Yup , but if you noticed up thread where I said that BB’s would come back as a class, but they would look nothing like the New Jersey with its nine sixteens, as well as there is no threat to justify bringing them back.
Declan
Thanks, and this is kind of what I meant about the reactivation of the Iowa’s. They look very scary and intimidating, and again I would not dispute their value at shore bombardment - but it’s pretty much flag-waving and sitting off of some country’s shores in the end. As you said, the reactivation cost wasn’t so bad compared to laying down a new cruiser from the ground up, but the cost of manning them was much larger than that of a new cruiser due to their age. I’m sure that designing a battleship from the ground up today would result in a much smaller crew requirement - but at the same time the costs of tooling up to be able to make heavily armored triple turrets, or 16" guns, or thick belt and deck armor would be very, very steep; they’re lost arts.
Very true, and it was much greater than the carriers of the '80s or today as well. As designed, the Iowa’s were intended to be able to take hits from shells weighing as much as a car and built to penetrate thick armor from other battleships. An Exocet, for example, wasn’t really going to do anything against a solid foot of steel, which was the Iowa’s belt armor. Compare this to say, the USS Stark which very nearly sank from a single Exocet hit. The ‘armor’ on modern warships if you can even call it that is very thin. Even against the most modern of anti-ship missiles from the USSR, the survivability of the Iowa’s from anything short of a nuclear blast would have been pretty amazing compared to anything else in the fleet. I mean when the Soviets designed the AS-6, they weren’t looking for it to penetrate very much armor before the 2,200lb warhead detonated.
If you ever get the chance to visit one of the museum battleships, it’s pretty sobering to walk into the bridge from an external bulkhead door and have to step over more than a foot of steel.
Oh god I loved watching that growing up.
Yes , but BB’s then could not have armor everyware, and especially the Iowa’s. The hood was most likely killed with plunging shell hitting the relatively paper thin armor on the decks, leading to the powder magazine.
Plus they are naked to Torpedos in the Mark 48 or 533 mm class, the USN has been coy about what protects the carriers from these sub launched torps, other than the attached submarines and the surface escort and embarked airwing. But the Battleship of the day was designed with taking a torpedo against the hull, not several feet under it. If enough water is displaced , the weight of the ship will break its own back.
Declan
Sorry but Billy Mitchell’s demonstration was incredibly contrived. Yes, a stationary battleship with no AA guns firing that bombers can leisurely cruise over and drop bombs on and there is no damage control on the ship - wow, it sinks! You may as well put a one inch hole under the waterline and watch it sink. Sorry, but while battleships were no longer the queens of the sea, the mantle of which passed to aircraft carriers, they were anything but obsolete. That message was kind of driven home by the first and second naval battles of Guadalcanal, Surigao Straights, the sinking of the Bismarck (which sank to - drum roll - surface ships including battleships), the sinking of the HMS Glorious (an aircraft carrier) to the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (battlecruisers!), Scharnhorst being sunk by the Duke of York (a battleship!), or… well there were actually far more surface engagements in WW2 than carrier battles, even in the Pacific where carriers were much more active.
Aircraft carriers had taken the mantle from battleships to be the decisive capital ship, but battleships served quite heavily and successfully during the war, they simply were not obsolete. Hell, even the US fast battleships served as escorts for the carrier fleets, they mounted a huge number of 20mm and 40mm AA guns as well as 20 5in DPs.
In WW2 they had to move away from any potential surface engagement at night, which opened huge opportunities for night surface actions. See for example Guadalcanal, there were 5 major surface battles and 1 carrier against carrier battle. Admittedly only 2 involved battleships mostly due to the unwillingness to commit them to anything but vital battles, but surface actions are surface actions, they involve naval fleets doing the obsolete and closing to gunnery and torpedo range and fighting it out, with nary a carrier airplane to be seen.
And well, carriers being everywhere at once and controlling hundreds of miles around them - well, tell that to Halsey when he fell to Japan’s Northern Force feint and went chasing Japanese aircraft carriers without pretty much any planes at Leyte Gulf. At least he opened up the opportunities for two surface engagements involving battleships - one of them in broad daylight!
I don’t think experiences from WWII are meaningful to this discussion - either way.
A lot has changed since then. Planes don’t need to fly over to drop bombs anymore - they can release their loads from dozens kilometers away and let it glide - and still hit with ten-meter precision. Thanks to satellites, drones and recon aircrafts ships as large as battleship are practically impossible to hide. Oh, and that pesky missiles - some of you seems to operate under impression that they are just like cannon shell, only flying further. Nope. During last half century we improved our technology of breaking armor quite a bit. Heck, top modern handheld anti-tank weapon can penetrate three feet of armor steel or more. Maybe Iowa belt could withstand direct Exocet hit. But it takes less time to fit Exocet with tandem HEAT warhead than to build battleship. Not to mention things like Storm Shadow or BrahMos, which could took it with single hit anyway.
There is a reason why only battleship sized ships in modern navies are carriers - you can keep them relatively safe far away within carrier group, and with they can still project force over hundreds of miles. Battleship don’t have that luxury and to engage in combat it needs to get within enemy range. And feet or two of armor is simply not enough to achieve suitable survivability today. Single frigate with displacement of 3.500 tons can score killing blow against 60.000 ton battleship. It’s a fact. That changed dynamics of naval conflicts and times of huge guns and heavy armor are not going back, unless we experience some civilization collapse.
Aye, but the lack of deck armor on the Hood was well known and worried about. She was stuck having to bear all of the misconceived notions by the British admiralty about battlecruisers from before WW1. In short, British battlecruisers were designed with speed, firepower, and armor in that order. The idea, which proved to be tragically and very, very wrong was that speed could make up for lighter armor. It was just a bad idea for a design, which was obvious at Jutland in WW1: 3 Battlecruisers lost to deck hits reaching the magazines
The deck armor of the Iowa was 6" for example, while the Hood’s was a mere 1", 3" over the magazines.
I don’t disagree at all about the lethality of torpedoes, but detonating the torpedo under the keel did date back to WW2. Both the US and Germany used magnetic detonators which were supposed to detonate the warhead under the keel, but they were plagued with problems. They would frequently detonate early (which often made it appear that a hit had been made), and depth keeping at least on US torpedoes was fucked up. Torpedoes would run much deeper than they were set to, so sometimes the twitchy magnetic detonator wouldn’t go off because the torpedo was running far too deep. Once the problem was identified, both navies went to contact detonators - but that was just the beginning of the troubles to fix the USNs Mk 14 torpedo, the contact detonator would frequently go dud. Ironically the best angled shots were the most likely to crush the contact detonator before it fired.
There are two points to be made with regard to this: the first is that you’re right that once your scenario of easily crippled battleships comes true, they become obsolete. But that point was not reached until very late in World War II, and then only when aircraft attacked battleships without air cover. It was never easy to sink a battleship – else Kurita would never have made it as far as he did at Leyte – and as I said, it is probably not until the advent of jet bombers that the battleship was becoming obsolete as an instrument of sea control.
The second is that just because battleships, and even that’s debatable, never dominated the sea with their firepower (they certainly did at Jutland), that doesn’t mean that they could not have, or that operations were not conducted with a view to what a battleship would be able to do if it did encounter an opposing force. Just as the various nukes scattered around the world could obliterate the planet, but don’t, battleships could duke it out on the high seas for naval dominance, but didn’t (or at least, not in World War II). For most fleets, a battleship in being was a valuable asset, and to risk it was necessary to have a valuable objective. Kurita had, or thought he had, such an object at Leyte, and but for the tides of war and twelve hours more time, Lee would have caught Kurita going back through San Bernandino Straight. We would have had a four vs. six battleship match, Kurita would have been annihilated, and there would have been no doubt about the utility of the battleship in 1944.
While I don’t dispute the rest of your assessment of how battleships would fare in modern combat, I would like for the record to point out that there’s ALWAYS someone stupid enough to blunder into the most unlikely military disasters. Not that we should base policy on having stupid enemies. Historically, however, people do inexplicably blunder into gun range despite having every reason to avoid it.
Gaudere’s law strikes again!
(it’s an abomination!)
Couple of misconceptions here. Battleships can be just as fast as carriers; the US Iowa class steamed 31-35 knots; carriers typically 33 knots.
On the armor, I went to find a citation; turns out modern carrier (Nimitz-class) armor belt information is classified. You may know something I don’t know, but I doubt it; I would be very surprised if a modern supercarrier had a significant armor belt.
The most recent class of carriers I can find armor stats for (from Wikipedia):
Midway class (1945 and following):
Belt: 7.6 inch
Deck: 3.5 inch
USS Iowa class battleships (contemporaneous with the Midway carriers):
Belt: 12.1 in
Bulkheads: 11.3 in
Barbettes: 11.6 to 17.3 in
Turrets: 19.7 in
Decks: 7.5 in
In addition to their dubious combat utility, the most damaging argument to be made against battleships nowadays is the enormous capital expense of building new ones. In their day they consumed national treasuries like nothing else, and we’d have to rebuild the vanished infrastructure to make more of them (where could we roll 19.7 inch class-A armor plate these days?).
Someone, I think it might have been Richard Humble, said that there have been many “ultimate weapons” in human history, but nothing looked as much like the ultimate weapon as the dreadnought battleship. What could be more menacing then a dark battleship bristling with huge guns lying just on the horizon?
They’re as dead as the armored knight, and nearly as romantic.
This is still Great Debates, not IMHO; although we’re in the forum for witnessing, I don’t suppose I imagined it would happen in the battleship vs. carrier debate.
Tell me, what was Billy Mitchell’s idea? That twenty years in the future, carrier planes would be capable of sinking battleships at anchor? I’d give him props for that (the British came up with it in World War I, actually). No, his idea was that the aircraft could defend the American coastline more effectively, cheaper, etc., than the surface Navy could – and he was wrong. He was also wrong in suggesting that aircraft could easily sink battleships, and would not be right until years later.
And consequently, the battleship’s decline as sole dominator of the sea went on another decade. In 1790, nothing could defeat a ship of the line but another ship of the line. By 1860, spar torpedoes were putting a dent in; by 1880, automotive torpedoes; by 1900, submarines and automotive torpedoes; by 1918, torpedo planes. And each of these weapons grew more powerful with time (well, not the spar torpedo), making the battleship more and more vulnerable. Fine, we’re agreed on that. But again: even in October 1944, at Leyte, the United States Navy, which had by then had two and a half years of wartime experience with progressively stronger carrier forces, thought that to reliably sink a battleship, you needed another battleship. That’s why they sent Lee to catch Kurita (and had previously planned for him to sink ISE and HYUGA in the Northern Force); that’s why Spruance wanted Lee to engage Ozawa at Philippine Sea six months earlier; that’s why ISE and HYUGA were so high on the hit list for the 3rd Fleet after Leyte.
So what did Pearl and Taranto prove? They proved the hypothesis, already uttered at least a decade earlier (and experimented with in U.S. Fleet Problems) that a battlefleet at anchor could suffer serious damage from planes. But why did the British bomb Taranto? The Japanese Pearl? Because the battleships anchored there were the sole tool of reliable sea control the Italians in 1940 and the U.S. in 1941 possessed! Coral Sea proved nothing (except that ships smaller than carriers could not operate were enemy carriers were present; there were no battleships at Coral Sea); and I wrote about Midway above. Spruance could deny the Japanese sea control, but he did not possess it himself either. In order to ensure that he could gain sea control in the face of the Combined Fleet during the Gilbert and Marshall campaigns, Spruance brought battleships, and was ready to use them in battle.
Again: is it so difficult to understand that an evolving role for the battleship, increasingly needful of protection, first by smaller cruisers and destroyers from enemy torpedo boats, then by carriers from enemy aircraft, is not proof of the obsolescence of the battleship?
I WWII, these were rare events. For example, in the Pacific, the only such conflict was the batlle of the Komandorski Straights-in which japanese and US Navy battleships blasted away at eachother (with little effect).
I remember visting the USS Massachusetts 9now at Fall River MA). This ship fought a brief gun battle with the (Vichy) French battleship JEAN BART (at the North Africa invasion, 1943). A 15" shell fired by the JEAN BART hit the forward turret of the MASSACUSETTS-it did nothing but make a slight dent in the turret.
So, it is paradoxical, that the batlleships were well-constructed 9to avoid damage from high-velocity cannon fire), but could be sunk by a single torpedo.
In the Battle of Komandorski Island, the link is to Vince O’Hara’s excellent summary of the battle, two American and two Japanese cruisers fought a daylight action. The next battleship was thousands of miles away.
I disagree. It was a proof-of-concept that a relatively inexpensive aircraft could locate and damage a big ship at sea. No, it did not instantly render the battleship obsolete. But it showed clear insite as to the direction things were heading.
It is difficult to understand. The battleship is designed to dominate the sea and yet it requires greater and greater protection from much smaller, less expensive threats - torpedo boats, submarines, aircraft, etc.
So what makes it different from the aircraft carrier in that regard? The ability to project force long distances. The TBF Avenger torpedo plane carried by Essex class WWII carriers has a range of 1000 miles. The guns on an Iowa class battleship has a range of 20 miles or so. The carrier battlegroup just has to provide local protection while the carriers aircraft can engage targets much further out.
So IOW, since the battleship can’t protect itself and can’t project force AND is ridiculously expensive, you are much better off just building a dozen smaller ships.
Yes, THAT is the whole point. The carrier battlegroup does not have to engage the battleship fleet on the high seas. They can sail within a few hundred miles and launch their swarm of torpedo and bomb laden aircraft and sink the fleet at anchor.
So no, the battlships shouldn’t have been scraped after Mitchels demonstration. And clearly the Iowas have had a useful service life up until as recently as the first Gulf War. And they look cool as shit. But in terms of the capital ship role they were designed for, they slowly became more and more impractical as soon as you could prove they could be hurt by itty bitty aircraft.
First off, you’re overestimating the effective combat range of a TBF. Second, I’ll try this once more and then retire concluding that you’re not reading what I’m writing: even as late as October 1944, it was the considered opinion and the tactical standard operations procedure to ensure sea control by destroying the enemy’s battlefleet by engaging it with your own battlefleet. Yes, the carrier could engage the enemy further away than the battleship. No, it could not reliably sink it, or barr a determined enemy from reaching his objective. This is what Leyte proved.
Good, we’re in agreement. Sadly, you seem to have ignored (just because you could, I assume) the point that while anything was vulnerable in port, only the enemy’s battleships were worth endangering all your carriers to hit them.
I hope you’ll stop cherry-picking my posts, or else I’ll call ignorance unfightable and slink off…
While I suppose in theory a single torpedo could have gotten lucky, in reality battleships were tougher and required multiple hits to bring down – the Americans were astounded at the toughness of IJN Musashi, for example.
But Musashi did go down, with enough effort. Admittedly, it required a major concentration of the world’s most experienced naval air, and took five separate attacks. And there’s a point to be made – had she had significant air cover – equivalent air cover – she would likely have survived. Battleships in WWII were effective if used in the right mix of fleet units. Like the tank, a weapon that had once been strategically decisive by itself became incorporated into combined arms tactics…one powerful part of a properly composed fleet, vulnerable when isolated. [By mid-war, tanks sent forward without infantry and air support were vulnerable.]
I love the old battlewagons, but I am unconvinced there’s a role for them today. It’s true that Iowa would survive any rubber boat filled with suicide bombers, and not even stop for a puny Exocet missile strike. But you could afford thousands of Exocets for a fraction of the cost of a battleship, especially if we’re talking the attendant costs of building a new one; and eventually Iowa would suffer Musashi’s fate. Yes, as part of an integrated task force, Iowa would live a lot longer and do more good; whether that would be cost-effective remains to be seen. And in a hypothetical equal encounter, the side with one battleship plus a combined fleet probably does not best the side with 10,000 Exocets (or however many is the equivalent cost) *instead *of a battleship, plus the same combined fleet.
That was total range. So lets say roughly a third to half of that as effective combat range.
I think you are missing the point. Here are the 9 Japanese battleships/battlecrusiers that saw action at Lyte Gulf:
Yamato - survived Lyte but ultimately sunk in by carrier based aircraft off Okinawa
Musashi - sunk by carrier aircraft.
Nagato - survived Lyte but driven off by air attack. Eventually used as target practice for nuclear bomb tests.
Kongō - ultimately sunk from damage caused by torpedo hits from the USS Sealion
Haruna - survived Lyte but ultimately sunk in by carrier based aircraft in port at Kure Naval Base
Yamashiro - Had it’s shit fucked up by torpedo hits and naval gunfire (woooo)
Fusō - blow’d up from torpedo hits from destroyer USS Melvin
Hyūga - survived Lyte
Ise - survived Lyte, later sunk by carrier based aircraft in 1945
Regardless of what the Navy thought in 1944, I have the advantage of 60+ years of hindsight. To me, in my uneducated opinion, the battleship, while certainly badass, is vulnurable to being destroyed by aircraft and smaller, far cheaper torpedo armed ships. In all fairness, I would have to evaluate how many ships were actually sunk or damaged by those ships to make a true assessment of their value.
But knowing what we now know of history, do you focus your research on building even bigger and more expensive battleships or do you focus on making naval aircraft and carriers more effective?
It’s like when the car was first invented. It didn’t immediately replace the horse and carriage. But you would have to be a fool to throw more and more money into technology to improve the buggy whip.
This can’t be true. Cite?
Well he is a little under on the BB and a little over on the CVN but he is close.
As to the Armor, the Enterprise has heavy Armor (8") and I imagine the Nimitz class does also. It is possible that is was upped to near the level of the Iowa class.
It’s important to realize that the best armor isn’t a few feet of steel. The best armor is a few thousand miles of thin air. If you can engage the enemy from hundreds or thousands of miles away with planes and missiles, then it doesn’t much matter how much steel you’re wearing.