All language subtitles for Combat.Ships.S02E04.Destroyers.And.Cruisers.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-BLOOM_track3_[eng]

This time
on 'Combat Ships'...

...vessels armed to the teeth,
ready for battle.

These are incredibly
bristling with power ships.

What they couldn't outgun
they out-ran.

From the lone wolf cruiser
fighting on the high seas...

Controlling the sea lanes,
dealing with pirates.

...to the destroyer

that stared down history's
largest kamikaze attack.

Six airplanes loaded with bombs
smashing into a 2,000-ton warship.

They never should had survived,
but did.

Today,
armed with the latest weapons...

A fully autonomous
weapon system,

completely self-reliant,
and absolutely lethal.

...they are the backbone
of modern navies.

Combat ships. Fast. Effective.

The mission
is pure James Bond espionage.

Deadly.
- Japan is willing to throw the dice

to engage just about every aspect
of their military force

in a climactic, decisive battle
to stop the United States.

They have
changed the world...

Warships have been key factors
in global history

from the beginning of civilisation
to the present day.

...thanks to
clever design...

...raw firepower...

...and the heroism of their crews.

Destroyers and cruisers
are the quintessential combat ships.

No other types of ships
saw as much action as them.

Each has its own role
within a navy.

A destroyer's name
comes from its original purpose:

a torpedo boat-destroyer.

But by World War II
their role had expanded.

They build hundreds and hundreds
of destroyers during World War II.

The reason was they were good
at different jobs.

They were big enough
to have an impact,

small enough
not to be too expensive.

They had speed
and endurance

to move with a battle fleet,
and enough firepower

to protect it against any enemy.

You could arm a destroyer
against aircraft,

against submarines,
against surface ships,

and you could put mines on it.
It can do all these things

in the same mission.
No other ships could do that.

But to keep them fast
and agile,

they had little protection.

Destroyers were sunk
in large numbers by all sides.

They're expendable. Everybody
lost a lot of destroyers.

But one American destroyer
fought some of the fiercest action

in naval history, and survived:
the USS Laffey.

Laffey was commissioned in 1944.

Her skipper was 36-year-old
Commander Julian Becton.

Captain Becton was quite a man.
The crew loved him.

He could be real strict
on some of the discipline,

but the men knew if someone
was penalised for anything,

they deserved it.

Becton was a man with a code.

He worked his crew hard, insisting
on endless drills and training.

They tired of that when they were
moving across the Pacific to Hawaii.

You know, why are we having
all these drills? Well,

they found out
when they were off Okinawa.

On April 1st 1945,

the US launched the invasion
of Okinawa:

the largest amphibious assault
in the Pacific.

For the Allies, it was
the final hurdle

before a planned attack
on Japan's home islands.

For the Japanese,
it was a last stand

to protect their motherland.

USS Laffey was part of
a massive 1200-ship fleet

surrounding the island.

By now her crew was battle-hardened.

They had fought the Japanese
from the Philippines to Uwajima,

and witnessed
their devastating new tactic.

In the last few months
of the Second World War,

the Japanese knew they were losing,
and came up with this idea

of the kamikaze, the suicide pilots,

turning the aircraft into bombs
and simply crashing

straight onto American warships.
They achieved devastating results.

There's letters of kamikaze pilots
that are survived,

and they were not particularly happy
about dying for their country,

but that's what they had to do,
so did it.

In a final letter
to his parents, one pilot wrote...

I am seized
with an impulse to cry.

But with an effort, I hold them back

and will go resolutely.

Aircraft carriers
were the kamikazes' ideal target,

so the American fleet was organised
to protect them at all costs.

The way the US Navy operated
in late '44/'45

was that you'd have the fleet
and the carrier groups here,

and then you'd have outside them
so-called radar pickets, destroyers

equipped with radar whose job
was to pick up attacking enemy,

either warships or,
much more likely, planes.

It was
a dangerous assignment

for the destroyers,
with enemy aircraft flying in

from Japan's home island
only 340 miles north of Okinawa.

The first American ships
they were likely to see

were these picket destroyers,
and so the picket destroyers

took a terrible pounding
from the kamikazes,

and the destroyer is a small ship,
not designed to stand punishment.

The United States lost
120 destroyer types in World War II.

We lost 42 to kamikazes,

so kamikazes were the single largest
cause of loss.

Two weeks a
fter the invasion began,

on the 13th of April,

Commander Becton
received an ominous order:

Laffey was assigned
to Radar Picket 1.

Of all 16 picket stations,
number 1 was the one

they most dreaded,
because picket station number 1

was closer
to the Japanese home islands.

News of the assignment
spread through the ship.

Lt. Frank Manson, an officer
aboard Laffey, knew the danger.

None of the five destroyers
sent to radar picket since April 1

had survived. All had been sunk
or so badly damaged

that they could not be used
in combat.

On the 14th April,

Laffey took her position
at picket station 1.

- She was probably in one of
the most dangerous spots of water

on the planet at that time.

The crew waited anxiously
for two days.

Then, on the morning of the 16th
of April, all hell broke loose.

At 8.27,
suddenly the radar plotter

showed all kinds of dots, each dot

representing
an incoming Japanese aircraft.

165 kamikazes approached that day.

22 peeled off and targeted Laffey.

As the crew rushed
to their stations,

Becton turned his ships
starboard-side to the attack,

bringing all his guns to bear.

Laffey's main five-inch guns
opened up on the attackers.

They were the big cannon,
and there were three twin mounts.

Those guns could fire shells
to a range of nine miles.

With a good crew,

each barrel could fire
between 15 and 18 rounds a minute,

and on 16 April, 1945,
they fired them

as fast as they could load.

When aircraft
got closer to Laffey,

then the 40-millimetre
and 20-millimetre guns take over.

If you had to use
your 40- and 20-millimetre,

it means kamikaze's
getting awful close.

Incoming aircraft
travelled a mile every 15 seconds,

making them hard to hit.

You had to stand there
as that plane came towards you

and not budge, and fire away
and just hope for the best.

If you didn't get it, it got you.

Laffey's gunners
stood their ground,

downing the first eight planes.

Nobody was injured.
Nobody was killed.

The men were feeling
a little better.

Becton's tactics worked:
manoeuvring Laffey

so the side of the ship
faced the incoming kamikaze

made it a narrower target,

and gave him enough firepower
to repel the attacks.

Now, the catch is,
if there's an aircraft coming in

and another one here,
what do you do, you know?

Sooner or later, there was going
to be a co-ordinated attack

that would hit Laffey.

The ninth, 10th, 11th
and 12th planes

came in quick succession.

Attacking from different sides,
they overwhelmed Laffey's defences.

Off the island of Okinawa,

the destroyer USS Laffey
had been hit by three kamikazes

and one bomb in three minutes.

These planes hit and just smashed
into the deck, dropped bombs,

went cartwheeling across,
igniting fires,

spewing gasoline all over,
shrapnel puncturing holes

in the superstructure deck.

Just one direct
kamikaze hit could sink a ship.

Destroyers weren't built to survive
this much punishment.

The whole aft section of the ship
was dealing with smoke and fire.

It was chaos back here.

Captain Becton's
insistence on drills and training

now paid off. Damage control crews
began dousing the fires.

Sailors instinctively moved
explosives away from the flames.

Becton's drills were designed
precisely for that.

He wanted to drill his men
so thoroughly

that they reacted instead
of thinking first and then acting.

If you thought first before
you acted in combat, you died.

The crew
kept Laffey afloat.

But the last attack
had damaged her rudder,

locking it at 26 degrees.
She could now only go in circles.

Now, a ship's main defence
besides its guns

was the ability to manoeuvre.

That's gone now.

Four more kamikazes
approached from the port side,

where half of Laffey's guns
were already wiped out.

Two ripped into
her already damaged aft section.

Luckily, the front guns
were still intact,

and the gunners dispatched
the next three aircraft,

numbers 17, 18 and 19.

But Laffey's stern was beginning
to dip beneath the waves.

After the 19th kamikaze came in,

Lieutenant Manson
walked over to Becton

and he just said, you know,
"Captain, you think

maybe we should abandon ship?"

Captain Becton gave a quote

that I think ranks up there
with any quote in naval history:

he said, "I'll never surrender
as long as a gun can fire.

I'm going to keep fighting
until the last gun."

Becton later recalled...

The ship might sink
under us.

We might not be able to sail her.

But I wasn't going to abandon her.

Three more aircraft
took aim at Laffey.

Two hit the ship with bombs.

One more hit and the Laffey
was almost certainly done for.

But as the Japanese planes
swung around for the kill,

American Corsair fighters
shot them out of the sky.

Help had finally arrived.

Suddenly silence, and the men said
it was a deafening silence,

if you can understand that oxymoron.
But to them they had heard

all this noise of battle
for 80 minutes,

and suddenly... silence.

With American fighters
now circling overhead,

Laffey was safe
from Japanese attacks.

But she was barely afloat.

The last third almost looked like
a giant had come

and just sort of crushed it
in its fists,

just sort of twisted it around.

The gun positions in the aft part
of the ship were gone.

The two barrels
of that five-inch mount were twisted

at opposite ends.

Below decks
there was significant damage

near the magazines,
the ammunition magazines,

but the fires never reached it,

and Becton attributed that
to the supreme effort

of the damage control parties
in fighting the fires.

But survival
came at a high price:

32 men died and 71 were wounded,

almost a third of her crew.

Only just afloat, Laffey made it
back to Okinawa for initial repairs.

She's given credit
for shooting down nine aircraft,

which is kind of incredible.
But she was still hit by six,

and she was hit by four bombs
as well.

They never should had survived.

Against unbelievable odds,
she endured,

was repaired, and would remain
in service until 1975.

I always love stories
about courage

against incredible odds.

When you think of 22 individuals
purposely wanting to sink you

with their planes
and you stand up to that,

and you surmount that,
that's a great story.

It's a saga for the ages.

In World War II,

destroyers were small, cheap,
versatile combat ships.

But when a bigger punch
was required,

navies turned to their cruisers.

These were larger,
with more powerful guns.

Cruisers began as lone wolves,

built to patrol the world's oceans
on their own.

Cruiser effectively describes
the role

that a number of naval ships had,

and it was based
around an independent command.

They were ships that were designed
to be on their own.

A ship that you could afford
to lose, but a ship powerful enough

where it can support itself
in a bad situation.

One of the most famous
was the British sloop, HMS Gannet.

Gannet represents
the type of small cruiser

which was vital for the policing
of the British Empire.

Its main role was cruising around
the seas of the world,

protecting trade
and interdicting the enemy's trade.

In the 19th century,

showing up was often all it took
to persuade weaker powers

to fall in line.

A small gun and a British flag
were usually enough

to get regional players
to behave themselves.

The Royal Navy's too important
to mess around.

The cruisers'
intimidating tactics

became known as 'gunboat diplomacy.'

Ships like Gannet,
although relatively small

with a crew of 140,
were heavily armed.

She had three 64-pounder guns.

She had two seve-inch muzzle loads
on the main deck

that could move to either side.
She had two

five-inch breach-loading guns
on the poop deck at the stern.

So really quite a punch.

And when mere threats
were not enough,

these guns were put to use.

In 1881, a revolt began
in northeast Africa.

Rebels fought to push British
and Egyptian forces out of Sudan.

That revolt
sweeps across the country,

and finally ends up

at what effectively
is the last British-Egyptian toehold

in Sudan, the port of Suakin.

HMS Gannet was sent
to support the beleaguered port.

The range of Gannet's guns
were much bigger

than the range of anything
that the rebels had.

Gannett effectively
sat in the harbour

and used her her after-armament,
the five-inch breach-loading guns

to shell the Mahdi's forces

that had surrounded
and were investing Suakin

to the extent
that Suakin didn't fall.

It allowed that toehold
that then eventually

turned into the recapture
of Sudan for Egypt and Britain.

Together Britain and Egypt
would control Sudan

for another 60 years.

As cruisers like Gannet
policed the oceans for Britain,

they found themselves
on the frontline

in the fight
against the slave trade.

Britain had once traded slaves
heavily, but outlawed it in 1807

after intense public pressure.

You have the establishment
of the West Africa Squadron,

which consists of a number
of Royal Naval vessels

which are tasked with patrolling
the west coast of Africa

and intercepting slaving vessels
of other countries

as well as
the odd British interloper.

The anti-slavery patrol
was one of the most fraught,

difficult tasks the Royal Navy had
to face on the west African coast.

They had to patrol 3,000 miles
of very impenetrable coastline

where slavers
were making huge fortunes.

While unable
to completely stop

this well funded, gruesome industry,

the Royal Navy
did have some success.

The most obvious positive outcome

from the activities
of the West Africa Squadron

is the saving
of 150,000 African lives

which otherwise
would have been obliged

to survive the journey
across the Atlantic

and into enforced servitude.

The brutal
Atlantic slave trade only stopped

when slavery was abolished
in the Americas in the 1860s.

But the trading of humans in Africa
was not yet over.

Britain's anti-slavery efforts

do shift from the Atlantic world

into the Indian Ocean.

Along the east coast of Africa,

particularly in Zanzibar
and in Mombasa,

you had a number of sultanates

which, as a central point
of their economy,

were supplying huge numbers
of enslaved Africans

to markets in Egypt, in Sudan,

in Oman, and elsewhere in what
we'd now call the Middle East.

HMS Gannet
was sent to stop it.

She made regular
anti-slavery patrols in the Red Sea.

In 1887, Gannet's crew
spotted a suspicious ship.

They stopped an Arab dhow,
which was a small Arab trading ship.

In that particular case the dhow
indicated that it probably

was doing something they didn't like
by opening fire on the crew.

A journalist
based in Suakin

reported on the incident.

While chasing a supposed
slave dhow near Mersa-Halib,

the boat's crew were suddenly
attacked by a large party of natives

concealed in a creek.

Lt. Stewart was fatally wounded
and died on board.

The slavers
likely sunk their own ship and fled.

Undeterred, HMS Gannet
continued her patrols

until the slave trade ended
around 1900.

She survives as a powerful symbol

of the Victorian
anti-slavery campaign.

In 2009, British Prime Minister
Gordon Brown

gave President Obama a gift
of a penholder

made from a piece of timber
from the Gannet.

The old cruiser's battles
are not forgotten.

By the Second World War,
cruisers were huge, powerful ships.

With thick armour and large guns,
they were built

to take on any enemy.

They'd evolved into ships
that were incredibly strong.

Different ranges of sizes,

but they could take
a lot of punishment,

could deliver
a lot of punishment.

These mighty combat ships
were given new roles.

The British build cruisers
to protect shipping from warships.

The Americans build cruisers
to fight other warships

in fleet actions.
And all the world's navies

tended to fall into one or other
of those two camps.

In either case,
they were now heavily armed,

enough to do serious damage.

5.23am, D-Day,

June 6th 1944.

Off the Normandy Beaches,
an armada of Allied warships

begin a massive bombardment.

Over 500 guns were trained
on the German positions.

The soldiers coming ashore,
although they were deafened

by the gunfire sometimes,
felt much more confident

as they saw the shells
landing ashore among the Germans,

and German morale slumped
as these very heavy shells

began to come in and cause
huge amounts of destruction.

It made counter-attacking
and getting rid of the Allies

off the beaches impossible.

The Royal Navy cruiser
HMS Belfast

played a key role
in the Allied assault.

Her guns fired
one of the first salvoes on D-Day.

They didn't stop for two hours.

One soldier at D-Day
wrote about Belfast...

The cruiser sat
like a broody hen,

surrounded by drifters
and landing craft.

As we passed, her guns spoke
from time to time.

The operation
of Belfast's guns was a team effort.

In all, over 220 members of the crew
were involved

in sending her deadly
six-inch shells to the target.

The gun director crew
fed the target's range and bearing

to a nerve centre
in the heart of the ship.

This is a mechanical computer

known as
an Admiralty Fire Control Table.

It calculated the angles of train,
left or right,

and elevation, up or down,
for the six-inch guns.

This was state of the art
when it was put in 1938

and it's an analogue computer,

and an analogue computer is designed
just to solve one problem.

You can't reprogramme it.

This is designed solely to compute
where we need to point the guns

to have the best chance
of hitting the ship.

The crew fed the computer
information about the enemy position

from the gun director
to help make its calculations.

For a start, we have our own ship,
which is in this dial here,

and this tells us where we are.

And then from the director,
we get the enemy ship's angle to us

and also the speed it's going,
and the range it is from us,

and that is all fed in there.
But also we get barometric pressure,

wind speed and drift,
and everything like that,

because all of these add on
to effect the shell

when the shell leaves the barrel.

Once the computer
has all the data it needs,

it sends out the information
to the ship's six-inch gun turrets.

Belfast has four turrets,
each weighing over 190 tons.

There's two bits of information:
the training angle for the turret,

which comes into
the small compartment

over on the left-hand side
of this gun turret, and also

to each of the three
elevating positions

to get the correct elevation
for the guns.

This is the elevation dial
in B-turret.

For the operator here,

it's simply a case of lining up
the actual position with a gun

to the position
is required to fire it.

There's a lever here and a clutch,
up for up, down for down,

and for fine control,
the handwheel,

just for that last little correction

to line up the position of the gun
with the indicator position

coming from
the transmitting station.

Each gun was supplied
by a shell room

deep in the bowels of the ship,

protected by three inches
of deck armour.

This is A-turret's shell room.

The carousel
is independently driven.

It revolves very slowly.

So the guys
who are loading the shells

into these hoists
have always got a shell to grab.

The rest of the crew in here
are taking shells out of these bins

around the shell room,
fusing the shells themselves

and loading them onto the carousel,

and then they're manhandled
onto these hydraulic hoists

and they go straight up
into the turret itself.

Each type of 112lb shell
is painted a distinctive colour

so it can be recognised
in the heat of battle.

They are lethal projectiles.

The shells were sent up
to a well-drilled crew of seven,

capable of firing
eight rounds a minute.

The breach is opened.

There's a shell come down
this loading tray

that comes up the hoist
from the shell room,

slides down the loading tray
onto here.

That is then brought
in front of the gun

and hand-rammed
right up into the barrel itself.

The gunner
then rammed the cordite charge

that propels the shell
into the breach.

The tray's moved
out of the way...

...breach is closed,
a vent tube goes in there,

a little brass cartridge
full of priming powder,

breach is closed, and then the gun's
elevated up to its correct angle,

ready for firing.

The gunners themselves

didn't feel the full force
of the guns.

John Harrison was responsible

for the smooth running
of Belfast's forward weapons.

Inside a turret,
there's so much noise going on

that you don't hear the gun fire.
You might feel

a bit of concussion
as the gun recoils,

because it's got to move air,
that's the only thing,

a double thud, and just
a little compression of air.

But the rest of
Belfast's crew

was well aware of the guns' power.

I'm 87 years old now,

and I can still feel
the noise of those guns.

Everything would go flying around.
If you was in your hammock,

trying to get some sleep
after a watch during the night,

the blast from the six-inch guns
used to lift you up out your hammock

and drop you down again.

And that is mighty, mighty scary,
I can tell you.

On D-Day,
Belfast's guns were blazing.

Belfast and other surface
warships, battleships, cruisers,

destroyers played a key role

in shooting the British, American
and Canadian forces in

as far as
the beaches were concerned.

Naval fire support
was actually more accurate

than aerial bombing, and it played
an absolutely key role

in getting the troops ashore,
and also protecting Allied forces

from German counter-attacks.

The crew on Belfast
would witness the success of D-Day,

but the war was far from over:

more sea battles would have to be
fought and won,

and new combat ships were needed.

During WW2 there were
two main types of cruisers:

light, like HMS Belfast, and heavy.

The custom grew in the 1930s

of calling eight-inch
gun-arm cruisers 'heavy cruisers'

to differentiate them
from light cruisers

with six-inch guns or smaller guns,
and the largest heavy cruisers

were Des Moines, Newport News
and Salem:

spectacular, powerful,
beautiful ships.

Of the three
Des Moines-class cruisers,

only one survives:
the USS Salem.

Today this incredible ship
is kept alive

in Quincy, Massachusetts
by a team of dedicated veterans.

When they were built,
they were state of the art.

What they couldn't out-gun
they could outrun.

The ship was fast.

I mean, it could go circles
around a battleship.

The ship could probably do
about 34 to 35 knots.

35 knots is about 38/39 miles
an hour.

That's very fast, very fast.

But speed
was not her only asset:

Salem's main armaments
were nine mark 16 eight-inch guns,

set in three triple mounts.

The big thing was

the guns were automatic.
Much like on HMS Belfast,

sailors loaded hoists
with shells and powder cases.

These would be transported
up to the guns.

But from hereon in,
everything else was automatic.

Hydraulic cradles
lifted the powder case and shell

into transfer bays, which set
the two elements in alignment

behind the breach.

A rammer pushed the round
into the chamber

and the breach closed,
target acquired.

After the recoil,
the empty powder case was expelled

just as a new round
was put in place.

This could happen, non-stop,
every six seconds.

They could keep on firing
and firing and firing

and they'd stay on target
with the radar, whereas other ships

had to come down, reload,
clean open and back on target,

find the target.

Salem's eight-inch guns

could fire three times faster
than any previous gun that size.

With all nine firing, Salem
could send a barrage of 90 rounds,

30,000 lbs of steel, every minute,

hitting targets
nearly 18 miles away.

Once they start firing,
you could feel a ship move,

and they fired these guns broadside.
You could feel the ship move.

This modern cruiser
was fast and powerful,

built to take on
any other ship of its time.

But USS Salem was too late
to join the war she was built for.

There were gonna be
about eight of 'em.

They were gonna build this type.
The war ended,

this was still being built,
almost built, three of 'em,

of this type. That's the USS Salem,
the USS Newport News

and the USS Des Moines.

They scrapped all the other cruisers
to be built, they didn't need 'em.

They kept these three
because they were all done,

put 'em in service.
The only one to see combat

was the Newport News.
It went to Vietnam.

Though there were
no major ship-to-ship battles

in Vietnam, the Newport News'
powerful guns

would prove very effective.

The South Vietnamese army
became hugely dependent

on support
from offshore bombardment,

and whenever it got into trouble,

obviously the warships offshore
were able to provide artillery

to support the South Vietnamese
10, 15, 20 miles inland,

and they valued this enormously.

So the USS Newport News
and all the other heavy cruisers

that are being used,
this is just massive firepower.

They would fire on
particular military installations,

roads,
any targets that they could find.

The most crucial
of the targets was Haiphong Harbour

in North Vietnam.

In 1972, the North Vietnamese
launched the Easter Offensive,

where they tried
to attack South Vietnam,

similar to the Tet Offensive
of 1968, a major military offensive,

and President Richard Nixon
wants to respond,

he absolutely wants to retaliate.

Bombarding and mining
Haiphong was part of this response.

85% of all North Vietnam's imports,
including weapons,

came through this harbour.

Shutting it down would strain
the North's crucial supply lines.

The goal is to bring
the North Vietnamese to their knees

so they will negotiate
an end to the war.

So that's kind of the big strategy
behind that particular operation.

The harbour
was heavily defended,

with multiple shore batteries
on the Do Son Peninsula

throwing out six-inch shells
and surface-to-air missiles

protecting against aircraft.

To overwhelm these defences,
the US Navy assembled a task unit

of three cruisers
and two destroyers.

Among them, their heaviest piece
in the area, Newport News,

with its nine fully automatic
eight-inch guns

capable of delivering
an enormous weight of firepower.

The bombardment began
at 03.47 a.m. on May 10th 1972.

Newport News fired
77 eight-inch rounds

at its primary target,
the Cat Bi Airfield,

and its ammunitions and fuse stores.

As the shore batteries opened up,
Newport News and the other ships

hurled five-inch rounds
back at them,

completely overwhelming the defenders.

They hit their targets,

they do the job
they're supposed to do,

and they are taking
a lot of return fire.

That allows aircraft to get in
and lay those mines.

The C-mines shut down
Haiphong Harbour for 300 days.

It gave the US
some badly needed leverage

and helped bring North Vietnam
back to the table

to negotiate ceasefire
in January 1973.

USS Newport News proved her worth

three decades after she
and her sister ships were built.

But Vietnam was the heavy cruisers'
high watermark.

Heavy cruisers,
like a lot of things after Vietnam,

start to go by the wayside
for a number of different reasons.

These cruisers,
they're expensive as heck to build,

you need a lot of manpower,

and there is more and more reliance
on the missiles.

USS Salem
was the last of her kind.

Big guns no longer ruled the seas.

The age of guided missiles
had arrived.

In the mid-1950s,
missiles began replacing guns

as the main armament
on combat ships.

Today, this development has allowed
the fusion of multiple roles

into fewer,
more versatile vessel types.

Like the Arleigh Burke-class
destroyers.

They're the most numerous class
of American surface warship,

have good general purpose
capabilities, are very effective,

and they are perhaps the image
of the modern US Navy.

There are 67
of these ships in service today,

with more planned.

One of those 67 is USS Howard.

As a class of ship,
it's a guided missile destroyer,

and will provide air warfare,
surface warfare,

anti-submarine warfare,
strike warfare,

and able to provide those
across the globe.

Its diverse capabilities
have made it a jack-of-all-trades.

The Arleigh-Burke destroyer
is important to the US Navy

because it's able to operate
independently,

with a carrier strike group, or with
an amphibious strike group.

And because it's able to do
all of that,

it becomes the backbone
of the United States fleet.

Its incredible effectiveness

is down to an advanced system:
the Aegis.

This combat system uses computers
and radar to track and guide weapons

to destroy enemy targets.

A vertical launch system
can fire a multitude of missiles

against surface craft...

...anti-ship missiles...

...aircraft...

...submarines...

...land targets...

...and ballistic missiles.

It can even engage all of these
simultaneously.

A highly trained crew of 30
inside the Combat Information Centre

or CIC manages the Aegis system.

So we still have the auto-SMs
in there.

- Yeah.
- I wonder if those primers

still meet the requirements
of air defence, self-defence.

Aegis is designed
to help the CIC crew

assess the threat and determine
which weapon can best deal with it.

It's very smart, it's doing
all its calculations simultaneously

while our watch centres
are doing their controlling actions,

it's going to calculate
when and where

it's going to actually execute
the intercept of that contact.

It will actually select the missile
that's going to launch at it

to take care of that threat.

Key to the entire operation

is state of the art radar.

FCA2 Cruz
is our radar system controller,

and he's in charge of the spy radar.

the heart and soul
of an Aegis destroyer.

He is specifically looking out
200-plus plus nautical miles

to truly identify any aircraft,
potential threats in the area,

so without spy we can't launch
missiles, can't defend our own ship.

Once the target
is verified

and the correct counter-measure
is chosen,

there is a final control
before launch.

So FCA3 Duncan
is the missile system supervisor,

so he is the last line of defence
before we actually launch missiles.

He is maintaining the overall
inventory and control of missiles

before they leave
vertical launching system,

so a key player in combat.

As well as missiles,
USS Howard has

a pair of rotating cannons
known as CIWS to defend the ship.

These can fire 20-millimetre shells
at a rate of 4500 rounds a minute.

Close-in weapon system
is a weapon system

that's more of a short-range,
last line of defence.

It's computer-controlled,
radar-guided

to deliver rounds down-range.
Its primary mission

is to engage anti-ship missiles.
Secondary mission area

would be surface contacts.

Amanda and a dedicated team of technicians

must ensure the CIWS is ready
at a moment's notice.

So prior to the pre-fire checks
that we do,

we make sure all the tension
is set properly,

that all of these brackets
are properly secured...

...make sure our hero shield
is installed...

...ammunition feed belts...
clipped in properly

to the entrance and exit units...

...and the clips are properly mated
on the transfer unit.

So once we verify all the lockwire
and the pins in the brackets

are properly installed, that's
pretty much pre-fire checks done.

When CWIS verifies
an incoming missile threat,

it tracks the threat
till it's in ideal range,

and opens fire. It keeps firing
until the target is neutralised.

It's a fully autonomous
weapon system,

completely self-reliant,
and absolutely lethal.

It will shoot
until there are no rounds left.

Even if the ship is sinking,

this gun will defend the ship.

USS Howard is packed
with impressive hardware

and software.
But just like on USS Laffey,

drills and training are essential
to ensure everyone on board

knows what to do in combat.

Efficient teamwork
is the cornerstone of what we do,

what we train to, how we operate,

and without the sailors
working together with other sailors,

that's working together
with the gear that we maintain

we can't be efficient or effective.

Today,
the Arleigh Burke destroyers

help fulfil the roles
that once were carried out

by cruisers like HMS Gannet.

The Royal Navy in the 19th century
effectively was

the world's imperial policeman,
the super-naval power

that effectively
kept the law of the sea.

That role, post-Second World War
in particular,

has transferred
to the American Navy.

They're currently
the naval policeman

of the 21st century.

With advanced weaponry
and modern technology,

the need for the bigger cruisers
with large guns is all but gone.

But destroyers
have retained their role

as versatile combat ships,
feared hunters,

and fierce defenders of their fleet.

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