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.

Chock

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by 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.

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.

[U49]

Originally Posted by 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.
(...)
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.
Chock

Very good research... thanks a lot!

[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!"

[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.