For Stalingrad, covered in part 1, Josef Stalin had an idea (however wrong) but no ship. Meanwhile in the United States after WWII, the US Navy had an incomplete ship, USS Hawaii, but was looking for ideas on how to finish it.
(USS Guam during WWII.) (photo via All Hands, the US Navy’s magazine)
(End of the road for USS Hawaii on 20 June 1959 as it is towed to the scrapyard.)
I have not done a 2-part series for a while and these are two ships I have been wanting to write about for some time.
USS Hawaii and Stalingrad were two warships of roughly the same type and of similar firepower, both born (directly or indirectly) out of WWII. Both were made at different times for totally different reasons, each had a unique life and in the end, neither was finished.
(How it started: artist’s rendition of the Soviet battlecruiser Stalingrad.)
(How it ended: the never-finished Stalingrad for use in weapons tests.)
I would like to wish a Merry Christmas to all wwiiafterwwii readers.
Below is the Rocket, the newspaper of Redstone Arsenal, AL from 23 December 1952 – 7 years after WWII and 71 years ago today. Santa Claus is on a JB-2 Loon. If the Loon looks like a WWII German V-1 buzz bomb, there is a good reason, because that is what a Loon was.
I debated on this topic as perhaps it is too bland for general reading, but perhaps readers will be interested not only in WWII military technology but how decisions about it was made in later decades.
(The launching of USS Dyess (DD-880) during WWII. A third of a century later, USS Dyess would be one of the Gearing class candidate ships for the study below.)
There were many proposals to upgrade WWII warships. For every success like the GUPPY submarines, many more proposals never saw daylight. They were too expensive, or mechanically impossible, or just dumb ideas to begin with. Today they survive only as poorly-documented sketches.
(The July 1980 report which spelled the end for WWII destroyers in the US Navy.)
However this proposal: to upgrade WWII Gearing class destroyers for service deep into the 1980s, was a reasonable idea to explore, mechanically feasible, and thoroughly documented in the unclassified realm. As it was never done, it is forgotten today. So hopefully it will be of some interest.
(The decommissioned USS William C. Lawe (DD-763) on the right, which in 1983 had been the very last WWII destroyer in the US Navy.)
I am not good at remembering dates (I forgot last year’s altogether), so let this be the official unofficial eighth anniversary of wwiiafterwwii. I thank everybody for the shared knowledge and comments over the years.
Recently I crossed the Atlantic to attend a sports event in Great Britain. I aimed to just relax and have fun and in no way was it a serious history-hunting trip. None the less, I did see some things which may be relevant to the overall theme of WWII kit in the postwar world.
(London’s Docklands area burning during the Blitz.)
(Roughly the same area in August 2023, with the white ensign aboard HMS Belfast.)
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During the 1982 Falklands War, Argentina’s ARA Alférez Sobral, formerly the WWII US Navy’s USS Salish (ATA-187), made a remarkable voyage of determined sailors surviving at sea.
(USS Salish (ATA-187) in US Navy service.)
(The heavily-damaged ARA Alférez Sobral, the former USS Salish, returning to Argentina in May 1982 after taking multiple British missile hits.)
After WWII ended the French navy experimented with grafting German technology into new French naval weapons, with varied results.
(French navy personnel with a WWII German Junkers Ju-88 during postwar weapons tests at Fréjus-Saint Raphael, France.)
(The WWII German Hs-117 Schmetterling SAM and its postwar French naval offspring, the Maruca.)
Asroc and Katie were two methods of introducing nuclear weapons to WWII-era warships. One was fairly well thought-out and had a long run in service during the Cold War. The other did not and is remarkable for how unusual it was.
(A nuclear RUR-5 Asroc detonates near the WWII aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (CV-10) during 1962.) (photo via Federation of American Scientists)
(Blueprints for the 1950s modification to the WWII Iowa class battleships to enable them to fire 16″ nuclear shells.) (photo via Battleship New Jersey Museum)
The use of man-portable air defense systems, or MANPADS, against WWII-era aircraft was not totally unique to the 1986 story of the plane below; nor even against the particular plane involved, the C-47 Skytrain.
What sets this incident apart is that the plane and crew survived allowing the event to be fully documented after the fact, and also that another aircraft was able to photograph it in flight.
(The South African C-47 Skytrain which was hit by a SA-7 “Grail” in 1986 making an emergency landing with its tail blown off.)
(South African soldier with a captured SA-7 “Grail” during the 1981 “Protea” operation against SWAPO inside Angola.)
The M4 Sherman was the main American tank type of WWII. After the war, it saw additional combat worldwide – first as a tank in its original WWII form, then in following decades through various upgrades, and in rebuilt form for non-tank uses.
One of the more remarkable of the latter was the Kilshon, an Israeli system to destroy the radars controlling and guiding enemy surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).
(US Army M4 Sherman tank in action during WWII.)
(The Israeli Kilshon ARM launch vehicle, which used a WWII Sherman as the lower portion.)
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