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 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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Thailand’s two Thonburi class warships of WWII were very unique and interesting designs, but very little has been written about them.
The second ship of the class, HTMS Sri Ayudhya, was later sunk in one of the strangest situations of post-WWII naval history; a big-gun capital ship fighting in the downtown of a major inland city. Outside of Thailand even less has been written about that. So, perhaps this will be of value.
(The Thonburi class as they appeared during WWII.)
(The old dredge Manhattan, which lent its name to the failed 1951 rebellion which resulted in the loss of HTMS Sri Ayudhya.)
In August 1945, the USA’s two atomic bombs hastened the end of WWII. Four years later the USSR tested its own atomic bomb. As the American military adjusted to the new reality, many new concepts came about. Some were tried, successful, and retained. Others were just tried.
NECPA (National Emergency Command Post Afloat) was a concept to use two WWII warships as a refuge for the President during times of great tension, either prior to a nuclear war with the USSR or as one was already starting.
(USS Northampton (CC-1), an unfinished WWII cruiser, was one of the NECPA ships.)
(USS Wright (CC-2), formerly a WWII aircraft carrier, was the other NECPA ship.)Read More »
Alongside the B-17 Flying Fortress, the B-24 Liberator was one of the main American bomber types of WWII pending arrival of the B-29 to the Pacific theatre. Despite the huge number built, they disappeared with amazing quickness from the postwar American military, serving on only in China and India.
(The EZB-24 test plane which was the very last Liberator in the US Air Force.)
(Indian B-24 Liberator bomber.)
(Taiwanese B-24 Liberator bomber.)
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Shanghai was famous as China’s international city, a busy trade port with notorious underworld . During the latter part of the 20th century, the city languished through Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, before once again becoming a world-class city leading in finance, technology, and culture at the turn of the millennium.
There was a very brief time after WWII, only four years, when the city was under the Kuomintang (KMT), or nationalist Chinese government. What makes this period interesting militarily, was the unusual combinations of WWII weaponry fielded there, and a now largely-forgotten American military presence in China.
(Officers of the Shanghai Police Department monitor a political protest in 1948. Equipment includes a stahlhelm M35 helmet and Arisaka Type 38 rifle.)
(An abandoned Mitsubishi Ki-21 “Sally” bomber sits opposite American C-46 Commando, C-54 Skymaster, and C-47 Skytrain transports at a former Japanese airbase near Shanghai after WWII.)
(Soviet-made T-26 and American-made M3/M5 Stuart tanks of the nationalist army together in Shanghai during 1949. An irony of this last battle is that the nationalists were partially equipped with Soviet gear and the communists were partially equipped with American gear.)
Formerly one of Great Britain’s eastern African colonies, Tanzania used WWII-era equipment throughout the later 20th century including a late-1970s war against Uganda.
(Mt. Kilimanjaro is the highest point of Africa and the only part of Tanzania to receive snow. East Africa Railways continued in dwindling existence after WWII, including the wartime Garratt steam locomotives. The defunct company’s rail lines were a great logistics asset to Tanzania during the 1978-1979 Kagera war.) (photo via internationalsteam.co.uk website)
(WWII-vintage PPSh-41 submachine gun of the Tanzanian army.)
Photos of USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin firing 16″ rounds at Iraqi targets in 1991 are well-known as the last instances of battleships in combat. Less widely known is their operations with Tomahawks during that war, and even less, about how cruise missiles ended up on WWII battleships in the 1980s to begin with.
(USS Wisconsin during WWII.)
(USS Wisconsin firing a BGM-109 Tomahawk during operation “Desert Storm”, four and a half decades later.)
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