Just trying to establish which was the largest (in terms of crew) warship which was lost with all hands.
In WW2 it was HMAS Sydney, which was lost with all of her crew of 645.
At Jutland, several British battle cruisers blew up with the loss of over 1200 men each. However, in each case there were survivors.
The largest I can come up with, for a single ship is SMS Scharnhorst, the German armoured cruiser of the Great War. She went down will hands- 860 men.
Any advances on this?
Just came close with two from Jutland- HMS Defence (lost 903) and HMS Black Prince (lost 857).
Japanese carriers at Midway? The German. Pre dreadnought lost at Jutland?
WW2 possibly Fuso, or Chiyoda.
WW1 seems to be HMS Defense.
Otara
Thanks AK84 and Otara. The Pommern from WW1 would be a possibility, but still less than the Defence.
Interesting your point Otara, I misread the page on HMAS Sydney. It was the largest Allied ship lost with all hands.
I know you said lost with “all hands”, but will still mention the HMS Hood which, after being hit by German shells, exploded and sank killing 1415 of the 1418 individuals on board.
No worries, I had thought of the Hood but knew of the few survivors. The guy who was into doing the interviews only died a few years back.
(And to hijack my own thread- what were the Admiralty thinking- sending a WW1 battle cruiser (they were known to be prone to explode when fighting as capital ships) and a battle ship that hadn’t been even given proper shake down exercises against the most powerful unit in the German Fleet).
The Scorpian went down with a total loss of life.
It appears to have been common (for obvious reasons) for subs to go down with all hands lost.
The board ate my last reply, so I’ll try to be brief.
I agree that Fuso and Chiyoda are probably the candidates for WW2, if we only look at warships. I would not be surprised if one of the merchant ships carrying prisoners back to Japan ended up being sunk with all hands and a much higher death toll. Awa Maru and Junyo Maru come close, I suppose. So does the SS Thielbek, in a similar role.
I wonder if the answer is one of the giant rowed ships that participated at Actium, Lepanto, or Salamis? Certainly, if one of the ginormous “Forty’s” of Philopator had sunk with all hands, it’d qualify, with it’s complement of over 7,000 rowers, sailors, and soldiers. I don’t believe they ever saw battle though, and I wonder if any were actually built, or if they were the antiquities version of military vaporware. While Antony’s navy at Actium certainly had ships large enough to potentially qualify if fully manned, malaria outbreaks meant that he had to sail with drastically reduced complements.
I had thought that some of the Spanish Armada ships would be large enough to qualify, but the wiki of their travails in Ireland suggest that even the largest ships (La Trinidad Valencera, 1,000 tons, 360 men) weren’t big enough. Maybe elements of the 2nd Mongol invasion fleet, the one scattered by the Kamikaze typhoon of 1281? An MA thesis on the fleet, and archaeological examination of its remains can be found here. He cites the Arab explorer, Ibn Battuta, who mentioned in 1347 that large ships, “carried 1,000 men, 600 sailors and 400 marines, had four decks and twelve sails, and were followed by three small vessels.” So perhaps one of those large ships, fully loaded, and lost at sea during the storm, might have been greater than Sydney, but certainly not Fuso.
Also wanted to mention the fates of HMS Neptune and USS Juneau. Neptune hit a mine in 1941 and lost 737 of her 767 men. 1 man of the 30 survivors that made it to lifeboats managed to survive 5 more days at sea until being rescued by the Italian Navy.
Juneau, while limping away from the November 13, 1942 battle of Guadalcanal, took two submarine torpedoes, exploded, broke in half, and sank in 20 seconds. Other ships in the vicinity, seeing the explosion, assuming no survivors of the sinking, and being engaged with the IJN at the time, left the area. Actually more than 100 men of the 699 man complement, including at least 2 of the 5 famous Sullivan Brothers, had survived the immediate sinking. 8 days on the open sea left only 16 survivors.
I would expect that the list would carry a very high number of WW2 subs
Found an interesting article on the fate of the IJN Fuso and its crew here. From the article:
I’m not sure if it counts for the OP if survivors made it to shore or another ship (the Asagumo), only to eventually be killed there.
It is surprising to read that people can survive even the most violent shipboard explosions: the aforementioned Hood, HMS Barham, IJN Mutsu. You’d think no one could possibly live through that, and yet people do.
I think there were four approaches/straits the “Bismarck” and “Prinz Eugen” could use and “Hood” and “Prince of Wales” happened to get the unlucky assignment.
Chruchill was afraid of what would happen if two large German capital ships got loose on the mid Atlantic and ran into a convoy. If that happened, the losses in ships, personnel and supplies would be staggering. Churchill was a real aggressive commander in chief..he was constantly pushing his admirals and generals to take more action. The British figured, or hoped, that the superior firepower of Hood and Prince of Wales could handle the two German ships, or slow them down enough for other ships to close in.
The Indianapolis wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. About 900 men.
I have to agree withJS The British were pretty desperate at this point in the war and really had no choice, one encounter with a convoy would have been a disaster and the US and USSR weren’t in it yet. I don’t think anyone British or German would have predicted the outcome with the Hood, In other words the Royal Navy had to stop the Bismarck at any cost IMHO
IOW:
Out of the cold and foggy night came the British ship the Hood
And evry British seaman, he knew and understood
They had to sink the Bismark, the terror of the sea
Stop those guns as big as steers and those shells as big as trees
[hijack if permitted]
What responses, and when, in warship design were made as a result of the Hood disaster, or others with the same structural failure mode?
Were armament bays reinforced and isolated then? And wouldn’t it be a likely conclusion to do so, at least to a greater extent?
[/hijack if permitted]
The Yamato went down with, roughly 2,500 souls, around 90% of her crew.
Interesting. Did some reading:
“But this ship was merely for show; and since she differed little from a stationary edifice on land, being meant for exhibition and not for use, she was moved only with difficulty and danger.”
“It must be noted however that there is no indication of any of these monsters actually participating in battle.”
So as you say, the hugest ones seem to be more showpieces at best, if not outright fibbing.
Otara
There werent any left, Hood was the last english battlecruiser. They’d already managed to get most of the others blown up in fairly similar circumstances, ie using a design that was never intended to fight directly against other battleships.
Most of the lessons about Hood’s vulnerability were learned in WW1 at Jutland, they then tried to keep it relevant by modernising it with extra armour , which didnt work so well in practise.
You’re also talking 1941 for Hoods destruction, Im not sure there were any new designs for heavily armoured capital ships after that date, they were already on the way to construction, or not made. Vanguard was still being built and did include some lessons according to wiki, but the fundamental flaw by then was recognising that battleships were pretty much done in general.
Otara
He is correct IMHO and I would like to add that the Hood was scheduled for an upper deck armor replacement and buttressing that did not happen because of the war. So to correct my earlier statement at least some British and probably some crew did know of her weaknesses. I can only assume the Germans would have thought the lessons of Jutland and WW1 were learned and corrections made