Regia Marina - Italian Battleships of WWII

The close of World War One found the Italian Navy operating a force of eleven battleships. However, only five of these were modern or "dreadnought" types. These were the Dante Alighieri, which was the first Italian dreadnought, entering service in 1913; the two Cavour class ships, Conte di Cavour and Guilio Cesare; and the two Duilio class, Andrea Doria and Caio Duilio. The six pre-dreadnought ships included the Saint Bon class and the Regina Elena class. During the war three ships had been lost. Two were the pre-dreadnoughts of the Briti class. A far more significant loss had been the sinking of the Leonardo da Vinci, a dreadnought of the Cavour class, sunk by an internal explosion (attributed by some sources to Austrian sabotage) on Aug. 2, 1916, at Taranto. She was refloated in September 1919 but was destined not to re-enter service. Work had been suspended since 1915-16 on three of the super dreadnoughts of the Caracciolo class. Only the nameship, the Caracciolo, slowly progressed, being launched in 1920.

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The Age of the Galley - Mediterranean Oared Vessels since Pre-classical Times

This method of building a ship, however, required considerable skill. Shear stiffness between planks would have depended upon achieving a simultaneous fit of the tenons in their mortices and therefore great accuracy in marking and cutting. In the 40m-long hulls of oared ships, tenons can be calculated to have been heavily loaded, crushing them across the grain, the direction in which timber is weakest. Tenons, however, were made of a selected hardwood, usually Turkey Oak (quercust cerris) which can carry a particularly high stress in that direction without being crushed. Tenons were also thicker in long ships, to judge from the only one so far found, near Marsala, in which they were 10mm thick, compared with 5mm commonly found in shorter, rounder merchant ships. When set very closely along a seam, tenons were often placed alternately nearer one side of the plank and then the other.

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Power at Sea - The Age of Navalism 1890-1918

ON A LATE AUTUMN DAY in the year 1888, an obscure, middle-aged
officer then teaching at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, wrote a friend about a project that he was developing. Industrialism was reaching flood tide, and America’s sailors, nearly a quarter century removed from any sort of combat, had become far too attached to “the tendency of the age” toward “material” matters. The new steam and steel navy with its powerful guns, engineering plants, and electrical systems had become so bewitching, Alfred Thayer Mahan told Charles R. Miles, that navy men had lost any desire for serious study of their “proper business... the art of fighting.” The “New Navy,” as the small U.S. industrial war fleet eventually came to be called, had taken its first step forward in 1873, when fifteen officers met at the Naval Academy in Annapolis to form the U.S. Naval Institute. The Navy Department, however, understood that this first impulse toward professionalism in the dawning industrial age was not enough. In 1882, it established the Office of Naval Intelligence “to collect, compile, record and correct information on fourteen categories of naval intelligence from descriptions of foreign warships to data on coastal defenses.” Two years later, the Naval War College was established “to create and disseminate a system of naval war.” The U.S. Navy was clearly moving toward modernity, but the college curriculum initially lacked a coherent intellectual framework—a vision of what sea power and sea warfare would become in the industrial age.

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Anatomy of the Ship - The Frigate Diana

Wartime inevitably provides a great boost for warship design and construction; not only does it provide greater incentive but equally importantly it also provides the necessary finance. It is therefore not surprising to find that on 6 November 1778, just five months after the entry of France into the War of American Independence, the Board of Admiralty had arrived at the stage where it was able to establish one of the most significant milestones in the history of the British sailing frigate. On that day the Board ordered two new ships to be built, one at Deptford Dockyard and one at Woolwich Dockyard. These ships were the first two frigates to be ordered with a main armament of 18-pounder guns, 12-pounders having been the largest guns carried until then. When Flora was launched at Deptford eighteen months later she was the first 36-gun ship to have been built for the Navy for twenty-two years. A month later Minerva was launched at Woolwich and made history by becoming the first British 38-gun ship to be built. She was followed by a sister ship Arethusa in 1781 and by two further sisters Phaeton and Thetis, with slightly modified hulls, in 1782.

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The Encyclopedia of U-Boats from 1904 to the Present

Wilhelm Bauer was born on 23 March 1822 in Dillingen and died on 18 June 1876 in Munich. From 1848 he was involved in the construction of submersibles, about which there was much discussion during the German-Danish War and for which there were high hopes at the time. He sketched his first submersible in 1850, a single-case type with transverse frames and riveted 6mm iron plating. Bauer's original sketch shows two floodable compartments and one control compartment, but this design was not implemented: instead 20 tons of iron in the keel served as ballast, trim being controlled by an adjustable 0.5 ton weight. Propulsion was achieved by means of two pedal-wheels with a two-stage transmission on a drive shaft connected to a propeller. This first draft, including as it does floodable and control compartments, has all the basic essentials required for a functional submarine. Indeed, in the opinion of the British author Burgoyne, Bauer made a greater contribution to the development of the submarine than any other inventor. However, the completed boat did not reflect all of Bauer's early ideas.

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Warship Series 04 - Free State Battlewagon - U.S.S. Maryland (BB-46)

The first of three vessels to honor the state of Maryland had the shortest career and remains the most obscure, with neither plans nor illustrations of the vessel known to exist. In the 1790s, Congress reasoned that the merchants of America's great ports were the chief sufferers of the depredations of corsairs and privateers and ought to be willing, therefore, to make a special contribution to the defense of the U.S. merchant marine. Thus on June 30,1798, the lawmakers authorized the Navy to accept any warships that the merchants might care to build and donate. The plan seemed agreeable to all parties and the new naval establishment received several excellent ships as a result. Following a public subscription in the Baltimore area (mainly among the merchants), the hull for a three-masted warship of the sloop-of-war type was launched at the Prince Shipyard on June 3,1799. According to correspondence from Henry Yellot, the Navy agent in Baltimore, the first Maryland was 87 feet long, had a moulded beam of 29 feet, and a 12- or 13-foot depth of hold.

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The Hybrid Warship

The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'hybrid' as 'anything derived from heterogeneous sources, or composed of different or incongruous elements', which seems clear enough, but defining just what constitutes a hybrid warship presents certain problems. Obviously, it must be a vessel that combines the characteristics of two types of warship, but which two types, and what degree of combination is required to make a ship a hybrid? For example, the Panzerschiffe of the Deutschland class were frequently referred to as 'hybrids' in the naval journals of the day, combining as they did the guns of a capital ship with the size of a cruiser. Yet the reader will find little about pocket battleships in this book. For our purposes, a hybrid warship is one that combines the characteristic features of one type of warship — most frequently, but not exclusively, heavy artillery — while also being designed or extensively modified to perform the functions of an aviation vessel. Defining the required features, however, does not provide a definition of the hybrid warship. The degree of the combination must be settled. Many conventional warships carried unusually large numbers of aircraft; for example, the US Brooklyn class light cruisers were designed to carry up to eight aircraft (although they never carried that number in service), while the Tirpitz could carry six aircraft, and the Yamato as many as seven floatplanes. No one would consider these ships hybrids, however. They are merely conventional gunnery vessels with an abnormally large aircraft complement.

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Warship's Data 05 - USS Yorktown (CV 10)

The aircraft carrier USS YORKTOWN (CV-10) was authorized by the Congressional Act of 14 June 1940. She was the fourth ship in the U.S. Navy to bear the name commemorating the, decisive American victory against the British forces at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781 during the American Revolution. The YORKTOWN was built by the Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company of Newport News, Virginia She was laid down on 1 December 1941 as the BON HOMME RICHARD, but was renamed YORKTOWN on 26 September 1942 to honor the YORKTOWN (CV 5), which was lost during the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The CV-10 was launched on 21 January 1943 and commissioned on 15 April more than a year ahead of schedule. The YORKTOWN was affectionately known as "The Fighting Lady" after a motion picture of that name which was filmed aboard her during May and June of 1943 while on her shakedown cruise. The first YORKTOWN was a ship sloop armed with sixteen 32-pdr. guns. She had a length of 117', a beam of 34' and displaced 566 tons. Laid down at the Norfolk Navy Yard in 1838 she was launched in 1839 and commissioned on 15 November 1840.

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Battleships - An Illustrated History of Their Impact

It has often been pointed out that Drake's sixteenth-century sea dogs could have quickly and literally learned the ropes aboard Admiral Horatio Nelson's eighteenth-century flagship, HMS Victory, Its greater size and gun power would certainly have impressed them, but Nelson's first-rate represented more growth than innovation. Actually, warships (and commercial vessels) of the late eighteenth century would not, except for their guns, have astonished Noah, Julius Caesar, or the Apostle Paul. The great multigun, three-decked wooden sailing warship had serenely ruled since the 1600s, facing no serious challengers from above or below the waters, and fearing only the fireship. In battle, the stout wooden sides (usually oak) resisted solid shot. Only rarely was a wooden capital ship sunk, and then almost always by fire. The near-invulnerable status of the wooden warship would begin to change only in the early 1800s, and by the middle of that century they would cease to be built.

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Anatomy of the Ship - The Ships of Christopher Columbus

The ships of Columbus's small fleet sailed from the port of Palos, Huelva, southern Spain, on 2 August 1492, following the ebb tide along the river Odiel to the Saltes sand bar. They set sail for the ocean passage at 0800hrs the following day, at a speed of 4 knots, heading for the Canary Islands. The passage to the Canaries took six days, in the course of which the Pinta required a jury repair to her rudder. The nearest port to Spain was Lan-zarote, which at the time belonged to the Spanish Crown, while the rest of the Islands were still in the possession of the Guanche people. The Pinta, commanded by Martin Alonso Pinzon, remained off Gran Canaria while the commanders sought a substitute vessel or a means of repairing her rudder permanently. On 11 August the Santa Maria and Nina headed for Gomera Island, while the Pinta was repaired at Gando, Gran Canaria. Columbus meanwhile set about converting the lateen rigged Nina for square sails on the foremast and mainmast. The Santa Maria and Nina returned to Las Palmas, arriving on 25 August.

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Anatomy of the Ship - The 74-gun Ship Bellona

During the first half of the eighteenth century British ship design had fallen behind that of the other European powers, especially France and Spain. The battlefleet had never really been tested during its last war, which ended in 1713, because the French had concentrated on commerce raiding ever since their defeat at Barfleur in 1692. During the 1720s and 1730s, the French and Spanish had begun to rebuild their navies, using talent and ideas from other countries, and had begun to approach the problems of ship design from new angles. They had concentrated mainly on the large two-decker, and the French evolved the 74-gun ship in the 1730s. It was about 170 feet long on the gundeck, while British two-deckers were little more than 150 feet; it carried 28 guns on the lower deck, and 30 on the upper deck, whereas British two-deckers had no more than 26 on any deck; its lower deck battery was of 36-pounders, while equivalent British ships carried only 24-pounders. The French ships had a low centre of gravity, low topsides, impressive gun power, and good sailing qualities.

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Anatomy of the Ship - The 32-gun Frigate Essex

The controversy surrounding the draught of the Essex by William Hackett has been due, in part, to what some consider its unpolished state, questionable draughtsmanship and confusing lines. Enlargements of the photographic copies from the National Archives have done little to correct this image. On these copies most of the delicate pencil lines delineating the curved sweeps for the gunports, buttuck lines and diagonals, and the erasures and corrections which would contribute to a better understanding of the inked lines, are, for the most part, lost. Further efforts to create a so-called line copy from Hackett's shaded pencil and ink drawing render the design even more obscure. Despite this drawback, these line copies do serve a purpose: when enlarged, they reveal dramatically the significant notations made by Hackett. These are neither random nor arbitrary jottings; each has a distinct meaning. They offer us the unique opportunity to observe, at first hand, the eighteenth century design and construction techniques used by Hackett, and allow us to trace the designer's steps as his work on the Essex lines progressed. The following discussion of Hackett's design and its evolution can best be understood by reference to the draught and annotations reproduced on p26 below.

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Badges and Insignia of the United States Navy WWII to Present

The first uniform for enlisted women was comprised of a single breasted coat (blue in winter and white in summer), long gull-bottomed skirts and a straight-brimmed hat (blue felt in the winter and white straw in the summer), black shoes and stockings. In the early days havelocks were also issued to female personnel, which was a protective cover worn over the combination cap to provide cold weather protection. Khakis were introduced into the Navy in 1912 for naval aviators and submarine officers in 1931. During World War IT, khakis were authorized for on-station wear by all officers and chiefs and finally for liberty as well. Gray working uniforms (the same style as khaki) were introduced in 1943 as a uniform for officers and chiefs. Prior to its discontinuation in 1949, the Navy "grays," were also authorized for cooks and stewards. In 1917, aviation green uniforms were authorized for aviation officers as a winter working uniform. Chief petty officers were permitted to wear this uniform in 1941 when they were designated Naval Aviation Pilots. Women joined the aviation community in 1985 (but were not authorized the green uniform until later).

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