THE SHOWBOAT engages THE IRON CHANCELLOR

No. Technical advisors, yes. 

It sure was and it sure is

One could tell a rocket from a telephone pole and could read your secret mail if you were stupid enough to give her a peek. The other was an actress who knew more about multi-channel and frequency hopping sonar than its "purported" inventors.

.

Somebody tells Karl to use sealed orders couriered mission instructions, one way no-reply C3I, and stay off the blasted radio. And let his staff actually do their jobs instead of be errand boys for Ego "I control everything" Karl. 

That was standard USN protocol. In the period, the sealed mission instructions was something like, "locate and identify unknown contacts" then "pass on an unfriendly contact" position and identity it as an "unfriendly contact" to "friendly nations".  When encountered, "the unfriendly contact" was to "initiate engagement actions". The level of hostile intent was left to the US commander's discretion.  He could "shoot, no-shoot" based on his risk assessment that the "unfriendly contact" posed to his command. 

It was not as generally supposed, "harass the Germans and provoke them, then shoot them" as anti-Roosevelt historians maintain. The orders were clear that the Germans had to initiate a "hostile intent". The judgment call left to the commander's discretion in the orders was to decide when that hostile intent meant open fire. 

Most US commanders assumed that the Germans were to shoot first. Once the Germans shot, the standing instruction in the SOP was to "destroy the hostile contact". That was doctrine and not necessary to put into written orders.

As to the JAPANESE... US submariners had written orders that required a broadcasted no-reply radio signal to implement.  "Execute unrestricted air and sea warfare against the Empire of Japan."  This was broadcast six hours after Pearl Harbor, but before the formal declaration of war.   That was in Plan Orange.   
   

Plan Orange (1935). It was standard boilerplate written into each mission orders packet issued to a sub skipper. He was not allowed to break the nine power, Washington or London conventions on submarine warfare and cruiser rules, nor the Versailles Treaty on same until the POTUS issued the order through the chain of responsibility and the sub skipper received that no-reply radio order.  Once it was broadcasted, anything Japanese afloat, except hospital ships, was to be killed without mercy.


      

Reposted here for technical commentary.

Article: a non-British or non-German analysis.

My comments: in summary; Holland lost situation awareness and track merge solution about two hours before the gunfight commenced. He was committed to a lag pursuit solution instead of a lead pursuit solution. In plain English, this gave the Germans the initiative as to engage no engage, or what in the parlance of the time was called the 'weather gauge'. The Germans could dictate approach angles and aspects and offsets. The British were compelled to respond to German maneuver initiative. It can be best described as having the ability to dictate what distance one wants in the gunfight and how much broadside one wants to show and how many barrels to bring into action. Holland conceded this to Lutjens. Now Lutjens was a tactical ninny who did not maneuver to exploit his position and aspect advantage, so it was a much more even merge than it should have been. Holland "might" have been able to at least even out the fight by getting into "belt punching range" and adopting parallel order opposite course sailing. That is what appears he attempted. Lutjens seems to have been acceptable to this outcome, because he made no counterturn to maintain his position advantage. The critical moment comes when Holland's lag pursuit merge requires the turn to bring on the parallel order fight. The Germans have been over, short, straddle, straddle and then hit into the HMS Hood's vitals. Whether this was at the armor step abaft the aft funnels or a submerged shell that ricocheted through the torpedo defense and thence UNDER the protective belt at that local, the result was some kind of primary explosion that set off a secondary explosion, with observed fires and then a tertiary explosion that set off the after main propellant charges stowage. Hood separated into two parts and sank quickly, possibly in as little as 250 seconds with almost no survivors.             

Contributing human and technical factors to the disaster were OBVIOUS.
a. Neither Hood nor Prince of Wales had worked up crews. They were "green". 
b. Not understood at the time and still not well known today, was that the Prince of Wales was a badly designed and built piece of junk, neither well thought out, nor ever mechanically reliable. Too many design faults from reliability in train and elevation issues with the guns and barbettes to the lousy fire control setup, as well as the well-known and associated electrical and hydraulic issues plagued her until her demise with Force Z. 
c. British ammunition stowage and propellant choices was not brilliant either on the Hood or the Prince of Wales. Not that this was a lone problem for the British. It took Pearl Harbor to show the Americans that they had to wake up to their own potential one hit catastrophes (USS Arizona), too. The damnable fault was that the British already knew their ammunition stowage and propellant volatility was an issue from WWI. It was a Jutland lesson. Did they correct for it? Hood blew up. Bismarck burned down. All the Americans could determine from their history with an eerie mirror of the Royal Navy, the Japanese navy, was that one in the belly and Japanese battleships tended to explode rather than burn down. Mutsu and Yamato, Yamashiro, and Fuso, even Kongo went that way. Kirishima, Hei and Musashi were burndowns, so it was not a universal Japanese event, but it was curious that most Japanese ships went up. In the British case: Royal Oak, Prince of Wales, Hood and Barham were actual one hit kills. So much for that theory of the "golden BB".                  
d. Much is made of the problems Prince of Wales had with her radar and her tracking party when it came to fire control and track solution. That in retrospect goes directly to training the crew and working up the ship properly. It turns out, however, that Prince of Wales with her five intermittently working guns and all her other defects and her green crew did score straddles on the Bismarck's track. No hits, but her ladders did drop all around the German battleship. Bad luck? Who knows? Hood was the actual one with trouble with overs and shorts and not finding the range in time before Bismarck killed her. Hood was supposed to be the champion shooter in the Royal Navy. So; what happened there? My best guess is that with draw-offs of experienced rates to man the ever increasing numbers of new RN ships, that key Hood technical trained talent was not present and that her tracking party and radar techs were as green as the PoW's. That may be why Hood's forward radar was also a mechanical casualty during the engagement, too. No maintenance pulled or repairs prior to engagement happened? Very likely; the Hood's electronics division or whatever the RN equivalent to this USN party, failed this elemental tasking.         

So... 

 Holland lost merge track awareness, knew his ships' crews were green, understood his ships were not mechanically on par with requirements for a technically ready enemy. In addition: he scattered his support forces to find Lutjens and thus frittered away any concentration of force and mutual support assets he had. He was under some political pressure and military necessity to find the Germans and force an engagement, so one might "excuse" sending off the destroyers and not bringing the cruisers in.  Is it still fair to suggest that he should have won the engagement in spite of these circumstances? 

He tried hard. I suspect that he could have at least fought to a draw if he had been able to bring on a parallel order fight as he obviously wanted. He faced a lousy German tactician in Lutjens who handled his own ships like rubber ducks in an Atlantic bathtub. It thus came strictly down to shooting during the merge. The Germans were better shots and got theirs in first. That was of course all Lindemann.   
 

You are welcome.

The basics will get a rate qualified, but not team ready.
It is not readily recognized even now . It took me a while to understand that faults with gun lay, fire control, the radar being out, flag signals, had one common cause. The crew was not a 'snap to it' kind of crew as the 1930s Hood crew was reputed to be. This was a war depleted crew and ship with many new men, much as the hitherto superb US PacFlt, becomes around this same time with frenzied fleet expansion and transfer of experienced men out of key slots.

I wonder why? 
For those who have never had to refresh perishable skills, there is "rote drill" and "skill drill". Rote drill is like memorizing a set routine, which for a civilian in civilian terms is like driving a car. Once a person learns the basics, it stays. But one gets rusty and has to refresh and refine the practice, if one has not been in a car for a while. Skill drill is being introduced to a new way of driving. Before you used a wheel. Now you use a joystick. Different enough that you have to do the thing you were taught in a new way, still using the basic theory of driving, but applying a new method. A Pre-commission unit (PCU) is like that. If you have the theory, it seems a new boot, will be easier to teach the new method to apply the theory, but it never works that way. The skill drill has to have an experienced teacher cadre to check-sum the new operators individually and in their teams to make sure they understand how to mesh process and execute intent properly. 
         
The hard part is when the "teachers" themselves have to unlearn old methods and learn the new methods in the skill drill.
Funny thing is, they do it with officers, too. USS Connecticut seems to have had this problem. But to get to cases, someone "I" know got assigned to an up or out, and boloed his assignment.  His "lack of confidence" letter was the result of his looking past his current assignment to bring a new system online; to his future employment as a consultant on that system, in the civilian sector.  He took his eye off the current mission because he was an apple polisher and careerist.          
More on that clown a bit later on.  

Whether it is a missile system, a plane or a ship, the problems with a new model or concept type can be a NIGHTMARE. It comes down to first iteration is the one that never really works. In the case of this thread, it is the KGVs which were the nightmare. This was a radical departure of Royal Navy practice in that the guns, propulsion system, fire control and even the ship layout tried radical new things that were unusual for the RN. And the first of the KGVs, was the HMS King George the Fifth. The Prince of Wales was supposed to be the ship that fixed the KGV's mistakes! As 2nd out of the gate, how did that work out? Not too good. 

Part of the reason was that in the rush to build the KGVs, the RN did NOT allow a break in period for first of class. They carbon copied the mistakes and all that continued clear to the Duke of York, which STILL had the gun and fire control faults of the KGVs at the Battle of North Cape.  
         
Oh; about that clown? He got that job he wanted after he was kicked out, with the aircraft company who was responsible for producing that new system. It still will never work properly, since the fundamentals built into the system were based on a man-machine interface design logic error. He let it slide through even though his people told him it was wrong. It, the mismatch, causes an uncontrollable pitch down fault which will crash a plane so equipped with that system.  It is being fixed, but like another design fault, created by the same company, which caused another aerial vehicle to blow up due to a fuel contamination problem, the burden to the taxpayers to hire a THIRD company to change out THAT crap system should not have happened. It will cost billions and has delayed us a decade for the new system and has forced us to retrain aircrews and kind of reinvent the wheel.    

30 tries and they still did not get it right? I thought Elmo Zumwalt was sniffing glue when he okayed those garbage hulls. Only thing that made them even remotely adequate is that Bath Iron Works remembered that the ships had to give the sailors half a chance after they were hit.

Remember Seafighter? If I could take a committee of "practical persons" into a closed room with Wayne Hughes, maybe we collectively could kinetically instill common sense into that lunatic. The point being, that one should distribute launch platforms across the battlespace and not pile 80% of your offense into a dozen hulls, but one has to intelligently distribute the launch platforms and make them survivable to RELOAD. Not only that, but build cheap and you build useless. The control units have to be able to survive.  The expendables should be unmanned. 

Two things:

a. the character of Queeg (movie version), if I recall correctly, was a recycled Battle of the Atlantic veteran in the novel, who had his destroyer sunk under him. In the novel, his prior command experience was "zero".

b. Keefer, in the novel, is promoted to command and folds up under pressure during a crisis, just like Queeg did. It happens in a navy that is wartime forced to take any and all "supposedly qualified" officers and put them in command of something to get the job done. Queeg gets a depot in Iowa and Maryk is sent to command an LCI as his reward for not being a "team player" and in my humble opinion, deservedly so.

And I always suspected that Herman Wouk wrote "The Caine Mutiny" to expiate the "Keefer" he thought he saw in himself. Murphy knows, if I were in a Halsey Typhoon, I would not be too sure about my 'rectitude' as regards Halsey's orders and then disobedience by turning into the wind on my own initiative as many a captain had to do.

But then I have a sour opinion of Halsey as a fleet handler, though NOT as a leader of men. Sometimes one needs a fool to grab the flag and yell charge, so that others will follow.  


It is not a waste of time, so long as one can always bring it back to this ATL and this topic.

And that brings us to this man...Admiral of the Fleet John Cronyn Tovey, 1st Baron Tovey, GCB, KBE, DSO

He managed and or led the battle to defeat Operation Rhine. 

I will keep this short. I sort of agree with Admiral Cunningham, that John Tovey lacked the necessary mentality to handle a battle fleet. He, Tovey, at the Battle of Cape Espero, diddled at long range and refused to close the deal. The italians mostly completed their  mission and in the doing of it, Tovey shot off a lot of scarce RN ammunition reserves and gained very little for the effort.

Now we look at Exercise Rhine. SEE MAP.
 
    

We see that Tovey has two tracked his forces. He sent Lancelot Holland ahead and north of his track to cut off an exit to the Denmark Strait. 



As a consequence of misuse of shore based recon, Tovey has no idea of where Lutjens is until Positive ID is made by British cruisers in the Denmark Strait. Holland rendezvoused and fights and loses the battle of the Denmark Strait for the reasons given above in this thread and the incredibly incompetgent Wake Walker, who should have been court martialed and cashiered, mishandles the continued shadow mission and misuses the Prince of Wales and his own forces in the pursuit. 

Meanwhile Tovey has digested the first results / reports of the Battle of the Denmark Strait. What has he concluded? The Germans have a terrifying technical edge in gunnery and training over the British. Their admiral apparently easily trounced an experienced British tactician (Lancelot Holland) and the current British commander (Wake Walker) has difficulty in maintaining intermittent contact and is about to lose it.     

Tovey bungles his air search plan, and HMS Victorious, her planes guided in by HMS Norfolk after they get lost, covers herself ingloriously with a one "miracle hit" that yielded a no-results outcome on Bismarck's belt armor. 

The British try again with HMS Ark Royal. if the RN wants to brag about this performance, then they better include malfunctioning torpedoes as the only reason they did not own goal HMS Sheffield and or SINK the USCG cutter Modoc.  I have little praise for Harold Somerville, but even by his "iffy" fleet handling standards, this was a poor show. And anyway his bungled first attack would not have been possible without Leonard B. Smith USN, who gave an ACCURATE contact position report to the British and homed them in on the correct target and they still muffed it. Somerville tries again (contact exploders, not magnetic influence), and it turns out that this attack is the rudder jamming doom blow that will kill Bismarck. This attack By the way was launched at 40 nm distance between HMS Ark Royal and KMS Bismark. So one wonders "what were the British thinking"?   

So: we have a circle in the water cutting Bismarck and Tovey closing with cruisers destroyers and battleships, specifically Rodney and King George the V. They merge tracks and what does Tovey see and decide? He sees the British ships backlit by the sun and the Bismarck obscured by twilight. Tovey decides to wait to put the sun at the British favor and have it silhouette Bismarck in the morning to British advantage in the morning. When the shoot-ex commences, it is RODNEY who takes the lead, since Tovey has qualms about the KGV.  And it is all OPTICAL fire control on the British side. Weather (wind, sea state, and spray made nonsense of the sun positioning plan so, Tovey had to engage from the NW. to keep wind shear from driving shells laterally off mark. It that gun action was a jittery affair with the Rodney doing the heavy British lifting until she scored a forward fire control system knockout on Bismarck about twenty four minutes or 25 Rodney salvoes into the engagement.  The neutralization of Bismarck at about ten minutes after that event occurred with the Bismarck's main armament and after fire control system suppressed. All this time, the KGV was me-tooing with no discernible conclusive effect. It was Rodney who closed to point blank range and hammered the Bismarck into a wreck. It must be remarked that the cruisers Norfolk and Dorsetshire joined in the gun-ex. 
        
At this moment, one wonders where are the torpedoes? Note that the British fired almost 2,800 large caliber shells and scored only 400 hits for 14% PH. This is LOUSY shooting by AMERICAN standards by the time the Rodney launches and misses with her 2 torpedoes at 3,000 yards. Now, whether or not the Germans scuttled or the Dorsetshire sent her to the bottom at the end, the fact remains that this gun-action shows a healthy British respect for the harm that even a crippled and mission killed Bismarck class battleship could do to the existent battleships and cruisers of the Royal Navy.    

And it shows a rather cautious British admiralty at work. 

This, I remark, is what one sees in Tovey. It is NOT what one will see in Willis Lee or Henry Kent Hewitt, or Jesse Oldendorff or the skippers of Hoel, Johnson, or Roberts, or Juneau, or San Francisco, or Houston or Salt Lake City or just about any US warship of that era whose captain is not a gutless craven coward like Capt Howard Douglas “Count, Boad, Ping” Bode.    .