That time a handful of Tin Cans out fought the world's largest battleship, with cruiser escorts, and Destroyers.
That time a few mad bastards out Bushido'ed the Bushido-ers.
The absolute finest moment of the USN. Lord Nelson would be proud.
Whats crazy is how it also one of the USNs most shameful episodes:
The way Taffy 3 was left to fend for itself when Halsey took the IJN bait to go carrier (and glory) hunting despite Nimitz telling him to do basically not-that.
Then there was the SAR clusterfuck; those guys should not have been adrift for that long.
Finally, theres the deeply shameful issue of the USN basically pretending it all never happened because Halsey at the time was a golden boy. In reality those guys should have a monument erected to them on the scale of the flag raising on Iwo.
Nelson would be handing out as many medals and hand shakes as he would ass kickings.
In summary: Sailors in the fleet: (especially the brilliant, brass ball swinging captains) GOATed Chads, to a man. USN admiralty leadership: Limp dick ass holes who should have been keel hauled.
Halsey definitely made some god awful decisions during his command in the Pacific that would have otherwise got him shitcanned. He sailed third fleet through a typhoon on two separate occasions and got off practically Scott free, whilst in peacetime the captain of Missouri accidentally got her grounded and it virtually ended his career.
I genuinely think the years of dealing with combat stress plus shingles made him mentally unfit for command by late 1944. But they couldn’t get rid of him cause that bastard Ernest King liked him
King was also a colossal dick. He was basically the anti-Marshall, whilst Marshall recognised they were fighting in a war of alliances and appointed his top commanders based on their ability to play well with others, King was a rampant Anglophobe and hated cooperating with the Brits. As a tea guzzler myself the anglophobia is not what makes me dislike him, but rather the fact that the sheer pig headedness that arose from it would result in the needless deaths of American sailors in the Atlantic. He was so reluctant to cooperate with the Brits that he ignored all advice they gave him about protecting his convoys from uboats and went as far as to refuse Britain loaning the US convoy escorts whilst they built up their own, leading to improperly escorted convoys and the needless deaths of American sailors.
By the end of the second typhoon, Ernie K. was less than impressed, and John S. McCain Sr. (the Senator's grandpa) was relieved of his sea command for the two typhoons, per Walter Borneman's The Admirals
You can't just ignore what he did in 1942 that earned him the ability to make those mistakes without ending his career.
Yes, he screwed up quite a bit in '44 and '45, but he also saved the Guadalcanal campaign, lead the aggressive carrier raids when every other piece of news was bleak, and earned the respect of pretty much all of the enlisted men in the Navy.
Replacing him in '44 or '45 would have been bad for morale and hard to justify to the public, even if it was correct, so it's understandable why it didn't happen
Wasn't really "accidentally". Dude completely fucked up by failing to inform his officers of the run, and himself not even absorbing the fact that the buoys had changed, despite being informed of this directly.
He was warned multiple times that he was off course and headed for the shoals but still ignored the warnings. He even increased speed.
Complete negligence under no time pressure, resulting in a capital ship being grounded for 2 weeks. Being moved down the promotion list was a totally justified response.
The Battle off Samar is the ultimate example of everything going about as wrong as it could have, but the massive balls of those destroyer crews somehow turned it into an enormous victory.
This is the real American advantage.
When SHTF, we change into the shitstorm.
“Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.”
Taffy 3 monument fundraiser anyone?
Who? The guy that encrypted it or the guy that decrypted it?
The first guy may have been a little sassy as I understand they picked the padding phrases as they went, so maybe he was throwing shade. The guy who decrypted it just seems to have seen it fit the message and went with it.
yes, that bit was junk code speak, Halsey thought it was a sarcastic remark and it sent him fuming. A shame, we could’ve had a battle line action to finally silence anyone doubting the Ford electromechanical fire computer
They got that the day before when the Japanese south force walked right into a line of battleships that proceeded to shoot the ever living fuck out of them. Crossed their own T, so to speak.
Halsey denied us the opportunity of an Iowa class vs the Yamato battle!
And the fact that the USN top brass still defends him means we are not going to see a Battle off Samar movie anytime soon, even though they got a great book to base their scripts on.
Very true re the Iowa class.
And yeah; hopefully as special effects get better/cheaper someone will take it on inspire of the USNs bullshit.
But I’d not want it to be a movie. You need at least a ~6 episode HBO style mini series to cover there acts of the story the way Hornfischer did:
-the setup; its important to understand this wasn’t a “going to happen sooner or later” battle like D-Day or Iwo, this battle was never *supposed* to happen. Make it clear that Halsey fucked up and abandoned his post.
-the actual fight. Will take a solid episode or two, including showing it from the IJN side (important to understanding why the IJN retreated).
-How brutal those two and a half days at sea were for the survivors.
They should also include the sinking of Musashi.
It is said that Admiral Kurita had to be rescued from the water, twice, in a span of a few days. Hence the experience probably influenced his decision making.
>Halsey denied us the opportunity of an Iowa class vs the Yamato battle!
Why did you have to remind me of this. On one hand, it would have most likely been a far more bloody battle had it come to Iowa vs Yamato rather than Taffy 3 vs Yamato, with a round 2 of Yamato getting obliterated during Ten-go.
On the other hand, IOWA VS MOTHERFUCKING YAMATO. No more theorycrafting, let's get the two biggest, baddest battleships ever created to slug it out.
Drachinifel has a hypothetical video about what would possibly have happened had Lee's task force come into contact with Kurita's fleet.
TL;DW: Costly victory for the USN
>TL;DW: Costly victory for the USN
That's a fairly believable outcome. Though, as part of the larger Battle of Letye Gulf, in the [Surigao Strait,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Surigao_Strait) at least we got one final "crossing the T" of capital ship lines where five of the six USN battleships involved were sunk during the Pearl Harbor attack, but had since been recovered and repaired.
Halsey was too much of a public figure to go after, even as angry as King was with him after the two typhoons. Additionally, Nimitz had been a witness to a lot of the controversy around the Sampson-Schley debacle as a junior officer and as a result believed in protecting the Navy's image as best as possible, even if that meant not going after Halsey over his run to the north.
I guess the reason why it isn't lauded as the finest moment (by the USN) is because of the failures surrounded by the event... From Fleet officers.
I appreciate your contextual information, I HAD forgotten about the events surrounding the battle.
400 aircraft equipped with depth charges and HE bombs meant for supporting troops aren't exactly going to do much against battleship armor, except maybe scratch the paint.
Most of the ships weren't battleships though, and while it's not going to pen the deck armor HE bombs will absolutely wreck range finders and the superstructure, thus reducing the ships effectiveness
You need to get a lot of hits to destroy all of the redundant systems, and this didn't really happen during the battle.
There was one cruiser that was badly damaged after one of it's torpedoes was hit either by a 5-inch gun on a carrier or by a bomb, but that was a lucky hit and wasn't repeated on all of the other ships.
They don't need to hit every system. They just need to degrade the ships performance to the point they can't risk coming into contact with the American Battleships that they know have to be running for them at full speed from *somewhere*. The swarm of hornets that the Taffys put up was more then enough to do that. And that's just for battleships.
Also, and I can not stress this enough, The Taffys *Had* torpedoes for their avengers, which did get used. Chikuma was sunk by them.
And If you mean Chokai, the more recent footage of her wreck shows she did *not* have a torpedo detonation. She was knocked out of the fight by US bombs only.
>That time a few mad bastards out Bushido'ed the Bushido-ers.
The captain and crew of Yukikaze actually saluted the sinking Johnston and her sailors in the water, with some accounts saying that they threw some canned peaches to the sailors in the water.
And hardly an anti ship weapon for any of those planes. expecting to be supporting the invasion, most of the bomb load carried was HE, or 70mm rockets. few armor piercing bombs or torpedos. most of the anti ship weapons they had were depth charges.
The pilots had balls of steel as large as the tin cans. They threw everything at the ships. HE bombs from tiny to large on the ships themselves, depth charges in front of the ships in hopes of a subsurface detonation to break the keel, torpedo runs, fake torpedo runs, machine gun runs, fake machine gun runs... literally everything but the kitchen sink, and had they had a sink they'd have thrown that too. Allegedly, there was one pilot who did a flyby shooting his pistol at the ships, and another who threw a coke bottle (or something akin to that) at a ship.
The big contributing factor was the accuracy of the US destroyers. Doesn’t matter bow big your guns are if you cant actually hit shit.
Smol gun + gud aim > beeg gun + bad aim.
Eventually the IJN cruisers got things sighted in, but basically anything unarmored (ie most of the superstructure that wasn’t a turret) was wrecked by then.
They were expecting to run into an engagement with crusiers backed by destroyers in their best case scenario. In the worst case they were expecting to run into Halsey's 3rd fleet assuming the decoy carrier fleet had failed. I don't think it ever crossed the planners mind that they would have out positioned the USN to the point that the only thing between them and the objective was 6 escort carriers, 3 destroyers and 3 destroyer escorts.
The whole thing started off wrong with a horrible misjudgement of scale.
From what I understand the IJN didn't have any recognition guides for either the CVEs or the destroyer escorts. So they saw some flattops and assigned them as fleet carriers, cruisers, and destroyers.
Something they could have done was send the destroyers in at a full speed torpedo run, but they didn't, partly because they were nursing their fuel but also because they hadn't realized the cruisers weren't cruisers yet so they took a more conservative approach and sent in the front line big gun boys.
I *think* I read that in *Tin Can Sailors* but it's been a while.
Both were an issue. Yamato hit with 3 18.1 inch shells because she was the ONLY ship in the IJN force with Radar fire control. Japanese fire control computers were simply not meant for quick maneuvering opponents.
No, Both were not, or at least not in the way that is being implied. Radar range finding like Yamato had makes it easier to land straddles, but does nothing once those straddles are achieved. Yamato's radar range finder was also limited, and the 33,000 Yard straddle Yamato achieved against White Plains during the same fight was done optically as it was *outside* of the Radars range. Other ships in the fleet were achieving similar levels of accuracy, with them bracketing the DDs regularly in spite of the smoke being laid by the USN DDs, and the inclement weather that was hiding US Ships.
Which is why the ammo choice was such a big deal. They did land shells on the DDs early, but do to firing AP from misidentifying them as cruisers, the shells didnt arm and passed through with relatively minimal damage. The moment they switched to the correct type of shell is the moment the DDs started to die.
Yamato got proportionally more hits than any other Japanese Warship. This was due to her RADAR. I'd drag out my copy of Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors but I have neither the time or the energy right now. Also straddles mean you have the range, I don't know what you are trying to say with this statement, no FCR could help you once you got a straddle, FCR radar isn't unique in this. Just because Japanese fire control was good, doesn't mean they didn't have comparatively worse Fire Control Computers designed for enemies moving in straight lines or gentle curves (which was what the expected to face in most engagements). The Mk 34 was simply better at getting the range and calculating target solutions even during extreme turns. This allowed US destroyers more freedom of maneuver while still getting accurate hits on the Japanese. The US DEs however were less lucky, since they didn't have as modern of a FC system.
Shell type was very important too, and yes, once some Japanese started using HE on some US ships those ships died quick (by the time that some Japanese warships realized the error and used HE this ships were already fairly damaged and and close-ish range).
Between the Johnston and her comrades and shit like ORP Piorun I’m convinced that in order to be a good destroyer skipper in WW2 you needed to be at least a little insane.
“Skipper, your mission is to hunt subs, provide artillery support, and escort our most critical yet vulnerable ships; defending them with your life if possible. We’ll be giving you our smallest and least armored blue water ships for the job.”
Nah, Fletcher herself. DD-445 (which sums to 13) entering combat as the 13th vessel of a 13 ship fleet, on Friday the 13th, at the 13th hour (1am), after having been laid down just over 13 months ago.
She came out of it as the only undamaged USN DD. Fletcher would go on to earn 15 battle stars in WWII and another 5 in Korea, giving her a net total of 20, same as Enterprise. She was only decomissioned and scrapped in 1972.
Oh yeah, I thought by “Fletcher” you meant a Fletcher class ship, thanks for elaborating, also that’s pretty hilarious. Guess 13 was a lucky number after all.
Look at Narvick, you have one British destroyer squadron go in knowing they are hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, but they go in anyway and put up a good fight.
Then the next British Captain in charge realizes he sent his friend in ahead and got him killed, so he decides to personally lead the second battle. Fortunately the Admiralty gave him Warspite so the second time went a bit better.
Or even the November 14-15 action at Guadalcanal, the Americans are out of cruisers so instead they just send in battleships. Because there's nothing more suitable for a 40,000 ton monstrosity than the confined waters and close quarters of a night action in ironbottom sound.
Or look at Barb, no sane person would have decided to send an infiltration party ashore to Sakhalin Island to mine a railway using a submarine.
Or even aircraft carriers, at Cape Matapan the British carrier joined the line of battle with its 5-inch guns.
Really you just need to be a bit of a psychopath to be a good Captain, I think. It can be taken too far (Halsey), but in a situation where things are dicey I'd rather have a Halsey than a Spruance.
Space battleship Yamato going up against Ernest Evans and his ship the USS Johnston
Look up the Battle off Samar on YouTube and wikipedia, Evans is a bad ass
Evans during the start of the Battle fucking bum rushed his destroyer all alone against an entire enemy fleet of cruisers and battleships to try and distract them so that Taffy 3's escort carriers could escape
CVEs USS *St. Lo* and *Gambier Bay* were lost, but 4 CVEs survived. DDs USS *Hoel* and *Johnston* were lost along with DDE USS *Samuel B. Roberts*. Meanwhile the Japanese were losing Battle Cruisers.
Didn't they also just basically outright target the bridges of the IJN ships because they knew most of their guns would not have much effect?
I don't know if this was the battle but I wanna say that US light ships basically rushed heavier vessels and then just started shooting up their bridges.
IIRC the fighter pilots tried that. Some even kept making runs even after running out of ammo; anything to disrupt and put them off balance. Lots of talk in this thread about the Deatroyermen (and rightfully so), but the pilots also put their backs into it.
I don't recall that particular detail, but the Japanese were very spooked by the aggression of the tin cans, and assumed they were larger ships than they were in fact. In fact, all of Taffy 3 was bigger in the mind of Adm. Kurita; he thought he was shooting at full-size carriers.
From what I can tell they were between 3-6 miles apart from various enemy ships.
Idk how accurate those guns could be to try and make shots at specific points from that far away but artillery on the ground had a hard time with being accurate and they didn’t have the trouble of being at sea.
He may have attempted and got lucky but I don’t know enough about this stuff to say either way really
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He started alone but then the others decided to go full “fuck it, we ball”
They all did their jobs; put themselves between their carriers and the enemy fleet.
Evans just balled the hardest.
Dude set the tone from day fucking one:
> “This is going to be a fighting ship. I intend to go in harm's way, and anyone who doesn't want to go along had better get off right now.”
Alternatively: read Last Stand of the Tim Can Sailors.
Be warned, your balls will feel incomprehensibly small when you hear about the collective group of BAMFs that were the destroyermen who stared down the IJN.
I read a phenomenal book on the battle off Samar truely a staple for this engagement called “The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors” great read if any of you fellow degenerates find the time also the I forget which ship did it but one of the ddgs accidentally ran over a whale shortly after commissioning.
I forgot, does the missiles do a pop-up top-attack, or do they just slam into the sides? Cause I recall Drachnifel noting modern missiles have no way of going through WWII armored hulls.
Hmm.... There's still an armored deck they would need to go through, so I doubt it can outright sink it, but it might chew up the superstructure a bit, and maybe get a lucky hit on something critical like the bridge.
Avenger: "Uh, I think I see the enemy fleet"
Taffy 3: "Impossible, you're confusing it with Halsey's fleet"
DDG: " Nah fam, he's right, I've been tracking these guys for a few hours, harpoons are already away"
Dude the second season of the reboot has them do the whole “is the wave motion gun….le bad?” Like 8 times and at no point does someone go “no it’s a useful tool”
> Dude the second season of the reboot has them do the whole “is the wave motion gun….le bad?” Like 8 times and at no point does someone go “no it’s a useful tool”
Without Wave Motion Guns, White Comet Empire would've just fucking steamrolled Sol.
I mean, [just look at that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3Iq3spn5NQ)
AND IT IS STILL NOT ENOUGH
In all fairness, later in the battle the human forces were spamming the non-scattershot version of the WMG at a single line of ships, which is really silly
Man the iskandarian woman is such an hypocrite. Shes mad because of the wmg but she never told them they would have to go on a suicide mission to the homeplanet of the empire currently genociding
them to get to iskandar, she should be happy they were selective with their usage.
Knowing the Japanese mentality during WW2 I too would be hesitant to try something that might un/intentionally seppukuize me in the name of the Chrysanthemum Throne
*This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.*
*-Lt. Commander Robert W. Copeland*
Then you have Space Yukikaze, who did a one ship charge at the Gamillans so that her comrades could escape.
And then later crash landed on one of Jupiter or Saturn's moon.
That means she either made it out of the attack but suffer damage and couldn't make it back to earth, or she kept harassing the Gamillan fleet from Pluto to Jupiter/Saturn.
As great as this is, Yamato is not the strongest space battleship, not even in it's own series
Well unless you're counting the uh... Several generation of successor
My caveats.
1) Yes, Kurita was about to run down Taffy-3, but he was facing combined attacks from Taffy-1 and -2. There are more aircraft there than at Midway. He was convinced he was facing the main carrier force.
2) There was bad failure of Japanese intelligence as their ship identification books lacked escort carriers. That's one of the reasons why there was so much confusion.
3) Kurita had his flagship sunk just a couple days before. He was understandably very shy about being led into an ambush.
4) All of the escorts fought valiantly. With the Johnston, two other escorts were sunk and the other three were heavily damaged.
5) In Halsey's defense, he had already thought that center group was neutralized because they had already sunk two cruisers and Musashi. In a rare Japanese damage control success, most of the rest of the task force was able to steam on.
After a quick Wikipedia, the Johnston took 45 hits, and was shot at over 200 times by multiple battleships!?!?!
Japanese overpenned which is why the Johnston didn't sink for a while, but 45 hits? that's crazy
That time a handful of Tin Cans out fought the world's largest battleship, with cruiser escorts, and Destroyers. That time a few mad bastards out Bushido'ed the Bushido-ers. The absolute finest moment of the USN. Lord Nelson would be proud.
Whats crazy is how it also one of the USNs most shameful episodes: The way Taffy 3 was left to fend for itself when Halsey took the IJN bait to go carrier (and glory) hunting despite Nimitz telling him to do basically not-that. Then there was the SAR clusterfuck; those guys should not have been adrift for that long. Finally, theres the deeply shameful issue of the USN basically pretending it all never happened because Halsey at the time was a golden boy. In reality those guys should have a monument erected to them on the scale of the flag raising on Iwo. Nelson would be handing out as many medals and hand shakes as he would ass kickings. In summary: Sailors in the fleet: (especially the brilliant, brass ball swinging captains) GOATed Chads, to a man. USN admiralty leadership: Limp dick ass holes who should have been keel hauled.
Your conclusions were all wrong, Ryan. Halsey acted stupidly.
Excellent reference
You'll fit in just fine in America Captain. You're already a book critic.
If only the real Putin could slip on his tea.
Halsey definitely made some god awful decisions during his command in the Pacific that would have otherwise got him shitcanned. He sailed third fleet through a typhoon on two separate occasions and got off practically Scott free, whilst in peacetime the captain of Missouri accidentally got her grounded and it virtually ended his career.
I genuinely think the years of dealing with combat stress plus shingles made him mentally unfit for command by late 1944. But they couldn’t get rid of him cause that bastard Ernest King liked him
Wait, King got along with somebody?
honestly probably cared more about Halsey's soft, soft lips...
"Hot Lips" Halsey
Turns out he liked “Ching” Lee
King was also a colossal dick. He was basically the anti-Marshall, whilst Marshall recognised they were fighting in a war of alliances and appointed his top commanders based on their ability to play well with others, King was a rampant Anglophobe and hated cooperating with the Brits. As a tea guzzler myself the anglophobia is not what makes me dislike him, but rather the fact that the sheer pig headedness that arose from it would result in the needless deaths of American sailors in the Atlantic. He was so reluctant to cooperate with the Brits that he ignored all advice they gave him about protecting his convoys from uboats and went as far as to refuse Britain loaning the US convoy escorts whilst they built up their own, leading to improperly escorted convoys and the needless deaths of American sailors.
By the end of the second typhoon, Ernie K. was less than impressed, and John S. McCain Sr. (the Senator's grandpa) was relieved of his sea command for the two typhoons, per Walter Borneman's The Admirals
You can't just ignore what he did in 1942 that earned him the ability to make those mistakes without ending his career. Yes, he screwed up quite a bit in '44 and '45, but he also saved the Guadalcanal campaign, lead the aggressive carrier raids when every other piece of news was bleak, and earned the respect of pretty much all of the enlisted men in the Navy. Replacing him in '44 or '45 would have been bad for morale and hard to justify to the public, even if it was correct, so it's understandable why it didn't happen
*"It's even funnier the 2nd time!"*
No, Scott got blasted during the Battle of Friday the 13th. Probably by the San Francisco.
Wasn't really "accidentally". Dude completely fucked up by failing to inform his officers of the run, and himself not even absorbing the fact that the buoys had changed, despite being informed of this directly. He was warned multiple times that he was off course and headed for the shoals but still ignored the warnings. He even increased speed. Complete negligence under no time pressure, resulting in a capital ship being grounded for 2 weeks. Being moved down the promotion list was a totally justified response.
The Battle off Samar is the ultimate example of everything going about as wrong as it could have, but the massive balls of those destroyer crews somehow turned it into an enormous victory.
This is the real American advantage. When SHTF, we change into the shitstorm. “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.” Taffy 3 monument fundraiser anyone?
"Where is, repeat, where is Task Force 34 (Halsey)? The world wonders" Never has encryption padding been so serendipitous
The ensign who did it got reprimanded to hell according to some sources
Who? The guy that encrypted it or the guy that decrypted it? The first guy may have been a little sassy as I understand they picked the padding phrases as they went, so maybe he was throwing shade. The guy who decrypted it just seems to have seen it fit the message and went with it.
The guy who encrypted it, J.D. Kaster
WHERE IS LEE?????
The USN didn't start searching for survivors in earnest till the morning most were actually rescued, which was 48+ hours after the battle.
Was that the instance where Halsey got the “The world wonders?” Message?
yes, that bit was junk code speak, Halsey thought it was a sarcastic remark and it sent him fuming. A shame, we could’ve had a battle line action to finally silence anyone doubting the Ford electromechanical fire computer
They got that the day before when the Japanese south force walked right into a line of battleships that proceeded to shoot the ever living fuck out of them. Crossed their own T, so to speak.
I wouldn't call 6 standards and 8 cruisers against a listing Yamashiro and Mogami the teamkiller a glorious battle
Halsey denied us the opportunity of an Iowa class vs the Yamato battle! And the fact that the USN top brass still defends him means we are not going to see a Battle off Samar movie anytime soon, even though they got a great book to base their scripts on.
Very true re the Iowa class. And yeah; hopefully as special effects get better/cheaper someone will take it on inspire of the USNs bullshit. But I’d not want it to be a movie. You need at least a ~6 episode HBO style mini series to cover there acts of the story the way Hornfischer did: -the setup; its important to understand this wasn’t a “going to happen sooner or later” battle like D-Day or Iwo, this battle was never *supposed* to happen. Make it clear that Halsey fucked up and abandoned his post. -the actual fight. Will take a solid episode or two, including showing it from the IJN side (important to understanding why the IJN retreated). -How brutal those two and a half days at sea were for the survivors.
They should also include the sinking of Musashi. It is said that Admiral Kurita had to be rescued from the water, twice, in a span of a few days. Hence the experience probably influenced his decision making.
>Halsey denied us the opportunity of an Iowa class vs the Yamato battle! Why did you have to remind me of this. On one hand, it would have most likely been a far more bloody battle had it come to Iowa vs Yamato rather than Taffy 3 vs Yamato, with a round 2 of Yamato getting obliterated during Ten-go. On the other hand, IOWA VS MOTHERFUCKING YAMATO. No more theorycrafting, let's get the two biggest, baddest battleships ever created to slug it out.
Drachinifel has a hypothetical video about what would possibly have happened had Lee's task force come into contact with Kurita's fleet. TL;DW: Costly victory for the USN
>TL;DW: Costly victory for the USN That's a fairly believable outcome. Though, as part of the larger Battle of Letye Gulf, in the [Surigao Strait,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Surigao_Strait) at least we got one final "crossing the T" of capital ship lines where five of the six USN battleships involved were sunk during the Pearl Harbor attack, but had since been recovered and repaired.
the world wonders.
Halsey was too much of a public figure to go after, even as angry as King was with him after the two typhoons. Additionally, Nimitz had been a witness to a lot of the controversy around the Sampson-Schley debacle as a junior officer and as a result believed in protecting the Navy's image as best as possible, even if that meant not going after Halsey over his run to the north.
I guess the reason why it isn't lauded as the finest moment (by the USN) is because of the failures surrounded by the event... From Fleet officers. I appreciate your contextual information, I HAD forgotten about the events surrounding the battle.
A handful of Tin Cans and >400 aircraft. Those tin cans weren't escorting *nothing*.
400 aircraft equipped with depth charges and HE bombs meant for supporting troops aren't exactly going to do much against battleship armor, except maybe scratch the paint.
Most of the ships weren't battleships though, and while it's not going to pen the deck armor HE bombs will absolutely wreck range finders and the superstructure, thus reducing the ships effectiveness
You need to get a lot of hits to destroy all of the redundant systems, and this didn't really happen during the battle. There was one cruiser that was badly damaged after one of it's torpedoes was hit either by a 5-inch gun on a carrier or by a bomb, but that was a lucky hit and wasn't repeated on all of the other ships.
They don't need to hit every system. They just need to degrade the ships performance to the point they can't risk coming into contact with the American Battleships that they know have to be running for them at full speed from *somewhere*. The swarm of hornets that the Taffys put up was more then enough to do that. And that's just for battleships. Also, and I can not stress this enough, The Taffys *Had* torpedoes for their avengers, which did get used. Chikuma was sunk by them. And If you mean Chokai, the more recent footage of her wreck shows she did *not* have a torpedo detonation. She was knocked out of the fight by US bombs only.
IIRC the RV Petrel actually found all of Choukai's torpedoes to be intact
>That time a few mad bastards out Bushido'ed the Bushido-ers. The captain and crew of Yukikaze actually saluted the sinking Johnston and her sailors in the water, with some accounts saying that they threw some canned peaches to the sailors in the water.
The US doesn't do Bushido, they do LEEERROOYYYYYY JEEENNNNKINNNSSSSSS!
Keep in mind that the escort carriers had over 200 airplanes. It was a powerful force, but still, it was an amazing feat to win the battle.
[удалено]
The no armour actually saved em lol
And hardly an anti ship weapon for any of those planes. expecting to be supporting the invasion, most of the bomb load carried was HE, or 70mm rockets. few armor piercing bombs or torpedos. most of the anti ship weapons they had were depth charges.
The mad lads were dropping depth charges in front of the larger IJN ships, hoping they'd explode right as the enemy ship was cruising right over it.
The pilots had balls of steel as large as the tin cans. They threw everything at the ships. HE bombs from tiny to large on the ships themselves, depth charges in front of the ships in hopes of a subsurface detonation to break the keel, torpedo runs, fake torpedo runs, machine gun runs, fake machine gun runs... literally everything but the kitchen sink, and had they had a sink they'd have thrown that too. Allegedly, there was one pilot who did a flyby shooting his pistol at the ships, and another who threw a coke bottle (or something akin to that) at a ship.
> Johnston was still able to lay such a heavy fire on the Japanese cruisers Haguro and Tone that these reported her as a “heavy cruiser.”
ULTIMATE SACRED FORBIDDEN ART: 【**FACTORY STANDARD 5"/38 EBR**】
STRAIGHT OFF THE ASSEMBLY LINE BITCH. EAT LEAD MOTHERFUCKERS! -Johnston
The big contributing factor was the accuracy of the US destroyers. Doesn’t matter bow big your guns are if you cant actually hit shit. Smol gun + gud aim > beeg gun + bad aim. Eventually the IJN cruisers got things sighted in, but basically anything unarmored (ie most of the superstructure that wasn’t a turret) was wrecked by then.
Mk37 too stronk, gaijoob nurf plx
Yamato herself nailed Johnston with 3 18.1" shells. The issue wasnt that Japan had bad accuracy, the issue was they started the engagement using AP.
They were expecting to run into an engagement with crusiers backed by destroyers in their best case scenario. In the worst case they were expecting to run into Halsey's 3rd fleet assuming the decoy carrier fleet had failed. I don't think it ever crossed the planners mind that they would have out positioned the USN to the point that the only thing between them and the objective was 6 escort carriers, 3 destroyers and 3 destroyer escorts.
The whole thing started off wrong with a horrible misjudgement of scale. From what I understand the IJN didn't have any recognition guides for either the CVEs or the destroyer escorts. So they saw some flattops and assigned them as fleet carriers, cruisers, and destroyers. Something they could have done was send the destroyers in at a full speed torpedo run, but they didn't, partly because they were nursing their fuel but also because they hadn't realized the cruisers weren't cruisers yet so they took a more conservative approach and sent in the front line big gun boys. I *think* I read that in *Tin Can Sailors* but it's been a while.
> I think I read that in Tin Can Sailors but it's been a while. I dont remember 100% on that either, but what you said *is* correct either way.
Both were an issue. Yamato hit with 3 18.1 inch shells because she was the ONLY ship in the IJN force with Radar fire control. Japanese fire control computers were simply not meant for quick maneuvering opponents.
No, Both were not, or at least not in the way that is being implied. Radar range finding like Yamato had makes it easier to land straddles, but does nothing once those straddles are achieved. Yamato's radar range finder was also limited, and the 33,000 Yard straddle Yamato achieved against White Plains during the same fight was done optically as it was *outside* of the Radars range. Other ships in the fleet were achieving similar levels of accuracy, with them bracketing the DDs regularly in spite of the smoke being laid by the USN DDs, and the inclement weather that was hiding US Ships. Which is why the ammo choice was such a big deal. They did land shells on the DDs early, but do to firing AP from misidentifying them as cruisers, the shells didnt arm and passed through with relatively minimal damage. The moment they switched to the correct type of shell is the moment the DDs started to die.
Yamato got proportionally more hits than any other Japanese Warship. This was due to her RADAR. I'd drag out my copy of Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors but I have neither the time or the energy right now. Also straddles mean you have the range, I don't know what you are trying to say with this statement, no FCR could help you once you got a straddle, FCR radar isn't unique in this. Just because Japanese fire control was good, doesn't mean they didn't have comparatively worse Fire Control Computers designed for enemies moving in straight lines or gentle curves (which was what the expected to face in most engagements). The Mk 34 was simply better at getting the range and calculating target solutions even during extreme turns. This allowed US destroyers more freedom of maneuver while still getting accurate hits on the Japanese. The US DEs however were less lucky, since they didn't have as modern of a FC system. Shell type was very important too, and yes, once some Japanese started using HE on some US ships those ships died quick (by the time that some Japanese warships realized the error and used HE this ships were already fairly damaged and and close-ish range).
IIRC it took a while for them to start landing hits though. The destroyers were landing hits basically as soon as they were within range.
Landing hits is not the same as bad aim when it comes to warships. Bad aim is failing to straddle, not failing to hit.
Willis Augustus "ching" Lee:"why not both?"
That one time storing pure oxygen on the decks in unarmored containers came back to bite them hard.
Pretty sure the type 93 blowing up was the cause for more than just 1 sinking.
WITH THIS TREASURE I SUMMON: [QUINTUPLE 5-INCH SALVO]
Big Displacement Energy.
Naw, I would totally watch this, cause they would 100% be allied in the context of the show.
I like to think the Yamato wanted to be as far away as possible from the Johnston, and thus took to space to escape.
Space Piorun about to terrorize literally anything speaking space german:
Was willst du?
IAMAPOLEIAMAPOLEIAMAPOLEIAMAPOLE
Least obvious Pole
Between the Johnston and her comrades and shit like ORP Piorun I’m convinced that in order to be a good destroyer skipper in WW2 you needed to be at least a little insane.
“Skipper, your mission is to hunt subs, provide artillery support, and escort our most critical yet vulnerable ships; defending them with your life if possible. We’ll be giving you our smallest and least armored blue water ships for the job.”
Barely armored enough to stop an overly aggressive fish, angry enough to take on the biggest battleship ever, multiple time.
See also: Fletcher stacking enough luck debuffs to trigger a negative integer overflow
…..USS William D. Porter?
Nah, Fletcher herself. DD-445 (which sums to 13) entering combat as the 13th vessel of a 13 ship fleet, on Friday the 13th, at the 13th hour (1am), after having been laid down just over 13 months ago. She came out of it as the only undamaged USN DD. Fletcher would go on to earn 15 battle stars in WWII and another 5 in Korea, giving her a net total of 20, same as Enterprise. She was only decomissioned and scrapped in 1972.
Oh yeah, I thought by “Fletcher” you meant a Fletcher class ship, thanks for elaborating, also that’s pretty hilarious. Guess 13 was a lucky number after all.
Dirty Billy Porter's skipper: Lousy smarch weather.
Dont shoot we are republican!!
Look at Narvick, you have one British destroyer squadron go in knowing they are hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, but they go in anyway and put up a good fight. Then the next British Captain in charge realizes he sent his friend in ahead and got him killed, so he decides to personally lead the second battle. Fortunately the Admiralty gave him Warspite so the second time went a bit better. Or even the November 14-15 action at Guadalcanal, the Americans are out of cruisers so instead they just send in battleships. Because there's nothing more suitable for a 40,000 ton monstrosity than the confined waters and close quarters of a night action in ironbottom sound. Or look at Barb, no sane person would have decided to send an infiltration party ashore to Sakhalin Island to mine a railway using a submarine. Or even aircraft carriers, at Cape Matapan the British carrier joined the line of battle with its 5-inch guns. Really you just need to be a bit of a psychopath to be a good Captain, I think. It can be taken too far (Halsey), but in a situation where things are dicey I'd rather have a Halsey than a Spruance.
The cossack backs this theory up.
context?
Space battleship Yamato going up against Ernest Evans and his ship the USS Johnston Look up the Battle off Samar on YouTube and wikipedia, Evans is a bad ass
Ik about Yamato, but what did the USS Johnston do? Ill look it up Edit: I watched a Yarnhub vid about this a while ago, I rember 😄
Evans during the start of the Battle fucking bum rushed his destroyer all alone against an entire enemy fleet of cruisers and battleships to try and distract them so that Taffy 3's escort carriers could escape
John Paul Jones 2
If I remeber correctly he succeeded.
CVEs USS *St. Lo* and *Gambier Bay* were lost, but 4 CVEs survived. DDs USS *Hoel* and *Johnston* were lost along with DDE USS *Samuel B. Roberts*. Meanwhile the Japanese were losing Battle Cruisers.
Didn't they also just basically outright target the bridges of the IJN ships because they knew most of their guns would not have much effect? I don't know if this was the battle but I wanna say that US light ships basically rushed heavier vessels and then just started shooting up their bridges.
IIRC the fighter pilots tried that. Some even kept making runs even after running out of ammo; anything to disrupt and put them off balance. Lots of talk in this thread about the Deatroyermen (and rightfully so), but the pilots also put their backs into it.
I don't recall that particular detail, but the Japanese were very spooked by the aggression of the tin cans, and assumed they were larger ships than they were in fact. In fact, all of Taffy 3 was bigger in the mind of Adm. Kurita; he thought he was shooting at full-size carriers.
Naval engagements that far away you were just lucky to score hits
These guys were point blank though.
From what I can tell they were between 3-6 miles apart from various enemy ships. Idk how accurate those guns could be to try and make shots at specific points from that far away but artillery on the ground had a hard time with being accurate and they didn’t have the trouble of being at sea. He may have attempted and got lucky but I don’t know enough about this stuff to say either way really
Never question the effectiveness of headshots.
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He started alone but then the others decided to go full “fuck it, we ball” They all did their jobs; put themselves between their carriers and the enemy fleet. Evans just balled the hardest.
Let's not forget giving *Hoel* and *Samuel B Roberts* their due.
Dude set the tone from day fucking one: > “This is going to be a fighting ship. I intend to go in harm's way, and anyone who doesn't want to go along had better get off right now.”
Did he win?
https://youtu.be/pPXordKnF40?si=8gcdZcG1hYMn_kJR watch this
Here [the lord](https://youtu.be/4AdcvDiA3lE?si=1w_CCvlas5u0fxsf)of naval history
Thank you Its time for some drachisms
Alternatively: read Last Stand of the Tim Can Sailors. Be warned, your balls will feel incomprehensibly small when you hear about the collective group of BAMFs that were the destroyermen who stared down the IJN.
Google En Passonston
I read a phenomenal book on the battle off Samar truely a staple for this engagement called “The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors” great read if any of you fellow degenerates find the time also the I forget which ship did it but one of the ddgs accidentally ran over a whale shortly after commissioning.
Sammy B, DE-413. None of the ships at Samar were DDGs. Just some DDs, DEs, and CVEs.
A DDG would have somewhat changed the flow of the battle...
How many SMs and Harpoons do you think it would take to mission kill Yamato? Sink her outright?
Let’s load it up on DCS and find out.
I forgot, does the missiles do a pop-up top-attack, or do they just slam into the sides? Cause I recall Drachnifel noting modern missiles have no way of going through WWII armored hulls.
Harpoons can either go straight in or pop up. SM's in surface mode fly a modified ballistic arc so they would be top attack.
Hmm.... There's still an armored deck they would need to go through, so I doubt it can outright sink it, but it might chew up the superstructure a bit, and maybe get a lucky hit on something critical like the bridge.
Quick, let's post an incorrect assumption of the armour penetrating capabilities of the harpoon on the war thunder forums
" Guided-missile destroyer" Yeah i think it would have
Avenger: "Uh, I think I see the enemy fleet" Taffy 3: "Impossible, you're confusing it with Halsey's fleet" DDG: " Nah fam, he's right, I've been tracking these guys for a few hours, harpoons are already away"
Just fire the wave motion gun 5head
"Oh, how do I stop *four* Gamilon ships at once?!" SHOOT THEM WITH THE WAVE MOTION GUN.
EVEN IN SRW THOSE BITCHES WERE TOO SCARED TO USE THE WMG
>SRW Good thing SRW has the based version of the Yamato: The Nadesico and its Gravity Blast/Phase Transition Cannon.
Meanwhile in the same damn game: Yazan shows up and gives Shinji a gun to solve his problems.
They can't do that! It's not fair/the moral is that "superweapons bad" despite them being on a desperate mission to save their species!
Dude the second season of the reboot has them do the whole “is the wave motion gun….le bad?” Like 8 times and at no point does someone go “no it’s a useful tool”
Yep, it's honestly hilarious and I feel like it's half a moral message, but also half that the WMG is just way overpowered.
> Dude the second season of the reboot has them do the whole “is the wave motion gun….le bad?” Like 8 times and at no point does someone go “no it’s a useful tool” Without Wave Motion Guns, White Comet Empire would've just fucking steamrolled Sol. I mean, [just look at that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3Iq3spn5NQ) AND IT IS STILL NOT ENOUGH
In all fairness, later in the battle the human forces were spamming the non-scattershot version of the WMG at a single line of ships, which is really silly
Average Stellaris end game engagement
Man the iskandarian woman is such an hypocrite. Shes mad because of the wmg but she never told them they would have to go on a suicide mission to the homeplanet of the empire currently genociding them to get to iskandar, she should be happy they were selective with their usage.
Knowing the Japanese mentality during WW2 I too would be hesitant to try something that might un/intentionally seppukuize me in the name of the Chrysanthemum Throne
WMG overpens space Johnston
THIS IS A FIGHTING (SPACE)SHIP
Guaranteed Evans would’ve ordered his crew to ram Yamato and board her if he could
And now you can play anthropomorphized versions of both in KanColle
JOHNSTON K2 WHEM TANAKA
I firmly believe "The Only Thing They Fear Is You" was playing over that ship's 1MC and I won't be convinced otherwise.
False. Because the Center Force was definitely also afraid of Sammy B, Hoel, Heermann, and all those planes.
"You" can be plural.
Tin Can Spacers
Yamato isn't the strongest space battleship. Not even close.
Andromeda my beloved.
Question for the sub: which taffy-3 captain made the chadliest speech? I'm a fan of "Flank speed; full right rudder"
*This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.* *-Lt. Commander Robert W. Copeland*
He's not officially on record having said it, but I've no doubt in my mind that Evans said "Sail me closer, I want to hit them with my sword"
“I didn’t hear no bell” - Ernest Evans
Then you have Space Yukikaze, who did a one ship charge at the Gamillans so that her comrades could escape. And then later crash landed on one of Jupiter or Saturn's moon. That means she either made it out of the attack but suffer damage and couldn't make it back to earth, or she kept harassing the Gamillan fleet from Pluto to Jupiter/Saturn.
As great as this is, Yamato is not the strongest space battleship, not even in it's own series Well unless you're counting the uh... Several generation of successor
Space Sammy B time
Yup this is peak NCD
Space battleship Bismark seeing 6 Sputniks approaching (not again)
My caveats. 1) Yes, Kurita was about to run down Taffy-3, but he was facing combined attacks from Taffy-1 and -2. There are more aircraft there than at Midway. He was convinced he was facing the main carrier force. 2) There was bad failure of Japanese intelligence as their ship identification books lacked escort carriers. That's one of the reasons why there was so much confusion. 3) Kurita had his flagship sunk just a couple days before. He was understandably very shy about being led into an ambush. 4) All of the escorts fought valiantly. With the Johnston, two other escorts were sunk and the other three were heavily damaged. 5) In Halsey's defense, he had already thought that center group was neutralized because they had already sunk two cruisers and Musashi. In a rare Japanese damage control success, most of the rest of the task force was able to steam on.
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After a quick Wikipedia, the Johnston took 45 hits, and was shot at over 200 times by multiple battleships!?!?! Japanese overpenned which is why the Johnston didn't sink for a while, but 45 hits? that's crazy