About this user
Name : Empress of Ireland
Screw the Empress of Ireland !
the Bismarck is a much better ship !
The Bismarck displaced over 50,000 tons and 40% of this displacement was armour. Such armour gave the Bismarck many advantages in protection but it did not inhibit her speed she was capable of 29 knots. Launched in 1939, the Bismarck carried a formidable array of weaponry 8 x 15 inch guns, 12 x 5.9 inch guns, 16 x 4.1 inch AA guns, 16 x 20mm AA guns and 2 x Arado 96 aircraft. The Bismarck had a crew of 2,200.
In comparison, HMS Hood (built 20 years before Bismarck) was 44,600 tons, had a crew of 1,419 and was faster than the Bismarck with a maximum speed of 32 knots. The Hood had been launched in 1918 and was armed with 8 x 15 inch guns, 12 x 5.5 inch guns, 8 x 4 inch AA guns, 24 x 2 pounder guns and 4 x 21 inch torpedoes. However, the Hood suffered from one major flaw she did not have the same amount of armour as the Bismarck. The fact that the Hood was faster than the Bismarck by 3 knots was as a result of her lack of sufficient armour. Within two minutes of being hit by the Bismarck, the Hood had broken her back and sunk.
On May 18th, 1941, the Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen slipped out of the Baltic port of Gdynia to attack Allied convoys in the Atlantic. Grand Admiral Raeder had already had experience of large warships attacking convoys at sea. Ships such as the Graf Spee, Admiral Scheer (both pocket battleships), Hipper (a cruiser) and Scharnhorst (a battle cruiser) had already been at sea but had found that their power was limited by the fact that they were so far from a dock/port that could carry out repairs if they were needed. Such a difficulty meant that mighty ships such as the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were loathed to take on a convoy if that convoy was protected by any naval ship. In 1940, both the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau came across a convoy returning from the UK to Halifax, Canada. However, the convoy was protected by HMS Ramillies and neither German ship could risk being hit by a ship that in other circumstances would easily be outgunned by both German ships.
This YT page is to celebrate the "Empress of Ireland"
On her first trip of the summer of 1914 the Empress of Ireland sailed away from her berth in Quebec Harbour bound across the North Atlantic to Liverpool, England. Fate, however, had disaster in store for the Empress of Ireland and in a veiling fog the collier, Storstad, was to pierce her hull and send the Empress to the bottom of the St. Lawrence River. The Empress of Ireland took all but 462 of the 1477 souls on board with her.
Today, the Empress of Ireland still lies in her resting place occassionally visited by those divers who brave the cold dark depths, the racing currents, and the myriad of posssible entrapments that exist inside her forbidding hull.
EmpressOfIreland
favorited
1 year ago
