Well, thanks. I’m begging off this pointless discussion. You claimed grandiloquently that Billy Mitchell proved the battleship obsolete. You’ve been given countless reasons why that’s just not a historically viable argument to make. If I’m missing the point now, it’s because you prefer to shift the point instead of coming to terms with the problems of your argument.
Well…bye:rolleyes:
One thing I’m not clear on: you seem to be saying that a battleship is obsolescent today, and yet rejecting that Mitchell was accurate in predicting the obsolescence. Am I reading you wrong?
If I’m in the ballpark with condensing your view to those very simple statements, when do you believe that is was clear that the usefulness of the battleship was ending?
(I’m not sure I have a strongly held view on that particular question, but on the face of it, Mitchell seems to have been substantially right that the days of the battleship were ending, though I’m not sure whether he said that they were obsolete during World War II, or making the more limited argument that sun was setting on the days of the battleship.)
I should note that in modern use of battleships, I’m thinking of things like the Israeli use of tanks to snipe things like people in cars from miles away. The DD(X) series is a first generation of a new kind of warship. How would you develop it into a battleship, with modern technology? Adding spotter drones is obvious, of course. The fact that you can perform instant counterbattery fire means we could probably take out mortar launchers on US bases before they scarper off, as opposed to needing to launch planes… which generally take more time.
It didn’t actually demonstrate any of that, nor was it what was intended to be demonstrated. The target battleships didn’t need to be located, and it wasn’t intended to prove that battleships could be damaged. Mitchell was trying to demonstrate that battleships could be sunk by bombers under war conciliations, which the sinking most definitely were not. He was also advocating that heavy bombers could sink battleships at will, and that they could replace the navy in the role of defending US shores. One need only look at the history of heavy bombers attacking ships in WW2 to see the folly of this; heavy bombers pretty much never hit anything but the water due to the inherit inaccuracies of high altitude bomber in that era and the fact that they were dropping bombs on targets that were moving and actively maneuvering.
Actually this applies to carriers much, much more than to battleships. Carriers need large screens ships to protect them from aircraft, submarines, and surface attack. Battleships could take a hell of a lot more pounding by any of these than carriers could.
As Enterprise said, you are seriously overestimating the range of a TBF - by a factor of at least 4. Sure, an unloaded TBF could fly to another airfield to relocate 1000 miles away. 250 miles or so was pretty much its combat radius, anything much past that and they were risking bingo fuel trying to perform final visual location of their targets. See for example the Battle of the Philippine Sea, where the US strike against the retiring Japanese carrier force was launched at a range of 270 miles and 79 planes ate the drink returning home because the fuel tanks ran dry. Mind you, in the WW2 era, carriers could pretty much do nothing at night. Battleships remained very effective at night, even more so when radars became common and effective, which was pretty early on for the US. For example, the USS Washington barely visually saw the Kirishima when she sank her in November 1942 by using radar directed gunfire, and seeing her was the result of setting her afire.
You might want to actually take a look at your list. Only 4 of those battleships were sunk by aircraft, 2 of them in 1945 while they were essentially defenseless and sitting at port in Japan because there was no oil left to run them. Two of them were sunk by naval gunfire and torpedoes from surface ships. If you want to actually include the 3 Japanese battleships lost prior to Leyte Gulf, 1 was lost to an accidental magazine explosion while at anchor, and the other 2 were lost to naval gunfire and surface ship launched torpedoes. The result is 4 to 4 for carrier vs battleship/surface ship losses, dropping to 2 to 4 if the sinking of Ise and Haruna are discounted; they were sunk pretty much as derelicts at the end of the war.
If you look at all battleship losses by all combatants in WW2 more of them were lost to naval gunfire and torpedoes than were lost to aircraft. There were also many more surface engagements than carrier engagements during the war. So much for battleships being obsolete. They were no longer the queens of the seas but they were anything but obsolete. They were actually very hard to sink when compared to carriers which were pretty fragile. While she was one of the largest battleships ever built, consider that the Musashi took 20 torpedo hits, 17 bomb hits and 18 bomb near misses to sink. That’s massive overkill for what it took to sink a carrier.
Carriers were so fragile that the US was reduced to a single carrier, the Enterprise, as the only operational carrier in the Pacific at one point in 1942. Lexington, Yorktown, Hornet and Wasp had all been sunk and Saratoga was laid up repairing heavy damage from a torpedo; the Enterprise was the only available carrier from October 26 until December 5 1942. That amounts to 2/3s of the US carrier fleet sunk in 10 months of combat at the start of the war, discounting the Langley which was sunk but could barely be called a carrier and the Ranger which was such a dated ship that she spent the entire war in the Atlantic since she didn’t even have the speed to keep up with fleet carrier operations.
Sorry to ask as well, but cite? Sorry, the Enterprise does **not ** have anything remotely close to an 8" armor belt, and neither does the Nimitz class. They may have 8 inches of armor around some very small vital part of the ship, but I’d even ask for a cite for that. Carriers, even modern ones, have nothing like the armor protection of even pre-WW1 battleships.
I don’t mean to speak for Enterprise, but since we seem to have been arguing thee same or a similar position regarding Mitchell:
What Mitchell was calling for and predicting was grossly at odds with reality in his day, or even 20 years later during WW2. He was arguing that the airplane had made the battleship, or for that matter any navy obsolete in 1921, and his proof was the sinking of a few unmanned, undefended and stationary vessels. He wasn’t arguing or predicting that battleships would slowly become obsolescent in the future, his case was that battleships and by extension navies as a whole were obsolete in 1921 due to the advent of aircraft. He was hardly alone in making sweeping predictions of the near future, or even the future in 20 years when WW2 happened about airpower. For example, Giulio_Douhet argued that victory in the future would be won by airpower alone in 1921. In a sense, he did predict aircraft truly being able to win a war (if it can be called that) with the use of nuclear weapons. He called for the use of
which is sort of a proto atomic bomb. While in the very distant future he was sort of, kind of proved right with the ability of aircraft to drop atomic bombs, that wasn’t his argument. He was claiming that pure strategic bombing would decide wars in the immediate future, which was clearly proven to be not true even in WW2 20 years later.
Similarly, Mitchell was arguing for the air force (or well, army air corps) making navies as a whole obsolete. Battleships were simply the top of the line for navies at that time, and if they could be sunk at will, any smaller vessel stood no chance in the face of airpower. While yes, in the end battleships lost their place to aircraft carriers as the most important vessels over 20 years later, that wasn’t what Mitchell was arguing for at all. Had his vision been followed, the navy would have been scrapped and the protection of US shores that the Navy had previously provided would be replaced by heavy bombers. While yes in the end his vision was sort of proved true just as Douhet’s vision was sort of proved true, they didn’t see airpower as an adjunct to what was already there but a complete replacement of it. If Mitchell had his way, the Navy would have been scrapped and B-17’s and such would have replaced their role - and we’d have lost WW2 in very short order.
Pretty much, yes. The things is that to condense Mitchell’s view to “the battleship is obsolete” is to miss Mitchell’s point, which was rather that in the face of air power all surface ships were useless and continental defense should be entrusted to air power. As a prognosis, that has failed spectacularly. But the battleship did become gradually less decisive as a naval weapon. Two things conspired to end the usefulness of the battleship: the utterly crushing naval victory of the Allies in World War II, which left no potential enemy with modern battleships afloat, and the necessity to downsize the Navy in peacetime. The carrier was just so much more useful generally. It became even more obsolete with the introduction of all-weather carrier planes, which avoided a major vulnerability of the carrier; and it remained obsolete because no country has seen fit to challenge the United States for naval supremacy in the last sixty-five years. I don’t think it will ever come back from its obsolescence, because as noted vital systems today cannot be passively protected – you cannot armor radars, computers, or missile cells properly.
In the same way that Douhet was right that someday, wars would be decided entirely from the air (see Kosovo); but wrong in the sense that he made a prediction of the immediate future, and on a far grander scale, that did not in fact turn out to be correct. The historiography of the conflict between “clever” air men who saw the future clearly and “dumb” battleship skippers who couldn’t is quite fascinating, to say the least.
[Or, on preview: what Dissonance said…]
So let me ask this in another way. What has the battleship actually acomplished in a military sense?
/minor nitpick: Ranger was as fast as the newer Wasp.
IIRC, the ship (by 1944) would need to have an expensive refit to operate the newer, heavier aircraft that the USN was flying, and upgrade it’s AA suite. However, the ship was badly overwieght already, and it was decided to use the dockyard space for something more important. (By 1944, shipyard priorities was being switched to support ships needed for the massive invasions planned.) Never-the-less, the Ranger saw service in the Pacific from the summer of '44 on as a training carrier in the eastern Pacific.
To get back on topic, the US Navy (as always on a limited budget) must prioritize where it spends it’s money. It looks to recent conflicts as an indicator of what missions (and enviornments) it can be expected to operate in. The doesn’t seem to be a role for an armored ship with large caliber guns, at the moment.
For gunfire support, the Navy is toying with this idea: MK 45 5-inch / 54-caliber (lightweight) gun , a rocket assist weapon.
To bring back the BB, IMO, the USN would have to deem that the ship must be built to survive hits from the enemy. With the modern CVN group, the defence is distance, ECM, and AA/SAM measures against aircraft and missiles. Sub launched torps, I’m not so sure about, but I think that modern USN attack boats patrol for “enemy” subs, and the carrier carries a handfull of decoy devices. (I don’t know how effective those measures are…) An armored ship seems to imply that the enemy will get through, no matter what, so you better beef up your ship to survive hits.
They force the enemy to commit a serious amount of strength (in a given contested area) to counter it, or cede control to the enemy.
The same thing can is accomplished by sending in air reinforcements, for example, but sometimes, a BB will do when an Bomb Group will not. (BB’s move, airbases don’t, so you can change theatre’s more quickly and cheaply. A Bomb Group needs a lot more in personnel and logistics than a BB will. In WW2 terms, BB’s could operate in weather that aircraft could not. See the Battle of North Cape, for example.)
Isn’t the whole point of a carrier that it’s an airbase that moves?
Sure. But as pointed out by Dissonance, from late October (1942) until mid '43, the USN was short of carriers.
This has been a fascinating discussion. Thanks, everybody.
Ranger’s main flaw, as far as I recall, was that she didn’t carry torpedo planes because her magazines did not fit torpedoes. She certainly was also more vulnerable than her Yorktown successors.
I can’t add much to this summary. You could ask the same question of other ships – what, afterall, did the German submarines accomplish?
But let’s say this. Battleships achieved two different things in the two World Wars.
In World War I, German battleships achieved nothing, because British battleships achieved exactly what they were meant to: control of the sea, if by default. Without the British battleships, German surface ships would have been free to operate as they wished, and the close blockade of Germany would have been broken.
In World War II, for a considerable time German battleships tied down larger number of British battleships, forcing the British to commit insufficient force in Mediterranean against the Italians, where Italian battleships made it impossible for British forces to operate as freely as they could have otherwise, especially when, as after the raid on Alexandria, the British had few battleships left. In turn, British battleships prevented German battleships from operating freely against British lines of communication.
In the Pacific, the sinking of U.S. battleships at Pearl Harbor prevented the Americans from doing what they had intended, namely to aggressively operate against the Japanese from day 1. Japanese battleships (though badly handled throughout) assured Japanese naval dominance in the Dutch East Indies, and then off Guadalcanal; where in turn American battleships prevented the Japanese from using their battleships to smash Henderson Field to pieces; then, the Japanese retention of battleship strength required considerable U.S. efforts to eliminate them up until the summer of 1945.
In each of these cases, if you take away one side’s battleships, the other immediately gains a huge ascendancy; and if you take away both sides’ battleships – well, as soon as one side has the idea of the battleship, it has a huge advantage.
Battleships were developed for fleet to fleet battles. Like Jutland in WWI. The death of the Battleship came on Dec 7, 1941. After that date nome the ship to ship battles that were battleship v battleship.
Most of the fleet to fleet battles happened when the carriers were in short supply or out of place. Battleships were assigned escort or bombarment duty. The battlefleet followed behind the carriers. As far as bombartment, cruise missles, and smart bombs. The battlehips were great in their time, but I am sorry to say their time is long past.
Once the Essex carriers began coming to the fleet the battleship were minor. I believe it was the first Naval battle for Guadalcanal when the Japaneese fleet was turned by “Taffy 3” agroup of DDs, DEs, and CVL. The fighting power of these men and the threat of carriers made the fleet turn.
Completely untrue. I assume you meant name the ship to ship battles that involved battleships on both sides - that being the case, the Kirishima, Fuso and Yamishiro were all sunk in engagements with US battleships. That’s 1/4 of Japan’s 12 battleships, and if you want to widen it to include battleships only on one side for Japan’s BB losses, the Hiei was badly crippled in a night surface engagement with US cruisers and destroyers in the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and was easy prey for aircraft from Henderson field to finish off once the sun rose since she lost rudder control and was turning in circles right in front of the US airbase. While the killing blow was delivered by aircraft, she was put in the position to be sunk that easily from torpedoes and naval gunfire, so I’d really chalk her up to ships rather than planes. That makes it 1/3 of Japan’s 12 Battleships lost to surface engagements, or 4/10 lost due to hostile action during the war.
The battle fleet most certainly did not follow behind the carriers; the fast battleships of the USN screened the carriers and operated directly alongside them. Amongst the things they could do, they were the most powerful anti-aircraft platforms of their day. By the end of the war the Iowa’s were sporting 20 5" DP guns, 80 40mm and 49 20mm AA guns. They could put 48,992 lbs of anti-aircraft shells into the air every minute.
You pretty much proved my point here. The first naval battle of Guadalcanal was a nighttime shootout between US and Japanese surface ships in which the aforementioned Hiei was sunk on Nov 13, 1942 (a Friday as well). Guadalcanal is a perfect example of why surface fleets and battleships were very vital in WW2 as well. During the day, the US was able to control the seas around the island through the aircraft on Henderson Field. Come nighttime, the Japanese had control of the seas and ran reinforcements and supplies there, and shelled Henderson Field while they were at it. Once with battleships and the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal occurred when the USN intercepted what was to be a second time shelling by battleships. Of the 6 major engagements fought near Guadalcanal, 5 of them were night engagements strictly between surface forces with narry a carrier in sight.
The action you are thinking of with Taffy 3 was the Battle off Samar on Oct 25, 1944 - a full 2 years later. Mind you, the US escort carriers (not CVLs) and their screen of destroyers and destroyer escorts were fighting a (drum roll) surface engagement. Frankly, were it not for the bravery of the US sailors that day, the timidity of Admiral Kurita and a good deal of luck the Japanese by all rights should have plowed through Taffy 3 and reached the invasion transports off of Leyte. There wasn’t any actual threat of the US fast carriers; they had been drawn off when Halsey went for the bait. Kurita however let himself believe that what he was engageing wasn’t a collection of CVEs, DDs and DEs and was convinced he was fighting proper US carriers and cruisers.
Actually I would say that the Battleship died at Jutland, when world war 1 could have been effectively lost in one afternoon.
Declan
My thanks for the nitpick, it’s ignorance fought. I was relying on memory and you are completely correct that the Wasp and Ranger had the same top speed. I was also unaware that the Ranger became a training carrier at the end of the war in the Pacific, learn something new everyday =)
This website contains the operational history of a bunch of USN ships, including all of the capital ships. Quite a few of the US BB’s were pretty active from early on, doing the patrols that needed doin.
http://www.hazegray.org/danfs/
Ranger was definately not as capable as the earlier Lexington class, but she was at least as capable as a CVE. Yet we look back through the mists of time and view her as a piece of junk. 
I guess standing in the shadow of the Essex’s is a heavy cross to bear.
Wasp was extremely vulnerable too, and two sub torp hits turned her into a blow torch.