Naval History Forums

Regarding these 'missing' files, It would be, I think, appropriate to at least post the archival file numbers for the material in question so that other researchers can recover and review the files themselves. If I am provided copies of the original files, I will be glad to try to prepare a precis o...

Please, gentlemen -- or at least the few gentlemen to which this applies -- do try to keep the conversation civil. I have had to make a number of redactions today, and do not feel up to having to read every word of every post in order to police these issues. It's too much work. If unnecessary or inf...

While I wouldn't consider PoWs gunnery performance exemplary by any means, it is difficult to tell exactly what proportion of her difficulties can be ascribed to poor-training and lack of experience, and what proportion might be ascribed to the fact that she was hit so severely by Bismarck and Prinz...

One of the problems we have revolves around a lack of provenance regarding the source of -- and in some cases the actual content of -- material held in the German archives. Regarding still and film photography, and particularly imagery displayed for public consumption during the war, one might best ...

For what it's worth, my information on British 14" and 15" bullets was that they used single driving bands, i.e. a single driving band seat. The Germans in contrast, seem to have preferred to use two driving bands.

Bill Jurens

Wadinga wrote: "It has been suggested that "violent heeling" can result from as little as 10 degrees of course change. I would be interested to hear further comment on this assertion. " A good deal, I suppose, might depend upon one's idea of 'violent'. In general, because the course changes rather s...

My thanks to Mr. Rico for taking the time to delete some personal commentary which I (and likely others) might have found offensive. It's probably better that way. I am sure that most readers realize that the intent of deleting commentary is not to muzzle discussion, but to prevent the posting of be...

While I'm on a roll (rant?) I might as well comment a little bit more on the heel of Prince of Wales during the turn around the wreck of Hood. Presumably all agree that such a turn occurred, although the precise nature of the turn, recorded only anecdotally, is difficult to assess. There are three m...

@HMSVF: Thank you for your comments. I have already commented that in the case of Prince of Wales, where some fairly detailed records survive, shooting appears to have been relatively poor near the beginning of the action. So far as I know, there are no reliable records listing the time or sequence ...

I regret that in the interests of keeping productive discussion alive, I have been forced to take the unusual step of deleting certain commentary posted by Mr. Virtuani in a previous post. The posting has been modified to show that deletions have been made. Although in this case only Mr. Virtuani wa...

OK, Gentlement, it's clearly time for both sides to begin backing off a bit. I did make a posting suggesting this earlier today, but for some reason -- this seems to happen about 10% of the time -- it never appeared, and I can see that since that time, things have gotten considerably more belligeren...

A good deal of the validity of the table, at least as it seems to be being discussed here, would seem to revolve around its derivation of the rate of fire being based upon a fire duration of 14 minutes. Assuming that to be true -- and it may not be if, for example, one or both of the open fire and c...

For what it's worth, I don't feel that the sample size in the Denmark Strait action is large enough to determine with any degree of reliability whether one ship or another was shooting "better" that day. Had the ships, for whatever reasons, fired target practices on successive days the day to day va...

My sense of it is that Bismarck would have been equipped with remote power in train. Insofar as we have, at least so far as I know, no surviving records of her ability to shoot and hit while in the midst of a turn, her effectiveness in attempting such an operation is questionable -- having the capab...

Mr. Virtuani has a point. I take it Wadinga's argument, insinuations (if intended) removed, is that some material in the quote has been either taken out of context and/or that additional and relevant material has been omitted. In that regard, might it be helpful for someone to post more of the state...