Anatomy of the Ship - The Battleship 'Fuso'

THE Battle of Tsushima in May 1905 between Russia and Japan -the first major battle fought by fleets of armoured battleships -was the earliest sign of the revolutionary changes that were about to occur in the design of capital ships and the increase in weapon power. The revolution began in 1906 when the leading naval power of the day - the Royal Navy - commissioned into service the first of the new generation 'all-big-gun' battleships, HMS Dreadnought. Although the introduction of the Dreadnought rendered every other battleship in the world obsolete, and caused worldwide excitement, it was not entirely unexpected. Designs for armoured ships with single-calibre armament had begun to emerge several years earlier in other countries, including Japan. As early as 1903, the Japanese had started to develop a 17,000-ton armoured cruiser armed with eight 305mm guns. Only the weak economic situation in the country prevented the project from being realised.

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Anatomy of the Ship - The Escort Carrier Gambier Bay

The Casablanca class CVEs were developed in response to the need for large numbers of small aircraft carriers for transport and escort duties. Earlier development had included the conversion of a small number of merchant types, primarily the diesel-powered C3 cargo types. Increased demand from both USN and Royal Navy sources caused the Secretary of the Navy to approve the conversion of twenty-four C3-S-A1 hulls in December, 1941. These new escort carriers were to be steam powered and have a single screw, with dimensions similar to their diesel-powered predecessors. Ultimately, only twenty C3 conversions, designated the Bogue class, were actually completed from this initial authorisation. The other four ships, the Sangamon class, were converted from Cimarron class oilers. A follow-on group of twenty-four Bogues, usually referred to as the Prince William class, was authorised the following year. All but Prince William were transferred to the Royal Navy.

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Anatomy of the Ship - The Battleship Dreadnought

On 10 February 1906 the hull of the first all-big-gun battleship, hms Dreadnought, was launched at Portsmouth Dockyard. Over 6000 tons of material had been built into her since her laying down just nineteen weeks beforehand. Eight months later she went to sea for the first time for her preliminary steam trials and, although this did not mark her final completion, the production of a seagoing warship of 18,000 tons, and of a new type, in such a short period of time was a remarkable achievement. The speed with which she was built was the product of the need to evaluate her qualities at the earliest opportunity and, more importantly, to steal a march on foreign navies for her revolutionary design would, if successful, render existing battleship designs obsolete. She was, indeed, a great success and marked the beginning of a new era in battleship development; she gave her name to all subsequent vessels of the type, which became known as dreadnought battleships, or simply 'dreadnoughts'.

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Anatomy of the Ship - The Battleship Warspite

It would be fair to say, that had it not been for the urgent requirement to go one better and ensure the Royal Navy's supremacy, Warspite and her four sister ships in the Queen Elizabeth class might have gone relatively unnoticed - or at least been regarded as just part of a logical progression in British battleship design. The story begins with the Dreadnought of 1906, a revolutionary ship and the realisation of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Fisher's desire for a super battleship which combined an all big gun armament with high speed. Dreadnought heralded the start of a new era in naval history and her name became synonymous with the goliaths of all other navies. Fisher had set up an advisory body known as the Committee on Designs, his objective being to ensure that ships were designed and constructed (as far as possible) to the Navy's precise requirements. Their first consideration was for a battleship with 12in guns and a speed of 21kts. On 22 February 1905, after only seven weeks of discussion, an agreed design had been reached. Even more astounding than this, the finished ship was ready for trials by October 1906, the only British battleship built in a year and the first with steam turbines. This new machinery meant a great saving in weight and was strongly favoured by Engineer-in-Chief Rear Admiral Durston and the DNC (Director of Naval Construction) Sir Philip Watts.

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Anatomy of the Ship - The Schooner Bertha L. Downs

The North American schooner Bertha L. Downs was one of many large four-, five-, and six-masted schooners which were built on the banks of the Kennebec River in Maine around the turn of the century. These huge wooden vessels were almost universally employed in the coastal trade and the principal part of this was coal from Virginia to New England. The Bertha L Downs was launched in 1908 and after some ten years in the lumber and coal trade was sold to Danish owners and renamed Atlas, and, like a number of her contemporaries, was able to make a profitable living through the 1920s and '30s. She was finally broken up in 1950, in Germany, after forty-two years' work under five flags. This volume features • An introductory history of the development of the schooner in Europe and North America, along with a full description of the building of the ship and her career history. • Photographic section depicting her under construction, on board shots at sea, and photographs showing the changes and modifications which she underwent during her long career. • A colour guide and portrait painting on the jacket. • Over 200 perspective and 3-view drawings with in-depth keys of every detail of the ship including all her rigging and iron work. A complete anatomy of the ship in words, photographs and drawings.

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Twenty-First Century Submarines And Warships

The San Juan is one of two Santa Cruz class attack submarines in service with the Argentine Navy. The TR1700 design, upon which the Santa Cruz class is based, conies from the Thyssen Nordseewerke shipbuilders. The original contract was for six boats to be delivered to Argentina.The first two were delivered complete and the subsequent vessels were to have materials supplied so that they could be built indigenously in Argentina's dockyards, thereby creating valuable jobs in an cconomy that needs such boosts desperately. However, all has not gone according to plan for the Armada Argent ma. Two of the additional boats being built in Argentina, it is almost certain, will not Incompleted. Furthermore, the equipment procured for the fifth and sixth units of the class is being used for spares since Argentina cannot afford to buy spares direct from the contractor, Thyssen Nordseewerke. Without doubt, the fragile nature of Argentina's economic situation coupled with the internal political turmoil, has directly led to the drastic cutbacks being seen in its armed forces. With the future still looking uncertain for the recovery of Argentina s precarious circumstance, the two Sama Cruz submarines could well be the only attack submarines available to the Argentine Navy for some time to come, and may well serve long beyond their original service lives.

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Anatomy of the Ship - The 20-gun Ship Blandford

The role of the 20-gun Sixth Rate in the Royal Navy during the early part of the eighteenth century is somewhat overshadowed by the great fleet actions of the period. However, although the names of these small vessels do not often come to the notice of history, their presence was essential to the integrity of the fleet and the wellbeing of merchant shipping. These ships carried out the rather mundane tasks of convoy escort to merchant ships, of dispatch vessels, fleet scouts and fire-support for amphibious assaults. The general layout of the Blandford type, with a row of oarports below the gundeck, can be traced back to the early seventeenth century. The National Maritime Museum at Greenwich holds a drawing of a vessel of 96 feet on the keel, 32 feet breadth and 12 feet draught (368 tons) that has been dated to about 1625. Evidence suggests that no ship was built to this plan, but the galley-frigate arrangement with a separate rowing deck is evident.

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The German Aircraft Carrier - Graf Zeppelin

When a new type of warship, the aircraft carrier, came into existence after World War I, it could not yet be suspected that a quarter-century later this type would surpass and finally replace the battleship, which until then had been regarded as the "nucleus" of every high-sea fleet. At that time the aircraft carrier was still regarded as a kind of auxiliary warship, and certainly as a satellite of the battleship, to which it could be assigned for its protection. Only a few far-seeing naval officers considered the possibility of offensive carrier warfare, and they were stationed, as could be said, at indefensible positions. The opposition of those circles who continued to see the battleship as the "non plus ultra" and were willing to concede, at most, reconnaissance service and defensive possibilities to the carrier, was too great. But since the new type of warship was at hand, the great sea powers did not give up on it, but at first they did very little to promote its further development. Meanwhile, time worked in favor of the airplane: with the increase in aircraft performance, the tactical standpoints toward a future sea war changed, and the aircraft carrier gradually gained importance.

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Famous Ships of World War 2

This book follows the style of Laurence Dunn's Merchant Ships of the World in Colour 1910-29 and was originally going to be restricted to warships only. However, the title was broadened to include some mercantile ships or ships of merchant origin, since both world wars saw sea warfare become a 'total' conflict, above, on, and below the ocean, and any ship at sea was likely to get involved in some aspect of hostilities, including the most innocent of neutrals. Modern sea warfare is uncompromisingly hostile, for apart from the hazards of shot, shell, torpedo, and bomb there is the common enemy of all ships and mariners, the sea and the weather, which can kill and destroy even when weapons fail to do so. In a conflict as long as World War 2, six years of intense naval activity involved ships of virtually every maritime nation. Actions took place in almost every sea and ocean of the world, though the really intense fighting was in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Pacific. Naval strengths were built up on a vast scale, unlikely to be surpassed in future, by the United States and Great Britain and the lesser participants, with only the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s building up a naval and merchant fleet bigger than ever before. This book presents a selection of the ships and types of ship which fought in the greatest of all wars, the 1939-45 period.

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Anatomy of the Ship - The Armored Transport Bounty

One of the most fascinating aspects of Bounty-, in terms of shipbuilding practices of the day, is that she was a merchant vessel not only converted into a 'floating greenhouse', but also refitted to meet the standards of the Royal Navy. Her refit took over three months to complete and cost more than her original purchase price. Refit and provisioning costs include £2504 spent on the hull, and £1952 spent on rigging and stores; with her purchase price of £1950 this gives a total of £6406. The first alteration made was to sheath the ship with copper. When Bethia was acquired she was sheathed with wood to prevent sea worms from eating into her external planking. Although this was a very old practice it was not very successful; it involved coating the underwater area of a ship's hull with horse hair mixed in tar, then nailing planks over it. By 1778 it was standard policy to sheath all Navy vessels with copper and it is interesting to note that the merits of copper sheathing were first realized on ships returning from the South Seas. Coppering a ship's bottom was expensive, not so much for labour expended (a ship could be coppered surprisingly quickly), but because the cost of copper was high. The replacement of all iron hull fastenings by bronze, necessary because of the galvanic action between copper and iron, also added to the cost.

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The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Navy in the Baltic 1921-41

About 22.00 hours on 21 June 1941, in his headquarters in Tallinn, the commander of the Soviet Baltic Fleet, Rear-Admiral Vladimir Tributs, received a long-expected telegram from the People's Commissariat for the Navy in Moscow. During the preceding weeks, tension had grown along the Soviet-German border with almost daily incursions by German ships and aircraft into Soviet territory. On the 19th, combat readiness had been raised to level 2, which meant readiness to go to sea within 4-6 hours. However, the forces along the frontiers were at the same time instructed to avoid countermeasures, which could provoke the Germans. Now, late in the evening on the 21st, Tributs was allowed to regroup his two battleships from Tallinn to the safer surroundings of Kronstadt, and to withdraw most of his remaining forces from Riga Bay to Tallinn. On the Latvian coast, only the cruiser Maxim Gorky and a squadron of destroyers were to remain.

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Destroyers - An Illustrated History of Their Impact

The destroyer, a comparatively small vessel of great speed and moderate armament, is one of the most recent additions to world navies, but it has evolved to become the most numerous and important type of surface combatant in the forces of the world's major maritime powers in the present day. Even so, far fewer studies are released on the development of this type of ship than the larger warships such as battleships and aircraft carriers. This fact is partly the result of the sense of glamour that surrounds the larger, more powerful vessels. Many of these studies examine the history of warships in general where destroyers are dealt with in only a single chapter thai, through the nature of these works, is a relatively small part of a larger whole. These works, although many are of good quality, have three chief drawbacks that detract from their usefulness in highlighting the history and importance of the destroyer. First, the coverage oftentimes centers on technological development and does not take political developments or foreign policy in individual countries that effect the development of the destroyers into account. As a result, readers are left with a history of destroyers that is detached from the events that govern their construction. Second, these works do not provide detailed information on the performance of destroyers in battle and how their design changed on the basis of that experience. Oftentimes, the reader is provided only with a summary of the combat roles of destroyers, without specific examples that lead to a better understanding overall. Last, these books fail to incorporate information about how these ships were operated and the people who crewed them. Destroyers, like all warships, are communities where people work constantly to make their vessels as effective as possible in conditions that have been far from comfortable until recent years.

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