by Bill Fawcett
On the inside, although the ship had been equipped with the latest in electrically powered watertight doors, the bulkheads themselves only extended as far up as E deck. The Titanic had been built to withstand four compartments being breached, but when six were opened, the volume of incoming water dragged the bow down, and, like water flowing from one compartment in an ice cube tray to the next, the flooding continued unchecked into each progressive deck, sealing the ship’s fate.
When the captain realized the ship was going down, he ordered the lifeboats—sixteen wooden-hulled and four collapsible—launched. Originally, Alexander Carlisle, a managing director at the Titanic’s builders, Harland & Wolff, had proposed a design with a new type of davit that could hold a total of forty-eight lifeboats—more than enough seats for the ship’s passengers and crew. But the White Star Line’s owner, J. Bruce Ismay, opted for a less costly layout, which meant fewer lifeboats, which meant that the Titanic’s boats could only hold fifty-two percent of its passengers at capacity. Ironically, England’s Board of Trade guidelines stated that all British vessels over ten thousand tons had to carry sixteen lifeboats, plus enough rafts and floats for seventy-five percent of the passengers. Although Titanic weighed in at a staggering forty-six thousand tons, the rules had not been adapted for a vessel so large, so even though the ship did not have nearly enough lifeboats, it had more than the number required by the current law.
Even when the evacuation orders were issued, there was no simple way to carry them out. The Titanic did not have any kind of alarm system, nor an internal intercom that would have allowed the crew to broadcast messages throughout the ship. Due to their haste in departing, the crew, most of whom had been hired only a few days earlier in Southampton, were not familiar with the ship’s layout, and had not performed a single lifeboat drill. In fact, for the first hour many passengers refused to get into the lifeboats, still confident of the massive vessel’s impregnability.
Because of this confusion, many boats were launched with much less than their maximum capacity on board—boat number one only carried twelve people when it was launched. If the sixteen wooden lifeboats could have been filled to their maximum capacity of sixty-five people, along with the four collapsible boats that could hold forty-seven people each, hundreds more could have been saved.
The epic disaster brought many changes to the shipping business. All ships were required to carry enough lifeboats for every passenger and crewmember. Wireless radios were also eventually made standard requirement, with twenty-four-hour monitoring. (Although the Titanic’s two operators had remained at their posts until the last minute, many smaller ships only had one operator, and couldn’t man the radio around the clock.) And the International Ice Patrol was created by Great Britain and the U.S. to monitor icebergs in shipping lanes. But for the Titanic’s victims, those changes came too late.
“Perhaps my dynamite plants will put an end to war sooner than your [pacifist] congresses. On the day two army corps can annihilate each other in one second all civilized nations will recoil from war in horror.”
—Alfred Nobel
The Sinking of HMS Hood
John Helfers
War is the often the catalyst of invention, and the beginning of World War I was no exception. In 1915, the British navy had already been considering a new battleship design to replace their outdated ships, which were often so heavily encumbered with guns and armor that their lower decks were awash in rough weather, allowing seawater to penetrate into gun ports and limiting their use in shallow waters. New requirements for this next generation of combat vessels included a high freeboard, higher-mounted secondary armaments, a minimum speed of 30 knots, and use of the new 15-inch gun system. In short, these ships would be everything the previous generation wasn’t.
In April 1916, the Admiralty placed an order for three new battleships, the HMS Hood, the HMS Howe, and the HMS Rodney, each based on a design from E. L. Attwood. The lightly armored, speedy warships would pack a considerable punch with their main 15-inch guns. However, May saw the Battle of Jutland, where three battle cruisers, the HMS Invincible, the HMS Queen Mary, and the HMS Indefatigable were lost to German shells that plunged through their light top armor and ignited ammunition magazines. A fourth ship, the HMS Lion, was only saved through fast damage control by flooding the magazines. Acknowledging the threat of this tactic, the new battle cruisers were redesigned, distributing 5,000 more tons of armor across their upper works and reinforcing decks and turrets, and adding additional weapons systems—none of which resolved the problems that would seal the battle cruiser’s fate more than twenty years later.
For example, only the forward cordite magazines were moved below the shell rooms, leaving the rest still vulnerable from the top. The newly reinforced deck and side armor still did not protect against shells impacting at all angles. Also, and most important, the deck protection was inadequate almost from the ship’s launch. Spread over three decks, the design was intended to allow the outermost deck to absorb the incoming shell blast, with the armor of the next two decks remaining relatively intact. However, the time-delay shells developed at the end of World War I could easily penetrate the upper deck and explode inside the ship. The extra armor provided just enough protection against the heavy guns of the day, but left the ship vulnerable to future advances in firepower. Finally, the additional thousands of tons of armor and weapons meant the Hood was terribly overweight, making her a “wet” ship, with lower decks awash in rough seas—one of the problems the Royal Navy had been trying to eliminate in the first place.
Although serious consideration was given to scrapping the already-started design, there was nothing else with which to replace it, so the Hood was launched on August 22, 1918, and commissioned in 1920, after the war was over. This also meant that the class of ships the Hood was originally built to fight were never constructed—instead, naval engineering progressed beyond the battle cruiser’s capabilities throughout the next two decades, while the Hood made do as best it could. Because she was practically a flagship for the Royal Navy, she saw constant service, and was therefore prone to much more wear and tear than the rest of the fleet. She received a major overhaul in 1929–30, and another refit had been planned for the end of the following decade, but the outbreak of World War II made that impossible. Except for a minor refit in early 1941, the Hood sailed in such poor condition that she was unable to reach her top speed.
When news came that the German battleship Bismarck had been launched, the Hood and the Prince of Wales were sent to intercept it. They found the state-of-the-art German battleship along with its escort, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, on May 24, 1941.
From the start the Hood fared badly. Approaching at a poor angle, she could only bring her two forward guns to bear on the two enemy ships, while they could unleash full broadsides. The Hood powered toward the enemy as fast as possible, to prevent taking deadly plunging fire on her now totally inadequate three-inch top armor. However, the enemy ships found the Hood’s range, and began shelling. An eight-inch shell from the Prinz Eugen struck the boat deck, igniting armor-piercing ammunition there, causing a fire that threatened the entire vessel. The Prinz Eugen, on orders from the Bismarck, then turned its guns on the Prince of Wales.
Approximately ten minutes into the battle, a gigantic jet of flame erupted from the area of the Hood’s mainmast, followed by a terrific explosion that destroyed the aft part of the ship. She sank almost immediately afterward. Only three of the 1,418 men aboard survived.
Although two separate Boards of Inquiry determined that a shell from the Bismarck had struck the Hood’s aft magazine, detonating it and causing the loss of the ship, alternate theories on the battle cruiser’s destruction include that the fire on the boat deck may have penetrated to an internal magazine; extra ammunition stored outside a magazine may have detonated; or one of its own guns may have exploded. The true cause of the sinking of the Hood—even after the wreck was located in 2001—may never be known. What can be
said is that the ship, even obsolete and in disrepair, fought to the very last. However, her most deadly enemy was the engineering flaws that were built into her, which certainly contributed to her destruction.
“But the power of destiny is something awesome; neither wealth, nor Ares, nor a tower, nor dark-hulled ships might escape it.”
—Sophocles, Antigone, l. 951
We Shall Never Again Surrender!
Paul A. Thomsen
After the conclusion of the Second World War, France tried numerous plans to regain their imperial prestige. They tried to reestablish colonial dominance in Africa and Vietnam. They periodically sought to undercut the long-term goals of their more industrious political and industrial rivals through diplomatic sleight of hand and demonstrations of realpolitik. They even embraced nuclear weapons.
All failed to give them an edge over their neighbors. Yet, in the aftermath of the Cold War, while other European nations downsized their navies, France committed itself to a plan that ensured regional hegemony by building and launching the “biggest and baddest” aircraft carrier to sail the North Atlantic, the FNS Charles De Gaulle.
An innovation of the post–First World War era, aircraft carriers had been used to great effect by various nations to project power far beyond their territorial borders in both war and peace. During the Second World War and throughout the Cold War, the United States and the other great nations utilized these mobile artificial runways on the rolling seas as landing strips and launching platforms for reconnaissance missions, first strike operations, enemy infiltration, search and rescue operations, and humanitarian relief expeditions. Having invested much in the flawed Maginot Line and suffering the embarrassment of the subsequent occupation force of Nazi Germany, France only looked to the sea as an expression of postwar power. After the war France rebuilt its military and maintained a small carrier fleet.
When the Soviet Union crumbled, however, their allies engaged in a program of military de-escalation—but instead of following suit, French pride demanded she at least maintain the status quo. In 1980, the French Defense Council had authorized the creation of two new nuclear-powered carriers, but even after the fall of the USSR they moved ahead with the building of the two ships, though it would be a long time before either could be put to sea.
In April 1989, the keel for the first vessel (French President François Mitterand insisted it be named the Richelieu) was laid. In the early 1990s the project faltered under economic pressure, but France’s two remaining carriers, the FNS Foch and the FNS Clemenceau, were also getting a bit long in the tooth. Initially, public sentiment turned against the floating symbol—until one French politician engineered an erudite fait accompli. Rather than cut their prized naval project, French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac repositioned the matter as an issue far greater than military supremacy on the high seas. Renaming the vessel the Charles de Gaulle after the World War II hero and postwar French leader and selling off the aging Foch to Brazil (the Clemenceau had already been mothballed), he argued that building this grand aircraft carrier was now a matter of French pride. The tide turned back in support of the vessel, the critics receded, and the slow-going project limped towards completion.
Now with France carrier-less, the De Gaulle would truly have to be the grandest aircraft carrier to sail the seven seas to meet expectations. Indeed, she would have the best of everything, including American surveillance planes (specifically, the E-2C Hawkeye) and catapults as well as two nuclear reactors. She would stand in the water 261 feet in length, at 38,000 tons, a worthy symbol of her country.
But as the ship approached her launch date, everything seemed to fall apart.
First, sea trials were delayed until January 1999 when French officials realized the deck length was far too short to be able to allow for an emergency landing by the fighters they had bought from the Americans. It was hastily extended 4.4 meters.
Next, the deck’s fresh coat of paint contained a corrosive agent that ate through the catapult wires used to bring landing aircraft to a complete stop. The wires were hurriedly replaced and the deck repainted.
Third, when the vessel got underway, radiation monitors revealed substandard shielding around the reactors. Additional plating was added.
Fourth, when the vessel entered the Bermuda Triangle en route to its Caribbean destination, one of the nineteen-ton port propellers snapped off and sank to the bottom. Evidently the vibrations engendered by the carrier’s engines were more than the propellers could handle, and when the navy sought out the original manufacturer who had cast them for inquiry on the matter (and the possible accusation of substandard workmanship), they discovered that the company had gone out of business back in 1999. Ergo retooling the previous part was now out of the question, and the possibility of further weakened propellers negated the possibility of using the replacement stock.
After the De Gaulle limped back to France, the broken propeller was finally replaced by a cannibalized prop from the mothballed Clemenceau. It was determined that the old model would safely withstand the vibrations. Unfortunately, the change also resulted in a curtailment of her maximum speed, allowing her a top speed ten knots per hour less than the old Foch regularly managed.
Since the completion of sea trials, the FNS Charles De Gaulle did finally complete the plan her Cold War originators had laid out. She served with distinction in the Afghanistan conflict, sat off the coast of India during the 2002 crisis with Pakistan, and has been used as a symbol of French displeasure by being ordered to sail out of the Middle East in the runup to the United States’ launching of the Iraq War.
French pride had been vindicated!
Yet, given the lackluster early performance of the Charles De Gaulle, not only were plans for the second carrier dramatically scaled back, but France also incurred the ridicule of its neighbors. With papers such as The Telegraph and The Irish Times calling the ship the “French Calamity Carrier” and “jinxed,” the nuclear-powered vessel became the laughingstock of the international community.
The cost of one nuclear-powered carrier: Seven billion pounds.
The time required to make the carrier sea-worthy: Fifteen years.
The value of French pride: Priceless.
No Plan Ever Survives Contact with the Enemy
No endeavor brings out the best and worst in men and women than war. It has also often been the same for those who create the tools with which battles are fought. Under the intense pressure of a nation at war, technologies can jump forward. Brilliant minds turn to mayhem with amazing results. Occasionally the needs of war lead to designers and inventors spending valuable and limited resources on things that in more reasoning times they would likely have instantly realized were mistakes.
“I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.”
—Solomon Short, a cartoon character created by R. Crumb
A Whole New Battlefield
Douglas Niles and Donald Niles, Sr.
How Machine Guns Were First Installed in Fighter Planes, Almost…
It is a truism of human history that every great development in the area of transportation has, sooner rather than later, been given a military application. It wasn’t long after men started riding horses before they were trying to knock each other off their mounts, resulting in a host of innovations—from bridles, saddles, and much later stirrups, to lances and spears—so that they could knock each other off their horses with greater efficiency. No one knows how long it was after the first rowboat was invented before sailors were bashing each other with their oars, then affixing battering rams to the prow so that they could send other men’s boats to the bottom of the sea.
Trains and steamships were first designed to transport people from place to place, but the rails soon became the primary conduit for military operations—the campaigns of the American Civil War, in many cases, were about control of rail lines and stations—and the power of steam was employed to build st
rong, fast ships capable of ignoring the wind and exerting their owners’ power to gain control of the seas.
So it comes as no surprise that flying machines went through a similar evolution. The first men to fly rode up in hot air balloons late in the eighteenth century. Less than a hundred years later tethered balloons were lifting military observers into the sky, where they reported information on enemy troop movements and helped to spot targets for friendly artillery.
When World War I erupted across Europe in 1914, the airplane was still in its infancy, since less than eleven years had elapsed following the Wright Brothers’ success at Kitty Hawk. Even so, the lure of powered, controlled flight—coupled with advances in metallurgy, engine design, and general technology—had resulted in a decade of stunning growth in the fledgling industry. By 1908, Orville Wright had demonstrated airplanes to the United States Army, while his brother Wilbur had done the same thing in France.