Shopping on line can be easy, simple and save you lots of money. It can also take a lot of your time, frustrate you, and result in unwanted purchases. Now the same can be said for regular high street shopping, but with the vast opportunity presented by the Internet it will pay you to spend a few minutes reading this and understanding how to better optimize your Battleship shopping experience:
1. Compare - without doubt the biggest advantage that the Battleship offers shoppers today is the ability to compare thousands of Battleship at a time. This is a great thing, but not necessarily all the time! Too much can be daunting at times so take advantage of the great comparison sites and where possible let them do the hard work for you.
2. Research - if it has been said it will be on the internet. Ignorance is no longer a justifiable reason for buying the wrong thing. Take the time to research in detail everything that you could possible want to know about
3. Testimonials - don't know anybody that has bought a Battleship? Wrong! If the Battleship is good the internet will let you know. Use the Internet as a friend and get testimonials before you buy.
4. Questions - Got a question about Battleship then search the Forums, FAQ's, Blogs etc. Don't be afraid to ask .....
5. Reputation - Never heard of the company selling Battleship? Don't worry, no reason why you should know every company in the world, but you know someone that does! Use the internet to find out what people are saying about Battleship and build up a picture of their reputation for sales, returns, customer service, delivery etc.
6. Returns - still worried that even after all of the above your Battleship wont be what you want? Check out the returns policy. There is so much competition now that someone, somewhere is bound to offer the terms that you are comfortable with.
7. Feedback - happy with your Battleship then let people know, after all you are depending on others people input in your buying decision, so why not give a little back.
8. Security - check for the yellow padlock on the Battleship site before you buy, and the s after http:/ /i.e. https:// = a secure site
9. Contact - got a question about Battleship, or want to leave a comment then check out the sites contact page. Reputable companies have them and respond.
10. Payment - ready to pay for your Battleship, then use your credit card or PayPal! Be aware of companies that don't accept them, there may be genuine reasons but given the huge amount of choice you have when buying online there is no reason at all not to buy via credit card or PayPal.
A
battleship is a large, heavily armour
warship with a main
artillery battery consisting of the largest calibre of guns. Battleships are larger, better-armed and better-armored than
cruisers and
destroyers.
Battleship design continually evolved to incorporate and adapt technological advances to maintain an edge. The word
battleship was coined around 1794 and is a shortened form of
ship of the line, the dominant warship in the Age of Sail."battleship" The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 4 Apr. 2000 The term came into formal use in the late 1880s to describe a type of
ironclad warship,Stoll, J.
Steaming in the Dark?, Journal of Conflict Resolution Vol. 36 No. 2, Jun 1992 whose design culminated in the 1890s with the generation of ships now known as
Pre-dreadnought. In 1906, HMS Dreadnought (1906) heralded a revolution in battleship design, and for many years modern battleships were referred to as dreadnoughts.
Battleships were a potent symbol of navy dominance and national might, and for decades, the battleship was a major factor in both diplomacy and military strategy.Sondhaus, L.
Naval Warfare 1815–1914, ISBN 0-415-21478-5 The global arms race in battleship construction in the early 20th century was one of the causes of World War I, which saw a clash of huge battle fleets at the Battle of Jutland. The Treaty for the Limitation of Naval Armament of the 1920s and 1930s limited the number of battleships but did not end the evolution of design. Both the
Allies of World War II and the Axis Powers deployed battleships of old construction and new during
World War II.
Nevertheless, some historians and naval theorists question the value of the dreadnought. Apart from Jutland, there were few great dreadnought clashes. Despite their great firepower and protection, dreadnoughts remained vulnerable to much smaller, cheaper ordnance and craft: initially the
torpedo and the naval mine, and later
aircraft and the guided missile.Lenton, H. T.:
Krigsfartyg efter 1860 The growing range of engagement led to the battleship's replacement as the leading type of warship by the aircraft carrier during World War II; battleships were retained by the
United States Navy into the Cold War only for fire support purposes. These last battleships were removed from the U.S.
Naval Vessel Register in March 2006.
The ship of the line
A
ship of the line was a large, unarmored wooden sailing ship on which was mounted a
artillery battery of up to 120
smoothbore guns and carronades. The ship of the line was a gradual evolution of a basic design that dates back to the 1400s, and apart from growing in size it changed little between the adoption of
line of battle tactics in the early 17th century and the end of the sailing battleship's heyday in the 1830s. From 1794, the alternative term 'line of battle ship' was contracted (informally at first) to 'battle ship' or 'battleship'. (1850), the first steam battleshipThe sheer number of guns fired broadside meant that a sailing battleship could wreck any wooden vessel, smashing its
hull (watercraft) and mast (sailing) and killing its crew. However, the effective range of the guns was as little as a few hundred yards, and the battle tactics of sailing ships depended entirely on the wind.
The first major change to the ship of the line concept was the introduction of
steam power as an auxiliary
marine propulsion. Steam power was gradually introduced to the navy in the first half of the 19th century, initially for small craft and later for
frigates. The
French Navy introduced steam to the line of battle with the 90-gun
Le Napoléon (1850) in 1850"Napoleon (90 guns), the first purpose-designed screw line of battleships",
Steam, Steel and Shellfire, Conway's History of the Ship (p39) — the first true steam battleship.
"Hastened to completion Le Napoleon was launched on 16 May 1850, to become the world's first true steam battleship",
Steam, Steel and Shellfire, Conway's History of the Ship (p39)
Napoleon was armed as a conventional ship-of-the-line, but her steam engines could give her a speed of , regardless of the wind conditions: a potentially decisive advantage in a naval engagement. The introduction of steam accelerated the growth in size of battleships. France and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were the only two countries to develop fleets of wooden steam screw battleships, although several other navies made some use of a mixture of screw battleships and paddle-steamer frigates. These included Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Sweden,
Kingdom of Naples, Kingdom of Prussia, Denmark and
Austrian Empire.
Ironclads
The adoption of steam power was only one of a number of technological advances which revolutionized warship design in the 19th century. The ship of the line was overtaken by the
ironclad warship: powered by steam, protected by metal armor, and armed with guns firing high-explosive
shell (projectile). The first Royal Navy ship to bear the formal designation 'battleship' was the ironclad
HMS Warrior (1860).
Explosive shells
Wooden-hulled ships stood up comparatively well to solid lead shot, as shown in the 1866
Battle of Lissa (1866), where the old Austrian steam battleship
Kaiser ranged across a confused battlefield, rammed an Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946) ironclad and took a pounding of several 300 pound (mass) shots at point blank range. Despite losing her
bowsprit and her foremast, and being set on fire, she was ready for action again the very next day.Wilson, H. W.:
Ironclads in Action - Vol 1, London, 1898, p. 240 By contrast, guns which fired explosive or incendiary shells were a major threat to wooden ships, and these weapons became widespread in the 1840s. In the Crimean War, the Russian Black Sea Fleet destroyed a flotilla of wooden Turkish ships with explosive shells at the
Battle of Sinop in 1853. Later in the war, French ironclad floating batteries used similar weapons against the defenses at Kinburn.Lambert, Andrew:
Battleships in Transition, pp. 92–96
Iron armor and construction
(1859), the first ocean–going
ironclad warship
The development of high-explosive shells made the use of iron
armour plate on warships necessary. In 1859
France launched FS Gloire (1858-1883), the first ocean-going ironclad warship. She had the profile of a ship of the line, cut to one deck due to weight considerations. Although made of wood and reliant on sail for most of her journeys,
La Gloire was fitted with a propeller, and her wooden hull was protected by a layer of thick iron armor.Gibbons, Tony:
The Complete Encyclopedia of Battleships, pp. 28–29
Gloire prompted further innovation from the
Royal Navy, anxious to prevent France from gaining a technological lead. The superior armored frigate HMS Warrior (1860) followed
La Gloire by only fourteen months, and both nations embarked on a program of building new ironclads and converting existing screw ships of the line to armored frigates.Gibbons, pp. 30–31 Within two years, Italy, Austria,
Spanish Empire and Russia had all ordered ironclad warships, and by the time of the famous clash of the
USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia at the
Battle of Hampton Roads at least eight navies possessed ironclad ships. (1876), the first battleship to use steel as the main building materialGibbons, p. 93
Navies experimented with the positioning of guns, in
turrets (like the USS
Monitor),
centre-battery or barbettes, or with the naval ram as the principal weapon. As steam technology developed, masts were gradually removed from battleship designs. By the mid-1870s steel was used as a construction material alongside iron and wood. The French Navy's French battleship Redoutable (1876), laid down in 1873 and launched in 1876, was a central artillery battery and barbette warship which became the first battleship in the world to use steel as the principal building material.Conway Marine, "Steam, Steel and Shellfire" (p. 96)
The pre-dreadnought
, flagship of the Japanese fleet at the
Battle of Tsushima, in 1905, a typical late pre-dreadnought battleship
By the 1890s, there was an increasing similarity between battleship designs, and the type now known as the 'pre-dreadnought battleship' emerged. These were heavily armored ships, mounting a mixed battery of guns in turrets, and without sails. The typical first-class battleship of the pre-dreadnought era displaced 15,000 to 17,000 tons, had a speed of , and an armament of four guns in two turrets fore and aft with a mixed-caliber secondary battery amidships around the superstructure. An early design with superficial similarity to the pre-dreadnought is the British Devastation class battleship of 1871.Gibbons, Tony:
The Complete Encyclopedia of Battleships, p. 101 However, it was not until the 1890s that the widespread adoption of steel construction and hardened steel armor meant that a turret-ship could combine heavy armament and protection with high speed and good seakeeping.
The slow-firing main guns were the principal weapons for battleship-to-battleship combat. The intermediate and secondary batteries had two roles. Against major ships, it was thought a 'hail of fire' from quick-firing secondary weapons could distract enemy gun crews by inflicting damage to the superstructure, and they would be more effective against smaller ships such as cruisers. Smaller guns (12-pounders and smaller) were reserved for protecting the battleship against the threat of torpedo attack from destroyers and torpedo boats.War at Sea in the Ironclad Age, Richard Hill, ISBN 0-304-35273-X
The beginning of the pre-dreadnought era coincided with an attempt by Britain to re-assert her naval dominance. For many years previously, Britain had taken naval supremacy for granted. Expensive naval projects were criticised by political leaders of all inclinations. However, in 1888 a war scare with France and the build-up of the Russian navy gave added impetus to naval construction, and the British Naval Defence Act of 1889 laid down a new fleet including eight new battleships. The principle that Britain's navy should be more powerful than the two next most powerful fleets combined was also enshrined. This policy was designed to deter France and Russia from building more battleships, but both nations nevertheless expanded their fleets with more and better pre-dreadnoughts in the 1890s.
In the last years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th, the escalation in the building of battleships became defined by conflict between Britain and German Empire. The German naval laws of 1890 and 1898 authorised a fleet of 38 battleships, a vital threat to the balance of naval power. Britain answered with further shipbuilding, but by the end of the pre-dreadnought era, British supremacy at sea had markedly weakened. In 1883, the United Kingdom had 38 battleships, twice as many as France and almost as many as the rest of the world put together. By 1897, Britain's lead was far smaller due to competition from France, Germany, and Russia, as well as the development of pre-dreadnought fleets in Italy, the United States and Empire of Japan.Kennedy, p. 209 Turkey, Spain, Sweden, Denmark,
Norway, the Netherlands, Chile and Brazil all had second-rate fleets led by
armored cruisers,
panzerships or
monitor (warship).Preston, Anthony:
Jane's Fighting Ships of World War IIPre-dreadnoughts continued the technical innovations of the ironclad. Turrets, armor plate, and steam engines were all improved over the years, and torpedo tubes were introduced. A small number of designs, including the American Kearsarge class battleship and Virginia class battleship classes, experimented with all or part of the 8-inch intermediate battery superimposed over the 12-inch primary. Results were poor: recoil factors and blast effects resulted in the 8-inch battery being completely unusable, and the inability to train the primary and intermediate armaments on different targets led to significant tactical limitations. Even though such innovative designs saved weight (a key reason for their inception), they proved too cumbersome in practice.Preston, Anthony. (1972)
Battleships of World War I, New York City: Galahad Books
The Dreadnought era
In 1906, the revolutionary
HMS Dreadnought (1906), created as a result of pressure from Admiral John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, made existing battleships obsolete. Combining an 'all-big-gun' armament of ten 12-inch (305
millimetre) rifles with unprecedented speed and protection, she prompted navies worldwide to re-evaluate their battleship building programmes. While the concept of an all-big-gun ship had been in circulation for several years, and the Japanese had even laid down an all-big-gun battleship, the
Satsuma, in 1904,Gibbons, p.168
Dreadnought sparked a new arms race, principally between Britain and Germany but reflected worldwide, as the new class of warships became a crucial element of national power.
Technical development continued rapidly through the dreadnought era, with step changes in armament, armor and propulsion. Ten years after
Dreadnought's commissioning, much more powerful ships, the
super-dreadnoughts, were being built.
The origin of
Dreadnought
's
Japanese battleship Satsuma, the first ship to be designed and laid down as an "'all-big-gun" battleship; she was also the largest battleship in the world at the time of her launch.
In the first years of the 20th century, several navies worldwide experimented with the idea of a new type of battleship with a uniform armament of very heavy guns.
General
Vittorio Cuniberti, the Italian Navy's chief naval architect, articulated the concept of an all-big-gun battleship in 1903. When the
Regia Marina did not pursue his ideas, Cuniberti wrote an article in Jane's Fighting Ships proposing an "ideal" future British battleship, a large armored warship of 17,000 tons, armed solely with a single caliber main battery (twelve 12-inch {305 mm} guns), carrying
belt armor, and capable of 24 knot (speed)s (44 km/h).Cuniberti, Vittorio, "An Ideal Battleship for the British Fleet",
All The World’s Fighting Ships, 1903, pp.407–409.
The
Imperial Japanese Navy's battleship Japanese battleship Satsuma was the first ship in the world designed (1904) and laid down (1905) as an all-big-gun battleship, although she was never armed up to specification due to shortages of the British 12-inch Armstrong Guns.
Satsuma retained triple-expansion engines, though her sister ship
Japanese battleship Aki, completed in 1911, used turbines.
An American design,
USS South Carolina (BB-26), authorized in 1905, also makes the claim for "first dreadnought", but she and her sister,
USS Michigan (BB-27), were not launched until 1908. Both used triple-expansion engines, but had superior layout of their main battery, dispensing with Dreadnought's wing turrets. They thus retained the same broadside, despite having two fewer guns.
The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) provided operational experience to validate the 'all-big-gun' concept. At the
Battle of the Yellow Sea and the Battle of Tsushima, pre-Dreadnought fleets exchanged 12-inch volleys at ranges of 7,600–12,000 yard (7 to 11
kilometre), beyond the range of the secondary batteries. It is often held that these engagements demonstrated the importance of the gun over its smaller counterparts, though some historians take the view that secondary batteries of the pre-dreadnoughts were just as decisive as the larger weapons. None of this was lost on First Sea Lord John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher. As early as 1904, Fisher had been convinced of the need for fast, powerful ships with an all-big-gun armament. If Tsushima influenced his thinking, it was to persuade him of the need to standardise on guns. Fisher's concern was
submarines and destroyers equipped with torpedoes that outranged battleship guns, making speed imperative for capital ships. Fisher's preferred option was his brainchild, the
battlecruiser: lightly armored but heavily armed with eight guns and propelled to a remarkable by
steam turbines.
It was to prove this revolutionary technology that
Dreadnought was laid down in 1905 and sped to completion by 1906. She carried ten guns, had an 11-inch armour belt, and was the first large ship powered by turbines. She mounted her guns in five turrets; three on the centreline (one forward, two aft) and two on the wing turrets, giving her at her launch twice the
broadside of anything else afloat. She retained a number of 12-pounder (3-inch/76 mm)
British ordnance terms#QF guns for use against destroyers and torpedo-boats. Her armor was heavy enough for her to go head-to-head with any other ship afloat in a gun battle, and conceivably win.Gibbons, pp. 170–171
Dreadnought was to have been followed by three Invincible class battlecruiser-class battlecruisers, their construction delayed to allow lessons from
Dreadnought to be used in their design. While Fisher may have intended
Dreadnought to be the last Royal Navy battleship, the design was so successful he found little support for his plan to switch to a battlecruiser navy. Although there were some problems with the ship (the wing turrets strained the hull when firing a full broadside, and the top of the thickest armor belt lay below the waterline at full load), the Royal Navy promptly commissioned another six ships to a similar design in the
Bellerophon class battleship and
St. Vincent class battleship classes.
The dreadnought arms race
In 1897, before the revolution in design brought about by
Dreadnought, the Royal Navy had 62 battleships in commission or building, a lead of 26 over France and of 50 over Germany.
The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, Paul M. Kennedy, ISBN 0-333-35094-4, p. 209 In 1906, the Royal Navy now had a lead of one:
Dreadnought. The new class of ship prompted an arms race with major strategic consequences. Major naval powers raced to build their own dreadnoughts to catch up with the United Kingdom. Possession of modern battleships was not only vital to naval power, but as with nuclear weapons today, represented a nation's standing in the world. Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Austria and the United States all began dreadnought programmes; and second-rank powers including Turkey, Argentina, Brazil and Chile commissioned dreadnoughts to be built in British and American yards.
The First World War, John Keegan, ISBN 0-7126-6645-1, p. 281
World War I
during World War I
The First World War was an anticlimax for the great dreadnought fleets. There was no decisive clash of modern battlefleets to compare with the Battle of Tsushima. The role of battleships was marginal to the great land struggle in France and Russia; and it was equally marginal to the First Battle of the Atlantic, the battle between U-boat and British merchant shipping.
By virtue of geography, the Royal Navy could keep the
High Seas Fleet bottled up in the North Sea with relative ease. Both sides were aware that, because of the greater number of British dreadnoughts, a full fleet engagement would likely result in a British victory. The German strategy was therefore to try to provoke an engagement on their terms: either to induce a part of the Grand Fleet to enter battle alone, or to fight a pitched battle near the German coastline, where friendly fields, torpedo-boats and submarines could be used to even the odds.
The First World War, John Keegan, ISBN 0-7126-6645-1, p. 289 during World War IThe first two years of war saw conflict in the North Sea limited to skirmishes by battlecruisers at the
Battle of Heligoland Bight and Battle of Dogger Bank (1915) and raids on the English coast. In the summer of 1916, a further attempt to draw British ships into battle on German terms resulted in a clash of the battlefleets in the
Battle of Jutland: an indecisive engagement.Ireland, Bernard:
Jane's War At Sea, pp. 88–95
In the other naval theatres there were no decisive pitched battles. In the
Black Sea, engagement between Russian Empire and
Ottoman Empire battleships was restricted to skirmishes. In the
Baltic Sea, action was largely limited to the raiding of convoys, and the laying of defensive minefields; the only significant clash of battleship squadrons there was the Battle of Moon Sound at which one Russian pre-dreadnought was lost. The Adriatic Sea was in a sense the mirror of the North Sea: the
Austria-Hungary dreadnought fleet remained bottled up by the British and French blockade. And in the
Mediterranean Sea, the most important use of battleships was in support of the amphibious assault on Battle of Gallipoli.
The course of the war also illustrated the vulnerability of battleships to cheaper weapons. In September 1914, the potential threat posed to capital ships by German U-boats was confirmed by successful attacks on British cruisers, including the sinking of three British armored cruisers by the German submarine
Unterseeboot 9 (1910) in less than an hour. Sea mines proved a threat the next month, when the recently commissioned British super-dreadnought HMS Audacious (1912) struck a mine. By the end of October, the British had changed their strategy and tactics in the North Sea to reduce the risk of U-boat attack.Massie, Robert.
Castles of Steel, London, 2005. pp127–145 While Jutland was the only major clash of battleship fleets in history, the German plan for the battle relied on U-boat attacks on the British fleet; and the escape of the German fleet from the superior British firepower was effected by the German cruisers and destroyers closing on British battleships, causing them to turn away to avoid the threat of torpedo attack. Further near-misses from submarine attacks on battleships and casualties amongst cruisers led to growing paranoia in the Royal Navy about the vulnerability of battleships. By October 1916, the Royal Navy had essentially abandoned the North Sea, instructing the Grand Fleet not to go south of the
Farne Islands unless adequately protected by destroyers.
The German High Seas Fleet, for their part, were determined not to engage the British without the assistance of submarines; and since the submarines were needed more for raiding commercial traffic, the fleet stayed in port for the remainder of the war.
The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, Paul Kennedy, ISBN 0-333-35094-4, pp. 247–249 Other theatres equally showed the role of small craft in damaging or destroying dreadnoughts. The two Austrian dreadnoughts lost in 1918 were the casualties of torpedo boats and of frogman. The Allies of World War I capital ships lost in Gallipoli were sunk by mines and torpedo,
HMS Majestic (1895) and HMS Triumph (1903) were torpedoed by
U.21; HMS Goliath (1898) was torpedoed by the Turkish torpedo boat
Muavenet. while a Turkish pre-dreadnought was caught in the Dardanelles by a British submarine.
The inter-war period
The inter-war period saw the battleship subjected to strict international limitations to prevent a costly arms race breaking out.
For many years,
Weimar Republic simply had no battleships. The Armistice with Germany (Compiègne) required that most of the High Seas Fleet be disarmed and interned in a neutral port; largely because no neutral port could be found, the ships remained in British custody in
Scapa Flow,
Scotland. The
Treaty of Versailles specified that the ships should be handed over to the British. Instead, most of them were
scuttling by their German crews on 21 June
1919 just before the signature of the peace treaty. The treaty also limited the German Navy, and prevented Germany from building or possessing any
capital ships.Ireland, Bernard:
Jane's War At Sea, p. 118
While the victors were not limited by the Treaty of Versailles, many of the major naval powers were crippled after the war. Faced with the prospect of a naval arms race against the United States, Britain was keen to conclude the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. This treaty limited the number and size of battleships that each major nation could possess, and required Britain to accept parity with the U.S. and to abandon the British alliance with Japan.Kennedy p 277 The Washington treaty was followed by a series of other naval treaties, including the
Geneva Naval Conference (1927), the London Naval Treaty (1930), the
Second Geneva Naval Conference (1932), and finally the Second London Naval Treaty (1936), which all set limits on major warships. These treaties became effectively obsolete on 1 September 1939 at the beginning of World War II, but the ship classifications that had been agreed upon still apply.Ireland, Bernard:
Jane's War At Sea, pp. 124–126, 139–142 The treaty limitations meant that fewer new battleships were launched from 1919–1939 than from 1905–1914. The treaties also inhibited development by putting maximum limits on the weights of ships. Designs like the projected British
N3 battleship, the first American South Dakota class battleship (1920), and the Japanese Kii class battleship—all of which continued the trend to larger ships with bigger guns and thicker armor—never got off the drawing board. Those designs which were commissioned during this period were referred to as
treaty battleships.
Rise of the aircraft carrier
As early as 1914, the British Admiral Percy Scott predicted that battleships would soon be made irrelevant by military aviation.Kennedy, op. cit., p. 199 By the end of World War I, aeroplanes had successfully adopted the torpedo as a weapon.From the
Guinness Book of Air Facts and Feats (3rd edition, 1977): "The first air attack using a torpedo dropped by an aeroplane was carried out by Flight Commander Charles H. K. Edmonds, flying a Short Type 184 seaplane from HMS
Ben-My-Chree on 12 August 1915, against a 5,000 ton (5,080 tonne) Turkish supply ship in the Sea of Marmara. Although the enemy ship was hit and sunk, the captain of a British submarine claimed to have fired a torpedo simultaneously and sunk the ship. It was further stated that the British submarine E14 had attacked and immobilised the ship four days earlier.
However, on 17 August 1915, another Turkish ship was sunk by a torpedo of whose origin there can be no doubt. On this occasion Flight Commander C. H. Edmonds, flying a Short 184, torpedoed a Turkish steamer a few miles north of the Dardanelles. His formation colleague, Flight Lieutenant G. B. Dacre, was forced to land on the water owing to engine trouble but, seeing an enemy tug close by, taxied up to it and released his torpedo. The tug blew up and sank. Thereafter, Dacre was able to take off and return to the
Ben-My-Chree A proposed attack on the German fleet at anchor in 1918 using the Sopwith Cuckoo carrier-borne torpedo-bomber was considered and rejected—but it was not long before such a technique was adopted.
In the 1920s, General Billy Mitchell of the
United States Army Air Corps, believing that air forces had rendered navies around the world obsolete, testified in front of Congress that "1,000 bombardment airplanes can be built and operated for about the price of one battleship" and that a squadron of these bombers could sink a battleship, making for more efficient use of government funds. Boyne, Walter J. (1996).
The Spirit of Billy Mitchell. Air Force Magazine Online: Journal of the Air Force Association. Retrieved on
October 6 2007.] This infuriated the U.S. Navy, but Mitchell was nevertheless allowed to conduct a careful series of bombing tests alongside Navy and
United States Marine Corps bombers. In 1921, he bombed and sank numerous ships, including the "unsinkable" German World War I battleship USS Ostfriesland and the American pre-dreadnought USS Alabama (BB-8).
Although Mitchell had required "war-time conditions", the ships sunk were obsolete, stationary, defenseless and had no damage control. The sinking of
Ostfriesland was accomplished by violating an agreement that would have allowed Navy engineers to examine the effects of various munitions: Mitchell's airmen disregarded the rules, and sank the ship within minutes in a coordinated attack. The stunt made headlines, and Mitchell declared, "No surface vessels can exist wherever air forces acting from land bases are able to attack them." While far from conclusive, Mitchell's test was significant because it put proponents of the battleship against naval aviation on the back foot. Rear Admiral William A. Moffett used public relations against Mitchell to make headway toward expansion of the U.S. Navy's nascent aircraft carrier program.Jeffers, H. Paul (2006).
Billy Mitchell: The Life, Times, and Battles of America's Prophet of Air Power. Zenith Press. ISBN 0760320802
Rearmament
of the inter-war period
The
Royal Navy, United States Navy, and
Imperial Japanese Navy extensively upgraded and modernized their WWI-era battleships during the 1930s. Among new features were tower height and stability such that optical rangefinder equipment for gunnery control could be used. Some British ships received a large block superstructure nicknamed the "Queen Anne's castle", such as in the
HMS Queen Elizabeth (1913) and
HMS Warspite (03), which would be used in the new conning towers of the
King George V class battleship (1939) fast battleships. The Japanese rebuilt all of their battleships, plus their battlecruisers, with distinctive "pagoda" structures, though the
Japanese battleship Hiei received a more modern bridge tower that would influence the new
Yamato class battleship battleships. The U.S. experimented with tripod and later caged masts, though after
Attack on Pearl Harbor some of the most severely damaged ships such as
USS West Virginia (BB-48) and
USS California (BB-44) were rebuilt to a similar appearance to their
Iowa class battleship contemporaries. Optic fire-control systems were rendered obsolete by radar, which was effective beyond visual contact and was effective in complete darkness or adverse weather conditions. CombinedFleet.com
Even when war threatened again in the late 1930s, battleship construction did not regain the level of importance which it had held in the years before World War I. The "building holiday" imposed by the naval treaties meant that the building capacity of dockyards worldwide was relatively reduced, and the strategic position had changed. The development of the
strategic bomber meant that the navy was no longer the only method of projecting power overseas, and the development of the
aircraft carrier meant that battleships had a rival for the resources available for capital ship construction.In Nazi Germany, the ambitious Plan Z for naval rearmament was abandoned in favour of a strategy of submarine warfare supplemented by the use of battlecruisers and Bismarck class battleship-class battleships as commerce raiders. In Britain, the most pressing need was for air defences and convoy escorts to safeguard the civilian population from bombing or starvation, and re-armament construction plans consisted of five ships of the King George V class battleship (1939) class. It was in the Mediterranean that navies remained most committed to battleship warfare. France intended to build six battleships of the Dunkerque class battleship and Richelieu class battleship classes, and the Italians two powerful
Littorio class battleship-class ships. Neither navy built significant aircraft carriers. The U.S. preferred to spend limited funds on aircraft carriers until the
South Dakota class battleship (1939) class. Japan, also prioritising aircraft carriers, nevertheless began work on three mammoth Yamato class battleship class ships (although one of these was later completed as a carrier).
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the Second Spanish Republic navy consisted of only two small dreadnought battleships, España (battleship) and
Jaime I.
España, by then in reserve at the northwestern naval base of El Ferrol, fell into Spain under Franco hands in July 1936. The crew aboard
Jaime I murdered their officers, mutinied, and joined the Republican Navy. Thus each side had one battleship; however, the Republican Navy generally lacked experienced officers. The Spanish battleships mainly restricted themselves to mutual blockades, convoy escort duties, and shore bombardment, rarely in direct fighting against other surface units.Gibbons, p.195 In April 1937,
España ran onto a mine laid by friendly forces, and sank with little loss of life. In May 1937,
Jaime I was damaged by Nationalist air attacks and a grounding incident. The ship was forced to go back to port to be repaired. There she was again hit by several aerial bombs. It was then decided to tow the battleship to a more secure port, but during the transport she suffered an internal explosion that caused 300 deaths and her total loss. Several Italian and German capital ships participated in the non-intervention blockade. On May 29
1937, two Republican aircraft managed to bomb the German pocket battleship
German battleship Deutschland outside Ibiza, causing severe damage and loss of life.
German battleship Admiral Scheer retaliated two days later by bombarding Almería, causing much destruction, and the resulting
Deutschland incident meant the end of German and Italian support for non-intervention.Greger, René:
Schlachtschiffe der Welt, p. 251
World War II
German battleships—obsolete pre-dreadnoughts—fired the first shots of World War II with the bombardment of the Second Polish Republic garrison at Westerplatte;Gibbons, p. 163 and the Japanese Instrument of Surrender of the Japanese Empire took place aboard a United States Navy battleship, the USS Missouri (BB-63). Between the two events, it became clear that battleships were now essentially auxiliary craft, and
aircraft carriers were the new principal ships of the fleet.
Still, battleships played a part in major engagements in
Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945),
Pacific War and Battle of the Mediterranean. In the Atlantic, the Germans experimented with taking the battleship beyond conventional fleet action, using their pocket battleships as independent commerce raiders. Although there were a few battleship-on-battleship engagements, battleships had little impact on the destroyer and submarine
Second Battle of the Atlantic, and aircraft carriers determined the outcome of most of the decisive fleet clashes of the Pacific War.
In the first year of the war, battleships and battlecruisers defied predictions that aircraft would dominate naval warfare.
German battlecruiser Scharnhorst and German battlecruiser Gneisenau surprised and sank the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious off western
Norway in June 1940.Gibbons, pp. 246–247 The vulnerability of unescorted carriers to attack by other ships meant that carriers almost always had escorts, so this engagement marked the last time surface gunnery sank a fleet carrier. In the
Attack on Mers-el-Kébir, British capital ships opened fire on the French battleships harboured in Algiers with their own heavy guns, and later pursued fleeing French ships with planes from aircraft carriers.
Taranto and Matapan
In late 1940 and 1941, a range of engagements saw battleships harassed by carrier aircraft.
The first example of the power of naval aviation was the British air attack on the Italian naval base at Battle of Taranto that took place on the night of 11–12 November 1940. A small number of Royal Navy aircraft attacked the Italian fleet at harbour, succeeding in sinking one Italian battleship and damaging two others. Importantly, the attack forced the Italian navy to change tactics and seek battle against the superior British navy, which resulted in their defeat at the
Battle of Cape Matapan.
Bismarck
The battleship war in the Atlantic was driven by the attempts of German capital ship commerce raiders—two battleships, the
German battleship Bismarck and the German battleship Tirpitz, and two battlecruisers—to influence the
Second Battle of the Atlantic by destroying Atlantic convoys supplying the United Kingdom. The superior numbers of British surface units devoted themselves to protecting the convoys, and to seek-and-destroy missions against the German ships, assisted by both naval and land-based aircraft and by sabotage attacks. On 24 May
1941, during its attempt to break out into the North Atlantic, the commerce raider
German battleship Bismarck engaged the British battleship HMS
HMS Prince of Wales (53) and the battlecruiser HMS Hood (51). Due primarily to the Bismarck's superior range-finding and accuracy, it soon sank
Hood with a hit to her magazines.
Bismarck and
Prince of Wales hit each other three times, the damage compelling the German battleship to withdraw.Gibbons, pp. 228–229 While the Bismarck was heading for home, the Royal Navy continued to hunt it, and eventually an attack by
Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo-bombers from the aircraft carrier
HMS Ark Royal (91) disabled Bismarck's steering. This enabled Royal Navy battleships, cruisers and destroyers to close in for the kill.
The Pacific battles
leading battleship
USS Colorado (BB-45) and cruisers USS Louisville (CA-28), USS Portland (CA-33), and
USS Columbia (CL-56) into
Lingayen Gulf,
Philippines, January 1945In many of the crucial battles of the Pacific, for instance
Battle of the Coral Sea and Battle of Midway, battleships were either absent or overshadowed as carriers launched wave after wave of planes into the attack at a range of hundreds of miles. The primary tasks for battleships in the Pacific became shore bombardment and anti-aircraft defense for the carriers. Even the largest battleships ever constructed, Japan's
Yamato class, which carried a main battery of nine 18.1-inch (460 millimetre) guns and were designed to be a principal strategic weapon, were seldom given a chance to fulfill their potential. They were hampered by technical deficiencies (slow battleships were incapable of operating with fast carriers), faulty military
doctrine (the Japanese waited for a "decisive battle", which never came), and defective dispositions (as at Midway).
Pearl Harbor
Before hostilities broke out in the Pacific Theatre, extensive pre-war planning centered around dreadnoughts. The
Royal Navy could not achieve parity with the estimated nine Japanese capital ships in Southeast Asia, since doing so would leave only a handful of ships to use against Nazi Germany. However, Prime Minister
Winston Churchill was optimistic about the improving situation in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean and Sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse to the defence of
Singapore in the Straits Settlements was seen as a compromise. Furthermore, the U.S. Navy later agreed to send its
United States Pacific Fleet with its eight battleships to Singapore in the event of hostilities with Japan. The sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse (Forcez-survivors.org)
On 7 December
1941 the Japanese launched a surprise
attack on Pearl Harbor. Five out of eight U.S. battleships were quickly either sunk or sinking, with the rest damaged. The Japanese thus neutralized the U.S. battleship force in the Pacific by an air attack, and thereby proved Mitchell's theory, and showed the vulnerability of warships lying at anchor, as at Taranto. The American aircraft carriers were however at sea and evaded detection. They in turn took up the fight, eventually turning the tide of the war in the Pacific.
The Sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse and her escort, the battlecruiser HMS
Repulse, further demonstrated the vulnerability of a battleship to air attack, in this case while at sea without air cover. Both ships were on their way to assist in the defense of Singapore when Japanese land-based bombers and
fighter aircraft found and sank them on 10 December 1941.
Prince of Wales has the distinction of being the first modern battleship sunk by aircraft while underway and able to defend herself.Axell, Albert:
Kamikaze, p. 14
Midway
Commonly understood as a victory of carriers,
Battle of Midway showed up deficiencies in Japanese operational planning. Isoroku Yamamoto, considering them his most valuable units, kept his battleships far to the rear, in line with traditional practice. This placed them too far away to assist
Chuichi Nagumo (and they would have been too slow to keep up with him in any case). Yet, when Nagumo's carriers were sunk, Yamamoto lost an opportunity to salvage something. Carriers, for all their evident potency, were virtually defenseless at night, and Frank Jack Fletcher might have been dealt a crushing blow by Japanese battleship Yamato the night of 6–
7 June, had Yamamoto stayed closer.Willmott,
Barrier and the Javelin,
passim.
Guadalcanal
Initially, when the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, it had no battleships available in the Pacific Theatre. Eight of them were sunk or crippled at Pearl Harbor and were sent home for repairs and reconstruction; they would not have been able to keep up with the carriers in any case. The new fast battleships of North Carolina class battleship and
South Dakota class battleship (1939) classes were still undergoing trials.
North Carolina and
South Dakota were ready by summer of 1942 and provided crucial anti-aircraft defense during the
Battle of the Eastern Solomons and
Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands carrier battles.
's
Japanese battleship Yamato, seen in 1941, and her sister ship Japanese battleship Musashi were the largest battleships in history.
By contrast, the Imperial Japanese Navy had the advantage of a dozen operational battleships early in the war, but chose not to deploy them in any significant engagements. The
Fuso class battleships and
Ise class battleships, despite their extensive modernization and respectable speeds, were relegated to training and home defense, while the Japanese battleship Nagato and
Yamato class battleship were being saved for
Isoroku Yamamoto's
Alfred Thayer Mahan which never came to fruition on Japanese terms. In fact, the only Japanese battleships to see much action in the early stages were Kongō class battlecruisers, which served mostly as carrier escorts due to their high speed.Gibbons, pp. 262–263
During the later part of the
Guadalcanal campaign in fall 1942, Japan and the U.S. were both forced to commit their battleships to surface combat, due to the need to carry out night operations, and because of the exhaustion of their carrier forces. During the
Naval Battle of Guadalcanal#First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.2C November 13, battleships Japanese battleship Hiei and
Japanese battleship Kirishima were driven off by a force of U.S. cruisers and destroyers. Several USN ships were lost and others were crippled, but they inflicted critical damage on
Hiei, which was abandoned after being subject to repeated air attacks that made salvage impossible. The following evening, at the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal on 15 November
1942, the United States battleships USS South Dakota (BB-57) and
USS Washington (BB-56) fought and destroyed the surviving
Kirishima.
It was also at Guadalcanal that battleships demonstrated the other primary use to which they would be put, delivering devastating fire against Honiara International Airport.
Leyte Gulf
At the
Battle of the Philippine Sea, heavy aircraft losses made the carriers ineffectual and forced the Japanese to finally commit their dreadnoughts, both old and new, to the upcoming
Battle of Leyte Gulf. The objective in this "decisive battle" was to stop the
Allies of World War II from capturing the Philippines, which would cut off the Japanese oil supply and render their navy useless. The Battle off Samar, on
25 October 1944, proved battleships were still lethal. The American escort aircraft carrier of "Taffy 3" had a narrow escape from under the guns of Japanese battleships Japanese battleship Yamato, Japanese battleship Kongō, Japanese battleship Haruna and
Japanese battleship Nagato and their
cruiser escort. American destroyers and aircraft attacked the battleships, enabling the American task force to disengage. Inexplicably, the Japanese disengaged as well, despite being near their intended target - the American amphibious landing forces at Leyte.
At Leyte Gulf, on 25 October
1944, six battleships, led by Admiral Jesse Oldendorf of the United States Seventh Fleet sank Admiral Shoji Nishimura's flagship Japanese battleship Yamashiro and would have sunk Japanese battleship Fusō if it had not already been broken in two by destroyer torpedoes moments earlier during the Battle of Leyte Gulf #Battle of Surigao Strait. This engagement marked the last time in history when battleship faced battleship. It was also the day after an engagement further north (the
Battle of Leyte Gulf #Battle of the Sibuyan Sea) in which
Japanese battleship Musashi, sister ship to
Yamato, was sunk by aircraft long before she could come within striking range of the American force.
Soviet and Finnish battles
moored in Gdynia prior to WWII.
Marat was sunk in Kronstadt harbor by a 1,000 kg aerial bomb but three of four main turrets continued to operate against the invading GermansDuring the Soviet Union-
Finland Winter War, the Soviet battleships
Battleship Petropavlovsk (1914) and Russian battleship Gangut (1909) made several attempts to neutralize the Finnish coastal batter
A
battleship is a large, heavily
armour warship with a main artillery battery consisting of the largest
calibre of guns. Battleships are larger, better-armed and better-armored than cruisers and
destroyers.
Battleship design continually evolved to incorporate and adapt technological advances to maintain an edge. The word
battleship was coined around 1794 and is a shortened form of
ship of the line, the dominant warship in the
Age of Sail."battleship" The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 4 Apr. 2000 The term came into formal use in the late 1880s to describe a type of
ironclad warship,Stoll, J.
Steaming in the Dark?, Journal of Conflict Resolution Vol. 36 No. 2, Jun 1992 whose design culminated in the 1890s with the generation of ships now known as
Pre-dreadnought. In 1906, HMS Dreadnought (1906) heralded a revolution in battleship design, and for many years modern battleships were referred to as dreadnoughts.
Battleships were a potent symbol of navy dominance and national might, and for decades, the battleship was a major factor in both
diplomacy and military strategy.Sondhaus, L.
Naval Warfare 1815–1914, ISBN 0-415-21478-5 The global
arms race in battleship construction in the early 20th century was one of the causes of World War I, which saw a clash of huge battle fleets at the Battle of Jutland. The
Treaty for the Limitation of Naval Armament of the 1920s and 1930s limited the number of battleships but did not end the evolution of design. Both the
Allies of World War II and the Axis Powers deployed battleships of old construction and new during
World War II.
Nevertheless, some historians and naval theorists question the value of the dreadnought. Apart from Jutland, there were few great dreadnought clashes. Despite their great firepower and protection, dreadnoughts remained vulnerable to much smaller, cheaper ordnance and craft: initially the
torpedo and the
naval mine, and later aircraft and the
guided missile.Lenton, H. T.:
Krigsfartyg efter 1860 The growing range of engagement led to the battleship's replacement as the leading type of warship by the aircraft carrier during World War II; battleships were retained by the United States Navy into the Cold War only for fire support purposes. These last battleships were removed from the U.S.
Naval Vessel Register in March 2006.
The ship of the line
A ship of the line was a large, unarmored wooden sailing ship on which was mounted a
artillery battery of up to 120 smoothbore guns and
carronades. The ship of the line was a gradual evolution of a basic design that dates back to the 1400s, and apart from growing in size it changed little between the adoption of line of battle tactics in the early 17th century and the end of the sailing battleship's heyday in the 1830s. From 1794, the alternative term 'line of battle ship' was contracted (informally at first) to 'battle ship' or 'battleship'. (1850), the first steam battleshipThe sheer number of guns fired broadside meant that a sailing battleship could wreck any wooden vessel, smashing its
hull (watercraft) and mast (sailing) and killing its crew. However, the effective range of the guns was as little as a few hundred yards, and the battle tactics of sailing ships depended entirely on the wind.
The first major change to the ship of the line concept was the introduction of
steam power as an auxiliary
marine propulsion. Steam power was gradually introduced to the navy in the first half of the 19th century, initially for small craft and later for frigates. The French Navy introduced steam to the line of battle with the 90-gun Le Napoléon (1850) in 1850"Napoleon (90 guns), the first purpose-designed screw line of battleships",
Steam, Steel and Shellfire, Conway's History of the Ship (p39) — the first true steam battleship.
"Hastened to completion Le Napoleon was launched on 16 May 1850, to become the world's first true steam battleship",
Steam, Steel and Shellfire, Conway's History of the Ship (p39)
Napoleon was armed as a conventional ship-of-the-line, but her steam engines could give her a speed of , regardless of the wind conditions: a potentially decisive advantage in a naval engagement. The introduction of steam accelerated the growth in size of battleships. France and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were the only two countries to develop fleets of wooden steam screw battleships, although several other navies made some use of a mixture of screw battleships and paddle-steamer frigates. These included
Russian Empire,
Ottoman Empire, Sweden,
Kingdom of Naples, Kingdom of Prussia,
Denmark and Austrian Empire.
Ironclads
The adoption of steam power was only one of a number of technological advances which revolutionized warship design in the 19th century. The ship of the line was overtaken by the
ironclad warship: powered by steam, protected by metal armor, and armed with guns firing high-explosive
shell (projectile). The first
Royal Navy ship to bear the formal designation 'battleship' was the ironclad
HMS Warrior (1860).
Explosive shells
Wooden-hulled ships stood up comparatively well to solid
lead shot, as shown in the 1866
Battle of Lissa (1866), where the old Austrian steam battleship
Kaiser ranged across a confused battlefield, rammed an
Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946) ironclad and took a pounding of several 300 pound (mass) shots at point blank range. Despite losing her
bowsprit and her foremast, and being set on fire, she was ready for action again the very next day.Wilson, H. W.:
Ironclads in Action - Vol 1, London, 1898, p. 240 By contrast, guns which fired explosive or incendiary shells were a major threat to wooden ships, and these weapons became widespread in the 1840s. In the
Crimean War, the
Russian Black Sea Fleet destroyed a flotilla of wooden Turkish ships with explosive shells at the Battle of Sinop in 1853. Later in the war, French ironclad floating batteries used similar weapons against the defenses at Kinburn.Lambert, Andrew:
Battleships in Transition, pp. 92–96
Iron armor and construction
(1859), the first ocean–going
ironclad warship
The development of high-explosive shells made the use of iron armour plate on warships necessary. In 1859 France launched FS Gloire (1858-1883), the first ocean-going ironclad warship. She had the profile of a ship of the line, cut to one deck due to weight considerations. Although made of wood and reliant on sail for most of her journeys,
La Gloire was fitted with a propeller, and her wooden hull was protected by a layer of thick iron armor.Gibbons, Tony:
The Complete Encyclopedia of Battleships, pp. 28–29
Gloire prompted further innovation from the Royal Navy, anxious to prevent France from gaining a technological lead. The superior armored frigate HMS Warrior (1860) followed
La Gloire by only fourteen months, and both nations embarked on a program of building new ironclads and converting existing screw ships of the line to armored frigates.Gibbons, pp. 30–31 Within two years, Italy, Austria,
Spanish Empire and Russia had all ordered ironclad warships, and by the time of the famous clash of the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia at the Battle of Hampton Roads at least eight navies possessed ironclad ships. (1876), the first battleship to use steel as the main building materialGibbons, p. 93
Navies experimented with the positioning of guns, in
turrets (like the USS
Monitor),
centre-battery or
barbettes, or with the naval ram as the principal weapon. As steam technology developed, masts were gradually removed from battleship designs. By the mid-1870s steel was used as a construction material alongside iron and wood. The French Navy's
French battleship Redoutable (1876), laid down in 1873 and launched in 1876, was a central artillery battery and barbette warship which became the first battleship in the world to use steel as the principal building material.Conway Marine, "Steam, Steel and Shellfire" (p. 96)
The pre-dreadnought
, flagship of the Japanese fleet at the
Battle of Tsushima, in 1905, a typical late pre-dreadnought battleship
By the 1890s, there was an increasing similarity between battleship designs, and the type now known as the 'pre-dreadnought battleship' emerged. These were heavily armored ships, mounting a mixed battery of guns in turrets, and without sails. The typical first-class battleship of the pre-dreadnought era displaced 15,000 to 17,000
tons, had a speed of , and an armament of four guns in two turrets fore and aft with a mixed-caliber secondary battery amidships around the superstructure. An early design with superficial similarity to the pre-dreadnought is the British
Devastation class battleship of 1871.Gibbons, Tony:
The Complete Encyclopedia of Battleships, p. 101 However, it was not until the 1890s that the widespread adoption of steel construction and hardened steel armor meant that a turret-ship could combine heavy armament and protection with high speed and good seakeeping.
The slow-firing main guns were the principal weapons for battleship-to-battleship combat. The intermediate and secondary batteries had two roles. Against major ships, it was thought a 'hail of fire' from quick-firing secondary weapons could distract enemy gun crews by inflicting damage to the superstructure, and they would be more effective against smaller ships such as
cruisers. Smaller guns (12-pounders and smaller) were reserved for protecting the battleship against the threat of torpedo attack from
destroyers and
torpedo boats.War at Sea in the Ironclad Age, Richard Hill, ISBN 0-304-35273-X
The beginning of the pre-dreadnought era coincided with an attempt by Britain to re-assert her naval dominance. For many years previously, Britain had taken naval supremacy for granted. Expensive naval projects were criticised by political leaders of all inclinations. However, in 1888 a war scare with France and the build-up of the Russian navy gave added impetus to naval construction, and the British Naval Defence Act of 1889 laid down a new fleet including eight new battleships. The principle that Britain's navy should be more powerful than the two next most powerful fleets combined was also enshrined. This policy was designed to deter France and Russia from building more battleships, but both nations nevertheless expanded their fleets with more and better pre-dreadnoughts in the 1890s.
In the last years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th, the escalation in the building of battleships became defined by conflict between Britain and
German Empire. The German naval laws of 1890 and 1898 authorised a fleet of 38 battleships, a vital threat to the balance of naval power. Britain answered with further shipbuilding, but by the end of the pre-dreadnought era, British supremacy at sea had markedly weakened. In 1883, the United Kingdom had 38 battleships, twice as many as France and almost as many as the rest of the world put together. By 1897, Britain's lead was far smaller due to competition from France, Germany, and Russia, as well as the development of pre-dreadnought fleets in Italy, the
United States and Empire of Japan.Kennedy, p. 209 Turkey, Spain, Sweden, Denmark,
Norway, the Netherlands, Chile and Brazil all had second-rate fleets led by armored cruisers, panzerships or
monitor (warship).Preston, Anthony:
Jane's Fighting Ships of World War IIPre-dreadnoughts continued the technical innovations of the ironclad. Turrets, armor plate, and steam engines were all improved over the years, and
torpedo tubes were introduced. A small number of designs, including the American Kearsarge class battleship and Virginia class battleship classes, experimented with all or part of the 8-inch intermediate battery superimposed over the 12-inch primary. Results were poor: recoil factors and blast effects resulted in the 8-inch battery being completely unusable, and the inability to train the primary and intermediate armaments on different targets led to significant tactical limitations. Even though such innovative designs saved weight (a key reason for their inception), they proved too cumbersome in practice.Preston, Anthony. (1972)
Battleships of World War I, New York City: Galahad Books
The Dreadnought era
In 1906, the revolutionary
HMS Dreadnought (1906), created as a result of pressure from Admiral
John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, made existing battleships obsolete. Combining an 'all-big-gun' armament of ten 12-inch (305
millimetre) rifles with unprecedented speed and protection, she prompted navies worldwide to re-evaluate their battleship building programmes. While the concept of an all-big-gun ship had been in circulation for several years, and the Japanese had even laid down an all-big-gun battleship, the
Satsuma, in 1904,Gibbons, p.168
Dreadnought sparked a new
arms race, principally between Britain and Germany but reflected worldwide, as the new class of warships became a crucial element of national power.
Technical development continued rapidly through the dreadnought era, with step changes in armament, armor and propulsion. Ten years after
Dreadnought's commissioning, much more powerful ships, the
super-dreadnoughts, were being built.
The origin of
Dreadnought
's Japanese battleship Satsuma, the first ship to be designed and laid down as an "'all-big-gun" battleship; she was also the largest battleship in the world at the time of her launch.
In the first years of the 20th century, several navies worldwide experimented with the idea of a new type of battleship with a uniform armament of very heavy guns.
General Vittorio Cuniberti, the Italian Navy's chief naval architect, articulated the concept of an all-big-gun battleship in 1903. When the
Regia Marina did not pursue his ideas, Cuniberti wrote an article in
Jane's Fighting Ships proposing an "ideal" future British battleship, a large armored warship of 17,000 tons, armed solely with a single caliber main battery (twelve 12-inch {305 mm} guns), carrying
belt armor, and capable of 24 knot (speed)s (44 km/h).Cuniberti, Vittorio, "An Ideal Battleship for the British Fleet",
All The World’s Fighting Ships, 1903, pp.407–409.
The Imperial Japanese Navy's battleship
Japanese battleship Satsuma was the first ship in the world designed (1904) and laid down (1905) as an all-big-gun battleship, although she was never armed up to specification due to shortages of the British 12-inch Armstrong Guns.
Satsuma retained triple-expansion engines, though her sister ship
Japanese battleship Aki, completed in 1911, used turbines.
An American design, USS South Carolina (BB-26), authorized in 1905, also makes the claim for "first dreadnought", but she and her sister,
USS Michigan (BB-27), were not launched until 1908. Both used triple-expansion engines, but had superior layout of their main battery, dispensing with Dreadnought's wing turrets. They thus retained the same broadside, despite having two fewer guns.
The
Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) provided operational experience to validate the 'all-big-gun' concept. At the
Battle of the Yellow Sea and the
Battle of Tsushima, pre-Dreadnought fleets exchanged 12-inch volleys at ranges of 7,600–12,000
yard (7 to 11 kilometre), beyond the range of the secondary batteries. It is often held that these engagements demonstrated the importance of the gun over its smaller counterparts, though some historians take the view that secondary batteries of the pre-dreadnoughts were just as decisive as the larger weapons. None of this was lost on
First Sea Lord John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher. As early as 1904, Fisher had been convinced of the need for fast, powerful ships with an all-big-gun armament. If Tsushima influenced his thinking, it was to persuade him of the need to standardise on guns. Fisher's concern was
submarines and
destroyers equipped with torpedoes that outranged battleship guns, making speed imperative for capital ships. Fisher's preferred option was his brainchild, the battlecruiser: lightly armored but heavily armed with eight guns and propelled to a remarkable by steam turbines.
It was to prove this revolutionary technology that
Dreadnought was laid down in 1905 and sped to completion by 1906. She carried ten guns, had an 11-inch armour belt, and was the first large ship powered by turbines. She mounted her guns in five turrets; three on the centreline (one forward, two aft) and two on the wing turrets, giving her at her launch twice the broadside of anything else afloat. She retained a number of 12-pounder (3-inch/76 mm)
British ordnance terms#QF guns for use against destroyers and torpedo-boats. Her armor was heavy enough for her to go head-to-head with any other ship afloat in a gun battle, and conceivably win.Gibbons, pp. 170–171
Dreadnought was to have been followed by three Invincible class battlecruiser-class battlecruisers, their construction delayed to allow lessons from
Dreadnought to be used in their design. While Fisher may have intended
Dreadnought to be the last Royal Navy battleship, the design was so successful he found little support for his plan to switch to a battlecruiser navy. Although there were some problems with the ship (the wing turrets strained the hull when firing a full broadside, and the top of the thickest armor belt lay below the waterline at full load), the Royal Navy promptly commissioned another six ships to a similar design in the
Bellerophon class battleship and
St. Vincent class battleship classes.
The dreadnought arms race
In 1897, before the revolution in design brought about by
Dreadnought, the Royal Navy had 62 battleships in commission or building, a lead of 26 over France and of 50 over Germany.
The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, Paul M. Kennedy, ISBN 0-333-35094-4, p. 209 In 1906, the Royal Navy now had a lead of one:
Dreadnought. The new class of ship prompted an arms race with major strategic consequences. Major naval powers raced to build their own dreadnoughts to catch up with the United Kingdom. Possession of modern battleships was not only vital to naval power, but as with nuclear weapons today, represented a nation's standing in the world. Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Austria and the United States all began dreadnought programmes; and second-rank powers including Turkey,
Argentina, Brazil and Chile commissioned dreadnoughts to be built in British and American yards.
The First World War, John Keegan, ISBN 0-7126-6645-1, p. 281
World War I
during World War I
The First World War was an anticlimax for the great dreadnought fleets. There was no decisive clash of modern battlefleets to compare with the
Battle of Tsushima. The role of battleships was marginal to the great land struggle in France and Russia; and it was equally marginal to the
First Battle of the Atlantic, the battle between U-boat and British merchant shipping.
By virtue of geography, the Royal Navy could keep the High Seas Fleet bottled up in the North Sea with relative ease. Both sides were aware that, because of the greater number of British dreadnoughts, a full fleet engagement would likely result in a British victory. The German strategy was therefore to try to provoke an engagement on their terms: either to induce a part of the Grand Fleet to enter battle alone, or to fight a pitched battle near the German coastline, where friendly fields, torpedo-boats and submarines could be used to even the odds.
The First World War, John Keegan, ISBN 0-7126-6645-1, p. 289 during World War IThe first two years of war saw conflict in the North Sea limited to skirmishes by
battlecruisers at the Battle of Heligoland Bight and Battle of Dogger Bank (1915) and raids on the English coast. In the summer of 1916, a further attempt to draw British ships into battle on German terms resulted in a clash of the battlefleets in the Battle of Jutland: an indecisive engagement.Ireland, Bernard:
Jane's War At Sea, pp. 88–95
In the other naval theatres there were no decisive pitched battles. In the Black Sea, engagement between
Russian Empire and
Ottoman Empire battleships was restricted to skirmishes. In the
Baltic Sea, action was largely limited to the raiding of convoys, and the laying of defensive minefields; the only significant clash of battleship squadrons there was the
Battle of Moon Sound at which one Russian pre-dreadnought was lost. The Adriatic Sea was in a sense the mirror of the North Sea: the
Austria-Hungary dreadnought fleet remained bottled up by the British and French blockade. And in the
Mediterranean Sea, the most important use of battleships was in support of the amphibious assault on
Battle of Gallipoli.
The course of the war also illustrated the vulnerability of battleships to cheaper weapons. In September 1914, the potential threat posed to
capital ships by German U-boats was confirmed by successful attacks on British cruisers, including the sinking of three British armored cruisers by the German submarine Unterseeboot 9 (1910) in less than an hour. Sea mines proved a threat the next month, when the recently commissioned British super-dreadnought
HMS Audacious (1912) struck a mine. By the end of October, the British had changed their strategy and tactics in the North Sea to reduce the risk of U-boat attack.Massie, Robert.
Castles of Steel, London, 2005. pp127–145 While Jutland was the only major clash of battleship fleets in history, the German plan for the battle relied on U-boat attacks on the British fleet; and the escape of the German fleet from the superior British firepower was effected by the German cruisers and destroyers closing on British battleships, causing them to turn away to avoid the threat of torpedo attack. Further near-misses from submarine attacks on battleships and casualties amongst cruisers led to growing paranoia in the Royal Navy about the vulnerability of battleships. By October 1916, the Royal Navy had essentially abandoned the North Sea, instructing the Grand Fleet not to go south of the
Farne Islands unless adequately protected by destroyers.
The German High Seas Fleet, for their part, were determined not to engage the British without the assistance of submarines; and since the submarines were needed more for raiding commercial traffic, the fleet stayed in port for the remainder of the war.
The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, Paul Kennedy, ISBN 0-333-35094-4, pp. 247–249 Other theatres equally showed the role of small craft in damaging or destroying dreadnoughts. The two Austrian dreadnoughts lost in 1918 were the casualties of torpedo boats and of frogman. The Allies of World War I capital ships lost in Gallipoli were sunk by mines and torpedo,
HMS Majestic (1895) and HMS Triumph (1903) were torpedoed by
U.21;
HMS Goliath (1898) was torpedoed by the Turkish torpedo boat
Muavenet. while a Turkish pre-dreadnought was caught in the
Dardanelles by a British submarine.
The inter-war period
The inter-war period saw the battleship subjected to strict international limitations to prevent a costly arms race breaking out.
For many years, Weimar Republic simply had no battleships. The
Armistice with Germany (Compiègne) required that most of the High Seas Fleet be disarmed and interned in a neutral port; largely because no neutral port could be found, the ships remained in British custody in
Scapa Flow,
Scotland. The Treaty of Versailles specified that the ships should be handed over to the British. Instead, most of them were
scuttling by their German crews on 21 June
1919 just before the signature of the peace treaty. The treaty also limited the German Navy, and prevented Germany from building or possessing any
capital ships.Ireland, Bernard:
Jane's War At Sea, p. 118
While the victors were not limited by the Treaty of Versailles, many of the major naval powers were crippled after the war. Faced with the prospect of a naval arms race against the United States, Britain was keen to conclude the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. This treaty limited the number and size of battleships that each major nation could possess, and required Britain to accept parity with the U.S. and to abandon the British alliance with Japan.Kennedy p 277 The Washington treaty was followed by a series of other naval treaties, including the Geneva Naval Conference (1927), the
London Naval Treaty (1930), the
Second Geneva Naval Conference (1932), and finally the Second London Naval Treaty (1936), which all set limits on major warships. These treaties became effectively obsolete on 1 September
1939 at the beginning of
World War II, but the ship classifications that had been agreed upon still apply.Ireland, Bernard:
Jane's War At Sea, pp. 124–126, 139–142 The treaty limitations meant that fewer new battleships were launched from 1919–1939 than from 1905–1914. The treaties also inhibited development by putting maximum limits on the weights of ships. Designs like the projected British N3 battleship, the first American
South Dakota class battleship (1920), and the Japanese
Kii class battleship—all of which continued the trend to larger ships with bigger guns and thicker armor—never got off the drawing board. Those designs which were commissioned during this period were referred to as
treaty battleships.
Rise of the aircraft carrier
As early as 1914, the British Admiral
Percy Scott predicted that battleships would soon be made irrelevant by military aviation.Kennedy, op. cit., p. 199 By the end of World War I, aeroplanes had successfully adopted the torpedo as a weapon.From the
Guinness Book of Air Facts and Feats (3rd edition, 1977): "The first air attack using a torpedo dropped by an aeroplane was carried out by Flight Commander Charles H. K. Edmonds, flying a
Short Type 184 seaplane from HMS
Ben-My-Chree on 12 August 1915, against a 5,000 ton (5,080 tonne) Turkish supply ship in the
Sea of Marmara. Although the enemy ship was hit and sunk, the captain of a British submarine claimed to have fired a torpedo simultaneously and sunk the ship. It was further stated that the British submarine E14 had attacked and immobilised the ship four days earlier.
However, on 17 August 1915, another Turkish ship was sunk by a torpedo of whose origin there can be no doubt. On this occasion Flight Commander C. H. Edmonds, flying a Short 184, torpedoed a Turkish steamer a few miles north of the Dardanelles. His formation colleague, Flight Lieutenant G. B. Dacre, was forced to land on the water owing to engine trouble but, seeing an enemy tug close by, taxied up to it and released his torpedo. The tug blew up and sank. Thereafter, Dacre was able to take off and return to the
Ben-My-Chree A proposed attack on the German fleet at anchor in 1918 using the Sopwith Cuckoo carrier-borne torpedo-bomber was considered and rejected—but it was not long before such a technique was adopted.
In the 1920s, General Billy Mitchell of the United States Army Air Corps, believing that air forces had rendered navies around the world obsolete, testified in front of Congress that "1,000 bombardment airplanes can be built and operated for about the price of one battleship" and that a squadron of these bombers could sink a battleship, making for more efficient use of government funds. Boyne, Walter J. (1996).
The Spirit of Billy Mitchell. Air Force Magazine Online: Journal of the Air Force Association. Retrieved on
October 6 2007.] This infuriated the U.S. Navy, but Mitchell was nevertheless allowed to conduct a careful series of bombing tests alongside Navy and
United States Marine Corps bombers. In 1921, he bombed and sank numerous ships, including the "unsinkable" German World War I battleship USS Ostfriesland and the American pre-dreadnought USS Alabama (BB-8).
Although Mitchell had required "war-time conditions", the ships sunk were obsolete, stationary, defenseless and had no damage control. The sinking of
Ostfriesland was accomplished by violating an agreement that would have allowed Navy engineers to examine the effects of various munitions: Mitchell's airmen disregarded the rules, and sank the ship within minutes in a coordinated attack. The stunt made headlines, and Mitchell declared, "No surface vessels can exist wherever air forces acting from land bases are able to attack them." While far from conclusive, Mitchell's test was significant because it put proponents of the battleship against naval aviation on the back foot. Rear Admiral
William A. Moffett used public relations against Mitchell to make headway toward expansion of the U.S. Navy's nascent aircraft carrier program.Jeffers, H. Paul (2006).
Billy Mitchell: The Life, Times, and Battles of America's Prophet of Air Power. Zenith Press. ISBN 0760320802
Rearmament
of the inter-war period
The
Royal Navy, United States Navy, and
Imperial Japanese Navy extensively upgraded and modernized their WWI-era battleships during the 1930s. Among new features were tower height and stability such that optical rangefinder equipment for gunnery control could be used. Some British ships received a large block superstructure nicknamed the "Queen Anne's castle", such as in the
HMS Queen Elizabeth (1913) and
HMS Warspite (03), which would be used in the new conning towers of the
King George V class battleship (1939) fast battleships. The Japanese rebuilt all of their battleships, plus their battlecruisers, with distinctive "pagoda" structures, though the
Japanese battleship Hiei received a more modern bridge tower that would influence the new
Yamato class battleship battleships. The U.S. experimented with tripod and later caged masts, though after
Attack on Pearl Harbor some of the most severely damaged ships such as
USS West Virginia (BB-48) and
USS California (BB-44) were rebuilt to a similar appearance to their Iowa class battleship contemporaries. Optic fire-control systems were rendered obsolete by radar, which was effective beyond visual contact and was effective in complete darkness or adverse weather conditions. CombinedFleet.com
Even when war threatened again in the late 1930s, battleship construction did not regain the level of importance which it had held in the years before World War I. The "building holiday" imposed by the naval treaties meant that the building capacity of dockyards worldwide was relatively reduced, and the strategic position had changed. The development of the strategic bomber meant that the navy was no longer the only method of projecting power overseas, and the development of the aircraft carrier meant that battleships had a rival for the resources available for capital ship construction.In
Nazi Germany, the ambitious
Plan Z for naval rearmament was abandoned in favour of a strategy of submarine warfare supplemented by the use of battlecruisers and
Bismarck class battleship-class battleships as commerce raiders. In Britain, the most pressing need was for air defences and convoy escorts to safeguard the civilian population from bombing or starvation, and re-armament construction plans consisted of five ships of the King George V class battleship (1939) class. It was in the Mediterranean that navies remained most committed to battleship warfare. France intended to build six battleships of the Dunkerque class battleship and
Richelieu class battleship classes, and the Italians two powerful Littorio class battleship-class ships. Neither navy built significant aircraft carriers. The U.S. preferred to spend limited funds on aircraft carriers until the South Dakota class battleship (1939) class. Japan, also prioritising aircraft carriers, nevertheless began work on three mammoth Yamato class battleship class ships (although one of these was later completed as a carrier).
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the
Second Spanish Republic navy consisted of only two small dreadnought battleships,
España (battleship) and
Jaime I.
España, by then in reserve at the northwestern naval base of El Ferrol, fell into Spain under Franco hands in July 1936. The crew aboard
Jaime I murdered their officers, mutinied, and joined the Republican Navy. Thus each side had one battleship; however, the Republican Navy generally lacked experienced officers. The Spanish battleships mainly restricted themselves to mutual blockades, convoy escort duties, and shore bombardment, rarely in direct fighting against other surface units.Gibbons, p.195 In April 1937,
España ran onto a mine laid by friendly forces, and sank with little loss of life. In May 1937,
Jaime I was damaged by Nationalist air attacks and a grounding incident. The ship was forced to go back to port to be repaired. There she was again hit by several aerial bombs. It was then decided to tow the battleship to a more secure port, but during the transport she suffered an internal explosion that caused 300 deaths and her total loss. Several Italian and German capital ships participated in the non-intervention blockade. On May 29
1937, two Republican aircraft managed to bomb the German pocket battleship
German battleship Deutschland outside
Ibiza, causing severe damage and loss of life.
German battleship Admiral Scheer retaliated two days later by bombarding
Almería, causing much destruction, and the resulting
Deutschland incident meant the end of German and Italian support for non-intervention.Greger, René:
Schlachtschiffe der Welt, p. 251
World War II
German battleships—obsolete pre-dreadnoughts—fired the first shots of World War II with the bombardment of the
Second Polish Republic garrison at Westerplatte;Gibbons, p. 163 and the
Japanese Instrument of Surrender of the Japanese Empire took place aboard a United States Navy battleship, the
USS Missouri (BB-63). Between the two events, it became clear that battleships were now essentially auxiliary craft, and aircraft carriers were the new principal ships of the fleet.
Still, battleships played a part in major engagements in
Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945),
Pacific War and
Battle of the Mediterranean. In the Atlantic, the Germans experimented with taking the battleship beyond conventional fleet action, using their pocket battleships as independent commerce raiders. Although there were a few battleship-on-battleship engagements, battleships had little impact on the destroyer and submarine
Second Battle of the Atlantic, and aircraft carriers determined the outcome of most of the decisive fleet clashes of the Pacific War.
In the first year of the war, battleships and battlecruisers defied predictions that aircraft would dominate naval warfare. German battlecruiser Scharnhorst and
German battlecruiser Gneisenau surprised and sank the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious off western Norway in June 1940.Gibbons, pp. 246–247 The vulnerability of unescorted carriers to attack by other ships meant that carriers almost always had escorts, so this engagement marked the last time surface gunnery sank a fleet carrier. In the
Attack on Mers-el-Kébir, British capital ships opened fire on the French battleships harboured in
Algiers with their own heavy guns, and later pursued fleeing French ships with planes from aircraft carriers.
Taranto and Matapan
In late 1940 and 1941, a range of engagements saw battleships harassed by carrier aircraft.
The first example of the power of naval aviation was the British air attack on the Italian naval base at Battle of Taranto that took place on the night of 11–12 November 1940. A small number of Royal Navy aircraft attacked the Italian fleet at harbour, succeeding in sinking one Italian battleship and damaging two others. Importantly, the attack forced the Italian navy to change tactics and seek battle against the superior British navy, which resulted in their defeat at the Battle of Cape Matapan.
Bismarck
The battleship war in the Atlantic was driven by the attempts of German capital ship commerce raiders—two battleships, the German battleship Bismarck and the
German battleship Tirpitz, and two battlecruisers—to influence the Second Battle of the Atlantic by destroying Atlantic
convoys supplying the United Kingdom. The superior numbers of British surface units devoted themselves to protecting the convoys, and to seek-and-destroy missions against the German ships, assisted by both naval and land-based aircraft and by sabotage attacks. On
24 May 1941, during its attempt to break out into the North Atlantic, the commerce raider
German battleship Bismarck engaged the British battleship HMS HMS Prince of Wales (53) and the battlecruiser HMS Hood (51). Due primarily to the Bismarck's superior range-finding and accuracy, it soon sank
Hood with a hit to her magazines.
Bismarck and
Prince of Wales hit each other three times, the damage compelling the German battleship to withdraw.Gibbons, pp. 228–229 While the Bismarck was heading for home, the Royal Navy continued to hunt it, and eventually an attack by
Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo-bombers from the aircraft carrier
HMS Ark Royal (91) disabled Bismarck's steering. This enabled Royal Navy battleships, cruisers and destroyers to close in for the kill.
The Pacific battles
leading battleship USS Colorado (BB-45) and cruisers USS Louisville (CA-28), USS Portland (CA-33), and USS Columbia (CL-56) into
Lingayen Gulf, Philippines, January 1945In many of the crucial battles of the Pacific, for instance
Battle of the Coral Sea and
Battle of Midway, battleships were either absent or overshadowed as carriers launched wave after wave of planes into the attack at a range of hundreds of miles. The primary tasks for battleships in the Pacific became shore bombardment and anti-aircraft defense for the carriers. Even the largest battleships ever constructed, Japan's
Yamato class, which carried a main battery of nine 18.1-
inch (460
millimetre) guns and were designed to be a principal strategic weapon, were seldom given a chance to fulfill their potential. They were hampered by technical deficiencies (slow battleships were incapable of operating with fast carriers), faulty military doctrine (the Japanese waited for a "decisive battle", which never came), and defective dispositions (as at Midway).
Pearl Harbor
Before hostilities broke out in the Pacific Theatre, extensive pre-war planning centered around dreadnoughts. The
Royal Navy could not achieve parity with the estimated nine Japanese capital ships in Southeast Asia, since doing so would leave only a handful of ships to use against Nazi Germany. However, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was optimistic about the improving situation in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean and Sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse to the defence of Singapore in the Straits Settlements was seen as a compromise. Furthermore, the U.S. Navy later agreed to send its United States Pacific Fleet with its eight battleships to Singapore in the event of hostilities with Japan. The sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse (Forcez-survivors.org)
On
7 December 1941 the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Five out of eight U.S. battleships were quickly either sunk or sinking, with the rest damaged. The Japanese thus neutralized the U.S. battleship force in the Pacific by an air attack, and thereby proved Mitchell's theory, and showed the vulnerability of warships lying at anchor, as at Taranto. The American aircraft carriers were however at sea and evaded detection. They in turn took up the fight, eventually turning the tide of the war in the Pacific.
The Sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse and her escort, the battlecruiser HMS
Repulse, further demonstrated the vulnerability of a battleship to air attack, in this case while at sea without air cover. Both ships were on their way to assist in the defense of Singapore when Japanese land-based
bombers and fighter aircraft found and sank them on
10 December 1941.
Prince of Wales has the distinction of being the first modern battleship sunk by aircraft while underway and able to defend herself.Axell, Albert:
Kamikaze, p. 14
Midway
Commonly understood as a victory of carriers,
Battle of Midway showed up deficiencies in Japanese operational planning. Isoroku Yamamoto, considering them his most valuable units, kept his battleships far to the rear, in line with traditional practice. This placed them too far away to assist Chuichi Nagumo (and they would have been too slow to keep up with him in any case). Yet, when Nagumo's carriers were sunk, Yamamoto lost an opportunity to salvage something. Carriers, for all their evident potency, were virtually defenseless at night, and
Frank Jack Fletcher might have been dealt a crushing blow by
Japanese battleship Yamato the night of 6–7 June, had Yamamoto stayed closer.Willmott,
Barrier and the Javelin,
passim.
Guadalcanal
Initially, when the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, it had no battleships available in the Pacific Theatre. Eight of them were sunk or crippled at Pearl Harbor and were sent home for repairs and reconstruction; they would not have been able to keep up with the carriers in any case. The new
fast battleships of
North Carolina class battleship and South Dakota class battleship (1939) classes were still undergoing trials.
North Carolina and
South Dakota were ready by summer of 1942 and provided crucial anti-aircraft defense during the Battle of the Eastern Solomons and
Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands carrier battles.
's
Japanese battleship Yamato, seen in 1941, and her sister ship Japanese battleship Musashi were the largest battleships in history.
By contrast, the
Imperial Japanese Navy had the advantage of a dozen operational battleships early in the war, but chose not to deploy them in any significant engagements. The
Fuso class battleships and Ise class battleships, despite their extensive modernization and respectable speeds, were relegated to training and home defense, while the
Japanese battleship Nagato and Yamato class battleship were being saved for Isoroku Yamamoto's
Alfred Thayer Mahan which never came to fruition on Japanese terms. In fact, the only Japanese battleships to see much action in the early stages were
Kongō class battlecruisers, which served mostly as carrier escorts due to their high speed.Gibbons, pp. 262–263
During the later part of the Guadalcanal campaign in fall 1942, Japan and the U.S. were both forced to commit their battleships to surface combat, due to the need to carry out night operations, and because of the exhaustion of their carrier forces. During the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal#First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.2C November 13, battleships Japanese battleship Hiei and
Japanese battleship Kirishima were driven off by a force of U.S. cruisers and destroyers. Several USN ships were lost and others were crippled, but they inflicted critical damage on
Hiei, which was abandoned after being subject to repeated air attacks that made salvage impossible. The following evening, at the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal on
15 November 1942, the United States battleships USS South Dakota (BB-57) and
USS Washington (BB-56) fought and destroyed the surviving
Kirishima.
It was also at Guadalcanal that battleships demonstrated the other primary use to which they would be put, delivering devastating fire against Honiara International Airport.
Leyte Gulf
At the Battle of the Philippine Sea, heavy aircraft losses made the carriers ineffectual and forced the Japanese to finally commit their dreadnoughts, both old and new, to the upcoming Battle of Leyte Gulf. The objective in this "decisive battle" was to stop the
Allies of World War II from capturing the
Philippines, which would cut off the Japanese oil supply and render their navy useless. The
Battle off Samar, on
25 October 1944, proved battleships were still lethal. The American
escort aircraft carrier of "Taffy 3" had a narrow escape from under the guns of Japanese battleships Japanese battleship Yamato,
Japanese battleship Kongō, Japanese battleship Haruna and
Japanese battleship Nagato and their cruiser escort. American destroyers and aircraft attacked the battleships, enabling the American task force to disengage. Inexplicably, the Japanese disengaged as well, despite being near their intended target - the American amphibious landing forces at Leyte.
At Leyte Gulf, on 25 October 1944, six battleships, led by Admiral Jesse Oldendorf of the
United States Seventh Fleet sank Admiral
Shoji Nishimura's flagship
Japanese battleship Yamashiro and would have sunk
Japanese battleship Fusō if it had not already been broken in two by destroyer torpedoes moments earlier during the
Battle of Leyte Gulf #Battle of Surigao Strait. This engagement marked the last time in history when battleship faced battleship. It was also the day after an engagement further north (the Battle of Leyte Gulf #Battle of the Sibuyan Sea) in which
Japanese battleship Musashi, sister ship to
Yamato, was sunk by aircraft long before she could come within striking range of the American force.
Soviet and Finnish battles
moored in
Gdynia prior to WWII.
Marat was sunk in
Kronstadt harbor by a 1,000 kg aerial bomb but three of four main turrets continued to operate against the invading GermansDuring the Soviet Union-
Finland Winter War, the Soviet battleships Battleship Petropavlovsk (1914) and
Russian battleship Gangut (1909) made several attempts to neutralize the Finnish coastal batter
battleship
Find out more about battleship from The History Channel's free online encyclopedia. ... EXTREME HISTORY WITH ROGER DALTREY: Surviving An 1812 Battleship Coming Soon
Battleship (game) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The game Battleship is a guessing game played by two people. Although popularized in the United States as a commercial board game, first published in 1931 by the Starex Novelty ...
Hasbro (UK): Play Games
Battleship An exciting new game, requiring strategy and a steady hand to blast your opponent straight out of the water. Only those with a keen eye and sturdy sea legs will claim ...
Battleship
Battleship "...We have located the enemy fleet under the command of Admiral Kompüter, but do not yet have visual contact. We suggest the best course of action is to fire at random ...
The Tiny Battleship Company
Jaeger-LeCoultre. The Jaeger-LeCoultre Society
battleship - definition of battleship by the Free Online Dictionary ...
Definition of battleship in the Online Dictionary. Meaning of battleship. Pronunciation of battleship. Translations of battleship. battleship synonyms, battleship antonyms.
Battleship Potemkin makes us strong | Film | guardian.co.uk
Eisenstein hoped somebody would write a new soundtrack every 10 years. We hope ours helps keep this powerful masterpiece alive
Electronic Battleship Advanced Mission Game - Milton Bradley
Battleship, the electronic naval combat game in a cool laptop design! Features special weapons, radar, search planes, battle sounds and voice commands
Amazon.co.uk: The Battleship Potemkin: Pet Shop Boys: Music
Amazon.co.uk: The Battleship Potemkin: Pet Shop Boys: Music ... Price: £10.47 & eligible for Free UK delivery on orders over £15 with Super Saver Delivery. See details and ...
Please Sign In
If you are not yet registered please Register Now
