In World War II, the Japanese fleet converted some of their ships into ‘hybrid’ carriers to help shore up losses inflicted in Midway. All of these were failures as far as I’m aware, but I’m a little surprised.
I would have thought that a Battleship that could carry its own air cover would be more potent, for example. But the only ship of this example, the Ise class, was never actually used.
Most only carried seaplanes, and seaplanes were really only good for recon at that stage of the war.
However, the problem the IJN had wasn’t lack of planes or ships, it was lack of pilots. The battle of the Coral Sea, while tactically a modest victory for the Imperial forces, was a heavy strategic loss, as the pilots lost there could not be made up. Note that the largest Aircraft carrier in the world was just about useless by the time it was ready for use.
Oh and one more little thing. The Bismark was IMHO that last Battleship used.
After that, the ships formerly known as Battleships were mostly converted to big fat floating (for the time being) targets. 
The USN converted theirs to large floating shore bombardment/flak battery barges, which worked pretty damn well. 
Basically, a hybrid is a battleship (cruiser, whatever) nailed to an aircraft carrier. That is tough to do. Big-gun ships require lots of armor, carriers require speed. Lots of other trade-off.
But in action we see the biggest problem. If you keep your carrier somewhere safe, you battleship is useless. If you take your battleship in close, then you cannot conduct flight operations.
To expand on Paul’s point, basically, the biggest issue is that for modern aircraft operations, you need to have a 30-kt bow wind. That means your course and speed are highly constrained by your top speed compared to current surface wind conditions. On the other hand, a gun battleship needs to be free to maneuver and dodge incoming projectiles.
I see no particular reason why no one’s tried a hybrid missile cruiser/carrier yet, except that since carriers use a large portion of their internal volume for things other than magazines, it might be more efficient to have the missiles and complex surface-based radars on a separate ship.
What is the purpose of a battleship? To close to gun range and blast the enemy to smithereens. What is the purpose of an aircraft carrier? To remain far far away from the enemy and send out planes to blast the enemy to smithereens. If the hybrid is within gun range, its flight deck is useless. If it’s out of gun range, its guns are useless.
The hybrid only has half the guns of a battleship, so it sucks as a battleship. In a fight against a battleship it would lose badly. It only has half the planes of an aircraft carrier so it sucks as an aircraft carrier. In a fight against an aircraft carrier it would lose badly. You’d be much better off with one battleship and one carrier than two hybrids. Of course, you’d be much better off with two aircraft carriers anyway. If an aircraft carrier is better than a battleship, why would you remove half the carrier’s capability to tack on some useless guns and armor?
Another factor is gun placement. You really need to put big guns as close to the ships’s center as possible, which is the same place you want to put the landing strip for the planes.
Also, aircraft carriers are full of aviation fuel, which is a hazard in close battle conditions.
One author (admittedly an anti-battleship one) said that the main service provided by USN battleships during WWII was as heavily armored fuel tankers.
Before the mid-1960s, the nature of the missile launchers and the range of the missiles would have made this problematic.
After the mis 1960s, the preeminent carrier force, the US Navy, had quite sophisticated combat data systems, including data links between ships. This negated the need to carry missiles and planes together.
Other navies that did not proceed in this direction (like the Soviet Navy) did indeed sail carriers with missile launchers, and other interesting craft.
Other concerns that I think are worth noting include: big gun platforms get an accuracy benefit from having an observation point that’s as highly elevated as possible - which describes part of the reasoning for the traditional battleship shape, with the elevated superstructure. By wanting to put the ship commander’s eyes in a position to get useful ranging and accuracy data, there becomes a need to protect that same commander - which translates to an armored bridge/observation deck. Which means it’s heavy, and elevated. And while it’s possible to put heavy things onboard ships, and elevate them, for reasons of stability, it’s easier to put those heavy, elevated items on the ship’s centerline. Which further reduces the fraction of hull length that’s going to be available for the flight deck.
Another factor is based on the fact that the staple of modern aircraft carriers was a post-war innovation: The steam launch catapult. While the idea of launching an aircraft using a catapult isn’t precisely new, AIUI that was the standard method for seaplanes attached to battlewagons, using that as a means to get heavily laden strike aircraft into the air was a major change in how carrier aviation was employed. Prior to that innovation it was expected that the aircraft would taxi off the aircraft carrier’s deck, gaining a small advantage from the carrier’s into the wind speed - which often called for longer decks than could easily be fitted into a hybrid carrier design.
Hybrids were a tolerable idea when the primary use of naval aviation was scouting and spotting - having one cruiser in your fleet/squadron with half the guns isn’t a huge disadvantage if you have better scouting than your opponent. Ise and Hyuga were just a mistake born of desperation. The Japanese needed carrier hulls but weren’t willing to give up on their battleships yet.
Bismarck’s battles: May 1941
Below are WWII battles I can recall offhand employing battleships engaging in surface combat occurring after May 1941. (only named the battleships involved, all included lighter vessels as well.) There were probably a few others.
Guadalcanal (Nov 13 1942): Japanese Hiei vs. US fleet
Guadalcanal (Nov 15 1942): South Dakota & Washington vs Kirishima
Battle of North Cape (Dec 1943) Duke of York vs Scharnhorst
Surigao Straits (Oct 44) Mississippi, Maryland, West Virginia, Tennessee, California, and Pennsylvania vs Yamashiro and Fuso
Battle off Samar (Oct 44) Nagato, Kongo, and Haruna vs US escort carriers and their escorts.
On preview: It should be noted that battleships in the middle of a fleet at sea were not particularly easy targets to hit or to kill with WWII air power.
Yes, but the BB’s in those battles really did nothing that had any real effect on the war. Yes, they were there, they fired their guns, but when three big IJN BB’s couldn’t sink even an escort carrier, the results were rather pathetic.
Say what?
Bismarck blew up the Hood but was then sunk after a suitably dramatic chase.
The two Guadalcanal battles* decided the fate of the Marines on Guadalcanal, which became the first reverse (on land, anyway) of the tide of Japanese conquest, and is regarded as a turning point in the Pacific war. In the second of those, Washington set the all-time combat gunnery record in a battleship duel.
*along with some other stuff; Guadalcanal was a complex campaign.
Sailboat
You’re right - weren’t the Soviet Kiev-class and Moscow-class carriers really hybrids? They combined V/STOL aircraft and helicopters (respectively) with a set of anti-surface and anti-air missiles. They never really got a trial in combat like the Japanese hybrids, so I guess we’ll never know if they would have been a flop or not.
Battle off Samar:
Several reasons why that fight did not go as decisivly in Japans favor as it might have:
IJN warships were expecting a fight with the USN battle line. The BB’s main guns were using Armor piercing ammo for the first portions of the fight. These shells are surprisingly less effective on unarmored targets (like the CVE’s). The shells pass through the target without exploding. (The 18 inch holes are still nothing to be sneezed at…)
The aggressivness of the US destroyer screen. Smoke screens, and the threat of torpedo attacks kept the IJN battle line from closing to point blank range, except when a US ship went dead in the water. An excellent example of a smaller force, through blufff and bluster, shaking the morale of the superior force enough to snatch a draw from the jaws of defeat.
The aggressiveness of the USN pilots. The small CVE’s used their planes to agressively bomb and strafe the enemy force. So much so, that the IJN Admiral later stated that he thought he ran into the main US carrier force. Similar in effect to enemy morale, especially when combined with #2, above.
For an account of thus fight, see here: http://www.hazegray.org/danfs/carriers/cve73.txt
Anyway, my point was that if the IJN Center force got amongst the invasion ships in Leyte Gulf, the liberation of the Phillippines would have been longer and costlier.
Even in the age of the carrier, the big gun BB’s can be dangerous if they can get the enemy in range of it’s weapons. Carriers, however, have 10+ times the range the BB’s do…
I just saw an episode covering this battle on Dogfights yesterday. They went into great detail on the actions of the Johnston and the Samuel B. Roberts. They pretty much implied that the flattops hung back and did their jobs of launching and recovering strike aircraft but then , towards the end of the show and out of the blue, they mentioned the ‘savaged’ flatops and that one or more were sunk. I’ve been meaning to look into who ‘ravaged’ them and how.
How the hell do you fly off that thing? If the plane takes off forward, it has to either climb over or turn to the side of the stack and bridge. If it takes off aft, they the wind is against it.
Beats me, Rick, I just did a search on the ship names to see what all the discussion was about.
Perhaps it was like the preWWII German seaplane catapult ships? Just … different …
The plane is catapulted, angled slightly to port or starboard of forward. Ise and Hyuga both carried floatplanes only, and not a whole lot of them either – I want to say 20 as designed, but never more than twelve in action. Both of them, in theory, were meant to serve as a launching platform only for dive-bombers, with recovery being effected by accompanying carriers – but in service only carried sea planes.
Neither of course was very successful in the role envisaged. But hybrid ships were considered by many navies, and quite a few were built. HMS Furious was a hybrid in the beginning, and the U.S. Navy considered the construction of scout cruisers with flight decks. It bears mention that no navy that I’m aware of wished hybrids to double as strike carriers and gunships – the U.S., for example, mainly intended their flight-deck cruisers to serve as scouts, taking that role from the fleet carriers, and as anti-aircraft screen ships, using fighter planes to screen the larger carriers, whose air groups, according to the Naval War College (cited in Friedman, U.S. Cruisers), would be engaged in “their legitimate offensive function”.
In other words, neither the IJN nor the USN considered their hybrids to be fully functioning vessels in both realms, rather, created them for rather specific purposes (increasing number of aircraft in the fleet, mainly).
Interestingly enough, the hybrid may become more valuable in the future, I think, with increasing cost of ships and fewer large hulls being built, plus new planes such as the JSF being full VTOL capable and still adequate against most hostile aircraft. The Royal Navy, incidentally, only got their light carriers of the INVINCIBLE class into production because they called them through-deck cruisers or somesuch – implying that it’s easier to get the House of Commons to finance an odd duck of a cruiser than a useful light carrier…