16-inch guns fired on BB-64 for last time

[fchavis]

I read this on a cited article from wikipedia and it got me thinking about the question Blacksmoke probably already answered - longest ballistic hit on a 'point' target.

wikipedia - Battle of Leyte Gulf, Surigao Strait:

At 03:16, USS West Virginia’s radar picked up the surviving ships of Nishimura's force at a range of 42,000 yards (38 km) and had achieved a firing solution at 30,000 yards (27 km). West Virginia tracked them as they approached in the pitch black night. At 03:53, she unleashed the eight 16 inch (406 mm) guns of her main battery at a range of 22,800 yards (21 km), striking the Yamashiro with her first salvo.

wiki article

According to the article, that battle marked the last time battlewagons faced each other in combat (10-25-44)

 

[Fred West]

We can build brand new Carriers from scratch, which makes me totally confident we could just as easily recondition and modernize any of the Iowa Class back to battle worthy status. Big sticks indeed!

I believe both Iowa and Wisconsin are still part of the reserve fleet. Although Wisconsin is preserved as a museum ship in Norfolk, nothing has been done to her that would preclude her from being reactivated in the future should the need arise.
For anyone interested, here are the coordinates of all 8 surviving US battleships. They are all in high res areas in Google Earth.

Alabama 30°40’54”N 88°00’52”W
Iowa 38°4’5”N 122°5’52”W
Massachusetts 41°42’24”N 71°9’46”W
Missouri 21°21’43”N 157°57’12”W
New Jersey 39°56’21”N 75°7’58”W
North Carolina 34°14’11”N 77°57’15”W
Texas 29°45’22”N 95°5’23”W
Wisconsin 36°50’54”N 76°17’43”W

 

[Ash]

Texas is in pretty wretched shape, Alabama is in okay shape - though she has suffered pretty badly at the hands of chambers-of-commerce types who think setting it up to host proms and the like is a good idea. Massachusetts is probably the best example of a North Dakota class left (of course, there are but two left). North Carolina is wonderfully preserved, but I don't know what the hull is like. The Iowa's are naturally in good shape but are certainly NOT in WWII condition.

Ash

 

[brickeyee]

How many foot/lbs of energy at the muzzle? Lessee, if it's mv^2, that's 2700*2500^2 = 16,875,000,000.

You need to divide the weight in pounds by g to get slugs, and it is 0.5mv^2.
About 226,000 ft-lb

8 inch guns are the largest 'fixed' ammunition.

The larger guns are breech (NOT muzzle loaded) with a projectile rammed into the barrel, followed by the powder.
Close breech and fire.

The 'trick' to the high chamber pressures is the shrinking of the outer sleeves at the breech onto the inner barrel.
This produces a very large compression loading on the inner portion of the assembly that must be overcome by the breech pressure before the barrel is even loaded in tension.
This allows the peak pressure to exceed what otherwise would be a pressure high enough to burst a uniform barrel.

I thought the fire was traced to over-ramming of powder bags kleading to a flash fire as they burned in the (essentially) enclosed space of the turret.

 

[catfish101]

The military will always change. Sometimes for the best and sometimes for the worst.

Field Artillery has changed and IMHO for the worst and far as the machine goes.

I hated to see the M110 go. It was a bad dude and very simple to work on.

The powders the guns are loaded with change from target to target. That is why they are in smaller bags and not one charge. In FA there is a "zone" charge that is in one bag. Some guys call in red bag cause it is red or a charge 8 like somebody else mentioned. The other sectional charges are in a green bag or a white bag. It all depends on how far you are shooting and how you want the bullet to get there.

 

[misANTHrope]

North Carolina's hull is supposed to be getting pretty bad. The way she's berthed now, she's actually sitting on the bottom, and there's been a plan in the works for years now to tow her up to Newport News, put her in drydock, and restore the hull.

It would be worth the trip for me to get to Wilmington when they finally do move her. I'd love to witness that ship making her way down the Cape Fear to sea again, even if it's not under her own power.

 

[brickeyee]

We can build brand new Carriers from scratch, which makes me totally confident we could just as easily recondition and modernize any of the Iowa Class back to battle worthy status.

Do not bet on it.
Most of the machinery and equipment to fabricate steel in the thicknesses used for the armor is long gone.
Aircraft carriers have nearly zero armor.

 

[General Geoff]

Yes, most of the infrastructure needed to fabricate repair/replacement parts for the Iowa class battleships is gone. In order to reactivate them or build new battleships of similar specifications, we'd need to practically build a dedicated steel mill and forging plant from scratch.

 

[akodo]

The Tomohawk Missle is one hell of a potent weapon. I totally understand how it outclasses 16" or even 24" guns as far as ship to ship or ship to land potential. I totally understand how one ship carrying 12 of these cannons is outdated and ineffectual vs such a weapon.

Still, I am not sure that the 12"-20" seaborn cannon is outdated. The Tomohawk is great, yes, but it is damned expensive. A reusable cannon and turret structure that consumes 600lbs of gunpowder to sling a 1500lb package of high explosives is a lot cheaper. And often you don't require the full power of a Tomohawk, nor it's full range.

It seems to me an occasional ship in the fleet, be it destroyer, frigate, whatever, that would mount a single 12"-20" would have a lot of utility especially now that with the addition of a few fins and GPS you can inexpensively create guided shells. Where a tomohawk is overkill tactically and bugetwise, a few shells from a 16" seem like a good idea to me.

 

[akodo]

P.S. I have heard it estimated that a battleship would take at least 3 cruise missle hits before it went under. Of course the destroyer firing those missles is untouched, but still, i see the tactical application of the 'Cruise Missle Battleship' something that can carry and rapidly deliver many cruise missles while carrying the raw armor and air-defenses to shoot down incoming missles so it would survive a ship-to-ship confrontation.

now it seems all the ship-to-ship warfare would result in both cruisers launching missles at great distance and destroying eachother minutes later.

Seems to me 'Cruise Missle Battleship' to rule the waves, and 'One Big Gun Destroyer' to handle the smaller conflicts in which we find ourselves.

kind of how we needed more armored Humvees and less AbramsM1A1s in Iraq. Do we need a ton of missle cruisers today?

 

[TEDDY]

battlewagon

full broadside I belive heals the ship 30 degrees.I was AOM3C so never was in
combat on ship.[thank god].the 16 guns also had a moral use in Korea against the chinese.one broad side was enough to clear the field.
-------

 

[Elza]

I used to work at a Navy shipyard back in the early ‘80’s. (Mare Island for you Navy types.) I was walking through a building one day. It was loaded with 20 & 40 m/m AA guns. One of the 40’s was set in a protective housing and had 7 Japanese flags painted on it. One thing that I ran across was a large, round steel object. It was about 5 feet in diameter and 6 feet long with a cam-lock door. “USS New Jersey” was stamped over the door. It as marked to weigh 50 tons. As I stood looking at it one of the guys working there asked if I know what it was. I didn’t have a clue. The guy smiled and said that it was a breech assembly for one of the New Jersey’s 16” rifles!

A sad experience actually. They were cutting the 20’s & 40’s up for scrap. Destroying the one with the Jap flags on it nearly made me cry. I got one of the brass ‘spider web’ sights off of one that had already been cut up. I wonder what the boys that looked through it were thinking………….

 

[Jimmy Dean]

where the Iowa class the last BBs to be made?

Why where the montana's canceled? they saw an end to the war and didn't bother? (woulda been nice to have a Battleship Louisiana (BB71, last Montana class scheduled, canceled before construction began) from a slightly more modern time period than 1903)

 

[sacp81170a]

You need to divide the weight in pounds by g to get slugs, and it is 0.5mv^2.
About 226,000 ft-lb

Thanks for the info. Still beats the snot outta any thing else for energy at the muzzle.

 

[General Geoff]

Why where the montana's canceled?

In short, because aircraft carriers stole the show.

 

[RNB65]

full broadside I belive heals the ship 30 degrees.

I don't think that's true. There were myths and legends for decades that claimed if an Iowa class shipped fired all nine main guns at once it would roll the ship over or break its spine, etc. I saw a battleship documentary on TV awhile back where they disproved those myths. They showed multiple film clips of Iowa class ships firing all nine guns broadside simultaneously. The ships barely noticed. The didn't turn turtle. No dramatic rolls. Nothing but a bunch of big fireballs and some serious muzzle blast...

FYI -- Some folks have mentioned the North Carolina. The USS North Carolina is not an Iowa class ship. It and its sister ship, the USS Washington, were the North Carolina class that preceded the Iowa class. They were the first generation of fast battleships but were considerably smaller than Iowa class and were armed with 16in 45cal main guns that had a shorter range than the 50cal guns on the Iowa class.

BB-55 is an awesome ship to visit if you ever get the chance. No trip to eastern NC is complete without spending a few hours touring the USS NC.
-

 

[Coronach]

Couple of thoughts:

1. Iowa and Wisconsin are not quite done yet, but Missouri and New Jersey are. All four are museum ships (well, last I heard Iowa was still at Suisan Bay but was slated to be donated to Vallejo/Mare Island), but Wisconsin and Iowa are stipulated to still be part of the reserve fleet and must be maintained in a manner that allows them to be reactivated. Anyone who has visited Wisconsin will note that visitors have access to very few compartments (nothing below deck); this is because of the preservation requirements that are not present on New Jersey and Missouri.

2. How likely they ever are to be called up again is up for debate. They're really expensive to reactivate, crew and maintain.

3. What has doomed them as gunfire support ships is that expense, more than anything else. The advanced gun concepts being explored by the Navy have the potential to be both more effective and less costly than activating a battlewagon and getting it on-scene for use, but of course they're not in service yet and no one knows if they'll ever live up to their predecessors.

4. The BBs are probably more survivable than any other warship in a modern combat environment, if they're operating in an area of air superiority. They have no air defenses whatsoever, so they need to be shielded like any other asset in an invasion fleet or carrier battle group. However, their ability to handle "leakers" is second to none. Their point defenses were, at the time of their retirement, state of the art, and they simply have more armor than is required to defeat any of the modern cruise missiles. Even the big Soviet missiles (Shipwreck, et al) would probably not sink them, though they would certainly leave a mark. I don't care about pop-up terminal flight profiles, either. Their deck armor can hold just fine against plunging fire. An exocet/Silkworm gets through and pops a cruiser, frigate or destroyer? That's months in port, if the ship survives. An exocet pops a BB? Get out the mops and the paint brushes.

6. Their biggest asset in gunfire support is their ability to loiter offhore and be ready to deliver death from above 24/7/365, which is something that no strike aircraft can do. Period. Oh, we missed on the first broadside? OK. Next one is inbound. Tell you what...we'll keep shooting until the whole hillside is levelled. Will that work for you? It will? Good. I'm gonna go make some coffee, you call me when the landscape is sufficiently pulverized.

Mike

 

[Murdock]

Sadly, there's just no way

We can build brand new Carriers from scratch, which makes me totally confident we could just as easily recondition and modernize any of the Iowa Class back to battle worthy status. Big sticks indeed!

These ships can never be sent to sea again. No way. Never.

The battleships lasted as long as they did because in the WWII era they were built to survive. This meant incredible redundancy in equipment (multiple boilers, multiple fuel pumps for the boilers, multiple engines, reduction gears for the screw shafts and the huge screws (that's propellers for you shore dwellers), multiple electrical generators, ballast tanks to compensate for flooding caused by torpedo hits, and armor, armor, armor (the armor on the USS Massachusetts on the 010 level (about 100 feet above the water level in the fire control tower) is 11 inches thick. At the water line it was maybe 3 feet thick.

Comparing a 16" shell and a cruise missile is apples and oranges. They have different purposes. The cruise missile of today is our equivalent of the kamikaze of WWII, and no more deadly. They are both precision-guided, point-target systems. The defensive characteristics of a ship that defends it against one will defend it against the other (armor, antiaircraft systems). Destroyers were and are always especially vulnerable, because they have no armor. That's why they're called tin cans.

By the 1960's and 1970's there just weren't any more repair parts for any of that stuff. Instead of having equipment taken off line by combat casualties, it just wore out. Because there were back ups, things wore out slower. Anything broken in the old equipment that was mission critical had to be custom machined. For instance, replacement rubber gaskets used in the armored watertight hatches between decks just didn't exist. No gaskets, no water tight integrity.

The most redundant thing of all was the crew, with 1,200 people needed to run and maintain all of that stuff in one ship. The Navy can't afford crews that large any more, and all of the crewmen who knew how to use and fix that WWII stuff are in mothballs themselves, now. Just imagine keeping all of the miles of 70-year-old wiring intact. I was on a WWII-era carrier in the late 1970s. There was an electrical fire someplace in that ship every day that we were under way.

Oh, and forget the 2,000 pound shell thing. More like 1,200 pounds, at a muzzle velocity of 2,650 fps. Caliber is correctly stated as 16"/50, which means a bore diameter or 16 inches, and a bore length of 50 times that, or 800 inches (66.67 feet).

No, the ships didn't heel 30 degrees when a broadside was fired. They weren't shoved sideways, either. That's what the hydraulic counter recoil systems were for. Things would vibrate a bit, however.

By the 1990's, these ships had two purposes, political and tactical. Anyplace they steamed into, they impressed. They were also fantastic naval gunfire support for the Marines. But the trend became one toward precision -- not area fire -- weapons systems. (The effective radius of a 16"/50 VT frag projectile was 250 meters). Weapons systems like the AC-130 Hercules aircraft began performing direct fire missions with 105mm artillery from up in the sky, making friendlies feel a bit more secure, with line-of-sight UHF communication instead of problematical HF (short wave) communication. When all you are trying to do is nail one sniper who is slowing your advance, it's easier to just bring a building down around his ears than it is to level a city block. And much more politically correct in the age of asymmetrical warfare, CNN and Al Jiz.

There was honor in standing tall in a ship that could see its enemy and be seen in turn, and having the coolness and fortitude to take it and dish it out with an enemy that had some concept of honor as well. Sadly, that's all as dead to us now as knights on horseback. We are poorer for it.

"Artillery lends dignity to what otherwise would be an unseemly brawl."

USN-USMC 1974-1994

USS Iwo Jima (LPH-2)
USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CV-42)
USS Charles F. Adams (DDG-2)
USS Edward McDonnell (FF-1043)
USS Fairfax County (LST-1193)
USS Guam (LPH-7)
Second Air/Naval Gunfire Liaison Company, Fleet Maine Force, Atlantic
Naval Special Warfare Group Two

 

[revjen45]

There are also torpedoes that are made to explode under the hull of the target ship, where most are not heavily armored. The picture I saw was a hit on a destroyer sized ship, which lifted the middle and broke the hull in half. The Yamato was the final proof of how well a battleship does against air power.

 

[General Geoff]

Oh, and forget the 2,000 pound shell thing. More like 1,200 pounds, at a muzzle velocity of 2,650 fps.

New(er) shell types were specified at 2700lbs.

 

[Coronach]

These ships can never be sent to sea again. No way.s Never.

Sure they can. Anything can be done with enough money. I agree with you, however, that in the case of Wisconsin and Iowa it is exceedingly remote, and in the case of New Jersey and Missouri it isn't even worth considering as a possibility.

As far as stuff wearing out and replacements being non-existant, consider two things:

1. Wisconsin is old, but she has not been heavily used. She has spent that vast majority of her time in mothballs. She is in the best condition, by far, of the four.

2. Cannibalization of the two static monuments. It won't solve all of the problems, but it will help.

I agree, though, that they're done from a practicality standpoint. It's just not feasible to bring them back, short of an all-out effort like WWIII.

And yeah, torpedoes are probably the greatest threat to them, from a single-weapon perspective. Of course, they're also probably the greatest threat to carriers, as well.

Mike

 

[misANTHrope]

FYI -- Some folks have mentioned the North Carolina. The USS North Carolina is not an Iowa class ship. It and its sister ship, the USS Washington, were the North Carolina class that preceded the Iowa class. They were the first generation of fast battleships but were considerably smaller than Iowa class and were armed with 16in 45cal main guns that had a shorter range than the 50cal guns on the Iowa class.

I don't think anyone in here has asserted that BB-55 was an Iowa class ship. If I implied so somehow with my comments, it definitely wasn't intentional.

 

[Jimmy Dean]

Hmm..Wonder how much it would cost to build one now. I wouldnt mind seeing a Montana class out on the water.

 

[RNB65]

The Iowa gun did not blow. The powder magazine caught fire and wrecked the entire gun mount form the lower elevators up to the gun chambers.

I thought the fire was traced to over-ramming of powder bags kleading to a flash fire as they burned in the (essentially) enclosed space of the turret.

The explosion on the Iowa did not originate in the powder magazine. It occurred in the upper turret when the powder bags ignited during loading while the breech door was still open. The blast traveled down the turret and ignited other powder bags that were waiting to be hoisted up for the next salvo. The ship captain ordered the powder magazines flooded minutes after the blast to prevent them from catching fire. If the powder magazine had ignited the entire ship would almost certainly have been lost.

Neither the Navy nor independent investigators ever found a conclusive cause for the fire. It's always been speculated that improper ramming was the cause since the man operating the rammer on the center gun was new, but all attempts to recreate a similar incident in a controlled test environment failed. Not to mention that this very same gun design had fired countless numbers of shells during WWII, Korea, and Vietnam without any similar event occurring.

The following words were captured by recording devices in turret 2 seconds before the fire. However, the exact cause of ignition remains a mystery to this day.

GMCS(SW) Reginald O. Ziegler (turret captain)-"Left gun is loaded. Good job! Center gun is having a little trouble. We'll straighten that out."

GMG3 Richard Lawrence Center gun cradleman -"I have a problem here; I am not ready yet."

Ziegler, now shouting to LTJG Robert M. Buch-"Tell plot we are not ready yet. There is a problem in the center gun!"

GMG3 Richard Lawrence (with annoyance) - "I'm not ready yet! I am not ready yet!"

Unidentified Seconds laterl- "Oh my . . ."

-

 

[Army]

Nope, I still disagree. Granted their technology is 70 years old, and many parts are not available. But there is no way you are going to convince me that in this day and age we cannot replace 70 miles of copper wire, electron tubes, light bulbs, screw in fuses etc., with fiber optics, LED's, and the most modern secure commo gear available.

The armor won't need to be replaced, patched in places perhaps, but 3' and change of steel takes a long time to rust enough to matter. Quarters can be upgraded easily, nuke plants installed, "slide rule" conn gear replaced with state of the art navigation. With the nuke plants, power is no longer a problem, as it can power the turrets, screws, life support, and water purification. Powerful and near instant plotting computers can replace the huge fire control room, and it's massive mechanical computer.

The only thing I want to really keep, is that gorgeous big brass trigger.

The USS Reagan cost how much? Manned by nearly 5000 sailors whom only a few are actually flight ops. True, no massive armor belts on a flattop, but the cost of all her aircraft, Jet-A, repair parts, and weapons (most of which is dedicated to battle group protection) would likely equal the cost of any re-tool required for a BB.

Cripes, how much Navy money is spent on the overhaul and upkeep of the USS Constitution? Exactly how battle worthy is she right now? I would rather she came out of the water and permanently housed and preserved. Let's spend the money on a proven and viable ship of war.

Besides....everyone likes battleships