How did destroyers protecting convoys operate in bad weather during WWII?
score:11
You are really talking not about seaworthiness, but about stability. "Together with the Hague Visby Rules, the common law provides that the concept of "seaworthiness" covers: the ship, its equipment and supplies, the crew, the vessel's suitability for the particular cargo and its suitability for the particular voyage or for particular ports".
If the physics worked as you think, the most seaworthy ship would be the Monitor - with almost empty deck. But she was one of the worst. For being stable, the ship needn't have small masts or no guns or no towers. Saying simply, she needs to have its center of gravity below its center of buoyancy. The larger difference means the greater stability.
Forget the stability problems. On the contrary, the gun warships mostly were made even TOO stable - because they need stability for better gun aiming. (Yes, sometimes even the large gunships had problems with stability, but these always were the cases of some mistake in construction or arms placement or/and the ship was already damaged.)
How can something be too stable? Easily - being stable, the ship can't react to the wave softly, by evading, as normal ships do, but she stands hard against the wave strokes. So yes, the gun ships HAD a problem in bad weather, but absolutely different one - even their hard boards covered by armor couldn't stand strokes of serious waves forever and periodically had to be repaired. (The armor desks fasting started to wobble.)
When convoys had bad weather, they were really really happy, for that meant they have to think about the sea alone. U-boats and planes were at once too far away or far below and therefore not dangerous. Merely ships changed their order for freer one and went farther from the shore - to diminish the danger of collision - the only real one in that situation.
Upvote:3
According to my calculation from this official list,
US navy lost 5 or 6 destroyers due to bad weather conditions, with total loss of about 1,300 people.
Upvote:7
During World War II, there were normally no U-boat operations during storms. WW2 vintage submarines required surface visibility to attack and had to be at periscope depth or above to attack. During a storm this was more or less impossible, so it created a temporary truce in which neither side could attack.
Large naval ships tend to be very sea worthy. As far as I know only one destroyer, the Truxtun, was lost at sea in the North Atlantic due to a storm and this is only because the crew mistakenly grounded her in low visibility conditions.
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