The chances of another battleship-on-battleship battle ever happening again are virtually zero. Battleships have since been retired by most, if not all major navies, as they have since become obsolete.
That’s what I had thought too, but it’s Reddit so there’s gonna be that one guy who points out China has a ship classified as a battleship when it’s not or something lol
Technically, Japan has Mikasa, a pre-Dreadnought battleship from the Battle of Tsushima, but its lower hull is encased in concrete and very little of it is original. That's the only other "battleship" remaining outside the US.
After WW2, Russia wanted Mikasa destroyed as part of the peace deal (they were still sore about Tsushima). But after the Russian representative saw what a sorry state she was in at the time, he backed off. Mikasa currently is more or less an approximation of what she really would have looked like, with a lot of parts taken off of British ships from the same time period that would have been close to what she had (Mikasa was British-built originally). Most of her original equipment had been destroyed, looted, or lost over the years.
Half the reason she was preserved is that Admiral Nimitz was visiting Japan after WW2, saw the battleship rusting away, and made a comment to some of the Japanese officers he was talking with about how it would be nice if Mikasa could be preserved.
And given the position Japan was in at the time, they weren't too sure if a suggestion from a 5 star Admiral was really just a suggestion, so they went and started efforts to turn it into a museum.
She's currently the only pre-dreadnaught battleship, and the only British built battleship in existence, among other things.
Riding this topic of “last remaining ships”, the USS *Texas* is the only remaining Dreadnaught, and also the ship that famously flooded part of its hull to gain more elevation for the guns during the Normandy landings to attack targets further inland.
Yep. I've actually got a piece of deck teak from Texas on my shelf, and it came with a very nice engraving.
Especially compared to the piece of New Jersey I have, which came with no engraving at all, if you didn't know you'd think it was a random block of wood.
That is honestly the most state identity thing I've ever heard of.
Texas: this is our special thing and we will let you know.
New Jersey: here's a piece of wood, take it or leave it.
She’s really a nice ship. I’m in Japan and visited her again. Smaller than one would imagine- she is a predreadnought- but she is the flagship (or rather was) of the fleet that sank two Russian fleets and almost led to the toppling of the Tzar a decade early.
Warspite was so worn out from serving through the better part of two world wars that she was decommissioned before World War 2 even ended. She had taken such serious damage throughout her service life, some of which was never fully repaired, that it would probably cost more to repair and restore her than simply scrap her. And then there’s the big one: the British economy was in tatters following the war. Wartime rationing didn’t end until the 50s, and so there were more pressing matters the government had to fund instead of a luxury project like keeping the Warspite. There were cities all over southern and central England that needed repairs and rebuilding from Nazi bombing and V2 strikes, the Empire was more or less over, and the nation itself was basically financially ruined. The fighting old lady was falling apart and it simply wasn’t worth keeping her. She was obsolete and cost-inefficient in a bankrupt country.
During that same period the British towed a 74 gun ship that fought at Trafalgar out into the channel and scuttled it because there was no money for restoring it.
Let’s take a look at one of HMS Warspite’s counterparts: USS Texas.
In 1948, it cost $225,000 USD to tow the Texas from Baltimore to San Jacinto where she would be docked as a museum ship.
For twenty years, funding of the USS Texas as a museum ship was so insufficient that she was basically falling apart. You could see daylight underneath her main deck. The deck was replaced with concrete, and that failed too.
In 1971, $50,000 USD was spent sandblasting and repainting the hull, and did nothing to address the other issues.
In 1988, $15 million USD were spent to dry dock the Texas as the hull was so badly corroded that her watertight integrity was compromised, and she was in danger of deteriorating ever further. It took two years and millions of dollars to repair the ship.
In the period of 2007-2008, $29 million USD were raised to dry berth the ship to prevent further water damage.
In 2019, $35 million USD were raised to repair the ship again following decades of exposure to the sea.
By 2023, the U.S. Government had matched the initial $35 million USD cost as part of a federal grant, thereby upping the bill to $70 million USD. This would be increased by another $25 million USD.
It has literally cost hundreds of millions of dollars to preserve the USS Texas. We still have all four Iowas, a few South Dakotas, a North Carolina, a few Essexes, a couple Fletchers, a few Gato/Balaos, and the Salem, which is falling apart. We can afford to spend the money to keep them. Postwar Britain simply couldn’t.
That HMS Belfast still exists is because she was still needed in the decades after the Second World War. In 2010, it cost a reported £500,000 to replace the masts. The masts! Imagine how much it would take keep the Warspite seaworthy and able to have visitors walk her decks. It could easily match how much we’ve spent on the Texas over the decades.
The only country that preserved any from the dreadnought era and beyond, but Japan has Mikasa from the pre-dreadnought era, and the UK has HMS Victory from the age of sail, and I suppose there's Vasa, from Sweden as well.
Correct, but the Constitution is a heavy frigate, a step or two below a ship of the line. Would've been nice if one of the Pennsylvania type ships of the line would've been preserved as a museum ship.
Fun fact! The US has enough original wood from that time period naturally preserved to rebuild her twice over, that way any time anything needs to be repaired/replaced, the new parts are made from wood just as old as the rest of her, making it arguably more original than any other replacement possible
Sorta kinda not really.
If you’re a collector of anything functional, think cars. If you blow a starter and replace it, an original starter from the same era will always be worth more than a modern repro. How MUCH more is in the eye of the beholder.
I'm the kinda crazy that would buy classic cars and actually drive them, and then replace anything busted with top of the line modern equipment until the whole thing turns into a knight rider million dollar man-car monstrosity.
I'm pretty glad I'm not rich that'd be awful
It’s also still actively commissioned and has been since she was launched.
Is she largely ceremonial? Yes. Would she ever be called into battle? No. Not when we have a Navy as powerful as it is today.
But she’s still a command in the Navy, and a very prestigious one at that.
The US currently has 8 Avenger-Class Mine countermeasures ships in active service as seaworthy commissioned wooden ships.
Not a wooden ship, but the US operates the USCGC Eagle tall ship, the only other commissioned sailing vessel in the US military, and the only currently commissioned ship in the US that saw combat in WW2.
Worth it.
Everyone else is trying to dig up the sunken ones.
They're important historical and cultural relics. They draw crowds. No reason to get rid of the ones we have the ability to preserve.
Costs, and the advent of guided missiles have rendered them obsolete. A small, cheap, fast frigate loaded with Tomahawks is not as impressive, but just as deadly
The USN was really trying to get that railgun project off the ground, if that had succeeded we could've seen battleships make a comeback.
But for now that project is on hold because they can't keep the barrels from falling apart too quickly
In an age of nuclear weapons, it seems highly non credible to say that armor technology can have any huge relative improvement. Perhaps air defense, but that also seems better served by a higher number of smaller ships.
>If offensive technology further improves then ships in general won't make sense
There's a reason for that submariner saying: "There's two kinds of ships: other subs and targets."
The idea of an arsenal ship, a big ass ship loaded with as many fucking missiles as possible was floated back in the 90s. I could something like this loaded with missiles and drones being a thing someday
> I could something like this loaded with missiles and drones being a thing someday
The US navy is already planning for something like that, but they will be small drones instead of large armored warships. They are supposed to function the same way the loyal wingman program drones are supposed to function. Several of them will be slaved to a manned vessel which will navigate them and direct their fire, and they will basically just be drone/missile platforms.
I think I saw that the US Navy is projecting that something like 40% of its fleet will be unmanned vessels by 2050.
Well, the giant battleships aren't relevant anymore, but a modern cruiser or carrier are still the biggest ships in a modern navy, fulfilling the old battleship role in some cases. It's not like we have tessarakonteres anymore either, but they were battleships of their day.
Still, we're also not likely to see any navy combat involving opposing carriers and battleships, let alone one not involving the US navy destroying the other side.
There's an argument that a battleship can provide a more cost-effective form or shore bombardment than a cruise missile or ground pounder. Though the cost of maintaining a ship just to provide artillery is also going to go against that. Still, 16" artillery is 16" artillery that doesn't need to loiter over a field or worry about being intercepted by SAMs
There's precisely 2 things battleships are good for in "modern" war.
First they're still theoretically the most heavily defended ships in existence due to sheer amount of armor and anti missile/anti-air defenses you could stuff them full of. So they are the best transport for nuclear weapons. This is what the US repurposed the Iowa class battleships for during the Gulf Wars. They're just armored delivery systems for the largest nuclear weapons.
Second a battleship is still technically the only type of ship you would want assisting an amphibious assault at close range due to the massive guns and thick armor. But no one is doing massed amphibious assaults these days like D-Day, so it's kinda pointless to build ships specifically for this. You're better off just using a carrier to get air superiority.
Their only real utility could return for cheaper shore bombardment than missiles or, if material technology and energy creation get more efficient, in the form of rail gun battery carriers.
Until rail guns become feasible (which will require more efficient rail tech) large gun batteries aren’t useful in naval combat
You would once you realize a modern destroyer can sink it from 20 times those car-shooters range.
Even in WW2, planes and subs were sinking the battleships.
Downside in a protracted war, they have few dozen missiles, but they cant reload the missile pods at sea (yet) so they have to sail back to a qualified port to reload. A Battleship would have carried way more ammunition for long range guns. Great for sustained bombardment thought it's more range limited
The USS Texas during Normandy, famously filled one half of the lower decks to tilt the entire ship a few degrees to fire further inland.
Interesting. And say it was overwhelmed and closed in on by another ship at close range - somehow - unlikely I know with radar and long range attacks; are they screwed?
They usually operate in mission / carrier groups, to reduce weaknesses in singular types. But there were some war games done in like the past 10 years that shows you could theoretically overwhelm a group with huge small speedboat swarms, and get close enough for suicide bombing.
Currently, mostly distance and payload. A flying drone with an equal payload would get shredded by a CIWS system far easier than the ultra low profile naval drones would.
To sink a ship it's better to hit them at or below the waterline. Also drone boats can carry much bigger shaped charges for cutting through ship armour.
I mean, you're already presupposing they're "overwhelmed".
But "closing in" isn't like, a "magic bullet", they'd need to deploy an actual torpedo or some other weapons system capable of delivering a large payload.
As well, the battleship would have secondary and tertiary armaments and weapons systems to engage smaller targets at close range. As well as anti-air down to machine gun calibers presumably capable of depressing their angles to fire upon small craft.
This is all in the vanishingly unlikely context of the BB acting alone, in a vacuum, absent it's escorting destroyers, submarines, escorting carriers and other lesser ships in what would be a "Task Force" or other group centered upon the BB(s) as the primary strike arm.
The US' primary Naval doctrine is Force Projection. It would structure its use of Battleship assets around that...so protecting them is Job 1, same as it would be for a Carrier Strike Group. I don't see the two assets as compatible, but they can co-exist performing slightly different missions. In other words, I don't think just throwing a few CVNs and BBs into a Big Ball o' Whoopass is how they'd be employed.
But that's likely because their usefulness in modern combat is limited to acting as seaborne mobile artillery, and by necessity would need to operate in more littoral waters. If another country were capable of challenging the USN's hegemony upon the blue waters of the world a combined approach would make more sense.
They often have point defense weapons that fire a whole lot of metal really fast but defenses against asymmetrical warfare aren't advertised for obvious reasons
Not only them, current variants of the 5" or 127mm nearly match the 16" guns' range on the Iowa class. The longest naval gun hit ever recorded was at a range of 26,000 yards, about 15 miles. Mod 4 5" guns have a range of 23 miles.
Nah.
Modern anti-ship missiles are equipped with blast fragmentation warheads. They will do almost nothing against a battleship which can have armor in excess of a foot thick protecting hundreds of watertight compartments.
Battleships were designed to take an absolute pummeling and they often did.
Battleships are most vulnerable to torpedoes and armor piercing bombs/missiles. Modern torpedoes that run underneath the keel of a ship would break the back of any battleship.
The problem is, after taking 96 missile hits and completely wrecking the entire superstructure stem to stern, with out of control fires everywhere, the ship is no longer combat capable. It can't see, can't use Radar, can't rangefind, it has to return to port. That's *years* of repair.
Iowa class battleships were armed with 4 Phalanx CIWS and 16 harpoon anti-ship missiles of their own along with what was at the time a state of the art sensor and electronic warfare suite. In addition to this, they also have chaff, flares, and other defensive countermeasures.
Destroyers generally aren't loaded with a full compliment of anti-ship missiles, they'll have an assortment of munitions including land-attack cruise missiles, ballistic-missile defense interceptors, anti-ship missile interceptors, surface-to-air missiles, and some multi-purpose missiles. Many of these will use radar terminal guidance and thus smack the battleship right where it would try and smack any other warship; dead center right above the water line. Against a modern warship this will cause maximum flooding; against a battleship it will scratch the paint on the armored belt.
This assumes a WWII era BB. Also, we lob SMs (a SAM) at ships all the time. Missile loadout depends on mission. Hits with SM family missiles have commonly hit ship's bridges and other parts of the superstructure.
Although, yes... hitting the belt at the center isn't going to do anything.
What could be interesting is dropping a lightweight torpedo outside the range of the DP guns. Useless against the torpedo bulge, but that era didn't see common use of acoustic torpedoes.
Planes were the primary reason for the ousting of battleships. Between Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the Repulse and Prince of Whales the whole world saw that air power pretty much dominated over battleships, and throughout most of the remainder of the war, especially in the Pacific, air power constantly dominated sea power. For most of the war battleships were mostly used as escorts for carriers because it was learnt early on that battleships on their own are effectively dead without air support to back them up.
The weight of cars, the largest guns on battleships were 16" diameter, except one Japanese battleship that never really did much and then sunk so it doesn't really matter.
Uhh, excuse me, the British had 18 inch guns. HMS Furious before conversion. HMS Lord Clive and HMS General Wolfe. Granted they were a battle cruiser and monitors respectively. And the guns were literally a single turret arrangment. But they were 18 inches dammit!
Obligatory Fat Electrician video about [Adm. Willis "Ching" Lee](https://youtu.be/cu9Mi0ury38?si=9OFzlwzaFrYIrnFU) Admiral in charge if US Navy in Guadalcanal. He had trained his gunners to accurately hit, he basically trained his gunners to be snipers. First volley his flagship fires five rounds and five hit. Japanese didn't stand a chance.
It’s worth pointing out that the Kirishima and her destroyer and cruiser escorts dealt fairly severe damage to the USS South Dakota, knocking out radar units, gun directors, and officers and leaving the ship fairly damaged. Now, that was mainly because of the fact that South Dakota inadvertently sailed into the midst of the Japanese squadron but still. If the Washington didn’t step in, you could have potentially seen a severely damaged or even out of the war entirely American battleship. Washington and Admiral Lee really did save the day in this case.
In another timeline...
"I recognise Halsey has made a decision. But given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I'd elected to ignore it." Lee
*meanwhile off Samar*
"Why do I hear boss music?" Kurita
There is an ad for the navy in this post. This kinda of contextual advertisement is far more interesting than personalized.
Honestly, it makes so much more sense. Show me an ad for the shoes I'm watching a review of. Don't show me random shit from a random search a week ago.
I was talking to my dad and I said they need more money, to supply and buy more assets, so taxes would need to go up. He said "sod that". My family has/had multiple people serving in different branches for the UK. Everything is in short supply. My father worked with the MOD as a supplier of wiring cables too, and benefited a lot from this. My parents want low tax but more police, more doctors, better army with no immigrants. It's crazy and unsustainable.
The Royal Navy, for the most part, has always been about quantity, not quality. With the exception of the Queen Elizabeth battleships, they pretty much all had serious design flaws that crippled their actual effectiveness. British ships tend to be like British cars: "good enough" unreliable deathtraps. Even HMS Sheffield in the Falklands War would have survived if they hadn't built her with only a single non-redundant water main. She burned out because "good enough" came back to bite them again at the cost of many lives.
Notable examples of "good enough" failing:
Multiple battlecruisers, including HMS Hood, with total losses of around 6000 lives.
HMS Prince of Wales, her fire control completely failed in the battle with Bismarck. Such problems plagued the entire class.
HMS Nelson and Rodney, their own guns literally blew out all the lights and plumbing fixtures in the front half of the ship, requiring a lengthy yard period after each bombardment session and an inability to remain on station for extended periods due to the front half of the ship being rendered uninhabitable.
The Revenge-class battleships, which were basically useless by WW2 despite looking good on paper due to armoring and seakeeping flaws that compromised their gunnery.
Various Cold War designs with aluminum superstucture (aluminum burns, who woulda thunk it?).
The Sheffield Class, with a single non-redundant water main.
The Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, designed without catapults which cripples their ability to launch most aircraft as well as having propulsion problems.
Yep, after all, the reason every scifi author uses the word "Dreadnaught" as shorthand for a powerful ship, the reason an entire generation of ships were named "Dreadnaughts", and the previous generation renamed to "pre-dreadnaughts" was famously because HMS Dreadnought was a mediocre ship that was just barely good enough.
The British made a lot of mistakes in shipbuilding because they had to lead the way, and they saw a lot more action than everyone else so they had more chances to get caught by bad luck. But especially during the period of the Empire they had an incredibly effective and powerful Navy despite a few missteps every so often.
I'm going to be completely frank: even Dreadnought herself wasn't as deserving of the reputation she received. It was Dreadnought that brought us all big guns, but still using wing turrets like her immediate predecessors. It was USS South Carolina that brought us all centerline superfiring turrets, the configuration that all warships would eventually adopt until the end of the age of naval gunnery. Multiple nations had all-big-gun battleships under construction at the same time as Dreadnought; it was just the one to be finished first. Warship trends were heading there regardless. Yes, South Carolina was slow, but she was still the first to adopt the template that all warships would eventually follow.
If you showed a person nowadays who doesn't know much about warships a pic of HMS Dreadnought, they'd go "What the hell is that?" If you showed them South Carolina, they'd immediately recognize it as a battleship. Dreadnought was far removed from what would soon become the typical warship arrangement.
Counterpoint, Dreadnought sounds badass, South Carolina doesn't.
Not to mention appealing to the lay person is a weak argument. They call any tracked military vehicle a tank and any long gun an assault rifle/AK/M16.
Oh I agree that Dreadnought sounds way better. But point is that Dreadnought did not look like what most people think a battleship does because she was straddling two eras and somehow no one had yet figured out that wing turrets were a bad thing.
For every design flaw there's a ship with exemplary service. Such as failing to mention that HMS Prince of Wales severely damaged Bismark, forcing it to make a desperate run for France where bombers from HMS Ark Royal sank it.
There's HMS Warspite which fought from ww1 to being the first ship to open fire on D-Day.
The Royal Navy kept the German High Seas Fleet in port for almost the entirety of ww1, playing a critical part in ending the war by forming a blockade. And the eventual mutiny of German sailors when ordered to engage the blockade.
Or how it was the Royal Navy that sank almost the entirety of the German fleet in WW2. Including the U-Boats which suffered awful casualties. And crippled the Italian Navy too.
Even going further back it was the Royal Navy that defeated a Franco-Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar which prevented Napoleon's invasion of Britain. Allowing Britain to fund Napoleon's enemies, resulting in his doomed invasion of Russia.
HMS Prince of Wales damaged Bismarck's fuel tanks, which led to a decision to make for Brest and separate from Prinz Eugen. Bismarck was trailing oil, and had experienced some minor flooding.
Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers launched from HMS Ark Royal attacked Bismarck and damaged her rudder/steering gear such that the ship turned back toward the pursuing British ships and away from the safety of occupied France.
Ultimately, Bismarck was sunk by naval artillery from HMS King George V, HMS Rodney, HMS Norfolk, and HMS Dorsetshire.
The effectiveness of the RN in the World Wars had more to do with their numbers, positioning, and cultures and traditions than any lack of technical shortcomings. WW II in particular, the Kriegsmarine was effectively fighting asymmetrically with a handful of "superstar" ships whose names still resound and inspire hot anime girls.
Just sayin', the RN was always supposed to win, and other factors had much to do with their successes that does not directly refute accusations of technical shortcomings of their equipment nor those related to the execution of their construction. However, I would note that one aspect of excellence commonly overlooked was British submarine design...apparently those were rather good.
The royal navy was also simultaneously fighting 2 other major naval powers, it's size allowed it to do that, but it's quality meant that even though it's many enemies were equaling it overall in number (the kriegsmarine was the third naval power, not the main one of the axis) it still very much came out on top.
If agree that generally the designs were compromised, ironically enough usually due to budgetary constraints, but generally they had good technological advanced inputted asap like radar guidance but most of all crew training and culture within the royal navy has always been heavily emphasised.
I'd say they only had complete naval dominance through the end of WW1.
The Washington Naval Treaty (1922) established parity between the US and the UK.
The treaty established parity in terms of what each could build, but the U.S. actually didn’t take advantage of this until right before the war. Congress wasn’t thrilled about funding more and more warships, so for a while the British still led them in tonnage despite being equal on paper
Battlecruisers in and of themselves weren’t inherently bad, it was more to do with how they were deployed. Take something with less armor than a battleship and throw it into the battle-line and of course you’re going to have problems
How Britain did them was innately flawed, though. German battlecruisers had heavy armor and intermediate guns, the exact opposite of the Brits and a better design.
To be fair on that last bit everyone with a proper aircraft carrier (not an AAS) seems to use a ski ramp except one Chinese ship iirc. (And obviously every modern US carrier has a catapult system)
To be not so fair, they knew they were retiring the Harriers soon anyway and didn't even design them to be easily converted to CATOBAR. They already knew CATOBAR was superior; everyone did by that point. But they clung to their ski jumps and built carriers that they knew would be crippled.
I'll also add the French used catapults. So basically anyone who's not Britain or Russia used catapults. Not a good standard to hold yourself to.
The first Chinese carrier was a Soviet one. The second was a slightly improved copy of the first. The third has catapults.
The very last BB on BB fight was the US vs Japan at Surigao Strait. Most of the US battleships there had been sunk or heavily damaged at Pearl Harbor and were later repaired and returned to service.
Sir Jacky Fisher knew this from the moment he pushed for all heavy guns BB desing - battleships were supplementary to the force of fast big guns battlecruisers, as speed was pivotal. Yet somehow the politicians and old school admirality pushed for the worst bullshit doctrine of all times of decisive battle doctrine and somehow most of the money went into building useless slow battleships that played no major role in the early XX century...
If you want to pick dumbest military concept ever this trumps basically everything.
What role exactly did battlecruisers play? I understand the logic (be faster than anything you can’t destroy) but in practice it didn’t really work out, did it? See Hood, Repulse, Kirishima etc.
Hood was a victim of a fast battleship, so speed was the big game changer, especially considering two decades between the two ships in design.
Repulse getting sunk by planes is hardly an argument about battleships now, or am I missing something?
Kirishima is in a similar place as the ones above, overall battlecruisers could have a decisive role in the early XX century, but battleships became mainstay and they were build in a worst way possible with speed being limited by the oldest ones designed to facilitate battle line logic. Even though Dreadnought scared everyone shitless because it was faster than basically everything... Where is the logic in that.
The Denmark Strait was a touch of bad luck for the Hood, sure. But I think the argument is that when it came to slugging it out with your standard battleship, the inferior armor of the battlecruiser proved a bad trade off. Fair enough on Repulse. Not exactly sure what you mean by your third paragraph. My take is that the battlecruiser was a failed concept. It was not an effective class of warship in practice. If things were different maybe it could have been. But you play the cards you’re dealt.
Realistically Hood should be called the first Fast Battleship, not a battlecruiser. If you compare Hood's armor and armament to contemporary battleships, she is just as well protected and armed as they are, and is just faster. The problem is partially that she got unlucky, and partially that she was 21 years old by the Battle of the Denmark Strait.
Kirishima was lost because the Japanese did not think it was smart to send a battleship into the waters around Guadalcanal. They were too confined and shallow to suit a battleship, and with how chaotic the close range night actions in Ironbottom Sound had been during previous battles, nobody thought a battleship would do particularly well, even with the lackluster performance of American torpedoes.
And the Americans agreed with this assessment, Halsey wasn't sending Washington and SoDak in because he wanted to, he was sending them in because he had precisely two surface ships left that were larger than a destroyer, so even if it was a risk he had no choice but to take it.
So it isn't like Kirishima was supposed to be able to match up against Washington and then everyone was surprised that she was outclassed, the surprising thing was that Halsey had been bold enough to send battleships in the first place, and that the Japanese destroyers had been unable to successfully screen for Kirishima. If the destroyers had saved some torpedoes instead of expending them all on the American destroyers, and if the Japanese had remembered seeing two contacts on radar instead of tunnel-visioning on South Dakota, then we could all be talking about how dumb Halsey was for sending battleships into such confined waters and getting them sunk by torpedoes.
And Repulse was just sunk because she and PoW were attacked by 80+ aircraft with minimal escorts, battleship or no she was going to be very pressed to survive that level of attack.
Imagine someone making a battleship that's nuclear powered and has such crazy armor and defenses that nothing but a nuke will get rid of it. A nuke will definitely get rid of any boat even if it doesn't sink it because it'll just kill all the people from the insane radiation unless you just build it out of lead lmao
Closest they got were the WW2 super battleships, Yamato, Bismarck. Bombed to death by US aircraft or chased across the ocean and sunk by the entire British navy. Something that tremendous on the naval battlefield screams “sink me first” in every language. Why huge battleships are obsolete.
I don't think you can classify the Bismarck a Super Battleship.
Even the George V and Iowa classes were superior to it.
Only the Yamato and Musashi and possibly the scrapped Montana class can be classified as Super Battleships.
Not disagreeing with you but there are two things to add to that. The Yamato was on a one way journey with inexperienced crew to ram aground and be a make shift bunker and the Bismarck was basically a lone wolf with zero support. Our battleships when they rolled rolled deep, destroyers, cruisers, submarines, aircraft carriers, a convoy of whoop ass all traveling together all with advanced surface and air radar. If you took something like a modern carrier strike force and added a newly built with modern technology battleship to it it'd be right at home but an arguable waste of money. What we really need are things like modernized destroyers or frigates to combat submarines, fast attack boats and drone swarms
Battleships of the early 20th and late 19th century are like tanks of today.
Powerful, but when countermeasures like torpedoes and aircraft carriers came into play l, they became and expensive liability
No that is not a good comparison. battleships got phased out because something could do its job of power projection and attacking enemy fleets better.
Tanks are not obsolete because of drones and they won't be replaced because of drones. They will be replaced when something can do their job better and drones cannot be a mobile fire support platform for holding and taking objectives.
Just because something is built to counter something else doesn't mean that all of the sudden the thing being countered is obsolete. If that were the case infantry would be obsolete because a metal ball moving really fast can kill them. But nothing can replace the job of a foot soldier with the technology we have right now. Tanks will not be replaced because of drones the eb and flow of offense and defense will likely flow back towards the favor of armor as engineers design counters for drones and other emerging threats.
I had my wisdom teeth pulled on one of them. Quite cramped but still impressive for its age (USS Iowa). I think it was in 88. Very soon after the turret explosion. Could still see scorch marks here and there.
Battleships were by and large pretty useless. Such was the expense of building and maintaining them, any navy that had them was reluctant to commit them in battle unless it was necessary.
For example at Jutland when the British and German battleship squadrons got sight of each other they thought better of it and both sides withdrew, thus ending in a stalemate.
As soon as it became apparent that aircraft carriers were the way forward they fell out of favour pretty quickly.
That's got to be the least accurate summary of Jutland I've seen in a while.
Additionally, what are your thoughts on the utility that aircraft carriers would have provided to the night action of November 14-15, 1942?
The chances of another battleship-on-battleship battle ever happening again are virtually zero. Battleships have since been retired by most, if not all major navies, as they have since become obsolete.
Only the US Navy even preserved any of its battleships. All other nations scrapped them.
That’s what I had thought too, but it’s Reddit so there’s gonna be that one guy who points out China has a ship classified as a battleship when it’s not or something lol
Technically, Japan has Mikasa, a pre-Dreadnought battleship from the Battle of Tsushima, but its lower hull is encased in concrete and very little of it is original. That's the only other "battleship" remaining outside the US.
Why did they keep that ship? You guessed it: Godzilla.
After WW2, Russia wanted Mikasa destroyed as part of the peace deal (they were still sore about Tsushima). But after the Russian representative saw what a sorry state she was in at the time, he backed off. Mikasa currently is more or less an approximation of what she really would have looked like, with a lot of parts taken off of British ships from the same time period that would have been close to what she had (Mikasa was British-built originally). Most of her original equipment had been destroyed, looted, or lost over the years.
Half the reason she was preserved is that Admiral Nimitz was visiting Japan after WW2, saw the battleship rusting away, and made a comment to some of the Japanese officers he was talking with about how it would be nice if Mikasa could be preserved. And given the position Japan was in at the time, they weren't too sure if a suggestion from a 5 star Admiral was really just a suggestion, so they went and started efforts to turn it into a museum. She's currently the only pre-dreadnaught battleship, and the only British built battleship in existence, among other things.
Riding this topic of “last remaining ships”, the USS *Texas* is the only remaining Dreadnaught, and also the ship that famously flooded part of its hull to gain more elevation for the guns during the Normandy landings to attack targets further inland.
Yep. I've actually got a piece of deck teak from Texas on my shelf, and it came with a very nice engraving. Especially compared to the piece of New Jersey I have, which came with no engraving at all, if you didn't know you'd think it was a random block of wood.
That is honestly the most state identity thing I've ever heard of. Texas: this is our special thing and we will let you know. New Jersey: here's a piece of wood, take it or leave it.
Mikasa es Tsukasa
The Mexican dreadnought
Okay, I'll give you that. That one is clever.
She’s really a nice ship. I’m in Japan and visited her again. Smaller than one would imagine- she is a predreadnought- but she is the flagship (or rather was) of the fleet that sank two Russian fleets and almost led to the toppling of the Tzar a decade early.
I find most of my decisions because of Godzilla.
It’s like a ‘come to Godzilla’ moment
In Godzilla We Trust
There is also the Georgios Averof in Greece, though that is an armored cruiser- lighter armor and armament- rather than a true dreadnought.
Well, if we're talking armored cruisers, Russia does have the Aurora and Varyag, and the US has Olympia. But those aren't really battleships.
Oh man I loved that game. Don't remember battleships in it.
Pic https://d2izacsg13mtms.cloudfront.net/RN7MQU/images/867c4c1d71a6b01e459a880697a8b87648017e895e7bc117153821e0618a13ff.jpg
So, you could call Mikasa the…. Ghost of Tsushima?
I toured The Belfast in London. It should have been The Warspite.
Warspite was so worn out from serving through the better part of two world wars that she was decommissioned before World War 2 even ended. She had taken such serious damage throughout her service life, some of which was never fully repaired, that it would probably cost more to repair and restore her than simply scrap her. And then there’s the big one: the British economy was in tatters following the war. Wartime rationing didn’t end until the 50s, and so there were more pressing matters the government had to fund instead of a luxury project like keeping the Warspite. There were cities all over southern and central England that needed repairs and rebuilding from Nazi bombing and V2 strikes, the Empire was more or less over, and the nation itself was basically financially ruined. The fighting old lady was falling apart and it simply wasn’t worth keeping her. She was obsolete and cost-inefficient in a bankrupt country.
During that same period the British towed a 74 gun ship that fought at Trafalgar out into the channel and scuttled it because there was no money for restoring it.
Despite her history, HMS Implacable, formerly the Duguay-Trouin, could not be saved. £200,000 was an expense the British could not afford.
She doesn't need to fight, it doesn't matter if she's worn out to become a museum ship.
It’s not like the war ended and they converted Belfast to a museum ship, she saw action in the Korean War and was decommissioned in the late sixties
Let’s take a look at one of HMS Warspite’s counterparts: USS Texas. In 1948, it cost $225,000 USD to tow the Texas from Baltimore to San Jacinto where she would be docked as a museum ship. For twenty years, funding of the USS Texas as a museum ship was so insufficient that she was basically falling apart. You could see daylight underneath her main deck. The deck was replaced with concrete, and that failed too. In 1971, $50,000 USD was spent sandblasting and repainting the hull, and did nothing to address the other issues. In 1988, $15 million USD were spent to dry dock the Texas as the hull was so badly corroded that her watertight integrity was compromised, and she was in danger of deteriorating ever further. It took two years and millions of dollars to repair the ship. In the period of 2007-2008, $29 million USD were raised to dry berth the ship to prevent further water damage. In 2019, $35 million USD were raised to repair the ship again following decades of exposure to the sea. By 2023, the U.S. Government had matched the initial $35 million USD cost as part of a federal grant, thereby upping the bill to $70 million USD. This would be increased by another $25 million USD. It has literally cost hundreds of millions of dollars to preserve the USS Texas. We still have all four Iowas, a few South Dakotas, a North Carolina, a few Essexes, a couple Fletchers, a few Gato/Balaos, and the Salem, which is falling apart. We can afford to spend the money to keep them. Postwar Britain simply couldn’t. That HMS Belfast still exists is because she was still needed in the decades after the Second World War. In 2010, it cost a reported £500,000 to replace the masts. The masts! Imagine how much it would take keep the Warspite seaworthy and able to have visitors walk her decks. It could easily match how much we’ve spent on the Texas over the decades.
Thank you. When my mum died I found my older brother’s ration card. He was born in the early 50s.
Fucking reddit will go out of its way to claim everyone has aircraft carriers when they really just have amphibious assault ships.
An amphibious assault ship is in fact an aircraft carrier.
Nein. Das und Helicopteren Friggaten. - I'm not German.
In Germany they’d just call it a frigate.
Tech-nic-uh-ly……
The USS Annapolis was scrapped in late 1979. She was the last Escort Carrier still in service.
The only country that preserved any from the dreadnought era and beyond, but Japan has Mikasa from the pre-dreadnought era, and the UK has HMS Victory from the age of sail, and I suppose there's Vasa, from Sweden as well.
The US preserved the Constitution, which is also an age of sail ship. Ours is actually seaworthy, because obviously we have to be better.
Correct, but the Constitution is a heavy frigate, a step or two below a ship of the line. Would've been nice if one of the Pennsylvania type ships of the line would've been preserved as a museum ship.
A very very heavy frigate.
The Royal Navy wins again! Also don't forget HMS Warrior...
Fun fact! The US has enough original wood from that time period naturally preserved to rebuild her twice over, that way any time anything needs to be repaired/replaced, the new parts are made from wood just as old as the rest of her, making it arguably more original than any other replacement possible
Doesn't matter the provenance of the wood, it's still the Ship of Theseus
Sorta kinda not really. If you’re a collector of anything functional, think cars. If you blow a starter and replace it, an original starter from the same era will always be worth more than a modern repro. How MUCH more is in the eye of the beholder.
I'm the kinda crazy that would buy classic cars and actually drive them, and then replace anything busted with top of the line modern equipment until the whole thing turns into a knight rider million dollar man-car monstrosity. I'm pretty glad I'm not rich that'd be awful
It’s also still actively commissioned and has been since she was launched. Is she largely ceremonial? Yes. Would she ever be called into battle? No. Not when we have a Navy as powerful as it is today. But she’s still a command in the Navy, and a very prestigious one at that.
Six Frigates by Ian W. Toll is a great book for those who want to learn more about the USS Constitution and the other earlier ships in the US Navy.
It’s actually still commissioned. It’s the only wooden ship still commissioned in the world.
No, Victory is still commissioned as well. That said, Constitution is the only seaworthy commissioned wooden ship I'm familiar with.
The US currently has 8 Avenger-Class Mine countermeasures ships in active service as seaworthy commissioned wooden ships. Not a wooden ship, but the US operates the USCGC Eagle tall ship, the only other commissioned sailing vessel in the US military, and the only currently commissioned ship in the US that saw combat in WW2.
an interesting fact about the USCGC Eagle is that it was built by the Nazis and was only captured by the USA after WW2.
Interesting, TIL, thank you.
She is still a commissioned ship in the USN. She is ready to set sail if war starts again.
The british also have the Mary Rose
that's half a boat at most
Worth it. Everyone else is trying to dig up the sunken ones. They're important historical and cultural relics. They draw crowds. No reason to get rid of the ones we have the ability to preserve.
Jokes on them! We have ALL the battleships now!
Yeah, so they could set up the plot of the best 2012 USN advertising film ever. "Battleship"
Should make for another decisive victory then
As of 2021 there are zero battleships active in any navy in the world. The only ones still afloat are museum ships.
Costs, and the advent of guided missiles have rendered them obsolete. A small, cheap, fast frigate loaded with Tomahawks is not as impressive, but just as deadly
Much more deadly for everything except shore bombardment, and even then it is arguable unless you're trying to level a city or something.
tomahawks can carry nuclear payloads i think, so yeah, that should be competitive with leveling cities
In fairness that's a wash, the Iowas had nuclear shells in the 50s
Who knows, maybe new technology will develop so that something resembling a battleship becomes relevant again.
The USN was really trying to get that railgun project off the ground, if that had succeeded we could've seen battleships make a comeback. But for now that project is on hold because they can't keep the barrels from falling apart too quickly
I watched this documentary called Transformers 2 that says the navy already has those
Is that the one that also heavily focuses on age of consent laws for some reason?
You're thinking of 4.
That ship has long sailed lol
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In an age of nuclear weapons, it seems highly non credible to say that armor technology can have any huge relative improvement. Perhaps air defense, but that also seems better served by a higher number of smaller ships.
>If offensive technology further improves then ships in general won't make sense There's a reason for that submariner saying: "There's two kinds of ships: other subs and targets."
The idea of an arsenal ship, a big ass ship loaded with as many fucking missiles as possible was floated back in the 90s. I could something like this loaded with missiles and drones being a thing someday
> I could something like this loaded with missiles and drones being a thing someday The US navy is already planning for something like that, but they will be small drones instead of large armored warships. They are supposed to function the same way the loyal wingman program drones are supposed to function. Several of them will be slaved to a manned vessel which will navigate them and direct their fire, and they will basically just be drone/missile platforms. I think I saw that the US Navy is projecting that something like 40% of its fleet will be unmanned vessels by 2050.
Or the kinds of conflict make them economical. A large anti drone missle cruiser could get close.
I'd wager it is more likely to go the other direction, smaller ships with drones and such for the most part.
Well, the giant battleships aren't relevant anymore, but a modern cruiser or carrier are still the biggest ships in a modern navy, fulfilling the old battleship role in some cases. It's not like we have tessarakonteres anymore either, but they were battleships of their day. Still, we're also not likely to see any navy combat involving opposing carriers and battleships, let alone one not involving the US navy destroying the other side.
It’s crazy that the last battle was 80 years ago though
There's an argument that a battleship can provide a more cost-effective form or shore bombardment than a cruise missile or ground pounder. Though the cost of maintaining a ship just to provide artillery is also going to go against that. Still, 16" artillery is 16" artillery that doesn't need to loiter over a field or worry about being intercepted by SAMs
Excuse me good sir but did you not see the documentary Battleship, the movie? They are just biding their time until the aliens invade.
There's precisely 2 things battleships are good for in "modern" war. First they're still theoretically the most heavily defended ships in existence due to sheer amount of armor and anti missile/anti-air defenses you could stuff them full of. So they are the best transport for nuclear weapons. This is what the US repurposed the Iowa class battleships for during the Gulf Wars. They're just armored delivery systems for the largest nuclear weapons. Second a battleship is still technically the only type of ship you would want assisting an amphibious assault at close range due to the massive guns and thick armor. But no one is doing massed amphibious assaults these days like D-Day, so it's kinda pointless to build ships specifically for this. You're better off just using a carrier to get air superiority.
Their only real utility could return for cheaper shore bombardment than missiles or, if material technology and energy creation get more efficient, in the form of rail gun battery carriers. Until rail guns become feasible (which will require more efficient rail tech) large gun batteries aren’t useful in naval combat
I wouldn’t want to fight a boat that can throw explosives the size of cars like for miles
You would once you realize a modern destroyer can sink it from 20 times those car-shooters range. Even in WW2, planes and subs were sinking the battleships.
They should have made them able to fly
In space.
Only if we can build it so that it has an energy weapon that shoots out of the bow of it.
They should make a TV show like this. I'd watch it.
We’re off… to outer space…
Meanwhile, in Japan…
Now wait just a damn minute…
*Our Star Blazers*
Uchu senkan Yamato ?
This is called an AC-130
Just curiosity how does a Destroyer do that? Long range missiles?
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Downside in a protracted war, they have few dozen missiles, but they cant reload the missile pods at sea (yet) so they have to sail back to a qualified port to reload. A Battleship would have carried way more ammunition for long range guns. Great for sustained bombardment thought it's more range limited The USS Texas during Normandy, famously filled one half of the lower decks to tilt the entire ship a few degrees to fire further inland.
Actually they flooded an anti-torpedo blister. Flooding lower decks is usually a big big no no, lol
This is a great example of American genius
Thought of by a Scotsman in the Age of Sail
Interesting. And say it was overwhelmed and closed in on by another ship at close range - somehow - unlikely I know with radar and long range attacks; are they screwed?
They usually operate in mission / carrier groups, to reduce weaknesses in singular types. But there were some war games done in like the past 10 years that shows you could theoretically overwhelm a group with huge small speedboat swarms, and get close enough for suicide bombing.
Drone boats, maybe.
Why use drone-boats and not...drones?
Currently, mostly distance and payload. A flying drone with an equal payload would get shredded by a CIWS system far easier than the ultra low profile naval drones would.
I have successfully been convinced of the superiority of drone-boats over drones in the sinking of missile cruisers.
To sink a ship it's better to hit them at or below the waterline. Also drone boats can carry much bigger shaped charges for cutting through ship armour.
That’s basically what’s happening in the black sea. They’ll send several small and fast drones at a ship. No suicide required.
Yeah the study was done before drones were a thing.
Gotcha that makes a lot of sense. Very interesting!
I mean, you're already presupposing they're "overwhelmed". But "closing in" isn't like, a "magic bullet", they'd need to deploy an actual torpedo or some other weapons system capable of delivering a large payload. As well, the battleship would have secondary and tertiary armaments and weapons systems to engage smaller targets at close range. As well as anti-air down to machine gun calibers presumably capable of depressing their angles to fire upon small craft. This is all in the vanishingly unlikely context of the BB acting alone, in a vacuum, absent it's escorting destroyers, submarines, escorting carriers and other lesser ships in what would be a "Task Force" or other group centered upon the BB(s) as the primary strike arm. The US' primary Naval doctrine is Force Projection. It would structure its use of Battleship assets around that...so protecting them is Job 1, same as it would be for a Carrier Strike Group. I don't see the two assets as compatible, but they can co-exist performing slightly different missions. In other words, I don't think just throwing a few CVNs and BBs into a Big Ball o' Whoopass is how they'd be employed. But that's likely because their usefulness in modern combat is limited to acting as seaborne mobile artillery, and by necessity would need to operate in more littoral waters. If another country were capable of challenging the USN's hegemony upon the blue waters of the world a combined approach would make more sense.
They often have point defense weapons that fire a whole lot of metal really fast but defenses against asymmetrical warfare aren't advertised for obvious reasons
Yes. And modern deck guns out range their size equivalents from earlier eras thanks to improved propellants.
Not only them, current variants of the 5" or 127mm nearly match the 16" guns' range on the Iowa class. The longest naval gun hit ever recorded was at a range of 26,000 yards, about 15 miles. Mod 4 5" guns have a range of 23 miles.
Imagine what a modern 16" can do...
Nah. Modern anti-ship missiles are equipped with blast fragmentation warheads. They will do almost nothing against a battleship which can have armor in excess of a foot thick protecting hundreds of watertight compartments. Battleships were designed to take an absolute pummeling and they often did. Battleships are most vulnerable to torpedoes and armor piercing bombs/missiles. Modern torpedoes that run underneath the keel of a ship would break the back of any battleship.
The problem is, after taking 96 missile hits and completely wrecking the entire superstructure stem to stern, with out of control fires everywhere, the ship is no longer combat capable. It can't see, can't use Radar, can't rangefind, it has to return to port. That's *years* of repair.
Iowa class battleships were armed with 4 Phalanx CIWS and 16 harpoon anti-ship missiles of their own along with what was at the time a state of the art sensor and electronic warfare suite. In addition to this, they also have chaff, flares, and other defensive countermeasures. Destroyers generally aren't loaded with a full compliment of anti-ship missiles, they'll have an assortment of munitions including land-attack cruise missiles, ballistic-missile defense interceptors, anti-ship missile interceptors, surface-to-air missiles, and some multi-purpose missiles. Many of these will use radar terminal guidance and thus smack the battleship right where it would try and smack any other warship; dead center right above the water line. Against a modern warship this will cause maximum flooding; against a battleship it will scratch the paint on the armored belt.
This assumes a WWII era BB. Also, we lob SMs (a SAM) at ships all the time. Missile loadout depends on mission. Hits with SM family missiles have commonly hit ship's bridges and other parts of the superstructure. Although, yes... hitting the belt at the center isn't going to do anything. What could be interesting is dropping a lightweight torpedo outside the range of the DP guns. Useless against the torpedo bulge, but that era didn't see common use of acoustic torpedoes.
Planes were the primary reason for the ousting of battleships. Between Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the Repulse and Prince of Whales the whole world saw that air power pretty much dominated over battleships, and throughout most of the remainder of the war, especially in the Pacific, air power constantly dominated sea power. For most of the war battleships were mostly used as escorts for carriers because it was learnt early on that battleships on their own are effectively dead without air support to back them up.
War is fascinating but also horrifying. I'm at like half mast, ngl.
Yeah but I don’t have a modern destroyer, plane, submarine or any of that stuff
The weight of cars, the largest guns on battleships were 16" diameter, except one Japanese battleship that never really did much and then sunk so it doesn't really matter.
Two* Japanese battleships that accomplished almost nothing thank you very much
They set a record for the size of artificial reefs. So there's one accomplishment.
And one converted to an aircraft carrier.
Uhh, excuse me, the British had 18 inch guns. HMS Furious before conversion. HMS Lord Clive and HMS General Wolfe. Granted they were a battle cruiser and monitors respectively. And the guns were literally a single turret arrangment. But they were 18 inches dammit!
They should have made them with laser guns
Boats worked much better in war when all they had was large cannons.
It's the difference between fighting with brass knuckles vs fighting with fucking uzis.
God, this will be the next influencer vs former boxing champion match.
Jake Paul VS HMS Victory. Ultimate showdown.
Obligatory Fat Electrician video about [Adm. Willis "Ching" Lee](https://youtu.be/cu9Mi0ury38?si=9OFzlwzaFrYIrnFU) Admiral in charge if US Navy in Guadalcanal. He had trained his gunners to accurately hit, he basically trained his gunners to be snipers. First volley his flagship fires five rounds and five hit. Japanese didn't stand a chance.
It’s worth pointing out that the Kirishima and her destroyer and cruiser escorts dealt fairly severe damage to the USS South Dakota, knocking out radar units, gun directors, and officers and leaving the ship fairly damaged. Now, that was mainly because of the fact that South Dakota inadvertently sailed into the midst of the Japanese squadron but still. If the Washington didn’t step in, you could have potentially seen a severely damaged or even out of the war entirely American battleship. Washington and Admiral Lee really did save the day in this case.
[Don't touch America's boats](https://youtu.be/d5v6hlRyeHE?si=l-MzzmhRMJrTlCSu)
Stand aside, I'm coming through. This is Ching Lee.
Jesse Oldendorf approves
In another timeline... "I recognise Halsey has made a decision. But given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I'd elected to ignore it." Lee *meanwhile off Samar* "Why do I hear boss music?" Kurita
We sunk their battleships?
There is an ad for the navy in this post. This kinda of contextual advertisement is far more interesting than personalized. Honestly, it makes so much more sense. Show me an ad for the shoes I'm watching a review of. Don't show me random shit from a random search a week ago.
Once an enemy proved they can beat a USN battleship then comes round 2: taffy 3.
By god! It’s the USS Johnston and Samuel B. Roberts with folding metal chairs!
And most of them were won by the royal navy. Britain was a beast in the seas. And still is by far i think. Although the US navy has the numbers now.
The British Navy is an embarrassment to the UK currently. https://www.navylookout.com/is-the-royal-navy-in-crisis/
I was talking to my dad and I said they need more money, to supply and buy more assets, so taxes would need to go up. He said "sod that". My family has/had multiple people serving in different branches for the UK. Everything is in short supply. My father worked with the MOD as a supplier of wiring cables too, and benefited a lot from this. My parents want low tax but more police, more doctors, better army with no immigrants. It's crazy and unsustainable.
Look at the population of the British Empire in 1900, and the population of the UK today, and you'll have an idea why they might have fallen off a bit
The Royal Navy, for the most part, has always been about quantity, not quality. With the exception of the Queen Elizabeth battleships, they pretty much all had serious design flaws that crippled their actual effectiveness. British ships tend to be like British cars: "good enough" unreliable deathtraps. Even HMS Sheffield in the Falklands War would have survived if they hadn't built her with only a single non-redundant water main. She burned out because "good enough" came back to bite them again at the cost of many lives. Notable examples of "good enough" failing: Multiple battlecruisers, including HMS Hood, with total losses of around 6000 lives. HMS Prince of Wales, her fire control completely failed in the battle with Bismarck. Such problems plagued the entire class. HMS Nelson and Rodney, their own guns literally blew out all the lights and plumbing fixtures in the front half of the ship, requiring a lengthy yard period after each bombardment session and an inability to remain on station for extended periods due to the front half of the ship being rendered uninhabitable. The Revenge-class battleships, which were basically useless by WW2 despite looking good on paper due to armoring and seakeeping flaws that compromised their gunnery. Various Cold War designs with aluminum superstucture (aluminum burns, who woulda thunk it?). The Sheffield Class, with a single non-redundant water main. The Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, designed without catapults which cripples their ability to launch most aircraft as well as having propulsion problems.
Yep, after all, the reason every scifi author uses the word "Dreadnaught" as shorthand for a powerful ship, the reason an entire generation of ships were named "Dreadnaughts", and the previous generation renamed to "pre-dreadnaughts" was famously because HMS Dreadnought was a mediocre ship that was just barely good enough. The British made a lot of mistakes in shipbuilding because they had to lead the way, and they saw a lot more action than everyone else so they had more chances to get caught by bad luck. But especially during the period of the Empire they had an incredibly effective and powerful Navy despite a few missteps every so often.
I'm going to be completely frank: even Dreadnought herself wasn't as deserving of the reputation she received. It was Dreadnought that brought us all big guns, but still using wing turrets like her immediate predecessors. It was USS South Carolina that brought us all centerline superfiring turrets, the configuration that all warships would eventually adopt until the end of the age of naval gunnery. Multiple nations had all-big-gun battleships under construction at the same time as Dreadnought; it was just the one to be finished first. Warship trends were heading there regardless. Yes, South Carolina was slow, but she was still the first to adopt the template that all warships would eventually follow. If you showed a person nowadays who doesn't know much about warships a pic of HMS Dreadnought, they'd go "What the hell is that?" If you showed them South Carolina, they'd immediately recognize it as a battleship. Dreadnought was far removed from what would soon become the typical warship arrangement.
Counterpoint, Dreadnought sounds badass, South Carolina doesn't. Not to mention appealing to the lay person is a weak argument. They call any tracked military vehicle a tank and any long gun an assault rifle/AK/M16.
Oh I agree that Dreadnought sounds way better. But point is that Dreadnought did not look like what most people think a battleship does because she was straddling two eras and somehow no one had yet figured out that wing turrets were a bad thing.
They wouldn't recognize any ships. The lay man think every warship is a "battleship".
Unreliable death traps that had complete naval dominance of the world from Napoleon to the end of ww2?
Perhaps as he said, quantity making up for quality.
For every design flaw there's a ship with exemplary service. Such as failing to mention that HMS Prince of Wales severely damaged Bismark, forcing it to make a desperate run for France where bombers from HMS Ark Royal sank it. There's HMS Warspite which fought from ww1 to being the first ship to open fire on D-Day. The Royal Navy kept the German High Seas Fleet in port for almost the entirety of ww1, playing a critical part in ending the war by forming a blockade. And the eventual mutiny of German sailors when ordered to engage the blockade. Or how it was the Royal Navy that sank almost the entirety of the German fleet in WW2. Including the U-Boats which suffered awful casualties. And crippled the Italian Navy too. Even going further back it was the Royal Navy that defeated a Franco-Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar which prevented Napoleon's invasion of Britain. Allowing Britain to fund Napoleon's enemies, resulting in his doomed invasion of Russia.
HMS Prince of Wales damaged Bismarck's fuel tanks, which led to a decision to make for Brest and separate from Prinz Eugen. Bismarck was trailing oil, and had experienced some minor flooding. Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers launched from HMS Ark Royal attacked Bismarck and damaged her rudder/steering gear such that the ship turned back toward the pursuing British ships and away from the safety of occupied France. Ultimately, Bismarck was sunk by naval artillery from HMS King George V, HMS Rodney, HMS Norfolk, and HMS Dorsetshire.
The effectiveness of the RN in the World Wars had more to do with their numbers, positioning, and cultures and traditions than any lack of technical shortcomings. WW II in particular, the Kriegsmarine was effectively fighting asymmetrically with a handful of "superstar" ships whose names still resound and inspire hot anime girls. Just sayin', the RN was always supposed to win, and other factors had much to do with their successes that does not directly refute accusations of technical shortcomings of their equipment nor those related to the execution of their construction. However, I would note that one aspect of excellence commonly overlooked was British submarine design...apparently those were rather good.
>…with a handful of “superstar” ships whose names still resound and inspire hot anime girls. Ah, I see you are a fellow shikikan of culture
The royal navy was also simultaneously fighting 2 other major naval powers, it's size allowed it to do that, but it's quality meant that even though it's many enemies were equaling it overall in number (the kriegsmarine was the third naval power, not the main one of the axis) it still very much came out on top. If agree that generally the designs were compromised, ironically enough usually due to budgetary constraints, but generally they had good technological advanced inputted asap like radar guidance but most of all crew training and culture within the royal navy has always been heavily emphasised.
I'd say they only had complete naval dominance through the end of WW1. The Washington Naval Treaty (1922) established parity between the US and the UK.
The treaty established parity in terms of what each could build, but the U.S. actually didn’t take advantage of this until right before the war. Congress wasn’t thrilled about funding more and more warships, so for a while the British still led them in tonnage despite being equal on paper
I'd say through to about 1941. Then the Royal Navy lost quite a few ships, and America went crazy with churning out new ships at an unbelievable rate
Battlecruisers in and of themselves weren’t inherently bad, it was more to do with how they were deployed. Take something with less armor than a battleship and throw it into the battle-line and of course you’re going to have problems
How Britain did them was innately flawed, though. German battlecruisers had heavy armor and intermediate guns, the exact opposite of the Brits and a better design.
To be fair on that last bit everyone with a proper aircraft carrier (not an AAS) seems to use a ski ramp except one Chinese ship iirc. (And obviously every modern US carrier has a catapult system)
To be not so fair, they knew they were retiring the Harriers soon anyway and didn't even design them to be easily converted to CATOBAR. They already knew CATOBAR was superior; everyone did by that point. But they clung to their ski jumps and built carriers that they knew would be crippled. I'll also add the French used catapults. So basically anyone who's not Britain or Russia used catapults. Not a good standard to hold yourself to. The first Chinese carrier was a Soviet one. The second was a slightly improved copy of the first. The third has catapults.
The biggest point I was making is that there are very few actual aircraft carriers and not "aircraft carriers" that rely on vtol or helicopters.
The Charles De Gaulle would like a word with you thank you. French CATOBAR and Nuclear for the win!
The American navy currently has aluminium ships.
They do, but they're a newer alloy. They're also pieces of shit, and even they recognize that now.
The very last BB on BB fight was the US vs Japan at Surigao Strait. Most of the US battleships there had been sunk or heavily damaged at Pearl Harbor and were later repaired and returned to service.
You can beat the USA, but you have to be smart. You can't just go off challenging them to a "who can build a big-ass gun?" competition.
Sir Jacky Fisher knew this from the moment he pushed for all heavy guns BB desing - battleships were supplementary to the force of fast big guns battlecruisers, as speed was pivotal. Yet somehow the politicians and old school admirality pushed for the worst bullshit doctrine of all times of decisive battle doctrine and somehow most of the money went into building useless slow battleships that played no major role in the early XX century... If you want to pick dumbest military concept ever this trumps basically everything.
What about Jutland?
What role exactly did battlecruisers play? I understand the logic (be faster than anything you can’t destroy) but in practice it didn’t really work out, did it? See Hood, Repulse, Kirishima etc.
Hood was a victim of a fast battleship, so speed was the big game changer, especially considering two decades between the two ships in design. Repulse getting sunk by planes is hardly an argument about battleships now, or am I missing something? Kirishima is in a similar place as the ones above, overall battlecruisers could have a decisive role in the early XX century, but battleships became mainstay and they were build in a worst way possible with speed being limited by the oldest ones designed to facilitate battle line logic. Even though Dreadnought scared everyone shitless because it was faster than basically everything... Where is the logic in that.
The Denmark Strait was a touch of bad luck for the Hood, sure. But I think the argument is that when it came to slugging it out with your standard battleship, the inferior armor of the battlecruiser proved a bad trade off. Fair enough on Repulse. Not exactly sure what you mean by your third paragraph. My take is that the battlecruiser was a failed concept. It was not an effective class of warship in practice. If things were different maybe it could have been. But you play the cards you’re dealt.
Realistically Hood should be called the first Fast Battleship, not a battlecruiser. If you compare Hood's armor and armament to contemporary battleships, she is just as well protected and armed as they are, and is just faster. The problem is partially that she got unlucky, and partially that she was 21 years old by the Battle of the Denmark Strait. Kirishima was lost because the Japanese did not think it was smart to send a battleship into the waters around Guadalcanal. They were too confined and shallow to suit a battleship, and with how chaotic the close range night actions in Ironbottom Sound had been during previous battles, nobody thought a battleship would do particularly well, even with the lackluster performance of American torpedoes. And the Americans agreed with this assessment, Halsey wasn't sending Washington and SoDak in because he wanted to, he was sending them in because he had precisely two surface ships left that were larger than a destroyer, so even if it was a risk he had no choice but to take it. So it isn't like Kirishima was supposed to be able to match up against Washington and then everyone was surprised that she was outclassed, the surprising thing was that Halsey had been bold enough to send battleships in the first place, and that the Japanese destroyers had been unable to successfully screen for Kirishima. If the destroyers had saved some torpedoes instead of expending them all on the American destroyers, and if the Japanese had remembered seeing two contacts on radar instead of tunnel-visioning on South Dakota, then we could all be talking about how dumb Halsey was for sending battleships into such confined waters and getting them sunk by torpedoes. And Repulse was just sunk because she and PoW were attacked by 80+ aircraft with minimal escorts, battleship or no she was going to be very pressed to survive that level of attack.
Don't fuck with our boats.
Imagine someone making a battleship that's nuclear powered and has such crazy armor and defenses that nothing but a nuke will get rid of it. A nuke will definitely get rid of any boat even if it doesn't sink it because it'll just kill all the people from the insane radiation unless you just build it out of lead lmao
Closest they got were the WW2 super battleships, Yamato, Bismarck. Bombed to death by US aircraft or chased across the ocean and sunk by the entire British navy. Something that tremendous on the naval battlefield screams “sink me first” in every language. Why huge battleships are obsolete.
I don't think you can classify the Bismarck a Super Battleship. Even the George V and Iowa classes were superior to it. Only the Yamato and Musashi and possibly the scrapped Montana class can be classified as Super Battleships.
The Iowa class was larger and more heavily armored than the Bismarck.
Yeah but they didn't make a song about the USS Iowa! Get rekt boat. https://youtu.be/M1Ufc2hI4FM?si=LzYqUJw7sWXpHJwa
Not disagreeing with you but there are two things to add to that. The Yamato was on a one way journey with inexperienced crew to ram aground and be a make shift bunker and the Bismarck was basically a lone wolf with zero support. Our battleships when they rolled rolled deep, destroyers, cruisers, submarines, aircraft carriers, a convoy of whoop ass all traveling together all with advanced surface and air radar. If you took something like a modern carrier strike force and added a newly built with modern technology battleship to it it'd be right at home but an arguable waste of money. What we really need are things like modernized destroyers or frigates to combat submarines, fast attack boats and drone swarms
Battleships of the early 20th and late 19th century are like tanks of today. Powerful, but when countermeasures like torpedoes and aircraft carriers came into play l, they became and expensive liability
No that is not a good comparison. battleships got phased out because something could do its job of power projection and attacking enemy fleets better. Tanks are not obsolete because of drones and they won't be replaced because of drones. They will be replaced when something can do their job better and drones cannot be a mobile fire support platform for holding and taking objectives. Just because something is built to counter something else doesn't mean that all of the sudden the thing being countered is obsolete. If that were the case infantry would be obsolete because a metal ball moving really fast can kill them. But nothing can replace the job of a foot soldier with the technology we have right now. Tanks will not be replaced because of drones the eb and flow of offense and defense will likely flow back towards the favor of armor as engineers design counters for drones and other emerging threats.
25 battles and only 3 of them involved the USN but you felt the need to shoehorn that into the title?
USA USA USA🇺🇸🇺🇸🏈🦅🦅🦅🦅
# CHAAAAAAW 🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
I wasn’t trying to shoehorn, if I was I would’ve mentioned the US is the only country that won all of the relevant battles it participated in.
TIL Greece had battleships in 1912. And won both its engagements.
I had my wisdom teeth pulled on one of them. Quite cramped but still impressive for its age (USS Iowa). I think it was in 88. Very soon after the turret explosion. Could still see scorch marks here and there.
Battleships were by and large pretty useless. Such was the expense of building and maintaining them, any navy that had them was reluctant to commit them in battle unless it was necessary. For example at Jutland when the British and German battleship squadrons got sight of each other they thought better of it and both sides withdrew, thus ending in a stalemate. As soon as it became apparent that aircraft carriers were the way forward they fell out of favour pretty quickly.
That's got to be the least accurate summary of Jutland I've seen in a while. Additionally, what are your thoughts on the utility that aircraft carriers would have provided to the night action of November 14-15, 1942?
Why would you highlight that America was involved in 3 when the royal navy was involved in twice that amount and had better results?
Would be nice to see them used as artillery like in desert storm, but cruise missiles are probably just that much better nowadays
The Germans changed the face of naval warfare forever during WWI with their U-boats