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Early 1995 was difficult for NATO submarines operating in the English Channel. On 25 January, south of Portland, the Royal Navy Broadsword-class frigate Battleaxe collided with the German Type 206 submarine U-14. There were no casualties, but the frigate’s starboard propeller damaged two torpedo tubes and a ballast tank on the 22-year-old, 520-ton German submarine. The Battleaxe and her three sisters are being sold to the Brazilian Navy, which chose the 4,400-ton, decade- old, gas turbine-powered vessels over a quartet of decommissioned, steam-driven U.S. Navy Knox (FF-1052)-class frigates; the first to be banded over will be the Broadsword, which this June will become Brazil’s Greenhalgh.
Only three weeks later, the Portuguese Dapline-class submarine Barracuda (seen here moored inboard her sister Albacore in 1991) attempted to surface beneath a merchant vessel in the same general area as the BattleaxelU-14 collision. Again, there were no personnel casualties, and damage was limited to a periscope and the top of the sail on the 1,038-ton (submerged), French-built submarine. The collision may damage the already slim chances for a trio of replacements for Portugal’s three ncar-30-year-old submarines, which face retirement before the end of the century. Scarce acquisition funds already have been committed to the higher priority projects of modernizing three frigates and restoring Portugal’s mine countermeasures capability in a joint program with Belgium and the Netherlands.
duties. Other than the 130-mm guns on Russian and Chinese destroyers, the only larger naval guns are on two aged Dutch- built cruisers in the Peruvian Navy. Shown here are the Iowa and Wisconsin (BB-64), moored at Philadelphia; the New Jersey (BB-62) and Missouri (BB-63) are in storage at Bremerton, Washington.
in Desert Storm—the Navy cited the $100,000 per year cost of maintaining them, the time it would take to activate them, and their large crew requirements. With the striking of the battleships, the fleet has a total of 150 5-inch guns (all Mk 45s) in service, not all of them on ships likely to be available for gunfire-support
On 12 January 1995, the Secretary of the Navy signed a notice striking the four Iowa (BB-61)-class battleships from the U.S. Navy. As rationale for disposing of the ships—which absorbed enormous sums of money during reactivations and modernizations during the 1980s and performed magnificently as recently as 1991
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Proceedings / May 1995