Some of you said thank you. Some of you told us about your fathers and grandfathers who served. And some of you told us, very politely, that we got it wrong.

And a few of you were not polite at all.

So we went back. We pulled the action reports, the ship histories, and the original Navy records, and we checked every single claim. Yours, and ours.

The results were not always comfortable. In some cases, you were right, and we were wrong. In a few cases, you were wrong too. And in one case, the comments led us to a mistake that nobody had even pointed out yet.

This is that scorecard.

We'll start with the comment that got the most likes. And it's a fair hit.

In our video on USS Nevada at Cherbourg, we called her "the oldest heavy ship present." About ninety seconds later, we listed USS Texas and USS Arkansas in the same task force.

Bobfelli caught it right away. Texas, BB-35. Arkansas, BB-33. Both older than Nevada, BB-36. Mark Whitney put it more directly. Get your facts straight.

So, here are the facts, straight.

Arkansas was laid down in January 1910, and commissioned in September 1912.

Texas was laid down in April 1911, and commissioned in March 1914.

Nevada was laid down in November 1912, and commissioned in March 1916.

Not only was Nevada not the oldest battleship off Cherbourg. Of the three, she was the youngest.

And it goes further than that. All three ships came from different classes. Arkansas was a Wyoming-class ship, and still carried twelve-inch guns. Texas was a New York-class ship, with ten fourteen-inch guns. Nevada was the lead ship of her own class, and the first American battleship built with all-or-nothing armor.

So she was not the old lady of the group. If anything, she was the modern one.

Bobfelli, Mark, and everyone who replied underneath, you were right. That one is on us.

Next, our submarine video. The old S-44, and the night she sank the Japanese heavy cruiser Kako.

This one got hit from three directions. History. Footage. And air conditioning. And while we were checking them, we found something else wrong in that video. Something none of you caught. We'll get to that before the end.

First, history. Crazygame twenty-seven twenty-four, with eleven likes. The first Japanese heavy cruiser sunk by the U.S. Navy was the Mikuma, at Midway.

Here's what we said: "She was the first Japanese heavy cruiser sunk by the United States Navy in the war."

And here's Mikuma. Sixth of June, 1942. Dive bombers from the carriers Hornet and Enterprise caught her, and that evening she rolled over and sank. That's two months before S-44 ever fired at Kako.

So the Navy did sink a heavy cruiser first. It just used airplanes.

What S-44 can claim, and what nobody can take from her, is this. Kako was the first Japanese heavy cruiser sunk by an American submarine.

Crazygame, you were right. And the dive bomber pilots of Midway would like a word.

Scorecard so far. Viewers, two. Us, zero.

Now, the footage. This is the part that hurt.

Russ Gallagher. At one minute eleven, that ship capsizing is HMS Barham. Not a Japanese heavy cruiser.

He's right. We sank Kako using footage of a British battleship, sunk by a German U-boat, in the Mediterranean. Wrong navy. Wrong kind of ship. Wrong ocean. Three mistakes in one shot. S-44 did better than that with four torpedoes.

At nine thirty, a viewer who actually flew in them spotted a Neptune patrol plane. The Neptune first flew in 1945, and never fought in the Second World War. He would know.

At five-oh-five, the narration said, "The boats leaked at depth." And on screen, according to another sharp-eyed viewer, was a woman sitting in a lifeboat. He asked, fairly, what she was doing there. So did we.

And then there's this one, with ten likes. This video is about S-boats, yet not one picture of an S-boat was shown. There are literally thousands of archive photographs.

He's right about that too. So here they are.

This is S-44 between the wars, running on the surface.

This is S-44 tied up alongside her sisters, on the submarine tender Holland.

This is her crew, relaxing around the deck gun in Brisbane, within a few weeks of sinking Kako.

And this is her captain, Lieutenant Commander John Moore, being congratulated by Captain Ralph Christie. The Navy's original caption says he had just returned from, quote, "a very successful week of patrol activity." Which is one way to describe sinking a heavy cruiser.

Every one of these is a U.S. Navy photograph. Every one of them is public. We should have used them the first time.

Viewers, three. Us, still zero.

Last one from that video. One of you wrote that S-44 had after-market air conditioning, seen to by her skipper.

In the video, we said she had no air conditioning of any kind.

The Navy's own history of the boat describes her first war patrol, in the spring of 1942. She ran submerged by day, and surfaced at night, to let fresh air into, and we're quoting here, "the unairconditioned boat."

But she did get air conditioning. In 1943, during an overhaul in Philadelphia. By then, Moore had already moved on.

So. Air conditioning, yes. Seen to by her skipper, we couldn't find any record of that. And it showed up about half a year after the patrol that made her famous. Which is roughly how the Navy delivered everything to the S-boats.

We'll call that one a draw.

Viewers, three and a half. Us, one half. And we are not especially proud of the half.

As for that mistake in the same video that none of you caught. We haven't forgotten it. It's coming.

So far, you've been beating us. Badly. So for this next round, we went looking for the comments where you might be wrong.

We start with a question. Richard Cleveland, under our torpedo video. After the Navy finally fired dud torpedoes into a cliff, did somebody at the Bureau of Ordnance get fired?

One small correction first. It wasn't Admiral Nimitz at that cliff. It was Admiral Lockwood's submarine command at Pearl Harbor, in the late summer of 1943.

Now, the answer. No.

Nobody at the Bureau of Ordnance was fired over the torpedoes. Nobody was court-martialed.

The man running the Bureau through all of it was Rear Admiral William Blandy. His official Navy biography says he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, and we're quoting, "as Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance from February 19, 1941, to December 9, 1943."

Those are, almost exactly, the dates the torpedoes didn't work.

He went on to command bombardment groups at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. And after the war, he ran the atomic bomb tests at Bikini.

To be fair to him, the same biography credits his Bureau with the proximity fuse, one of the most important weapons of the war. The torpedoes were not the only thing on his desk.

Here's the contrast. Germany had its own torpedo crisis, in 1940. And in 1941, a German court-martial sent four of the officials responsible to prison. Six months later, they were out, and back at work in weapons development.

So, Richard. Nobody got fired. And in the one navy that tried, it didn't stick.

Next. Overkill five twenty. The Mark 14 was built by an admiral who had a monetary interest in the Navy using that torpedo. He should have been court-martialed.

We went looking for that money. We couldn't find it.

The Mark 14 was developed by the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport, Rhode Island. A government factory. Since 1923, by act of Congress, Newport had been the only place in the country designing, building and testing American torpedoes. There is no record of any officer making a cent from it.

But we think we know which admiral you mean. Ralph Christie. An MIT-trained engineer who had personally helped develop the Mark 14's exploder, and who kept defending it for most of 1943. His stake in it was pride. Not money.

There was money in this story, though. When the Navy needed more torpedo production before the war, New England's congressmen fought to keep the work in New England.

So no admiral got rich off the Mark 14. Rhode Island is a different question.

Point to us.

The same video drew another comment. The torpedo fiasco likely caused a hundred thousand American deaths.

We'll take this one straight. We could not find any historian who puts a number on it. What the Navy's own submarine magazine does say is this. Twenty-one months after Pearl Harbor, the last major torpedo malfunction was finally identified. And Germany fixed most of her torpedo problems in less than half that time.

The cost was real. But nobody can honestly count it, and we won't pretend to.

Next, engines. One viewer wrote that the Gato class had serially defective, MAN-designed engines that couldn't last a full patrol.

And before we could even get there, another viewer, klydon twelve ninety-one, replied. Just the ones that had the H.O.R. diesels.

Klydon is right. The Hooven-Owens-Rentschler engine was based on a German MAN design, and it went into twelve of the Gato boats. The rest of the class had General Motors or Fairbanks-Morse diesels, and those worked fine.

The Navy's solution was the one you'd use on any bad relationship. Get out at the first opportunity. The Navy's history of the submarine Harder records her, quote, "problematic double-acting Hooven-Owens-Rentschler main engines" being replaced with General Motors diesels, in a navy yard overhaul that ran into 1944.

That point goes to the viewers. Specifically, to klydon.

And finally. Escort destroyer. There are no such class of ships called an escort. And we are not the French.

Two things. First, our script says destroyer escort. Every single time.

Second, escort destroyers did exist. The Royal Navy's Hunt class were escort destroyers. Eighty-six of them were completed. And after the war, the U.S. Navy had both. Destroyer escorts, and escort destroyers, at the same time.

So the habit of putting the words in the wrong order didn't come from the French. It came from the British. And then, from us.

Point to us.

Scorecard. Viewers, four and a half. Us, two and a half.

We're catching up. Slowly.

Back to Nevada. Because that video didn't just get one comment section. It got a review board.

First, David Ford. When Nevada was at Normandy, she was using Arizona's guns.

That's a great story. So we checked it. Serial number by serial number.

After Pearl Harbor, three fourteen-inch guns were pulled from Arizona's wreck. According to NavWeaps, which tracks these barrels individually, those three went into Nevada's front turret in the fall of 1944. And the Navy's own history of Nevada says her barrels were relined at Norfolk, with trials in November 1944.

Normandy was June.

So the guns from Arizona's wreck fired at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Not at Normandy.

But. The same source lists one more gun. Serial number 41L3. It served on Arizona before the war, then on Nevada at Normandy. And today, it sits in a park in Phoenix, Arizona.

So, was Nevada using Arizona's guns at Normandy? Short answer, no. Long answer, one of them, and it's now retired in Arizona.

Half a point to David. And David, your other point, that the 1927 refit mattered less than we claimed. Hold on to that. It comes back at the end.

Next. Denise. You mentioned that HMS Glasgow was an old ship. It wasn't.

We never called Glasgow old by name. What we said was worse. Quote: "Every heavy ship in that force had been laid down before 1920."

Glasgow was laid down in 1935. Tuscaloosa, in 1931. And Quincy was laid down in October 1941. Two months before Pearl Harbor. Our cutoff was 1920. We missed by twenty-one years.

Denise is right. Point to the viewers.

Now, the German shells. This one is a group project.

One viewer asked how much a shell from those German 240 millimeter guns weighed. Another replied, and we're quoting, "About 530 pounds, according to Goggle."

Not Google. Goggle.

In our video, we said roughly 360 pounds.

NavWeaps' ammunition tables for that German gun put the coastal shells at around 310 to 330 pounds.

So Goggle was wrong. And so were we. Just by less. Nobody gets a point. Everybody goes home.

Then Joseph Black. The Nazi guns were smaller than the battery that shot at Wisconsin during the Korean War. This wasn't a duel. It was a massacre.

Two claims. The first, that the German guns were smaller than Nevada's? Correct. 240 millimeters against fourteen inches.

The second, that they were smaller than the gun that hit Wisconsin in Korea? The Navy's history of Wisconsin says that shell came from a 155 millimeter battery. The German guns were much bigger.

Half a point each.

As for whether it was a duel or a massacre. That depends on a question we should have asked when we made that video. Which German guns was Nevada actually shooting at? We'll answer that at the end.

And finally, twelve likes. The ship that wouldn't sink. The only battleship that got moving on December 7th. Nuked twice. Hours of Iowa and other ships firing on it. None of which could sink it. They sent in a torpedo bomber to finish it.

Let's check the Navy's own history of Nevada.

The only battleship that got moving? On the morning of the attack, Nevada was moored on her own, and, quote, "had freedom of maneuver denied the other six battleships along Battleship Row."

Nuked twice? Test Able, an air burst, in July 1946. Then Test Baker, underwater, three weeks later. Quote, "the ship survived the blasts."

And the end. Two years after that, she was used as a target off Hawaii. The Navy's official cause of death: "the cumulative damage of surface gunfire, aerial bombs and torpedoes, and rocket fire."

Two atomic bombs, warships, aircraft, rockets and torpedoes. And even then, the paperwork says cumulative.

Point to the viewers.

Scorecard. Viewers, seven and a half. Us, three.

So much for catching up.

Lightning round. Short comments, fast answers, and at least one radioactive fish.

Thomas George. After they nuked it twice, it was so radioactive that they X-rayed a fish by flopping it on the photo plate.

This is real. The official record of the Bikini tests has the photograph. Its caption reads, quote, "A radioactive puffy surgeon fish takes its own x-ray. Fish was placed on photographic film overnight."

One correction, for the pedants. Nobody X-rayed that fish. The fish was the X-ray machine. And it came from the lagoon, not from Nevada.

But the caption adds one more line. "The fish was alive and apparently healthy when caught."

Thomas is right. And that fish was very much not fine.

Point to the viewers.

Next, a debate in the replies. Minh Thu says the Japanese surrender should have been signed on Nevada, or on the Enterprise, and that the brass picked Missouri just because it was Truman's home state.

Half right. Missouri was christened by Margaret Truman, the President's daughter. That didn't hurt. But according to the Navy's history of Missouri, Admiral Halsey had made her the flagship of the Third Fleet back in May. She was already the flagship.

And Enterprise could not have made it. On the day Japan surrendered, she was in drydock, at Puget Sound, being repaired after a kamikaze hit. She had a doctor's note.

Then another viewer, ut000bs, replied. No fleet carrier went into Tokyo Bay, and the old battleships were there instead. West Virginia, Colorado, Mississippi, New Mexico and Idaho.

We checked the Navy's own list of ships present. Every one of those five was there. No fleet carrier. Two light carriers, Bataan and Cowpens, made it in. Fleet carrier, no.

And one more name on that list. USS Quincy. The cruiser we said had been laid down before 1920. She was in Tokyo Bay too, looking young.

Half a point to Minh Thu. A full point to ut000bs.

Next. Foolio seventy-seven. My home state. She should be a museum ship.

We agree. There's one problem. Nevada is lying more than fifteen thousand four hundred feet down, off Hawaii. Visiting hours are limited.

But Allen pointed out in the replies that you can still see USS Texas, in Galveston, once she finishes her refit in 2027.

Battleship Texas's own foundation says they're targeting 2027 for her grand reopening. So if you want to stand on the deck of a ship that was at Cherbourg, you can. Just not Nevada.

Point to Allen.

And finally, a shout-out. Pete Storz has left long, careful comments on four of our videos. Destroyer escort speeds. Battleship armor. S-boat build groups. Asiatic Fleet bases. Pete, we don't have a point for being consistently thorough. So we're giving you an honorary one.

We checked. Honorary points still count against us.

Scorecard. Viewers, twelve. Us, three.

And that brings us to the end. And to the mistakes nobody caught.

Earlier, we promised you a mistake nobody had caught. While we were checking your comments, we found two.

The small one first. In our S-44 video, after she sank Kako, we said, quote, "There were no escorts to counterattack. The submarine took no damage of any kind."

The Navy's own history of S-44 says otherwise. Minutes after her torpedoes hit, quote, "Japanese destroyers had started depth charging, without success."

Without success. But they were there. And they were trying. None of you caught it. We did, and we're telling you anyway.

Now the big one.

Our Nevada video was called, "The Written Off American Battleship That Won A Three Hour Duel With Hitler's Heaviest Coastal Guns." Those guns were Battery Hamburg. Four 240 millimeter guns on a hill east of Cherbourg. In the video, we said Nevada's first target was Hamburg itself.

Here's what the Navy's own records say.

The Cherbourg force was split in two. Group One was Nevada, with the cruisers Tuscaloosa, Quincy, Enterprise and Glasgow. Group Two was Texas and Arkansas. And according to the Navy's history of Arkansas, the first group would attack the port, while the second, quote, "concentrated on nearby Marine-Küsten-Batterie Hamburg."

Nevada was not fighting Hamburg. Texas and Arkansas were. Nevada was firing on batteries west of the city, around Querqueville.

And it gets worse. That phrase in our title, the three-hour duel? It's in the Navy's official history. Of USS Texas.

We gave Nevada another ship's fight.

So, all of the unfinished business.

David, you said the 1927 refit mattered less than we claimed. We said it gave Nevada the range to reach guns that outranged her. But Hamburg wasn't her opponent. And according to NavWeaps, Hamburg's maximum range was about 29,000 yards. Nevada's was about 34,000. Those guns never outranged her at all. And at Cherbourg, Nevada's group closed to 12,000 yards. Her guns could reach that before any refit. David, you were right. That's your other half point.

Joseph, a duel or a massacre? Neither. Nevada was straddled more than twenty times that day, and the Navy says she took only superficial damage from shell fragments. But the German gunners were good. One shell hit Texas's fire control tower and killed her helmsman. It was a real fight. Nevada just wasn't in the one we described.

Final scorecard. Viewers, twelve and a half. Us, three.

Twelve and a half to three. We lost. And we're fine with that, because this is what a comment section is for.

One last comment. A retired submariner wrote, the old boats get the most grief, yet lead the most history. My first sub was commissioned ten years before I was born.

S-44 was commissioned in 1925. In October 1943, on her last patrol, she closed on what she thought was a small merchant ship. It was a warship. She was hit, and she went down. Two men survived. They spent the rest of the war as prisoners, working in a Japanese copper mine.

The old boats get the most grief. They also carry the history. Thank you for making us get it right.