But how could a battleship, bristling with antiaircraft guns be so susceptable to enemy aircraft? Why can’t it shoot down the planes that are attacking it?
for starters, at the begining, & well into the middle of the war, they weren’t bristling with AA guns.
The Admirals severely underestimated the effectiveness of Air Power vs ships, & depended too much on armor.
When the crunch came, & the balloon went up, the Battleships were caught short.
Later, they were retrofitted with more AA guns, but by then, the casualties were so great…
Also, the style of Naval Warfare had changed. The Battleships were designed for great, decisive engagements, naval battles that could decide the war in one fight.
These never materialized.
Even if the envisioned great battles at sea had taken place, the surviving fleet could never have approached the enemy homeland, due to defending heavy bombers.
The Atomic Bomb sealed the fate of battleships. Big, slow targets, they were expensive enough to justify an a-bomb, but couldn’t launch defending aircraft the way a carrier could.
Well, the “newer and fancier” thing was certainly a factor. After 60 years of advances in aircraft and missile technology, yes, battleships are useless in their designed role, but there’s still nothing better for heavy artillery support within 25 miles (advanced projectile types could triple that) of a beach.
That’s like asking, “Why can’t the batter hit the ball when the pitcher throws it to him?” Sometimes you hit it, sometimes you miss.
The only US battleships sunk during WWII were those at Pearl Harbor. US ships sustained a relatively moderate number of hits from Japanese aircraft while at sea. (I’m not aware any any US cruisers sunk by aircraft, although carriers were highly vulnerable to secondary explosions and fire.) Until, that is, the kamikazes came along who sought to overwhelm our defenses. Still, we shot them down in droves, but it was always the combination of fighter cover and AA that was effective. AA alone could never be relied upon to defend ships from determined air attack.
Explosive reactive armor (ERA) is designed primarily to defeat anti-tank weapons that use High Explosive Anti-Tank or shaped charge warheads. From here:
I doubt it would be of much used against the harpoon and similar anti-ship missiles; they don’t use shaped charges, they simply penetrate the armor (such as it is) through kinetic energy and the warhead then explodes inside the ship.
I’m pretty sure that most anti-ship missiles don’t have shaped-charge warheads.
For one thing, since the ships aren’t armored, they really don’t nead them.
Second, anti-ship missiles are huge. The SS-N-19 Shipwreck missile has a 750kg(1653 lb) warhead, and travels at supersonic speeds. Something tells me that if this hits your ship, anything short of battleship armor isn’t going to help much.
Third, the compartmentalization of modern ships would tend to negate shaped charges- imagine it as several layers of widely spaced armor.
Correct, of course. However, we can usually work around beach-front engagements and having those kind of battleships for that sole purpose is a huge wasted expense; its money that would be much more effective sending extra A-10’s in with the force.
We’d like to have a lot more things than we do, but no one can ever have all the toys they please.