During WWII, Guadalcanal witnessed some of the most brutal
and devastating naval battles in history.
Ironbottom Sound acquired its nickname for good reason. Allied battleships, cruisers, and destroyers
absorbed many dozens of torpedo and shell hits.
Despite this onslaught, all the ships remained combat effective right
until they either sank or the battle ended.
These were unbelievably tough ships.
In contrast, we’ve long noted that modern naval vessels are
no longer WARships but glorified
cruise ships. They’re thinly and weakly
built with no significant armor and small crews for damage control. They lack separation and redundancy among
other survivability flaws.
Let’s just verify that our belief is correct (or not?) by examining
the modern record of naval ships that have taken hits of various types. The table below lists the ship, the number of
hits, and the result.
The obvious observation that jumps out is that only one ship
was able to continue its mission and the bomb that hit that ship failed to
explode. Note, also, the very small
number of hits that were required to achieve a sinking or mission kill. Contrast this with the WWII examples where
the ships around Guadalcanal sustained many dozens of torpedo and shell hits
and continued fighting.
For example, at Savo Island the USS Astoria received 65
shell hits, the majority being 8”, and continued to fight though the end of the
battle (no mission kill !) before, eventually sinking the following day (see, “Battle Damage – Savo Island”).
Another interesting observation is that ship size
(displacement) seems to offer no enhanced survivability or resilience, contrary
to what one might expect. This is likely
a massive condemnation of the thinness and weakness of modern ship construction
materials and design.
Also note the large number of bombs and missiles that failed
to explode. This should serve as an eye
opener for those who believe, against all of history, that modern weapons are
unerring, infallible, certain-kill, wonder weapons. The reality is that most modern weapons will perform
surprisingly (surprising only to those who do not follow this blog) poorly.
I had intended to include some examples of ships that took a
hit and continued to function but I was unable to come up with any.
Conclusion
It seems obvious that, just as we believed, modern ships are
weak and unable to sustain even the slightest degree of damage without being
sunk or immediately rendered a mission kill.
Modern navies have completely forgotten how to design WARships. The US is not alone in this ill-considered
trend. This is a perfect example of the
entire world agreeing about how to build a modern navy ship and the entire
world being wrong (similar to the pre-WWII battleship debate – everyone agreed
and everyone was wrong).
Note: It is likely that I’ve inadvertently omitted
some examples. Feel free to offer them
in the comments.
Roberts maintained a Harpoon on the rail, ready to go as they were being approached by Iranian surface ships. Plus there is a lot of apples to oranges comparisons. We know shell fire tends to only get you so far. If I were planning surface ships I would invest in things that keep me from getting hit first, then active defense, and passive defense third, although we could start planning better designs on this front. I have no idea why more ships don't have a bow azipod and separated propulsion plants.
ReplyDelete"Roberts maintained a Harpoon on the rail, ready to go as they were being approached by Iranian surface ships."
DeleteHow is this relevant to the post?
"there is a lot of apples to oranges comparisons."
DeleteNothing is being compared other than modern design and construction to WWII design and construction. Warship to warship. Apples to apples.
USS Princeton took two mine strikes but had the forward weapons and Aegis system back up in 15 minutes. She couldn't move but she was operational.
ReplyDelete"Modern navies have completely forgotten how to design WARships."
ReplyDeleteI always wonder when did this trend begins to exist in the first place? Was it a Post-WW2 nuclear war mentality that begins it? If so, how much more armored the Spruance class has compared to its predecessors?
Modern missiles records has shown surprisingly little success in damaging modern ships and yet how does everyone believe that missiles becomes a end-all be-all system and whatever armor is not enough to mitigate the damage? A system if you get detected, you are as good as dead???
WW2 showed that air power would easily overwhelm even the toughest ship if they could get through so why spend extra resources making ships tougher when having more carrier aircraft and AA/AA missiles to stop the aircraft getting through in the first place which was seen as a better bet.
DeleteIt wasn't until around 1960 that the USSR deployed their first ship launched anti-ship missile and sub launched cruise missile.
For the 15 years between 1945 and 1960 it was aircraft launched bombs and missiles and sub launched torpedoes that were the threat and by then ships had gone from being armoured cruisers and battleships to increased in size destroyers and frigates with some being renamed cruisers to close the 'cruiser gap'.
Armour is good but world war 2 destroyers didn't really have any even the front face of the main gun turrets of a Fletcher class was just 0.125 in (3.2 mm) thick it was basically splinter protection which modern destroyers have with their Kevlar armour.
Modern ships take the WW2 destroyer/destroyer escort/frigate bare bones ship which is just a power plant with weapons on top and make it much bigger with cruise ship level crew quarters and amenities.
"why spend extra resources making ships tougher"
DeleteYou completely fail to grasp the purpose of armor. See,
"Armor for Dummies"
You would relegate multi-billion dollar ships to one-hit kills. That's not very wise or economical.
Wasn't meant to imply that's my view but the view of those building the USN ships of the 50's which started the trend of unarmoured cruiser sized destroyers.
Delete"the view of those building the USN ships of the 50's "
DeleteI've heard all kinds of theories about why we abandoned proven WARship design principles but NONE are supported by any documentation. Do you have any proof/documentation to support your contention? I'd love to know what the designers of that time were thinking but I have yet to see any documentation. Lots of theories ... no documentation.
Dunno what the 50's designers were thinking but I would offer the Forrest Sherman- and C.F. Adams-class DD's and DDG's as WARships following in the vein of Fletchers and Summner/Gearings. Those ships had decent hulls for compartmentalization and Damage Control. The Mk42 5"/54 was a capable successor to the 5"/38
DeleteBoat Guy
KNM Helge Ingstad is also a good example : collision on 08/11/2018 with an oil tanker, sunk.
ReplyDeleteIngstad is in the table list. Look closer.
DeleteIt appears that in the case of the Helga Ingstad, McCain and Fitzgerald, crew inexperience (non-qualified bridge watch, inadequate battle damage mitigation and sleeping Captains) was a contributing factor to the extent of the damage.
DeleteReuben James
Damage control is a factor in EVERY incident but does not change the conclusions. In every case of a ship being rendered a mission kill, the "kill" occurs instantly. Damage control is what helps determine whether the mission killed ship eventually sinks or not.
DeleteSo, for this analysis, crew training is not a relevant factor.
Okay, I see your point.
DeleteReuben James
What makes a ship inherently 'tough' - and what we lack today - is armor, structural strength, separation and redundancy of equipment, rugged equipment (as opposed to delicate electronics), etc. That's what allows a ship to keep fighting rather than being an instant mission kill. It's deeply disappointing that the modern examples were all mission killed from just one or two hits and many of those didn't even explode! That's a terrible indictment of our modern designs and standards.
DeleteHMS Ardent (sunk): multiple bomb hits, not all exploded. May not fit your criteria of lack of toughness due to the number of hits.
ReplyDeleteRFA Sir Galahad (essentially scuttled after the war, used as target): two or three bombs.
"Ardent"
DeleteI missed that one. It appears three bombs (1 failed to explode) hit and rendered the ship an instant mission kill followed by sinking.
"Galahad"
I'm only examining warships in this analysis.
INS Khukri (Type 14 frigate - sunk): one-three torpedoes. Again, may not fit your criteria of lack of toughness due to the number of hits.
Delete"INS Khukri"
DeleteThat's too old. It's closer to a WWII design than a modern ship.
HTMS Sukhothai in 2022. Per Wikipedia: Seawater entering an exhaust port led to flooding and a heavy list, followed by a short circuit in the ship's electrical system and failure of the pumps. This flooding caused the engines to fail, and the pumps became unusable. Sunk not due to battle damage but possibly due to poor design.
Delete"Sukhothai"
DeleteThe premise of the post is resistance to inflicted damage (bomb, shell, missile, collision). This incident was certainly a poor design but not appropriate for the premise of the post.
I wonder if anyone has seriously wargamed the US surface Navy in 1945 against the current surface one. Due to the old ships' survivability, I'm guessing the modern navy runs out of anti-ship missiles and bombs before the 1945s get in gun range. It probably ends in a stalemate as the modern navy can run away faster.
ReplyDeleteI do think the SSGNs and the ADCAP loads on the SSNs change things enough to warrant a separate scenario.
"the modern navy can run away faster."
Delete???? WWII ships could uniformly do 30+ kts.
So they're not even fast enough to run away from the 1945 fleet.
DeleteLutefisk
There's a known reason for the large number of bombs that failed to explode in the Falklands. The Argentine pilots were in in the habit of flying so low that their bombs didn't arm before impact. They were doing this to reduce their exposure to anti-aircraft fire; one cannot assume that will happen again.
ReplyDeleteYou're perfectly illustrating one of my overarching cautions. Too many people find a reason why the miraculous xxxxweaponxxxx failed and assume it will never happen again and that new weapons will have none of the old failings. They do this while ignoring all of history that proves with 100% certainty that EVERY weapon will perform far worse than predicted. The reasons may change but there will ALWAYS be failures.
DeleteConsider how many people, today, believe that cruise (or ballistic) missiles are unstoppable, unerring, unfailing, and will kill any ship with absolute certainty. It's because the shrug off the entire history of weapons performance by rationalizing away the failures and blindly believing that the next miracle weapon will be invincible.
Don't rationalize. Look at the pattern of all of history and recognize that the pattern will continue for all of time to come.
You can't assume that weapons will work well, but you also can't assume they will fail completely. There are huge uncertainties in all assessments.
Delete"you also can't assume they will fail completely"
DeleteOf course not! That's why I said,
"100% certainty that EVERY weapon will perform far worse than predicted."
instead of "completely".
Very few weapons fail completely. They fail relative to their expectations. No weapon system ever matches expectation and most miss by a good margin.
Of note, the Mk14 torpedo that the Navy started WWII with failed completely.
The LCS, considered as an overall weapon system, failed completely with no significant combat capability, no useful modules (ASW was out and out cancelled), and with many being retired after just a few years of use.
The Zumwalt Advanced Gun System failed completely.
You know, as I'm starting to recall, there have been a lot of near total failures!
I believe the Argie naval A-4s did have the retarded MK80s bomb that allowed them to drop at low altitude but had the release settings wrong for most of the time. Then eventually fixed it.
DeleteOh and HMS Coventry was very unlucky in that one of the 2 out 3 bombs that hit and did explode went off in the aft engine room right next to the bulkhead, breaching it, that separated it from the fore engine room. If it had hit a little further aft in the aft engine room there was a good chance the ship might've survived.
"HMS Coventry was very unlucky"
DeleteAs in sports, you make your own luck. If the ship had been more robustly designed and built, with thicker bulkheads, more compartmentation, better isolation, better reserve buoyancy, or whatever, it might have survived. If your ships need luck to survive then you've designed and built them wrong.
‘….you make your own luck…’ is just a cliché and though a coach might say it to motivate a high school football team it really isn’t true.
DeleteIn reality luck - aka The Fortune of War - is nearly always a - or maybe ‘the’ - key player in any conflict, and always has been.
At Midway it was sheer luck that McCluskey spotted the wake of the Japanese destroyer that led him to Nagumo’s carriers.
The previous year it was sheer luck that a single torpedo hit from a British aircraft ‘mission killed’ the Bismarck - a well designed battleship that the following day took about 350 hits from heavy shells without sinking.
Bad luck that she got seen by a USN Catalina too.
Bad luck for the Hood that she took a shell from Prinz Eugen straight down her funnel.
Bad luck to strike a mine; bad luck for a submarine when your target randomly changes course and your torpedo misses.
And so on…
Agreed 100%.
Delete‘I know he’s a good general, but is he a lucky general?’ (Napoleon Bonaparte.)
Of course good ship design, good quality construction, good seamanship, a good crew and good training are all important.
But if the God of Battles doesn’t favor you with good luck then basically you’re screwed.
"‘….you make your own luck…’ is just a cliché"
DeleteSorry but it's very much real. Using some of your examples ...
Bismarck did not have bad luck (or, conversely, the British good luck). The Bismarck's "bad luck" was the direct result of stupidly sending Bismarck out without sufficient escorts and no air cover. This was compounded by ineffective anti-aircraft weapons which couldn't even shoot down biplanes! Bismarck made its own "bad luck".
"Bad luck that she got seen by a USN Catalina too."
No, that's stupidity for operating without air cover.
"Bad luck for the Hood that she took a shell"
No, that was poor design resulting in inadequate protection of her magazines. You make (or design!) your own luck.
"Bad luck to strike a mine"
No, that's failure on your part to scout/detect mines.
Without a doubt, you create your own luck. Intelligent designs, good training, armor, etc. create good results which is what we naively refer to as luck without recognizing that we created it. Conversely, poor designs, poor training, foolish planning, poor tactics, etc. create poor results which we naively refer to as "bad luck".
‘Stupidly sending Bismarck out without escorts or air cover’. Not really - the ship’s mission was to break out into the Atlantic and destroy British convoys. German destroyers had a range of about 2,000 miles, compared to Bismarck’s 10,000 miles, so obviously couldn’t serve as escorts, even if the British hadn’t sunk most of German’s destroyers during the Norwegian campaign.
DeleteThe Germans didn’t have aircraft carriers so obviously air cover wasn’t an option, although Bismarck did carry 4 useful armed reconnaissance planes. I guess they missed the Catalina but it got a message away within a minute, so shooting it down wouldn’t have helped much anyway.
Bismarck’s air defense was pretty good, but the torpedo planes were flying about 6’ above the waves, so hard to target, and all this was happening during a force 9 gale, which also was bad luck. So that torpedo hit that jammed the rudder was bad luck too for the Germans, and there wasn’t much they could have done to mitigate the risk of that happening.
If Hood took a shell straight down the funnel (and nobody really knows) it’s never happened before or since, so a one in a million shot, and definitely bad luck imo. A heavy naval shell that bypassed all the armored decks and detonated in the engine room would probably have mission killed the Missouri - a much more modern ship than the Hood.
Obviously all the factors that you mention - intelligent ship design and good training etc. are critical.
But in wartime Lady Luck always has a role to play.
"the ship’s mission"
DeleteThe ship's mission was ill-conceived and tactically unsound. Everything that happened after that was not the result of bad luck; it was the result of an exceedingly foolish operational plan that was doomed to failure and amounted to a suicide mission.
Only an idiot would send a ship out without escorts or air cover. That's a one-way mission, not bad luck.
Hood had a poor design and/or construction. If the funnel is a vulnerability, you don't design the ship with a magazine directly under the funnel. That's not bad luck, that's poor design.
You make your own luck, good or bad. Every commander understands that. Why do you think soldiers train instead of just blindly depending on "luck"? You train to create "good luck" and eliminate "bad luck".
"The ship's mission was ill-conceived and tactically unsound. "
DeleteSpecifically, it was the result of assuming that the partially successful missions of the Deutschland-class cruisers (aka "pocket-battleships") at the start of WWII could be repeated with greater success by a more powerful ship, 18 months later.
It failed to consider what the opponent (the Royal Navy) might have done to make such a mission harder. They'd considerably improved their reconnaissance capabilities, and had the advantages that they knew when Bismarck was likely to sail, and that the initial part of her route was obvious. They didn't have any single ship as powerful as Bismarck, but they had a lot more of them.
Here's the Wiki description of the fatal hit on Hood:
Delete" ... at least one of the 38 cm armour-piercing shells struck Hood and penetrated her thin deck armour. The shell reached Hood's rear ammunition magazine and detonated 112 t (110 long tons) of cordite propellant. The massive explosion broke the back of the ship between the main mast and the rear funnel;"
That's not bad luck, that's poor design and a poor protection scheme.
There’s no shortage of theories about the Hood, and Wiki’s may or may not be correct.
DeleteBut regardless, luck always plays a role in these things.
For the Japanese Midway was a Series of Unfortunate Events (or bad luck), and bad luck again that the carriers weren’t at Pearl that day.
In 1776 Washington was lucky the East River was fogbound and he was able to get his Continentals across to Manhattan.
Frederick the Great was lucky that the Empress Elizabeth died when she did, and lucky too that Peter III was a big fan of Prussia.
In June 1944 we were lucky with the weather, and so on….
You can’t really mitigate against sheer blind chance.
All I'll say is, thank goodness you're not a military commander! I wish you good luck.
Delete😄
DeleteWhen I was in many years ago there was talk of installing sprinkler systems throughout navy combat ships, not just the deck and munitions compartments. This makes sense with smaller crews and have proven great on other ships. You'd thinking losing the USS Boxer would wake up the Navy.
ReplyDeleteIs this now standard? All I found is this from a 2007 article:
"the U.S. Navy’s Naval Sea Systems Command launched a research effort in the early 1990s to develop a suitable fire suppression system without the use of chemicals. A paper by Robert L. Darwin and Dr. Frederick W. Williams noted Navy studies as early as 1978 fighting fires aboard submarines favorably endorsed water mist principles. In Navy tests, “mist was generated by commercial impingement-type atomizing nozzles operated at discharge pressures of 17-27 bar (250-400 psi). Droplets were estimated to measure in the 80-100 micron range. Modest success was achieved in extinguishing flammable liquid pan fires in simulated submarine machinery spaces and torpedo storage rooms.” The technology was not used at that time but since then, following more research and tests, water mist fire suppression systems have been specified for the Navy’s LPD-17. "
The only problem with throughout the ship sprinkler systems is that any compartment taking a major hit will likely see the system breached. Sure, it can be isolated and shut off, but you still need DC sailors to do that, and likely still go in with a hose team to extinguish a fire if present. The fire main systems on ships, if damaged, can hazard DC efforts, and the the ship through loss of pressure. The bit of DC principle I learned aboard ship showed a tendancy to minimize it, in order to make it a smaller target for damage. Now, how much that is true in the minds of the actual ship designers, I have no idea.
ReplyDeleteThe only automatic DC systems that make sense to me are the mainspace halon systems. And even then, there are drawbacks...