Replying to a message of Adam Flinton to Frank Haber:

 AF> From: Adam Flinton 

 AF> Frank Haber wrote:
 >> Curiosity question:
 >> 
 >> Thinking back to accounts of chasing down the Bismarck, etc., I
 >> remember
 AF> being
 >> struck by the fact that the ?Hood, was it, had to stop chasing because
 >> it was running out of fuel.  I also seem to remember that it had only
 >> been steaming 1000 mi. or so. So, 

The Hood had to stop chasing the Bismarck because Bismarck sank her.

 AF> It wasn't the Hood she was a battlecruiser & they had good range as
 AF> part of their design......but the rest of the ships had got low on
 AF> fuel which is partly why the swordfish attack was a "last roll of the
 AF> dice".

Unfortunately for Hood and the sailors on her (three were rescued IIRC),
the battlecruiser design sacrificed armor protection in favor of speed;
couple of hits and she's out of the fight (unfortunately one of those hits
was in or near her after magazines, which went up and tore the ship apart).
 AFAIK Hood had no sisters.

Actually, while that last statement is true, the basic reason for it is
that the British ships were too far behind Bismarck to catch her before she
came under the umbrella of land based German aircraft.  If memory serves,
Bismarck was just 24 hours from such air protection.

FWIW, there was a U-boat there too, but it was returning from its mission
and was out of torpedoes.

 >> o Was fuel consumption so high at flank speed that a battleship
 >> couldn't
 AF> carry
 >> enough fuel for more than that?
 >> 

 AF> Yes & no. It depended on the battleship. The US & Japan had
long range
 AF> battleships because of the scale of the Pacific. The UK had shorter
 AF> range battleships partly because the Atlentic was more important to
 AF> us & partly coz we had lots of re-fuelling points round the globe.

One of the reasons for the Falklands existence as a British possession was
its use as a coaling station for British ships.  If memory serves, during
WW I there was a naval engagement fought in that area.

 AF> This mattered quite a lot near the end of the war where there were
 AF> combined UK/US task groups formating on Japan & the US fleet had much
 AF> better endurance than the UK one.

That's probably why they measure bunker oil (fuel) in tons rather than in
gallons.....  If memory serves, at standard speed an Iowa class battleship
uses several hundred gallons of bunker oil per mile travelled....  I don't
want to KNOW what it uses at 30 knots...
For comparison purposes, the Union Pacific Railroad maintains a large steam
locomotive (a 4-6-6-4 Challenger) for PR purposes.  It's based in Cheyenne,
Wyoming, roughly 500 miles west of here.  On a recent trip, that locomotive
went through 5,000 gallons of fuel oil to travel from Cheyenne to Omaha,
approximately ten gallons per mile.

 >> o One would assume that they'd have to build for a 4-5000 mile range at
 >> cruise, at least?  Did flank burn 4-5x the fuel? 

 AF> Take the GGV'es which had in many ways the worst range of the UK main
 AF> battleships.

Weren't the KGV's (KGV, Duke of York, Prince of Wales, Anson and Howe) the
last of Britain's battleships (I'm ignoring Vanguard, which was launched in
1946, had inadequate air protection, had no sister ships, didn't see combat
and was scrapped about 1960)?  I've a picture around here someplace of one
of them (Anson, I think) being hauled off to the shipbreakers.  Beautiful
ship.

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