The Texas also cost a lot more, but it had gone without maintenance for much longer, too.
(Also being scrupulously fair, the Texas is now out of dry dock and in a new permanent location. On the other hand, the Texas was in dry dock for 18 months, not the two months estimated for the New Jersey, and anyone who wanted to had plenty of opportunities to go see it.)
$1,000? Really? Nothing against Mr. Szimanski: I do watch the New Jersey YouTube channel sometimes. But $775 seems like a steep YouTube premium. (As I recall, the dry dock tour of the Texas was $150.)
It is kind of nice to see the New Jersey is selling merch (though they already had an online store). But can you get Battleship New Jersey 1911 grips? As far as I can tell, no.
(Okay, that’s a trick question: you can’t get Battleship Texas 1911grips either. Except for the deck pattern ones, which I personally don’t like. The other two patterns seem to come into stock and sell out very fast. One of these days I might be lucky enough to snag a pair.)
What’s the takeway from this, other than dry dock tours of old battleships are fun?
If I had thought about it, I would have prepared a longer post. However, I’ve been distracted by other projects, and would have completely missed this if it wasn’t for McThag.
(Edited to add: I should clarify, since this is a little confusing: the “Texas” above is the 1892 USS Texas, not the 1914 USS Texas.)
Side note: one of the tour guides at the Texas made an interesting comment, and I’d like to do more research on this. In brief, the Germans pioneered modern welding.
Because of arms limitation treaties after WWI, the weight of battleships was limited. If you rivet battleship plates together, you have to overlap the plates. But if you weld battleship plates, you can basically butt the plates together rather than overlapping. This allows you to use less plate. Less plate means bigger battleship within the weight limitations.
I’d really like to find some good sources on welding history. I think that’d be a technically interesting area to explore.
Anyway, remembering the Maine: somewhere I have what I believe is a first edition of Rickover’s How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed. (Affiliate link goes to a Naval Institute Press reprint edition.)
Edited to add 2: Thanks to valued commenter Chuck Pergiel for providing a link to his post on the Maine.
Drachinfel. This one is short:
The USS New Jersey. This is a little under 30 minutes.
Father O’Callahan was a good Boston boy. Shortly after he graduated from high school in 1922, he signed up with the Jesuits.
He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1934. Along the way, he picked up a BA and a MA from St. Andrew’s College, “specializing in mathematics and physics”. He was a professor of math, physics, and philosophy at Boston College for 10 years (1927-1937), then he went over to Weston Jesuit School of Theology for a year. From 1938 to 1940 he served as the director of the math department at the College of the Holy Cross.
He enlisted in the United States Navy Reserve Chaplain Corps in August of 1940 as a lieutenant junior grade. But I gather he was pretty good at his job: by July of 1945 he had reached the rank of commander. He participated in Operation Torch and Operation Leader.
On March 2, 1945, Commander O’Callahan reported to the aircraft carrier USS Franklin.
On March 19, 1945, the Franklin was hit by two bombs from a Japanese aircraft. The bombs started a massive fire on the carrier deck.
There is a short documentary, “The Saga of the Franklin“, that you can find on the Internet Archive.
Commander O’Callahan was offered the Navy Cross, but refused it. There is speculation that his refusal had to do with “his heroic actions on USS Franklin highlighted perceived lapses in leadership by the ship’s commanding officer, Captain Leslie E. Gehres, which reflected poorly on the Navy”. Wikipedia claims there was a controversy at the time, Harry Truman stepped in…
Father O’Callahan retired from the Navy in 1948 and headed the math department at The College of the Holy Cross. He also wrote a book, I Was Chaplain on the Franklin (affiliate link).
He died in 1964 at the age of 58, and is buried in the Jesuit cemetery at The College of the Holy Cross. The destroyer USS O’Callahan was named after him.
One of Father O’Callahan’s students at Holy Cross before the war was John V. Power, who also received the Medal of Honor (posthumously).
In honor of the late G. Gordon Liddy, how about a tour of the Watergate Hotel?
Bonus #1: I’m kind of bending one of my own rules here, but I’m thinking of this less as military history and more as “also inspired by current events”.
The Battleship New Jersey folks put up a video the other day about transiting the Suez and Panama canals.
Bonus #2: What the heck, let’s do some more ships. From the “Great British Royal Ships” series, “RMS Queen Mary”.
This is a short film from the 1980s about Lloyd’s of London and how it works.
Something that I find kind of interesting is the Lloyd’s Open Form (LOF). The basic idea is: if something comes up at sea that requires a salvage operation, the two parties (the one being salvaged and the one doing the salvaging) sign a LOF.
Back in 1978, an oil tanker, the Amoco Cadiz, ran into some problems: it encountered a storm that damaged the rudder and caused a hydraulic fluid leak. The captain called for assistance: the responding salvor wanted the captain to agree to a LOF.
One of the books I’ve read on the subject states that the captain was resistant to signing a LOF, as he felt he’d be signing an open-ended commitment, while the salvors were reluctant to proceed without a LOF. Ultimately, the captain agreed, but the situation had deteriorated…
…and the Amoco Cadiz ran aground off the coast of Brittany and dumped over 220,000 tons (metric) of oil into the sea.
Semi-related, because we’re talking about oil: “Fires of Kuwait”. For once, something in high-res.
Today, December 7th, 2020, a date which will live in infamy…
…having reached a certain age, I have a doctor’s appointment this morning for a routine procedure, and expect to be out of it for a bit.
(I’ll take the 15 yard penalty for oversharing.)
So I’m scheduling this post in advance. Given the history of the day, the fact that I’ve only linked to him once, the fact that these are short-ish, and the fact that I’m a lazy shiftless blogger who is (I hope) lying around in pajamas and slippers right now, I thought I’d link to Drachinifel‘s series on the salvage of Pearl Harbor.
I thought it might be fun today to go down to the sea in ships…
…which (because I am a jerk) promptly sink. Since today is Saturday, I feel like I can run a bit long, at least for this first one. The bonus videos are all shorter.
“The Shocking Truths Of King Henry VIII’s Ship The Mary Rose”.
Bonus #1: One of the things I’d like to do before I die is to see the Vasa.
Vasa or Wasa[a] (Swedish pronunciation: [²vɑːsa] is a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628. The ship foundered after sailing about 1,300 m (1,400 yd) into her maiden voyage on 10 August 1628. She fell into obscurity after most of her valuable bronze cannon were salvaged in the 17th century until she was located again in the late 1950s in a busy shipping area in Stockholm harbor. The ship was salvaged with a largely intact hull in 1961. She was housed in a temporary museum called Wasavarvet (“The Vasa Shipyard”) until 1988 and then moved permanently to the Vasa Museum in the Royal National City Park in Stockholm. The ship is one of Sweden’s most popular tourist attractions and has been seen by over 35 million visitors since 1961. Since her recovery, Vasa has become a widely recognised symbol of the “Swedish Empire”.
I’m putting this here only because I know one person who might like it: Bill Burr rants about the Vasa.
Bonus video #2: More seriously…a 4K video tour of the Vasa Museum from 2015.
Today, random. First up: “RMS Titanic: Fascinating Engineering Facts”. This actually talks about both Olympic and Titanic, and (unlike a lot of Titanic stuff) concentrates more on the engineering and shipbuilding: basically, how do you build and launch something that big?
This is only science adjacent, but I wanted to post this as a tribute: James Randi appears on “I’ve Got a Secret”.
And since that was only science adjacent, James Randi’s TED talk on homeopathy, quackery and fraud. I generally hesitate to link to TED talks, but this is an exception.
More Randi: this time, talking about Uri Geller and Geller’s “repudiation” of his claims to have psychic powers.
(As a side note, when Randi died, I got to wondering what Uri Geller was up to these days. I ran across this amusing bit from Geller’s Wikipedia entry.
Have you ever wondered, “How do they build those massive freaking mirrors for really big telescopes?” I’ve read some stuff about how the mirror for the Hale Telescope was built in the 1930s and 1940s, but today?
Finally: you’ve seen the footage. But do you know the engineering reason(s) why the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed?
The plan for today’s video went out the window because I watched the video I was thinking about using. I won’t name it here, but it was from a channel I don’t usually watch, and was about a subject I thought would be amusing. Unfortunately, it turned out to be kind of draggy and more boring than I expected.
So, instead, I thought I’d fall back to some actual history today. I finished listening to “The History of Rome” a few weeks ago, and vacillated for a while about subscribing to “Revolutions“. Not because I didn’t like “The History of Rome”: I thoroughly enjoyed it, and commend it to your attention. But having cleared out my backlog of one podcast, did I want to immediately start a backlog of another podcast?
In the end, I decided “yes” because Mike Duncan is currently covering the Russian revolutions (1905 and 1917), he’s taking an extended break between 1905 and 1917 to work on his new book (Citizen Lafayette, which I don’t see listed on Amazon yet), and he’s announced that he is wrapping up “Revolutions” after the Russian revolutions are done. So like “The History of Rome”, there’s a defined limit, and I have time to catch up. Plus there’s structure to “Revolutions” that allows me to listen in blocks of episodes, rather than crunching through from episode 1 to the end.
Anyway, Mr. Duncan recommended these two videos in episode 10.35, and I liked them enough to feature here, even if they are a bit long. I find Drachinifel kind of funny: almost like a good stand-up comedian.
It helps that, in this first video, he’s got naturally funny material to work with: the Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron. Or, as he refers to it, “Voyage of the Damned”, one of the most messed up operations in naval history. Start with the decision to send the fleet on an 18,000 mile voyage with no friendly naval bases for resupply and refueling. Add in the fact that many of the ships in the fleet weren’t designed for operations in this environment, and were rather dated. Then add in the fact that many of the officers were incompetent drunks, and the crews lacked experience.
Hilarity ensued. The 2nd Pacific Squadron nearly started a war with the United Kingdom, narrowly managed to avoid some other incidents because their gunnery was incompetent (and they didn’t have enough ammunition loaded for practice), turned their ships into a zoo (complete with a poisonous snake that bit an officer) and an opium den, and the list goes on. I think this is one of those historical moments that justifies the use of the word “fiasco“.
Bonus #1: Unfortunately, the punchline to the voyage of the dammed isn’t quite as funny: the Battle of Tsushima. In which, having sailed 18,000 miles, the 2nd Pacific Squadron confronts the Japanese navy…and gets slaughtered.
I’m easing into the July 4th weekend myself. So there’s no overarching theme here, other than: America!
“Grayhounds of the Sea”, a history of U.S. Navy destroyers, narrated by none other than Mr. Jack Webb.
Ordnance Lab builds a replica of the Syrian Hell Cannon Mortar. This is part 1: as far as I can tell, they haven’t posted part 2 yet. (The Wuhan Flu probably has something to do with that. But it looks like they’ve been doing stuff recently with the Roomba-Boomba.)
“Ten Years To Remember”. This is a promo film from the Martin Company (which later merged and became Martin Marietta, and even later on merged again and became Lockheed Martin) from 1964, covering ten years of rocket development.
1972 NASA promo film for Skylab. I’ve always been kind of partial to Skylab.
I was only going to do three, but this one popped up, and it is short: a tribute to Robin Olds from AirForceTV.
So we have an answer: no, they aren’t “too big to sail”, since the Nimitz-class ships seem to be working just fine.
More seriously, the article is the usual naval gazing about whether cruise ships have become so big that the safety of passengers can’t be guaranteed. This seems to be more of a question about ship design, crew staffing levels, and safety equipment.
Mini golf? I am there, man. (Doesn’t it seem kind of odd that a cruise ship would have mini golf, while mini golf courses all over the country have been closing? I realize that land is probably more valuable for purposes other than mini golf, but as big as these cruise ships are, isn’t their real estate limited as well?)
(Yes, I know I’m citing Wikipedia, but that’s just because that’s the first reference I can easily lay hands on. The argument that lifeboats weren’t needed because the Titanic was her own best lifeboat is mentioned in pretty much every Titanic history I’ve read, so pick your favorite.)
Hmmmm. One wonders what percentage of that “35% percent” turnover is among ship’s officers, crew, and other people who are important for safety? And what percentage is among people like cooks, restaurant workers, maids, and other people who are, shall we say, less important to the safety of a cruise ship?
