Bring back the battleships?

Great Debates
241

Another story about the power of aircraft against the battle ship. The battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse were both sunk in about an hour and a half by a force of less than 100 Japanese bombers. The battleships had no air cover, but the PoW had the most modern antiaircraft system available at the time. It failed. The Japanese lost 3 aircraft. The Brits were on the open sea, expecting a fight, and had an additional escort of 4 destroyers.

The British were pretty dumb though – there was air cover available, and they declined it. They didn’t imagine they were so vulnerable.

242

The theoretical ship of the future which comes as close to a battleship as we’re likely to see is called an arsenal ship. Here is an overview of a proposed arsenal ship concept by the Federation of American Scientists.

The idea is something akin to how artillery fire bases were used in Vietnam, though obviously covering a much larger territory. Various ships and/or aircraft would be able to call on and direct the fire of the arsenal ship using their own sensor packages. The ship itself would be relatively dumb, though with a lot of comm capability. And the crew would be very small. In theory it might hold somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 VLS missile cells, loaded with antiship, aintiair and antisurface missiles.

The Wiki article suggests that the creation SSGN subs have put the arsenal ship concept on the back burner.

243

I guess it’s more a semantic question of what a battleship is; aside from size the defining characteristics of the Iowa’s as the last remaining BBs was 16" naval rifles and armor thick enough to take hits from guns that size, but a modern ship larger than a cruiser could be called a battleship. After all, the Soviet Kirovs were often called battle cruisers although they had nothing in common with traditional battle cruisers. The 16" guns and thick armor are anachronistic at least in that they’re not going to be making a comeback. I’m too tired/lazy to see if it was in this thread, but it’s a pet peeve of mine to hear that aircraft and aircraft carriers made the battleship obsolete aside from shore bombardment in WW2; more of Japan’s battleships were sunk by naval gunfire than by aircraft in WW2.

Besides the arsenal ship the USN has been dickering around with and cancelling plans to improve shore bombardment capabilities for quite a while, there was the 5" Extended Range Guided Munition which was supposed to be able to deliver a GPS guided round to a range of 60nm, and the Major Caliber Lightweight Gun which was an 8"/55 that was being considered to replace the 5"/54 as the standard gun on cruisers and destroyers.

244

Does that include submarines?

245

Not according to Wiki. Of 12 Japanese battleships:
5 were sunk by air attack
3 in surface combat (one is credited to a destroyer, which if correct must mean torpedoes)
1 by submarine
1 by unknown causes (an explosion)

246

What you’ll find with ships equipped with rail guns (maybe not the first ones) is that all those fancy planes become nothing more than clay pigeons to be shot down as they come over the horizon. Any missiles they fire get shot down just as easily. It is the planes that become obsolete because they can’t move fast enough to avoid the rail guns shooting at them. A small projectile at 20km/s makes kindling of any plane/missile it hits.

247

The thing is, unless better armor is developed, fast, all of those battleships are just more expensive kindling themselves when faced with shore-based railguns with a 200km range. A single gun hidden in an Iranian barn will be able to sink every single ship in the Persian Gulf.

The sea is much smaller than it once was.

248

Japanese battleship losses in chronological order:

Hiei – disabled so badly in the night surface action of Nov 13, 1942 off Guadalcanal by cruisers and destroyers that it was unable to even leave Ironbottom Sound by morning when it was finished off by air attacks from Henderson Field. Call if 50/50 air/surface action, but most of the heavy lifting was done by surface action.

Kirishima – sunk by naval gunfire by the US battleship Washington on night of Nov 15, 1942 off Guadalcanal

Mutsu – exploded at anchor at Hashirajima on June 8, 1943 from an accidental internal magazine explosion.

Musashi – sunk by carrier aircraft at the Battle of Leyte Gulf on October 24, 1944

Fuso – broke in half and sank when torpedoed by US destroyers at Surigao Straits on October 25, 1944 while passing the gauntlet of US naval vessels just before her sister ship the Yamashiro met her fate.

Yamashiro – sunk by naval gunfire from US cruisers and battleships at Surigao Straits on October 25, 1944. Interesting side note, 5 of the 6 US battleships that sank her were at Pearl Harbor but refloated and repaired.

Kongo – sunk by submarine torpedo by the submarine Sealion II on Nov 16, 1944

Yamato – Sunk by carrier air attacks while conducting a special attack (suicide) mission to Okinawa April 7, 1945. Famously due to the severe fuel shortages in Japan she was order to be sent with only enough fuel to reach Okinawa, but the base commander ignored the order and provided enough fuel for a round trip

Haruna – sunk at anchor at Kure by carrier aircraft on July 28, 1945

Hyuga – sunk at anchor at Kure by carrier aircraft on July 28, 1945

Ise – sunk at anchor at Kure by carrier aircraft on July 28, 1945. Note that all three of the battleships sunk at Kure this day were more or less sunk as derelicts; they didn’t even have the fuel to leave the harbor. For example Ise herself had been redesignated a fourth-class reserve ship on April 20 and towed to Onto Seto between Kure and Kurahashijima to serve as a floating anti-aircraft battery.

Nagato – survived the war, sunk at Bikini Island July 1, 1946 during nuclear testing

So you have 1 survived, 1 sunk by submarine, 1 lost to accident, 3 ½ sunk by surface action, 2 ½ sunk by air attack while at sea and 3 sunk more as derelicts rather than as proper battleships while at anchor at Kure by carrier aircraft at the end of the war.

249

Sitting at anchor without fuel does not equal “derelict”. They had crews and were maintained. According to this version, Huyuga, at least, was still mobile. It was run aground to prevent it from sinking a during the same air attack that sunk Ise.

It’s a bit questionable, though, whether Ise and Hyuga were still battleships, though, as they both had their aft turrets removed, flight decks added, and converted into weird and pretty useless hybrid battle carriers.

Also, Hyuga wasn’t even included in the Wiki list, as it wasn’t actually sunk during the war. It was put aground by its crew to prevent sinking after the air attack and AFAIK never moved again – it was broken up for scrap after the war.

There was another quasi-battleship that wasn’t on either of our lists. The Shinano was intended to be a third sister ship to the Yamato and Musashi, but during construction was redesigned as a carrier. Presumably it had a battleship hull, which didn’t do it much good as it was sunk during a sailing before it was even fully complete, by a submarine. Wiki claims that the 72,000 ton ship remains the largest ever sunk by a sub.

250

No reason – that is, no military reason. But, as David Szondy remarks:

I guess it all depends on whether you want to enjoy a long journey, or reach your destination sooner via a quick and uncomfortable one. Most travellers apparently prefer the latter, that (and not the Hindenberg disaster) is why you don’t see airships any more, they can’t compete with airplanes for speed.

251

Perhaps you are familiar with “stealth”.

I think you guys might be missing the point. If the deciding factor is being able to anihilate a target 100 miles away with a missle or hypersonic rail gun bolt, a better defense is to either be invisible or fast enough to either close and engage your target first and be out of the area before you can be acquired.

252

Sitting at anchor without the fuel to leave the harbor and being down-rated to fourth-class reserve ships doesn’t exactly make them proper battleships though. I didn’t mean to imply complete immobility on their part, rather a lack of enough fuel being available in Japan to ever leave port again. When the *Yamato * was sent to attack Okinawa in Operation Ten-Go three and a half months before the sinkings at Kure, she was only accompanied by the light cruiser Yahagi and 8 destroyers because she was considered the last operational heavy unit left by the IJN; there was no thought of sending the other 3 battleships as they were no longer considered fully operational. Hyuga was sunk, it was just run aground in shallow enough water to prevent it from going entirely beneath the waves. There’s an overhead photo of her here, a side photo of her here and a short color video of her immediately post-war here.

253

Towed decoy. Takes time to deploy.

254

No! Really?!

The point of the question was for Declan (since he pointed up the vulnerability of a battleship to a torpedo attack) to realize that a battleship, even the refitted Iowa-class ships, had similar torpedo defenses as an aircraft carrier.

Thus, torpedo vulnerability was not (IMO) a legitimate argument against bringing back battleships to active fleet service.

255

Stealth doesn’t mean invisible. Missiles aren’t invisible. But ‘stealth’ applies to any type of ship or platform.
What I’m saying is if it can be seen it can be, most likely will be, destroyed.

256

Yes and no. The carrier can stand off hundreds of miles from a threat to perform its mission. The battleship has to go in close, and because of the risk of subs, among other things, has to drag a support fleet along with it.

Mines would also be a significantly greater threat in shallower coastal waters where a battleship, but not a carrier, would have to operate.

Unless of course, they toss out the big rifles and put in rail guns.

257

What support fleet? The same one surrounding an aircraft carrier? Any capital ship has escorts. BB, CV, it makes no difference. If it is deemed necessary to have BBs, then providing adequate support fleets to go with them is also a given.

But yes, enemy subs can defend coastal waters much easier, letting a BB (and the escort fleet) “come to them” so to speak (making the search box much smaller) than having to sortie out into blue water to try to locate a hostile CBG.

That makes the sub threat higher for BBs than for CVs, but the individual threat posed by any torpedo is not necessarily higher for a BB than it is for a CV.

No argument there. Don’t mistake my debunking the “torpedo threat” against bringing back BBs as an advocacy on my part for bringing back BBs. I was just pointing out a spurious argument.

That’s not an argument I’m advancing, although rail guns are not as far-fetched as some here want to portray them. The basic technology exists and has been proven, it’s now a matter of refinement into more practical forms.

But BB-launched UAV’s could spot for improved smoothbore big-guns (or heavy rockets) firing LGMs. I say smoothbore because of higher muzzle velocity (greater range). And the ability of a BB to loiter off-coast and provide on-demand fire-support in a much more timely fashion than carrier-deployed aircraft (or even MAU-deployed) is not an invalid argument. But it’s not a good one, either.

258

Really.

I responded to the post while going through the thread, I did not finish reading the entire thread first. So someone got there later. My apologies for offending you.

259

Sorry. I should’ve tossed a smiley in there to show I wasn’t snarking. No offense taken, and sorry for the apparent snark.

260

This thread reads to me as similar to arguing that some of the German railway WW2 guns could still be useful.

I mean they could once funds dont matter, but the problem is they’re so specialised and expensive as to be obsolete for all practical purposes, even if specific uses can be identified. They had to do tons of mine sweeping to get the Missouri into useful range for its guns, one very cheap stealth mine could have made for a very very bad day.

Otara