Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Discussions about the history of the ship, technical details, etc.

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Alberto Virtuani
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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by Alberto Virtuani »

Hello everybody,

the anger of Mr:Dunmunro is apparent from his post, after he tried to say that 208 and 180 hm in BS KTB were referred to Hood...... :lol:

There is NOTHING in the PG KTB that poin to Hood explosion at 5:58, except in Mr.Dunmunro desperate attempt to change well known timings. Jasper report says PoW reached Hood position at 6:01, thus Hood explosion at 6:00 beause there is NO WAY that a ship broken in two can proceed by 1 mile before being reached by PoW, so his theory is (as usual) totally unsupported.


Bye, Alberto
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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by dunmunro »

Alberto Virtuani wrote: Wed Jul 04, 2018 7:19 am Hello everybody,

the anger of Mr:Dunmunro is apparent from his post, after he tried to say that 208 and 180 hm in BS KTB were referred to Hood...... :lol:

There is NOTHING in the PG KTB that poin to Hood explosion at 5:58, except in Mr.Dunmunro desperate attempt to change well known timings. Jasper report says PoW reached Hood position at 6:01, thus Hood explosion at 6:00 beause there is NO WAY that a ship broken in two can proceed by 1 mile before being reached by PoW, so his theory is (as usual) totally unsupported.


Bye, Alberto
More correctly there's nothing in the PE War Diary that you want to discuss because it undercuts your favourite theory. The timing of PE's salvos against Hood and their correlation with the fatal salvo from Bismarck are "clearly" stated in Jasper and Schmalenbach's statements which I quoted on Fri Jun 29, 2018 12:59 am. Much of Hood's damage was caused by implosion as she sank. After the after magazines detonated Hood would have still continued to move forward for a considerable distance. Hopefully Bill Jurens will share his thought on that subject.
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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by Alberto Virtuani »

Hello everybody,

the theory of a ship broken in two that moves forward for 1 mile is simply fantastic.

Jasper report is clear that only at 6:01 PoW reached Hood remains and this points to Hood explosion at 6:00 as per most of the timings witnessed by German and British side, as discussed already.

Hunter-Terry (the witness considered the most precise by the board) is crystal clear about the sequence of events and the Hood explosion time: 6:00.


Bye, Alberto
"It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition" (Adm.A.B.Cunningham)

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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by dunmunro »

Alberto Virtuani wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2018 7:46 am Hello everybody,

the theory of a ship broken in two that moves forward for 1 mile is simply fantastic.

Jasper report is clear that only at 6:01 PoW reached Hood remains and this points to Hood explosion at 6:00 as per most of the timings witnessed by German and British side, as discussed already.

Hunter-Terry (the witness considered the most precise by the board) is crystal clear about the sequence of events and the Hood explosion time: 6:00.


Bye, Alberto
Hood took about 3 minutes to sink. She was moving at ~1000 yds/min when the magazine exploded. Hood's speed would have declined rapidly as she sank, but not instantaneously, and she probably moved forward about ~500 yds/min average for the 3 minutes or so before she sank. Therefore it would have taken PoW about ~2.5 minutes to overtake the wreck, and probably a bit longer because of her turns to avoid the wreck.

Terry Hunter is just one of many witnesses to the loss:
Here's the timing of events as recorded by Suffolk:
Phase 0550 (B) to 0851 (B)

18. 0550 (B). Suffolk's course 220°, 29 knots, following the enemy.

0553 (B). Heavy gun flashes bearing 185°. Half a minute later Bismarck opened fire to port.

0556½ (B). Prinz Eugen opened fire to port.

0559 (B). Hood blew up.

0600 (B). Enemy bore 208°.

(Suffolk/Ellis narrative)
Suffolk was not firing nor being fired at and consequently could make accurate notes.

If we correct the timing to match PoW's salvo chart we get:

0552:30 Hood opens fire
~0553:00-05 Bismarck open fire (confirmed by Leach, Rowell, Brooke)
0556 PE opens fire
0558:30 Hood blows up just after PE's 6th salvo lands and is witnessed by Schmalenbach.

and we have accurate timing via the PoW salvo chart, which points to ~0558 or earlier as the timing for the fatal hit
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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by José M. Rico »

dunmunro wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2018 9:39 pmHood took about 3 minutes to sink. She was moving at ~1000 yds/min when the magazine exploded. Hood's speed would have declined rapidly as she sank, but not instantaneously, and she probably moved forward about ~500 yds/min average for the 3 minutes or so before she sank.
Hood took about 3 minutes to disappear under the waves, but only a few seconds to break in two following the magazine explosion. The idea the ship could have moved forward for 1,500 yards after the bow portion began raising from the water is...

Image
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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by dunmunro »

José M. Rico wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2018 11:34 pm
dunmunro wrote: Thu Jul 05, 2018 9:39 pmHood took about 3 minutes to sink. She was moving at ~1000 yds/min when the magazine exploded. Hood's speed would have declined rapidly as she sank, but not instantaneously, and she probably moved forward about ~500 yds/min average for the 3 minutes or so before she sank.
Hood took about 3 minutes to disappear under the waves, but only a few seconds to break in two following the magazine explosion. The idea the ship could have moved forward for 1,500 yards after the bow portion began raising from the water is...

Image


The rear of the ship was blown off, but Hood continued to move forward and slowly rolled onto her side. Then the after part of the ship filled with water, allowing the bow to rise (how can the bow rise almost vertically unless there is sufficient weight aft to counterbalance the heavy bow?) and the painting shows about 430 ft (50%) of the ship suspended above the water. That indicates that the ship was mostly intact from the engine rooms forward and ~35000 tons of ship doesn't stop instantly. Both PE maps indicate about 2.5 minutes for the geometry of the painting, relative to PE, to occur.

Do you really think Hood simply stopped completely after the fatal hit? What could possibly cause that? The explosion of the after magazines would actually add thrust to the forward part of hull, and the ship would not stop it's forward motion until sufficient hydrodynamic drag was created and this probably didn't occur until the ship was mostly submerged and until then Hood's momentum would carry her forward, albeit whilst rapidly decelerating.
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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by Bill Jurens »

A few quick comments:

The painting is, to put it mildly, highly imaginative. It would be physically impossible for the bow to have been raised in the air that much.

Although there are admittedly few (if any) full-scale tests of how battleships might slow down after their sterns have been removed by explosion, it's my opinion that the extreme drag caused by the severed hull, plus stability (both transverse and directional) would have resulted in rather little forward motion -- perhaps two or three ship lengths -- before the bow section turned sideways, became nearly stationary, and plunged.

On other issues, it's worth noting that in many cases it's impossible with a 'minute by minute' account to correlate supposedly simultaneous issues within a couple of minutes. Assuming clocks were being read correctly, incidents logged at (let's say) 0600 and 0601 are not likely to actually be anything like a minute apart. The one-minute difference is really just a very rough average. In reality, if one event occurred at 0600:59, and the other at 0601:01, the difference would be only two seconds. Similarly, if one event had been logged at 0600:01 and the other at 0606:59, the difference would be nearly two full minutes. This very much blurs the picture when one is trying to reconstruct events from logs recorded to even minutes only.

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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by HMSVF »

Good Afternoon Mr Jurens,

I know that the case is different but....


Isn't HMS Queen Mary's stern now ahead of whats left of her bow on the seabed? I suppose that the hydrodynamic forces (? right term) would be different - a now bluff fronted wrecked, but floating stern section isn't going to cut through the water like a bow would, however I get the impression that the stern isn't that far in front of whats left of the forward section?


Best Wishes


HMSVF
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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by Bill Jurens »

I visited the wreck of Queen Mary some years ago, and made diagrams of the distribution of the wreckage on the bottom, but I did not record the direction of north on the sketches, so I really don't know the orientation of the debris field. McCartney's recent book should cover that, though. One might be able to see if some of the other British ships destroyed by large explosions there over-ran their original explosion points as well as one typically sees two debris fields in such situations, one caused by the explosion itself, and the other comprising the resting point of the remaining wreckage. The Hood debris field shows just this sort of pattern, and one could, I suppose, measure the offset between the center of the original explosion debris 'donut'
and the position of the conning tower, which probably detached and sank nearly straight down as the bow plunged. I haven't looked at much of this in quite a few years now, but it might be worth pursuing again. Details of the debris fields have been printed in my SNAME paper on the loss of Hood and, as I recall, are also reproduced in the White/Mearns book covering the wreckage. The forensic analysis in the White/Mearns book is highly questionable, but the original data is still there and can be used for study purposes.

It's been my perception that in these sorts of situations -- and there are admittedly only a few to go by -- that there is relatively little forward motion of the individual parts after a large explosion occurs. In the case of Hood, which lost her stern and (probably) suffered nearly instantaneous flooding of many of the larger machinery spaces aft, the ship would have trimmed rapidly by the stern, and the additional drag caused by the large flat bottom would probably have stopped the bow rather quickly. It's not as though she had any power or ability to 'water ski' or somehow skim over the waves after the explosion occurred, as she was, during that time, essentially dragging a partially submerged and very unstreamlined wrecked middle body with her, especially if the hull slewed port or starboard during the post-explosion trajectory, which is fairly likely.

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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by HMSVF »

position of the conning tower, which probably detached and sank nearly straight down as the bow plunged

Mr Jurens,

Im really glad you said this! Ive read some crazy theories that the conning tower was blown off the ship in an explosion and thats why it lies a distance from the wreck.! I couldn't for the life of me see how a conning tower weighing around 600 tons (?) could be blown such a distance and thought that the most likely scenario was that the sections of the wreck drifted on the way down, whereas the very heavy, dense conning tower sunk like a stone. Could it be the case that the conning tower probably gives a much clearer position of where Hood sank (at the surface) as opposed to the rest of the wreck?



Best wishes

HMSVF
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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by dunmunro »

Bill Jurens wrote: Fri Jul 06, 2018 3:40 pm I visited the wreck of Queen Mary some years ago, and made diagrams of the distribution of the wreckage on the bottom, but I did not record the direction of north on the sketches, so I really don't know the orientation of the debris field. McCartney's recent book should cover that, though. One might be able to see if some of the other British ships destroyed by large explosions there over-ran their original explosion points as well as one typically sees two debris fields in such situations, one caused by the explosion itself, and the other comprising the resting point of the remaining wreckage. The Hood debris field shows just this sort of pattern, and one could, I suppose, measure the offset between the center of the original explosion debris 'donut'
and the position of the conning tower, which probably detached and sank nearly straight down as the bow plunged. I haven't looked at much of this in quite a few years now, but it might be worth pursuing again. Details of the debris fields have been printed in my SNAME paper on the loss of Hood and, as I recall, are also reproduced in the White/Mearns book covering the wreckage. The forensic analysis in the White/Mearns book is highly questionable, but the original data is still there and can be used for study purposes.

It's been my perception that in these sorts of situations -- and there are admittedly only a few to go by -- that there is relatively little forward motion of the individual parts after a large explosion occurs. In the case of Hood, which lost her stern and (probably) suffered nearly instantaneous flooding of many of the larger machinery spaces aft, the ship would have trimmed rapidly by the stern, and the additional drag caused by the large flat bottom would probably have stopped the bow rather quickly. It's not as though she had any power or ability to 'water ski' or somehow skim over the waves after the explosion occurred, as she was, during that time, essentially dragging a partially submerged and very unstreamlined wrecked middle body with her, especially if the hull slewed port or starboard during the post-explosion trajectory, which is fairly likely.

Bill Jurens
The distance of the conning tower to an after(?) barbette is about 1150 meters and the CT is about 600m north of the rest of the debris:

http://www.hmshood.com/hoodtoday/2001ex ... /index.htm
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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by dunmunro »

Anyways if we want precision timing, then the best we can do is via the information provided by PoW's AFCT salvo chart which is produced via the precision paper plotter:

~0552:30 Hood opens fire

~0553:05 PoW opens fire

~0556 annotation that Hood is out of action

~0557:30 'A' arc open. 5.25in guns open fire at 18600 yds and fire "a deflection triple" (3 salvos).
The time to fire a 5.25in deflection triple would be between 15 (if using half salvos) and 30 seconds (using full salvos) or less and these salvos can be fired in between 14in salvos so the 5.25in DCTs can view the target. All 3 salvos can be in the air simultaneously.

~0558:10 - no further 5.25in salvos (has the forward director has already been disabled by a 38cm hit?):
7. The 5.25-in. armament opened fire at a range of 18,600 yards. After firing a deflection triple, a 15-in. shell passed through the superstructure supporting the H.A. directors.

The shot caused the director to jam temporarily in training and the Control Officer of the latter ordered all turrets to go into "aft control". This was carried out, but about the same time a 15-in. shell burst on the boat deck and seriously upset the after starboard H.A. director. The crew of this director had already been considerably blasted by "Y" turret firing on a forward bearing. The 15-in. shell burst threw the Control Officer off his feet, broke his telephone lead, and a splinter hit his earphones and very slightly wounded him. By the time he had regained control of the situation, the target was lost behind smoke astern.
http://www.hmshood.org.uk/reference/off ... 09guns.htm
~0559:15 - "...During the first action after firing salvo 12, a heavy hit was felt on the starboard side and the director setting mechanical pointer was seen to be oscillating violently..."

So clearly PoW is being hit by 38cm shells well before 0600 with the timing clearly established by the AFCT plot.
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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by Alberto Virtuani »

Hello everybody,
thanks to Mr. Rico and Mr.Jurens for their wise contributions.
IMHO the stern of Hood stopped immediately and almost instantaneously, due to the extreme drag. The bows (depending on how much water entered instantaneously inside the engine spaces, already put in communication among them by the enormous pressure of the gases) might have proceeded for a short time interval, surely not 1500 yards :lol: , I doubt even 500, due to the huge loss of stability.


In any case, being PoW in front of Hood remains at minute 6:01 (it can be 6:01 or 6:01:59, it is 6:01:30 according to PoW map, 6:01:45 according to Antonio reconstruction) as per Jasper, 1200 or 1500 yards total distance (less than 4 cables + let's say 500 yards) fix again the explosion at 6:00 and very few seconds, despite the attempts to re-propose British funny observations (contradicting among themselves) instead of PG KTB + all surviving German GO's ....


Bye, Alberto


P.S. regarding the painting, it may be a bit exaggerated, but also Barham's bow raised by 30° (at least in the final stage of the sinking getting to more than 45°) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdrISbwy_zI. I guess Hood bows raised possibly almost vertically, but only the relatively small part afloat after the whole forward section has been filled of water.
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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by HMSVF »

P.S. regarding the painting, it may be a bit exaggerated, but also Barham's bow raised by 30° (at least in the final stage of the sinking getting to more than 45°) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdrISbwy_zI. I guess Hood bows raised possibly almost vertically, but only the relatively small part afloat after the whole forward section has been filled of water.

If you look at the film 37 seconds in you can see that the bow is inverted with only the first 50 -60 feet showing.Im guessing that (as you said) whats left of the forward section has flooded to a point where the weight of the water is enough to raise the bow (god knows how much stress the hull must have been under).Didn't Ted Briggs say that Hood was vertical when "B" turret went under? I suppose to achieve that you would have to have whats left of HMS Hood completely flooded from the break aft to the conning tower(a good 200 foot?). The problem with that picture is (I think) that there is a lot of HMS Hood showing out of the water (her fore funnel is shown still way clear of the sea) and to me she seems very "high" in the water for a ship that is sinking extremely fast.


Just my 2 penneth!



Best wishes


HMSVF
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Re: Jasper, Schmalenbach and 6 salvos...

Post by Alberto Virtuani »

@HMSVF,
I do agree with you, it looks a bit too much of the ship out of the water....I guess the painter got this impression due to the last part of the sinking, while in the beginning the angle would not have been so extreme (in addition to Barham, please also see this video, of a much smaller ship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OshdAk4t6UU)


Bye, Alberto
"It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition" (Adm.A.B.Cunningham)

"There's always a danger running in the enemy at close range" (Adm.W.F.Wake-Walker)
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