The sailors themselves called them “well very big light cruisers”.
With a hull length of 207 meters, the Worcester was longer than all ships of its class built at that time. Standing vertically, it would be 30 meters higher than the skyscraper on Kotelnicheskaya embankment.
That is, you can imagine the scale.
Full displacement - 18 thousand tons. The crew at the time of entry into service - 1560 people. This is the concept of "lightness" in the American way.
Worcester owes its unnatural classification to the London Maritime Agreement of 1930, which divided all cruisers into “heavy” (with guns over 155 mm) and “light” (with the main caliber up to 155 mm).
Indeed, with its impressive dimensions, this ship was armed with only six-inch main guns. With one small clarification: the new Mark-16 DP turrets (apparently dual-purpose, dual-purpose) provided the guns with a maximum elevation angle of 78 ° while maintaining the possibility of reloading at any elevation angle of the trunks. Automation and a new design of the shutter, in theory, made it possible to fire at a rate of 12 rds / min.
Six-inch anti-aircraft caliber.
Perhaps the most powerful anti-aircraft gun in history. For which 152-mm projectiles with a radar fuse were created.
The new turrets with enhanced protection, equipped with the Mk.27 radio range finder and separate ammunition supply lines (for armor-piercing and anti-aircraft shells) turned out to be noticeably heavier than the previous ones. Each Worcester two-gun tower weighed 208 tons against 173 tons for the Cleveland KRL three-gun tower.
The total number of towers increased to six, the length of the cellars increased, which determined an increase in the displacement and dimensions of the ship itself.
Designers and constructors saw the Worcester as a fast cruiser, writing out "eights" under a hail of enemy bombs and firing deadly fire on targets at all altitudes.
122 thousand "horses" on the propeller shafts. Speed and maneuverability - like a destroyer.
Armor protection - about it will be a little lower. In a number of aspects, "Worcester" was not inferior to battleships.
To help the powerful six-inch guns, a battery of auxiliary anti-aircraft guns of 76 mm caliber, which appeared in 1949, was attached.
Five twin installations on each side, one "twin" in the bow, near the stem, and two single guns in the ledges at the stern. A total of 24 barrels. With a rate of fire of 40-50 rds / min, these artillery systems could hit aircraft at altitudes up to 9 kilometers.
3 '' / 50 Mark-33. Installation weight - 14.5 tons. Max. elevation angle - 85 °. The mass of the anti-aircraft projectile is 5, 9 kg, by the way, eight times less than that of the six-inch main gun.
The Worcester-class cruisers had no more weapons.
But they had something else.
A new booking scheme optimized for resistance to air threats. For the first time, the total mass of the horizontal protection elements (decks) exceeded the mass of the vertical armor (armor belt).
In practice, this was expressed in the following values.
The upper armored deck was one inch (25 mm) thick, which served as anti-fragmentation protection and a barrier for detonating bomb fuses.
The next level, the main armor deck, was 3.5 inches (89 mm) thick.
For comparison: the thickness of the main deck of "Worcester" (excluding the upper one) was one and a half times thicker than both armored decks of the German TKR type "Admiral Hipper" (2 x 30 mm) of a similar size. Feel the difference, as they say.
According to calculations, its deck armor could not be penetrated by conventional 450 kg bombs under any conditions.
An armor-piercing bomb of this caliber (1000 lb., 450 kg) had a chance to penetrate the deck only when dropped from a height of at least 8000 feet (over 2 kilometers). Of course, in the absence of guided bombs, the chance of an aimed hit from such a height on a moving ship was close to zero.
What we managed to realize was only part of what was planned. Initially, the air defense cruiser project provided for the installation of an armored deck with a thickness of 152-178 mm!
At first, the Worcester's protection scheme did not include belt armor at all. But, by the time the final decision was made, the preference was given to the more traditional belt pattern. After all, no one canceled the close fall of aerial bombs, with the formation of a blast wave and fragments, and the prospects for an artillery duel with surface ships were still considered a very real threat.
An armored belt with a length of 112, 8 m and a width of 4, 4 m covered the compartments of the power plant from 60 to 110 shp. In its upper part, the thickness of the slabs was 127 mm, gradually thinning towards the lower edge to 76 mm. The ammunition cellars of the bow towers were covered by a narrow 51 mm underwater belt with a width of 1, 4 m. The cellars of the aft towers had similar protection, but with a thickness of 127 mm.
The thickness of the outer shell is 16 mm.
On the surface of the side, in the area of the towers, belt armor, of course, was absent. Protection of the turret compartments was provided by barbets of the towers themselves 130 mm thick, reaching the depth of the hull to the first platform at the end towers of the main battery.
The towers themselves (their rotating parts) in the frontal part were protected by armor plates 165 mm thick. The roof is 102 mm. The walls of the towers are 76 mm. Some elements (roof, rear wall) were one and a half to two times thicker than those of the KRL of previous projects.
The wall thickness of the conning tower is 4.5 inches (114 mm).
The total mass of armor (excluding the protection of the towers) was 14% of the standard displacement of the "Worcester" or, in absolute terms, 2119 tons.
In general, any wartime heavy cruisers could envy the protection of the "light cruiser" (and even many of those that began to be built after the Washington and London restrictions were lifted). And in terms of horizontal protection - its parameters came close to battleships.
Measures to ensure survivability are worthy of special mention. The Worcester project embodied all the accumulated wartime experience. Four boiler rooms and two engine rooms alternated according to the echelon principle. Each boiler was housed in its own insulated compartment. As in the heavy Des Moines, both engine rooms were additionally separated by six transverse fragmentation bulkheads.
The double bottom extended along the entire length of the hull, reaching in height to the third deck.
Keeping in mind the danger of weapons of mass destruction, the designers have developed and implemented a system of forced irrigation of the upper deck, towers and superstructure with water jets to clean the cruiser from radioactive fallout.
The operation of this system is demonstrated in the title illustration for this article.
Purely as a guess: if the Worcester designers took care of the anti-nuclear protection system, they could not help but understand the danger from the penetration of radioactive particles into the hull. The simplest and most obvious way of protection is to create excess pressure inside the compartments, as in all modern warships. Indirectly, these measures are evidenced by the absence of windows in the Worcester hull.
Armament, speed, protection … It's time for a short introduction to fire control systems.
19 radars
Three radars for detecting air and surface targets, two standard radars for controlling main battery fire in naval combat (Mk.13), four radar posts for centralized fire control at air targets (protected director Mk.37 with Mk.25 radar) and four posts with radars Mk.53 for fire control of 76 mm anti-aircraft guns. Also, each main caliber turret had its own sighting system with Mk.27 radar.
Before such a combat vehicle, stories about the German "wunderwaffe" fade away. Taking into account the characteristics of the guns themselves, the anti-aircraft fire of "Worcester" was something completely unusual, unlike the firing of naval guns during the Second World War. Although only a few years have passed since its graduation …
The only time the gleaming barrels of the guns wavered and were aimed at the enemy on the afternoon of May 5, 1950. While patrolling off the coast of Korea, Worcester's radars detected an unidentified aerial target.
- Single. Distance 50, azimuth 90, heading for ship.
The alarm sounded on the cruiser, the servants froze at the guns. The Worcester turned around, picking up combat speed. Three warning shots were fired from the main battery guns. However, the "enemy" was a British anti-submarine aircraft.
For the rest of the cruise, the cruiser got out of the water the pilots of the downed aircraft. Carried out the tasks of the radar patrol. And a couple of times he practiced shooting his magnificent guns at the huts on the coast. However, in this role, the Worcester's six-inch guns looked pale against the background of cruisers with an eight-inch main battery.
The second cruiser of the project, "Roanoke", never took part in hostilities.
Both ships served until the end of the 50s, after which they were put into reserve. With the development of anti-aircraft missiles, the need for their weapons has disappeared.
Hunter or Protector?
The Americans were furious with fat, deciding to build the "coolest" cruiser with a six-inch main battery. And they successfully carried out this venture.
The question of the prospects and place of the light supercruiser in the structure of the Navy was left without attention. Given that many officials already initially expressed doubts about the need to build such a ship. The first naval battles demonstrated minimal threat from high-altitude bombers to ships on the high seas.
The appearance of "Worcester" could be explained by the threat from the German guided bombs, if not for one fact. The official start of the project to create an air defense cruiser with a six-inch main battery came in May 1942, long before the first meeting with Fritz-X.
During the entire war, only one destroyer and two US tank landing ships were sunk by German guided bombs. Damaged KRL "Savannah". The British got a little stronger, but all these were episodic losses that did not affect the course of the war in any way. Fritz-X and Hs.293 posed a very minor threat against the background of the traditional air attack of the period (dive bombers and torpedo bombers).
How much did the appearance of the Woosters mean against the background of dozens of cruisers with five-inch anti-aircraft guns? More modest in terms of performance characteristics, but available in huge quantities. The Clevelands alone had 27 built by the end of the war (more than the remaining cruisers in the world), followed by the Fargo with an extended gun range, and the Juneau light cruisers, which succeeded the Atlanta.
As for doubts about their capabilities, the height of destruction of five-inch anti-aircraft guns was twice the calculated height of dropping guided bombs (6000 m).
Let's leave these questions on the conscience of those who made the decision to build obviously inadequate ships.
The outstanding size of the Worcester, on the contrary, is not surprising. It is this displacement (18 thousand tons) that a high-speed ship of the last century with a dozen six-inch guns and protection from most possible threats of that time should have had. All previous attempts to create a KRL within a smaller displacement were a deliberate compromise and led to stability problems.
The term "light cruiser" has outlived its time. Which Worcester is a solo hunter? It is a secure air defense platform designed for squadron operations. To cover connections from air attacks.
USS Worchester became a pointless military technical record. However, no one canceled technical progress and the development of technologies, which sometimes need to be embodied in the form of experimental weapons.
Another thought in this story has to do with the unusual ship defense scheme. As soon as the need arose, the designers changed their usual views on the location of the armor. By optimizing its scheme for new threats.
