HMS Nelson - Guide 108 (Extended)
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- čas přidán 8. 02. 2019
- The Nelson class, battleships of the Royal Navy, are today's subject.
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Next on the list:
-Gato class
-Admiralen class
-H class (NB)
-'Habbakuk' project
-HIJMS Mikasa
-County class
-KMS Tirpitz
-Montana class
-Florida class
-USS Salt Lake City
-Storozhevoy
-Flower class
-USS San Juan
-HMS Sheffield
-USS Johnston
-Dido class
-Hunt class
-HMS Vanguard
-Mogami class
-Almirante Grau
-Surcouf
-Von der Tann
-Massena
-HMCS Magnificent
-HMCS Bonaventure
-HMCS Ontario
-HMCS Quebec
-Lion class BC
-USS Wasp
-HMS Blake
-HMS Romala/Ramola
-SMS Emden
-Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen
-Destroyer Velos
-U.S.S. John R. Craig
-C class
-HMS Caroline
-HMS Hermes
-Iron Duke
-Kronprinz Erzerzorg Rudolph.
-HMS Eagle
-Ise class
-18 inch monitor
-Mogami
-De Zeven Provinciën
-Fletcher class
-USS Langley
-Kongo class
-Grom class
-St Louis class
-H class special
-All-big-gun designs
-USS Oregon
-Gascogne
-Alsace
-Lyon and Normandie classes
-Leander class
-HMS Ajax
-Project 1047
-O class
-R class
-Battle class
-Daring class
-USS Indianapolis
-Atago/Takao
-Midway class
-Graf Zeppelin
-Bathurst class
-RHS Queen Olga
-HMS Belfast
-Aurora
-Imperator Nikolai I
-USS Helena
-USS Tennesse
-HMNZS New Zealand
-HMS Queen Mary
-USS Marblehead
-New York class
-L-20e
-Abdiel class
-Panserskib (Armoured ship) Rolf Krake
-HMS Victoria
-USS Galena (1862)
-HMS Charybdis
-Eidsvold class
-IJN “Special” DD's
-SMS Emden
-Ships of Battle of Campeche
-HMS Tiger
-USS England (DE-635)
-Tashkent
-1934A Class
-HMS Plym (K271)
-Siegfried class
Specials:
-Fire Control Systems
-Protected Cruisers
-Scout Cruisers
-Naval Artillery
-Tirpitz (damage history)
-Treaty Battleship comparison
-Warrior to Pre-dreadnought
-British BC Ammo Handling
-Naval AA Special
-Drydocks
Music - / ncmepicmusic
Grandmom still flies the flag she was given the day we buried that cheese.
They shall not grow mold
Underrated comment.
Touché
@Der Frosch-Prinz Aus Bayern *moldier*
"Which was a positively American level of anti aircraft firepower." Yessss.
5peciesunkn0wn XDDDD
We like full auto stuff. It’s fun.
The rest of the World: How many AA guns do you REALLY NEED on your ships?
America: Yes and Yes.
The USN carrier group's AA output increased 11x between '42 and '44,
Not even that level of firepower is American enough.
20:00 Petition to have HMS Nelson as a honorary member of The American Battleships that Ran Aground in Their Home Waters Club.
Here Here!:-) 🖖
Not when my grandfather was her navigating officer! He was acknowledged as one of the best two navigating officers in the entire navy.
And obviously the Warspite must also be included on this list, mainly because it spent it's whole life ramming things and the whole Last Stand against the Scrappies was also a thing...
Not to mention the AA compliment!
When you have more battleships than any other nation on earth, you're going to run aground more often than anyone else on earth.
"Those measures of displacement are unfair because they do not account for the special burden of having the world's largest empire on which the sun never sets."
God bless the British diplomats who sold that, just brilliant!
It was damned cheeky given that the two powers the line had to be mainly sold to - the US and Japan - had the massvie Pacific to worry about.
The far away bow reminds me of an oil tanker.
That was great humble-brag.
Fact with largest empires is that on the one hand the sun never sets, on the other hand it also never rises. So it kinda equalizes itself.
Today, battleship displacement is measured in museum curator body sacks😂 ok, ok, may be, because americans measure still everything in body parts the brits invented.😮
In the future can you give a trigger warning before a story where cheese is harmed. Some of us are Wisconsinites.
The tragic music truly painted a scene of the horrors of war.
Sorry for your loss
*plays taps for the cheese*
What was the cheese's name?
@@garymingy8671 Don't ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
My grandad served on HMS Nelson during WW2, I have a number of photographs of him during this time and love looking at them. He was a gunner on the Pom-Pom guns.
stevenmoody1983 Pom Pom guns?¿?
@@stonks6616 ; The QF 2-pounder naval gun was called Pom-Pom because of her cadence.
FirstDagger are they the guns that make little balls of smoke in the air
My great granda was a CPO on her sister ship HMS Rodney during ww2.
My respects to him and your family, trust all are safe virus wise
Regarding the shock of firing the main battery; Many years ago I worked with someone who had served aboard Rodney, and I clearly recall him saying (and I quote) "What no-one tells you is that when they fire them guns, all the lights go out".
Faerie, I r remember reading in Sir Ludovic Kennedy's book, PURSUIT, which was about the sinking of the Bismarck, that the blast from Rodney's own guns cracked portholes and shattered light bulbs during the Bismarck's last fight.
I recall when we fired a broadside we often blew off dogged down doors on the bridge or the flag bridge. The ship would slip about 10 feet. I would love to have seen the HMS Nelson fire a broadside. USS Newport News CA-148 my service on cruisers 1968-72
AdamosDad, I was told by a veteran who served aboard the U.S.S. MISSOURI that when they fired a nine gun broadside that the entire ship would heel over and be blown slightly off course. From the numerous videos of the MISSOURI firing her guns, and the blast effect on the water near the ship, I can see how this could be true.
Yeah, that's what I've read as well. During the battle with Bismarck, they basically destroyed all the lightbulbs and all the plumbing fittings in the front half of the ship. Honestly, these ships were garbage. They couldn't sit on station for bombardment because they rendered huge portions of the ship basically unlivable just by firing their own guns. One firing session and they're done, and have to go back to port for repairs. As a practical weapon of war, they're probably the worst of the treaty battleships.
@@WardenWolf Actually, it was a little more complicated than that. From what Cecil (for that was his name) told me, they had to have someone with a number of light bulbs near all the essential lights, ready to replace bulbs between salvos.
God alone knows how many light bulbs they must have had to keep in the stores !
Hilarious...
'Water doesn't count towards displacement'
*Uses water as armour*
Technically the Habbakuk ice carriers would be treaty-compliant :p
@@Drachinifel the next steps in water-armour technology: Ice armour! Then Pykrete!
Standard displacement actually excluded reserve feed water for the boilers, not water in general. Water in the side protection system should have been counted.
Drachinifel habbakuk wasn’t made of water I didn’t think but another frozen material.
@@gabrielm.942 Habakkuk would have been made from pykrete, a mixture of wood pulp and ice.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk#Pykrete
The cheese story is an example of why I REALLY like this channel; there is always some tidbit that humanizes the shipboard experience.
Hehehe! On my ASW Frigate in the early 1980s, an ET buddy kept a wheel of hard cheddar, a couple boxes of crackers and a bottle of Canadian Mist hidden in the AC ductwork in the Radar Equipment Room. We'd snack on them.
Imagine having to work in the middle gun turret knowing you have three 16" guns pointed directly at you and they might be loaded
In fairness it IS a great incentive to do your job right and not piss off any gunnery officers 😂
I'm certain there was some sort of lockout mechanism to prevent the guns from firing into any of the the ship's own structure.
@@pr9383 yeah most ships of the era had this measure. I believe one of the Iowa’s had one of there’s fail at one point which caused a 16 inch gun to obliterate one of the 5 inch gun turrets.
Why worry? You wouldn't feel a thing in the event of a misfire anyway.
Absolutely fantastic video! My Grandad served on HMS Nelson. I'm the youngest of 3 brothers, my oldest brother being born in 1969 and my 2nd oldest being born in 1971 and I was born in 1986, so they both got told more about Grandad's service on the Nelson that I did, my Grandad passed away in 1994 when I was 8 so I sadly was too young to truly understand much of what happened. Funnily enough, Grandad was briefly transferred to the Hood because a fellow sailor was wanting to go back to the UK which the Nelson was going to at the time due to their wife giving birth, Grandad offered to swap with him and so he served on Hood very briefly, transferring back to the Nelson literally weeks before the Hood was sunk. From what I've been told Grandad shared a good number of stories with my older brothers about where Nelson (Nelly as he used to call her) went and what he saw, really wish I got the chance to properly ask him myself. My brother has an amazing photo that Grandad took I believe on his wall and I often look at it fondly.
My grandad also served. He was a radio operator.
RIP cheese, you will be missed
All cheese goes to heaven.
Did Drach play sad music for the cheese?
Do you think they sruck to naval tradition and gave it a burial as sea.
There are very fine cheeses on both sides
Blessed are the cheese Makers!
I really wish we had kept a Nelson class as a museum ship, I would have loved to see one of them.
R.I.P to the Nelsons Inspecting Officers wheel of cheese...
*Nelson
F
F
F
They should be in dry dock for people to visit! 1 of the most powerful ships in the 2nd world war
I know many might disagree, but I think this is the best looking battleship. The bridge right at the back gives it a fast, sleek look. The slab sided superstructure looks brutal yet at the same time elegant.
I wouldn't say it's my absolute faviroute but yeah love the superstructure looks like a castle
Warspite wore it better.
Seems to have quiet a few with you on that.
Yeah, she had a very unique look.
ChristophInns agreed.
I still can't decide if the Nelson or the Hood was the most aesthetically pleasing warship ever built, and I've been thinking about it for over twenty years now.
Better not look at WW1's HMS Tiger then......
@@PaulP999I'll look that one up.
Well every other person this side of dirt knows which of the 2 they'd pick.
or the derfflinger class in WW1 or the hipper class cruisers in WW2
“Ran aground in Portsmouth on its way to the Caribbean”
That’s as spurious as “I hit a telephone pole on my way across the continent at the end of my driveway”
You weren’t going anywhere.
There is a Portsmouth in Virginia too.
there's one here in NH as well.
@@nukclear2741 same difference. They're so far away we are discussing locations in hundreds, even thousands of miles. if I hit a telephone pole at the end of my driveway while setting off on a trip across a county, even a city, the grand trip never actually began because I never really left home
@@redram5150 Running aground in Portsmouth, VA would be 70+% of the way to the Caribbean.
@@hailexiao2770 It doesn't change my point considering Virginia isn't local
22:27 Axis tanks: Exist.
HMS Nelson: Do be a splendid chap and hold my beverage for a moment.
It was 22:27
@@TycoonTitian01 Indee
d it was. I tyoped. :D
In Hans Von Luck's book Panzer Commander he describes the bombardment of the 21st Panzer Division by British and American battleships noting that even the heaviest of tanks would be lifted into the air even if the shell did not actually hit the tank. I recommend the book for the German perspective on the Normandy campaign and its consequences for Germany.
Read it several times and still have a paperback copy on my bookshelf. And Mellenthin, Rommel, Bradley, Stilwell, Ike, et al. And Liddel Hart, Churchill's "Ring" series, and a diverse set of supporting works. Anecdotal accounts can give the feel of the war, but not much in accurate detail. That usually requires meticulous examination of after action reports and other official documents. Military historians are often better at pulling all the pieces together, while commanders in action only see one of the pieces at a time.
@Ian Greenhalgh that would then make it a 20 ton portable radio.....
C B there is a photo of Eisenhower visiting the front and on the photo depicting a Königstiger that literally has took off upside down on a near hill from a near miss from massive concussion from a battleship.i have no idea if the crew survived but surely most of them was seriously injured. Yet we are talking about a 72 metric tons. In the area of Cisterna behind Anzio outside the completely rebuilt town it can still be seen massive craters created by the shells from the battleships. It is quite impressive to see....
C B it was Rodney and her 16” guns that caused so much havoc at the Normandy landings,German soldiers who was I. Britain between the wars said,,I hated her then and I hate her now,as he sees another armoured vehicle being blown into the air
@@paoloviti6156 No tiger 2's or konigstiger were ever deployed in Italy they fought on the eastern front and the western front 1944 onwards so it was either a tiger 1 which were deployed in Italy or a misrepresentation which happened a few times with the allies. I interviewed a German panzer veteran when i was a lot younger he was in one of the first tiger 2's to enter service and stayed with them till the battle for Berlin where his crew abandoned their tank after it was out of ammunition and was taking fire from russian tanks. He was very clear if you wanted to crew a tiger 2 it was east or west he called Italy south and had served with a heavy tank unit briefly in a tiger 1 before transferring for training on the tiger 2.
Wish they hadn't scrapped her. She was a very unique design and I'd like to have toured her. The Warspite too for that matter.
@Kathleen Mcmanus I would love to, not least which that means I could afford a trip across the Pond without US military....ahem.... assistance 😂
@Kathleen Mcmanus well my goal is to visit the UK in the next few years so I will definitely go see the Caroline when I go 🙂
Darkhorse13Golf Gaming as an owner and restorer of larger wooden vessels, i learned a hard fact: you can't save them all.
Warspite should never have been scrapped. Amazing ship with an amazing story. Surviving 2 world wars and kicking serious ass doing it.
When the ship needs to sleep, it needs to sleep....
When Nelson and Rodney were under construction, an article in a French naval magazine erroneously postulated that they would have a flight deck aft; after all, why were the turrets all mounted forward? This led to wild rumours in the American press that they were hybrid warships that were somehow more powerful than any other vessels afloat. It was left to an American commentator who retained his composure to call the story "a ridiculous canard" in an article with a Drach level of snark.
One of my favorite aspects of the Nelson-class’s 16” guns is how they affected what came after them. (Also, love the video, and can’t wait for you to cover good old Rod-ol!)
Supposedly, the Royal Navy was so unhappy with the Nelsons’ 16-inch guns that they reverted back to a very conservative gun design for the King George Vs. However, in their haste to backtrack from their mistakes with the Nelsons, they went too far the *other* way. Rather than reuse the tried-and-true 15-inch guns used on the Hood and Queen Elizabeths, the British developed a new 14-inch gun that, though it was more accurate and had a longer barrel life, just didn’t have the same oomph as the 16” guns. The fact that King George Vs' guns had far *more* technical problems than the Nelsons' just added to the silliness of the whole situation.
The British were at least somewhat aware of their issues with firepower before the war, and they tried to solve them by getting other nations to agree to limit themselves to a similar gun size. To no one’s surprise, it didn’t work: The rise of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan had changed the diplomatic situation that the earlier naval arms treaties were born from. France was engaged in a naval arms race with Italy, the Germans were making noise with their naval rearmament, and Japan would refuse to renew the naval treaties in 1936 following its wars of conquest in China and withdrawal from the League of Nations. In this climate where their most likely enemies weren’t respecting naval treaties, the United States and France weren’t interested in lowering their battleships’ firepower to satisfy Britain’s insecurity.
Besides, the Americans had a 16-incher and the French a 15-incher that they were very happy with. If the Brits couldn’t get their big caliber guns to work, that was their problem.
Years later, the final battle against Bismarck showed very clearly the power discrepancy between the guns of Britain’s newest battleships and the much-disparaged Nelsons. While King George V’s 14-inchers were largely “meh” against Bismarck’s armor, the old, lumbering Rod-ol’s 16-inchers completely took the German battlewagon to school. In less than 15 minutes of fighting Rodney took out half of Bismarck’s main battery and crippled the remainder, and within another half hour she completely silenced the German ship. That done, Rodney proceeded to trash pretty much everything above Bismarck’s main armor belt. It was such a one-sided ass-kicking that Bismarck’s main guns never landed a single hit during the fight. And throughout it all, King George V, the flagship of the Home Fleet, was essentially relegated to an ineffectual supporting role as Rodney curb stomped the pride of the Kriegsmarine into a watery grave.
Afterwards, the public credit and honor for the victory went to every ship but Rodney (and the unlucky and underappreciated Prince of Wales): King George V, Ark Royal, the destroyer Cossack, and even Victorious all got the spotlight while Rodney was largely ignored. Iain Ballantyne, author of the excellent “Killing the Bismarck”, says that this was likely “a matter of not wanting to be reminded that it had taken the guns of a ship built in the 1920s to take Bismarck apart while the Home Fleet flagship’s 14-inch weapons were less effective” (p. 206).*
The British would eventually get the 14-inch guns’ issues fixed and the King George Vs were still dangerous battleships (plus they had many other advantages over the Nelsons, like speed). All the same, it’s a bit amusing that the British seemed to give up on innovating with their guns and went back to the good old 15-inchers for their next battleship class.
*The marginalization of Rodney and Prince of Wales wasn’t because King George V’s commanders were glory-hogs or anything. Following Bismarck’s sinking, Admiral Tovey received a call on board King George V from First Sea Lord Dudley Pound telling him that the Prince of Wales’ Captain Leach and Rear-Admiral Wake-Walker were to be court-martialed for withdrawing while engaging the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen at Denmarck Strait. “Admiral Tovey was angered by this suggesting, considering Captain Leach, in charge of a new ship with severe teething problems, had done as well as could be expected. Despite serious hits Prince of Wales had, in fact, continued to shadow Bismarck. Had he been foolish enough to engage Bismarck and Prinz Eugen at close quarters, Captain Leach could have easily thrown the lives of his own sailors away on top of the dreadful loss of Hood’s. Admiral Tovey told his boss: ‘If the Admiralty is going to do that, then I will resign and act as Prisoner’s Friend, because I consider he did absolutely the right thing.’” (Ballantyne, p. 206) Thus, instead of a court martial, Leach and Wake-Walker received medals.
( *EDIT:* It's worth noting that Rodney was in desperate need of a refit at the time of the battle, so she wasn't even operating at 100% when she wrecked Bismarck. She was definitely the badass grandma of the British fleet, even with contenders like Warspite.)
Dude, you need your own blog. Or a CZcams channel. Essays are wasted in comment sections 😉
Thanks for taking the time to write this. 👍
Back when I watched documentaries on the matter, I was under the impression that the sinking of the Bismark was more akin to taking down a raid boss, with the British showering the Bismark with shells of every calibre in an attempt to take him down. After reading more on the matter, Now I think the event was more like am extremely brutal demolition, with good ol'Rodnol single-handedly pounding the Bismark into a blazing sinking scrap heap, whilst all the other ships kicked Bismark while he was down as revenge for the Hood. I guess the marginalization of Rodney may have something to do the tones of those documentaries I watched.
With all due respect, Bismark couldn't do much with a stuck rudder and defective targeting radar
With all of the problems he faced both during and after the engagement Captain Leach did a remarkable job with POW never really getting the recognition he deserved. It was, after all, as a result of his hits on the Bismark that forced her to steer for France and along with Ark Royal's air strike, put her in striking distance of the RN. That and the loss of the Hood may well have given the British that extra motivation to go after her so vengefully.
Love the Nelson Class - unique, beautiful and immensely powerful.
They were also the only British battleship/battlecruiser class in WWII to not have a ship sunk.
I had not thought about that. You are correct.
Ya I keep forgetting the Prince of Wales was a GKV
Big Smoke: I'll have 2 Number 9's A Number 9 Large, a Number 6 with extra dip, a Number 7, 2 Number 45's one with cheese a....
British Navy: Cheese is broken.
Big Smoke: OOOOOOOOOHHHHHHH
He turns that restaurant green one second later
Hallou Ni. X
You do it every time man!!!! 'Nelson made it her duty to run into every underwater threat imaginable...' I get the feeling our battleships were as mental as their crews, and a comedy series about them should definitely be in the works!!! Doesn't beat Warspite going sideways drifting through the Strait of Messina, I must say.🤣🤣🤣🤣
The photos on this site are wonderful......sorry about the cheese
I felt great sadness about the cheese as well :(
May God save that cheese.
My name is Peter Nelson and my father and his father before him were sailors till the day they died. I'm remembering my middle school day's, sitting in the library with books open to pictures of battleships ans especially the HMS Nelson. So mid 1960's to 2020, that 55 years ago and I still love looking at her. She's one of a kind in my mind. I did not go to sea, instead I became a Mechanical Engineer instead of a Marine Engineer or Chief Engineer like my Father. Heck, my dad ran away from home at a very young age and joined the Merchant Marine Navy in Pensacola Florida and then the U.S. Navy and served in WWII, Korea and Vietnam. He was away at Vietnam while he paid for my college education. He was in the war zone and his ship did get hit. I remember the communist trying to take over the entire student body one May around 1970. I stood up and I remembered that it was my father who was providing me with my college education and I spoke out against them and that was that my college was not taken over by the communists. Mind you, they tried, they even held another meeting at night and talked of forming "cell blocks" ...I was front and center and I looked into that man's eyes with such ferocity that he could not speak and just sat down thus completely putting an end to the communist take over of my college. I understand "Loyalty". You would have to kill me because there is no way you could make me do anything against my father! My dad was born in Mobile Alabama and lived in NY so he could be near the NYC Union Halls for the United States Merchant Marines. He's dead now, died two weeks before his retirement. It's going on 46 years later and I finally moved to Alabama to be near to his place of birth. Us children of life time sailors know what it's like to grow up with no father present in the house. Yet the time he was around he taught me well. God Bless All Sailor's Everywhere! Peter Nelson age 70.
P.S. My father was born whilst his father was out at sea somewhere off the coast of South America in May 7, 1915. They "Signaled" the ship from Biloxi Mississippi, America using the "wireless" and asked what to name the boy. The reply came back "Signal" because of the great joy the signal had brought to my Grandpa Elias Nelson. So my Dad was named "Charles Signal Nelson" and that's the name on all his Seamanship papers. We called him "Sig" for short, but he sure had a name befitting a man of the Sea.
What an incredible story
Fun fact: Right after HMS Royal Oak was sunk by a u-boat in scapa flow the Nelson almost suffered the same fate. Even more intriguing is that Churchill was actually on board when the U-boat attack occurred. Only the torpedos being duds actually save the ship and perhaps the most important man in history from certain demise. It’s one of those “what if” moments in history. Sheer luck was clearly on the Brits side that day.
Well more like dodgy magnetic exploders on the German torps.
Yeah they were a bit unreliable in the beginning of the war but once the homing torps came out the game changed drastically!
So I was playing the game Uboat and sunk Royal Oak in Scapa flow. I went back rearmed and was assigned to patrol the coast of Spain. The first morning after I arrived in the patrol grid I found Nelson unescorted with only a tanker with her. 2 Nelsons in less than a week.
The Iowa class BBs have roll down bridge windows. This abated the concussion problems. The New Jersey, during it's Vietnam period demonstrated the need for this when the ship fired it's first rounds during pre-commissioning exercises. I have a photo of reams of paperwork flying out of the bridge of Missouri when we fired our guns.
I could only imagine what it must have been like to be aboard when the 16 inchers fired. I got to go aboard the Mo many, many years ago during a friends and family day but, sadly, this was after the Iowa tragedy and there was a moratorium on firing the 16 inchers and so they were only allowed to fire their 5 inchers. Even still, the 5 inchers were pretty impressive but I'm sure they pale in comparison to the 16 inchers.
I wonder if the paperwork was mourned by anyone?
@@MichalSoukup1995 only by the tree lovers and relatives of the trees used to make that paper....
Can you show the photo?
Mines.... Always looking for a ship to hug.🤗
They had chemistry!
Click, click 💥
Such is the power of mutual magnetism.
We all know the ships rarely if ever consent to this hugging, say no to mine hugs!
What if it were your battleship, how would YOU feel then?
@@ETAlnes Mines are evil tools used by shipophiles to murder them in a vicious and cruel way. Together, we can stop shipophiles.
For scale:
Shipping 2000 extra tonnes of water in through your hull is the literal equivalent of dragging two Sumner class large Destroyers along with you. Any rough edges caused by the impact(s) that let all that water in would tend to help tear the hole(s) in your side wider, likely causing you to ship even more water. Examples are several, and Drachinifel has covered some of these already.
"Which was a positively AMERICAN level of anti-aircraft firepower" ... you, sir, win the Internet for that comment.
merica....is the ship sinking yet? add more dakka then.
I've always loved how these look similar in sort of relative dimensions to the Star Destroyers in Star Wars. All the main weapons forward with a large bridge and just engine and controls aft.
Except the theme as it passed by was probably Rule Britannia instead of the Imperial march.
Thanks to you, I can only think of “a particularly large and nice cheese” accompanied by Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings whenever HMS Nelson is mentioned
It’s so sad what happened too Nelson after the war😿😿
It was HMS Nelson's sister ship, Rodney, that set a big torch to the Bismark - not so much King George V, as the movie "Sink The Bismark" would lead you to believe.
The Nelson-class were beautiful ships.
I disagree
I agree
I think they look like formidable fortresses, a clear warning for you to stay away, unless you want a 16 inch shell in the face
Holy crap I forgot this comment existed
they should have preserved these ships or at least one of them :/
I take it the image at 23:12 was taken well after Nelson''s retirement. The port side of the hull is so corroded that it has the aspect of a stone wall, giving the Nelson a fortress-like look.
The addition of solemn violins for the contaminated cheese anecdote was a nice touch.
One aspect of the Nelson design that I have never seen discussed is the effect that placing all of the main armament forward on a relatively slow ship will have on the tactical use of the ship. I think that the Admirals/Captains only real option against another battleships is to fight until either they triumph or they are destroyed. This is because they cannot retreat as the ship are both too slow to escape and defenceless when sailing away from an enemy. Having said that the Royal Navy fostered an aggressive attitude in its officers so it may not have mattered.
That is one beautiful ship
Quite possibly THE most impressive looking battleships of all time… bar none…
Thank you for doing this video. I'm a Brit and Nelson/Rodney are arguably my favorite battleships. So unique.
I'm always down for an all-forward turret battleship.
The Nelsons and the French Dunks/Richilues are my favorites.
I can hardly think of anything more English than a RN sailor lamenting his cheese getting soggy.
When Churchill travelled to meet with President Roosevelt he went in style on HMS PoW, he also took some select civilians to report on the encounter. The President turned up with a small packaged gift for each RN sailor. This consisted of a piece of fruit, 200 cigarettes (or chocolate for non-smokers) and...….(roll the drums)….200 grams of cheese. This was deeply appreciated, rationing had been in place in the UK and these were telling gifts, all dairy products were in short supply back home. The gentlemen of the press were able to go ashore in Canada and went to a restaurant to order steaks and other cullinery goodies that they hadn't seen for literally months (even years). The staff gave them an enormous slab of butter and crackers to take the edge off whilst the steaks were being cooked. That too went down well. Sadly they were recalled aboard before the steaks arrived. It is all set out in H.V.Morton's book giving an account of the meeting which was to set out the Atlantic Charter.
Anyone else find the practice of calling any quirky behavior English/British a trifle stale?
@Maddog3060 why English?
@@TheArgieH cooking steaks ? no wonder it took all long time
They had a similar window issue with the iowa class battleship. The ultimate solution was to just open the windows during firing. The problem is the pressure difference the blast from firing the guns creates, having the windows open allowes pressure to freely disperse inside the cabin.
My favorite battleship class, thought the engineering was brilliant. I liked the rakish sports car look.
Nelson is my ship, why? My father went to fight Rommel and Nelson escorted his convoy. His words " it would go away and come back later". Thank you Nelson you made my dad feel safer than without you.
I've read about the failed torpedo attack. I believe it was a smaller coastal type U-boat that stumbled onto the Nelson. The U-boat captain was PISSED! The Germans had the same problem with faulty torpedoes at the beginning of the war like the Americans did when they entered the war.
Yeah. Those magnetic influence detonators could not take into account the fact that the earth's magnetic field was not consistent and might be different at the location the torpedoes were fired than it was at the place the detonator was calibrated. Since these torpedoes were designed to run below the ship so that it would detonate right under it's keel - if the influence exploder failed to set it off - it ran harmlessly beneath the ship and on into oblivion. The other possibility was that the torpedoes would detonate to soon and explode before they were close enough to damage the target.
I don't know about the German Torpedoes but the American one's also had faulty depth gauges so that they ran deeper than set and fragile contact detonators that would break if they hit the target squarely instead of setting it off. A glancing blow though would set them off - which contributed to the mystery of just what was happening.
For the Americans the fact that the Admiral running the submarines had been the one to play a large role in the development of these torpedoes also hindered investigations as he didn't want aspersions being cast on his torpedoes and he blamed the sub commanders for lack of aggressiveness.
.
@@BobSmith-dk8nw Tth US. submarines were taught that a dead on shot was the way to do it and a glancing shot was to be avoided.
@@rutabagasteu Hmmm. Is that in reference to normal targeting procedure - or on how to avoid breaking the detonator? My understanding was that it was the dead on shots that broke the detonator but that the glancing shots might not break it.
Similar, but no where near as bad. Using the contact fuses, average system fail rate was 30%, as opposed to 70% on U.S. (if i recall correctly. Been some years since i read that book XD)
"...to prove that it isn't just American warships who are sometimes unclear about the depth of their own home waters..."
I resent this, Drach. Can't contradict it, but I resent it just the same.
You and me both
Sometimes you just need to run tests to make sure the depth measurements are accurate...so, not a mistake, but a intentional test.
We Americans just have too much coastline for our own good. Atlantic coastline? Check. Pacific coastline? Check. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE! The Great Lakes, and don't forget about Alaska's coastline with the Artic Ocean
@@f4fwildcat29 You left out the Gulf of Mexico... :)
So does the "show me state"
Thanks for the video. I have seen photographs of German tanks after the D-Day bombardment. Sixty ton Tiger tanks laying upside down like they had been thrown around by some giant toddler. Not a place you would have wanted to be at the time.
Except there was no heavy tank battalion in range to get shot at by naval bombardment
Ten Armurk yes there was
@@tenarmurk Schwere Abteilung 101 and Pamzer Lehr had Tigers and were in Normandy on D-Day. As to there exact locations and whether or not P. Lehr brought their Tigers the sources aren't super clear. Wittman had his big fight at Villers Bocage (which was just a few miles inland) a few days after the landings so I would surmise at least some of the Tigers were in range of the battlewagons.
I've seen some photos of smashed Tigers in Normandy but they were attributed to being caught in the Goodwood bombing
The problem with the shallow belt is that, if the ship is at speed, or rolling, part of the hull will be exposed with no belt behind it. Even waves just a meter high would expose large parts of the unprotected belly. And a exploding armor piercing shell is not comparable to a torpedo. The explosive charge is not the dangerous part, the splinters are. And large splinters would just punch through the torpedo belt and reach the magazines or machinery spaces behind.
Thanks! I always wondered how they got a battleship with 9 16 inch guns within that displacement. I didn't know they managed to get the torpedo bulges excluded.
Bro they had 18 inch guns! She was a power house if the seas
@@roycorlett5778 No, only 16 inch guns. Yamato and Musashi were the only battleships ever to carry 18 inch guns
@@y0Milan Well, HMS Furious also had 18-inch guns. Sort-of.
Thanks for another video
Despite their flaws the Nelson class were very powerful ships and not to be ignored. Yours is the first I've seen which actually mention the highly effective method of using water as additional armour. This is usually ignored by so others due to limited research.
In defense of the so called "cheating" by the British with the water displacement armour scheme I say it was perfectly legal and NOT cheating as ANY other Navy could have done the exact same thing IF they had thought of it.
This is far, far different compared to the total lies and treaty violations done by the Japanese, Germans and Italians as their ships did exceed the Standard Displacement as defined by the Washington Treaty or the case of the Germans, The Anglo-German Naval Treaty.
now your passport will be pulled on your next visit in the UK because stating brits cheating!!
One of my personal favourite ships😀😀
@keith moore One of my favourite jets is the F4 Phantom. It also did not have graceful lines but it was extremely capable of dealing with the enemy,
One of mine also.
Ben Poole shame they never built the n3
@keith moore Among my favorite battleships as well. Having graceful lines was usually not a design requirement for battleships. Their purpose was to bring heavy guns into battle (while having effective armour). And the Nelsons look like living up to that purpose like few other battleships.
One of my favourite ship designs too! And I also like the look of the nelsons somehow. in my opinion its recognisable and "characteristic" ship. Her design is neither about graceful lines nor about following traditional rules but making the best out of the circumstances, its a treaty battleship that was planned to be powerful without completely ignoring the treaty, they actually tried to obey it while building an equally strong ship as other nations with other requirements (amount of fuel etc.) or completely ignoring the WNT. In my opinion that deserves some respect and, to be honest, i like the odd look; )
Nelson and Rodol - truly unique, pugnacious and effective warships in the best British tradition.
My father’s first and favourite ship despite serving aboard the Rodney, Malay, U.S.S. South Dakota, and Valiant. He was aboard when it was torpedoed by an Italian S.M.79. Still have all his photos and memorabilia. 👍🏻🏴
The main guns being forward, gave it an aggressive look, so well deserving the Nelson name.
At the start of WW2, my grandfather was the 3rd officer of a merchant that was sunk at the entrance to Valletta. He was in the ship's boat motoring into the harbor to collect the pilot when he turned to look at his ship 100 yards behind him and saw it torpedoed. Shortly afterward he was then promoted to Captain and ended up commanding the supply ship that serviced both Nelson and Rodney. His merchant was fast enough to keep up with both ships and he carried dried stores and ammunition. Many of his friends were blown to pieces when their ships were torpedoed, but after that first incident at Malta, he was never attacked again, except when Nelson and Rodney came under air attack.
3 elevated turrets poised to fire looks very impressive!
21:37 I now have mental images of battleships sailing through German landing-craft with men screaming
"SAIL ME CLOSER SO I CAN HIT THEM WITH MY SWORD!"
"fires rail mounted mgs"
I don't know why windage would effect steering so badly, since the superstructure looks almost ideally placed to me to negate crosswinds, pushing the stern of the ship downwind just slightly more than the bow, so that the ship should point just enough upwind to compensate for the sideslip, unless backing up. However, if such a ship loses power, it might turn sideways to the wind and waves, which is usually the least seaworthy orientation. This is why the mayflower had such a high stern, and might help some modern tankers as well.
Fun fact. All throughout the cold war the guns of Oskar II fort in sweden did fire exercises. These guns were massively huge and everytime they would fire people living in the vicinity had to open their windows.
UK was a good chap trying to lead by example and actually follow the Washington Naval treaty that they actually sponsored. UNlike literally every other country that violated it
I'd like to have had some information about the Nelson class' unique 25.4 inch torpedo tubes and their 'fish', the type fired at Bismarck and their apparent inspiration for the Jappanese 'long lance'.
Got to be one of the best looking British ships out there!
Agreed. Unusual, unorthodox but undeniably handsome.
Yeah, in WW2 only KGV's, R's, QE's, Ren's and Hood looked significantly better, the brit battleships and battlecruisers counted.
losing an entire wheel of Parmesano Reggiano is a crime against humanity.
I personally love to refer the HMS Nelson in World of Warships was ISD Nelson due to its shape.
as a kid this ship always fascinated me because of the unique silhouette, whenever i think of the royal navy i think of this class of battleship!
In all her years of service, the HMS Nelson was never attacked from behind - what a lucky ship . ^^
“Positively American level of firepower...” damn right sir and don’t you for forget it!
Tne Nelson was scrapped in March 1949. A month before I was born!!! How time flies.
14:20 "You can't design armor to resist a weapon that doesn't exist"
Say that to the designers of Zimmerit XD
This channel definitely has the best opening sequence on CZcams!
As regarding the shallow main belt, POW and Bismarck were both damaged by shells which hit water didn’t explode and penetrated the 10:34 ship.
The unexplored she’ll in POW was discovered during repairs. I don’t know if the Bismarck’s shell exploded but it did cause flooding which affected the power plant. IJN Kirishima took two hits below the water line which ultimately sank her. 16” shells do a lot of damage whether they explode or not. Rodney and Nelson have powerful main rifles but the Iowa’s guns shoot a 30% heavier shell at roughy the same velocity muzzle energy is significantly more, the guns on North and South classes shoot the heavy shell but at a lower velocity so muzzle energy is about equal.
Thank you for this video, from now on whenever someone mentions cheese, I will think of HMS Nelson.
I am slightly saddened by the fact that I was a little too late to serve on the more artillery oriented cruisers and destroyers of the royal Swedish navy as they were either mothballed or scrapped when I joined.
But I think I can vividly Imagine the effects of firing away the main guns of a battleship, I have had the honour of visiting an artillery regiment when they were firing a full battery of 15.5cm howitzers with salvo fire.
Impressive! And then scale this up is mind boggling.
I have also had the dubious joy of being right under the 57mm Bofors MK III gun of a corvette when firing.
I was out on my usual rounds checking equipment, hatches and integrity of the ship under an exercise. I then felt the need and positioned myself in the forward latrine right next to the ammunition hoists, that means only the thin deck separated me from the gun overhead and during my movement between two headset jacks they had ordered ready for AA action.
Firing can be described as very conducive for a good bowel movement...
Britain: Makes awesome ships and say they are the best in the world
Also the Britain: Let’s scrap every ship we have ever made (almost)
Atomsmasher927 cuz bankrupt
@@5000mahmud not bankrupt. One of the most prosperous places in the world.
@@zaphodbeeblebrox9109 After WW2
@@5000mahmud vid cleary says they used the ship as training vessel and then target hulk. Before scrapping in 48. These are not the actions of a bankrupt country.
Zaphod Beeblebrox they should keep atleast one like USA
Nelson and Rodney were disparagingly referred to as "the Cherry Tree Class": CUT DOWN BY WASHINGTON!
Odd looking as they were, still amongst my fav battleships. Their guns proved deadly and their speed somewhat underappreciated...after all Rodney made a good speed while chasing Bismarck, although en route to the USA for refit. Maybe we can consider them the best 16 inch gun built shortly after wwI? I think so.
I would agree with that. Nagato was a bit faster, but less well protected, and Colorado was slower,but not protected any better, and possibly worse. I've also read(can't remember where)that Nelson's 16 inch guns were a little more powerful than the competition.
It's not necessarily the guns being more powerful as it is the shells being fired. Just like the shells being made in a very uniform manner as well as the propellant charges being the same is going to make accuracy much better as well.
But I definitely like the way the ship looks as well. The way they have the 3 turrets up front they resemble the Hood. And idk, for some reason I have always thought that if you have a main battery turret aft then you are planning at some point to have to fire on a ship while running away. And although it does make sense considering you may need to turn around during a battle in order to NOT open the range too much. But, idk, it's like having a turret aft is like planning to fail.
amazing how those wonderweapons sunk Bismarck with only a few salvos at maximum range (:-)
My Grandad, John Hamilton McLeod served onboard HMS Nelson 1939 - 1943 until it returned to the UK at which point he was transferred to the Hunt Class Destroyer HMS Wensleydale until the end of the war. He was onboard Nelson when General Eisenhower and Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham boarded for a tour while moored up at Algiers Dock in Malta May 1943. There is a video on CZcams somewhere showing this.
My dad was a Royal marine on that ship
Boot neck,boot neck...this is what my dad use to say in jest/ military way.dad 1928-2018was a dock worker in Popey during the war then join the Navy as a submariner, becoming one of the youngest cpo.1946-1958.he explained to me boot neck was the term the Navy called the marines, and dating back to a collar worn of leather to keep their head up.
Those 16" Mk IB APC shells were only 2049 pounds in weight, a fall back to pre-1900 shell weights, allowing a rather high muzzle velocity for the type of gun used by British battleships. They also were different from all other British battleship APC shells after WWI in other ways:
(1) They were only rather loosely in the "B" ballistic shape category, which was later defined in the British Navy by a long "Secant-Ogive" windscreen -- that is, a single circular arc formed the curve from base to point, but instead of fitting smoothly to the cylindrical body with no shoulder, the usual "Tangent-Ogive" shape, the arc was much longer, making the windscreen more streamlined and conical, but having a distinct shoulder at the joint with the cylindrical body. Such a nose ("head") shape reduced drag for a given length of projectile compared to the more-widely-used (at the time) Tangent-Ogive form. US Navy gun projectiles from 8" up designed after 1900 all had a Secant Ogive nose of various lengths (longer and longer as time went on), with Tangent Ogive noses being used in most smaller gun shells designed in the US (not for 20mm Oerlikon or 40mm Bofors of foreign design), possibly to save in cost due to simpler manufacture of the many more small shells needed. The late-WWI "A" nose shape was also of Secant-Ogive design, but much shorter to allow the older ships that had used the pre-"A"-nose-shape shells of rather wildly different nose shapes to use the "A" shells after this standard was introduced after the Battle of Jutland for the new, improved APC "Greenboy" ammo -- HOOD, for one, never could use "B" shells and had to use the shorter-windscreen "A" versions of all later 15" ammo, though some of the other 15"-gunned WWI-era warships were overhauled to allow them to use the longer, more streamlined "B" designs. The 16" APC shells for NELSON and RODNEY were, I think, the first "B" shells, but at the time this new nose shape had not been finalized and thus the 16" Mk IB APC shells had the windscreen shaped like a cone ("dunce cap") with a round-shouldered AP cap under it. The Japanese Type 91 AP shells of WWII, introduced in 1931, also used a similar windscreen, but they added a tapered. base ("boat-tail") to further optimize their shells for low drag, but the British Navy did not do this, retaining a square base, as in its other gun projectiles. No other British shell, to my knowledge, was ever designed to the 16" Mk IB APC pattern.
(2) These were the only, to my knowledge, British post-WWI naval APC shells (the 8" and smaller guns did not use APC) to use a filler other than Shellite, the replacement for the Lyddite (trinitrophenol or "picric acid") APC shells used prior to the Battle of Jutland, which had been found to be so sensitive that they would explode even with no fuze installed when they hit a moderately-thick or greater armor plate. Note that this did not change the armor penetration properties of the shell due to the very short delay (circa 0.003 second) before exploding, but it did mean that no delay-action fuze to allow more than about 5' (~1.5m) penetration into the target before exploding (usually less) could ever be used with Lyddite -- the Japanese, with their Shimose variant of Lyddite, tried and tried but gave up this lost cause when they introduced that Type 91 AP shell mentioned above. Shellite was 70% Lyddite mixed with the rest being 30% of a weaker "brother" to Lyddite called dinitrophenol and a small amount of chemical stabilizer and it could remain inert when hitting even thick armor, as long as the shell body was not crushed or broken. Instead of Shellite, the 16" APC shells used the same TNT filler as the post-WWI British cruiser 6" and 8" anti-armor shells did -- 6" uncapped Common ("Common, Pointed, Ballistically Capped" or "CPBC") and 8" capped common ("Semi-Armor Piercing, Capped" or "SAPC"), both of which had larger explosive charges than APC but weaker bodies that would not remain intact when going through very thick armor, which these small ships did not expect to ever be firing against. In these shells the TNT was mixed with about 5% beeswax to reduce sensitivity and had a small plaster cushion to reduce impact shock in the upper tip of the explosive cavity, with only a small region directly surrounding the base fuze being pure TNT to make detonating the filler more easily done. While the smaller gun shells had the usual roughly-4% Common shell filler size, the 16" kept the 2.5% maximum of all other British post-WWI APC shells, just of a different kind of filler. All later large-caliber British battleship APC shells, such as for the 14" guns of the KGV Class, reverted back to Shellite and the standard, heavier, curved-nose-"B"-shaped 15" APC baseline design of the time both size shells were being made.
The 16" guns on NELSON and RODNEY were considered a failure, at least as to reliability and accuracy, and never repeated again by Britain.
It's gorgeous. I love it's profile staring down the bow. What a menacing beauty
She's a beautiful ship
Not sure why this design is considered so ugly. It’s the most effective way of getting three triple turrets on one ship.
My Uncle served on the HMS Rodney and was there when they chased Bismark and sank her. Another little bit of history in my family.
“The HMS Rodney “ For gods sake ! You don’t need the “the” .Its HMS Rodney !!
@@maryburnell7825 Thanks mommy for correcting me
My grandfather was her navigating officer, and was the only man ever to take her (or any other British Battleship) into New York harbour without a pilot...
For me one of the most beautiful ship built for the royal navy...and a spectacular career during ww2!!!!
Very British things: your description of the North Sea weather and what someone once told me (incorrectly, but funny) about the ships unusual layout; "As the most powerful RN battleships, they would never have to run away from anyone, so all the guns were put forward for the attack."
No other class epitomises what a battleship 'ought' to look like quite so much as this pair.
I have never understood the use of underwater torpedo tubes in battleships and battlecruisers. They represented a hole in the side armour that frequently attracted shell hits and led to significant damage and/or sinking, for example SMS Seydlitz at Jutland nearly succumbed to this and SMS Lützow did. Some experts reckon that HMS Hood was also fatally hit in the torpedo flats, though of course this can never be proven.
Scrapped at Wards of Inverkeithing along with many other fine ships including HMS Rodney and HMS Revenge. There is a photograph of the 3 being scrapped at the same time.
13:15 is that the song from platoon “sir the ship is safe” “what about the cheese”
“I’m sorry sir it didn’t make it”
“ DAMN YOU JERRY”
*Eyetie
I absolutely love your videos, keep 'em coming.
Loved this guide and I can't wait for the HMS Rodney guide. Keep em coming m8!
It was only now that I understood how this unique 3 turret layout came about. Thanks for many clarifications!
Dear @Drachinifel , you have made it again, an exellent video that goes deeper than just numbers. Your explanations of the conceptual considerations, limitations
of the construction is exellent and gives an logical understanding of the very intresting context of the construction. To often the WEB is full of simplified ship vs ship comparisions, where the only logic would be that any built ships should be bigger, faster, heavier armed and better protected than the previos one as if any battle would take place in the open sea. Your analyzes gives an insight that warship contruction instead had to take a number of considerations into account, describing that also the Nelson-class was a kind of a genious construction given the conditions. In a theoretical reality where only ship vs ship on high seas is the scenery everyone would of course build an Iowa or Yamato, but in the more interesting real world that you describe with defesive/offensive tactical doctirines, need for range, political treatties and limitations, as well as geographical realities you actually make it intresting to understand the rationales of both UK to build Nelsons as well for lets say Finland to build an Illmarinen (and not an Iowa). So thanks again !!
On the Yamato, the blast was so bad that it could strip flesh from limb(and must have done so on at least one occasion) afflicting those unfortunate to serve in the unprotected light AA positions. This led to all Aa mounts having a cover fitted and a major contributor to its delayed entry into service.
It's an Imperial Star Destroyer!
From an engineering standpoint, it's quite interesting to see how the designers worked within and around the Washington naval treaty to get the most out of the design as they could.
While it may not have been the best battleship around, there is something about how it looks that makes it want to scream "CHARGE!" at you because it looks like it was thought up with the idea of straight up driving at you at flank speed while firing full broadsides, which might be terrifying !
Always liked the Nelson class. I like the look of the post war British Battleships and Battle Cruisers in general and that large tower design in particular. Love your videos!