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There was never a plan to recover the bombers.

Doolittle’s remark was disingenuous. Without the Navy, islands wouldn’t be secured to launch B29’s fire missions. And it was the Navy that attrited Japan’s Army on Guadalcanal and Solomons

Who let the enemy get within 400 yards before telling anyone????

l doolittles B25s went down & were given sanctuary in china this marked the chinese for brutal revenge by japs was the raid worth that cost being only a moral boosting propoganda action for the usa

I love these great under reported topics that you cover!! This is exactly the sort of thing I need and crave- between my reading, documentaries and the TH-cam channels I follow I know damn near everything about WWII. (lol okay maybe not EVERYthing, but sometimes it feels that way given how many topics i find repeatedly covered again and again). Thanks for these great videos!!

very interesting.

Great conversation guys. Thanks.

Drachs.... 😍

Really a non-point. Using cruisers for the purpose was actual normal. British did it regularly. literally uses the destroyers for their best purpose, defending the oiler.

Lack of fleet oilers. It’s part of the reason the repaired Pearl Harbor battleships didn’t rejoin the (west of Hawaii) Pacific Fleet, and sailed along the west coast instead. There were enough oilers to support either the carriers, or the battleships, but not both at the same time in a battle group.

New subscriber and really liked your video. As others have said the DDs didn't have the legs for the high speed run. It would have hampered the mission even more.

Destroyers would have put the force at greater risk because of their need to refuel almost daily at a long high speed run. It was a smart move considering the nature of the mission.

It’s not even the number of yards it’s how they function. Ships and subs are in the yard way too long!

We need new shipyards! We are definitely screwed period! We can not even maintain the fleet we have with the yards we have. This is a huge problem that needs addressed now.

Terrific episode! This change by the USN definitely affected the war and beyond as high pressure steam was used for USN ships above and below the waves. The outside look by Drach was important too. Do some more of these!

Great topic. I thought for sure it was a Pearl Harbor movie blunder, turns out they got one thing right in that movie.

That was some great footage that I haven't seen before.

Till you go- 1200 psi ,steam It's a useless discussion.

Thanks for Watching! Let us know below if you’d like to see something covered in the future.

20:15 the other problem with single reduction gears in trying to do anything in a single stage is gear wear. The driving gear would have to do so much work, it would wear out long before the driven gear would show any signs of wear. Manual transmissions in cars are double reduction for that reason. The counter shaft is reductive before going into gear on the output shaft

Gonna dive for some history.

We need a new branch of the military to just deal with making stuff other branches use. (1) Retain institutional knowledge of critical systems. (2) Have a strong reserve component that teaches recruits trade skills. (3) Literally have an army of somewhat skilled workers that could be deployed to production bottlenecks caused by labor shortages. (4) Be able to accept people who want to serve their country but aren't able to meet the MEPS idea of everyone should be medically deployable to a combat zone. (5) The mere creation of a non-civilian production branch would set the tone for how important this issue is becoming.

And Navy type locked train double reduction gears are even harder to make !

I was chief engineer on Manley DD940… staying on top of maintenance was key to reliability. Fuel economy was greatly affected by the anticipated speed demands. If on a straight line ocean crossing we would be able to make 18 kts with half of the auxiliaries secured …ie one feed pump one forced draft blower on each of two boilers. If the XO wanted 27 kts available for training, the fuel economy was crap… it all depends on how hard you run the greyhound.

I feel the issue was seeing yards as back office or non-core functions of the navy. Therefore privatize them or starve them of funds to support the fleet operations. There really needs adherence to a systems view as decision makers have to see support services not just the logistics but training and maintenance as well, regardless of ownership they are still responsible for it. I'm also shocked at how American yards can be so inefficient, it's not a unionisation issue, but how can new ship construction constantly run behind schedule on even mature designs eg Virginias, Burkes? The problem hasn't been identified so you can't say this is the solution but it is having significant impacts on the service in terms of readiness and financial waste.

I think one thing that was missed in the discussion is what happened with post war capital ships. The large super carriers after the war all increased in their steam pressure as did other navies ships. So it wasn’t viewed as too much of a hinderance and most of the plants on those ships would go on to do many more miles of peacetime steaming.

Hey Elon Musk and other billionaire step up to the plate and buy this beautiful ship don’t let it become an artificial reef. Save it dried and clean it up. Put it back into service.

So I have a long winded comment because I do want to have a discussion on this as I have been trying to research the development of USN high pressure plants of the interwar and WWII period. First caveat is I have yet to buy the book which I am going to because books about powerplants are rare and awesome. But I feel as if in this podcast there was no real defense for the USN machinery, which was overall lighter, had very good reliability for that pressure, and did produce fuel economies when cruising long distances. What wasn't considered in my opinion when it came to the operational ranges of the high pressure machinery was that wartime additions in weights. All ships in the USN got much more weight added to them as wartime progressed such that I'd argue every single USN ship got more AA guns and more radars and sensors than initially designed in lets say the mid to late 30's. This would explain the discrepancy between the advertised fuel savings and the real wartime economy of these ships. But I suspect that there was a decent amount of fuel savings with the high pressure plant as Bowen does mention in his book Ships Machinery and Mossback (granted that is his own personal biography so dose of salt here). I am as Othias from C&Rsenal says a determined idiot with internet access and not a proper archive and researcher but I do want to try and unravel the full story of USN machinery, which while it was not perfect or the one trick wonder the USN needed to win the war I still believe that it was not a hinderance but something that did help the USN win the war against Japan and also laid the foundations for the USN post war to have the best steam plants full stop. If you made it this far in this comment, give yourself a cookie because you earned it

The Germans had massive problems with their high-pressure propulsion systems, compared to which the USA's problems were merely teething problems. It is a stroke of luck in history that the German engineers were perfectionists, but the hasty rearmament of Nazi Germany before World War II, the circumstances of the war and the lack of skilled workers prevented them from producing fully developed weapons. Airplanes and tanks in particular were often "bananas" that were delivered green and only ripened in use. With the large warships, even that was not possible. As an German I am lucky that back than the Allied Forces had the better functioning equipment to bet an actual Empire of Evil. For me as a not entirely "Aryan" German a German Victory in WW2 is the darkest nightmare I can imagine.

it is foolish attacking a full fledge giga chad TRIPLE A's

Imagine the SS United States restored and docked in Boston Harbor, next to the USS Constitution. Old Ironsides remains commissioned, and has been there long beyond her useful life, paid for by the Navy and manned by active-duty Navy crew. It would be a glorious display of two of the most significant ships in American maritime history. And the government could afford it!

52:00 Good grief. No, you don't perform endurance trials by burning every drop of fuel oil to see how far it will go. You run the trial for several hours to get accurate speed and fuel burn numbers. It gets compared to the model test resistance data and the plant design data to correlate the theoretical curves and actual consumption. These guys should know this.

The elephant in the room are the treaty displacement limits which played a bigger role in machinery selection than trans-Pacific logistics.

Helical cut gears of that era were hobbed. A hob can cut a straight gear or about any helix angle desired. Straight cut gears can be made on a variety of machines, including shapers. Hobbing machines are specialized tools.

There are three issues: 1. Did the high pressure ships have shorter ranges than expected? A) due less efficiency v low pressure or just less than planned B) due to more than anticipated high speed usage C). USN didn’t know how much fuel they were using! (This is inexcusable.) 2. The gearing bottleneck. This was well known during the war! 3. Admiral Bowen’s CYA book. Brilliant Drac keeping the guys on topic and out of rabbit holes! Just my cup of tea (steamed with fuel oil)

Let him answer the questions and stay on subject. Bad interview

I was a BT2 from 87-93 and going to Persian Gulf we burned 68k gallons of fuel in 3 days...we had fore and aft fire rooms and had 1200lb Foster Wheeler boilers in each FR

The algorithm brought this up. Interesting. Thanks.

Drach and Rick on the podcast!! How good does it get? Steam Engineer, grade 2 paid an extra $5/hrs in addition to houly wage. People don't realize a boiler is a potential bomb if the safeties fail. On ships, there are other nasty things that factor into the tea kettle going POP.

Surely the gears were made with hydraulic set-ups and divider heads specifically so you don't have to freehand it?

Great plants and overall very successful. And, they were more efficient than the older lower pressure plants.

as a retired usn 1520...idk shite bout ships but dang this vid is super fun to watch. thanks )))

Thank You.

This is excellent! Even as a Gunner's Mate during the 1980s, I had to understand the steam cycle on our 600 lbs boilers on my ship, the USS Austin (LPD-4) Thank you for adding a new book to my Amazon wishlist. Cheers, - Wright Sublette

Ryan really needs to grow a proper naval historian's beard. The goatee and stubble just does not work.

I enjoyed the format and discussion! It was enjoyable to pull up a chair and listen to the discussion.

I steamed 1200 psi steam plants when I was a boiler technician in the Navy 🎉 they were very efficient in my opinion, we didn’t need a extra burnerman to operate the superheated side of the boiler because it was a internal part of the boiler which took the heat ahead of the generating tubes after the screen wall tubes which saved on manpower to operate a boiler

Yamato could have took 2 Iowa's on it own cause thats it was built for it was built as a traditional battleship against a fast battleship a fast battleship should always run unless it outnumbers it by a lot

That face plate was a defected piece is was rejected for being inferior steel for the shinano but point blank range no armour would have stood up to 1225kg AP shell but if a 18 inch AP shell at nearly 1 1/2 ton hit Iowa at point blank on the belt well

At the end of the day Japan were absolutely out of their minds going to war with U.S. you don't attack a country that has over 10 times the industrial capacity as you and all the natural resources etc. If Japan had any sense their best course of action for getting the oil resources they needed would have allying themselves with the U.S. U.K. and France.