Aviation and Military History
The secondary armament of the ‘Montana’ class battleships was planned as 20 5-in (127-mm) L/54 guns in 10 turrets located as five on each side of the ships’ central superstructure ‘island’. Designed specifically for the ‘Montana’ class ships, these guns were to replace the 5-in (127-mm) L/38 guns of the secondary batteries then in widespread …
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The ‘P’ class was planned as a group of no fewer than 12 heavy cruisers to succeed the three ‘Deutschland’ class cruisers, known to the British as pocket battleships, in the long-endurance commerce raiding role. Work on the type began in 1937 and continued until 1939, and in this time no fewer than nine designs …
The name Fritz-X was one of several applied to the German guided anti-ship bomb which was the world’s first precision-guided weapon, and the first to sink a ship in combat. Other names for this important weapon were Ruhrstahl SD-1400 X, Kramer X-1, PC-1400X and FX-1400. Together with the similar Azon weapon developed for the US …
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For a transoceanic passage, the LST Mk 2 could carry one landing landing craft (LCT Mk 5 or LCT Mk 6) for side-launching, and this was a feature which was sometimes also used for the carriage of LCTs to the vicinity of an amphibious assault. In LST beaching operations, a satisfactory manner to bridge the …
Continue reading “Amphibious Warfare – The Tank Landing Ship (III)”
When the LST Mk I was being designed, the concept of distant raiding still featured strongly in British minds and thus influenced the design, but by the winter of 1941 the distant raiding concept had been largely replaced by a fear of invasion. At their first meeting at the Atlantic conference in Argentia, Newfoundland, during …
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The Tank Landing Ship, or more properly, the Landing Ship, Tank (LST), is the type of vessel created in World War II to support amphibious operations with the carriage of vehicles (most especially armoured vehicles), cargo and troops to be landed directly onto an unimproved shore. The British ‘Dynamo’ evacuation from Dunkirk in June 1940 …
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A dock landing ship (often formally designated as a landing ship, dock, or LSD) is an amphibious warfare ship incorporating a docking well into the stern for the accommodation, transport, and launch/recovery of landing craft and amphibious vehicles. Some ships with docking wells, such as those of the Soviet/Russian ‘Ivan Rogov’ class, also have bow …
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The comparatively small type of monitor intended for use on rivers and larger wetlands is well protected and, in general, carried the largest-calibre guns of any riverine warship. On 18 December 1965, as its major commitment to the Vietnam War was in its early stages, the US Navy decided to create a ‘brown-water navy’ for …
Given its huge size and enormously varied geography, the USSR – like the Imperial Russia it succeeded in 1917 – found that there was considerable scope for the use of gunboats on the country’s many large rivers, major lakes, and even its shallow coastal waters (such as the Sea of Azov and the Gulf of …
Continue reading “Soviet armoured river and coastal gunboats – the BKA and MBK types”
A number of European powers, the USA and Japan maintained flotillas of these shallow-draft river gunboats to patrol the larger rivers with which China abounds, enforcing these nations’ concessionary rights under the terms of treaties which China had been compelled to sign in the period after her defeat during the 1st Opium War (1840/42) with …