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warspite1 -> RE: Who is she? (4/26/2015 5:05:01 AM)
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ORIGINAL: wdolson
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ORIGINAL: Orm
Yes. That is indeed a sad picture. But the "preparing for scrapping" pictures were hard for me to watch.
warspite1
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ORIGINAL: warspite1
I envy (if that is the right word) the Americans who have been able to preserve so much of their WWII history - and visiting one or more of those ships is defo on the bucket list.
Sadly at the end of WWII we were stoney broke - there was no money for museum ships and she was, like her surviving sisters indeed all her contempraries, paid off and quickly broken up. At least the Grand Old Lady chose her own end [:)]
Most of what was saved were ships that were new enough to go into mothballs after the war and when they were deemed completely obsolete there was some interest in preserving that past. Some of the most valuable ships to history such as the Enterprise and San Francisco were scrapped too soon after the war to be saved, though there was an effort to save the Enterprise that came up short.
The only pre-fast battleship that was saved was the USS Texas.
You posted a picture of the last hurrah for the Warspite, the older US battleships had the same job for most of the last couple of years of the war. They got their pound of flesh at Surgaio Strait, but that was only because the enemy was obliging enough to sail right into their guns.
BTW, regarding that picture of HMS London. It may be the perspective, but the gun barrels look shorter than they usually do on a cruiser. Did she has short caliber guns for some reason? I'm nowhere near as well read on RN ships as you and some others here.
Bill
warspite1
Bill the RN had one 8-inch gun version that the used on the County's and Exeter/York in WWII. This was the MkVIII 8-inch/50. Maybe it is the angle, but the calibre used for the modernised HMS London was no different to her sisters, half sisters and the smaller Exeter and York.
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