Reply to post: "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today."

Paul Allen hunts down sunken Japanese WWII super-battleship

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

"There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today."

> But another suggestion is that the Royal Navy spent a lot more time on training for speed of gunnery than they did on safety, so they opened all the blast-proof hatches between turrets and magazines

The crews were safety trained and actually forbidden from leaving the hatches open like this, but gunnery doctrine of the time emphasised weight of fire more than anything else.

Beatty essentially looked the other way (or allowed his captains to do so) whilst they stacked ammo and propellant ALL along the corridors between the turrets and the magazines in order to maintain the rate of fire he wanted, which was fine until the damned Germans rather unsportingly started lobbing shells through their (relatively) thinly armoured decks. This tended to make a battle cruiser do a rather impressive disappearing trick.

It wasn't so much convenience over safety as it was political expediency. Failing to keep up with what was expected of him could easily see a captain reassigned to a the navy's rustiest gunboat on it's way to the arse end of the empire, a fate apparently worse than getting atomised in a magazine explosion.

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