"Unredacted report on the loss of HMS Sheffield" Topic

I'm surprised this news story hasn't been posted yet. It makes for interesting reading and seems to confirm a few suspicions that have been knocking around for years.

link

Nick

Thanks for the link.

Just backs up my own personal theory that very often navies need a "wake-up call" before they get their C3/damage control/security procedures together.

The shipboard handling procedures learned from the loss of the Audacious, the debacle at Savo, the damage to the Stark and the Cole, the loss of the Sheffield etc. were subtle but important.

I think all three services often get the wake up call in the heat of battle.

Sometimes those calls are actually heeded.

Sometimes, it seems not :-(

The Margrave of Hess Cassel held a Court of Inquiry to see how the debacle at Trenton happened. They blamed all the dead officers, and decided that the Hessian army was just fine as it was.

Major freaking design deficiencies in the Type 42s, that's for sure.

How the [expletives deleted] do you end up with emergency escape hatches too small for someone wearing breathing gear to fit through?!?

It is a little tougher to design a fire main system that can continue to function with a break in the pipe, but the USN managed to do that on the Burkes by making the fire main a continuous loop.

The Type 42s were under considerable pressure to be as inexpensive as possible. So the main fire main wasn't duplicated. The Perrys also had a single main but they were frigates, expendable as it were.

The escape hatches were sized for an escaping person wearing ELSA (essentially a smoke hood and air to allow from escape from smoke filled compartments, and not bulky so not affected by hatch size). The issues would come with attempts to re-enter compartments when wearing full BA and fearnought suits. The firemain was actuallya ring main but it was severed in the initial damage. The worse issue for the firefighting systems were the failures in the fire pumps themselves – one was defective before the attack, one was on standby and woldn't start, the two running pumps both stopped and would not restart. So the ship was left without firefighting water (the Rover emergency pump was pretty ineffective).

Anybody found the actual unredacted report?