Naval makeover! (cruiser-to-submarine edition)

 The cruiser Москва has passed on.

He is no more. 

(Russian naval vessels are by tradition "he's" rather than the "she's" of English or American sailor tradition) 

He has ceased to be, expired and gone to meet his maker. Bereft of life, he rests in peace, has shuffled off his mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

Okay.

Rule #1 of war is "Shit happens", and the fact that this vessel is now full of water is not in itself either shocking or particularly interesting. 

If one was in a snarky mood one might make the same sort of observation Bismarck might have made about continental powers like Germany or Russia wanting (let alone "needing") large capital ships: "...the fuck?" (only in the original German, of course...). 

If one was in a snarky mood.

To me there are two interesting parts about this, though.

The first is that the Russian official line is that the cruiser was lost "under tow in heavy seas after an internal ammunition explosion". 

Not because nasty enemy missiles turned him into a flaming pyre, no, no! Just your basic head-on-collision-twenty-car pileup of fucked-up munitions handling and/or storage, piss-poor damage control, and incompetent seamanship.

I kind of get the dictator-grade level of "not wanting to admit that your enemy hurt you" propaganda. But to want to make the story "our sailors are lethally incompetent" seems...a bit louche' at best. Tell me...how does that make things in your navy sound...better?

Now, that said; damage control at sea is goddamn hard. It requires constant, repetitive, realistic training led by good petty officers and planned and overseen by competent and demanding officers.

Even the best navies have their bad days; we saw that back in 2015 when we talked about the loss of HIJMS Taiho during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. 

The 日本海軍 Nippon Kaigun - the Imperial Japanese Navy - was one of the best-led (at the tactical level, at least...) and best-trained in the world in 1944. But that didn't prevent the sinking of one of their newest carriers because of poor damage control after a single torpedo strike.

On the other end of the military scale, though? Damage control is one of those massive-training-fail issues that seems to be endemic in "gangster" military organizations. Think Idi Amin's or Saddam's "armies" if you want a model. 

If nothing else this Russo-Ukrainian War has done a pretty good job of throwing a nastily bright light on exactly how fucking brutally bad the Russian armed services are. As bad as the Ugandans or the Iraqis.

Turns out that when your national model is "kleptocracy" your national military is just about as good as you'd expect based on that. 

When your soldiers and sailors are "led" by people - from petty officers and NCOs through general officers to their political masters - whose whole mode of thought is "steal what you can, neglect what you can't, and lie about everything to everyone both above and below you"  and those troops are either not trained for shit (or completely untrained) and their "leaders" are often incompetent, either because the system is designed to ensure the leaders are piss-poor, or unable to demand they aren't, to find that the entire organization those soldiers and sailors are part of ends up being criminally incompetent at the difficult business of war, including the difficult task of naval damage control, should hardly be shocking.

If you choose shitty crooks to "lead" you, you shouldn't be shocked when they "lead" you into shitty crookedness. 

Which leads me back from the shores of Ukraine to the shores of North America.

Because you'd think that this sort of military clusterfuckery would be a cautionary tale for those of us here on the sidelines in the United States about the whole business of being all enthusiastic for dictators because, say, they hate homosexuals and you do, too. That getting your dream of "leaders" hating on liberal soy-boys and darkies and uppity women isn't worth the sort of incompetent "leadership" that ends up getting your sailors killed and their capital ships sunk. 

Even for the most foaming-mouthed-rabid MAGAt groupies of Tubby and his crooked little weasel pals.

But, no.

They won't believe that.

Ever.

And that's a problem, a problem deeper than the bottom of the Black Sea, where the Москва now rests.

HIJMS Kirishima, 2019

Interesting footnote to the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal; a second underwater archeological investigation of the wreck of the battlecruiser Kirishima, sunk in the action I wrote up back in November 0f 2012. The wreck was discovered in 1992, but the return allowed for substantially better observation of the ship.

If you recall, this was one of the handful of surface gun actions in WW2, in which the new battleship USS Washington hammered the old battlecruiser:

"USS Washington slid through the night, a great gray steel ghost. She had tracked a large radar target but held her fire, unsure of whether the object was friendly or enemy. Finally she was within 9,000 yards, and Kirishima lit off her searchlights and fired on South Dakota. Washington's gunners immediately opened up and pasted the living shit out of the old battlecruiser; at least nine 16" shells and probably something like 40 6" projos impacted within minutes. Kirishima lit up like a balefire. Her rudder was jammed hard over to port, hundreds of her crew were dead, many more maimed or injured. Within minutes the elderly battlecruiser was transformed from a fighting ship into a wreck."

Based on the new investigation it sounds like Washington's shooting was better than we'd thought:

"I believe that it is safe to say that Kirishima was struck between 17 and 21 times by 16-inch projectiles and between 17 and 20 times by 5-inch projectiles." (Lundgren, 2019)

One of the intriguing sidenotes I found in this article was the observation that one of the major contributing factors to the destruction of the Japanese battlecruiser was it's projectile load.

The primary mission of the IJN task force that November night was to bombard and destroy Henderson Field, therefore Kirishima carried a large number of the "Type 3" bombardment projectiles. These were thinner walled than the typical armor-piercing 14" projo but, more critically, were filled with a different explosive.

Both her forward ("A" and "B") turrets were hit hard, and both barbettes - the armored column chambers where projectiles and propellants are stored - were penetrated. Here the USN projectiles would have exploded, and very likely caused sympathetic detonation of the IJN projos.

"Within Turret "A" barbette - assuming the Japanese had pre-positioned ten Type 3 projectiles per gun in advance of the battle - the barbette structure would hold twenty projectiles prior to the battle. Turret‘"A" fired three times during the battle, expending six shells and thus leaving at minimum fourteen projectiles within the barbette and hoists when it was destroyed. Using the figures above, each projectile contained over 44 lbs (20 kg) of incendiary material of which 18lbs. (8.2 kg) was magnesium. With an estimated fourteen projectiles within barbette one ("A" turret barbette) this single compartment had 252.3lbs (114.4kg) of magnesium powder available to burn within barbette." (Lundgren, 2019)

Magnesium is a whole different cat than the usual nitrocellulose explosive. It burns hot, really hot, like 3,000-degrees hot, and can't be extinguished without CO2 firefighting chemical foam.

So the implication is that 1) Washington's 16-inch guns hit and penetrated both Kirishima's forward turrets, and 2) along with wrecking the turrets and killing the guncrews, the USN hits 3) ignited the Type 3 bombardment ammunition, producing the immense flames - burning magnesium can flare as much as 15-20 feet high - that were reported by both Japanese and American sailors. Those fires would have quickly made the battlecruiser unfightable as at the same time more large-caliber hits below the waterline were sinking her.

Worth reading the whole thing.