IJN Taiho - Always Train Your Crew

The Tae-ho was supposed to be the lead ship in a new type of Japanese aircraft carrier, unfortunately for them, as it turned out that she would be the only ship of her particular class built in a rather interesting way, while the US Navy had opted for a armored. flight tax on their Yorktown and Essex class carriers and the British took the opposite tack with armored flight decks on all but Ark Royal, the Japanese, although their pre-war carriers were not armored in the same way as The Americans had decided to go a third route when it came to their construction in the late 1930s and in wartime, on the one hand, for speed and ease of construction, they had ordered more than a dozen of the boon Ryu class , which were a modified Harry you class design, these ships were unarmored flying. type platform and were basic evolutions of Japanese design philosophies up to that point, however, tae-ho was a heavily modified shikaku type design, perhaps the prescient Lee anticipated that his aircraft carriers would take a lot of hits.

The tae ho was supposed to take multiple hits and still remain as a combat unit and for this reason it carried an armored flight deck and an armored belt, so the Japanese had decided why not both and were building both armored vehicles as armored vehicles at the same time, although the greater expense and technical complexity of the Thai Hope class meant that only tae ho and five of an improved variant would be built alongside the 15m Roos, just a bit of a view. I think Japanese naming conventions need a little more recognition, as most people tae ho just sounds like another Japanese word, whereas if you really look at the translation it means a large Phoenix, which is actually a pretty impressive name. for a ship and when you look at many Japanese capital ship naming conventions during World War II, there are quite a few These ships actually have very interesting sounding names, as well as the standard: let's name a ship after a state or city.

A lot of people around the world seem to like doing it with their warships compared to the shukaku it was based on at that point. -ho sacrificed about a squadron of aircraft in exchange for her armor being able to carry approximately 65 aircraft into combat. The ship's armor consisted of a three-inch-thick upper deck and a lower deck with 1.3 inches of armor plate plus armor plating. A belt of varying thickness ran along the side of the ship, with just over 2 inches thick over the machinery spaces and 6 inches thick over the magazine spaces. This type of heavy side armor actually exceeded even British armored vehicles and was one of several.

Design defects present in the Tie Ho that you may notice in the images we have been showing you. The Tie Ho appears to be quite low in the water compared to most other aircraft carriers, including the British ones, which sit quite a bit above the water and this was As a result of the weight of that side armor, the ship impacts so low in the water that her lower hangar deck was just above the waterline and her two elevator shafts actually ran below the waterline, although the elevators were obviously mounted in the shafts. They were just above the waterline, which is good, this factor would come back to haunt her later, furthermore, while the bomb and torpedo magazines, as we explained above, were heavily protected by armor, the fuel tanks for The aviation fuel used by his plane was only partially. protected and this would also come back to haunt her in her last battle with eight boilers generating 160 thousand horsepower, she was capable of reaching just over 33 knots, which was quite fast and quite useful for an aircraft carrier because they obviously need to be able to maintain a high speed to increase the apparent speed over the deck so that the plane takes off as quickly and efficiently as possible an effort to further protect the ship's fire the flight deck was not covered with wooden planks over the armor but with latex, this was quicker to apply and easier to repair, however, it was somewhat less slip-resistant and could crack over time, especially when exposed to cold weather.

She was also supposed to be equipped with catapults to help her plane take off; However, a viable catapult design was not ready when it was built. and so instead they put a bunch of rockets in the storage areas to help the planes take off that way. I just strap a couple of rockets to the side of the plane and like the blue paper, I remove them and hope the pilot is good enough to keep the plane under control until he can get rid of the rockets for defense, the tae-ho It would be equipped with various radar equipment along with a secondary anti-aircraft battery of 12 3.9-inch anti-aircraft guns in six twin turrets, three on each side. got a total of fifty-one of the hideous 25 millimeter anti-aircraft guns in 17 triple mounts although, to be honest, they probably simply wouldn't have installed them or perhaps traded that wait for literally any other anti-aircraft guns. weapon and would have had a more beneficial effect.

The Tahoe design was finalized before World War II. She was placed before Japan entered World War II with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Her laying date was July 10, 1941. She would be launched in April. 1943 and commissioned in March 1944; However, compared to the fleet it was supposed to enter service with, which would have numbered over 20 aircraft carriers according to the various plans the Japanese Navy had made in mid-1944, this situation was somewhat different with the Japanese Navy. the United States. Having had some say in the number of Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft carriers it still possessed, just three months after their commissioning in the Tie, it would find itself participating in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, on the morning on June 19. tae-ho was launching his plane to be part of the second wave of Japanese attack, his destiny was not to be attacked by planes from American aircraft carriers but by submarines, since the USS albacore had sighted the aircraft carriers that same morning and had been preparing for an attack. fired at this point, the Ordnance Bureau has been dragged kicking and screaming into reality by several US Navy submarine captains and the albacore fired a series of six torpedoes at the aircraft carrier, one of the pilots Tae-ho's attack plane saw the torpedoes coming and in a great show of devotion to duty had his plane fly directly into the sea in the path of one of the torpedoes, causing it to detonate before reaching its target.

Of the five remaining torpedoes, four of them would miss, but unfortunately the brave pilots show the The sixth torpedo still found its target hitting the aircraft carrier on the starboard side, just ahead of the island. Initially, the tae-ho seemed to have a relatively good impact, although the forward elevator was stuck, Vice Admiral Ozawa ordered it to be placed on planks so that aircraft operations could resume and the ship had only lost about a knot and medium in speed and this was mainly to reduce the force of the water coming through the hole. No fire appeared to have started, so the carrier launched two more waves of aircraft, unfortunately what was not immediately evident was that those partially armored fuel tanks and their supply pipes had ruptured on impact and that Aviation gasoline was rapidly accumulating in the forward elevator pit, as it subsequently began to evaporate and permeate the upper and lower decks of the hangar, effectively rotating both. of them in gigantic fuel and air pumps, the danger this represented did not go unnoticed by the

crew

, since the smell of gasoline evaporating is quite obvious;

However, with the ship only three months in operation they were not very experienced, so their efforts to counter this growing danger were somewhat ineffective, one of the things an experienced

crew

would have done would have been to cover the gasoline with foam from the system. of the ship's fire extinguishing system to prevent it from evaporating or further evaporating and obviously the accumulated vapors had to be vented out of the hangar decks, but unfortunately due to their inexperience the crew did not use the fire extinguishing foam because they thought that It was not a fire and their attempts to ventilate the hangar decks were relatively unsuccessful, furthermore this was partly due to their design, as with completely enclosed hangars, any ventilation had to come from physically opening holes in the hangar itself, To their credit, they tried several things, they tried to open the hatches of the actual ventilation ducts that were installed for that purpose, they dropped the stern lift and even broke some. from the ship's portholes, but none of this was too much beer and it was at this point that the fatal error was made: the chief damage control officer ordered that the ship's ventilation systems be filled and that all doors and hatches that To try to get those fumes off the hangar deck, unfortunately this basically just resulted in the ventilation system distributing the fumes evenly throughout the ship and although the hangar deck crews had been relatively good keeping that area free of sparks and flames when you are talking about a complete boat with many electrical systems, engines, boilers, etc., there will inevitably be sparks somewhere on the boat and at about 2:30 in the afternoon one of those sparks coincided with that particular part of the ship that was full. of gasoline fumes and there was a massive explosion, the force of this was such that a surviving officer on the bridge saw the entire flight deck rise like a wave and the sides of the ship explode in huge fireballs, he was clearly doomed.

At this point, although the destroyers and the top cruiser Oh took off as many survivors as they could, a second massive explosion tore through the ship about two hours later and would sink Stern first, taking with it 650 of her complement of 2,150, although there were flaws. in its design. had contributed to her downfall, especially because the plane's elevator covers were left alone, which had allowed gasoline and seawater to accumulate on them after the torpedo hit. The main factor contributing to her loss was the poor damage control exhibited by her relatively inexperienced crew. This may be said because when you look at the number of damage control systems on paper, the tae-ho had experience, the damage control crew would have been able to use those systems to relatively easily remove gasoline vapors from the ship, although given the outcome of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, this will likely have only delayed the inevitable until a wave of Avengers or Dauntless appears.

This contrasts significantly with the excellent

train

ing and effort put in by damage control crews on American aircraft carriers who were able to bring their ships home fairly quickly. Often, despite the absolutely horrendous damage levels, the Franklin and the Bunker Hill are obviously the watchwords for that particular type of incident, but even when you look at the aircraft carriers that were lost, like Yorktown or Lexington, even on these ships damage control efforts are made. managed to keep the ships afloat for considerable periods of time and managed to save most of their crews, ultimately the tae-ho and her fate confirm a very important lesson that most navies are forced to learn or are forced to learn. remembers violently at several moments. points during its story, which is that you can have the biggest, nastiest, most heavily armed, most heavily armored, most technologically advanced ship, but ultimately, if

your

crew isn't up to it, you really have nothing worth It is worth calling a fighting machine, so

always

remember to treat and

train

your

crews well and then both the crew and the ship will return home at the end of the operation.

That's all for this video. Thanks for seeing it. If you have any comments or suggestions for reviewing a boat, please let us know in the comments below. Don't forget to tag your question with Q&A if you want to leave a question for dry dock.