When I was riding my bike this morning I got to thinking about steering. There are a lot of different methods of steering and ships of WWII were not very good at it. A rudder in itself is pretty primitive and not very effective when you are at close quarters. You could put your rudder at hard to port or starboard and nothing happened for quite a while. The ship’s speed also had a lot to do with it. I am sure that you all have seen a ships steering wheel. This is also known as the helm. These are little changed from the days of sail. Large, cumbersome and unwieldy. The major improvement is that you no longer have to manhandle it so that it no longer has spokes.
In addition power steering has been added to it in the form of a motor- driven aft steering gear room. The thing that has not changed is the response time from when you turn the wheel and when the ship actually starts to turn.
Add to this that the ship has to be moving for a rudder even to work. The faster the ship is moving, the faster the response to the rudder. But, in close quarters, such as when docking, you don’t want to be moving fast. The answer is, of course: Tug boats. Get it close and let the tugs do the work.
I mentioned speed control. That too was pretty archaic. On the bridge and in the engine room were these two devises known as the ships telegraph. They were connected to each other by a chain; much like a bicycle chain . There was a lever by which you could rotate the chain. This lever operated a pointer attached to what resembled a clock face. Except, instead of numbers it had words. At the top it said stop. Evenly spaced out on the right side were, slow ahead, half ahead and full ahead. On the left side were, slow astern, half astern and full astern. At the bottom was the longed for “finished with engines.”
So; How fast is slow, half or full engine speed? On a Liberty ship, about 25, 50 and 75 RPM. I think that I mentioned in an earlier blog that A liberty ship’s engine is located amidship with a long drive shaft to the propeller. No reduction gears, the propeller turns at the speed of the engine. Primitive but effective.
Today’s modern ships are all diesel. Big engines are connected to a reduction gear box that resembles somewhat a transmission. The captain really operates the ship from the two flying bridges. He controls every thing, the speed, the rudder, all from a control station the size of a card table. The romance is gone. He even has propellers called thrusters mounted on each side of the bow and stern so that he can actually move the ship side ways. It might be progress, but not much fun.
On the horizon lies pod propulsion. These ships’ diesel engines drive generators that power electric motors in pods hanging under the ship and connected to propellers. The pods can rotate 360 degrees making the ship very maneuverable.
Too much about the technical operation you say? Re-reading it I agree. Sorry, but I am going to post it any way.
Back to where I left off last week. We left our dock In Bremen right after 8 am with half a load of German armament heading for Bremerhaven where we were to pick up the other half. It was only about a six hour trip so we did not go to sea watches, leaving me free to be a tourist for the entire trip down river.
We passed the same almost total devastation all along the way. The Esser here had been an important submarine construction and resupply area and we had hit it hard and often with air raids. Toward the end of the war Germany was running out of aircraft and staging what they had left around Berlin. About the only resistance to our bombing runs was the anti aircraft emplacements and we and our British friends were making life pretty miserable for them also.
For some reason we seemed to have some kind of priority as there was a dock waiting for us. Our cargo was pretty well stacked docked side but as was the case in Bremen we had to use our own cargo handling gear to load as shore side equipment was pretty well destroyed.
I don’t know what you have read about the division of post war Germany to the allies but it went something like this. Immediately after the war a summit was held with the US, Britain, Russia and France[?] to divide Germany into four zones. These were supposed areas of reconstruction, re-education and re-entry into the world community.
The capital, Berlin, was also divided into four zones. Little did we know at the time, but we should have. Russia, It seems, had an agenda far different from what been agreed to at the Potsdam Conference and was about to show its true intentions, much to the dismay of the entire war- weary western world.
Anyway; were we had been in Bremen, we were in the US zone. But now, in Bremerhaven, and on the other side of the river, we were in the British zone. The major differences were two. The MPs were Tommies and much more inclined toward a friendly attitude toward American seamen than our own MPs had been; and the British had brought their pubs along to Germany. We spent all our evenings enjoying the warm companionship of these people and were sorry to leave them behind when we left.
See you next week, That’s a threat:
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