Minor nitpick:
Japan dropped out of the Washington/London treaties in 1936. Yamato and Musashi were laid down after that.
Also, the treaties were also regulating ship sizes (by displacement weight). 35,000 was the Washington limit. By 1938, the US and UK also abandoned the limits in their latest and greatest designs.
And indeed, the hulls originally started for some of the other Yamato-class ships were converted to carriers.
One carrier, the Shinano was built on the hull of a Yamato class ship. It was commissioned (prematurely) in November, 1944 and sunk ten days later while carrying out ferry duties. The submarine USS Archerfish hit it with four torpedoes, the incomplete watertight seals on internal areas and less than fully operational damage control facilities allowed the ship to continue to take on water until all the boilers had flooded. With the loss of power, no further pumping could be continued and the ship eventually rolled over and sank.
The Irifuneyama Memorial museum indicates that two hulls were converted (and the remaining one never started), which is what I was remembering. However, Wikipedia states that the fourth Yamato-class hull was cancelled when only 30% complete, and never suggests that it was converted to a carrier. My mistake, apparently.
Specifically, the Americans, with the Pennsylvania & Oklahoma classes, pioneered
the so-called “all or nothing” protection method, armoring the central part of the
ship heavily while leaving the bow and the stern less protected. The Japanese
copied the American concept for their future BBs.
Note that a torp punched clear through the Yamato’s bow, which is very narrow
(visible in this diorama).
The Yamatos had a flaw tho: they never fought in the Solomons in 1942/43, because
the distance from the main base at Truk was a bit too great for their relatively meager
range. If the range was made longer some of those night battles might have gone
quite different. As it was the Yamatos were two of the biggest military white
elephants ever.
And the movie Yamato recreated that specific torp hit, BTW…
Exactly. The IJN made them tactically superior but strategically worthless.
To expand on that, beyond the plethora of hits on the Musashi and Yamato, what other damage were US topedo bombers able to inflict overall during WWII (with their torpedos, that is)?
I once read that the YAMATO’s massive 18" guns were only marginally better that the 16" high velocity rifles fitted to the US IOWA-class battleships. Is this because of diminishing returns? (heavier projectile weigh offset by propulsion charge)? Having 18" shells crashing down on you must be an impressive sight-but without modern computers, how could these guns hit distant targets consistently?
Could be for any number of causes. IIRC, durign World War I, German naval guns were superior to British guns of the same calibre simply because they used armor-piercing rounds. A British cruiser fires it’s guns at a German cruiser, and makes a hole in the side of the ship when the shell explodes on contact. The German cruiser fires it’s guns back, and makes a hole in the INSIDE of the ship when the shell hits the hull, burrows 5 or 10 feet in, and THEN explodes inside the armor plating :eek:
The American 16" rifles may have had better penetrating characteristics or other warhead design advantages, they may have had better range, better accuracy/fire control, faster refire rate, any number of things. Probably helped that the ship they were sitting on top of could haul ass for long distances like nothing else afloat (IIRC, for years after WWII, the Iowas were the only escorts that could keep pace with the aircraft carriers for long-distance sprints when needed)
Really complicated subject that comes down to the different ammunition designs, philosophies of use, gun barrel design life and all sorts of other things. Take a look at this table. Note the wide variation in projectile weight even for nominally similar 15 in guns. The 18-in has the same mv as the US guns, but a lighter shell than one might expect. Most likely the available technology prevented them from building a gun firing a much heavier shell at that same velocity, which they needed to maintain in order to prevent the US ships from outranging them.
Also, when making guns bigger and bigger, their weight and bulk starts to get out of control, probably to do with some engineering relationships involving square and cube powers. A book on battleships I read claimed that 18 inch guns were considered by the US, but a twin 18 turret would have weighed almost as much as a triple 16, and would have meant less firepower. The Yamato’s turrets weighed 2500 tons apiece - the IJN could probably have built three 16-in battleships with the resources used by the Yamato and Musashi.
If you are really interested in this sort of thing, have a browse through this very detailed site, with scary amounts of detail.
Glancing through their list of articles, I noticed a link about torpedo defense systems which goes into a great deal of pertinent information, including at the bottom a (lenghtly) list of battleships and cruisers struck by aerial torpedoes.
What a cool site, thanks for the link
The French (true to form) built battleships with quadruple-gun turrets! Was this design more efficient? I imagine, better rateof fire, easier to aim, etc. How come no other navy imitated this design?
More crowded, more guns to loose at once if a turret gets hit or backfires (oh, and when a 14" naval rifle backfires, it’s a definite problem), etc.
The British used four gun turrets, briefly, then went back to 3-gun turrets, IIRC. The penultimate battleships, the Iowa Class (which served intermittently from WWII to the Gulf War) used three 3-gun turrets, presumabling gaining a fair amount of additional speed in exchange for ditching the fourth turret. Also, later on, it gained a helipad with all the extra room aft of the third turret.
One of my favorite battleship gun layouts is that of the USS Texas (BB-35), which had five 12" guns in five turrets, with one of them parked inbetween the forecastle and the superstructure, such that it could not fire fore or aft without hitting the ship itself (not that this was much of an issue for most battleships, but it’s still funny).
This didn’t make a bunch of sense to me so I did a little googling. The Texas has 10 14"/ 45 caliber gun. cite
Erm… yeah, I got discombobulated. I meant five twin turrets, and then went and got the caliber wrong, it seems.
No prob, but I just had to see a picture of a battleship with single gun turrets, so I started looking.
It might have been a way of getting around treaty limitations , I think I recall that was the reason for the BB class that the prince of wales belonged too,
Declan
Actually, you should look for the battleship USS Texas (no, the other one), a pre-Dreadnought “Second Class” Battleship that saw action against the Spanish fleet near Cuba in the Spanish American War. Apparently it’s main battery was a pair of heavy guns mounted in diagonally opposed single-gun turrets. Which, to my mind accustomed to bilaterally symetrical ship design, is really weird.
