So you’re going to take shells in “rusting” stockpiles, rely on them working effectively, create GPS guidance kits for them from scratch, somehow guarantee that the kit is “El Cheapo” even though no one has built one for shells that size before and there would be no general market for them? Even putting aside the lack of usefulness of guns that can only hit targets within a few miles of the coast and that can’t engage modern naval craft at standard combat ranges, it doesn’t sound like a good idea to rely on ‘rusting’ shells and ‘El Chapo’ newly designed GPS kits for a weapon system.
You guys seem to be fixated on those 16" guns. 
I think they would literally have to take the old guns off of the museum battleships to put them back into use…either that or figure out how to recast the things and then hire a bunch of out of work buggy whip makers and switch board operators to use grinders to take the rust off of the surplus shells. 
Seriously, a modern BB isn’t going to use those things, so no use even talking about them. No use talking about trying to lash up some sort of kludged together Excalibur type guided munitions system when the Navy is and has been working on other directed fire systems that do more and have more capabilities (assuming they can work out some of the glaring engineering issues). No one is going to take those ships out of mothballs, either, since they would be the worst of all worlds…expensive to bring back up to scratch (again), manpower intensive, and far less capable while also being very vulnerable.
So, if we are going to talk about battleships we should try and keep it real at least and really look at the pros and cons…there are some of each.
Artillery has historically been the #1 casualty producing arm of the military for centuries, causing something like 2/3 to 3/4 of all casualties.
So it’s extremely effective in a killing/wounding kind of way, AND it has the added benefit of suppressing and rattling the enemy on the receiving end of the barrage.
That said, battleships are still way too expensive and limited to be useful in a modern war.
RickJay
I know that you are summarizing it but the Yorktown was already damaged from the previous battle of the Coral Sea and had some emergency repairs done to it so it was not in 100% shape.
It took 2 separate attacks from the Hiryu to damge the ship and even then the damage was under control until the Yorktown was hit by a torpedo from a submarine which finally sunk it.
It took more than just the Dive Bombers to sink the Yorktown!!!
Thanks
A bomb can be fitted with a cheap guidance kit because a bomb doesn’t need to be fired out of a 16" gun, A bomb is just a propane tank filled with fertilizer and some sheet metal fins on one end. Making an artillery shell steerable and guided while still surviving being fired out of a gun is actually quite difficult. Much easier to maybe take the guided bomb and attach a rocket to it and launch it off a rail or tube that doesn’t wear out…
And yet, that’s where JDAM and laser guided Paveway bombs come from. It’s the US military finding a use for those tons upon tons of dumb iron bombs that had been patiently stockpiled in preparation for When The Russians Come ; retrofitted with fins and a guidance system that is the most barebones, kludgy thing you’ve ever seen.
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Rusting was a humourous addition - I’m sure the Navy takes care of its stocks and ballistic shells don’t really “go bad” with time provided they’re stored properly.
Those are BOMBS not artillery shells. They’re basically a big payload with fins that just drops out of a plane, so it’s easy to add effective guidance to them. 16" shells don’t have any airfoil surfaces for guidance by default and get fired from a cannon. You’ve got to make an electronic guidance system that consistently survives the jolt and acceleration of being fired, and that still gets a good signal once it’s out in the air (so probably can’t just be internal to the shell). And you’ve got to add flight capability to the shell to let the guidance actually guide it, and the wings/fins/etc that you add need to be both strong enough to actually move the shell, compact enough to fold away for the initial firing, and strong enough in their folded form not to be damaged by firing.
It’s not an insurmountable engineering problem, but the idea that it’s going to be “El Cheapo” to add multiple completely new capability to something that starts as simple as a shell, especially with the costs military projects rack up, is not based in reality. And there are nowhere near as many 16" shells in stock as there were bombs, so this unique newly engineered weapon system can’t spread it’s R&D and startup costs over nearly as many devices.
And doing all of this in some weird bid to possibly reduce the per-explosion but not per-mission cost of bombarding things that are really close to the shoreline while forcing the task force to cling much closer to the shore (and thus be much more vulnerable to attack) than they’d need to without the ‘cheap’ weapon system is just nuts.
Complaining that I responded to the words you wrote is perhaps the weakest response you can make; if you didn’t want to denigrate the readiness of the shells you shouldn’t have described them that way. Explosives do go bad over time, regardless of how much you romanticize battleship guns.
Small hijack sorry.
I believe that old 16 inch shells were implicated in an explosion that killed many sailors on board a US navy battleship some time ago? The name of which of course escapes me. Bad powder in the shell was one of the stronger theories as to why it all went bang. I would like to corrected if wrong about that please US navy buffs because it was awful tragedy and my memory is hazy.
So I am not certain stockpiled big gun ammunition can be necessarily relied on.
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Actually, I think it was the bagged charge (16" shells don’t have powder in them, they use bagged charges that are separate from the shell) not the shell (and possibly the loader was involved as well). If the shell had gone off it would have had a rather, um, major effect on the ship, even in the armored loading area…
Dude, you’re focusing on something that is the least of the problems with this plan. It’s like if we’re having an online debate about finding a wrecked Model T in a junkyard, and we’re having a discussion about whether its worth rebuilding it. It isn’t worth a half-dozen posts about whether or not we can find tires that fit, when we have to deal with rust, no seats, an engine that’s been sitting for twenty years, missing parts, etc.
47 sailors were killed in the explosion. The likely cause was an overram of one of the powder bags.
36 inch armor belt?? Cite?
This says the belt armor was 12.1 inches. There’s an awful lot of BS about cool weapons. “One 16 inch shell can clear 200 yards of jungle to create a landing zone for a helicopter!” is another doozy.
You picked up an interesting question and yes, carriers were unappreciated up until December 6, 1941. The next day changed that, of course, at least for the Americans.
Actually usedtobe was on the right track.
Yamamoto believed that striking at the battleships would demoralize the Americans and this was the most important goal of the raid. The IJN was completely wedded to the Mahanian doctrine, believing that there would be a “decisive battle” of battleships between Japan and the US and that carriers would be used to pick off some of enemy before the encounter.
In one of the greatest ironies of WWII, while the US was forced to jettison its battleship strategy after Pearl Harbor followed by the sinking the RN capital ships, Prince of Wales and Repulse by land-based IJN bombers, Japan never did!
Had the carriers been at PH, they would have loved to have sunk them, of course, but for Yamamoto the carriers were not the highest priority. The officer in charge of actually planning the mission, Mitsuo Fuchida, took it on himself to allocate a large number of dive bombers for the carriers, but as they were absent, the dive bombers were utilized for other targets.
As it was, sinking or heavily damaging six of the eight WWI-era, slow battleships was perhaps a service to the USN, as the trained crew could be used on other ships. These older battleships couldn’t keep up with the carriers and used far too much oil when tankers and oilers were in short supply.
I’ve seen it suggested that the Japanese would have actually been better off attacking the destroyers at Pearl Harbor instead. They were the work horses in the war and losing a bunch of them would have stung.
Actually, they were attempting to lure the American fleet into an ambush. Yamamoto still didn’t get it. He was behind the Japanese carriers in the First Battleship Division, hoping to wreak havoc on the USN fleet.
After the loss of the first three IJN carriers, the Japanese still attempted to press the attack with the surface fleet, the 3rd Battleship Division and some cruisers! In another example of their bat shit crazy tactics, the forth carrier, *Hiryo, *tagged along with this group, allowing itself to be found and sunk as well. It should have retired from the battle.
Yamamoto suffered from the same problem as the little girl with a curl. When he was good, he was very good, but when he was bad, he was horrid. The planning was a fiasco.
Japanese scout planes were in contact with the US carriers from before the attack by the American planes. However, the Japanese weren’t able to launch their attacks until after they lost the three carriers.
I’m responding directly to posts that are spouting misleading and/or incorrect information. It’s like if we’re having a debate about fidning a wrecked Model T in a junkyard, and someone keeps insisting that you can cheaply and quickly retrofit the engine with a modern hybrid engine, and I respond to that person.
Now that the Russian might well come again, the US finds itself short of munitions. No, really.
Artillery fire may produce the highest percentage of casualties but how does it compare to the percentage of artillery fired overall? There were artillery barrages that literally went on for days; obviously, there’s going to be casualties from any weapon if you keep shooting it at the enemy long enough. The statistics vary but it appears it took an average of around a hundred artillery shells to produce one casualty. It may be that artillery wasn’t more effective than other weapons but just got used more than other weapons.
Maybe we could call it the Tsushima Effect. Japan was the only country that ever won the kind of decisive naval victory Mahan had envisioned. Other countries, which had never had any Mahanian successes, were quicker to question his doctrines.
Artillery kills those who are caught in the open, once when they take cover casualty rates fall precipitously. People taking cover are not very effective at fighting. Arty is excellent at forcing people to take and stay in cover.
Arizona was probably sunk by a Type 99 No. 80 Mk. 5 bomb, converted 16" AP shell, ~50lbs of explosive. I don’t know what’s being viewed as ‘typical’ AShM but obviously way more than that for biggest ones. But of course it depends on more than explosive weight. A very small weight of explosive could destroy a battleship if ‘helped out’ by the BB’s own propellant charges.
But BB’s became obsolete mainly because of their inability to strike at ranges anything like carriers could, and the carrier’s capability to carry fighters to defend itself and other ships. It wasn’t that BB’s were softer targets than carriers; it was the other way around, just considering the ships themselves. Lack of long range offensive capability was partly addressed by fitting the Iowa’s with long range missiles in the last reactivation, but taking that past a certain point then it isn’t really a battleship. The reason to reactivate BB’s, were it still practical which it no longer is, would be for the unique capabilities of their 16" guns in certain situations. But it’s a narrow of set of situations given their short range* (compared to planes or missile) relatively poor accuracy*, and relatively few opposing targets which can’t be engaged otherwise.
Anyway the points about vulnerability of surface ships to super/hypersonic air breathing AShM’s or anti-ship BM’s, more realistically and unfortunately from POV the USN, affects carriers and their escorts to a large degree also. Although, it’s moderated to the extent carriers can remain far from their targets. The practical hedge against this however is submarine and long range a/c capability at sea, besides continual attempts to advance the defense. Also the effect of ‘soft’ countermeasures is hard to predict. Modern AShM’s would certainly be much harder in absolute terms to jam or decoy than the old Soviet P-15 (‘Styx’). But in 1973 the Israeli Navy still had little practical capability to shoot down P-15’s yet the missiles were completely ineffective due soft kill countermeasures. It’s hard to say ‘there’s no defense’ without knowing secret details of seekers (comms, surveillance systems) and ECM against them.
But BB reactivation is now fully in the realm of defense porn, completely impractical.
*it’s possible to develop much longer range guided shells, but fundamentally harder to develop a given propulsion/guidance system in something that has to survive being shot out of a cannon compared to boosted by rocket. In-shell electronics go back to proximity fuses in WWII but ambitious long range guided shell projects in the USN have had a troubled history. That’s one of the Zumwalt class issues, long range guided 155mm shells that the USN has decided are too expensive to buy in large numbers.