Minesweeping: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1955

 In a perfect world where everyone spent their time following the paparazzi who follow me around, you all would have learned not to take my complaints about my work schedule too seriously. The last time I did this, I was getting ready for a grueling week that did not, in fact, emerge, thanks to the timely deployment of my entire paid time off bank. But! In the last week I had split days off, always bad for my productivity, and an exciting variety of shifts that made it worse. I ought to be reporting this in a "view from thirty thousand feet" sort-of tone, in that the reason that I'm not posting my December technology postblogging this morning is that I started a new Baldur's Gate 3 run yesterday instead of working on it. But my excuse for that is tired, etc. 

On the bright side, I'm a little over half done, and have a long weekend for Easter followed by a vacation week. So! Don't cry for me, post-Peron Argentina set on a bright course of democracy for all.

Our current King reached the apex of his active naval career as the commander of a "Ton-"class minesweeper, one of the enormous class of minesweeper/minehunters built in the mid-Fifties. Timing is right for the ships, and the Prince is in the  news, even if it's hard to get a picture of him in his service uniform that isn't camped by Getty Images. Relevance, 1955-style! 

Shiny!

Or so I say, holding a poker face. In fact, as hard as it will be for visitors to this blog from the distant future to believe, we're in the middle of a global crisis brought on by an American attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran conducted in spite of four decades of acknowledged American naval mine warfare deficiencies. The Persian Gulf is narrow and shallow, its entrance strait particularly so, with Iran controlling its northern shore, and vast quantities of shipping, and in particular, oil tankers, pass through it. Warhawks in Washington have been pushing for an attack on Iran for this entire period, without much self-awareness in general (at this very moment as I write, an interview with John Bolton is up at Vox to the effect of "But not like this!"), but historically very conscious of these deficiencies and a solid record of trying to solve the problem with magic battleships. That is, "Littoral Combat Ships," and not "battleships," but "magic battleship" is more euphonious. 

How did we get here? Mine warfare is hard is how we got here.

By El Pollock, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40920793

HMS Bronington is moderately famous as the King's old command, and also for sinking at its moorings in the Birkenhead Docks after a two-decade career as a museum ship. This is a metaphor for something.

Behind that, the reason for this is that the Admiralty and various affiliated organisations procured 119 of them [the veterans' association did a better job] in a building spree in the 1950s. Somewhat incredibly, there were two other overlapping classes at the same time. Taken together, that is a great many minesweepers, more than enough to give the Prince of Wales a command without playing favourites too egregiously. 

Why so many? Mine warfare is war in an industrial scale. I am not aware of an official or scholarly history of the British mine warfare effort in WWII, but Hilbert Hardy's The Minesweepers' Victory is a self-published labour of love that will serve in lieu of the reader is looking and has access to a good old-time library. The issue is that minesweeping is hard, but also boring, and the title is, as the author points out,  misleading. Allied minesweeping forces did not "win" the minesweeping war. All of that effort only contrived to keep a congested set of channels open so that the east coast could be held open for the strategically vital coasting trade that brought construction materials and coal to London and worked the "engine" of the Thames tide that used to contribute more power to the urban economy than its steam plants in the old days, lifting waterborne cargoes up through the city and then down.

I can't stress enough here that the sea is big,  mines are small, and that demining is work for a mass mobilisation navy. 

CAPTOR mine armed with a Mk60 torpedo being loaded in a B-52
By Camera Operator: STAFF SGT. RUSS POLLANEN - DOD-ID: DF-ST-90-11649
,Service Depicted: Air Force Command Shown: F3211Operation / Series: GHOST WARRIOR,
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3331902

Much of the work of demining in WWII consisted of mechanical sweeps up and down those passages, accompanied by routine buoy marking to update merchant skippers. WWII contact mines were moored to an anchor, and laid on the bottom of a shallow channel. Sweeps work by cutting the mooring cable, after which the mine is detonated remotely by shooting it. Influence mines were originally laid directly on the bottom, and have a limited blast radius, which greatly constrained where they could be used and demanded careful navigation to deliver them a suitable location. This is why the discovery of a German magnetic mine on the tidal flats in 1939 was an accident waiting to happen and not a lucky fluke, and why influence mines were soon jiggered up with mooring anchors and cables, or releasable submunitions.

Gadgety influence mines are more expensive and complicated than moored mines, which is why the "Tons" were mostly built as minesweepers, but there was already such a thing as a "minehunter," and all Mine Counter Measure vessels these days are mostly "minehunters." The "Tons" already had provisions for minehunting contingencies in the form of non-ferrous aluminum framing an mahogany hulls, so as not to set off magnetic mines, but the fact that they had diesel engines, and latterly Deltics, suggests that acoustic influence mines were a less serious consideration. (On the other hand, towed noisemakers were a thing.) They were not, however, equipped for minehunting until 16 of the class were taken in hand for equipping with a minehunting sonar (Type 193). Again, kudos to the Veterans' Association for providing a lucid explanation of the technology of modern minehunting, which, in the 1950s, relied on a combat diver or lowerable demolition device at the sharp end. They also had "active rotors," sometimes "active rudders" for precision manoeuvring, which seems to have been where you put the screws on a swivel, with electric motors for quiet operation once in contact with the object. 

By Pilot25dmc - Toom photo myself.
Previously published: Not published., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77366692

As electronics is the thing in the Fifties, it would be nice to know more about the Type 193 now that the technology has moved on. It appears that a class of minehunters was cancelled in 1952 for lack of a proper sonar, and that by 1953-55 the Type 193 was in view, although not installed for almost another decade. At its  height, 1850 people including 93 naval staff worked at the Underwater Weapons Establishment on projects like this (which will be relevant next week, as this is the month that "Parkinson's Law" hit. Haha civil service is so funny!). Although the Type 193 is always credited to Plessey, so the work might have gone on there. They are gnomically described as 15 band short range active low frequency sonars, all those bands giving them "high definition," probably because of the need to match wavelength to weapon shape to get clear refraction spikes in the returns. I don't know. Does this sound plausible? As we've seen with the LP story, sound engineering is another of those "any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic" fields. There's more material available, admittedly at a high level of abstraction, for modern minehunting, which currently seems to be in the "I sure hope that RPVs and AI work out because there's not the hands to do it  manually" stage. 

Makes the prodigious Fifties expenditure on 119 minesweepers potting up and down the coasts of Britain even more amazing in retrospect. And just to put the fabulous Fifties in perspective, the Cold War section of the Wikipedia article on Plessey is illustrated with the picture of a single product, a Plessey branded Geiger counter. They were weird back then, but I suppose we're weird again today, and it isn't like we've stopped worrying about nuclear war. We just do it in an environment where a 119-ship minesweeper class is not a thing. Currently, the RN, which actually cares about mine warfare, has a class of just 7 MCM vessels, which is in line with the other NATO powers and quite a bit more investment than the USN has made.  Enough coverage to keep the Straits of Hormuz open, is, to put it gently, a utopian fantasy. 

Probably should have thought of that before we gave up on income splitting, incremental brackets, and family allowances, what? Or endlessly harassing the Islamic Republic of Iran. Tax reform, no performative beating on brown people. If these things were easy, we wouldn't have moved away from it back in the day.