I feel like the 5in gun with its radar targeting system is relatively overlooked in its part for winning the battle in the Pacific for the US Navy. They’d accurately and consistently pepper the larger IJN ships with hits while dodging huge main gun shells.
I love the 5in gun.
the 5in gun was the best DP gun of the war
>USN realizes how great DP guns are and puts them on every ship they can
>other countries only start to move towards it after WWII
Any particular reason why?
Money.
Most navies probably didn't want to bother with designing and producing a DP gun.
Before the war no one really knew how crazy air power was and during the war most countries were using resources allocated elsewhere while running on war economy.
Only a hand full of navies were really building ships or retrofitting old ones by the time the war really got serious. Those are the ones that started throwing DP guns on their ships. So really the UK and US.
You can probably make an argument about ship doctrine.
Couldn't afford it
It's one of the things the Brits shared with the US as part of Operation Paperclip because they didn't have the capacity to build ships to utilise the technology even though it was well established with the 4in Mk.XVI guns on the Tribal Class
Mean Tizard, not Paperclip
most navies used dedicated AA and dedicated surface guns, since the conventional wisdom is that a gun that does both will be worse at either job
the japanese actually invented the DP gun first, with their 5in gun being the originator, but its AA performance was poor and was an surface gun in practice
when the war rolled around, the US quickly discovered that the 5in gun was better at AA than most actual purpose built AA guns while also being one of the best surface guns at the same time, so they rushed to have as many of them available as possible
it wasnt until after the war that everyone could fully swap over to all-DP secondary batteries since refitting was a months long process and the VT-fuze meant a minimum caliber of 3in and a preferred caliber of 5in to fit the fuze inside the shells
>Any particular reason why?
Only the US had the excess industrial capacity to mass produce such things in the middle of the war. Everyone else was desperately trying to replenish losses and repair wrecked vessels and supply ammo and parts for existing vessels. The US by comparison launched something like 600 new destroyers during the war, retrofitted virtually every ship with radar directed gunnery and also supplied both ships and weapons to all its allies.
the famous "Woken a sleeping giant and filled it with terrible resolve" quote from Yamamoto was because he has traveled widely in the US and fully understood the Industrial capacity that could be brought to bear in a long war. The US's war production of virtually all assets during WW2 was greater than all other belligerents combined. the sole exception being the USSRs production of tanks and field guns, but they only lived long enough to do that because of early war US aid in the form of trucks, aircraft, tanks, ammunition and food, without which they would almost certainly have lost in 1942.
The US started WW2 in 1941 with 8 aircraft carriers, lost 12 aircraft carriers during the war and ended the war in 1945 with 105 aircraft carriers. In 4 years the US built 109 aircraft carriers of various types, with 33 of them being full sized fleet strike carriers.
we put 5 inch dual purpose guns on literally every naval ship of ww2 because the US can afford to do shit like that and can produce things like 5 inch guns by the tens of thousands. Other nations simply cannot. Even britain had to compromise and place DP guns on only certain ships.
We also started spamming 6 inch dual purpose and 8 inch automatic guns by wars end, along with the 3inch automatics AA guns that repalced the bofors late war.
hold up.
Is it underrated? I feel like if you had made this thread asking what the best DP gun of WW2 was everyone would agree it's a radar guided, radar fused 5"/38
It's more that secondary guns like the 5"ers don't get much respect period. They get overshadowed by the 12-16" guns carried on battleships.
VT Fuze FTW!!!
Hello, what does DP stand for in this context please?
Work on your reading comprehension. Maybe then you'd realize when people are referring to aerial and surface/ground targets, they mean dual purpose.
I was leaning toward danger porpoise but dual purpose makes more sense.
DP=double penetration i.e. anal and vaginal at the same time
Still clinging to past glory ,mutt?
Past glory is better than no glory, bug.
let's see anon's country 5in WW2 guns