Talk:USS Gambier Bay

"Point Blank Range"

This is slang. Yamato advanced close, but not to "point blank range." Somebody should correct this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.30.245.96 (talk) 12:26, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

It was the US destroyers and destroyer escorts that advanced to "point blank range" and IMO that phrase makes sense. The concept of "Point blank range" for the Yamato doesn't make much sense. It was designed to hit ships from miles away. In fact one of the advantage of the US small ships getting to within point blank range was that they were so close that the big guns from the Yamato and the other Japanese battleships and cruisers couldn't be trained low enough to hit them. Although even the smaller guns of those ships were as big or bigger than the biggest guns on the Destroyers and could still sink them. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 22:55, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Supposed copyright vio

This is not a copyright violation. The source of all of this information comes from http://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/danfs/g/gambier-bay.html. And since this information is published by the United States Navy, all of it falls under the public domain. (As do all US Government works) Even if the text is claimed to be copyrighted on the other site, that claim is no viable. -- malo (tlk) (cntrbtns) 00:17, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

This is an old comment so I don't know if this issue is still even valid but just to clarify: plagiarism is plagiarism. If you insert some text in a Wikipedia article that you copied from somewhere else without quoting it that's plagiarism. The fact that it may or may not be a copyright violation is another issue but either way it's not allowed. You either need to say it in your own words (and provide attribution) or quote the original text. I plan on doing some work to this page to improve the references. If anyone knows what specific text was copied please let me know. If I discover some text that was copied from a source I will correct it. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 22:32, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Which flag?

After discussions, the advice is to use naval ensigns, not jacks - see Wikipedia:WikiProject Ships/Tables. The correct US flag has been selected by a template - see the US entry in Wikipedia:WikiProject Ships/Ensigns. Folks at 137 06:35, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Unclear para

The article says "As her fighters prepared to take off, they found intense antiaircraft fire of the entire task group covering their flight path. Captain Goodwin called the event "another shining example of the adaptability and courage of the young men of our country". Eight pilots of Composite Squadron 10 (VC-10) did take off to help repulse the aerial attack."

It sounds like the AA fire was coming from their TG, and that they somehow had to fly around/ over it. But that seems odd--why didn't the Gambier just arrange for the AA fire to stop while the US planes were flying over? And why did only 8 pilots (fighter planes, all?) take off? Mcswell (talk) 22:12, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

The paragraph seems clear to me. The task group thought they were being attacked by Japanese planes and so they all were firing their AA guns. As quite often happens in such situations the AA fire made it difficult for friendly planes to take off. As for "why didn't the Gambier just arrange for the AA fire to stop while the US planes were flying over" this would have been improbable or impossible with the communication technology of the time and the fact that they were in the heat of battle. For one thing if they were being attacked from the air there is no way they would take a "time out" so the planes from the Gambier Bay could take off safely. One direct hit from a bomb or torpedo could be enough to sink an escort carrier and better to risk losing several planes from friendly fire than a whole ship. Also, communicating such a request in the heat of battle probably wouldn't have been practical anyway. Friendly AA fire was just a fact of life that pilots of that time had to deal with. There are many stories of fighters performing Combat Air Patrol to defend carriers getting shot at and even shot down from their own ships during an attack by the enemy. I will look at the text more carefully though and see if it can be made clearer and also check with the references. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 22:49, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Just a follow up: I'm reading the book The Men of the Gambier Bay by Edwin Hoyt and I got to that part of the book and it confirmed what is in the text about friendly fire (although there are a couple of points I need to check more carefully to be sure). The author didn't comment about why the Gambier Bay didn't radio the other ships to ask them to stop firing I'm sure because he knows the Navy and how warfare was conducted at that time and knew it would not be something expected for a carrier to do. I'm going to add some references from that book and others so there are inline references (responding to a tag on the article) but I'm waiting to finish the book and also working in my sandbox for now and plan to move text back after I finish the book, verify against other sources, etc. If there are any sources people know about that aren't currently listed in the article please let me know. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 21:44, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Text from Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships

In the references there is a macro that says: "This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships." I just wanted to clarify what I think the Wikipedia policy on plagiarism is. I looked up some of the Wikipedia policy articles to double check and I'm pretty sure that I'm correct. So it is okay to copy small parts of text from public domain sources without quoting them. Especially if the text is about something that is widely accepted within a subject area. So (an example in one wikipedia article) if a source says "the definition in Physics for Force is F = MA" that's acceptable to just copy/paste (although putting an inline citation is still a good idea). But it still is not acceptable to copy and paste paragraphs or even more than 1-2 sentences. In those cases as with any other source the appropriate thing to do is to either re-write the text in your own words or put the text in quotes with appropriate attribution. If anyone knows what parts of the article were taken from the Dictionary please document it. I took a quick look at the Dictionary entry for the Gambier Bay and nothing jumped out at me but I didn't look at all carefully. If there are large sections of text that have been pasted from that source without quotation I'm going to fix that and either put it in quotes or rewrite it and in either case add an inline citation to the Dictionary. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 19:09, 13 May 2020 (UTC)