Word: battleships
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...aircraft carrier Courageous. Last week an even more astonishing disaster occurred. The Admiralty sent an electric thrill of horror through the nation by tersely announcing, with regrets, that "His Majesty's Ship Royal Oak has been sunk, it is believed by U-boat action." Royal Oak* was a battleship of 29,150 tons, built in 1914, and her loss reduced from 15 to 14 the number of Britain's capital ships. The time and place of the sinking were not officially divulged, but it appeared to have happened between midnight and dawn...
...about 1,200 men aboard Royal Oak, only 414 had been saved at latest reports, indicating that she had, when struck, gone down like a dumped ballast of pig iron. Question: How did it happen? Although one old battleship, the Britannia, was downed by submarines two days before the Armistice in 1918, not a single capital ship of the Grand Fleet was torpedoed by a submarine during the whole of the War, and anti-submarine tactics and technology are supposed to have vastly improved since then. In the absence of concrete information neutral naval experts were free to speculate. Best...
...business to be), its course was made known to the Germans either by espionage or by radio communication between reconnaissance airplanes or submarines. The German submarine then stationed itself along Royal Oak's path, turned off its engines to avoid detection, rested on the bottom, waited till the battleship came by, discharged a shoal of torpedoes. One could not have sunk Royal Oak, protected by "blisters" and by a compartmentized hull. Big German U-boats carry twelve to 18 torpedoes...
...Bombing battleships in motion on the high seas was proved possible and, to the vessel, disastrous, as long ago as 1920 by the late General "Billy" Mitchell of the U. S., who bombed the condemned ex-German battleship Ostfriesland off the Virginia Capes. During the Spanish Civil War, Loyalist bombers put the German Deutschland out of commission. First British air raid of World War II was on battleships anchored in Wilhelmshaven, Cuxhaven and Brunsbüttel, with the sinking of one and damaging of another battleship claimed. Last week the Royal Air Force retorted to the Nazis' North...
...prevail over battleships, planes need not sink them. In fact, in a battle line at sea, a sunk ship is less troublesome than a disabled one, which must be escorted home. To disable a battleship, an air bomber need not score direct hits. Bombs landing beside a hull may do more damage, especially to steering mechanism, than direct hits on an armored deck. Major Al Williams, U. S. A., a vociferous champion of the airplane over the battleship, who believes the German Air Force (which he inspected intimately last year) can knock out the British Navy, says: "A pure...