Ships of the second world WAR!!, Pacific Options

[Spartan]

Thought I'ed start with The pacific though the bismark and vessels of the atlantic are welcome on the post.

Yamato
Yamato, lead ship of a class of two 65,000-ton (over 72,800-tons at full load) battleships, was built at Kure, Japan. She and her sister, Musashi were by far the largest battleships ever built, even exceeding in size and gun caliber (though not in weight of broadside) the U.S. Navy's abortive Montana class. Their nine 460mm (18.1-inch) main battery guns, which fired 1460kg (3200 pound) armor piercing shells, were the largest battleship guns ever to go to sea, and the two ships' scale of armor protection was also unsurpassed.

Commissioned in December 1941, just over a week after the start of the Pacific war, Yamato served as flagship of Combined Fleet commander Isoroku Yamamoto during the critical battles of 1942. During the following year, she spent most of her time at Truk, as part of a mobile naval force defending Japan's Centeral Pacific bases. Torpedoed by USS Skate (SS-305) in December 1943, Yamato was under repair until April 1944, during which time her anti-aircraft battery was considerably increased. She then took part in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June and the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October. During the latter action, she was attacked several times by U.S. Navy aircraft, and fired her big guns in an engagement with U.S. escort carriers and destroyers off the island of Samar.

Yamato received comparatively light damage during the Leyte Gulf battle, and was sent home in November 1944. Fitted with additional anti-aircraft machine guns, she was based in Japan during the winter of 1944-45. Attacked by U.S. Navy carrier planes in March 1945, during raids on the Japanese home islands, she was again only lightly damaged. The following month, she was assigned to take part in the suicidal "Ten-Go" Operation, a combined air and sea effort to destroy American naval forces supporting the invasion of Okinawa. On 7 April 1945, while still some 200 miles north of Okinawa, Yamato was attacked by a massive force of U.S. carrier planes and sunk.

After the war, the great battleship became an object of intense fascination in Japan, as well as in foreign countries. Yamato's remains were located and examined in 1985 and again examined, more precisely, in 1999. She lies in two main parts in some 1000 feet of water. Her bow portion, severed from the rest of the ship in the vicinity of the second main battery turret, is upright. The midships and stern section is upside down nearby, with a large hole in the lower starboard side close to the after magazines.



Yall Know the drill!

[Spartan]

The infamous tirpitz
Tirpitz, a 44,755-ton Bismarck class battleship, was built at Wilhelmshaven, Germany. Commissioned in February 1941, she operated in the Baltic during her first several months of service, conducting trials and training, as well as combat missions in connection with the invasion of the Soviet Union.

In January 1942, Tirpitz steamed to Norwegian waters, where she remained for the remainder of her career. Initially based at Trondheim, and later in fjords further north, she was a constant threat to supply lines between the Western Allies and the Soviets. Though Tirpitz never actually came into contact with Allied shipping, and only fired her guns at enemy targets during a September 1943 raid on shore facilities at Spitzbergen, her great power caused the U.S. and British navies to divert scarce resources to counter her and generated intense efforts to put her out of action.

In late September 1943, a British midget submarine raid planted explosives near Tirpitz, causing serious shock damage when they exploded. In February 1944, while she was under repair, the German battleship was the target of a raid by Soviet bombers that produced one near-miss. In early April, as her repairs were completing, Tirpitz was attacked by British carrier-based planes, receiving several hits and serious damage and casualties. Further repairs lasted until June, and she was again attacked by British planes in July and August, though the resulting damage was not serious. In mid-September, she was hit in the bow by very heavy bombs dropped by Royal Air Force heavy bombers. Moved to Tromsø in October, she was the target of further raids. Finally, on 12 November, Tirpitz was hit and near-missed by several very heavy bombs, causing massive damage. She listed heavily, suffered an ammunition explosion and rolled over. Her wreck was largely scrapped in place after the war.



H.M.S (her maqesties ship) Hood
HMS Hood, a 42,100-ton battlecruiser built at Clydebank, Scotland, was completed in March 1920. For more than two decades, she was the World's largest warship and, with her long, low hull and finely balanced silhouette, was to many the embodiment of "big-gun" era seapower. During her travels in European waters and far away, Hood actively represented Great Britain throughout her career. Her first cruise, in 1920, was to Scandanavia. The next year she went down to Gibraltar and Spain and in 1922 visited Brazil and the West Indies. After a brief call on Denmark and Norway in 1923, Hood was flagship on a eleven-month cruise around the World, accompanied by the smaller battlecruiser Repulse and a number of light cruisers. In 1925, she called on Lisbon to help commemorate Portugal's contributions to navigation and exploration.

For ten years after 1925, Hood was assigned to the Royal Navy's Home and Atlantic Fleets, operating primarily around Europe, with a visit to the West Indies in 1932. She served with the Mediterranean Fleet in 1936-39, protecting British interests during the Spanish Civil War. Back with the Home Fleet after mid-1939, Hood operated in the North Atlantic and North Sea through the first part of World War II and received minor damage in a German air attack on 26 September 1939, an event that demonstrated the relative ineffectiveness of contemporary anti-aircraft gunfire. In June and July 1940, the battlecruiser was in the Mediterranean area. She was flagship during the 3 July Mers-el-Kebir battle, the most dramatic and destructive of several incidents in which the British Navy seized, interned, destroyed or attempted to destroy the warships of their recent ally, France. These acts were undertaken on Government orders to allay fears that the French Navy might fall into German hands.

Hood spent the remainder of her service operating from Scapa Flow, covering the North Sea and Atlantic from the threat of German surface raiders. She was now elderly, overloaded, and burdened with an inadequate armoring arrangement. However, her great operational value had acted through the 1930s to prevent the Royal Navy from taking her out of service for a badly-needed modernization, and now it was too late. In May 1941, in company with the new battleship Prince of Wales, she was sent out to search for the German battleship Bismarck, which had left Norway for the Atlantic. On the morning of 24 May, the two British capital ships found the enemy to the west of Iceland. In the resulting Battle of the Denmark Strait, one or more of Bismarck's fifteen-inch shells got into Hood's after magazines. They erupted in a massive explosion. The great ship sank in moments with all but three of her large crew, an event that shocked the Royal Navy, the British nation and the entire World. HMS Hood's remains were located and photographed by a British deep sea expedition in July 2001.



This post has been edited by Sparta: 03/20/06 5:28pm