Devastating US Navy Ambush - Battle of Vella Gulf Documentary 

Yeah might be a seperate video going into that

Nice cameo

@@historigraphit’s the Oppenheimer ending all over again

that's how JFK permanently injured his back, thus suffering chronic, often debilitating pain until his assassination..

@@wilson2455 You seem to be arguing for assassination as a cure for back pain? ;)

nothing special, just another day learning the things, i feel nothing about it.

​@@Mechanized85you sound depressed, you okay?

as opposed to the American torpedos in the beginning of the war :D

@@skeletonwguitar4383 What the fucking hell are you saying about being depressed? I simply meant that I feel nothing. It doesn't mean I am depressed. I am kicking ass and actually fine.

@@Mechanized85bro stfu he was just asking if you were ok! No need to be an ass about it

I'm too lazy to look it up, but I'm pretty sure I recall Shigure being the sole survivor of so many engagements that it became part of her reputation.

Actually, before Hara took command, the Shigure and its division were considered among the worst in the Navy, so much so that he initially balked when told he was being assigned to command it. He did a lot of work to straighten out the crew, but it wasn't a feint that Shigure's engines couldn't keep up with other DDs. It plagued her throughout her career, and that made Hara's command later in the war to throw them into super boost all the more horrifying to the crew. Truly a lucky ship with a captain that knew what he was doing (after learning from his mistakes). It didn't carry on past his time as her commander, unfortunately for Shigure.

Burke once remarked that the difference between a good commander and a bad one was 10 seconds

Japanese naval memoirs are always fascinating

@@Bandog23 and many were transparent lies

I never trust memoirs from officers. They will always twist things to make themselves look great or the enemies look stronger than they really were. German memoirs from WW2 and the book that inspired We Were Soldiers are good examples

Fun story - many years back (20 or so) my old pal was on joint RN / Dutch Navy exercises in the North Sea, when USS Moosbrugger announced loudly that she was "coming through" and simply barged her way straight through the exercise area, fouling up everything momentarily. Proof that, like her namesake, she was well capable of disrupting the enemy's carefully-planned manoeuvres & formations.

I saw a video on the reason for the torpedoes not working and was surprised that the main cause was the force of impact was destroying the front of the torpedoes rendering the firing mechanism inoperable. The fix was not a simple one as I had always believed it involved redesigning the whole front of the torpedo to withstand the initial impact when striking the side of the ship

My dad told a story of when something like 16 torpedoes were used to try an sink a Japanese transport. And they all bounced off the haul

I 0:28

@@jimsharp5044 I guess the theory was if you hit it enough times eventually they punch their way through? Seriously though, what amazed me was the lack of testing when the torpedoes were put into production.

@@stanburk7392 War time production. Get the stuff out there and hopefully it worked correctly.

I'll bet there are Sumerian tablets complaining about a new chief coming to power and shuffling around what already worked just to put his stamp on things.

Was Burke cashiered or promoted & do you have any sources I can read about that? Sounds like once again they removed the guy from his post that was doing his job "admirally" read admirably!

@@MrAdamNTProtester I'm not completely sure. The book I quote above, Dark Waters, Starry Skies by Jeffrey R. Cox just says that Burke was reassigned before the battle without going into detail about it. I'm very sure he wasn't cashiered, as Burke was present in two later naval engagements in the same year. (Both of them victories) He commanded one of the two destroyer formations in the battle of Empress Augusta Bay and later commanded the destroyer force in the battle of Cape St. George, which, if I recall correctly, is very similar to this battle here, since he used the same plan that he had developed for this battle, which had been used very succesfully by Moosbrugger. After that, he became Chief of Staff for Admiral Marc Mitscher, the guy who commanded the Fast Carrier Task Force of the Fifth Fleet, so he held a very important post and of course the Arleigh Burke class of modern destroyers is named after him, so he is very well regarded by the US Navy.

1943. Back when americans didnt support socialism because of adolf hitler and they all knew there was only 2 genders and you couldnt switch

He wasn't that famous in 1943.

And there was a mildly famous book about that ship that was almost required reading in my youth. ( PT-109: John F. Kennedy in WW II )

@@rembrandt972ify Should have been...by court martial.

@@LionlordEbonfirethat genuinely may be the second most famous memoir of a captain in this engagement

Mikey famous? Not so much. Highly overrated? 100%.

Also cutting the DDs free from the cruiser line helps. It's crazy that it was a few days short of a year since Savo Island and the USN kept relying on cruisers in the narrow waters until they literally had none before even giving the destroyers the ability to range free.

⁠​⁠@@legoeasycompanyThe USN weren’t unique in employing cruisers the guard straits - after all many USN cruisers were lost at Guadalcanal to IJN cruisers funneling into those same waters. Experience also showed that destroyers had a rather short life expectancy if detected and fired upon by larger ships. USN failures at Guadalcanal were due to poor understanding of radar, bad communication, often simply incompetent leadership (like the USN cruisers refusing to take evasive action at Tassafaronga even when torpedos were already beginning to strike) and *finally* lack of creativity in employing destroyers (which in some ways circles back to the former *koff* Wright not understanding his own DD’s torpedo range *koff*). It’s not like giving destroyers free engagement was mutually exclusive with effective cruiser utilization, as Empress Augusta Bay and early Japanese victories showed The decision to switch to only destroyers was likely motivated by the fact that the Japanese were only employing destroyers and a few positively ancient light cruisers, because if Japanese heavy cruisers had gotten the drop on US DDs as they had done before the results would not have been so pretty

They literally had the industrial capacity to give themselves the luxury of royally screw things up at the beginning, and then come back even stronger now using the same lethal Japanese tactics against them, “oh no my cruisers are gone... anyway, want me to introduce you to my little fellas here the Cleveland’s and Baltimore’s”

I think it really just speaks to how unrealistic the US had expected night battles to be. Whereas the Japanese Navy placed a premium on realistic night combat training since the 1920s and willingly accepted the loss of several destroyers during training accidents, the pre-war USN focused more on safety over realism in their training. The confusion and brutal nature of night combat was ignored in those exercise, making the lessons skewed. One of those being that destroyers were too vulnerable to heavier warships, and thus needed the escort of light cruisers and heavy cruisers. This wasn’t at all realistic to the Solomon Islands Campaign, and hindered Allied naval success. To be fair, the tactic of combing destroyers and cruisers in the Solomons had worked during Cape Esperance, but it’s still really surprising that it was only in July 1943 that the US Navy finally learned of the capabilities of the Japanese torpedoes (from Kula Gulf and Kolombangara, and from a recovered Japanese torpedo on Guadalcanal).

@@somerandomguy4812 unfortunately Cape Esperance was more luck and a few other factors than the viable tactic if we take in the experiences of other battles like Tassafaronga and those two other battles mentioned are taken into account. It's also crazy that the assumption of IJN submarines hitting the ships with torpedoes rather than the long lances being better ranged thought still would have the USN risk cruisers in the narrow confines of "The Slot".

These destroyers are tiny, with total displacement under two thousand tons. That means they had very little armor, and any sort of impact (torpedo or shell) could do substantial if not catastrophic damage to them. The battleships were made to take a punch, and indeed the Yamato did, taking many dozens of such hits any one of which could have sunk one of these destroyers.

@@CydeWeys still, was the Johnston that took hit after hit in the battle of the coral sea and only after a day of battle did it finally sink?

@@samschellhase8831 Yup, it's all about where the hits landed. Of course caliber was important but location even more so.

@@samschellhase8831 battle off samar, but yes. there's also a few destroyers who had their bows completely sheered off yet managed to stay afloat (HMS Eskimo, IJN Suzutsuki, and technically the USS O'Brien are good examples)

Considering the mission was resupply & creation of a buttress to the main DEF Line

Sometimes, it's good to have no music. it's better to find something that is truly suitable to your type, rather than settling for modern rubbish, popularized chaos, or mindless meme songs either any music that cannot match with theme. If there's nothing suitable, I wouldn't fucking bother playing any music at all.

​@@Mechanized85watch his older videos with music in the intro, it's not "modern rubbish".

Im talking about his intro music at the start of each video, really set the tune for the video..@@Mechanized85

I agree with this sentiment as the intro music can really set the mood. Similar to having a show/channel with a distinct sound affiliated with it (ex: Mark Felton's intro randomly pops into my mind from time to time). Histriograph's intro even got me to downloading the Ryno's Theme just to hear that particular segment of the song.

Did you hear about Johnny Somali?? He is an asshole RU-vidr that harassed the Japanese civilians. He is an embarrassment for our entire country. I am disappointed he only recieved a small fine and deportation. He should have been jailed for 10 years.

So you're stationed at Yokosuka or some such?

@@AbeBSea I am not in the military, personally, though much of my family is. Oddly enough I just work as an actor here, so in terms of my work, no connection.

@SquidInJapan -- So you're the round-eye who "gets it" in all of their WWII movies ?

​@@linguinatorschwartz9309 haha, from time to time. Thankfully I mostly do voice acting these days, and that is a lot of fun.

> I agree. Placing Kennedy's disaster in the context of this larger battle was very useful.

very nice i must get this book for my kindle then ty.

Thanks so much for the support, means the world!

Yep.

Do we really have to yell out the first syllable?

Next to the Minute Man Silo

Making a ship after the capital of a land locked state? I’ll never understand that

If you had ever been to Helena you would understand why the first part is all capitals.@@samarkand1585

@@samarkand1585 Emphasis on the first syllable, no yelling necessary. 🫢

I’ve heard he did some stuff later in life, yeah

Yeah he's JFK aka John F. Kennedy

Im literally unable to not picture this conversation as anime girls with high pitch voices, this is what media has done to me And i love it

@@d.olivergutierrez8690 Agreed. Anime girls are a complete good in the world. No one will steer me any different.