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Originally Posted by Dread Knot
Interesting. The Japanese carrier pilots and cruiser and destroyers crews had a parallel disdain for their own battleship fleet as well. It was often disparagingly referred to as the "Hashirajima fleet" as they spent most of their time idle at anchor at Hashirajima anchorage near Hiroshima. As in the USN, finding productive work for the older, slower BBs in the shadow of airpower was a problem early on in the war.
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This brought back a memory - My father served on HMS Black Swan during WWII and he once told me that the joke amongst sailors back then was that the Grand Fleet needed three days notice to move, because they needed dredgers to clear away all the ration tins that had been thrown over the side whilst at anchor in Scapa Flow.
As an aside, one of the reasons I enjoy watching Run Silent, Run Deep, is that the older he got, the more he resembled Burt Lancaster, not that he actually got that old - Have met him once in-game too, playing with a type IX off Gibraltar That would have been an ironic way to end a career
Anyway, sorry to stray from the topic at hand. It seems like the Royal navy had similar feelings - some of them at least.
I'd be interested to know whether this was just human nature manifesting itself - after all Battleships were pretty prestigious and I can imagine their crews bragging would rub the crew of a destroyer up the wrong way, especially one that had just brought a convoy into port.....