And for HMS Barham, Royal Oak; IJN Fusō. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. Torpedoes really can work well and quickly, in a way that shell fire (HMS Hood aside) usually didn’t. Warspite though might have been an exception, if that Fritz X missile was a few feet from where it hit. RM Roma wasn’t as fortunate.
In WWI, battleships were the premier naval weapons systems. Their only real threat was another battleship or a well-placed mine. Submarines were theoretically a threat, but in WWI a submerged submarine was so slow that it would have to be in place ready to hit an oncoming dreadnought to have a hope of catching it. As described above by ASL_v2.0, the battleships of WWI were used about as aggressively as possible. Germany’s plan was to lure a portion of the Grand Fleet away to destroy it with their full force, but they were constantly prevented by British codebreakers, so they could never lure the British Battlecruiser squadron away, or drag the Grand Fleet through a net of waiting U-boats.
In WWII, Battleships had a few successful actions. The standouts for me are the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst sinking the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and the many actions where battleships provided gunfire support for invasion in the south Pacific.
What always confused me is why more nations didn’t build “pocket battleships.” The Deutschland-class Battlecruisers had 6 11-inch guns in 2 triple turrets, and a manpower compliment of 600+. This ship could potentially operate as a “super destroyer,” being fast and having enough gun-power to take down anything they came up against, and would probably be cheaper to build than a full-scale battleship. I could imagine versions with twin 15s, ore even two triple 16s, like a mini-Iowa.
Another ship type which intrigued me was the oft-discussed but never-constructed battlecarrier, a ship with turrets in front of a full raised flight deck. That would have a hearty compliment of planes, and one or two turrets of battleship guns. After WWII, missiles would make this ship obsolete, but during the war, it could launch bombers, keep a CAP of fighters, and provide gunfire support. Not as good as any of the others at any one thing, but a decent swiss-army ship. I’d have liked to see how they fared in WWII.
1st paragraph, yes, it was tough for a submerged submarine to target a transiting warship, but if the naval surface commander was silly enough to remain in the area after the first BOOM!, he could have a bad time.
Battleships in WW2 really proved their worth as either shore bombardment specialists, and in that case, Admiral Lee taking several fast battleships to pound Japan in 1945 is notable. Or they were very effective AAA platforms, particularly after the introduction of the 5"/38 fast-firing DP gun, the proximity fuse, and radar fire control. Early on though, especially with a platform suffering various equipment casualties, and you end up with Prince of Wales and Repulse
The pocket battleships lacked the armor to contend with serious surface combatants. Graf Spee fought one CA and two CLs to a slight victory, despite outgunning all three opposing ships. Yeah, it beat on Exeter, but beating on Exeter wasn’t the mission goal. Raiding merchants was, and the damage from this scrap, not to mention nearly running out of ammo, meant the engagement was a failure for the Germans. Had Graf run into a BB, its life would likely be interesting and short. As Scharnhorst’s was during the Battle of the North Cape.
Yes, the pocket BB’s could run, but not forever. That giant 16,000 mile bunker age range for the Graf is at 16 kts or so. Crank it to 24+ because it’s running for its life from the SAG or two dedicated to kill it, and see what happens to the range. True for the Brits as well but they could send out Oilers and supply ships, or have their ships go to a friendly port. The Germans couldn’t.
Lack of ammo and other consumable storage, is a reason why we never saw the hybrid BB/CVE like you describe. Airplanes take a lot of fuel and bombs to fly combat missions, and all of the space to store that has to come from somewhere. Adding space to operate a turret and ammunition, just compromises the design too much. Travel with a few fast CVs if it’s necessary to embark planes for CAP or long range strike duties. And an oiler or two and replenishment ship to keep everything running.
There’s an issue with using battleships for shore bombardment; you have to bring them within range of the shore. Horatio Nelson said “a ship’s a fool to fight a fort” because no matter how many big guns you pack on to a ship, you can always put more guns and bigger guns on land. And you can put more armor around those guns.
That largely was not an issue by WWII. The heavy guns on battleships outranged most shore based guns. The shore based artillery was overwhelmingly designed to be mobile, even if put into fixed positions, limiting weight. They also had to deal with limits on weight of projectile in order to be able to resupply them over rough terrain by truck. Both factors limited the range of the ground based artillery.
Then there is finding the target. The BB can get targeting data from ground and aerial observers. It can also conduct suppressive fire on key terrain that, if occupied, would be a threat to the ground force scheme of maneuver. Its targets are mostly stationary. Compare that to the defender on the ground. Their ground based observers cannot see over the horizon to the BB. Unless they have air superiority, aerial targeting data can be difficult to come by. Since the BB is mobile what data they can collect ages quickly. It is also not trivial to hit a moving target with unguided artillery even under constant observation.
The third issues is that BB is typically armored to protect itself against the kind of bigger guns it is carrying. The smaller ground based guns are going to be less of an issue.
In Lord Nelson’s time the argument made a lot of sense. Things changed.
Are you familiar with the Alaska-class cruiser?
FWIW, my sense is that “hybridization” and other compromises in shipbuilding (there were many due to treaties between world wars) is something that sounds appealing in peacetime, but has consistently failed in wartime, although I’ll grant I’d be hard pressed to provide an actual definition of hybridization that doesn’t amount to special pleading, whereby multi-role platforms like destroyers and cruisers capable of conducting ASW, AAW, and ASuW (anti-submarine, air, and surface warfare) don’t get binned in a “hybridized.” Perhaps I could say limit it to hull forms. That is, if there is a role that it has been deemed beneficial for a ship to have, and meeting that mission along with another mission fulfilled by a “different” kind of hull would require some level of mixing of hulls, we might call that “hybridization.”
Sure… cheaper than a battleship, but also more expensive than a cruiser or destroyer. And in the end, what advantage would it offer over cruisers and destroyers? FWIW, one of the “freak builds” (my words) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was monitor-like big gun ships. Basically, the turrets of a battleship (not as many, but similarly sized), but on a more destroyer-sized hull, and not capable of going very fast, basically just big gun platforms.
I’m going to assume you’re aware of various hybrid-carriers that had both big guns and a less than full-length carrier. Beyond that, I think you’re overlooking two things:
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To get the most out of a flight deck for conventional fixed-wing aircraft, a carrier needs to be able to go fast for long stretches of launch and recovery cycles. That means conducting launch and recovery (which really go on constantly during flight operations, even in peacetime), pretty much makes naval gunfire support of forces ashore impossible.
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That’s a lot of weight. Reinforced flight decks are heavy. Big guns (and all their supporting systems) are heavy. Not only does that add displacement, it adds displacement disproportionately to the bow, which then needs to be factored in by adding yet more way to the stern to keep the trim even from bow to stern.
As a random aside, the now decommissioned Tarawa Class of LHA actually used to have five in guns on the bow, but they were removed during midlife upgrades.
On the whole, you may be surprised by just how many of your hybrid or novel designs have actually been tried throughout history. Tried and discarded for the most part, though.
Iowa weighed 45K tons.
It depends on the nation, but the country for which this question obviously is really relelvant is Germany. Germany could never, ever, ever catch up to Britain, much less all the Allies, in capital ship production, and so an attempt to use a true battleship was going to end exactly the way Bismarck did; hunted down and blown to smithereens by the whole Royal Navy. Even Gneisenau and Scharnhorst were probably wasteful.
The only success German surface naval ships were going to have was as commerce raiders. You don’t need a gigantic battleship to do that; the pocket battleships, like Admiral Scheer, were more than powerful enough to blow a convoy to smithereens, and three could be built for the price of one Bismarck.
In addition to the excellent points upthread, the whole point of an aircraft carrier was that WWII airplanes have ranges of 100-200 miles whereas guns’ ranges are 10-20 miles.
The success carriers had against BBs, etc. was entirely because they could stand off out of reach of the BBs’ guns. Sure the planes took a beating, but the CV didn’t.
Putting short-range offensive armament on a long-ranged platform is silly. Short ranged defensive armament is another story; of course every warship wants as much of that as they can afford (cost, weight, cubic space, manpower) to carry.
Crap. That’s what I get for not looking that up. 80KT would be one hell of a battleship in any era! Thank you.
The one firm thing that people can agree on that battleships did best compared to their cost is shore bombardment. And the only thing an armored battleship would do better at than an unarmored one is bombarding heavy artillery, which happened infrequently enough that as callous as it sounds it would be better in my opinion to build 3 battlecruisers for the cost of 2 battleships and accept that one of them might fall victim to ground fire, which might not even happen anyway.
But despite the fact they’d be specialized, the war required enough flexibility that they’d have to have some anti air and surface combat ability, so regular old battlecruisers (perhaps fine tuned to focus more on tonnage of guns than speed) would be preferable to gun platforms.
I read a Marine-written report saying that they would have loved an all-in-one solution, a carrier with attack and fighter aircraft as well as the capability to provide off-shore bombardment capabilities. If battleships, the big BBs, are already completely outclassed, I don’t see why alternatives were not pursued to give a fleet the big gun bombardment capability without having to build a whole new capital ship. Could have been interesting! I know there was a plan in the 80s to convert the 4 Iowas to semi-carriers, taking off the rear turret and adding a flight deck and hangar to carry 20 harriers. If battleships are so obsolete in 1943, why not do that to the existing Iowas? You’d get probably closer to 30 planes extra in your fleet, and all you sacrifice are 3 16-inch guns which, as you say, are of limited value.
I am aware of the Soviet carrier hybrids post-war, but I thought that was basically an experiment by their fleet to see if they liked the idea of a carrier fleet. I also know about the WWI and post-WWI conversions as various fleets converted battlecruisers to carriers before designing flat tops from the hull up, and I know several nations converted battleship hulls to carriers mid-construction during WWII, but I thought they all took off the big gun armament, thus eliminating the shore bombardment capability that the Marines loved so much. There was one old Japanese ship with 6 turrets that they pulled 2 of them off to put on a flight deck with 20+ planes, but I thought thy only got halfway done, then needed to rush it out to fight the Americans. Otherwise, I’m not familiar with any constructed battlecarriers, just halfway-finished conversion jobs and a lot of plans (in particular, one which was panned by a British Admiral for clinging to the idea of a 1914 navy in 1934).
It just seems wasteful to me to have an entire battleship hanging around for big gun bombardment support when you could have half of that same ship launching planes. Again, post-war, it’d be discarded as missiles and even longer-range aircraft come into play, but as late as 1st Iraq we had Iowas bombarding shore positions. Why not convert those Iowas to half-carriers, keep the majority of the guns, and add some planes?
As for point 1: Good point. I had not thought of that.
As for point 2: The article I read about converting an Iowa said that the weight saved by cutting the turret would make up for the weight of the flight deck. I could be wrong about that, but that’s what I read. Starts scrounging the internet to find that report.
But if big battleships were mostly relegated to shore bombardment and carrier defense, why not build 2 or 3 “mini-Iowas” for the price of one full Iowa? Smaller, still with the big guns and tons of AA capability, not as much of an economic drain as a full-length battleship.
The last US battleships were all funded, designed, and mostly built before the US entered WWII. More specifically, before the Japanese demonstrated their obsolescence at Pearl Harbor. Economic drain wasn’t really an issue. The building of the Iowa class ships was as much a job creation expenditure program as it was necessary Defense spending.
Really, truly, that is kind of what the Alaska-class I linked to earlier was. Whether there was ever such a role to fill, it went away with the battleship.
Here’s a picture literally showing an Iowa and an Alaska side by side (okay, there’s a pier in between, still…):
Were they any battleship to battleship actions in World War II? The only one I can think of would be the “Battle of the Komandorskis” in March 1943. And, according to Brian Garfield in “The Thousand Mile War”, that was broken off when the Japanese Admiral mistook the splashes of white phosphor shells (the United States ships were firing everything they had in their ammunition lockers) for an air attack.
Kirishima took on South Dakota and Washington, November 14, 1942. It ended badly for the IJN, though they came close to sinking South Dakota.
EDIT: And of course, there was Bismarck (and Prinz Eugen) v. Hood and Prince of Wales, then Bismarck v. Everybody.
The Italians and British had a few duels in the Med too.
I’d say that the WWII-era ‘monitors’ like HMS Roberts were something that could be very useful today. They were basically a sort of barge with what was usually an old Dreadnought/pre-Dreadnought turret mounted on it, along with some basic engines, fire control, and ammo storage.
They were slow and lightly armored (save for the recycled turrets/barbettes), but primarily used for shore bombardment, where none of that mattered. And where none of that would really matter today either, FWIW.
Jack_Reynolds’ “fast and having enough gun-power to take down anything they came up against” sounds suspiciously like Fisher’s battlecruisers, which took an absolute beating at the Battle of Jutland.
But then we haven’t exactly been in a position to conduct “shore bombardment” lately, either. The kind of places that can’t do much to threaten a warship off the coast also don’t tend to hold their coast lines long enough for big guns to matter. The nearest “modern” equivalent to such an idea is, I think, the arsenal ship, which was an idea the US Navy had in the late nineties for a ship packed full of cruise missiles, but which never came to fruition.
True, but the British battlecruisers were weakened by excessively light armor and especially poor flash control, so a hit on the turret would blow up a magazine. The German battlecruisers took a hell of a pounding at Jutland, and most of them survived. Heck, the Lutzow had to be torpedoed by a friendly destroyer to make certain it went down the night after the battle.