As soon as a .50-caliber round hits water,
typically it ricochets.
So it's highly unlikely that that would penetrate
any kind of steel hull.
My name is Adm. Jamie Foggo,
and I served in the Navy for almost 40 years.
When I retired, I took over as dean
of the Center for Maritime Strategy of the Navy League
here in Washington, DC.
Today, we're going to be looking at
warship scenes from movies
and judging how realistic they are.
King Kong covers his ears, not unexpectedly.
Hearing protection and hearing conservation
is a big deal in the United States Navy.
And if you're a gunner's mate
or anybody that's been on a ship
firing a small-caliber weapon
to a 5-inch gun, it's loud.
So no doubt the only damage we did to King Kong
was probably rupture his eardrums.
Now, a US aircraft carrier
displaces 90,000 tons.
According to Google, King Kong weighs 50,000 tons.
Now that's a heck of a lot of weight,
half the weight of the carrier, dropping on its deck.
But we make our aircraft carriers
to be battle-ready and battle-hardened.
So my money's on the carrier
as far as King Kong and his 50,000 tons
landing and not breaking through that deck.
It's not part of our tactical training in the Navy
to fight either one of those two creatures.
A lot of weapons used.
I see deck guns,
I see anti-submarine rockets,
more or less realistic.
Now, when they launch something called a Hedgehog
from the starboard side of one of the ships,
we don't have those anymore,
but some of our allies and partners do in Europe.
This is a weapon that's typically used against submarines.
We have a more sophisticated and modern method.
It's an anti-submarine rocket.
So typically a Mark 54 lightweight torpedo.
It's launched into the air.
When it hits the water, it separates,
and that torpedo behaves then just like a torpedo.
And the reason you do that is to go after a submarine,
not necessarily to go after Godzilla.
Godzilla grabs one of the ships and rolls it over.
That's pretty hard to do when you're talking about
tens of thousands of tons of displacement
and a hull form that is designed to take bad weather.
Now, for an aircraft carrier
that displaces 90,000 tons, highly unlikely.
For realism, pretty fictional here.
1 out of 10.
Cradle lowered.
All right, now ram the projectile.
Easy.
When you ram that powder, you ram it easy.
Real easy.
This is one of the most accurate movies
on how you load a 16-inch projectile into a 16-inch barrel.
That projectile weighs 2,000 pounds.
So you're essentially loading a Volkswagen Beetle
into the breech of that gun and firing it at the enemy.
And you notice that the projectile,
it's followed by these powder charges.
This was a very accurate representation
of how you load that gun.
There are spark-proof tools,
and everybody is very careful, because, you know,
that powder is obviously explosive and volatile,
and any mistake or any spark or any flame
could set it off and blow up that turret.
204 degrees, Calloway.
Sailor 1: 204 degrees.
Sailor 2: 204 degrees.
This very shiny brass device, that's a gun sight.
And that's to allow the gun captain to take a look out
and see the direction that he's firing in.
That's the way that we used to do it,
before we had these very sophisticated fire-control radars
and gun directors that are on top of the turrets today.
All right, fire in the hole.
I got a chuckle out of the fact that Tommy Lee Jones
runs toward the 16-inch gun turret just before it's fired.
We had on the battleships procedures
to prevent sailors from being topside
in proximity to those turrets when they fired the guns,
because the overpressure of the blast
blew him back, you know, a dozen or so feet.
And that's probably fairly accurate.
Even today, with our missile systems,
if you're launching from the foredeck of a destroyer,
nobody's up there when you're launching,
because there's going to be a lot of flash to bang
as the weapon comes out of the tube,
and you don't want anybody to get hurt.
I'd give it a 7 out of 10.
"Battleship" happens to be one of my favorite movies.
These are World War II-era ships.
They're not part of the active fleet anymore,
but these ships are made to fight.
And when you're on one of those battleships
and you have a belt of armor around you
12 to 17 inches thick
and 50,000 tons of steel to protect you,
that's pretty reassuring.
Drop forward anchor.
What?
The officer of the deck on the bridge
uses the anchor on the battleship
to avoid getting hit by some of the aliens' weapons.
Frankly, that's pretty hokey.
The amount of chain on a battleship or an aircraft carrier
connected to the anchor is pretty long.
It's probably at least 1,000 feet.
But we don't use anchors for that reason.
We use anchors to moor the ship in port.
And this is in the Pacific Ocean, which is really deep.
One thing that the viewers might not notice
is it's so powerful that the ship
actually moves sideways several yards.
When you fire a broadside, it can move significantly,
and you have to do a course correction there.
I'd probably give it a 2.
I think Hollywood took a little poetic license
on the anchor in this case.
Torpedo!
This clip is tough to watch.
Probably the greatest fear that any sailor has
is being stuck in a compartment filling with water
and being unable to get out.
The ship is rolling over.
Ordnance is exploding on board.
And if you get out, that's great,
but then you're going to jump
into the freezing waters of the Atlantic.
And you're still wearing your boots and your kit,
which is, if you're not a good swimmer,
it's pretty hard not to sink.
One of the enemies against their escape route
are these watertight doors.
The watertight doors are heavy,
and they're created to contain the water
that might be leaking into a compartment.
Or, if there was some kind of a catastrophic explosion,
the reason that they're heavy
is to contain that blast overpressure in the compartment.
Now, most doors on ships or submarines
have two kinds of latching mechanisms.
There's something called a latch or a dog.
We call it a dog.
And when you're in a normal steaming,
you just push the door shut,
and it latches the same way a screen door does.
In the event that you're at
a heightened readiness condition,
you will crank that wheel to lock that door.
And the only way to get it open
is to open it counterclockwise.
So you can imagine, you're at an awkward angle,
your hands are slippery
because there might be oil in the compartment,
there's water in the compartment, and you're panicking.
You know, it's a life-and-death situation.
You're trying to get out.
I think the realism factor here is a 10 out of 10.
Second torpedo to starboard beam!
Bearing 120!
Right hard rudder, hard over!
"Greyhound" is an absolutely phenomenal movie.
It tells and depicts with great historical accuracy.
The Germans are depicted in the movie
as deploying the wolfpack tactics,
and you see two torpedoes coming from different directions.
You know, that's more than one submarine firing,
and these tactics were extremely effective.
Belay that, belay that!
Meet her. Meet her!
Belay, meet her, meet her!
So, what you see on the bridge of the ship
is an attack on the destroyer.
You know, I think that was very realistic.
And you see the wake of the torpedo coming towards you.
The propellers do something we call cavitate.
They create bubbles as they're going through the water,
and that creates a trail behind the torpedo.
And so a sharp lookout can pick that up early,
and it gives the commanding officer an advantage
to conduct those drastic evasive maneuvers.
If it was nighttime,
a lot of times it's even easier to see the torpedo
because of the phosphorescence in the water.
It kind of glows as it's coming at you.
A lot of these torpedoes were electric-powered.
They had batteries and electric motors in them,
and they would go towards the target.
Nowadays, we have torpedoes that are propelled by fuel
and have a very long range.
And so it was a different game back then,
but in this case, absolutely accurate.
As far as the maneuverability is concerned
of that destroyer, you have to keep in mind,
this is not a battleship that displaces 50,000 tons.
These are lighter ships.
Nowadays a heavy destroyer in the United States Navy's
about 7,800, 8,000 tons.
The propulsion systems on these destroyers,
the engines and the propellers and the rudders,
are made for speed and maneuverability,
particularly because in the second battle of the Atlantic,
they were not only going after surface ships,
they were going after submarines.
And that means you've got to be able to turn on a dime.
The rounds that actually hit the water
or penetrate the water,
whether or not they actually do any damage, it depends.
As soon as a .50-caliber round hits water,
typically it ricochets.
If it does go beneath the waterline,
you'll lose velocity very quickly.
So it's highly unlikely that that would penetrate
any kind of steel hull.
But again, you never know.
So, he has to surface, because water's coming in.
And then while he's on the surface,
they finish him off in pretty much a brutal manner.
But you see what looks like anti-aircraft guns
that are lowered to the deck-plate level.
As this projectile went in and it blew up,
it may have caused secondary explosions.
First there's an initial boom, and then a massive boom.
There's so much oil and fuel and weapons
on board that submarine that, you know,
once it took that initial penetration of the hull
and those shaped charges went in, it exploded.
This movie gets absolutely top marks from me.
As far as realism, 10 out of 10.
Are we absolutely sure of our position?
Yes, sir. An exact satellite fix.
It's Her Majesty's Ship Devonshire
that thinks she is operating in international waters.
The bad guys have somehow interfered
with the navigation system of that ship,
and she's actually operating one mile inside
Chinese territorial waters.
Devonshire doesn't know that.
Now, that's not unrealistic in digital warfare today.
We just had a situation in the Black Sea
where somebody spoofed
the automatic information system
of a couple of NATO warships and depicted them
off the coast of Sevastopol in the Crimea,
where there's a Russian naval base.
That's dangerous activity.
This scenario is fairly realistic.
English is the international language for communication
in airspace or sea space.
But many times somebody on the bridge of a ship
may not speak English,
so we have other methods for communication.
We have flashing lights,
we have signal flags,
and we have agreements to avoid mistakes.
Sound the general alarm.
[alarm blaring] The ship has been overflown
by two Chinese planes.
We believe they have hostile intent.
The commanding officer directs a general alarm.
So that is a call to action stations, battle stations.
There's also a series of red lights that go off.
Typically on a surface ship at night,
you are in a darkened-ship status,
so there's very low light in compartments.
There are key points throughout the passageways
that are lit, but not necessarily red lights.
So there's a little bit of Hollywood poetic license here.
The unrealistic part of this scenario
is this thing that looks like a drill.
Penetrating the hull of a warship like that
will not sink the warship.
Now, in this case, the bad guys figured out
that by boring through the hull at a weak point
and going in along the length or along the keel of the ship
to go through several compartments,
and by that time,
HMS Devonshire was overwhelmed with displacement of water,
and it sunk.
So as far as realism, a 1 out of 10.
Sir, I'm picking up mobile bandwidth
low-latency transmissions. Could be a UAV data link.
You know, "The Last Ship" is a show
that I'm very familiar with.
In the clip, they talk about a UAV.
It stands for unmanned aerial vehicle.
So it's a intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance tool.
In the last decade,
we've seen UAVs evolve from just being a sensor
that takes a video or a picture
and sends it back to the mothership
to UAVs with real weapons on board.
Enable spy radar.
But sir, if the Russians pick it up,
they'll track our bearing.
We've got 30 seconds, then we shut it down.
Sir?
I gave an order.
The spy radar, that is part of the Aegis weapon system
or radar system on the ship.
And the radar that is looking out on the horizon,
over the horizon, in the air, and on land
for 100-plus miles is the SPY-1 radar.
That's the best radar in the world,
and it gives us essentially 100% situational awareness.
I had four of these destroyers at my disposal
when I served in Europe,
and they were absolutely terrific.
There's really two areas of the ship
that are areas where the ship is controlled.
One is the bridge.
So that's where you drive the ship.
That's where you control speed and rudder
and course and direction.
The real heart of the ship for fighting
is in the combat information center.
You see the sailors taking direction from their skipper
and carrying out that direction effectively.
What I like about the series
and what I like about the scene is
it's the calm professionalism that you would expect.
I give it high marks.
I give it, for realism and professionalism,
I give it a 9 out of 10.
General quarters.
Sound general quarters.
All engines ahead full.
Aye aye, sir.
[whistling]
You know, you hear whistle signals from the bridge.
In this particular case, these guys are at battle stations.
They want to get people's attention.
And in the Surface Navy today, tradition will have it that
when somebody wants to address the crew
over the general announcing system,
oftentimes the boatswain will blow his pipe
to get the attention of everybody.
Stand by to roll depth charges.
It speeds towards the submarine, the submarine submerges,
it drops a series of depth charges.
So those depth charges are in canisters,
they look like 50-gallon drums, on the stern of the ship,
and they were actually rolled off the ship
after a gunner's mate set the charge to explode
and set the depth that it would explode at.
You had to estimate at
how deep you thought that submarine had dove
after she went from the surface down to try to evade you.
And it was a bit of a guessing game, but, you know,
there are limits to how deep the submarine can go.
For historical accuracy, 10 out of 10.
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