Japanese ships

[blinky]

Whoops....thanks for catching my typo Bob. It's probably the same book, mine was printed by St. Martin's Press but it might be published by the Naval Institute. Mine was also written by the captain of the Archerfish. I think as you mentioned earlier the Shinano wasn't in any condition to fight, a lot of her was unfinished...she set sail with many civilian construction workers still working on her insides. She also had a very untrained crew members. I don't remember the number but for a large percentage of her crew this was their first voyage as well.

You are so lucky to have met some of the Yamato's attacking pilots, that must have been an awesome sight and a huge pucker factor going into attack her.

eric

[MikeW]

Blinky... I think the date the picture of the Shinano was taken was 1944. Is the book on the Shinano the one published by the US Naval Institute? The one that I got from there is really good. It is the story mostly from the American submarine (USS Arherfish) perspective of the encounter in which the Shenano was sunk.

The reason she was the largest aircraft carrier at that time was that she was one of the sisters of the battleship Yamoto, which was the largest battleship class in the world at the time (still is, since nobody has built a bigger one since and the Iowa class were smaller than the Yamato). The Iowa class battleships were about 55,000 tons and the fleet carrier (Essex Class) was 26,000 tons. The Yamato and her sisters weighed in at some 72,000 tons and her main armament was 18" versus 16" for the Iowa (and other American class battleships) Class. But if it had come down to a fight between the two, I'd put my money on the Iowa Class because of it's radar and firecontrol systems. And as proven so many times before, ships without air cover are sitting ducks. The US Naval aircraft that attacked her put just about all their torpedoes in one side of her. No amount of counterflooding could keep her from rolling over. I met two US Naval aviators over the years that won Navy Crosses for successfully putting torpedoes into the Yamato, one, Grant Young (I think), put the last one into her before she capsized.

Bob

If it hadn't been for the aircraft carrier taking over the role of the battlewagon, then you would have the Montana Class which was proposed but never built.

[MikeW]

Check this out

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/usnshtp/bb/bb67.htm

[Generaldirektor]

The Mikasa, Admiral Togo's flagship, is at Yokusuka (location of the US and Japanese fleets in Japan), and is now a museum. I went aboard her in March of this year. Interesting.
Also, I had the priveledge of drinking with an 80+ year old veteran of the Nagato. He bought my beer after he learned I was a former US Marine.

Hi Andy!

Thanks for the info! I will try to visit the Mikasa if ever I'm able to go to Japan. I really wish I can go to Japan someday.

And you're very lucky, you even met a Japnese veteran! I also would like to meet and interview one. I hope I get to meet one before it's too late for me.

Jay

[Generaldirektor]

I agree Josh, she probably had one of the most colorful careers of any navy ship. I've heard parts of her survived, the guns at least, but I don't know how true the stories are or not. I'd tend to think not, 30 year old Japanese war relics weren't on the top of the Chinese interest list in 1970.

Jay, here is a link to one of the best pictures of the Shinano:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Shinano.jpg

It was taken on November 11, 1994 during steering trials in Tokyo Bay. The Shinano was a very secret project and taking pictures of her was not allowed which is part of the reason why she's not very well known. Very little documentation of her construction was saved as well, most of it being burned before the surrender. There is a very good book titled: "Shinano! The Sinking of Japan's Secret Supership" by Captain Joseph Enright. It's not the best book but it reads like a novel and gives a pretty good bit of information on her life and sinking.

In the West there isn't a lot of good photographic information on Japanese ships but there are a ton of pictures out there from Japanese sources. During the war security was pretty tight concerning photographing ships and equipment, especially of some of the really neat programs and projects. There are some amazing pictures of the pre-1940 Navy around, they were rightly proud of their fleet.

Somewhere I've got some diagrams that show the comparative size of some of the major ships of the war. They really help put sizes into prespective. I'll have to try and dig them out this month.

As for preserving the remains, well, that's pretty much impossible. Apart from the fact most of them were lost in very, very deep water and the fact that they are war graves, there are a lot of issues including tons of live munitions scattered inside and around most of them. Another major concern is like the USS Arizona, a lot of them sunk with a lot of fuel in their bunkers that didn't necessarily leak out. If you start to move them what's left would probably be so fragile the bunkers would collapse and you'd have to deal with tons of spilled oil.

If you want a little idea of what the ships were like, check out the clips from the Battleship Yamato on U-tube (I posted a link in the Japanese section under a thread about it).

As Andy said, visit the Mikasa if you ever have the chance. That is a very historic ship with an amazing history.

Anyway, enough rambling for me.

eric

Hi Eric!

Thanks a lot for the info about the Shinano!

At least I get to see what it looked like far away. If there are still more Pictures or Blueprints of it in Japanese sources (that weren't destroyed), then I hope someone publishes them especially if these are Close-Ups of the ship or Interior shots. I'm already imagining of how fantastic it could've been to be able to walk aboard that ship, it could've been like a floating airport/mini city. Also, I'll try to find that book here.

For me, I just wish the US Navy just captured the ship as a trophy and made it into a museum instead of sinking it if they had known it wasn't battle worthy (unfinished) in the first place.

About the preservation, I never thought about the danger of live ammo and oil. Nevertheless, I hope someone could invent a way to be able to preserve these old ships (maybe like a procedure like they can siphon out the oil and remove the ammo before getting the ship's parts ). I don't like to see them disintegrate.

Moreover, I hope someone here knows a Shinano veteran (or anyone who was able to work on her) so that we will know what it was like aboard the largest Carrier in the world (as mentioned, the Yamato class was even bigger than the proposed Iowa class). And I hope someone locates it's current position down there. (has anyone done before?)


Jay

PS: Please do post the Comparative sizes of the Ships when you do find them.

[Josh Beckett]

Nah, I wouldnt have tried to capture it, that thing wouldve been all over the pacific and I thank the lord it(Shinano) got sunk before it couldve been unleashed.

[NavyFCO]

I think blinky and coastie hit most of the points about not keeping enemy ships around, but just to add my bits of info (and some redudant):

1 - As coastie put it, ships cost money. Museums are nice, but we have a hard enough time finding cities/museums to take our own historic ships let alone taking care of an enemy ship. Maybe now someone would have an interest in taking care of an enemy ship, but 60 years ago, the chances were very very unlikely. The fact that the U boat up in Chicago (as I remember) survived was because it was a "technological wonder" rather than a historic ship. Luckily for all of us, they took very good care of it and it survives to this day. Unfortunately, our government has always been strapped for cash, and after going into major debt during WW2, we had a tough time maintaining the huge fleet that we had spent our own money building let alone someone else's fleet!

2 - Preservation on ships can be an utter nightmare. Even ships that are well cared for require constant care and attention. I always compare them with a baby - always requiring attention and you never know when they're going to poop their diapers - it can happen when you least expect it. And with a ship, when it "poops" itself, something really expensive is usually broken - thus the reason that US ships have a several million dollar maintenance budget every year for upkeep. Preservation on a ship is constant as well. Any time you have metal and the sea, the metal loses out. Whether it is from rust or from bottom fouling (the goop that grows under the waterline on a ship's hull) it costs money and takes time to repair.

3 - There was also a point of pride at that time in history as well. WE had won the war with OUR ships. They had LOST the war with theirs. Whose ships were superior? Duh, OBVIOUSLY OURS! Of course, was that realistic? No. However, that thought process probably was the cause for many an enemy ship to find itself on the bottom of the ocean floor.

4 - As for the Bikini Atoll atomic testing, they needed ships to test the results of the atomic bomb on, and ships of varying classes, from aircraft carriers and battleships to destroyers. There wasn't much reason for NOT using enemy ships for this... After all, we were testing the power of the bomb and what it could do to the enemy anyway, and besides they came with a bonus... Those ships were FREE! We didn't have to go through the process of decommissioning a ship that we had paid for and that might well provide us with years more service.

5 - Coastie was also right when he mentioned parts. Ships require parts. Lots of parts, all the time. Where would we have gotten the parts to replace broken parts? Remember that our Navy had - and still has for the most part - higher standards than many of the other world navies. If another navy from a smaller country adopted one of the captured ships, they could jerryrig whatever they wanted to make the ship worked. If that happened in our Navy, and someone had gotten injured, heads would have rolled. Definately not worth the risk! If something had broken on a captured ship, we would have had to have gotten three bids from contractors who would all have to set up the machinery to make said part... Really expensive, and really not worth it. Unfortunately for us, "ghetto rigging" just doesn't go over well.

6 - Say you found one of these ships sitting in a port somewhere today. "Wow," you'd say, "let's take this back to the states to make a museum out of it!" GREAT IDEA....but....welcome to those folks called the EPA. Old ships, and particularly those manufactured outside the US and not to US standards are floating environmental hazards. Very, very, very few other countries have the same environmental standards that we do, and in order to make that ship compliant to US standards would cost more than anyone would be willing to put out on it. (God help you if you scrape paint on it and even a solitary flake of the lead-based paint lands in the water......!)

7 - Finally, I think that the thought of keeping something for posterity probably didn't even cross many minds simply because there was just SO MUCH of the stuff around the world. Several thousand ships of every shape and size - from tugboats to battleships - suvived from the Axis powers and it was more of a burden trying to figure out how to get RID of it rather than how to keep it around! I think it was blinky who mentioned that there was a huge shortage of steel and iron in the Pacific, so any available ship went to the scrapyard, and I am certain that the same fate befell many ships in Europe...... Those ships later became the framing for the future reconstruction of Asia and Europe... they were sacrificed for the rebuilding of the nations that they were built to destroy.

Just my thoughts...

Dave

[NavyFCO]

Forgot to mention in my rambling that the screws off a German destroyer are located on the former Naval Station Annapolis. They are all that remains of a destroyer that we towed over and used for testing at the David Taylor Research Center.

Ironically, both the destroyer and the research center have gone the way of history, with the screws fairing better than the dilapidated buildings of the research center.

Dave

[Josh Beckett]

I used to have a peice of an Xcraft used agaist the Tirpitz but it got thrown away by my mom.

[MikeP]

Took 30 seconds to find this.
People keep telling you to research brfore posting and you keep ignoring us.
Guess you get a big post count, though.

Yamato the Ultimate Battleship