1914 levels, there was a drop as compared to pre-war levels in most areas, the Russian agricultural sector did not employ fertilisers to the extent AH and Germany did so it suffered far less from the munitions industry competing, but it suffered from two large issues, the first being something we have seen to a lesser extent in the previous 3 warring nations, disengagement from the war effort, and the other being a vast increase in consumption, huge amounts of refugees were brought into Russia and the vast consumption called on by the swelling army. Disengagement from the war effort meant essentially that areas of the rural economy who were relatively self-sufficient stopped trading, they were subsistence farmers who sold around 25% of their crop before the war, but the government imposed a compulsory grain levy to try and feed the army and deal with its faltering finances, peasants responded by withholding their grain and consumed more of their product, as you can see in the table this was especially problematic in 1916 with an overall decrease in the grain balance caused by this disengagement, combined with an increase in the urban population of 5 million people over the course of the war lead to massive hunger in Russian cities. This problem appeared in all of the peasant farming based economies but most seriously in Russia, it is interesting to look at in terms of an economic feedback mechanism. In peace the peasant farmers sold their crops to buy necessary manufactured goods from the town, however in war, the young men who were most of the workforce left the countryside and still needed to be fed, vastly increasing the demand of the non-rural population for food. But due to war manufacture the urban civilian manufacturing output fell dramatically which is the very thing that the rural population sold its food to buy. Hence the rural farmers had no motivation to sell food, money was not in of itself useful for them because there was literally no consumer goods to buy, so they retreated into subsistence farming and stopped exporting, they had no real motivation to break their backs working really hard to increase output, especially given the general dissatisfaction with the government felt by many Russians, hence prices for food in the town soared. This caused famine not because there was no food available as in Austria Hungary, but because the food did not get it to the towns, what food there was was taken by the army as the government needed to feed them at any costs so they would keep fighting, the Russian urban workforce lost the ability to access food.  Balance of Grain imports in Russian regions, (Northern, Southern, Central and Eastern respectively) The Russian government could not afford or did not want to afford to pay farmers more, so they tried to legislate low prices, which the peasants responded to by sticking up two fingers and refusing to work for their benefit, this problem was not unique to Russia and happened in all the other countries that tried very low fixed prices, but it was the most serious in Russia. This bungling approach to food appropriation is how Russia managed to starve while still producing enough food, and how one of the largest food exporters pre-war managed to lose the war to hunger. Why didn’t Britain and France starve? As the two last early combatants left, these two were the only countries that did not suffer from widespread systematic hunger, they were never really in a huge danger of doing so because they had access to import markets to cover any shortfalls and the money to pay, but they also had much more robust agricultural sectors. France suffered from localised hunger caused by the stresses on its transport system and the loss of the grain producing areas of north eastern France to the Germans, but largely speaking it comes down to the fact that France had 3 things: 1: Access to the world economy and the food exports of its empire and the world at large, along with a robust economy and trade system that enabled them to pay for said food without incurring massive costs. 2: A very well developed train system with sufficient supplies of rolling stock. 3: The ability to mechanise and sufficient supplies of fertiliser and manpower to continue to farm. Britain was a very interesting case, a large part of the story of the U-Boat war is the threat of starvation, but Britain was never really in significant danger, rationing existed but it was not anywhere near as hungry as any other country in the war. Its own farming sector had shrunk significantly as it did not adopt protectionist policies in response to massive US exports, its agriculture focused into meat and dairy and remaining grain and crop producers had been forced to become highly mechanised and efficient to compete. This meant that Britain had vast amounts of untapped potential on the eve of war that other countries did not have, in 1916 in response to a drop in American output and U-Boat losses, meant that the government was able to guarantee a minimum price for grain and this lead to a surge in production as many fallow fields were plopughed up and subjected to high efficiency Industrial farming, this lead to a growth in output of crop agriculture throughout the war of around 30% from 1914 levels. Secondly Britain was extremely rich, it was able to loan to its allies in the early days of the war and it had an excellent record of paying its debts which meant that new lines of credit were very easy to come by, it was able to borrow and import to a huge degree more than any other power in the war. It is also the case that the government had a much stronger degree of legitimacy than the Central Powers or Russia, this meant that when it stepped in to control parts of the economy people were much more cooperative in working towards the common good and less likely to try to dodge the system as we saw in the other powers, (this also applies to France). Both countries also introduced a tax on excess profits of its companies, which raised vast amounts of money for their war chests, in Britain this tax reached 80% and was the single biggest income generator for the government. Concluding remarks. The First World War was a major point of change in warfare between the old style and the new, but it also represented a clash in Industrial terms between the old and the new, the US was the first to really adopt industrial farming and its massive output hit Europe hard pre-war, the countries that maintained peasant agriculture adopted protectionist tariffs and as a result had underdeveloped and inefficient farming industries that buckled under the stresses of war, even large food exporters like Russia failed to have their agriculture stand up to the stresses of war. The food shortages that this caused were a major cause of the defeat of the Central Powers, their populations refused or were simply unable to fight on, ultimately Falkenheim was right when in 1914 he informed his government that the only way out of the deadlock was to seek peace through diplomatic means, the CP were doomed to lose the war of economics, their economies and especially their agriculture could not stand the war of attrition they were to embark upon. Even with the defeat of Russia leading to a hope that the massive grain imports from the east would start again, Russian society had degraded to the point where it was incapable for many years after its surrender of feeding its own people, let alone another country. This catastrophe for Germany greatly informed its policy after WW1, having lost the naval struggle with Britain it turned again to being a land power and its desire for Lebensraum in the East, they wanted the great grain producing plains of western Russia and Ukraine to give security in food, indeed in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk you can see that the CP occupied the large grain fields of Ukraine.  Hitler was to write after the first world war that Germanys trade rivalry with Britain had provoked the war, it was foolish to contest Britain at sea and Germany should focus on a continental empire, any war against Britain would need Russian food and other supplies, and any war with Russia would need British neutrality in order to not impede German access to international markets for the very same supplies, this thinking would contribute to the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum and eventually the Second World War. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Aug 27, 2016 |
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Aug 27, 2016 17:30
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Nebakenezzer posted:A good post, thanks. They spotted the lessons of WW1 but they didnt really identify the correct solution. This is going to be a little fuzzy because im not great on Nazi ideaology so someone may need to correct me. The Nazi's got many votes from the rural set because they deliberately attempted to appeal to them, they were sort of the epitome of the classic German family that the Nazi's wanted to espouse, clean living and honest work and all that jazz. What they needed to do to become self sufficient was to mechanise and consolidate in order to raise efficiency, the german agriculture industry remained protected, in a large part, because it was such a large voting block that no politician wanted to mess with it, so you had small farms with one family working them still as the mainstay of German agriculture. Those farms by the basic rules of manufacturing could never be as efficient as large industrialised farms in use elsewhere in the world, its exactly the same problem but in a different skin as the problems that the Germans had with manufacture in WW2. Food shortages were not as bad for most of WW2 as they were for WW1 to my knowledge, food shortages started early and continued for a large majority of WW1, but the time of Germanies hunger was far smaller in WW2, it was the point when their railways were pounded into the dirt and when they lost the ability to pillage conquered countries that things started to go wrong (as Archangel says it was a deliberate move to starve the east of Europe in order to steal their food to feed Germany, they knew they couldn't feed them when they went east.), Germany had much more robust trade in WW2, they had land links into the balkans and unquestioned control of the west of the continent so they were much more able to get for example imported wheat from Romania, fish from the Scandanavian countries etc, so until those links were cut in late 1944 and early 1945 they were able to keep up a reasonable diet for their populace, this was not as a result of Nazi domestic policy but as a result of them being able to employ the means of easing hunger that they couldnt use in WW1, that of import. The solutions the Nazi's seemed to identify was that of expanding the current agricultural system rather than improving, transplant German farmers east and have them Aryanise it by taking their way of life with them, i dont know how they planned to organise the new settlements in the east, to be honest i would guess that the Germans didn't either, setting up the neccesary infrastructure for mass farming in a new and war torn area of the world was beyond the Germans ability to create, they had their strategic transport network running on fumes for most of WW2 as it was.
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Aug 27, 2016 22:45
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Fo3 posted:I don't understand this at all. It is a rule of thumb of economics that protected markets are less efficient and less innovative (See the car industry of the UK, the need for the EU Common Agricultural Policy, or Japanese industry pre WW2). In a case where there are cheap imports broadly speaking there are two options 1: Match whatever is causing them to become cheap in order to compete. 2: Make those imports artificially more expensive, usually via the means of governmental tarrifs. What happened in unprotected markets is what happened in Britain, farming sector shrunk and specialised into high value goods, this left them with a lot of untapped capacity that wasn't economic to actually employ, but as soon as war came they moved to reuse that capacity and boosted domestic food production again because the government started setting minimum food prices and providing other guarantees that made it economic to farm. Pre-war as farms went out of business or people moved elsewhere their land was bought up cheaply by other farmers to form larger and more efficient farms or just lay unused. The British agriculture sector was about 50% more efficient than Germany in terms of output per worker even pre WW1 and notably only slightly less efficient than the US agricultural sector (by around 3%). While the countries are not neccesarily 100% comparable the biggest distinguishable difference between Germany and the UK was whether there was significant tarrifs and other trade impediments put on food by their government. In Germany this didnt happen, farms did not go out of business because of the protectionist policies of the German government, you are partially right in the sense of because they were essentially subsistence farmers they didnt have a huge amount of money and there was less land available to actually buy because they were surrounded by lots of other small farms. If people are not compelled to move due to actually going out of business then it would be a risk for them to sell up and try to get a job in the city, why should they if they are making a living and are relatively happy where they are? Some may choose to do so but there wont be a really significant amount of people all making the same decision to uproot their life and take the leap into the unknown without a strong external influence. Protectionism was not the only reason that the German farming sector was inefficient, but i think it is reasonable to say that they remained inefficient because they had no extenal impetus to develop. (It may also be that German business lending was less developed or available, i dont know if that is true or not). Not everybody acts in a rational way entirely driven by money and there was a strong element of traditionalism in German farming which discouraged change, those people were actively courted by politicians because they represented a large section of german society which stopped them from getting the impetus to change. It is plausible that if they had not adopted those policies they would have had less farming capacity at the start of the war, but im not arguing that it was the worst course for them to embark on, just that it was a major reason why the sector was so inefficient, it is also possible that they would have reoorgansied into larger more efficient farms and eased their food issues, we cannot with any certainty say which way they would have jumped, though either way would have factored into war thinking and changed everything. they were not forced to compete with New World industrial farming, they competed with other farmers who were more similar (Russian, Romanian etc.)
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Aug 29, 2016 14:38
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In the run-up to WW2 it is worth noting that the Nazi regime very much doubled down on agricultural protectionism, I’ve just had a re-skim of some of my books and I’m going to try and have a look at some bits of German Agricultural policy especially under the Nazi's. Pre Nazi regime Agricultural protectionism started with Bismarck, in an effort to win over the roughly 50% of the working population involved in farming at the time of German unification he instituted the first grain tariffs to protect German agriculture which put a brake on the decline of the entire sector for a very long time, until well after WW2 the German economy would still have a large quantity of essentially subsistence farmers, coming out of WW1 the agricultural voting block was very much right leaning, the major parties of the left, the Social Democrats and the Communists didn't appeal to them and never really had a credible plan to address their concerns, so they stayed on the right with the DVNP and the NSDAP both of whom were preaching protectionism and tariffs to protect Germanys agriculture. It was the Agricultural lobby that was a large part in twisting Hindenburg’s arm into approving of a coalition between the DVNP and the NSDAP, he owned a large estate himself and had vested interests in agriculture so I’m sure it didn’t take a great deal of persuading. The Agrarian lobby wanted a government that would unilaterally act in order to protect their interests, ignoring or abrogating the trade deals of the Weimar government, the party most willing to entertain that was ultimately the Nazi’s. They had been hit hard by the chaos of commodity prices in the late 20’s and early 30’s, caused in a large part by American economic measures to deal with the depression, and this radicalised them to the far right. The Weimar republic tried to break up the large land owners, especially in the east, they tried to resettle peasants onto the large estates there to farm the land by making it a social obligation, there was compulsory purchase of some of the land held by the large estates to bring the total proportion of land owned by the large estates down to 10%. However this was bitterly opposed by the landowners and little progress was made, failing to satisfy the Agricultural lobby. It is also interesting that at around this point Herbert Backe wrote his thesis, (who he is will come up later, but he was to become a prominent Nazi and agricultural administrator.) in 1926 for his PhD in Agricultural science he wrote “The Russian Grain Economy as the Basis for the People and Economy of Russia.” He posited that only by the infiltration of foreign ethic elements of higher quality could the Russian Agricultural sector develop, the ethnic elements of higher quality of course being the Germans. This would return when Backe would push for the SS to be the implement of this change, to clear out the racially inferior and make way for his ethnic elements of higher quality. Early Nazi policy. People are I’m sure familiar with the Nazi work creation programs, but especially in East Prussia agriculture was a huge part of it, Gauleiter Koch adopted a huge program of essentially forced labour, he created great “Camps of Comradeship” where unemployed men engaged in heavy earth moving to prepare the land for agricultural colonist, and political education, one of the very early concentration camps was employed here and accredited as a work creation venture. Goebbels trumpeted the East Prussian miracle across Germany with Koch proudly announcing that he had “cleansed” his province unemployment and this effort was repeated in many other regions of Germany. Low efficiency agriculture is a great way of employing lots of people as it requires no real skill just a degree of physical fitness and as a result the Nazi government employed it extensively. Agriculture was originally headed up by Hugenberg from 1931-33 he was the head of the other German far right party, the DNVP, but he managed to create a major diplomatic embarrassment by demanding the return of Germanys colonies and a right to expand in the east, he wasn’t backed in this by Hitler and resigned, consigning him and his party to oblivion, he was replaced by a particularly virulent Nazi in the person of Richard Walther Darre, (One of the top echelon of the SS.) It is worth noting at this juncture that in the peace settlement of WW2 Germany had lost an awful lot of land, fertile farmland was lost to Denmark and Poland while they still had a large proportion of the population who lived in those areas who moved into Germany proper to feed. Also that German farmers in general were very VERY poor, like couldn’t afford shoes for their children poor, working low yield arable crops as subsistence never made anyone rich but it especially hurt the 9 million or so Germans employed at this time in that field and their families, Germans in general were significantly poorer than Britons at this time, it would have been exceedingly foolish for any bank to really lend to them to buy new equipment or land and they had zero chance of affording the money themselves, corporations were more interested in manufacturing because that was where Germanys export money lay, indeed Nazi policy at this time was to encourage that to try and address Germanys crippling foreign exchange problem. The Nazi party for idealogical reasons more than anything refused to accept this, they were especially twitchy about food, a lot of their ideology came from a guy called Reverand Thomas Malthus, who wrote in the late 1790’s that unchecked population growth is exponential, while food supply growth is arithmetical, a country that could not feed itself was doomed to die out in large numbers, he advocated population control and early forms of eugenics. Hitler and the Nazis saw dependence on imported food as dooming them to economic stagnation and eventual race death. Nazi policy after full control. A very important figure in Germany in the early days was Darre, he created the grassroots Nazi organisation that came to dominate the politics of the Agricultural sector, from 1930-33 he built the largest political organisation in that sector and pretty much entirely subsumed it. He held rallies larger than the Nuremberg rallies on the occasion of the annual harvest and were highly attended by Nazi party elite. He very closely cooperated with the SS and was one of the major forces behind the SS’s transformation into a racially pure set of families, SS men wanting to marry had to apply to the office controlled by Darre. He believed firmly that German cultural identity was rooted in the peasant farmer, the enemies were the nomads and raiding tribes, and the modern equivalent was the racially impure population of the cities, naturally this was masterminded by rootless Jewish influences, they were responsible for the uprooting of peasants and turned their land into a commodity that capitalist forces could buy and sell at will. He held up the sinking birthrate as proof that the German population was born out of a deeply rooted connection to the soil could not sustain itself in an urban culture, urbanisation was to be another source of race death. Naturally the head of the Agricultural ministry holding this view put a major brake on the idea of any structural change in German agriculture. He and his deputy, Herbert Backe, viewed with hatred the large agricultural monocultures of the liberal democracies, and blamed this for the great famines in the 20’s (nearly 5 million people died after the end of WW1 due in a large part to infrastructure disruption and devestation, in really really broad strokes about their argument, had they been subsistence farmers the argument crudely went, they would not have starved). They both aimed for a secure national food supply and its attendant healthy farming community, both of which would create and ensure racial purity and virility for the German people. Land Shortage.  The Nazi ideological bit out of the way, but don’t worry it will return later, there was the very real problem of actual available land, Germany had one of the lowest areas of arable land per farmer in Europe, 74% of German farms farmed around 19% of the land area, the typical German farm area was 0.5 to 10 Hectares, farmers in these conditions were barely able to feed themselves and their families that relied entirely on family labour. They could not afford to employ anyone, even on the farms of 10 Hectares to 100 Hectares comprising about 25% of farms and about 40% of the land area, a lot of work was done by farm servants, live in people who received a significant amount of their pay in kind in the form of food and board. Peasants worked at least 12 hour days 6 days a week in order to survive. Blood and Soil. Darre and Backe proposed a new law in late 1933, it was based in what was called the Blut und Boden ideology, where a new category of farm, the Erbhof or Hereditary farm, was to be created as a breeding ground for racially pure peasant family. It would be immune to debt, insulated from the market via government guaranteed prices and passed down through these racially pure families. All farm owners between 7.5 and 125 Hectares were required to apply and were granted the title of Bauer. Naturally to succeed in the application you could not be Jewish, disabled or of inferior racial stock, these farms could not be sold or used as security for a loan. Essentially they could not be disposed of by their owners in any way. The Reichsbank proceeded to poo poo the bed at this juncture with Schacht denouncing it for undermining the finance market, Schmitt, the Minister for economic affairs said it would, “create a new breed of indolent state peasants with no interest in efficiency.” But Hitler approved and so it became law. Schacht tried to fight this by economic means by disallowing all Bauers from long term credits, but Darre would not be swayed. Eventually though the reality of the situation was worked out on a local level far from the prying eyes of the Nazi ideologues with the courts relaxing the rules and allowing limited use as collateral to gain loans. One decisive problem was that this new law really pissed off the peasant farmers whom it was intended to help, bits of the law were bent and adapted to try and entice people in, but they were not happy about it, though the major concern was that a large quantity of farms just did not meet the size criteria. Full governmental Control Starting in 1933 the government essentially ended the free market for agriculture in Germany, the prices were set centrally by the Reichsnaehrstand, and this unlike the Blut und Boden laws hit every part of the agricultural sector. It was another area that caused Schacht to voice his opposition, especially given the large budget allocated for the staff responsible for administrating it. This upset the peasants as well initially until they saw that the minimum prices they were guarantee were very generous indeed. However, the minimum prices did lead to a sharp spike in food prices for urban Germans, food prices had fallen for years but starting in 1934 they spiked hard, there were instances of a 10% spike in a single months which lead to panic buying and shortages, the RNS was instructed to avoid further price increases in order to maintain public confidence in the Nazi regime. The RNS bought up huge amounts of reserves in its early days but was soon faced with an unenviable task. It had to boost national self-sufficiency while not increasing the prices paid to farmers, the German economy was tenuous and Schacht was relentlessly attacking the RNS and Darre, he wanted to use their stockpiles of food to gain foreign exchange. Darre responded by creating the RNS’s own propaganda department and accused Schacht of being an agent of international freemasonry. Depite all of this the efforts of the RNS were partially successful, boosting supply of food by around a quarter. It installed large processing plants for enriched animal feed to feed the vast German pig herds. The Reichsbank was cutting the amount of money allocated to buy animal feed which is what resulted in this measure. Ersatz foods started to reappear at this stage, bad weather caused bad harvests in 34 and 37, there was talk of rationing but it was deemed politically unacceptable so they ran down their grain reserves and substituted maize and potato starch for flour in bread. They were forced to discretely ration butter and meat. However from 37-39 the recovering economy and better harvests enabled imports and yields to rebuild national food stocks. Long term solutions. There was a school of thought in the 30’s that advocated rationalisation and mechanisation, but essentially it was politically impossible, the forces of Nazi ideology and Agricultural pressure made it unattainable, the RNS calculated that it needed an extra 8 million Hectares of good farmland to become self-sufficient, they rejected the idea of overseas colonisation and fell in with the ideas of Mein Kampf, settlement in the east, displacement of the populace there and its settlement by Germans of appropriate racial stock to ensure the survival of the German race, the eyes of the German agriculture ministry were very clearly set on Poland and Ukraine, alongside Hitlers and the rest of the Nazi party. The Nazis essentially nationalised the majority of German Agriculture largely for political or idealogical ends, they had some success in boosting output but did not fix the central underlying inefficiencies. I dont know if they could have done, extensive farm mechanisation would have deeply cut into the heavy industry used to prepare for war, and that would have in all likelyhood have been unnaceptable to the main government, not to mention the vast social unrest it would have caused turfing millions of people out of their livelyhoods to replace them with machines may well have caused another massive social upheaval that the Nazi's were desperately trying to avoid throughout their reign.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:44
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Basically this. I don't recall how good their fire control was, but they were basically a paper tiger. Their navy just wasn't up to date enough, and as a result they had a hard time controlling what is basically their own backyard. Broadly, Italian pre-war fire control design was pretty good, they bought the good designs of rangefinder and computer produced by Barr and Stroud towards the end of WW1 and followed an independent development path from that, they underinvested though so didnt manage to consistently modernise their battleships and as a result though they had the right technical idea it was not fully implemented. Their big defficiency was in training, they adopted laddering in the mid 30's as opposed to the RN who adopted it in 1918, they didnt train for Night Actions at all, often retiring rather than fighting at night after their first rather ugly suprise at the Battle of Matapan. They managed only really to damage a few RN ships and sink a couple of MTB's in surface engagements, whereas the RN racked up several Cruisers in return.
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Aug 29, 2016 17:30
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Hogge Wild posted:What's laddering? Conventional fire control is shoot, wait for impact, observe splash, correct, shoot until you walk the salvos onto the target. It suffers badly from the target taking evasive action as the target state is changing between salvos. Laddering is shoot several salvos at different range estimates, see them all impact at different ranges in a short time span, hopefully either side of the target giving you a better idea of the targets actual range more quickly by giving you more information and a bracket value set in which the target lies.
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Aug 29, 2016 18:18
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Cythereal posted:True, though I still prefer Jellicoe as surface commander in this naval wanking for his organizational capabilities, and the fact that the High Seas Fleet that Jellicoe was much better constructed, maintained, trained, and lead than the Second Pacific Fleet that Togo smashed. Perhaps most to Jellicoes credit he recognised that as Churchill put it, he was the man who could lose the war in an afternoon, he knew what he needed to do was above all survive, he didn't try to reenact Nelson and Trafalgar as someone like Beatty would I think have done, he kept the RN edge intact, didn't take unnecessary risks for personal glory and ultimately kept the HSF in harbor and won the naval war.
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Aug 29, 2016 19:07
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Campioni and Iachino were cowards, Cavagnari was an idiot, and Italian (and German) land based air should have made up for deficiencies in carriers. Not to mention the one time they tried a battleship on battleship fight they got their poo poo kicked in. (Admittedly by the FAA not the actual guns of the battleships). Polyakov fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 04:09
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Hogge Wild posted:Were the big estates in Prussia better mechanized? The large estates were generally much more developed and mechanized and worked like farms in the US or UK, some were also let out in lots of small parts to tenant farmers in a similar process to what occurred in the middle ages, though that was still known to happen across europe at this time in other countries at well.
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Aug 30, 2016 12:29
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MikeCrotch posted:Oh god. Lindybeige has a new video. It's called..."Cavalry Was a Stupid Idea". Its a really dumb title for a not very good video about the difficulties of fighting on horseback and developing the technology for such.
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Aug 30, 2016 15:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'm not going to give that idiot page views. Can someone tldr how he hand waves away the only option for that kind of tactical mobility before the internal combustion engine? Sitting on a horse is hard. Barely domesticated horses are not naturally inclined to fight. Horses are a big vulnerable target that when they charge at you an infantryman will casually shiv it up. Early horses were small and sitting on them in armor is difficult. Chariots are apparently superb. Stopped about the time of the Romans with a brief afterword about stirrups. There are no upsides to cavalry except in their use as chariots and logistical movers.
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Aug 30, 2016 16:00
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SeanBeansShako posted:One of my wall mounted shelves is starting to resemble stereotypical university stacks. I think I should stop buying (physical books) for a while. I moved to an all e-book setup for exactly this reason, i only have a large book of fighter plane pictures left as a physical copy. Though being able to abuse my academic access to get PDF scans of interesting books does help with that, though for my area of enthusiasm most books are available in ebook format. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Sep 1, 2016 |
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Sep 1, 2016 13:56
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ArchangeI posted:Work expands to fill screen space available. If you have three monitors you'll still have at least one open book in your lap and another face down next to the keyboard. Its true, i moved from working on a laptop with one screen to a pair of 27 inch monitors and my tablet still sits on my desk to give me more screens.
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Sep 1, 2016 16:52
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Its probably perceived as "cleaner" because bombing cities was seen as the norm after a while, and, from what I've read, you mostly get the civilian strafing stuff from the first 2 years when the Germans were invading other countries. lovely as it was the Luftwaffe was far from alone in just strafing roads, a not insignificant amount of bailed out allied pilots were lynched by enraged german civillians, typically condoned or actively instigated by the local nazi officials, this was in a large part because of the fighter pilots who would fly low and strafe the roads of Germany (also because of the massive bombing of the cities). Air forces were generally equally dirty as far as i know in terms of actually fighting (ignoring the luftwaffe ground forces), the only difference was in capability allowing many to kill far more, if an allied airman was found by the Luftwaffe or the Wehrmacht he was usually ok, if he was found by the Volksturm or committed members of the Nazi party he was very often in trouble, theres a quote from an American bomber crew who were shot down: "Nobody tried very hard to do us harm… they just seemed to stare at us and we at them. The strangest odyssey began next morning, when we began to walk out of Gravensberg down the main street. We walked down the middle of the street, and the civilians on the sidewalk hurled epithets and threats at us, ‘Kaput machen!’, again and again – a frightening litany. We passed a group of nuns, and even they spat at us. We learned later that they really hated the fighter pilots because they came down and shot up anything that moved on the roads and even farm animals in the fields. Our fighter pilots generated a lot of anger and distress, and if they were shot down they were in great jeopardy – the civilians would gang up and beat them mercilessly"
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Sep 2, 2016 17:20
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Koramei posted:When you say "strafing roads".. it sounds like you mean civilians on the roads? Not just the infrastructure? I do mean that, its what i take from the quote in question and others, there was probably very little distinction in the thought of a fighter bomber between a horse and cart pulling ammunition and a horse and cart pulling food, they both got shot up all the same.
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Sep 2, 2016 18:03
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HEY GAL posted:"gently caress nazis" is the proper response, tho? It is however really important to say gently caress nazis because of what they did do rather than what they didn't (uniquely).
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Sep 2, 2016 18:19
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HEY GAL posted:nah Ill rephrase it, it is important to recognise that both sides did horrible things in war, some of which were not unique to the nazis, its important not to only say the nazis were bad and did bad things but to acknowledge the fact that we also did some of the same acts. Its unhelpful to list off nazi atrocities in a vacuum without considering other sides who committed the same acts. An act isnt uniquely worse because the Nazis did it. E: clarified language.
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Sep 2, 2016 18:30
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spectralent posted:I have absolutely no idea. I've had hours of fun in III, though I don't think I ever quite got the hang of amphibious landings. I'm hoping 4 is a tidied-up 3, anyone got any comment? Its a hell of a lot easier to play than 3 and is significantly streamlined (its a lot less complex in many ways), the AI is still dumb as a box of rocks and is REALLY bad at the air and sea layers, and as a result its really easy, the only time i felt threatened was doing historical timeline France and having to fight the Germans in 1939. I still really enjoyed it and they have given it a good hard patching since i played it last so it may well have improved, but i still reccomend it based on my experience.
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Sep 2, 2016 18:45
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Xerxes17 posted:So I guess I should post about Kubinka. T-90 of some kind?
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Sep 5, 2016 20:38
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Xerxes17 posted:Look closer))) Is it a gas turbine T-80? E: or even Object 219A. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Sep 5, 2016 |
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Sep 5, 2016 20:49
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Xerxes17 posted:Yes, gas turbine. Given it was a T-80 i was wondering why it was especially notable, my first thought was the early gas turbine model, then i thought it might be more subtle than that so i looked around at the development models of the T-80 and found a reference i think to the A model being at that museum on Russian wikipedia with a photo of the top of that turret. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2-80%D0%90 Given my russian is nonexistant i couldnt really check that pages info very closely so i took a guess it was that.
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Sep 5, 2016 21:19
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Xerxes17 posted:Ha, that's one way to find out. I found cheating much easier  When i found that i was looking for schematic views of all the T-80 variants i could lay my hands on as that is my go to approach for identifying tanks.
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Sep 5, 2016 21:29
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Crazycryodude posted:Does the thread have anything resembling a reading list? I know there've been plenty of recommendations about specific periods and events (Castles of Steel was great btw - thanks to whoever mentioned that) but are there any works that anyone interested in milhist in general should read? It's kind of hard to read about milhist in an abstract way, you can read the major strategic texts like On War, Achtung Panzer or the Influence of Sea Power on History but they are a lot better read after you have a good grasp of events that happened in the wars that they influenced. I would suggest that you want to pick a war or period and read about it in detail, most wars share many similarities and you need to read in detail to see that, i started with the Iran-Iraq war and sort of spread throughout the 20th century from there. Should is somewhat subjective because how you want to approach reading about war will differ dramatically, i really like reading about logistics and production because i think it gives the best idea of why wars turned out the way they did and i find it much more intuitive than looking at the tactical level. But many people go for that much more than i do, that's part of why i say choose one war and read in detail because it helps you work out how you want to look at something and what part of it all interests you the most. If you could give me a little more to go on i can recommend lots of good books for the 20th century its just tricky to recommend off just whats in your post.
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Sep 6, 2016 05:21
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Could you recommend some books on the Iran-Iraq War? I heard it was one of the only modern instances of trench warfare. The Iran–Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History is a very good book about the whole thing, i also would reccomend The Twilight War: The secret history of Americas 30 Year conflict with Iran this book covers the tanker war and it also gives historical context to why Iran ended up the way it did and the history of American interference/involvement before and during the war.
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Sep 6, 2016 14:27
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FAUXTON posted:E: /\ that doesn't even get into the way swordmaking metallurgy eventually made it important to put metals of different hardness in different, specific parts of the blade so that it kept an edge but didn't shatter when hitting something hard. If you're melting down blades made in that fashion, you're not able to reforge an equally capable weapon because it's all mixed together. So maybe prior to that advancement it was acceptable to just reforge stuff you melted down but once the minds of the day realized you wanted hard metal wrapped around a more flexible core (or maybe the other way around, not a swordsmith) they probably stopped just melting everything real quickly unless they had the ability to adjust mineral content on the fly too. You can kind of, but im pretty sure they wouldn't have done so, the actual hardness of the edge of the sword was done by forging/tempering or potentially carburizing by the swordsmith after the production of the metal itself (a set of processes called case hardening), furnaces didn't really start to get advanced enough until the 1800's to produce steels of a specific grade, but what that does mean is that theres no real advantage to recycling the steel of weapons as you still need to go through the same set of processes to produce a workable weapon at the end of it as you would from any other raw ingot. Im pretty sure that furnaces hot enough to melt steel at the time also introduced a significant amount of carbon into the mix from the charcoal used in them, which then had to be purified later on in the process so you didnt have incredibly brittle pig iron at the end of it.
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Sep 6, 2016 15:50
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Fangz posted:What was the rationale for that design? I mean nowadays the dreadnought seems terribly obvious. There was an idea that the way ships would fight was to disable the enemy with a hail of smaller caliber fire then close to short range and sink them with high calibre guns. This didn't go away for a very long time, really until the Japanese showed the Russians up at tshushima with their higher calibre guns. A huge argument raged through the letters page of the Times during Fishers royal naval design reforms about it, after all ships had relied on high numbers of guns for centuries beforehand and people just didn't quite get the advantages of all big gun for a while.
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Sep 18, 2016 05:12
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