Jonathan Dimbleby's "The Battle of the Atlantic" and the US Two Ocean Navy Act

As I said in a previous post I am reading Jonathan Dimbleby's "The Battle of the Atlantic", and I had uneasy feelings about the accuracy of some of the research behind the book. Now about thirty pages later we have this paragraph related to the Two Ocean navy Act:

  But it took another year for Congress to get the message. Only as the German offensive on the far shores of the Atlantic intensified did the nation's legislators eventually realize that it would be impossible for the United States to immunize itself the virus of Nazism merely by averting its gaze. In the last days of May 1040 they finally agreed to pour resources into the defence of the nation, appropriating even more than the billions of dollars the president had requested for the purpose. The standing army was to be expanded fourfold, from 280,000 to 1,200,000 men and the National Guard was to be fully at Roosevelt's disposal, and 16 million civilians were soon to be conscripted; America's industrial complex would be cranked up to deliver a throughput of 50,000 aeroplanes; and the shipyards would begin a crash programme to provide the navy with 9 new battleships, 31 cruisers and 181 destroyers. 'The problem', as historian Waldo Heinrichs noted, 'was no longer money but time and capacity.' From the French and British perspective, he might have added, it was also that, in the collective mind of the American people, these programmes were intended only for the defence of the United States, not to prop up a disintegrating Europe.

I could comment on his starting a paragraph with "But", but as I am in the habit of at least so starting sentences maybe I should give that a pass...

I would like to focus on the naval building program. The Two Ocean Navy Act to which this paragraph presumably refers included 7 battleships and 6 Alaska class large cruisers. None of the battleships (the last two Iowas and the five Montanas) were completed and only two of the large cruisers. So to what does "new battleships" refer? I suppose it could refer to the new battleships which enter service after the act, but they were not ordered as part of the naval expansion program being discussed, and there were 10 of them anyway, 12 if we include the two completed Alaskas. I can make a total of 9 battleships if I take the 7 authorised as a result of the Two Ocean Navy Act and add in the second pair of Iowas already authorised but started at the same time as the third pair authorised under the act.

In some sense worse is the 18 carriers (Essex class) authorised by the act and passed over in silence by Dimbleby.

I will not bother to analyse the possible meaning of the remaining numbers, I'm sure they will not add up however I chop the numbers. The numbers should either be those authorised in the June 1940 acts, or the war production subsequent to the acts. I don't like the idea that they include ships already authorised, but if they do at least the numbers should add up.

Jonathan Dimbleby's "The Battle of the Atlantic" and the Battle of the River Plate

I am currently reading Jonathan Dimbleby's "The Battle of the Atlantic", and right from the start I had an uneasy feeling about his interpretation of events. Nothing definite, it would have taken days of research to confirm of refute the statements I thought looked suspect.

Anyway, I read away, until this morning (2016-08-31) I came to the part where he discusses the Battle of the River Plate. I stopped in my tracks at the statement:

Harwood's decision to attack the German battleship was audacious*: a broadside from the Graf Spee outweighed the combined fire-power of the three British cruises by a factor of more than two to one.                                                                                                         

The wording of this was something I did not like, first the ambiguity of language. The weight of a broadside is relatively unambiguous, but we are comparing it with the "combined fire-power" of Harwood's ships. I suppose he means the combined weight of their broadsides? If so the comparison is at least consistent (comparing like with sort of like), but is it true? What about the more appropriate weight of ordnance potentially deliverable per unit time? (I will pass over in silence -or not- my dislike of his using the term Battleship to describe GS, Panzerschiff, Pocket Battleship or Heavy Cruiser would have been acceptable, but not Battleship)

At this point I decided to do some calculations, as I was not at home with access to reference books I decided to use the NavWeaps site as source for the needed data on the weapons (and memory for numbers of barrels of each). The spreadsheet with the relevant calculations is shown below:

                                                                                                                                  

 Here we see that the total mass of ordnance potentially delivered per minute by the RN cruisers is substantially greater than that from GS (7663.2 kg/min as opposed to 5587.2 kg/min). Also the vanilla weight of broadsides does not favour GS by the alleged factor of two.

A word of caution is needed with respect to the rate of fire figures used, NavWeaps gives a range for those other than the German 11", I have chosen to use values towards the bottom of the range, if not the figure they quoted as achieved.

I would not claim this analysis proves the superiority of one side or the other, but does raise the question of the adequacy of the research behind the book.

*Maybe Harwood had consulted the shade of John Byng on the wisdom of caution?