Those German battle cruisers were remarkably tough and arguably the best battle cruiser design (for the job they were to do) of all time.
However, in saying that, if you can disregard the problems with the flash doors (admittedly a big ask) the British battle cruisers could absorb punishment. Tiger received 17 hits from heavy guns at Jutland and still stayed in action. She was back fully refitted by 1st July. The Derrflinger which also suffered 17 hits from heavy guns wasn’t out of drydock until 15th October (that may also be a reflection on greater capacity in British yards.)
Ok, yes I know its a zombie, but I was the OP and do not want to start another topic. Why did British Aircraft carriers not suffer such explosions. The Battleships, Battlecruisers and even Heavy Cruisers did, but why did the British Aircraft carriers shrug of some tremendous amounts of punishment.
One of the major things not mentioned regarding Jutland is the problem with British shells. Basically, how you want it to work is that the shell pierces the armor and then a fuze causes the shell to explode a split second later, hopefully in the interior of the ship. What happened to the British was that the shock of hitting the armor caused the explosives to explode prematurely. So they were scoring hits, but the shells were exploding outside of the German ships, doing little damage. Here’s wikipedia’s explanation:
Hms Victory carried 104 guns which fired a broadside of about 1¼ tons. The enthusiasm for a high rate of fire may well have been a legacy of those days, in which the English gunners could fire four balls to the French three. This was a significant advantage.
Anyone interested should visit HMS Victory at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, where she is kept and fully restored.
The carriers had smaller and more distributed ammo stores. More voids in the outer hull of the ship to effectively absorb damage, and a decent amount of armor.
The Ark Royal and the Illustrious class saw a fair amount of action.
British carriers had more comprehensive fire protection arrangements for petrol than US ones (which also substantially reduced their petrol stowage capacity). Dasher blew up after an internal explosion, blamed on a rating smoking in the service tunnel beneath the petrol stowage. The surviving ships in the class were modified, reducing petrol stowage from, in most cases, 75,000 gallons to 36,000. The USN thought that the better petrol protection that the British had been used to made them complaisant about handling petrol, though they later also made (lesser) reductions in petrol stowage in their ships of the class.
Avenger blew up after a torpedo hit, blamed on a splinter reaching the ship’s bomb room right against the hull side (a longitudinal bulkhead was later installed in the surviving ships of the class to keep bombs and torpedoes 10-15ft from the side; the USN made similar changes to its surviving hulls)
Don’t count on any pre-Washington Treaty battleship to withstand heavy pounding in WWII. Remember what happened to the Arizona and the Yamashiro (or was it Fuso)?
The French Navy built several battleships with two forward turrets , each mounting 4 guns (ISO 3). Was this design a better way of reducing topside weight (while maintaining a high firing capacity)?
It was done to reduce the area that needed to be covered by heavy armor. The HMSs Rodney and Nelson also followed this weight saving approach.
In battleships, the heaviest armor protected the turrets, and the barbettes (the vertical tube surrounding the ammo hoists), and the belt armor protects the waterline (and therefore bouyancy).
Magazines were typically below the waterline, so usually didn’t need much vertical armor.
High angle plunging fire (and heavy bombs) might penetrate the deck armor, which was typically only a couple inches in the WW1 dreadnoughts, and reach volatile stuff that way.
"The carriers were subject to heavy and repeated kamikaze attacks, but because of their armoured flight decks, the British aircraft carriers proved highly resistant, and returned to action relatively quickly. The USN liaison officer on the Indefatigable commented: "When a kamikaze hits a US carrier it means 6 months of repair at Pearl [Harbor]. When a kamikaze hits a Limey carrier it’s just a case of ‘Sweepers, man your brooms.’” "
Conversely, as I understand it, British aircraft carriers were well-known in WW2 for their excellent armour, but with the trade-off of greatly reduced aircraft capacity. I can’t remember where I read it but I heard that US Navyers looked at British carriers with envy as kamikaze planes tended to just bounce off British carriers where they would have torn a deadly hole in a US one.
Edit: oops, I missed the post above mine. Malacandra found the quote
Here is an article about kamikaze attacks on US and British carriers. The conclusion is that the larger CAP provided by the USN carriers was better at preventing kamikaze damage than the armored flight decks of the RN.
From the article:
*In fact, the British designs failed. Off Okinawa, the resistance of the British carriers seemed impressive but in reality the damage they took was severe. Having the hangar inside the hull girder made the hull structure weak and the ships were deformed by comparatively minor damage. Note how quickly nearly all the armored carriers were scrapped postwar - surveys showed they had irreparable hull damage. In contrast, the Essex’s, which suffered much more severe damage, lasted for decades. *
Illustrious had never been properly repaired after wartime damage, and was among the first to be discarded - worn out. The armoured hanger deck restricted the overhead height when jets came in, for which these ships were not well adapted, and full modernisation of Victorious, with the angled flight deck and steam catapults, proved extremely costly (not least due to poor project management) - the only wartime carrier so modernised.
The build quality of the wartime hulls was lower, and this was accepted as a tradeoff for rapid construction during the war.
Is there a list of American and Japanese ships that suffered magazine/ammo explosions?
Arizona was lost due to the destruction of two of her forward magazines as the result of a hit from a heavy armor piercing bomb, though it’s not clear which magazine lit off first (there wasn’t enough left of either to determine with any accuracy, and the question is largely academic to begin with). This was fairly early in the attack, IIRC, and the Arizona had not soaked up much damage yet. The only other battleship to be irretrievably damaged at Pearl Harbor was Oklahoma, which capsized at her mooring and was later lost in a storm while being towed back to the US for repairs. All other battleships were repaired and put back into service (Utah was also abandoned at her resting place, but she had been decommissioned as a battleship in the 30’s already)
Probably the most famous US battleship to be lost to a magazine explosion is the Maine (remember her?). They’re still not sure what set that one off to this day (mine or torpedo are seen as less likely nowadays, though sabotage is still vaguely possible and negligence/accident seems likely now). Maine and her sister-ship Texas were both flawed designs for various reasons, though I’ve never heard the magazines in particular get cited here (usually it’s the en echelon battery arrangement that caused them problems).
Several Japanese carriers were lost at Midway due to poor ammo handling as well. In this case, the magazines were still intact, but there was far too much ammo being stored in the unarmored hangar spaces due to various circumstances and poor practices combined with the worst killer of all: Remarkably bad timing. The American dive bombers from three different carriers all stumbled across the Japanese carrier force while they were in the middle of rearming their planes for an anti-shipping strike (they were almost ready to launch another wave against the ground installations at Midway, when the American fleet was spotted, so they had to switch out fragmentary bombs for armor piercing bombs and torpedoes, right tool for the job and all).
As it turns out, a large quantity of aviation gasoline, many tons of unsecured high explosives, and many tons more of high explosives falling from above can all combine to have a heavily detrimental effect on a carriers’ combat effectiveness.
EDIT: Another problem with putting more guns in fewer turrets was that if you happen to lose a single turret (lucky hit from an enemy, accident while handling the powder or shells, or even a mechanical or power failure caused by other circumstances), you lose more of your battery in a single fell swoop. It took several decades for the shipbuilders of the time to settle on three turrets of three guns as a pretty good setup, with ships having varying numbers of turrets with varying numbers of guns (homework assignment: Look up the WWI dreadnought HMS Agincourt)
I was going to mention the battleship Mutsu which exploded at anchor in 1943 from an magazine accident. While it’s not specifically what you’re looking for, I did come across this at wiki.
It should be noted that economics played a large role in this; the damage was economically unfeasible for Britain to repair, not impossible to repair. Britain’s economy wasn’t in very good shape after the war, while the US economy was booming. From here:
Probably the strongest evidence of the value of armored flight decks is that every US carrier from the USS Midway on to the present day has had an armored flight deck.
