USS Lexington - Guide 046 - Aircraft Carriers (Human Voice) 

Why doesn't USS San Diego CL-53 get a video :C

What would be the effect of modern anti ship missiles against WW2 era battleships, considering most of them are designed to hit the waterline (where the main belt would be) and are not armour piercing weapons. The Fritz X and other bombs were actually designed with armour piercing in mind afterall, and no sabe designer of modern ASMs would design a missile that gives up explosive payload and range in order to pierce armour that is mostly nonpresent in the modern context?

Perhaps a series on the ships of Bikini Atoll. Their position relative to each test and the results. For example did they survive the blast, were they left sinking or on the bottom after the blasts. I think the tests themselves have been covered to the nth degree. Nevada, Saratoga and Prince Eugen Have been talked about as well as a CVL that ended up scuttled off San Francisco. (loaded with nuclear waste no less) I think the political, social and ecological aspects of the tests have been covered on other channels, so that would be redundant. I might be worth mentioning the oops factor of the test.

It would be nice to see a visit to La Hemione in Rochfort Charente Maritime. It's a working replica of the sailing frigate (sailed to the US a couple of years ago). She was built using traditional methods. The naval museum and the royal cordiary are all situated in the same location. The museum has a massive collection of naval architect hand built large model warships from down the ages (absolutely incredible detail). A real find for French Naval history. (Steady now)

@Eduardo Charlier while the question presented is interesting like @Pixel Dust said, you can just slap an explosively formed penetrator warhead on there. Considering that the payload of most missiles is in the hundreds of killograms, it wil go quite a way.

That's how politics works

They didn't lie, they just made several 'mistakes' while calculating stuff. Math is hard, right? :D

The Japanese wanted to build their cruisers to the treaty limit, but because they added way too many weapons to their cruisers they had to rebuild them to avoid structural damage and capsizing, increasing their displacement. Still a lot better than the Germans....

Or found the extra tonnage by robbing the Royal Australian Navy of at least one battlecruiser under construction.

@@Lgs260495 I sure am glad we and everyone else are completely honest about treaty compliance today!!! :-)

Well, they really needed a way to trunk the exhaust gasses from those 16 oil fired boilers. I think at one point the battlecruiser design had 3 or 4 or ever 5 smaller uptakes (funnels) and even the late designs had 2 massive funnels. Later ships like Yorktown and Essex had fewer and more efficient boilers, reducing the need for the Lexington class' massive single uptake. Both Lex and Sara could be considered 'Two Island' ships since the uptake is all but totally separate from the Island containing the Navigation Bridge and control centers.

@@robertf3479 yes, the volume of gas was a major issue. The Lexingtons could have easily been designed like the Kaga, with huge ducts along the sides of the hanger. The USN also looked at having the forward end of the hangers open for additional aircraft launching, as was done in the original layout of Kaga. Aviators were pressing for the Lexintons to have no obstructions at all on the flight deck, no island, no funnel. Ranger tried to address the gas issue by placing the boilers aft of the turbines so the gas could be vented near the aft end of the ship without long ducts. Given the minimal experience with carriers at the time, it is pure luck that they turned out as well as they did, rather than looking exactly like Kaga's original configuration. iirc, the original 1916 design for the Lexintons had 24 boilers, located on 2 decks, with 7 funnels.

I never knew it was a giant funnel untill I started watching Drach's videos. Still, it gives the ships of this class a unique, non-ugly look.

@@stevevalley7835 I think the USN played with the 'Kaga' type ducts for fireroom exhaust gases and even 'folding' exhaust uptakes (Ranger) on either side of the flight deck before settling on more conventional vertical uptakes in the Yorktown and later classes up through the introduction of nuclear power. In CV-5 Yorktown there was a catapult mounted on the open forecastle, just above the anchor chains and anchor windlasses below the flight deck. I think one was fitted to CV-6 Enterprise as well, not certain about CV-7 Wasp or CV-8 Hornet. I don't believe any were fitted in the CV-9 Essex class ships even though these were completed with open forecastle decks below the forward end of the flight deck. Enclosed 'hurricane bow' plating was installed in the Essex class post war. If they had the hurricane bows during the war it's likely much of the damage to the flight decks incurred in very heavy weather (Halsey's Typhoons come to mind) when high seas could crash against the BOTTOM of the flight deck, lifting it off its supports and allowing it to crash down onto the forecastle. The Hurricane Bow plating deflects these monster waves away, protecting from this kind of damage though I have watched 60 foot high waves crash solid over the leading end of the flight deck of USS Nassau (LHA 4) and roll down the deck before reaching the island. The Nassau is about the size and height above the waterline of an Essex class carrier, with a full length flight deck and island on the starboard side. Google USS Nassau (LHA 4) if you're curious. 'Islands' have always been unpopular with naval aviators due to air flow disruption over the flight deck … until they rise to actually command a carrier or it's air wing. That's when they come to appreciate not only the field of vision the CAG and his staff have of the flight deck but also the very necessary ability to see where the hell the ship is going, something the Commanding Officer (ALWAYS a Naval Aviator with only limited experience as a 'ship driver') comes to appreciate very quickly. My CO in Nassau was an A-6 Intruder pilot until he was promoted to Captain and was placed in line to eventually … maybe … command a carrier. His XO was a surface warfare officer (ship driver.)

@@robertf3479 Langley also had folding funnels on the port side of the flight deck. Jupiter's boiler and engine rooms were located well aft, so the funnel location was an easy adaptation. Ranger replicated that funnel location, but had more funnels because of the greater boiler capacity. That approach was not an option on the Lexingtons because the boiler room location had already been set closer to midships, same as Kaga. The options with the more midships boiler room location were an island with a funnel, which the aviators opposed, or entirely flush decked, with the stack gas trunked aft. and directed away from the flight deck. Furious had the stack gas trunked aft and exiting from grills on the aft corners of the flight deck, which was a particularly bad location and the ducting inside the hanger turned the after part of the hanger into an oven from heat soak. Argus had a similar setup, but, less powerful engines, so less hot gas to vent. As I said, it was luck that the Lexingtons turned out as well as they did. With the US' lack of experience with carriers, they could easily have used the same solutions as Kaga. Unlike the Japanese, Italians and Brits, the USN, for whatever reason, did not do major reconstructions on it's older ships in the 30s, so, if the Lexingtons had been built like the Kaga, they would have entered WWII with the same configuration, while Kaga had been rebuilt with a small island, full length flight deck and a downward curving funnel midships in place of the long ducts.

As the little Spanish speaking girl says, "Why not both?"

There was also the (canceled in 1949) USS United States super carrier.

@@misterjag Which would have been horrifying, being armed with nuclear bombers.

@@misterjag No, it would have been awesome, yet another example of the US Navy's power to defend America, and by extension, the free world.

Hey, that's the American dream.

Renault R35 Nah, that’d be one of the Tillman battleships. Next to her sister USS Overcompensation.

Source? Would like to read into this more

Yep. I remember reading about that in the Tacoma News Tribune some time in the '80s, probably an anniversary of the event. historylink.org/File/5113

@@ryanferrell2921 its true. The water behind the dams were low so….

Beginning on about December 17, 1929, the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lexington (CV-2) ties up to the Baker Dock and supplies electricity to Tacoma for a month to meet a power crisis. In the 1920s, Tacoma received most of its electrical energy from dams on the Nisqually and Skokomish Rivers.

ifga16 my grand uncle served aboard the Lexington as well.....

I hope your uncle is ok

My grandfather was a CPO, signalman on the Lexington. He had to abandon ship when it was too badly damaged. Some of the stories he told me about his WW2 experiences were amazing. The one I remember most was men going down to the galley and filling their flak helmets with ice cream and jumping over the side eating it. Better than letting it go to waste!

We sailed Taney across the Atlantic to Cork Ireland, Le Harve France and Rota Spain during the Coast Guard Academy 1978 cadet training cruises. Three modern Hamilton Class cutters sailed with us. I visited her in 2019 in Baltimore. I always thought she was the dreariest ship imaginable and later in life wondered if that was just a lonesome 20 year old's thinking or if she really was that dreary. I've sailed a number of US Navy ships that seemed better maintained and less oppressive. So when I had a chance I visited her again in Baltimore circa 2019. She was just like I remember her, dreary and worn out, and now with her teak deck I holy stoned covered in some sort of gray goop they apparently sprayed on rather than replace the teak.The CO's cabin still has the same old Colonial style maple furniture that looks more like it belongs in your great grandparents living room than in a ship. The passageway to Officer's Country still looks dark and foreboding. I could still see in my mind the water mixed with pee sloshing around the enlisted head next to the enlisted berthing. At Rota all the cadets rotated. Those who had been on the Eagle flew to Rota to take the cutters. Those of us on the cutters boarded C-141s for NAS North Island to take the Eagle north to Sea Fair 78 in Vancouver with a stop in Victoria before Vancouver and our final stop in Seattle. Now that was a cruise!

Another would be that those guns muzzle blast is capable enough to shake plane on the deck which is another why they remove them

I suspect that if you had an 8" gun enemy cruiser to port, or a flotilla of destroyers preparing to launch Long Lance torpedoes at you, well, flight deck be damned....

@@johnreynolds7996 Yes, but I don't think they were ever actually used in combat. Why ruin your deck for a firing drill?

@@naverilllang why save your deck for a few kageros with long lances

@@ralphkerr6809 you wouldn't. But they were never in that situation. And lets be honest: if an aircraft carrier is in the position of having to defend itself with surface artillery, then the battle is probably already lost.

And an old Essex Class carrier is only 1/3 the displacement of a Nimitz or Ford class. Here is something that amazed me. I was having a flight physical on Nimitz during a deployment. Every space seemed to have a TV monitor showing the PLAT, Pilot Landing Aid Television. There was one in the superstructure space I was sitting in waiting for a helo ride back to my own ship and you could feel every so slightly a bump whenever an A-6 trapped.

@philsalvatore3902 Those newer carriers are insane in size. They're literally cities on the water. That's pretty cool.

@@Kdub09swm Yep. And then you go someplace like LA or Long Beach harbor and see container ships that are at least 50% larger than a Nimitz class. Those box ships are just huge. What also surprised me is how hard it can be to find an aircraft carrier at sea even when they want to be found. We were approaching Nimitz in hour CH-46 from her starboard beam. It broad daylight but very hazy with broken clouds. The Air Boss asked us to call when we saw the ship. We were only five miles out on our TACAN but neither I nor my command pilot could pick the ship out from the haze. The Air Boss was starting to get angry at us (they have notoriously short tempers !) when we finally saw her. The internet fanbois who think a carrier is so easy to find and sink have never been out there in blue water. Even something as big as a Nimitz is a tiny little speck in the vast ocean.

I remember touring it as a kid

Indeed, iirc, the second torpedo incident shorted out the electrical control system for the engines, leaving the Sara dead in the water. But the turbo-electric system looked good on paper because it allowed tighter compartmentalization.

Saratoga spent so much time on injured reserve early on. Then her limited aircraft elevator design severely restricted aircraft handling.

@@EliteF22 Yes, the midships elevator, in particular, was so small it was nearly useless by 44. Elevator size was a function of her age. When built, the designers had to guess how large aircraft would get during her lifetime. That elevator could have been enlarged, but, for whatever reason, the USN did not go in for major rebuilds of it's older ships in the 30s.

If I didn't know better I'd think you were referring to the movie Pearl Harbor the commemorative

Nah, the WW2 Illustrious class carriers were the best looking carriers of all time. And they all had such great names.

@@johnreynolds7996 can't really argue with an opinion lol

Bikini Atoll and Chuuk Lagoon are also on my list.

You'll love it! I dove Bikini a few months ago. The greatest wreck diving on earth, but you need to have at minimum mixed-gas certification allowing you to go to 50 meters.

@@wolfetwain I'm certified. Deepest ive been was close to 100.

Was it "Queen of the flattops" by any chance?

@@monkeyship74401 No, I can't remember exactly since I was in high school about 45 years ago but it was actually about the battle of Coral Sea.

@@ninline2000 same here, I think I still have the paperback. It's been since '77 or so since I read the book. (that's 1977 for the younger crowd) Google Queen of the flat tops: The U.S.S. Lexington and the Coral Sea Battle. Stanley Johnston.

@@monkeyship74401 Mine was in my High School library back in the seventies.

I mean.... From 5 funnels, to 2 big funnels and then finnaly one *THICC* funnel

My dad was part of the group of people that got to see her last moments above the surface. He was aboard USS Phelps, the DE that torpedoed n sunk her... I remember going to ships reunions as a kid, and those guys had tears in their eyes talking about it 40yrs later.....

There wasn't an escalator clause for the Washington Naval Treaty

He did in I believe one of the drydocks. The ships were structurally barely damaged but the crews would've all been killed, so it was kind of a moot point.

Nukes in those days were rather small. Almost benevolent weapons...

@@AudieHolland I understand what you're saying but I'm not sure the 1945 residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima would appreciate the distinction...

@@seafodder6129 People at war should not live in paper houses.

@@AudieHolland Good point.

Too busy collecting torpedoes.

November 1942: Saratoga: Hey what did I miss. Enterprise: Not much.

Coral sea and santa cruz. Two of the most important and intense. Coral sea was a bit hillarious but santa cruz was just wow. Rip hornet

Not likely to be much in the way of radioactivity - the neutrons from an underwater nuke detonation would be mostly shielded by the water. Any remaining induced radioactivity would have decayed down to almost zip by now.

Was thinking along the same lines myself.....not sure if I'd take any comfort from Eric Sprague's response........they did use plutonium for those tests......not exactly sure what type......but plutonium 239........its half life is only 24,400 years......you might want to wait a bit

@@logansorenssen sure about that?.......they did use plutonium in those tests......plutonium 239's half life is 24,400 years.....my dad worked with those people .....he used to come home carrying radioactive bits in his pocket to show folks......died suddenly of sirosis of the liver........wasn't a drinker.......they didn't know what they were playing with

@@stephenmichalski2643 Yeah, well here is an issue, you literally will be subject to more radiation on the FLIGHT to the wreck site than on the wreck. She is at a shade over normal natural background level radiation but not by much. You know what kind of places are actually at higher background radiation levels than Saratoga? ANY major city you care to name, literally, ANY of them. You blather on about Plutoniums half life and utterly forget that the damned stuff has been dispersed into a Marine environment that scales to literally TRILLIONS of Gallons of water. They did not use much plutonium in those bombs I might add.... most of that material has made its way to where heavy stuff eventually ends up, the depths... average depth of the Pacific is 4 THOUSAND metres.... You are NOT diving that deep. I have dived more than one wreck used in Nuclear tests, we ran an experiment at one point, we took counters down to several of these wrecks, and also ran them in multiple large cities, including London, New York, Berlin and Paris.... The cities had a higher background radiation count.... just so you know..... People need to get real about radiation and learn something about it. Were you aware for example that the vast majority (though not all) of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is at about natural background Radiation levels? Sure, there are a few hotspots, but most of it is clear. Radiation does NOT work the way a Fallout game suggests it would, or the Media, the CEZ does not have the advantage of trillions of litres of seawater to dilute the fissionable material either..... So yes, unlike Eric Sprague I am UTTERLY sure of that, as I have dived the wreck, and she was one of those we took a counter down with us to. In other words, if you get the opportunity, dive her, unlike many WWII wrecks she is not a Grave Site, and she is literally one of only three carrier wrecks that are reachable by divers without specialist and very expensive equipment (not to mention training). Love a Marine Ecologist utterly pissed off with the waaaaaah, eeeeek, argh view of Radiation... Don't even get me started with the 'Doomsday' view of Fukashima... which according to some is going to destroy the world in a few years because that damned stuff is eating its way to the planets core according to them!

@@alganhar1 glad to hear this... Will probably never get to, but one of the things "on my list" is to dive there!!!

That is the successor this ship.

That’s not the same ship.

Lexington CV-2 sank during the battle of the Coral Sea in May of 1942. She is not radioactive. Saratoga CV-3 sank during operation crossroads in 1946, she was radioactive but due the time and the tides she isn’t anymore.

is the "lex lady. your waifu? or is the ship in love?

@robert3479 explains in the thread that they needed a way to vent the exhaust from the 16 oil-fired boilers that drove each of the sister ships. This somehow reminds me of how they put eight nuclear reactors on the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), the world's first atomic supercarrier and inheritor of the World War II hero ship's name and legacy. (It turns out she only needed two, and the cumulative radiation dose from the six extra reactors would earn this Big E the less flattering nickname of the "Mobile Chernobyl.")

Nobody had any idea how carriers were going to be employed, and when the Lexingtons were being redesigned it was thought that carriers might wind up in gun duels with heavy cruisers. Remember, in the late '20s aircraft were rather short-ranged and not a lot of ordnance capacity. The Japanese had the same idea when they converted Akagi and Kaga. Akagi had 6 8" guns near the waterline aft and Kaga had 10 8" guns.

Maybe, maybe not, British Design philosophy for their Fleet Carriers was different to the US. They did not have to cover the vast range of the Pacific, far from bases, but they *did* have to operate for large portions of time in constrained seas in range of large groups of enemy Land based aircraft. Hence why RN Fleet Carriers sacrificed some Hanger space for increased deck armouring. It is no accident that most of the British Carriers lost were lost in the Mediterranean! It is all about compromise, the RN Carriers carried far smaller flight groups partly due to smaller hangers, and also partly because they did not deck park aircraft. On the flip side British Carriers could shrug off the kind of damage that would put a USN Carrier into dock for repairs for months, if not sink them. Indeed, one USN Liason officer aboard a British Carrier supporting the USN noted after a Kamikazi struck the flight deck of the British ship that the crew simply bulldozed the flaming wreck over the side, doused the deck and she was ready to operate aircraft within ten minutes of being struck. With that kind of difference in Design Philosophy the RN and USN would have built two very different ships even if the starting hulls had been exactly the same.

Agreed, however I was more reffering to a converted Incomparable completed in the mid-1920s. Such a ship would likely have been built more along the lines of Courageous and Glorious before the RN developped its "armoured deck doctrine" and at a time when Japan looked like the most likely foe. No matter the design they went with however, at a 1000 foot long this carrier would have been the largest vessel of its type for quite a lot of years.

@@rem26439 I have actually asked that question, and the answer was that the thing would basically be the closest thing to a Forrestal you could get in the 1920s.

No, the dangerous radioactive isotopes have a short half-life and have already decayed. The remaining radioactive material only gives off alpha particles which can't pierce your skin and don't go far in water.

That Lexington is an Essex class named in honor of the previous Lexington, which is the ship present in this guide, both would fight in WW2. :)