Weren’t HMS Repulse and Renown also battlecruisers? Different classes than Hood, I think, but still battlecruisers with those 15 inches.
I think the USA had two battle cruisers on the boards just before the end of WW2 (Alaska and Guam from memory).
Re the Hood- Churchill was an interferer in operational matters- he had done this since WW1 when he was first Lord of the Admiralty. It didn’t help that the Fierst Sea Lord (Dudley Pound) had a brain tumour that would kill him and Churchill found him easy to dominate. If tthe Bismark had got into the Atlantic so what? It was one ship in a huge ocean. It had to have fuel and replinish supplies eventually- and sooner or later it would have been caught. The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had made sorties into the Atlantic and the Graf Spee had intercepted ships. It didn’t make a lot of difference- a few hipss versus (eventually) a heap of U Boats.
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One big difference is that, unlike a U-Boat, or even a wolfpack of them, a major surface combatant can close with a convoy and stand a good chance of annihilating every ship. It doesn’t have to ambush and run like subs do. Even absolute disasters like SC-7 or PQ-17 rarely sank more than half the ships in the convoy. Moreover, unlike the pocket BB’s like Graf Spee or the battlecruisers like Scharnhorst, Bismarck potentially had staying power when confronted with major surface combatants. I’m not surprised the British lost their shit at the thought of Bismarck in their sea lanes.
Aside, it’s surprising that Spee tried to duke it out with Exeter, Achilles and Ajax. Even giving up 2-3 knots of speed to them, you’d think he could have punished them in a stern chase over the day, especially with his range advantage with those flat-shooting 280mms, and eluded them at night. Then again, I’m not sure what his bunkerage situation was, and wiki mentions that he was overdue for an engine overhaul; perhaps he felt he couldn’t outrun them all day, at the height of the S. Hemisphere summer?
I don’t think it would be a nice experience if you were in a convoy and the Bismark intercepted it. However, the ocean is a huge place and finding a convoy is not that easy. However, even when intercepted I doubt if every ship could be destroyed- if you have ships going in all directions even at a slow ten knots you still have to find them and catch them- and get out of the area before any Naval vessel showed up. The Germans had a policy of avoiding damage or potential damage if possible. There was also historical data from WW1 where the German cruisers did a “fair” amount of damage but were eventually cornered. Even the powerful squadron of Von Spee (Admiral, not the ship) after destroying a motley collection of British vessels at the Battle of the Coronel Islands was itself destroyed at the Falklands.
As to the ship Graf Spee, you would think it could have cleaned up the relatively thin skinned Ajax and Achilles after the Exeter was pretty much disabled. However, it had been at sea for a long time and I think fatigue on the part of the Captain may have been a factor- as it was with his name sake at the Falklands.
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Likewise, the sinking of the Vichy French battleship Bretagne in the battle of Mers-El-Kebir killed 1012 seamen, but some escaped.
Sorry, last one made, which I confused into last one left - Id forgotten about them completely to be honest. It should be pretty obvious most of my knowledge here is wiki doodling.
Renown had a pretty major reworking, its arguable whether it was a BC any more, but cant really dispute Repulse.
Alaska class was designed in 39, last one finished in 43. They might have included some changes, more likely they didnt make the mistake in the first place. There was a general knowledge about the vulnerability of magazines, but you can only protect them so far without ending with a battleship.
Otara
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Wow, the USN did not even try to rescue survivors from Japanese ships! That is really really sad.
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Wasn’t there some enormous (Elizabethan?) warship that capsized on its maiden voyage, right out in front of the crowd assembled to witness the launch? Tilted, and water came in the lower gun ports, I believe. I tried Googling, but only found the Vasa, and I don’t think that was it.
The French battleship Suffren was lost with all hands in the Great War - that was about 650 men. Similarly the French battleship took 96% of her crew down her- again just over 600 men.
Even though the French battleships were smaller than their British counterparts, they still seemed to carry far less crew.
Mary-Rose?
Sounds like the Mary Rose. There was also the weird HMS Captain which capsized a few months after completion (Black Night Off Finesterre) with the loss of 500 crew.
I have a suspicion that there was a battleship which had a magazine explosion around 1900 but I can’t remember the name. HMS Bulwark had an internal explosion and lost 738 men. There were a few survivors though.
“It is a myth that the Mary Rose sank on its maiden voyage! It was launched in 1511 and it did not sink until 1545!”
Mary Rose actually sank during a battle, looks to me like a confounding of its loss with the Vasa or some such.
Otara
Most of the forming convoys would have been held in port and anyone making transit would have been recalled, leaving only what convoys were over the magic line. Basically damage control, until the bismark and hopefully not joined by her sister ship the tirpitz in a rotation, were either elimated or mission killed.
The only problem is that the British would have sued for peace long before that happened.Not wanting to besmirch the honor of the Royal Navy, but enough politicians of that era would have concidered it an honourable reason to sue for an armistice or a separate peace.
Declan
They did try, though it’s debatable how hard they tried. As mentioned upthread, many Japanese sailors simply refused to be rescued by American ships for various reasons. There are accounts of American shipwrecked sailors and downed pilots concealing themselves from Japanese forces in hopes of being rescued by their own friends instead.
Figure the Japanese refusal to be rescued by the Americans might have been one part honor-before-reason, one part possibly fearing what the Americans would do to them once captured, and one part hope that friendly forces would rescue them instead or that they could survive on their own (such as by swimming to shore).
On the topic of American battlecruisers, the Alaska class weren’t battlecruisers in the classic definition, but “Large Cruisers”. They were designed to be bigger, more heavily armored cruisers, rather than smaller, faster battleships.
And newer battleship designs, interestingly enough, featured less armor coverage than older designs, the idea being to pack as much armor as possible around the most vital parts of the ship (engines, guns, magazines, basically the ship’s center of mass) and conserve weight by not armoring any of the less vital parts. The idea being to make it a lot less likely for a situation where a lucky shot penetrates something important and takes the ship out of the fight immediately.
Another brief hijack to comment on this hijack:
I’m looking for an online cite for this, but in the battle of the Bismark Sea, American and Australian air forces sank 8 Japanese troop transports and 4 escorting destroyers, and slaughtered every survivor they could see, by strafing men in the water and in lifeboats. They killed about 5,000 – it’s unclear how many died in the sinkings and how many were killed in the subsequent attacks. The rationale was that any Japanese troops who made it to shore would be able to accomplish their mission and reinforce Japanese positions in New Guinea.
This site claims that that there were a few isolated instances of PT boat and submarine commanders who ordered survivors killed for the reasons I mentioned above, but there was no “systematic” plan of mass slaughter. An account I read years ago came from one of Martin Caidin’s WWII Pacific histories – I believe it was The Ragged, Rugged Warriors. According to Caidin, there was a specific plan, and the attack aircraft were sent out specifically to locate and kill survivors for days, long after the ships were sunk or had cleared the area.
To reply more directly to the OP – well, not exaclty warships, but certainly ships of war…
The German transport MV Wilhelm Gustloff was packed to the gillswhile evacuating soldiers, and was sunk by a Russian submarine with a loss of more than 9,000. According to Wiki, it may be the largest loss of life in a single sinking in recorded history.
Then the was the HMS Rohna, one of the first ships ever sunk by a smart bomb. Though Bristish, it was carrying American troops and more than a thousand of them died, making it America’s greatest loss of soldiers due to a single sinking during WWII.
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This I agree with. It was the disruption to the Atlantic supply lines that Britain feared. The loss of ships if the Bismark got amongst an individual convoy would have been bad but the need to delay and re-route convoys over a prolonged period would have been disastrous for the already over-stretched merchant fleet.
This I do not understand. What politicians and when and why would they have sued for peace? Things were not good in May 1941 but I do not believe there was any substantial group looking for a way out. (Incidentally, it could hardly be a “separate peace”. Separate from who? Britain (or at least the British Empire) were the only power fighting Germany at this point!) The Greek adventure had gone sour and the battle for Crete was being lost but support from America was growing (Roosevelt could not take the US into the war but was moving steadily into a state of active support for Britain) and it was clear from Ultra that Hitler was intent on invading Russia. Against that background there was no significant support for giving up. A long term failure of the Atlantic supply route might have forced Britain out of the war but nobody was looking for an “honourable reason” for quiting. We are not talking of politicians looking for an “exit strategy” from an unpopular war.
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The only problem with the subs as part of the “most men lost” list is that few, if any subs of that era carried more than about 100 crew.
The Wasa sank on its maiden voyage.
The Mary Rose sank while sailing to engage a French fleet off of the Isle of Wight, while watched by Henry viii from Southsea Castle.
It is believed to have been heavily overladen with extra soldiers, and sank when the ship heeled in a sudden gust of wind and her lower gunports which were open, were flooded.
Are you thinking of the USS Mainein 1898? She blew up in Havana harbour but there were 89 survivors.