The city of Belfast itself has a former Royal Navy museum ship near the slipways where the Olympic, Titanic and Britannic were built - the light cruiser HMS Caroline, which was at Jutland.
Missiles are pretty neat in a technical sort of way but the idea of an unguided 15 inch, 1000 pound potato blown out of a pipe at several times the speed of sound really appeals to my inner 10 year old. Oh, and the potato is packed with high explosive.
It was a known tactical flaw to put battle cruisers up against battleships or even other battle cruisers.
Or bought from the Navy, or in some cases not. When fund raising efforts didn’t collect enough money to buy her from the Navy for use as a museum, the Enterprise was sold off to the scrappers in 1958 for example.
Indeed, the British economy wasn’t in great shape after the war, while the US economy was booming. The Franklin and Bunker Hill would have been written off if they were part of the Royal Navy in 1945 due to the severe damage they had sustained. The US Navy fully repaired both of them just to put them in mothballs from which they were never reactivated until they were stricken in the 1960s.
“Indeed, the British economy wasn’t in great shape after the war”
Wartime rationing didn’t completely end until 1954, and their rationing was severe being an island nation. I’ve read the government also “mined” their silver coinage to help pay back Lend Lease debts to United States.
Once Lend-Lease was terminated on 1st September 1945 the financial crisis of 1941 promptly reappeared. Britain was broke, and the American Loan, at 2%, the price of which was the convertibility of sterling, was the only thing that enabled them to avoid very severe financial retrenchment, which would have included abandoning all Britain’s overseas commitments, including the Army of Occupation in Germany, regardless of consequences.
There was considerable opposition in Washington to giving Britain any kind of financial assistance after the war. At this point the US was still seeing Britain through the lens of a competitor for its postwar international trade, rather than an ally against Communism. Some in the Irish lobby urged that Britain should be forced to disgorge Northern Ireland to the Irish Free State as the price of aid.
“flying the flag” meant world tours, visiting ports around the world…
Ships are darned expensive. And have 30-50 year mechanical lives.
A Navy could be forgiven a bit for trying to keep a ship around even half that long in an era of rapid technological progress. One in which, by definition, the latest new-fangled gizmo had not seen the test of combat, whereas the old dogs had. Even the idea of “rapid technological progress” itself was a new idea in the 1920-30s. Senior military leaders born in the 1890s had a hard time grokking just how much they knew was no longer true.
A lot of 1920s military hardware of all services was functionally obsolete by the onset of WW-II and even the stuff from the late 1930s was hopelessly outclassed by the stuff being built in 1944. Much of which didn’t get to the battle before the war ended.
But an awful lot of that functionally obsolete stuff on all sides did see duty as bullet sumps for enemy ammunition. At considerable cost to the youth of their own nation. Often you’re forced to fight with what you have in the only way the stuff you have can be fought. Ineffectual though that might be.
Hood was actually bigger than Bismarck (gross tonnage).
But yeah…the theory was the battlecruiser would be fast enough to escape anything more dangerous but for some reason no one ever seemed to follow that plan.
There seemed to be some fancy for awhile in Naval circles of imagining opportunistic one-on-one battles. Where being able to close, fire, then retire at will to reset for another attempt later was a valuable capability. Sort of “the Red Baron rides the waves”.
The reality was rather different.
There were mass actions by groups of ships of varying capability where sticking together mattered. There were wartime missions that don’t permit retirement because you must stop Enemy X from doing Y or getting to position Z. The much more constricted waters around Europe’s approaches that meant you couldn’t maneuver 100nm to the west or north or whatever with impunity.
So pretty much every naval engagement became the same thing: You and your mixed-bag fleet will close with their mixed-bag fleet at a place and time of neither’s choosing, with geometry as much a matter of luck at detection than skill at seeking. Then everyone will slug it out until they’re sunk or run out of targets to shoot.
In that latter melee-unto-death style of combat, battlecruisers, and especially obsolete ones, were just a sinking waiting to happen.
Every discussion of battlecruiser tactics I’ve seen has indicated that a battlecruiser was supposed to bully cruisers (commerce raiders) or convoys, and never try to stand toe-to-toe with an actual battleship. So every time they were ordered in to engage an actual capital ship, it was a potential suicide order. A battlecruiser’s superior speed wasn’t enough to affect opposing gunnery so they were going to get hit, and their thinner armor meant those hits would really hurt.
And because battlecruisers stopped being built before the 1920s, they were obsoleted to the point they no longer had a speed advantage over the new generation fast battleships, so they were unalterably doomed if they crossed paths with one of those.
Armchair admiral checking in:
I was thinking earlier that Hood and PoW could have just chased Bismarck without ever quite getting into range. AIUI, while those ships can be quite fast, they consume gobs of fuel compared to cruising speed (not to mention wear-and-tear).
Granted Hood and PoW are in the same boat (heh) but repair and refueling were much closer at hand. Bismarck and Eugen would have to retire to a base much sooner and at considerable more danger as they got within range of land-based aircraft.
Just my worthless $0.02
An interesting set of problems to be sure. Naval tactics are not my specialty, not even a smidgen. But I have read a couple of books on the battles with the Bismarck, Prinz Eugen.
Something that’s kind of hard for us to grok these days is the fact that sightings, whether visual or radar, were as much luck as skill, and the idea of shadowing a target out of shooting range, but within reliable keep-them-in-sight-at-all-costs range was actually very hard to do with the tech of the time.
Between sea state, shit weather, and darkness, if you did spot somebody near the limits of your detection gear, you pretty well had to close, and close hard to have any hope of keeping them in contact.
That same problem obtains in air combat and in infantry / armored warfare. The ranges, speeds, and tactical details are all different, but the underlying problem remains the same.
At the battle of Guadalcanal, for a few minutes, the WW1 battlecruiser Kirishima was a counter-example to your “unalterably doomed” statement. With the help of supporting cruisers and destroyers, she’d clearly bested a modern battleship and was in the process of finishing the job. Then a 2nd battleship opened fire….
This was attempted after the battle, with PofW and the cruisers chasing at near-max visual, gun, and radar range. Eventually, Bismarck was able to slip away.
Another problem is that it goes against centuries of RN tradition. Aggressive action was expected, even when the odds weren’t good.
Nitpick: Kirishima was initially built as a battlecruiser, but heavily refitted in 1927 to battleship standards, including 4,000 tons of more armor (and upgraded propulsion systems to keep up speed); and then again in 1934 to fast battleship standards.
On paper, Kirishima was fully the equal of South Dakota, and South Dakota’s electrical system’s were malfunctioning so she was “deaf, dumb, blind, and impotent”, to quote Adm Willis Lee.
The IJN declared the modernized Kongo class “fast battleships”, but they weren’t. The mods made their armor deck closer to, but still inferior to, that of modern battleships. The rest of their armor was still typical of WW1 battlecruisers. Kirishima had an 8” belt. That’s essentially tin foil to 14-16” shells, at any range. Other than speed, I can’t think of any area where they remotely compared to modern BBs.
The RN modernized Renown in very similar ways, but wisely continued to call her a battlecruiser.
Also, Lee’s comment was describing her after she’d been shelled. The earlier electrical issue had largely been resolved when she took on Kirishima.
Well, I’m not getting into a “no true battleship” argument. Kirishima kicked South Dakota’s ass while she was completely shut down, and got pasted in turn by Washington by surprise.
The story is so anomalous it’s hard to draw any credible conclusions from it, other than “badly led naval forces will suffer disproportionate losses” and “your own engineering department might be your worst enemy.”
Yep. One British Admiral was hung for not pressing the battle. So there was no way the Hood and Prince of Wales could run away from the Bismark.
USS South Dakota however, suffer little serious damage, she was never in danger of sinking:
wiki- Japanese destroyers illuminated the ship and the rest of Kondō’s vessels concentrated their fire on South Dakota. She received 27 hits during this phase, including a 14-inch shell from Kirishima that hit the rear turret and failed to penetrate the armor, though it damaged the training gear. Most of the hits came from the medium-caliber guns of the cruisers and destroyers, though they were largely confined to the superstructure, where they did not threaten the ship’s survival. They nevertheless inflicted significant damage, destroying radar sets, disabling radio systems, and knocking out other systems, leaving the ship in Lee’s words “deaf, dumb, blind, and impotent.”[22]
Note that according to this, the Kirishima only landed one big gun hit, which did not penetrate the armor.
What in modern parlance is termed a “mission kill”. As a floating hotel, South Dakota was still fully functional. As a weapon of war, it was done.