Slight correction…
That would have been General Billy Mitchell.
Real quick, and then back to the BBs:
The Russian boats are also far less reliable (automation really doesn’t mean much, one way or the other: just something else to break, and fewer people to fix it when it does break), noisier, and have crappier sensors. Fast and deep-diving mean precisely jack if you’re broken, deaf, and easy to find. Good torpedoes are useless if you don’t know where to shoot them The Russian boats were pretty good, when they were introduced, but have fallen pretty far behind now.
Back to the BBs: The Yamoto’s shells were more inefficient ballistically, lower velocity, and arrived with less penetrating force than you would have expected, for all their great size. They were, however, well shaped for underwater perfomance in case of a miss (not a bad choice, as most shots would be misses). The trouble with this is that all AP battleship rounds have quite small bursting charges, and make rather poor substitutes for a bomb or mine near-miss.
The extra seven thousand yards doesn’t mean too much: At those ranges, the chances of scoring a hit against a manuevering target are very low. Now, the extra seven thousand yards (three and a half nautical miles) would take about seven minutes to close if one vessel is closing at right angles to the other, at maximum speed. Three and a half minutes if they were closing head-on at max bells. More time will pass if one vessel is trying to keep seperation at maximum (remembering that maximum range equals minimum accuracy).
For all intents and purposes, rate of fire and gunnery are the deciding factors. The whole idea behind a BB is to put the most weight of fire possible on your target. With a higher rate of fire you can correct faster, and once you’ve corrected, can lay down more shells on target. If there’s a 1% chance (for illustration) of scoring a hit with each shell, the ship laying down more shells of adequate capacity wins. As the Bismarks shells were certainly of adequate capacity, I’d say the Bismark has a better mathmatical chance of laying it’s shells on target, though the Yamoto would have had more fire cycles to refine their aim, offsetting the Bismark’s greater speed in adjusting aim. So it boils down to who can fling the most, the fastest.
All the above presupposes similarly competant gunnery. If one or the other has significantly better gunnery, then the sharpshooter wins hands down. Again, this is because they’ll be laying more heavy metal on the target than they are recieving. Once a BB takes a half-dozen high-calliber hits, their combat effectiveness begins to plummet, even if they can still technically fight back. Taking hits wrecks fire direction, loading equipment, tactical manueverability, and so on. It only takes a handful of such hits, and the odds swing decisively against you.
Oh, and don’t rule out random chance. When fate puts a joker in the deck, all bets are off.
It’s speculated, for instance, that the Arizona was killed by a bomb detonating a store of pyrotechnics outside the magazine, which secondary esplosion set off the magazine itself. The “bomb down the stack” theory has been recently decisively laid to rest by ROV exploration of the funnels on the wreck. Likewise, it’s believed by at least one expert (Nathan Okun) that the Hood was killed not by a direct hit to her magazines, but by splinters from a 38cm shell detonating in her engineroom, which penetrated the quite thin bulkheads seperating the magazine from the engine room. In either case, a quarter-second change in any direction would have made a world of difference.
Lady Luck always plays the trump card.
The thing about the 18" guns (which by the way were illegal - in breach of treaty limitations) is that it would allow the Yamoto to stand-off outside the range of any other battleship of the time - no matter how fast the Bismarck could fire, they wouldn’t reach their moving target. So if it comes down to a pure one-on-one battle, the Yamato must win.
This in inherently a matter of opinion.
That presumes that the Yamato could stay out of range while keeping Bismarck within range.
Wrong. This is a Great Debate topic. Moving it to IMHO ignores the body of facts (and opinions) that drive this debate.
During WW2, everyone thought that Yamato had 16" guns. If, say, Iowa had run into Yamato, it would have attempted to close the range, rather than using its superior radar fire control to stay at a distance.
I think you’re right though – the range of the engagement would dictate what happened, and of course, artificial what-if scenarios are just that. What-if. Other factors beyond armor and guns come to play.
Re: Russian Subs
The Russian submarine fleet is in shambles and is stuck at a late 80s soviet tech level, which compares to a late 70s US tech level.
Even with modern fire-control computers, scoring hits (on a moving target) at the extreme ranges of big naval guns is difficult.
Take the WWI battle of the falklands-when a British task force was in pursuit of a german squadron. The British opened fire with their 12" diameter guns, while in pursuit. Since the german ships were presenting the smallest possible target , the British gunners had a difficult time. it is estimated that no more than 10% of the British shells hit their targets. The british task force had about a 5 knot speed advantage, so the range was gradually closed. All of the german ships were sunk, but the british used virtually ALL of their ammunition doing so.
It was later learned (at the diasastrous Battle of jutland) that the british made shells had faulty detonators-many german ships were hit, but the shells failed to explode-they just broke up on impact.In additon, the British used an explosive (melinite) which was inferior to the german’s-many british shells would explode prematurely, and thus not do any damage to the enemy.
I would guess that the YAMATO was a huge waste of money-for what it cost to build, the japanese could have had a fleet carrier , which would have been worth far more to them.
I used a Janes and Naval Institute tables on gunnery and these sources from the web to formulate my conclusion:
http://www.warships1.com/Weapons/WNJAP_18-45_t94.htm
http://www.warships1.com/JAPbb08_Yamato_specs.htm
http://sunsite.tus.ac.jp/pub/academic/history/marshall/military/wwii/German.navy/german_hclass_bat.txt
http://www.wwiitechpubs.com/dock/nv-deutschland/nv-de-bs-bismarck/nv-de-bs-bismarck-br.html
http://64.124.221.191/okun_biz.htm
IMHO: The Yamato would probably beat the Bismarck without sustaining crippling damage.
How? Even taking into account the fact that the Yamato was a slightly less stable platform than Bismarck (it had a small flutter problem from being so manouverable for its size), the gun ranges and penetration speak decisively.
The ranges even though both had very long ranges, the Yamato could start penetrating the deck and conning tower at 32-30,000 yards. The Bismarck could penetrate the deck of the Yamato at 20,000 or so yards, also being able to penetrate most of the belt armor at the same time. At 20,000 yards the Yamato could shoot through anything on the Bismarck. That leaves a 10-12,000 yard radius that the Yamato could shoot the stuffing out of the Bismarck.
Now at 20,000 yards or less the Bismarck has nearly twice the rate of fire as the Yamato and at that point the Bismarck could start to win if it hadn’t been critically damaged before hand.
Since the Bismarck is faster than the Yamato, it would have to be the aggressor. If the Yamoto made a running battle of it (using only the aft turrent and steaming directly away from Bismarck), it would take almost 3 hours for the Bismarck to move through the radius where it couldn’t hurt the Yamato but Yamato’s plunging fire back could cause critical damage. During that time the Yamato could get off about 90 volleys of three shells or 270 shells. (At these ranges the Japanese were expected to lay a three shot pattern within a 500 yard circle.)
If the Yamato chose to fight with “S” twists and turns to unmask more of its guns while still slowing the Bismarck’s closing rate, I figured the time for Bismarck being in the danger zone drops to about a half-hour (closing rate of 12 knots or so). That would give about 15 volleys of nine shells or about 135 shells…the advantage of laying more shots on target outweighs the less number of shells fired.
Finally, if the Yamato just turns sideways and sits popping away at the incoming speed demon…the danger time drops to less than 10 minutes and only about 45 shells dropped.
The Bismarck could be popping away all this time and possibly playing hell with the upper superstructure of the Yamato, but that has very liitle chance of causing significant hurt to the ship.
So it boils down to can the Bismarck close the gap before Yamato critically wounds it. IMHO- no. The Bismarck loses.
Realize that during WW2 it was thought that Yamato had 16" guns. Knowing that it actually has 18" guns does change decisions, I think.
Battleships were not obsolete in 1941. Interwar naval doctrine held that BBs were the primary big weapon at sea. The Battle of Midway demonstrated the usefulness of carrier-based planes, and thus validating a new doctrine of warfare.
Nevertheless, in the modern age, BBs are truly obsolescent for a major naval power (like the USA). The New Jersey could drop an unguided shell on a target within 20-25 miles; a pair of FA-18E Super Hornets based on a carrier can dump assorted precision-guided munitions on a target within at least 250 miles (farther with tanker support). And ship- or sub-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles have an even longer range.
(BTW, a carrier is also big and expensive to crew. I believe a Nimitz-class CV has a ship crew of about 3,000 and a flight crew of another 3,000.)
Of course-- stupid Friday afternoon mistake-- grumble, grumble. Thanks!
True. The Russian obsession with speed and performance numbers produced the Alpha class. Which was a superstar performance wise but a death trap when faced against a much quieter L.A. class or the similar NATO sub. Don’t forget, some of the NATO countries have some lethally quiet subs themselves, and the Brits have quite the nasty torpedo too.
The Russians made lots of changes in the 80’s based on military intelligence from spies and moles(burn in Hell- Walkers), and much improved screws thanks to the sleaze who knowingly sold an illegal screw milling machine to the Russian during the Cold War. They got the quiet bug in a big way and the Acula’s were a step in the right direction. But too little, too late. The Russian Navy was built up with way too many 60-70 era subs. The obsession with fleet size did not serve them well.
Also they waited way too long to start building a real full deck carrier and develop their good fighters into sea variants. Those VTOL Yaks were sitting ducks.
Conversely, their shore based bombers were rightly feared. Those Backfires and the Russian anti-sea missles were nasty little buggers.
The Bismarl had Radar targeting gear for long range/nighttime fighting.
I do not believe Yamato did; or, if it did, it was very inferior to Bismark’s.
How much would Radar targetting improve hitting accuracy?
Drat. I wanted to ask that one.
Battleships were obsolete in 1941 when Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese aircraft. Heck, they were obsolete before then, but that was the first overwhelming example that their time was past.
What this “Midway” need for demostrating the usefulness of carrier based planes? Taranto? Pearl Harbor? Coral Sea? What were those?
Agreed!
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Yes, but its a hell of lot more useful, and in addition, they’re really focusing on crew-reduction tech for future ships.
As an aside – the British are designing a new larger carrier to replace their current ski-jump carriers. Its being designed by BAe with an automatic ammunition handling system. One would hope that it works better than the BAe designed automatic baggage handlind system at DIA. 