Sea Control - Sea Control 156: Sink the Montana! - Part 1

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

1. https://gijoe.fandom.com/wiki/Sink_the_Montana!From Joepedia, the definitive fan site for everything Joe, the episode summary.2. https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-navy-ships/battleships/montana-class-bb-67-71.htmlNaval History and Heritage Command's website for the Montana-class battleships.3. https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/ships/ships-of-sail/uss-constitution-americas-ship-of-state.htmlNaval History and Heritage Command's website for the USS Constitution

You're listening to a Sea Control Preble Hall production. All opinions are personal opinions and do not represent the Department of Defense, the Navy, or the Army. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard. Normally I would say Sea Control, but today is the first joint or combined episode of Sea Control and Preble Hall. So today my guests are the Angry Staff Officer and Dr. Claude Baraby from the Naval Academy History Museum. Two of them joined me a few weeks ago to talk all things USS Constitution, and it was there that Claude revealed the existence of a 1986 episode of G.I. Joe that featured the Constitution rescuing the Atlantic fleet from a rogue battleship in the famed episode Sink the Montana. So gentlemen,

thank you again for being here. Before we kick off, how's everybody doing? Doing great. Thank you very much. We're obviously, you know, being very courteous and don't want to talk over the other. The absolutely thrilled to be back here. Love being able to do joint operations. I'm really hoping i'm getting credit for this as a joint billet right that's that's why we're here do you do you get a jsam for this right yeah i've got to write that up i will uh i will fill out the paperwork but uh i think i think i'm technically the senior in this one so i will submit it and we'll see what happens my boss will probably be surprised to learn uh both that i've submitted

jsam and that i have a podcast so before we go into the episode in particular is like the episode comes out September 1986, and I'm going to start with my take that this represents sort of the high watermark of the U.S. Navy in popular culture here. 1983, you have Tom Clancy's novel, Red Storm Rising, and I know it postulates a third world war here, but I remember reading it as a young anti-submarine warfare officer. I'm kind of gasping. It's like, this is the most realistic description of anti-submarine warfare that I've encountered. 1984, you have The Hunt for Red October. Obviously, another great Navy movie, and then 1986, Top Gun. So, Claude, as the naval historian in the group here, what do you think of that take? That's pretty spot on. The 80s, you had

this, you know, the concept of the 600-ship Navy. We were getting there toward 86, 87, and then it started going back down again. Of course, you missed 1989 Cher's video, If I Could Turn Back Time, which was shot on an Iowa-class battleship, and there's actually a very good story behind there that we'll tell at another time from the PAO who was responsible for that. But no, I think that's very realistic. The 80s is not just a high watermark for the Navy because of its size, but because of the number of operations you're conducting overseas, you've got a major competitor. And so it was only natural that you would start to see this in popular culture reflected, whether it's in the movies or on television. To some degree, you'd see it later on in shows like

like Jag, but those are kind of far afield. You'll see once in a while these shows popping up, The Last Ship. But I think that's why eventually during the G.I. Joe cartoon run, in the title song it says that they're fighting for freedom over land and air, but they never mentioned sea. So it was kind of nice to see that in Sink the Montana and a couple of other episodes that they decided to address it. So people, I think generally the population in the United States

would have been more familiar with the Navy then in a way that I don't think they are today. Yeah. And this is also sort of the peak Reagan era military expansion, where I think this is on a lot of folks' minds. And Claude, you managed to get an interview with the episode's writer, David Cairn, where he talked about sort of his target audience there. What age were you in 1986, Claude? I realize I'm asking you to out yourself, but I was six at that point. So this wasn't as much on my radar uh at the time but i imagine this landed for you slightly more than me yeah no i was in college yes it's true i was in college and i remember seeing this episode because what would happen is we'd get back from classes and uh study period and then before we went off

to to get some dinner we'd just kind of veg out in the common room for like a half an hour and usually it was when gi joe was there and so we'd watch gi joe or something else but when i spoke to david karen and i i gotta tell you one thing i've always heard at writers conferences because as you know i've not only written non-fiction i've written a couple of novels too i think that writers are the the nicest most down-to-earth people that you can meet maybe that's because they're not always recognized on the street because you know actors and actresses everybody knows what they look like but a writer really can sit on the train and observe everything for an hour and not be noticed for who they are regardless of how famous they may be in their

books and to reach out to i figured okay look this is 30 years ago maybe the writers must have been in their 20s or 30s so they might still be available and sure enough i was able to track david down could not have been nicer in providing a pre-interview for about an hour and then we had a one-hour interview and that's the second part of our episode oh sorry i i meant to add yeah i asked him you know this is kind of a kid's show why did you include these historical ships or these concepts and he says well it wasn't really just a kid's show yeah they were hasbro was trying to sell toys however it went well beyond teens in some cases and what we try to do at least in the episodes that i wrote as david was telling me is that uh we wanted to bring in some historical

things that maybe there it would reach some people to make them want to research it more And that's exactly what happened. Here we are 30, what, 34 years later, talking about this episode within the context, not as a cartoon, but what are the concepts that they brought out during this episode that we are familiar with either as historians or as practitioners in the Navy or the Army? Sapper, what was G.I. Joe's impact on you? Is this part of your childhood as well? it gives me a little bit of pause because uh we're talking about something that was released the very year that i was born so uh claude in case you i hate you i know but hey i just wanted to say you you look so much younger and just you know if it's any consolation no so gi joe for me actually it's similar with claude i first experienced it in college uh because one of my roommates was just like this i don't know a joe fanatic i guess and so we would just watch

old episodes and uh more often than not the uh the gi joe commercials which were uh just showing up on youtube at the time and there was a sort of boom of gi joe all the old gi joe episodes on youtube um which was also uh heating up at the at the time so it was this like uh cross-generational thing that was going on but then i hadn't actually seen the constitution episode until just uh until claude mentioned it on the last episode and uh i was just sort of blown away with um feeling like i like i was missing out like there's so many more gi joe episodes i'm gonna have to go back and watch because it was sort of i mean i'll be honest it's like in a certain sense it's a little bit corny but it's also really well and we'll talk about like some of the stuff with the montana it

like it really hits home and uh in a way that i you know for a landlubber like me is is probably sort of not as much as it does with you gentlemen in the Navy. So they definitely tapped into something, I would say. Before we dive in here too, I'll just make one comment on tone for the listeners. We are discussing a cartoon. We're going to use that cartoon to pull out different historical themes and talk about some of the history, but it is not our intent here to make light of a cartoon from the 1980s. That was an era. A lot of things in there have their place the writer could not have been more gracious in offering us his time so we don't want to appear that we're that we're making light of his uh his work here no and i'll tell you he

he had a he's had an incredible career and he wrote for star trek next generation stargate sg1 buck rogers so he was familiar with you know ships personnel etc this episode was presented in three acts and as a format for our conversation we'll be breaking down each act providing a description of the act punctuated by interjections here from the other two audience member claude i believe you have act one is that correct okay and i'll start off with just what a summary of the show and here is here's the storyline the battleship montana is being decommissioned in the philadelphia navy shipyard its ceo has served on it all of its all of his life and joins cobra to save the ship they steal the ship and eventually we'll talk about how they try to fight the ship but that's that's

the essence of the story that they steal the last battleship so they really did put a david karen really did put some thought into this especially with history because he says in the interview the thing that influenced him with sink the montana was the movie sink the bismarck so he said why don't i try to tie this into the episode so he brings in the montana now you may not be familiar with the battleship montana but again doing research there was a proposal for a battleship Montana. In the show, they say it's fought three wars and has served for 45 years, which at that time would bring you back to about 1942, which is just about the time that the Montana class was canceled. Now, for some historical reference, an Iowa class battleship, they had four of the

six that were built. They were about 48,000 tons, a top speed of 35 knots, and they had three 16-inch gun turrets, and the Montana class was designed to be the follow-on class to the Iowa, and it's supposed to be 63,000 tons, a little slower at 28 knots, but it would have four turrets, and it was authorized in the 1940 budget, and BB-67 was going to be the first one, so he does get some things really, I mean, the reason he gets some things right is because he told me, he said, I went to the library we had a library on the lot so we could do research so the montana is is said to be the largest battleship in the world in gi joe uh and the last of its kind it was not in reality the last in during the time of this show because the missouri was decommissioned in 1992 you hear

the one of the admirals and i assume he's the admiral the atlantic fleet say well we'll never see the likes of her again but he but they're very right that's very prescient they talk about it being old outmoded and so is her captain this cat this admiral latimer for comic relief you have the navy guy of course shipwreck yeah uh who appears in most of the episodes and he says ah they're nuts to scrap her she's got the lines of a lady and the punch of a of a doc fight and you know it's kind of funny when you when you do some research into some of these voice characters that when you listen to the voice it's a combination of two things i think one of them was jack nicholson that influenced the character and another person.

But he's the one that's really lamenting the last of its kind, and he's got this old chief way about him. So the ship pulls into the dock, into the decommissioning ceremony at about 10 knots, which I've got to tell you, coming in hard and heavy at 10 knots is a lot. Yeah, I brought in a YP with some of my midshipmen many, many years ago, and three to six knots, we managed to put in a minor dent in the YP, which we won't talk about that much.

Anyway, so they're coming in hot. Cobra shoots start shooting up the pier because there's a decommissioning ceremony. They board the ship. The ship only has Destro, who's the at that time Cobra commander and a bunch of Cobra androids. He's got General Hawk on the G.I. Joe side manning a twin .50 turret. Destro is on the bridge with Admiral Latimer. And one of the nice things about this episode is that David points out is that there are these black and white cartoon flashbacks of Latimer's life. So you see why he's so drawn to the ship. He is an enlisted guy, he's a junior officer, he's a CO. And Latimer says, quote, anything is better than retirement, unquote. So I'm going to assume that Admiral Latimer didn't get one of those government board of directors, defense contractor positions that tend to proliferate when there's retirement.

So he says, I've only got one friend, the Montana. Now, that's the ultimate swole, you know, ship, shipmate self. He is all about ship. The Montana gets underway. And when you see it get underway in the Philly Navy Yard, what's interesting is that she's got four turrets, two forward, two aft. So the illustrator must have also done the research because the proposed Montana class had four turrets, two forward, two aft. And after this, Latimer is going through the Navy yard saying, I'll show the Navy what they can do with their mothballed fleet. And he starts firing on all the ships.

And it's not mothballed at the time, and it still isn't, but you see him firing and sinking CVN 68, which is the aircraft carrier Nimitz. and toward the end they say okay now it's on to Norfolk and we're going to attack the seventh fleet headquarters well no it's the second fleet in actuality so I don't know how what what do you do when you're going to be the basically head leading the the or commanding the Atlantic with this great ship that can't be defeated and the reason it can't be defeated by modern technology is because they've Cobra's given him this EMP device that they've got on the ship which gives them a two mile bubble to protect themselves from any kind of modern mechanics so how do you defeat that so let's talk about the that act one and then uh i'll hand it over for the act two summary can

we just say like if you say i don't know maybe is maybe this is a navy thing but as an army guy if i hear somebody say oh my only friend is the first division or something like that i'm like man you i feel like that's something that actually pershing would say in world war one my only friend is the first division because they're the only ones i care about but you can't say that you can't say that because the first division is comprised of people that's like saying it's true uh you know i i love first division on the ship or something i love all the boats or whatever but it's a it's a platform now if you could say it if it's patent saying my only friend is a tank i think that's the right analogy yeah no it doesn't i don't think it translates to army too

well because we it's usually like well we've just got a lot of tanks and we can get more if one of those is blown up and so i i'm just saying he seems uh predisposed to be somebody who might be uh you know i'm looking at insider threat here and he does seem to be somebody who's predisposed to uh i don't know maybe his cyber awareness training would have uh or um you know what would the equivalent be in the 80s the uh does he do too much coke um no i i loved the uh i love the idea that that is how they appeal to him and sort of subvert him and undermine him um because Because, I mean, let's be honest, I'm in the army and I wish we had battleships like they're really cool. Just from a sympathetic outsider's perspective, they're very, very cool.

And I can imagine having served on one, say, for one's entire career. I mean, the age of not having capital ships like that is, you know, it's not unlike peace in Europe. It's a relatively new phenomenon. Yeah. And there were always, you know, you always see some comments online. And I think David Larder often laments we should have a BBGN, a guided missile nuclear battleship. Well, actually, the Montana was designed to be BBGs at least to have some guided missiles aboard later on and I think one of the other later ships. But I'm sorry, not the Montana. The two Iowa class that were not built, the Illinois and the Kentucky, were going to be guided missile battleships.

And what's interesting with the Kentucky, at least, they took her boilers off and gave them to the two Sacramento-class fast combat support ships. And I remember speaking many, many years ago to a former CEO of the Sacramento, and he said, yeah, it's one of the reasons why we really could keep up with the fleet. It's because we had those battleship boilers aboard. Claude, you hit it on the head with that cultural piece as far as what drives Latimer's betrayal here is that the ship may itself. And separate to get to your point about the Army, it's like, I don't think you have anything culturally. I don't think you have any cultural sayings that people associate themselves that way as far as a catchphrase that sort of encapsulates the mindset of the community that way. There's definitely like organizational loyalty, but loyalty to one specific platform. I mean, like, my dad was in the Coast Guard, and when I found out that his old cutter was, like, formed the basis of a reef now, he was kind of broken up about that.

And he'd only served there for, like, two or three years. So, yeah, it's definitely something that it kind of forced me to change my perspective a little bit. Jared, that's a really good observation, because when you look at this episode, what is Latimer really getting at? he's he's getting at what a lot of what you see on social media and op-eds about the number of ships he's lamenting this is a grand old ship this is a fighting ship he never once talks about the sailors and the officers aboard he doesn't talk about having served with them and who he served with or who he commanded it's about the ship so in his mentality the way you maintain a fighting force is with a ship and he neglects that other component now cobra tries to help him

out with this because they end up populating it with androids and maybe that's what but there we go there there we go to our our era of reduced manning aboard increasing automation so claude the other thing that you brought up was uh david's background with sync the bismarck and there are more parallels here than i think is like one the idea that latimer is going to command the whole of the atlantic with this individual ship very reminiscent of 1941 thought on the german side two what eventually happens to the bismarck is it gets taken out by a biplane torpedo plane the swordfish it's like it disables it which allows the british fleet to catch it and kill it which there's actually some parallels in the way this episode is going to play out yeah i i found it

really fascinating that immediately as soon as they get underway latimer asks hey where's my air cover like he admits i can't maintain this platform without uh without air cover like so he's not denying that um you know that the age of of of warfare uh has evolved to the point where yes he does need this air cover from cobra um and so really he's implying the need for either a you know a cobra air wing or or a naval air wing or some type of joint action but they would have had that aboard montana maybe they already took it off because when you look at the iowa class battleships they had i think it was two to the two kingfishers aboard on this because they had that stern the stern catapults so you did have some and then uh in i don't think it was in time

for this episode but the iowa ships had the early uh oh shoot uh the arc was it the rq2 pioneer which was the unmanned aerial vehicle so that it was the beginning in the in around the time that that gi joe episode came out that you started having a very different kind of air component to to the your ship one other correction there claude i think you mentioned that uh shipwreck was a chief i i do believe he was a first class petty officer a gunner's mate oh maybe maybe he was a chief later on i just saw him in the uh in the blues there like the uh the dungarees the old fashion i don't want to get the online chief's mess up in arms like don't don't ever upset the chief's mess but uh i think that brings us though to act two which is you sapper yeah so act two

But really, it begins with that, you know, Latimer asking for air cover and Cobra chuckling evilly, allowing the the Joes to close in and then initiating his EMP. And, you know, I kind of wonder, is this, you know, is this our first our first show of the EMP in a cartoon at this time in 86? It's kind of an early, early thought at the time, but definitely something that people were probably thinking about as more and more systems became electronic. And of course, that disables everything. The aircraft fall into the sea, all the submarines peter out, and the surface ships go dead in the water as well. And so then begins the classic brainstorming session of what do we do about this? and uh they decide oh well we will we will use uh we will go to the one ship that uh cannot be that is still in the u.s navy service and that is uss constitution and in an act that i love that is a throwback to a grander age of you know asking for volunteers for essentially for a cutting out expedition let's be perfectly honest here this is asking for volunteers for a cutting out expedition

all the joes of course step forward uh they do um what i would call a a joint venture because they use what i would say are prototype or not prototype chinooks because the chinook was definitely already a a platform uh but it's a a new type of ch47 that can uh that can do some heavy lifting so uh you know with some help of you gentlemen and then reviewing my air assault uh handbook uh you know the uh the chinook has a lift capacity of about 26 000 pounds and uh you know so you bring in four of those um well you know you're gonna need some more chinook so uh what it looks like is they're using much more advanced rotary wing aircraft with a much heavier lift capacity to lift this 2.4 million pound vessel and uh they do it uh they

they cut her out of the the boston navy yard complete with the shore patrol never knowing what's going on which i thought was very accurate what are you guys doing uh as the uh as it lifts out and uh and then the uh they they proceed to see to uh towards the the montana uh where the montana is beginning it's uh beginning to uh it's opening engagement with the atlantic fleet and sort of latimer's tortured soul you know realizing of firing now you know prior to this he's fired on inanimate objects and now uh you know we talked about the the people on the vessels and he's beginning to see that his little uh the the bargain is is calling for more and more and more he has to give up more and more of who he is uh to cobra um and then one thing i noticed is that

they're they're talking about loading ap shells armor piercing shells when it seems like everything else at this point is laser um or some sort of future technology so i i enjoyed that piece as well so i just want to open yeah sorry just on that point uh sapper i got a point out i think it may have been during the pre-interview that david mentioned that uh his intent was for depleted uranium shells because he was reading about during his his research and so he says well you know does it still have some radiation well is that why it would you know kind of spark off when you're firing these weapons so that was his thinking behind that yeah the uh the the i enjoyed all the all that aspect so uh we'll go ahead and say can could one cut out the uss

constitution by air i mean i think that's a great question it and you know what it was uh it was about the only way you could do it because if if the ship is if the montana is going from philly to norfolk you're not going to be able to get the constitution there in time if you sail it out because constitution on a great day on beams reach could be it could do about 13 knots you're never going to catch it so the by air is the only way but you're right uh now the problem is you've got those chinooks and not all those chinooks are going to be equal because when you think about it uh and jerry you've i'm sure you've watched uh vert reps see yeah and what what'll happen i remember one time watching i was in the osso shack and the helicopter our helicopter was coming over

from the other ship and you what happens is if the you've got this dangling pallet that's really heavy so you've got to be very careful when you're flying and then if there's wind or if there's any other conditions that causes this thing to start swinging then you start to hear the pilot might say you know the load is unsteady very unsteady we are cutting the load because if they don't pull that that manual release that opens the cargo hook that swinging pallet is going to cause the crash of your helicopter let's take it to 2020 however there was a video that came out a few weeks ago of 2000 drones, which lifted and carried off a 40 ton truck. So in 34 years, it's not necessarily these heavy lift craft. Now I'm not saying that drones could, could pull off

taking the constitution right now, but it's very interesting to see how drone development will occur. And they in operating this swarm mentality can really adjust for that, uh, that balancing act that you would need for whether it's a 40 ton truck or for say the constitution uh sapper you asked you know how's the shore patrol doing i have to say from a historical standpoint it's not the first time we've we've seen uh problematic shore patrol in the late 1830s the commander of the boston navy yard had put a figurehead of president andrew jackson on the constitution and local folks were not amused by that so during one one thunderous lightning storm night a couple of a couple bostonians you know they're probably both named sully uh one of them is is a merchant

captain and they take a rowboat to the figurehead and they chop it off and there's another yeah there's another story behind that too but anyway so shore patrol was not doing their duty on that thunderous night in the 1830s, and they weren't when G.I. Joe came in to steal the Constitution. Well, to be honest, nobody expects, you know, an air assault operation to be coming in to seize the Constitution, which again, I think that it is a classic cutting out expedition, as, you know, as B.J. Armstrong talks about in Small Boats and Daring Men. These were often joint operations, ad hoc uh you know cobbling together either militia or army units with uh with naval forces and so i think it's really in the grand tradition of the of the u.s navy um and we talk about you

know a very daring expedition is uh is getting the constitution out of boston uh you know overlooking just i think that probably if they were doing their risk assessment and they were thinking about trying to take this over land they'd have to look at uh you know boston drivers which yeah Yeah, exactly. Or Logan Airport, which is right next to where the Constitution is. But, you know, when we were all emailing each other before, and one of the things that you brought out, Sapper, was, well, where do you exactly hook on to a 1790s frigate? Well, I think the answer isn't to do that, but to have some sort of sling or some grapple. And when you think about the grapple, the only thing that I could think of that was comparable was the Glomar Explorer in 1974 with Project Azorian. That's where the K-129, which was a Gulf II Soviet submarine, had sunk, and it was in like three miles of water.

And what they did is they built the Glomar Explorer. It was a Howard Hughes platform, and it had this giant grapple. And its intent was to go down three miles, hook onto it, take this 2,700-ton submarine, raise it, put it in its well, and secret off with it. Unfortunately, one of the grapples gave way, I think, a third of the way up or something. So they lost two-thirds of the submarine. They were able to bring up one-third. And that's about the only way I think you could really hook onto – take something like the Constitution or even a smaller ship up. I mean, if you were to fly PCs somewhere from Bahrain to UAE, if you really needed to get them fast, you know, maybe that's what you do.

Well, you know, we've the U.S. Army loves to experiment with different types of rotary wing aviation. I mean, back in Vietnam, they talked about their their this. Again, it's this obsession with honestly with the battleship of, hey, we took this massive thing. We put massive guns on it. Isn't it cool? And we're like, all right, we're going to try that. And, you know, of course, we have the C-130 gunship. Well, I can't say we, that's the Air Force, but they came out of us, so it happens. But the Army looked for a while about putting 105-millimeter howitzers on board Chinooks, which is absurd, of course. But, you know, we thought about it.

We tried it. So these would be the types of things that one would think about if in the future you're looking at massive lift. I think, Claude, you had found a Russian helicopter with about, what, 53,000-pound lift or something like that? No, I think they had done a 127,000-ton lift. That was the Halo. You would need a couple of those to get off something this size. But, you know, I think as cutting-out expeditions go, it goes very well. And I think that probably puts us towards the ultimate act.

Yes, Act 3. I'll get into it in a second. Though I do have a non-sequitur question. Sapper, you mentioned the Air Force coming out of the Army. Does that mean the Space Force is technically the grandchild of the Army? Oh, man. I just thought of that. Yeah.

Well, the Navy is the godfather. All right. You're opening a whole can of worms here because let's all be honest. The Space Force is – why is it not Navy? Like literally every depiction of military forces in space is naval-centric. And I take it from your silence that you agree and not the fact that you've had to sign non-disclosure agreements with the U.S. Air Force to not tread on their intellectual property apparently. There is a rumor that the first Space Force ship is going to be called the Bainbridge. Well, that's another story.

When it crashes on Jupiter and we have to go get it. Or stolen by aliens, yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, no, it's just not even going to get off the ground. It's going to go surrender to France. It's early days, is what I would say. So, no, I have not given up on the idea yet of Space Force assuming a more naval character. I mean, they're going to be called spaceships, right? Not space planes.

Act 3 finds us aboard the Montana. We're headed south. My first question here was, where are we? I'm not super familiar with East Coast geography, but I started pulling up Google Earth and was able to narrow it down to what I think is a rough location. So once Montana has cleared the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, she has to transit the Delaware River out into Delaware Bay and then proceed down the eastern seaboard towards Norfolk to meet the 7th Fleet. So all told, that's about 190 statute miles or 165 nautical miles. Now, her top speed was supposed to be 28 knots, but given her age and likely condition, I would dock a few knots there. So 26 would have taken her 6 hours and 20 minutes to get to a position off Virginia's eastern shore.

So I believe she's somewhere in the vicinity of Hog Island when we come back into the story there. Is Latimer actually steaming at 26 knots? I spent a lot of time teaching over in Germany about the Second World War in the Pacific here. And one of the things that you come to learn very quickly is these large battleships burn fuel at precipitous rates. So the Japanese were extremely hesitant to get these massive battleships like the Yamato underway. Montana's coming back from sea, going into decommissioning, probably didn't refuel. I would guess they're below 50% when they get back to the pier. There's no way they're steaming at 26 knots, which actually is going to allow Constitution to do what you're going to see her do in this episode.

But I would throw out, if you want to read about U.S. Navy logistics in the Second World War, I'd recommend Bullets, Beans, and Black Oil. That is kind of the definitive account of Service Squadron 10, the replenishment vessels that supported the fleets in the Pacific there. So the Constitution gets dropped into the water off of Hog Island here, and she's lying in wait behind the island to keep her mask from Montana's radar. The plan is to overtake the Montana once she's passed here. Claude, what did you say Constitution's top speed was? On a good day, on a beam's reach, probably about 13 knots. Okay. Can you define for me beam's reach real quick?

I'm a Navy surface warfare officer. I am not a sailor as in one who understands sailing vessels. Sure. On a beam's reach. So imagine the wind is coming from perpendicular to you, either from the port or starboard. So that is pretty much pretty close to the optimum direction you want the wind coming from when you're sailing. So based on earlier fuel concerns here and the speed that we think Latimer might be going, this plan to overtake could actually work. And then we see the 7th Fleet, which you had mentioned was probably the 2nd Fleet, steaming up out of Norfolk to meet them. Claude, based on your eye here, what does it look like is coming up there? Because I see what appears to be five battleships here.

And I think you actually talked about this with David a little bit in the other episode as far as what they had access to drawing-wise. Yeah, and actually he said that there was something that was cut out, and I'd love to see if it exists somewhere in some archives. But a much more detailed view of the battle, but it just became so intensive that they weren't able to keep it in the 22-minute time frame. So I think when they're going down there, if Latimer is a decent sailor, he's probably – for the Montana, he's probably ordered trail shaft and is trying to optimize fuel efficiency to get down there because he's not going to have enough for that trip and engage in the battle. What I think is a shortcoming for Latimer is he doesn't put – this is bad watch standing because with all the androids – I mean think about this. So the Constitution's mast is 198 feet, and from – on the Iowa-class battleships, using that as a baseline, it was 209 feet from the keel to the mast top. so let's assume that they're relatively equal don't you have somebody up on the bridge who can see the mast over the tree line because down there you don't have mountains you really don't have

hills on the south southeast virginia you know you're not going to have trees that are more than i don't know 50 60 feet high maybe so i think this is bad watch standing so that they're able so that's why the constitution is able to hide in wait behind the island and then sail in right behind the montana so bad androids yeah i would i would say though this is why you need people on the ship by the way not androids absolutely exactly but i would say probably not expecting the constitution at that point nobody expects the u.s constitution but or the spanish inquisition but getting back to what sapper said about air cover latimer knew he needed air cover had he had that air cover, whether it was a Kingfisher or another seaplane or a small drone, he would

have seen what was coming over the horizon and would have had at least a better ability to prepare against the Constitution and the G.I. Joes coming aboard. You should always have air cover because of G.I. Joe. I'm going to use that one in briefings from now on. We need synchronized combined arms operations to ensure that G.I. Joe is not waiting beyond the next hillcrest. Look, even G.I. Joe recognize the importance of having an aircraft carrier so which begs the questions like where is the G.I. Joe aircraft carrier well we understand the EMP would probably be effective against it so Vice Admiral Overton has brought his battleship fleet here and is now setting up what will be the new last battleship battleship battle the previous one being the Battle of Surigao Strait

in and around Leyte Gulf here when Admiral Jesse Oldendorf and his battleships crossed the Japanese T and destroyed much of the Japanese center force. Smart move by Overton. Why? Because these battleship guns probably outranged the stated two-mile radius of the EMP system. But our next viewpoint is from Shipwreck standing on Constitution's deck, and he's watching the two combatants approach one another here. We'll talk briefly about the concept of bearing drift for a second. So bearing drift is how sailors determine whether risk of collision exists. And Claude, this goes back to your point about good watch standing here. We have Shipwreck, you know, GM1 shipwreck standing watching these two forces approach here and bearing goes back to a compass

so there's 360 degrees on the compass there are individual degrees between all of these if I see a ship due north of me that ship bears zero zero zero if I look at it a few minutes later and it's moved slightly to the right and now bears zero zero three it's said to have right bearing drift shipwreck is watching these two come closer together here and what they're going to have to do is they eventually want to achieve a zero bearing drift with the montana which means that a risk of collision exists so yeah sorry i lost my train of thought there well they were about to lose the constitution if there's a collision so i'm afraid that old ironsides isn't going to withstand uh a full weight of a battleship but you know you never know and the second part of

that is once they uh threw the line over to the montana they were being dragged by the montana and i think that probably might have pulled the most of the bow spread or a part of the bow itself off i'm i'm pretty sure but they got the the men aboard pretty quickly to to board the montana i do love i do love the uh the continental navy throwback garb that was actually awesome of uh shipwreck being in the uh oh no no no no no no no no yeah it was not no i i researched it that is that is continental navy no for our listeners we need to clarify shipwreck went down to of course he's you know he is a sailor he went he 1776 navy no he comes up with a pirate uniform and even his his parrot polly has a pirate uniform how they found a pirate uniform for polly

the parrot in the ship's museum i don't know so you're gonna say that you are going to go against what the u.s navy says in its own history of uniforms for the 1776 because in 1777 they go toward the white facings rather than the red facings which source did you use navy history dot mill or something i don't know some wordpress thing i found it somewhere on the internet it It was one of those engravings of, you know, uniforms of the U.S. Navy, history.navy.mil, which is probably about as accurate as army.history.mil. I didn't say that out loud. So they tried. They tried.

They tried, but she does get alongside, gets a grappling hook over. You mentioned it turns into a very taut towing line, not necessarily a recommended way that you want to tow a ship at sea. Shipwreck is the first one aboard and discovers pretty quickly that the modern Navy swords are more ceremonial than anything else. You're not going to run anyone through with that thing without overwhelming force. But just as he's about to be overwhelmed, he's bailed out by Hawk and his team in the greatest boarding in the history of visit board search and seizure. But the VBSS team is undermanned for taking down a battleship. This is pre-under siege. Then sort of a common thread here that you see between Cobra and Under Siege is that the only way to take down a battleship is with the man on the inside.

So I believe that Latimer and Gary Busey actually exist within the same cinematic universe. And Destro is probably Tommy Lee Jones, but it's less clear if he can sing. But as Hawk's team is forced back, Hawk jumps on what appears to be a 40mm AA gun, which I think is one of the cooler developments from World War II. Montana would have had 10 of these, and these were key U.S. anti-aircraft armament as you got towards the end of the Second World War as the Navy is dealing with the kamikaze threat. And Hawk swivels that 40-millimeter around to blast the pulse modulator. Which is sort of fascinating because I had a chance to interview a guy who is on a heavy cruiser, I want to say USS Boston in the Pacific. And he talked about being on one of those. And I asked him, you know, how do they deal with the kamikazes? And he said, oh, you know, they would the kamikazes would come all the way down to sea level and then try to pitch in, try to get below the below the arc of the guns.

And he said that they would time their fire with the roll of the ship, which to me is terrifying. But he's just, you know, calmly explaining to me how he did this. And I'm going, oh, my God. Yeah. And then the other thing that I think it's underestimated is just the sheer cacophony of the noise. You have the main guns firing, so 16-inch rifles on some of these battleships, plus 30, 40 5-inch guns. I mean, your modern ship today only has a single 5-inch gun on a U.S. Navy destroyer. Yeah. If those 16-inch guns are being fired, I don't think there's supposed to be anybody on deck. Because, you know, Jared, you know that you kind of clear the bow when you've got the 5-inch gun firing. I can't imagine anybody.

I know, you know, the old legend of Philo McGiffin, who was an 1882 Naval Academy grad, was in the Battle of Yalu commanding a Chinese warship, and he's rolling under the guns. He had just come out from firefighting, and the guns went off, and he immediately went deaf in one side, and it burned part of his face. But, yeah, it's not a place you want to be during. At this point of the battle, Latimer kind of realizes he's lost once he sees the pulse modulator destroys destroyed which begs the question if is the pulse modulator the center of gravity or is it a critical capability of the montana probably a question oh boy for our students of uh sam's and

saw and all the other advanced planning courses but so latimer starts trying to undo everything he's done however montana appears to have some sort of 1980s equivalent of the aegis auto special doctrine which is kind of we put aegis in auto to destroy incoming threats like the guns are going to continue to threaten the seventh fleet and the seventh fleet does what what they do when threatened it's like nope we're going to sink that ship because it won't stop firing at us so they start pouring it on as the bridge burns hawk pulls uh latimer off the ship and they make their escape and i will say here uh so this is the only part of the episode that actually seeing the seeing a ship sinking is a sad event and shipwreck says it earlier in the episode here

sat in for a grand lady have either of you ever decommissioned a ship or taken part in a syncx no i've prepared a couple ships for syncxs but i haven't seen a ship go down no claude can i ask what was the preparation like for this syncx was part of my role it's ages ago for office enable intelligence we were we were doing uh sanitation exercises which basically says you're you're going through the ship to make sure there's not any uh flotsam and jetsam that can be that can eventually rise that would be compromised okay so i've done three of these sync x's throughout my navy career when you say sync x is basically we're going to take a hulk out or a ship that's been decommissioned that the navy has determined we have no more use for it and we're

going to put as much ordinance into it as we can before it goes down really one of the coolest things i've ever done right up until the end when your bridge just goes silent because it becomes a sad moment for everybody watching. As you think about it, it's like, oh, this is what could actually happen if things go poorly for us in combat. I mean, we sank USS Harry W. Hill off the coast of Hawaii, and we're in a cruiser. Initially, as we steam up on it, we can only bring the forward gun to bear. So the initial salvos landing a little short, then long, finally get on target. Forward gun would still occasionally come short, and then the aft gun on the cruiser swings in, and every round is impacting, and the whole bridge is going nuts.

And then we finally get up alongside her and we can see the damage done and fire is going and everything. And she's starting to slip between the waves and the whole bridge just goes silent. And that was the one part of this episode made me flashback immediately to that moment. It's like, wow, this is more emotion than I was expecting to feel while watching an episode of G.I. Joe. Yeah, it sort of goes back to that early point of, you know, why Latimer makes his decision. because there is there is something really personal about that that uh dedication to to that one ship and so you know even as as a non-navy guy it is it i think it's i think it's in sync the bismarck as they're watching her go down um there's everyone everyone is commenting

on um the sadness of that moment i'll kind of bring it back to that to that movie and it is sort of a tragic moment even if it is an adversary the back to the the ideas of uh so many people are tied up in the history of these vessels and so many stories and yours could be next that's i think that it's a it's a strange thought of the mortality of your own ship bunker hill is now i think the one of the oldest surface warfare ships in the fleet and i imagine she'll be decommissioned soon i think i'll i'll probably sense that when i see her decommed absolutely so gentlemen any final thoughts on this episode or anything else you think we need to discuss here yeah i uh i just want to go back to the the essence of this this episode sink the montana and why david karen did

such a great job in the fundamental theme of how do you take a weapon like an emp how do you how do you defeat new technology and sometimes the answer is less or no technology and i think that We tend to over-tech stuff. We've seen this in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so we've seen this low-end fighting that has been such a challenge for so many years, and this could happen even at sea. I'm going to use the example of the USS Cole. It wasn't a missile or a hypersonic missile or anything like that that attacked the Cole. It was simple explosives on a skiff and a couple of dudes. And I think we tend to overthink the technology, whether it's there or elsewhere in the Pentagon.

Yeah, I mean, it is a cartoon. I get that. But we have seen this also in reality of how low-tech or no-tech can defeat or prolong a war. Absolutely. The Army is going the same way where who would have thought that in the 21st century, yes, we're talking about a lot of high-tech stuff. But the Army is also saying, hey, get back to basics, know how to read a map, use a compass, use analog products for battle tracking, do as much as you can that cannot be affected by disturbances in the comm systems or loss of ability to generate electricity. So it's forcing us to think outside the box. And while I don't think we'll go back to an age of muskets, I think there's definitely a lot of looking towards the past to go, hey, how did we used to do things?

What are the basics of our profession? And I think that's sort of what this episode kind of harkens back to. I want to thank my guests. Angry Staff Officer can be found online at his blog, angrystaffofficer.com, and on Twitter, at PPTSAPPER. Dr. Claude Berube can be found online at CGBERUBE. And I'll put another plug for the excellent podcast series he's involved with here, Preble Hall. So, again, this is a joint sea control Preble Hall product here, but go listen to Preble Hall every week. Gentlemen, any other projects you'd like to mention?

No, I think that's it. I think between the podcast and writing, I've got a couple of other articles I'm working on right now. So I've got something coming out soon with Naval War College that I'm looking forward to seeing finally in print. Excellent. Sapper, anything from you? Nope, nothing at this time. All right. Well, for our listeners, thank you for turning in, and we'll see you next week. © BF-WATCH TV 2021