Talk:Johnston/@comment-85.76.32.212-20181227203021/@comment-2606:A000:1010:C1C7:E83D:EB48:7C3F:6409-20181228075650

I've read Lundgren book, parts of it are good, parts of it strike me as him working hard to contrive scenarios to make it theorically possible for the Japanese battleships and Yamato in partiular to contirbuted more then usually claimed. It's pretty clear she damaged Johston, the evidecne for that over Kongou is really strong, and she likely scored some hits on Hoel though other ships inflcited the acutally fatal damage. At the end of the day though she missed White Plains, and he oversells the effects of that miss as well it did not seriosuly impede the ship, power was only lost breifly because a circut breaker tripped from shock. I'm frankly not sure where the hell his claims regarding the damage being so bad she wasn't fit for further service are from.

Certainly not the offical damage report from the USN which discribles the overall damage as "minor", and this is no suprise as the idea that a few dozen kilos of HE exploding outside the side of the hull would somehow permantly damage a ship this size is baffling. There were escorts carriers that sustained direct hits by torpeodes with warheads literlaly ten times the size and were repaired without issue.

It's also kind of odd the USN would decide to keep a "permantly damaged" ship in storage for 15 years after the war and only finally dispose of her when they disposed of all the remaining war era CVEs.

I also remain decidely skeptical off his miracle 30,000+ yard 'side-swiping' hit to disable Gamiber Bay when an  cruiser diivison was pummeling her from about a third the range with multiple hits already scored however. It's quite covnient as well that this massive shell just happened not to penetrate the ship and instead inflicted a comapritvely piddly (if crtically placed) ammount of damage...

The later case also suffers from the fact that since several of the cruisers toward the front were sunk in the battle their detail reports from them were lost. I feel like this resulted in his work overall shunting them to the side and tending to try and assign more credit the battleships because he has the records for them. It just seems very improbable that these ships that were so much closer and firing so much more rapidly for so much of the battle did so little of the damage inflicted by his account.