I can't find a breech plug for this

[duckey]

Hiked the Marin Headlands today across from San Francisco (right by the Golden Gate Bridge)walked around all the battery's. The very last one we visited held a gun that came off the Missouri. Huge! I couldn't back up enough to get the entire gun in the picture.
167276
167278

[fryboy]

I remember those bunkers etc,had a great time exploring them with the bratz,the barrel wasn't there then tho ,but ...we do have some industrious machinist on the forum that if you'd be so kind to lyg it down to their shop would give it ye olde college try ;)

[leeggen]

What do they call those grooves maxi micro? Wow just wow.
Cd

[koehlerrk]

What do they call those grooves maxi micro? Wow just wow.
Cd

Those aren't rifling grooves. They're called interrupted screw threads and they're the equivalent of the locking lugs on a normal rifle.

[duckey]

I believe this is the breech plug locking system tha Lee uses for presses but I could be wrong?

[Frank46]

Alwayshave to laugh at when I see something like this. For one reason or another they always leave off the breech block on naval rifles or static displays of cannons or artillary. Kinda makes you wonder. Not like someone's going to stuff a 1900 pound projectile and 6 bags of powder and set it off. Nice display though. Frank

[Mk42gunner]

Not necessarily Frank, although I would almost bet the firing pin is removed or cut on most of them.

I remember one time we were in San Francisco in 89 or 90, and we decided to walk from Fisherman's Wharf to the Presidio. Along the way we stumbled upon Fort Mason and the Liberty ship they had there. It still had a hand ram 3"/50 and a 5"/38 mounted, so we climbed on and tried to figure out just how they worked. What else would you expect from two Gunner's Mates and a Fire Controlman?

Robert

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Alwayshave to laugh at when I see something like this. For one reason or another they always leave off the breech block on naval rifles or static displays of cannons or artillary. Kinda makes you wonder. Not like someone's going to stuff a 1900 pound projectile and 6 bags of powder and set it off. Nice display though. Frank

People are so unreasonable. I think the possibility of someone cutting off fingers, even his own, might come into it.

Mine's bigger than yours, at least in caliber and obesity. It is the hundred ton Armstrong gun in Gibraltar, and it is a muzzle-loader.

167300

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100-ton_gun

They thought in the 1890s, when it was only a little obsolete, that they ought to fire it again. But it didn't go off. A particularly small gunner had to crawl down the barrel to screw an eyebolt into the nose of the shell to unload it, and they promoted him to bombardier, which in the Royal Artillery means corporal. He probably meditated long and hard on hangfires. It is a sobering thought that it was very accurate in the 1870s, and a formidable weapon against any modern warship. Just try jamming the guidance system.

It is interesting that a black powder hand firearm can benefit from a longer barrel than a smokeless one, but a black powder artillery piece (even with moulded and pierced grains the size of plums) can't benefit from one as long. I think it is because the burning rate of black powder only increases about in proportion to the pressure on it (compared with loose powder ignited in a dish), while the burning rate of smokeless increases much more.

That is marvelous machining on the 16in. gun. If you simply make a thread and then cut slots to interrupt it, only half that threaded area is providing strength to resist pressure. But in modern (or nearly modern) guns the thread is in three steps, each of a diameter. Once it is rotated, block thread A will slide lengthwise past the barrel thread B, block thread B past barrel thread C, and barrel thread C will slide lengthwise past an unthreaded empty space. Almost 3/4 of the circumference can be load-bearing when closed, and you have to rotate it less.

[Earlwb]

Hiked the Marin Headlands today across from San Francisco (right by the Golden Gate Bridge)walked around all the battery's. The very last one we visited held a gun that came off the Missouri. Huge! I couldn't back up enough to get the entire gun in the picture.
167276
167278

That would make for one heck of a muzzle loader wouldn't it.
I suppose carving out a stock for it might be a problem.
:D

[Earlwb]

People are so unreasonable. I think the possibility of someone cutting off fingers, even his own, might come into it.

Mine's bigger than yours, at least in caliber and obesity. It is the hundred ton Armstrong gun in Gibraltar, and it is a muzzle-loader.

167300

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100-ton_gun

They thought in the 1890s, when it was only a little obsolete, that they ought to fire it again. But it didn't go off. A particularly small gunner had to crawl down the barrel to screw an eyebolt into the nose of the shell to unload it, and they promoted him to bombardier, which in the Royal Artillery means corporal. He probably meditated long and hard on hangfires. It is a sobering thought that it was very accurate in the 1870s, and a formidable weapon against any modern warship. Just try jamming the guidance system.

It is interesting that a black powder hand firearm can benefit from a longer barrel than a smokeless one, but a black powder artillery piece (even with moulded and pierced grains the size of plums) can't benefit from one as long. I think it is because the burning rate of black powder only increases about in proportion to the pressure on it (compared with loose powder ignited in a dish), while the burning rate of smokeless increases much more.

That is marvelous machining on the 16in. gun. If you simply make a thread and then cut slots to interrupt it, only half that threaded area is providing strength to resist pressure. But in modern (or nearly modern) guns the thread is in three steps, each of a diameter. Once it is rotated, block thread A will slide lengthwise past the barrel thread B, block thread B past barrel thread C, and barrel thread C will slide lengthwise past an unthreaded empty space. Almost 3/4 of the circumference can be load-bearing when closed, and you have to rotate it less.

It makes one wonder if they could really hit anything when shooting the big gun. They had a minimum firing rate of 4 to 6 minutes between shots. Thus a moving target would not be standing still for them to make a follow up shot. Plus in peacetime, due to the expensive shells, they only fired maybe one shot a month, or save the shells and fire more than one occasionally. Thus I doubt the gun crew would be all that experienced in shooting them. Somebody would have had to develop a firing table of aiming numbers for the guns. Where you would look up in a book of tables on what to set the charge, elevation and azimuth for when aiming it.

It is interesting in the arms races of the time, that these monster guns never got fired in anger though. It tends to give one doubts on whether the guns would have been effective in being fired at a enemy ship (or shore battery).

[Ballistics in Scotland]

The main reason they never got fired in anger, is that there was precious little anger between developed nations at the time. There was a feeling with the improvements in weaponry in general, that a war of great nations would be unacceptably destructive, as Kaiser Wilhelm eventually demonstrated.

I once saw a History Channel demonstration in which a Civil War Parrot rifle of field-gun size convincingly outshot the Canadian army's modern equivalent at 1000 yards. It wasn't a proof of lethality, of course, as the modern field gun was far superior in rapidity of fire, fusing and quality of fragmentation. But black powder is a very consistent propellant, and the bigger a gun, the better is responds to calculation.

[Went2kck]

if you look at my picture to the left it is a shell and powder charge for same. 1600 lbs shell and 6 bags of cordite. BIG BANG!!!!

[Scharfschuetze]

Gibraltar?

Here is another shot (in February this year) of a muzzle loading rifled cannon at Gibraltar. No breach block needed for this baby.

It was apparently dumped into the Med at sometime in its history and then recovered. The carriage was recently duplicated and made in England for it. It rotates on the bore of another cannon sunk vertically below it.

The shell and powder handling rooms beneath the cannon are marvels in themselves. Coastal artillery was its own branch of either the Army or Navy in many countries with coast lines.

Photos two and three were taken on Corregidor Island while on an assignment to the Philippines. The damage to the 12" rifle and the howitzer is from Japanese shelling during the siege there in early 1942. One often sees the Japanese propaganda photo of the cannon in photo three with several Japanese soldiers and their flag standing on it.

[Frank46]

On Grande Island in Subic Bay in the Phillipine Islands there is or were two disappearing 10" rifles. A lot of stuff had been stripped off the guns but during a ship's party we had both the time and opportunity to closly look at these guns. They were made at Watervliet Arsenal in 1910. Supposedly the Smithonian Museum was to get the two guns and refurbish them like they were when they were new.Never heard anything about it for years. Then a post on greybeardoutdoors.com showed what looked like the two guns being set up on the west coast. Since I had pics taken '66-'67 I sent copies in and the shrapnel scars on the tubes as well as the markings on the muzzle were identical. Mystery solved. You westpac sailors should remember these guns if you had ship's parties on Grande Island. Frank

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Gibraltar?

Here is another shot (in February this year) of a muzzle loading rifled cannon at Gibraltar. No breach block needed for this baby.

It was apparently dumped into the Med at sometime in its history and then recovered. The carriage was recently duplicated and made in England for it. It rotates on the bore of another cannon sunk vertically below it.

The shell and powder handling rooms beneath the cannon are marvels in themselves. Coastal artillery was its own branch of either the Army or Navy in many countries with coast lines.

Photos two and three were taken on Corregidor Island while on an assignment to the Philippines. The damage to the 12" rifle and the howitzer is from Japanese shelling during the siege there in early 1942. One often sees the Japanese propaganda photo of the cannon in photo three with several Japanese soldiers and their flag standing on it.

The first of those guns is the smaller (!) one near Europa Point in Gibraltar. Those lighthousemen must have been trusting men. I haven't seen the emplacement for that one in any detail, but the hundred ton gun had steam-powered training and elevation machinery, and the benefit of triangulated target location, theodolite and telegraph or heliograph probably, from spots higher and more stable than a masthead. It would be no contest against a moving ship trying to hit any specific target (e.g. that battery) on land.

There are guns everywhere in Gibraltar. They include a battery of all-cast smoothbores on reproduction cast iron carriages, with plaques saying they were made by John Slough of London. I knew him slightly, as the maker of a rather good investment cast stainless pistol, in the days when that technology was relatively new. Dr. Franklin Mann of the United States, about the first real amateur ballistics experimenter there, called his test range, with a concrete pedestal benchrest, his "Shooting Gibraltar".

[Eddie2002]

Wonder how many kids have been stuck trying to craw through that bore. I'd give it a try just because it's there ;)

[Teddy (punchie)]

Wonder how many kids have been stuck trying to craw through that bore. I'd give it a try just because it's there ;)


My two would be right up the tube. I'd make sure they would have something to snap a few pics.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

This is a mock-up of the eyebolt incident, in the Hundred Ton Gun emplacement.

167622

I have walked through a section of what was supposed to be Saddam Hussein's supergun, made by Sheffield Forgemasters and impounded on the way out by British customs, who decided it wasn't oilfield equipment as claimed. I'm doubtful about this, since they are quite thin, and have a rippled internal finish that would be quite difficult to smooth accurately on such a scale. I suppose asking for a perfect surface on a refinery cylinder could have excited suspicion, and outer winding under tension with carbon fibre cord and resin, like a now vanished Winchester shotgun, could have strengthened it.

167623

[Geezer in NH]

To find a breech plug try SARCO and but a 55 gallon jug of rust off. :kidding:

[funnyjim014]

Sarco, partscorp, and charleys surplus might have one left. I hear that they had a big demand for em a few years back:D

[fgd135]

Loading big guns was a very regimented and precise exercise--two US battleships, the Mississippi BB-41, in 1924, and the Iowa, BB-61, had turret explosions during peacetime while firing their main batteries--a 14" 50 cal gun in #2 triple-gun turret on the first, and one of the 16" 50 cal's in #2 triple-gun turret on the Iowa. Both explosions were caused in part by deviations from loading practices, including ramming powder bags into the breeches while hot gases had not been evacuated from the bores, and over-fast ramming speeds. The Iowa was also using improperly stored powder...58 men in the turret of the Mississippi were killed, and 47 on the Iowa.
Btw, how accurate were these guns? At the Battle of the Surigao Strait, the West Virginia's first salvo, a full broadside of radar-directed 8 16" guns, hit the Japanese battleship Yamashiro , in pitch black night, at almost 13 miles.

[Squeeze]

How many do you need? 168712

[JHeath]

When I started shooting, gun shops had umbrella stands full of those in the corner. Couldn't get rid of them. We used them for stub barrels and never thought twice about cutting them off or rechambering them. They were just shooters, we used them until they wore out. Once I discovered one of the ultra-rare 2-groove M65 atomic cannon Korean-era barrels stamped "Wurlitzer Pipes & Reeds Co." with an Elmer Keith inspector's cartouche. The LGS didn't know what he had and took a last-ditch Arisaka in trade! A buddy decided he wanted that barrel for a chunk gun he was building and like a fool I sold it to him.

[Earlwb]

That is a interesting use for a M65 Atomic cannon barrel, as a chunk gun. One could use a mold frame on the pumpkins to get them to the correct bore size. I wonder if the rifling would have helped with the distance one can fire them using gas pressure.

[Scharfschuetze]

One of these barrels? This one is at the Artillery Museum at Fort Sill, OK.

[JHeath]

One of these barrels? This one is at the Artillery Museum at Fort Sill, OK.

Sort of. The photo is of a run-of-the-mill Singer Sewing Machine made barrel. Or maybe a Rock-Ola. They're are all the same. Glorified fenceposts. The Wurlitzer barrels were made from special steel salvaged from the hull of an experimental U-boat.

"Sarge says to pull this lanyard detonating 300lbs of H4895 behind a small A-bomb. If everything goes well, the nuclear explosion happens next town over."

[W.R.Buchanan]

Gibraltar?

Here is another shot (in February this year) of a muzzle loading rifled cannon at Gibraltar. No breach block needed for this baby.

It was apparently dumped into the Med at sometime in its history and then recovered. The carriage was recently duplicated and made in England for it. It rotates on the bore of another cannon sunk vertically below it.

The shell and powder handling rooms beneath the cannon are marvels in themselves. Coastal artillery was its own branch of either the Army or Navy in many countries with coast lines.

Photos two and three were taken on Corregidor Island while on an assignment to the Philippines. The damage to the 12" rifle and the howitzer is from Japanese shelling during the siege there in early 1942. One often sees the Japanese propaganda photo of the cannon in photo three with several Japanese soldiers and their flag standing on it.

Scharf: I went to Corregidor in 1972 when stationed at Clark AFB, and the Crockett Battery (The one with the 6ea 12" Howitzers) was the one that took a hit by a 16" round from a Jap Battle Ship. One of the guns was blown down the access road about 100 yards and I bet it is still right there. The gun weighed 104,000 lbs and it was marked so on the muzzle. I have a slide of it some where. They weren't painted gray when I was there. I also had a pic of the one you show. and the disappearing guns as well. Pretty impressive machinery!

We walked that whole island and what I took home with me is that I didn't see one piece of cement work on the entire island that didn't have a bullet hole or strafe mark on it! NOT ONE! The place definitely got shot up as witnessed buy the Cement Wall behind the Howie in your picture!

It was an amazing trip and I learned a lot about just how powerful things were 80 years ago.

Good post!

Randy

[M-Tecs]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Rodman_gun_va.jpg

Ship Island Gulfport MS. This is a 15" Rodham. They made them up to 20"

[Earlwb]

That picture of the 15" Rodham cannon had me wondering how they got the cannon ball loaded into the barrel. A 15 inch iron solid cannon ball weighs around 330 pounds. Shells could weigh more of course. I didn't see anything like a crane or lift in the picture.

OK I see it now, they had a folding mini-crane to help support the shell for loading. It wasn't in the picture shown above.

http://www.minecreek.info/artillery-battalion/images/8840_7_19-fort-monroe-1940s.jpg

[Scharfschuetze]

Scharf: I went to Corregidor in 1972 when stationed at Clark AFB

Randy,

A little off topic I guess, but you would not recognize Clark AFB after Mount Pinatubo blew and the local Angeles City vermin stole everything out of the buildings when the base contract was not renewed in the early 90s. It definitely was a beautiful base during your tenure there.

It's now a duty free zone and has been rehabilitated to some extent and while not what it was in during the VN conflict, it's better than it was in the 90s. The last time that I was there was in 2011.

Remember Mount Arayat to the East? Last time there it was a strictly no go area due to the Communist KPA activity.

[W.R.Buchanan]

I knew Pinatubo made a big mess when it blew up,,, and that Commie BS was just getting started when I was there.

We went to Baguio on a trip once and got bad vibed out of town by those clowns, but back then, they weren't nearly as brazen as they are now.

I do not miss the Philippines or any other portion of that part of the world. Life is pretty cheap there and I tend to not go where that is the norm. Mexico is the same way now.

Stayin' right here in the good ole US of A :mrgreen:

Going to watch our bi-annual Cannon Shoot at the range today. Will post pics of our big guns later today.

Randy

[EDG]

My what big teeth you have.
Known as a Welin breech with the interrupted stepped thread. It takes very little rotation (one small tooth segment width = about 24 degrees) to lock it.

169136

[Ballistics in Scotland]

That picture of the 15" Rodham cannon had me wondering how they got the cannon ball loaded into the barrel. A 15 inch iron solid cannon ball weighs around 330 pounds. Shells could weigh more of course. I didn't see anything like a crane or lift in the picture.

OK I see it now, they had a folding mini-crane to help support the shell for loading. It wasn't in the picture shown above.

http://www.minecreek.info/artillery-battalion/images/8840_7_19-fort-monroe-1940s.jpg

The Rodman guns were all smoothbores, limited to roundshot, and therefore the shell would be lighter than the solid shot. Rodman's real achievement was hollow casting with a water cooled core, when gunfounders usually followed the old practice of drilling a solid gun, which imposed a size restriction.

Due to contraction and the emission of gases a very large iron casting is spongy with voids in the inside. You can sink a penknife into it. Up to a certain size you drill this away and are left with good iron. Above that size you get a weak and spongy bore. Rodman's method put that good "outer" layer on the inside as well with both less thickness and better distribution of contraction stresses reducing the sponginess.

Tomorrow is the centenary of the Battle of Jutland, which is often called indecisive or even a German victory, because British losses were considerably higher. I've just watched an investigative documentary which among much phony and irrelevant model tests came to the same conclusion on British losses as Churchill wrote in the 1920s. T

They were of battlecruisers, which were really dreadnaught battleships with less armour, designed to catch fast commerce raiders, of which the critics said an admiral would inevitably put them in the line of battle against battleships. Most of the British losses were in the explosion of battlecruisers, whether from inadequate armour or bad magazine protection practices isn't known, but it was probably both. When battleships met battleships von Speer turned away in poor visibility, and no German shell ever penetrated battleship armour. British shells did, but exploded before full penetration. It is a lot easier to produce new shells or fuses (as was done) than to rearmour a warship.
It was also learned that submarines, even pre-sonar, weren't the effective weapon in a fleet action that had been feared, and that there was a need for wireless communication, rather than the signal flags which had failed to bring four of the most modern fast battleships into contact with the German battlecruisers. A simple one-action battle code would have given no time for cryptography.

The German navy had been built to win the freedom of the seas. First they wanted to maintain their colonies, but by the time of Jutland there weren't any colonies. They wanted to put commerce raiders on the open sea, and to break the British blockade, but after Jutland the blockade continued and there were no more commerce raiders, except an extremely close-run Battle of the Atlantic against submarines, which could get in and out anyway. The German plan had been for the weaker German fleet to cut off and destroy part of Britain's, then repeat the process. But the danger of an all-against-all fleet action had been unacceptably close. The Royal Navy could have accepted the same disparity in losses the next week, and Germany couldn't.

[EDG]

Today is Memorial Day in the US and US Navy in WWII was much larger than anyone's navy by the end of the war.

[Scharfschuetze]

Wasn't it Admiral Beaty who pushed the battle cruiser concept and who then put the battlecruisers into the battle line at Jutland or Skagerrak in German?

His rather infamous quote sums the error up: "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today."

While often claimed as a draw or German victory, the Royal Navy held the battle field and in reality won the battle that day as a result. It is an interesting battle that takes into account poor visibility, primitive signal techniques, signal intelligence, gunnery, optical range finding, missed opportunities and often luck. The big guns of both fleets were stellar performers, but in pre-radar days, optical range finding was not up to the task of getting steel on target, although the Kriegsmarine was considered to have been better than the Royal Navy in that regard.

I was just on the Royal Navy's cruiser HMS Bellfast last week. She's tied up on the Thames River in London. While it is a WWII cruiser, it gives some idea of what service on a battle cruiser or battle ship would have been like.

And finally:

A salute to our fallen this Memorial Day.

[Earlwb]

I sort of wonder if having the battlecruisers in the line was more of a ploy to make the Germans think there were more battleships there than they thought there were. Since visibility wasn't good, it would be difficult to identify the ships.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Wasn't it Admiral Beaty who pushed the battle cruiser concept and who then put the battlecruisers into the battle line at Jutland?

His rather infamous quote sums the error up: "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today."

While often claimed as a draw or German victory, the Royal Navy held the battle field and in reality won the battle that day as a result. It is an interesting battle that takes into account poor visibility, primitive signal techniques, signal intelligence, missed opportunities and often luck. The big gun of both fleets were stellar performers, but in pre radar days, optical range finding was not up to the task, although the Kriegsmarine was considered to be better than the Royal Navy in that regard.

I was just on the HMS Bellfast last week. She's tied up on the Thems River in London. While it is a WWII cruiser, it gives some idea of what service on a battle cruiser or battle ship would have been like.

An finally:

A salute to our fallen on this somber day.

Beatty commanded the battlecruiser squadron (thought it included four of the most modern battleships, which flag signals failed to bring into action at a moment which would surely have been decisive. He set out from the Firth of Forth, while the battleship part of the fleet came from Scapa Flow, and he opened the battle before contacting them.

He wasn't, however, identified as a great supporter of the battlecruiser theory, and around the time it was taken to excess, his career was rather in the balance. He had refused a post as second in command of the Atlantic Fleet, arguing for a posting closer to home, and he was close to dismissal after two years of half-pay when he was resurrected by his friend Churchill. It may not be true that Churchill said "You look very young to be an admiral" and Beatty replied "You look very young to be a First Lord." But Churchill did recognize him as the officer who had tossed him a bottle of champagne from a Nile gunboat in 1898.

The main force behind the battlecruisers was the First Sea Lord Admiral Fisher, an extremely great and extremely awful old man whose enthusiasm for the dreadnaught battleships and turbines was of huge value to the navy. He was a control freak of the first order, and careers died with real or imagined opposition. His final brainchild was the "Furious", a ship with two eighteen-inch guns and the armour of a light cruiser. He probably intended her for the traditional battlecruiser role, but to circumvent a prohibition on laying down new capital ships in wartime, said she was to support Russia in the Baltic.

The guns were fractionally smaller in caliber than those of the "Yamato" and "Musashi" of three times her size, and firing a heavier shell. They claimed an effective range of over 30,000 yards, and would carry much further. But as Russia looked less and less capable of offensive action against Germany, she was converted to an aircraft carrier, with the somewhat disconcerting characteristic of a superstructure in the middle, and made several attacks on "Tirpitz" in 1944.

Beatty was undoubtedly rash, and his superior, Jellicoe, too cautious. A brain graft might have made two first-class admirals. Jellicoe probably needn't have broken off action in poor visibility, and might have forced a more general encounter of main battle fleets. But his reason was the effect of submarines on a fleet action, which eventually turned out to be less than was imagined at the time. Even in "Sherlock Holmes" we hear that conventional naval operations would be impossible with a fictional Bruce-Partington's area of operation.

"Belfast" is impressive indeed, although only on the heavier side of the light cruiser category. CS Forester the novelist, as a journalist, went to sea on a lighter cruiser which he fictionalizes in "The Ship", which is one of the finest novels of sea warfare. He describes how any foreign power would gladly part with immense sums of money to place an expert for an hour in the room below the waterline where the Marine bandsmen operated the analogue fire control system.

They didn't even replace the American version of that on Ronald Reagan's de-mothballed battleships, because electronics couldn't do the job better. "Warspite", a battleship which was damaged at Jutland, possibly holds the record for a first-shot hit by one warship on another, 26,000 yards on "Giulio Cesare" in 1940. It was improvements in rangefinding and fire control that made that possible, with a 1913 ship and guns.

[Scharfschuetze]

The main force behind the battlecruisers was the First Sea Lord Admiral Fisher, an extremely great and extremely awful old man whose enthusiasm for the dreadnaught battleships and turbines was of huge value to the navy.

Ah yes, Fisher was the driving force behind the "Battle Cruiser" concept.


CS Forester the novelist, as a journalist, went to sea on a lighter cruiser which he fictionalizes in "The Ship", which is one of the finest novels of sea warfare.

A most impressive author he was. His "African Queen" is my favorite of his long list of books.

Another fine read of a light cruiser is Alistair Maclean's: "H.M.S. Ulysses"

[Frank46]

CS Forrester's "Brown on Resolution" is another good read. Frank

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Ah yes, Fisher was the driving force behind the "Battle Cruiser" concept.



A most impressive author he was. His "African Queen" is my favorite of his long list of books.

Another fine read of a light cruiser is Alistair Maclean's: "H.M.S. Ulysses"

"HMS Ulysses" is a novel that always saddens me - not for itself, for it is a very well written story of the Battle of the Atlantic, a first novel by a young man who was there. It is every bit as good as Nicholas Monserrat, who gained high critical opinions as an author of literature, for "The Cruel Sea". The trouble is that when Maclean made it big, he sank into a long series of formula traitor-in-the-group thrillers set in different times and continents.

Forester never had an off-day, and I'd stake my life he never used a ghost-writer. "The Ship" more than the others, though, demonstrates his journalist instinct for picking up a subject and the specialists' way of thinking on brief acquaintance. There is something extremely realistic about his characters, with their various quirks and failings, sometimes serious ones, who work together as the crew of a well worked-up warship. Or indeed Hornblower in his Napoleonic Wars novels, who is inwardly timid and viciously self-critical, while the readers and all around him know he is a first-class seacaptain. That is what the literary set mean by irony: the readers knowing something the characters don't.

Two movies well worth seeing are "Sink the Bismarck" and "In which we serve" in which Sir Noel Coward plays a fictionalized Lord Mountbatten, the Queen's cousin as a destroyer captain eventually sunk off Crete. That was where the generals suggested that evacuation might cost the navy too many ships, and Admiral Cunningham said "It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue." Crete was a peculiarly British sort of defeat, which nobody could even call indecisive, but after which the Germans never attempted another large-scale parachute attack, not in Barbarossa as had been planned nor on Malta, which was quite vital to the Mediterranean war.

A light cruiser was in various ways a particularly dangerous warship to be on. She might not take any more punishment than a destroyer, but the enemy would risk a lot more to get her, and the navy would send her where they wouldn't risk anything big.

[JHeath]

Ballistics In Scotland, thanks for sharing this and the WDM Bell notes and all the rest. JNH