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theschell — Navajo Class
#battleship #military #navy #pearlharbour #war #worldwar2 #ww2
Published: 2015-11-23 21:46:28 +0000 UTC; Views: 966; Favourites: 11; Downloads: 0
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Description
A 3rd addition to my on-going Pearl Harbour project is the USS Navajo... an Ocean-going Fleet Tugboat typical of the types used at Pearl Harbour. Fleet Tugs carried out numerous duties including anti-submarine patrols of the Harbour Area, vessel towing for Port entry/exit and more. During Dec 7th, the Navajo and the other Fleet Tugs provided rescue and firefighting assistance and were unsung heroes of the attacks... I'd like to give a bit of the spotlight to the other smaller and less well known vessels like the Vestal and Navajo that, though not major combat units, played their own parts in the war...Related content
Comments: 22
Lovely. Finally some of the smaller players getting their due!
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Yep... I don't think it's fair to talk about just the larger ships when ship and boat crews of all sizes did their parts too... which is why I modeled the Vestal, and the HMCS Snowberry... small ships with big jobs!
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Exactly... 
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Well the last line battle between battleships took place shortly before Taffy 3. A line of US Navy battleships crossed the T of a line of IJN battleships and gave them a pummeling.
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Leyte Gulf was a last hurrah, so-to-speak, for the gun Navy... afterwards the IJN stayed fairly much out of action... much as the German High Seas Fleet had done after Jutland in WW1... the outcome of that battle being so expensive in losses of men and equipment that in WW2, the German Navy refused to engage in major surface operations, instead using its few large assets as "raiders"...
For the most part, after WW1 and Pearl Harbour, the "big guns" were relegated to shore bombardment and invasion artillery support
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The real problem with the big guns was the essential nature of the beast. The only time the big guns came into their own was against other ships with big guns. Bismarck being one of the few examples. Once she sunk the Hood it was a matter of pride and revenge for the RN to sink her in turn.
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Once air-power proved how vulnerable the big ships were it was just a matter of time... In WW1 the "big guns" were the best of world power... but by the time the airplane had come into its own, the days of the big Battleship were numbered...
A matter of a very short 20 years obliterated over a thousand years of naval supremacy...
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Billy Mitchell showed thr future and he was court-martialled for it.
The final nail was Taranto when Swordfish plnes made junk out of Italian battleships.
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Also the loss of Prince of Wales and Repulse to air power in Malaya due to lack of air cover just 3 days after the fleet at Pearl Harbour (which too was brought about by air power and which also had no air cover)...
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I recall a documentary on Midaway where the presenter said that after the loss of all four carriers Yamamoto had considered using his big gun battlewagons but that they were nothing more than white elephants.
German planners however learned lessons from Sicily and had designed the Atlantic Wall fortifications with those big guns in mind.
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Yep... even to the point of using old retired Battleship and Cruiser guns as armaments for the forts...
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Which ironically worked in some cases but a island battleship is still a white elephant.
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They were fairly effective in the defense of the beaches during D-Day... but were useless once the Allies breached the lines and moved in-land...
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Exactly as the Germans had feared. But it was Allied destroyer captains who helped to save the day on Omaha.
Destroyers.
On Gold, Juno, and Sword the Brits and Canadians had monitors.
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Yep... Things is that most later WW2 Destroyers were actually more heavily armed and armoured than most WW1 Cruisers and Scout Cruisers... infact by the time of the Fletcher Class of WW2, they would have been about the equivalent of a medium of heavy cruiser of WW1 era...
Those "New Navy" Monitors were an interesting idea actually... when they started stripping the old pre-war WW1 Battleships, they took the turrets and guns and built them onto a shallow draft hull and used them for Coastal Defense and Bombardment... They served through both world wars and some were even still in service into the 50's...
They were useful for coastal work and "brown water" riverine warfare... as the shallow draft meant they could get to places larger ships couldn't, and when you could deliver 12" guns up river for fire support you could be very dangerous indeed...
Some countries actually still use this concept for large "brown water" vessels...
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Yes the USN did so during Vietnam...up-gunning and armoring old ww2 LST for that purpose and they performed better than hoped when used in conjunction with PBRs. In fact many of the modeified LST became de facto helicopter carriers, enabling the USN to operate heavy navalised versions of Huey gunships directly from their decks.
I recall reading the accounts of the battles for the Scheldt estuaries in late 1944 early 1945 where Royal Marines fought pitched battles with German troops and had the support of WW1 monitors.
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Those old WW1 monitors underwent refits and updates during the same yard periods as the rest of the fleet in most cases... being fully modernized each time... They even mounted aircraft and launching catapults for trials on them just as they'd done with the battleships and cruisers...
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In many cases those old monitors actually proved more useful in places where even cutters could not operate.
Funny how that works sometimes. Some of the very things the pencil pushers deem "obsolete" are the very things that work the best.
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The biggest down-side to them was that they were very definitely not Ocean-going... they had such a shallow draft and low free-board that even moderate seas risked swamping them... not to mention that most of them were slower than molasses in February... lol
I'm planning on doing a model of a British Monitor that saw active service in both wars to go along with my HMS Hood at some point...
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Well I look forward to them all no matter what you do. Having lots of fun with your aircraft.
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I'm glad you are enjoying them!
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