British Navy question

[PapaG39]

I'm sure our British cousins can answer this easily enough...

During WWII The British Navy lost a lot of various types of warships, but they just kept plugging along & got stronger with more ships showing up regularly.

I know that they picked up a lot of used DD's from all over the place at the beginning, but how about the large warships.
Where did they build those larger ships. Where did they get all of the steel that went into building them? How did they keep them hidden from prying eyes?

I should know this, but until now most of my History reading has been mainly of the ground forces nature..

[Sailor Steve]

All capital ship building was suspended at the outbreak of the war.

The Nelsons were finised; the KGVs were all laid down in 1937, and well on the way to completion when the war began. Vanguard was the only one started during the war.

A lot of carriers were built, and as you said a huge amount of destroyers. The steel? Most of it came via those convoys you're tasked to sink.

[Chock]

If you ever come to the UK, a quick wander around the suburban areas of any town will provide you with the answer as to where all the steel came from.

A typical house in a UK street has a low brick wall at the front of the garden topped off by large sandstone coping stones, this is about the height that you could comfortably sit down on. Prior to WW2, most of those coping stones would have had wrought iron railings set in them up to about five feet in height, and if you look at most of them these days, you can see little stubs of metal at regular intervals inset along the top of them where the railings were sawn off or cut off with a torch. My house (A large Victorian one) has evidence of this for example. Most iron gates went too, and you rarely see an original pre-war iron gate on a residential property in the UK.

If you add that all up, all over the UK, thats a hell of a lot of metal, and this was supplemented by 'drives' for metal at regular intervals throughout the war, with people handing over cutlery, pans and all kinds of bits and pieces. So steel was not really an issue, of far more strategic value was the bauxite in France, which was a major component in lighter aircraft alloys.

With regard to shipbuilding, most of the UK's shipbuilding industry was on Tyneside and in the ports up near Scotland, although it did have other industrial bases, a lot in Ireland for example and some near Liverpool, but the vast majority was in the north of the main island, which meant that it was largely out of range for aircraft with heavy bombloads, regardless of whether they came from the European mainland or across the North Sea from occupied Norway or wherever.

The bases at Portsmouth and Devonport did have some building facilities, although they were more about servicing things than building them, so pretty much anything could be built safely out of range from major bomb raids if necessary (keep in mind that German bombers at night did not fly in formation, they each navigated to the target individually, the navigator being the ranking guy in the plane as opposed to the pilot in most cases, so they lacked the advantage of blanket damage from tight formation bombing along the lines of the USAAF), and even if bombers made it to Scotland, bear in mind that they usually had to navigate at night, which meant that only really recognisable inlets of water offered practical targets, which is why Liverpool, Manchester and London copped many more raids than the heavily industrialised midlands, as the bombers could not fly up a river to find their way to targets in the Midlands, which they could with the readily recognisable (at night) Mersey and Thames Estuaries (although the Luftwaffe did have pretty good maps of the UK, as it was photomapped by Lufthansa prior to the war). The Luftwaffe did use some radio navigation aids to assist in night navigation for bombing (such as knickbein - where two widely-spaced radio beams would be aimed to intersect over a target) but it was not suitable for the kind of pinpoint accuracy you'd need to knock out a ship on a slipway.

On top of all that, most of the big RN Battleships were already built before the war, and the RN had a very big fleet in those days.

:D Chock

[seafarer]

Actually, they didn't keep most building in the UK off prying eyes any more then the germans did of their ship yards. UK shipyards were frequently bombed, and like the germans, they dug out afterwards and just went back to work. One source I have mentions that the shipyards along the Clyde produced 1,526,000 tons of merchant shipping during 1940-1944. Other figures I do have for the Royal Navy

Aircraft carriers in commission 1939 - 7, by 1945 - 58
Destroyers in commission in 1939 - 184, by 1945 - 277
by class, the cruisers saw the largest proportionate losses, from 66 in commission in 1939 to only 35 in 1945 (although some of those represent ships transferred to service with other commonwealth nations).

read more at http://www.naval-history.net/WW2CampaignRoyalNavy.htm

The allies did have the advantage of foreign shibbuilding. A lot of corvettes and frigates were built in Canada. They also had access to the worlds largest iron ore mines, including the massive one at Bell Island, NewFoundLand.

[GoldenRivet]

If you ever come to the UK, a quick wander around the suburban areas of any town will provide you with the answer as to where all the steel came from.

A typical house in a UK street has a low brick wall at the front of the garden topped off by large sandstone coping stones, this is about the height that you could comfortably sit down on. Prior to WW2, most of those coping stones would have had wrought iron railings set in them up to about five feet in height, and if you look at most of them these days, you can see little stubs of metal at regular intervals inset along the top of them where the railings were sawn off or cut off with a torch. My house (A large Victorian one) has evidence of this for example. Most iron gates went too, and you rarely see an original pre-war iron gate on a residential property in the UK.

If you add that all up, all over the UK, thats a hell of a lot of metal, and this was supplemented by 'drives' for metal at regular intervals throughout the war, with people handing over cutlery, pans and all kinds of bits and pieces. So steel was not really an issue, of far more strategic value was the bauxite in France, which was a major component in lighter aircraft alloys.

With regard to shipbuilding, most of the UK's shipbuilding industry was on Tyneside and in the ports up near Scotland, although it did have other industrial bases, a lot in Ireland for example and some near Liverpool, but the vast majority was in the north of the main island, which meant that it was largely out of range for aircraft with heavy bombloads, regardless of whether they came from the European mainland or across the North Sea from occupied Norway or wherever.

The bases at Portsmouth and Devonport did have some building facilities, although they were more about servicing things than building them, so pretty much anything could be built safely out of range from major bomb raids if necessary (keep in mind that German bombers at night did not fly in formation, they each navigated to the target individually, the navigator being the ranking guy in the plane as opposed to the pilot in most cases, so they lacked the advantage of blanket damage from tight formation bombing along the lines of the USAAF), and even if bombers made it to Scotland, bear in mind that they usually had to navigate at night, which meant that only really recognisable inlets of water offered practical targets, which is why Liverpool, Manchester and London copped many more raids than the heavily industrialised midlands, as the bombers could not fly up a river to find their way to targets in the Midlands, which they could with the readily recognisable (at night) Mersey and Thames Estuaries (although the Luftwaffe did have pretty good maps of the UK, as it was photomapped by Lufthansa prior to the war). The Luftwaffe did use some radio navigation aids to assist in night navigation for bombing (such as knickbein - where two widely-spaced radio beams would be aimed to intersect over a target) but it was not suitable for the kind of pinpoint accuracy you'd need to knock out a ship on a slipway.

On top of all that, most of the big RN Battleships were already built before the war, and the RN had a very big fleet in those days.

:D Chock

quite informative!

[PapaG39]

Thank you for this very informative bit of historical background.

I spent a couple of months roving throughout England and just a bit into Scotland back in 1959, but at that time (19) my mind wasn't on checking out the things you just described...I did have a grand time. The English country side is quite beautiful.

These games can help to bring an awareness of what went on in WWII, but we will never really know just what our fathers really went through...

[3Jane]

I think most of the railings ended up being secretly dumped in the sea after the war finished. As they would have been made of cast iron, I'm not sure if they would have been usefull in shipbuilding. But metaleurgy isn't really my field.
As far as I am aware it was a moral boosting exercise for the British public. Like the pots and pans for the 'spitfire fund'. A lot was dumped in the Thames estuary, not sre about the rest.

[Torplexed]

Here's a wikipedia entry about the HMS Vanguard which Sailor Steve mentioned, Britain's largest and last battleship. She was a 40,000 ton warship with 15" naval rifles. But due to the priority given other construction she was not completed until 1946 and missed the war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vanguard_%2823%29

She was scrapped in 1960, having never seen combat. Some feel her guns would have quite handy for shore bombardment purposes had she still been about during the Falklands conflict of 1982.

[U49]

If you ever come to the UK, a quick wander around the suburban areas of any town will provide you with the answer as to where all the steel came from.
(...)
On top of all that, most of the big RN Battleships were already built before the war, and the RN had a very big fleet in those days.
:D Chock

Very good research... thanks a lot! :up:

[bigboywooly]

Capital ships were on there way to becoming a thing of the past when war broke out
Didnt take them long to realise carriers would rule the waves

Would have been nice to see a Jutland style battle in WW2
The Kreigsmarine heavies were greatly outnumbered BUT modern compared to a lot of the RN heavies

"There's something wrong with our bloody ships today!"

[Captain Nemo]

I think most of the railings ended up being secretly dumped in the sea after the war finished. As they would have been made of cast iron, I'm not sure if they would have been usefull in shipbuilding. But metaleurgy isn't really my field.
As far as I am aware it was a moral boosting exercise for the British public. Like the pots and pans for the 'spitfire fund'. A lot was dumped in the Thames estuary, not sre about the rest.

I remember seeing a 'World at War' episode that supports your view on the pots and pans etc. Purely done for morale.

Nemo

[Chock]

Purely done for morale.


It wouldn't surprise me if that was true to be honest, but the scale of the effort involved in collecting stuff would seem a bit excessive for a morale booster, and while many materials collected were useless, that's not true for iron and steel, it was useful and used, and it still is today (see note at the bottom of this post). Of course it's obvious that rough pig iron would not exactly be useful in creating a Spitfire, and I don't think anyone seriously believed their gate would be a wing on one of them. Sort of in a manner similar to the 'Spitfire Funds' (more correctly, Presentation Spitfires) in which a nominal value was placed on an aircraft so that a group of people, town or borough could 'buy' one. In fact, they merely bought the opportunity to have their name added to a current model from the production lines. In reality, the money probably went to a US Aircraft manufacturer for a P-40 or any other aircraft the RAF was buying from the US, something of that nature, but to a Brit, that wouldn't sound patriotic...

I turned this up after a bit of a search on the 'net with regard to metal collecting from the populace, although it is mostly in reference to the US, it does show that it wasn't all purely for morale:

'In 1942, when the first scrap drives were organized, the war was far from won, and frightened civilians at all levels were anxious to do something, anything, to help. So campaigns were organized to collect not just metal and rubber but kitchen fat, newspapers, rags, and so on. These drives were extremely successful--millions of tons of material were collected. It was only afterward, contemplating the assembled mounds of junk, that those in charge of the war effort asked themselves: What are we going to do with all this crap?

World War II shortages weren't just home-front propaganda. Japanese conquests in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies cut off access to natural rubber supplies. President Roosevelt urged Americans to turn in "old tires, old rubber raincoats, old garden hose, rubber shoes, bathing caps, gloves," and so on at their local service stations. Just one problem: there wasn't (and still isn't) an efficient way of recycling rubber products. Rubber's complex chemistry and the variety of formulations in use made recycling slow and expensive and the resultant material inferior to virgin rubber. Although the rubber recycling industry did produce a fair amount of material throughout the war, the rubber scrap drive didn't significantly boost its output. The real solution to the rubber shortage was development of synthetic rubber and conservation--gas rationing was primarily meant to save tires, not gas.

Many of the other materials collected couldn't readily be recycled either. Many who lived through the war remember collecting old newspapers, but apart from using them as packing material and such there was little to be done with them. A 1941 aluminum-scrap drive to help the plucky Brits pulled in 70,000 tons of aluminum pots and pans, but only virgin aluminum could be used to manufacture aircraft.

Iron and steel were a different story. These metals could be easily melted down and used for munitions. It's not as if the U.S. lacked domestic sources of iron ore, though. The real challenge was gearing up American industry for war production. That meant everything from increasing steel-making capacity to building more factories and designing better weapons. Recycling of steel and iron unquestionably helped. One campaign netted five million tons of steel in just three weeks, and scrap-metal drives continued for most of the war.

Useful though recycled steel and iron were, some scrap drives went overboard. In addition to old streetcar tracks, wrought iron fences, church bells, and the like, people carted off relics of previous wars, including cannons, park statues, and other memorials. When the memorials were being rebuilt after the war, many wished they hadn't been so hasty.

There's no denying scrap drives and other World War II home-defense efforts were meant in part as morale builders. Some seem pretty loopy in retrospect--air-raid blackouts in Nebraska, for example. But a few were surprisingly effective. In 1943 victory gardens produced 40 percent of the country's fresh vegetables. Salvaged kitchen fat was used to produce glycerin, an ingredient in drugs and explosives. Then there's the Civil Air Patrol, organized in 1941 to watch the coasts and assist in search and rescue operations. Less help than hindrance, right? Not so. In the 18 months before the navy took over patrol duty, the CAP spotted 173 U-boats, located 363 survivors of sunken ships and downed aircraft, and reported 91 ships in distress. Lest you think all home-front volunteers were paunchy air-raid wardens in tin hats.'

So if all, or any, of that is true, I wonder if I can phone Gordon Brown up and ask him to put the railings back on my garden wall? If not, I'll settle for a free Spitfire:rotfl:

Oddly enough, the theft of metal in the UK has risen massively in recent months, and it is reckoned that China's expansion, and the worldwide demand for metal is at the heart of this trend.

:D Chock

[Captain Nemo]

Oddly enough, the theft of metal in the UK has risen massively in recent months, and it is reckoned that China's expansion, and the worldwide demand for metal is at the heart of this trend.

Yes, saw that on the news recently, apparently copper prices have more than doubled. Plumbers are already expensive, now more so if they need to use new pipe.

Nemo

[johnm]

Apparently favourite items to steal are: cast iron man-hole covers and the odd bronze 'work of art' (if handy). Mind you, some of the newer art needs scrapping!

I read somewhere that in America nickels and cents are now worth more as scrap than as money! Supposedly they are passing laws to prevent them being melted down.

I can also confirm the removals of iron railings, Liverpool was full of walls with stumps of iron popping out (my childhood home)

[PapaG39]

What it seems to look like then as I read through this vast storehouse of knowledge poring in from my British cousins, is that during the war the DD's and aircraft carriers became the most in demand.
I know that the US had carriers galore...big ones, small ones & just about anything that would hold a barn door on top would launch something...
Then they had a dozen DD's running around protecting each and every one.

A very telling statement came out in that old movie "D-day" where the german in the bunker screeming at his superior over the phone during the initial bombardment... "THOSE 5000 SHIPS U SAY THEY DON'T HAVE, WELL THEY HAVE THEM!"

I can't believe that the average U-boat Kaptian didn't see the hand writing on the wall. As time marched on and he could see more and larger convoys that just kept coming...No matter how many he sank, they just kept coming...more and more, and endless array of ships full of supplies.

My uncle Al joined the merchants in 1936. He was sunk first in the channel and then again just in sight of New York harbor.
He told me that the Mermansk run was the worst. They were so heavly loaded and he watched while one iced up ship just went into a wave and never came back up.

I think of some of those "sea war stories" that he told me about sometimes while I am playing this game.. Especially after I have torpedoed a merchant in very rough seas....

[Chock]

Yup, it's when you hear 'em first hand from those who were there that it really comes alive.

A good friend of mine's Grandfather (now sadly deceased) told me about a time he was on a Merchant ship in WW2 manning the anti-aircraft gun with another guy, and they were running low on ammo. While his pal carried on firing, he left the turret it was placed in and ran over to an adjacent gun to fetch some ammo back. Halfway back to his pal, the gun was hit and his friend killed and the gun knocked out of action. If it hadn't have been for that trip to the next gun to get some ammo, he'd have been killed too. Stuff like that must really freak you out. As far as I recall, that was in the Med.

I must try and scan some of his photographs sometime, because there are some real interesting ones that have probably never been published before, including a few of them picking up a U-Boat's crew after their sub had been destroyed. The thing that really strikes you in those pictures is how young the U-Boatmen look, it's quite shocking and it really sticks in my memory.

:D Chock

[PapaG39]

Yes, young...lol... I have a picture of me and a guy I did training with standing on an anchor on a troop ship while enroute from New York to Bremerhaven I think it was..that was 1958 & I was 18 years old...Man, I can't believe how young we look... All the guys in my basic training platoon were around 17-18 or so. To damn young to know any better, but at an age where we can be molded to what ever they want us to be. I loved my M-1...
During the first & second world wars the kids were going directly from high school to the front lines...Just a 6-8 week for basic and then the rockets red glare...

[Stealth Hunter]

Just remember that Irishmen built them during the First World War.:shifty:

[johnm]

my step father (George (Granville) Beaumont), who served in convoys during the war, used to tell many stories.

One was about 'protection' fitted to his ship - a steam powered projectile firing hand grenades. The idea was to fire the hand grenades when being attacked by aircraft. It fired the grenade into the air, the aircraft flew past and was blown out of the sky. They tried it, firing potatoes. The potato lifted about 20 feet above the deck and then dropped. Needless to say, they never used it for real!

My wife's father (Edward Hawkes) used to tell a story of his ship having a naval officer as temporary captain. As he gave steering instructions to my wife's father (quartermaster) the merchant captain signalled with his hands behind him to give the correct directions to steer!

His was torpedoed twice. As he used to say, he was lucky - they were both in the Med.

Unfortunately both are dead. I wish that I had talked more to them. after all, they LIVED real history and it has now gone fore ever.

[PapaG39]

Great stories...
Uncle Al, who was also sunk twice was quite the survivor. He was in the engine room and on both occasions he said that he had just gone up on deck to get a breath of fresh air. The first time he was blown overboard and was only one of three or so who were picked up afterward. The second time in the channel, same scenario, but most made it & they were picked up by small British coastal patrol boats. I can't remember if the second time was a mine or torpedo though..

He did say that all of them were always scared, but how each individule handled it was the story. Some guys wore several life vests while other wore none.
very few saved any money after pay day...What the heck..may be dead next trip out so have fun now...

at least in the army you can dig a 40foot hole to hide in, but on a ship in the middle of all that ocean....Just wait & pray...lots of praying...