Trent Telenko Profile picture
May 8, 2021 16 tweets 7 min read Read on X
@DrydockDreams has put up another Coral Sea post modeling ships & US Navy CAG William Ault plus his disappearance returning from the strike against IJN CarDiv 5.

This thread goes into what the role of preventable HF communications failure played in that

...disappearance.

To do so I will be using screen captures from Squadron Leader A. L. Hall, RAAF, presentation "farewell to communication failures" reprinted in the Aug 1944 CIC magazine

This is a clip showing the beginning of S/F Hall's manuscript.

WW2 wartime military periodicals often have 'retro' or 'era specific' high tech buried in the articles that modern eyes will not understand.

3/
What that diamond & cross shape with chains between a plane, a ship and two ground antennas represents is a Rhombic antenna.

This antenna was invented by Bell Labs in the 1930's and was used extensively in WW2 era strategic HF coms & SIGINT.
See:
qrznow.com/the-mighty-rho…
4/
At the beginning of WW2 Australian government & military built a series of rhombic antenna point to point high frequency analog voice circuits (wireless telephone of W/T) to link Northern & Western Australia to the South East.
5/
This system brought Australia face to face with the problems of what we now call "space weather" living in the bad radio neighborhood of the "Great South Pacific Radio Blob."


6/
This radio system didn't pop into existence like Athena from Zeus' brow.

Australian Radio Research Board, established by J P V Madsen in 1928, worked together with the Australian civil service & got the American Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism to
7/
...put an ionosphere observatory in Watheroo, Australia.

The operation of Australia's HF wireless telephone system brought Australian RAB scientists face to face with the fact that the British military HF frequency prediction system pushed by Marconi scientist T L Eckersley
8/
...did not work as well as the the British civil radio predictions using the Appleton-Beynan periodic layer model.

E Appleton & T L Eckersley had been academic enemies of the worst sort since 1930. When the British ISIB was stood up in 1941 & copied by the USA. It used the
9/
...rival Newbern Smith model instead.

In Australia, it was all "needs must as the devil drives" & the devil was the "Great South Pacific Radio Static Blob."

Just prior to Coral Sea, Gen. MacArthur called a scientific conference to standardize HF communications in the SWPA.
10/
This standard was implemented for Coral Sea and all SWPA air & sea search elements. They had no problems communicating with each other.

This was not the case for CAG William Ault and the air groups on Lexington & Yorktown.
11/
S/L Hall obliquely refers to this inability of the SWPA to communicate by radio to USN carriers during the Battle of Coral Sea in his manuscript.

The inability of the SWPA & SoPAC to effectively communicate endured until the latter was absorbed by the former in Aug 1944.
12/
The inability of USN carrier groups in 3rd/5th Fleets to communicate to SWPA units lasted the entire war and played a major role in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

The US Navy, or course, blamed General MacArthur for this.

13/
S/L Hall's manuscript gives a very good idea of how CAG William Ault died.

Six Mhz was generally the best SWPA HF radio freq. during the daylight hours, but failed at dusk & dawn. But, you had to have planned alternate frequencies for where your plane was going & it's base.
14/
CAG William Ault was not so blessed.

Being outside the ground wave, facing a weather front, Ault wound up in a high freq. "skip zone" where no communications would reach USN CV's.

Like Hudson A-16-198 in S/L Hall's manuscript, Ault got lost, ran out of fuel & crashed.
/End

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More from @TrentTelenko

Nov 5
Western media & political commentary are dominated by "doomers" predicting short & long term outcomes on the 'inexhaustibility' of Russia's personnel & equipment pools, despite overwhelming evidence that Russia is struggling badly.

Reality:
Russia is in a crisis of loss. 🧵
1/ See: https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/confirmed-russian-battlefield-equipment-losses-1730799222.html
The following are the things I've been tracking for some time:

1. The Russians are losing an infantry division every week to 10 days in terms of soldiers at a rate of between with a 1,100 to 1,700 and associated equipment.

2/ Image
2. The Russian artillery is getting shorter ranged over time from losing the ability to make barrels and liners for 152mm guns. We are seeing literal WW2 122mm artillery pieces, presumably from North Korean stocks, in the Donbas.

3/
Read 15 tweets
Nov 3
This Warzone article is an example of one of the things that has been driving me bug house nuts watching the US Military deal with drones.

Recognizing the utter collapse of analytical rigor compared to the "Big Five"
1/
...procurement programs and the MLRS artillery rocket system in the late 1970's-to-early 1980's.

The post 1973 Arab Israeli War US Army understood the idea of "the logistical costs of a stowed kill."
2/ Image
The US Army kept the 105mm on the M1 in production so long because the depleted uranium (DU) 105mm "Long Rod" APFSDS could kill a early T-72 and you could carry 55 rounds versus 40 rounds for a 120mm gun firing a tungsten APDS or early DU APFSDS round.

3/ Image
Image
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Read 47 tweets
Oct 4
Thermite drones inside a bunker are all sorts of evil beyond burns.

My WW2 flame weapon research found that CO, carbon monoxide, fills the chemical bonds that O2 does in the lungs of air breathing fauna.

That means once CO hits those bonds in your lungs, you suffocate.

1/
What killed Imperial Japanese soldiers in WW2 "without a mark" inside bunkers was carbon monoxide poisoning, not a lack of O2.

Once you get enough CO in the lungs on the O2 chemical bonds.

No further O2 can get into the bloodstream and you suffocate.

2/ Image
I ran across that fact in a trip report of a US Army Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) medical doctor sent to Leyte to take blood samples from IJA corpses that died from flame weapons.

It didn't work out and the CWS used goats in bunkers hit with flamethrower weapons to get the CO poisoning medical data.

3/3Image
Read 4 tweets
Oct 4
You all realize that this Ukrainian thermite drone innovation just made every field fortification design by every army in the world obsolete?

1/
Any trench w/o overhead cover and any passage or firing slit that is big enough to shoot a crew served heavy weapon or vehicle out of is also big enough for a FPV drone spewing thermite to fly into.

2/ Image
Every field fortification manual ever written by every military in the world is obsolete and will have to be re-written with an eye to placing curtains, nets or wire screens across firing slits and doors to keep out small drones.

3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Oct 1
These appear to be long range heavy MLRS of 240 mm to 400 mm diameter rather than "ballistic missiles."

1/
Heavy MLRS like the Chinese PLA, 350 km range, PCL191 erases the distinction between short range ballistic missiles & guided MLRS.

It is unclear exactly what the real ranges range of Iranian Heavy MLRS are given Chinese technology transfers.
2/

The "missile" impacts have the classic artillery rocket impact ellipse with strikes being on the line of flight axis having more dispersal (long/short) that left or right of it.

3/
Image
Image
Read 7 tweets
Oct 1
Just...no. That's bad analysis.

One of the spaces @secretsqrl123 had with @RyanO_ChosenCoy present. He made clear Ukrainian FPV drones based on Hollywood camera multi-copters have a 50 km one way range.

The other issue is the disintermediation of drones from platforms.
1/
Image
"Disintermediation" means any shipping container or flat space on a vessel/vehicle works as a launcher.

A ISO container with 126 drones can be stacked on a 24 X 24 top level of a Chinese MGX-24 container ship and lob 72,576 drones in a simultaneous wave 50 km or more.

2/ Image
Another thing that works are simple racks in cargo aircraft, helicopters or boats.

The Russians are using simple racks in the Mi-8 to hold FPV drones in large numbers to engage Ukrainian boat drones or special forces craft with MANPADS or FPV's.

3/
Read 18 tweets

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