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I wrote these as part of the comments section discussion of his USS Franklin video, I think they rather apply here at this point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tJh-XkVyYA

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As someone else commented upthread a bit, the Japanese used specialized highly trained damage control parties - but DC was limited to these parties. The US had those, but they also trained every crewman in at least basic DC procedures - if nothing else, “This is a fire hose. You find hoses in places marked like this. You deploy the hose like this. You turn the hose on like this. Now you do it until I’m sure you know it.” “This is a hatch. You keep these closed. If fire or smoke is coming through them, you close and lock them and the next one after it. You don’t leave them open.” Even simple things like that, when literally every man Jack aboard knows them at a minimum and to the same standards, no matter what their specialty is, you end up with, well, the astonishingly resilient and independent DC exhibited by the US Navy in the war. DC that was so good that basically if the Japanese didn’t sink your ship outright, there was a greater than even chance that the ship would at least stay floating long enough for the survivors to get off in an orderly fashion but shockingly often would be able to be towed or limp back to port. Assuming random Japanese submarines didn’t put torpedoes into your ship on the way back as insult to injury.

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Prior to and during WW2, all US sailors were trained in very rudimentary damage control. (I wasn’t kidding about “this is a fire hose, this is a hatch” - but even that was more than the Japanese reportedly got.) Sometime after WW2, the Navy decided this was no longer necessary and went to the Japanese model of specialist DC teams. After ForestFire, they went back to the WW2 standard of “every man will know damage control rudiments” and added to it.

The weird thing is that there’s more than a little evidence that the WW2 US standard for DC was learned from post WW1 investigations of the surprising survivability of ostensibly inferior German warships against the Royal Navy at Dogger Bank and Jutland. The US Navy realized that good DC and designing for survivability/with DC in mind on the German model could be extended and improved in ways the German Navy didn’t consider or had rejected to make their ships survive when the armor failed, the ship was on fire and the sea was pouring in. They took the idea and ran far far away with it; by the time of WW2, the German Navy would not (and did not) have recognized the end result of the ideas they’d set in motion.

Look into the story of USS Laffey (DD-724) - the only reason that thing stayed on top of the water long enough for help to get to what was left of the ship was because of US DC and to a lesser degree a design optimized for US DC. Judging by the number of US ships of all classes that somehow made it back to port after being pounded into what any other navy would have considered scrap (many of which were technically ‘inferior’ to counterparts, but somehow ended up surviving things that destroyed their counterparts), I think the title of the USN as Best Damage Control, WW2 is quite intact. While the RN was probably second best, it was not a close second.

Great post!

I didn’t know they had discontinued basic damage control training for all sailors, and only instituted it after the Forrestal fire...that certainly seems penny-wise and pound-foolish!

The damage control training I got in boot camp certainly left an impression on me. I recall one of the things they did (to impress upon us the necessity of making sure men were manned and holding the hose before turning on the water) was to take a fire hose, and with nobody holding it, turned it on. Watching that big brass nozzle fly around smashing on the ground and whipping through the air, well...even for young men whose minds were on getting liberty and chasing tail, that vision found its way in, and I doubt any of us could not imagine what that would do to you or your shipmates if it did that in a narrow passageway!

In the years since then, that remains one of my most vivid memories of Boot Camp, watching that uncommanded fire hose whip around in that bright sunshine.