Reading numerous books on the subject and watching plenty of documentaries, I’ve seen the 8 American battleships are Pearl Harbor alternatively called “obsolete relics” and “state-of-the-art war machines” depending on the point the author was trying to make. The former for minimizing the strategic value of the battleships lost there there while the latter to show that they were still a major threat.
Now I know they were all WW1 era battleships and the Japanese intended to wipe out ALL capital ships including aircraft carriers, but had the attack on Pearl Harbor taken place what would have been the offensive value of them had they been able to leave port during the first two years of the war? Would we have seen the American Pacific fleet of all eight battleships and its three carriers directly engage the Japanese fleets off the Philippines? Or would they have literally just been kept on convoy duty in the Pacific much like what happened in the Atlantic to battleships and not see much action?
In addition, let’s say the battle of Guadalcanal occurs much like it had in our timeline, would the American battleships have been able to due much during those massive surface naval battles there?
Without air protection from carrier aircraft or land based aircraft I doubt the battleships would have had a significant impact at the Coral Sea, Midway or Guadalcanal.
Hmmm… it’s all conjecture. While carriers were clearly coming into their own as of 1941, most admirals still believed oceans will be won by battleships in line slugging it out. Had the old battleships survived, they might have been have been sent to supplement Force Z, and maybe help slow the Japanese advance into the Philippines, Java and New Guinea. But without sufficient air cover from carriers, the attrition would have been very high. Old battleships don’t like being bombed and torpedoed that much.
My guess is they will be based in partly in Hawaii, partly in Australia, to help keep the South Pacific command area open.
The big danger was that the “battleship” admirals would be the ones making policy. But even if the Pearl BBs had survived, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse 3 days later made the point that battleships were outmoded.
IIRC, having battleships in a carrier formation would have just slowed the whole fleet down.
eta: Yep. US fleet carriers were a good 11 knots faster than the battleships.
First two are understandable but Guadalcanal had some of the biggest surface battles of the war and the Japanese were still sending in surface ships against American forces despite Henderson Field being active, the first and second Naval battles of Guadalcanal for example.
A couple of battleships would have made the Battle of Savo Island a closer affair. If our people had trained up for night action. Which they never were. So really we’d just end up with the USS California and the USS Nevada sunk in Iron Bottom Sound instead of the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor.
I think battleships were highly overrated by WW2. The USN would have been better off building none of the newer ones (N. Carolina thru Iowa classes). And hauling an oil-sucking 21 knot Pearl Harbor survivor into a carrier fight is foolish.
OTOH, I can see how having an old BB at the Guadalcanal battles would come in handy. Unlike the cruisers, they can survive a couple of torpedo hits, so they’re not likely to sink. Their larger guns will do more damage. And once identified, they might cause the IJN to commit their own battleships where they are vulnerable to air attack from carriers and Henderson field.
Yeah, considering how often the IJN thrashed the USN in night surface actions, many of our BBs would have ended either in Bremerton for 9 months of repair or on the bottom of Iron Bottom Sound. I don’t think that the BBs would have improved our performance which was a failure of command, personnel, and procedure rather than firepower or equipment. We especially had not yet learned our lesson about the Long Lance torpedoes.
I agree the characteristic of those ship do tend to change in popular and/or high level history depending on author’s point or mood. The simplest factual comparison is probably to the IJN’s battleships: relatively similar ships built in a similar period, modernized during the interwar period, though some of the Japanese modernizations were more extreme. Ten ‘old’ IJN battleships (including the 4 battlecruisers, often considered also to be battleships after modernization) v 15 USN, per the naval limitation treaties of interwar period. None of the new generation battleships on either side was fully operational at the time of the PH attack although USS North Carolina and Washington were commissioned earlier in 1941.
The Japanese did not consider their battle line obsolete or useless, so why would they have considered the US one so? They didn’t. They did expect that if they launched a war in the Far East without attacking Hawaii, as originally planned, they would eventually face the US battle line, with its supporting aircraft carriers and other fleet units proceeding across the Pacific. Where, according to intensive Japanese planning of the interwar period it would be gradually attrited in night cruiser/destroyer torpedo attacks as well as air and submarine attacks from Japanese forces in the mandated islands (the Marshalls etc) then eventually be destroyed by an IJN battleline now closer or perhaps superior to the remnants of the US one in a decisive fleet action somewhere in the western Pacific.
The actual chronology of the war and its naval operations were significantly related to the fact that the US battle line was cut down so much in the initial attack. Which along with general political/strategic considerations contributed to also keeping several battleships in the Atlantic, the oldest pre Washington Treaty ships and the new generation ships, well into 1942.
With that said, of course both sides learned things in the first year of the war they did not expect previously. IOW with benefit of hindsight neither would have been as focused on battleships. But, they didn’t have that hindsight. The initial operations were planned and carried out on the assumption it was important to knock out at least several of the US battleships to bring the US battle line’s strength down to or below that of the IJN battle line. And the tactical success of the Hawaii operation had a significant influence on subsequent actions by both sides.
The real answer is that they were both obsolete relics AND state-of-the-art war machines at the same time. Thing was, the admirals in charge (on both sides) still thought in terms of fleet actions a-la Mahan, where the two fleets would mass, and their battle lines would duke it out in a decisive battle.
So they’d geared the Navy toward that particular aim, with nine battleships, and only 3 aircraft carriers in the Pacific Fleet on the morning of December 7, 1941.
I suspect that say (to use a hypothetical) that the US subs managed to turn back the Pearl Harbor attack fleet before launching planes, that we’d have probably seen that decisive battle, or something similar to it.
I quite agree. Even if the old Battleship Admirals were still around after Pearl Harbor, they had no ships to use – carriers were going it alone.
And since 200 days later, at the turning point of the war in the Pacific, the battle of Midway, the US carriers were winning the war without any battleships. So it became pretty clear to anyone that we didn’t need battleships any more, so the ‘Battleship Admirals’ were never able to regain control over Naval policy.
In one sense, the Japanese sneak attack at Pearl Harbor forced an early change in US Naval policy & strategic thinking – something that otherwise probably would have taken 20-30 more years in the hidebound Navy.
But how dit they use them? Only as glorified destroyers escorting the troopships in the 2nd and 3rd wave. And once the Japanese carriers were sunk, they turned them around to go back home. I don’t think any Japanese battleships even got within 500 miles of Midway.
And I expect the Japanese Navy high command was just as loaded with ‘Battleship Admirals’ as the American. i wouldn’t give too much credit to their strategic thinking – they lost, after all.
The plan was to lure the US Pacific Fleet (which, according to the plan, would be at Pearl when the Midway attack began) out to the island’s defense. Then after it had been softened up by carrier attacks, Yamamoto and Kondo would catch it in a pincer with their battleship groups and pulverize it.
Another indication that however much aircraft carrier tactics had evolved, strategically the emphasis was still on the Mahan and the battleship.
They brought battleships, but did not use them. And those Japanese battleships used OH SO MUCH oil that they were absolutely unable to use them at Guadalcanal because of fuel shortage (already). Rather than my poor summation, look here.
If Japan still emphasized the battleship, they were wrong.
Both sides brought their battleships to the Phillippines in '44. And both sides got to use them.
Battleships are vulnerable to air power, but they are still potent warships in their own right. (Both Halsey and Kurita flubbed it. ) Several times in the war, “surprise” night encounters happened between the opposing surface forces, despite one side or the other having nominal control of the air during the day, so I guess one can “hope” for (or try to arrange for) your BB’s to get in gun range at some point or other.
Obviously, one can try to min/max your forces, and ask if battleships as a type are worth it. In my opinion, for a nation strapped for steel and oil, maybe not. But, there’s an old saying: “you fight with the forces [army] you have, not the forces you wish you had”.
Japan realized any war with the US would involve giving priority to carriers and smaller ships that could be finished more quickly and halted the building of new battleships of the Yamato class (class hulls 3 - 5) very early (wiki says Dec of '41), well before Coral Sea & Midway. Shinano was ordered to be converted to a carrier after Midway, while hull #4 was ordered dismantled (beginning in March '42).
The US suspended the Montana’s after Midway, and cancelled in mid '43. Hulls #5 & 6 of the Iowa class (Illinois & Kentucky) were laid down in '42, but worked halted after Midway, and never completed.
Battleships were overrated, but they were still immensely powerful and useful things.
War is a combined arms affair. Battleships needed air cover, but that doesn’t make them useless. Tanks need support from artillery and infantry, but you wouldn’t call them useless, would you? The Pacific War was a war that had to be won with a full fleet; battleships, destroyers, cruisers, minesweepers, submarines, aircraft carriers, support ships, torpedo boats, amphibious support vessels. All had to be supported by the availablity of ground troops and and air force wings. No one part of that was “useless” y virtue of needing the support of the others.
The mistake that had been made was in thinking battleships were somehow a new thing in war, that they did NOT need support. That had been proven wrong long before the war; the reason we have a ship called a “Destroyer” is that they were originally called “torpedo boat destroyers” and were meant to protect battleships from torpedo boats, a threat battleships had poor defenses against.
It seems to me they were modified to be anit-aircraft platforms. I don’t know if this was to protect fleets as well as the battleships. They were very useful as mobile artillery in bombarding beaches during landings not only in the Pacific, but in the Normandy invasion as well.
Combined Fleet is a great site. But an omission in that essay is assuming the IJN had lots of Type 3 Common (incendiary AA) shells for battleships at that time, the kind that were most effective in the bombardment of Henderson Field October 13/14 1942. Only 104 of those shells were fired (all by Kongo) out of 918 total battleship main battery (36cm ie 14") rounds. Another 189 were Type 0 Common (a more conventional semi-AP shell basically, much larger explosive charge than AP shells but smaller than US BB’s High Capacity shells used in shore bombardment in later campaigns) fired by Haruna. The rest were AP shells fired by both ships, which apparently mainly buried themselves in the soil before their relatively small bursting charges exploded and apparently did only a small proportion of the damage. But it seems what was fired of the non-AP types was all that was available at Truk (the forward base for the IJN heavy units) at the time. By November when new bombardments were attempted there were more of each non-AP type. But the 18" gun ships Yamato and Musashi apparently hadn’t any Type 3 shells until 1943. So appropriate ammo as well as a fuel would have been a limitation on more battleship bombardments of Guadalcanal.
Also there’s some counter current of revision on the Japanese side about the effectiveness of that bombardment, as given in for example in the book “Yamamoto isoroku kyokō no senkan hōgeki” (Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s Fictional Battleship Bombardment) by Masao Yamamoto.
But basically it wasn’t just limitations of fuel or ammo that prevented any battleship bombardment of Henderson Field from the August 7 US landing all the way to October 13. It was also an air minded IJN doctrine that said the mission of neutralizing enemy airfields belonged to the ‘land attack’ (or ‘rikko’ for short) twin engine bombers units of the JNAF. That force, which had no direct counterpart in US naval aviation at the time, was instrumental in that role in the operations in the Philippines and Dutch East Indies (and along with Japanese Army bombers to some degree in Malaya), as well as scoring the huge success of sinking the British capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse at sea with torpedoes and some lesser torpedo successes. One might argue that stubborn air mindedness and too little ‘battleship admiral’ thinking was part of the reason the JNAF banged its head against the wall trying to neutralize Henderson Field with just air raids for two months during which time the US built up the field infrastructure. And the rikko units not only failed but their cumulative losses mainly to USN/USMC fighters made the force a shadow of its former self by the end of 1942. Losses to escorting Zeroes were also cumulatively serious (the JNAF lost 24 Zero pilots in the Midway operation including the Aleutian part, 122 in the Guadalcanal campaign). Eventually there was more flexible thinking which brought in heavy ship bombardments, and IJA heavy artillery bombardment (‘Pistol Pete’) which significantly harassed Henderson operations from the same date as the first battleship bombardment, October 13. But none of the measures ultimately completely neutralized the field, which had become two separate fields actually by October (Henderson and Fighter One), and more later.
I don’t think anyone is claiming the old BBs were useless. As you mentioned, they were excellent amphibious support vessels. But with 20/20 hindsight, the efforts put into some of their post-PH repairs is hard to justify, especially the rebuilds of the Tennessee class and West Virginia.
) Several times in the war, “surprise” night encounters happened between the opposing surface forces, despite one side or the other having nominal control of the air during the day, so I guess one can “hope” for (or try to arrange for) your BB’s to get in gun range at some point or other.