Pics of the mothball fleet- USS Iowa, etc 3/17/08

   Len,

      Very nice! But my true love is for the C-45. My father train in the Navy version way back in '43. Do you have any more photos of either?

     Is the H version the modified type with a nose wheel?

Leftie-  here you go:

if you want more-  email me-  lrobertojr@aol.com

-Len

So sad to see a battleship in mothballs..... such things will never come again!

PS Nice plane!!!

I'd love to see the USS Iowa come back into the active fleet to sit in-the-ready off the Coast of Iran.  That would make a statement.

Semper Fi,

Chris

I didn't know the Iowa was there? Wow!

I have lived in the Bay area my whole life and have never really looked close at those old ships sitting out there. There are sure a lot of them.  

mfsob wrote:

I don't know if that would have much of an effect anymore ... the days of gunboat diplomacy are pretty much over. Nobody was that impressed by the New Jersey off of Lebanon, and being able to lob a one-ton shell 20 miles into a rainbarrel, while handy in its day, is sadly part of our glorious past.

Well, I don't know about that, as the Marines and the Army were pretty happy in the first Gulf War with the battleship fire support!  In fact, it was SO effective for those guys heading up the coast to Kuwait City that they had to tell the battleships to 'cease fire,' because their shells were altering the terrain so much, the maps of the area were no good anymore (and that's the God's honest truth!)!!!!  Add to that the multiple cruise missiles they carry, and you have a really good 'all-rounder!' 

One final note in favor of battleships, which is something that just seems to have been lost in the calculations over the years...... Battleships can not only dish it out, but (and perhaps more importantly) they can TAKE it as well, and keep on going!  I mean, when you think about it, there is not much difference between a 500, or 1000 Lbs bomb dropped by a plane (as in WW2), as a Tomahawk or other missile.  The only difference is in the delivery, not the warhead.  That being the case, to take out a decent battleship, you had best expect to have to hit it at least a half-dozen, or maybe a dozen times with that kind of hardware, otherwise, all you are going to do is make a battleship angry, and God help you if you can't dodge its counterpunch!! 

Now take a modern warship and its 'combat survivability.'  Think about what happened to the HMS Sheffield at the Falklands.  ONE hit by an Exocet missile, and the whole damned ship is half busted in two, on fire and sinking.... I for one, am NOT impressed!  And i seem the same vulnerability in just about EVERY modern warship built since the '60's.... No armor, none at all!!  In fact, the factories don't even EXIST anymore that could roll out armor plates of that kind of size and thickness!

Yes, it's nice to talk about how much a particular weapons platform (any weapons platform!) can dish out in terms of weaponry, but to me, that is only HALF of the equation, and the other half has been lost, mostly because of the assumption that at the end of the day, nothing can withstand a nuke.  True!  But how often have nukes been used since WW2????  Gimme the armor and survivability any day, and if you can add some whacking big guns and missiles too, I ain't afraid o' no ghosts, nor anybody else!

searat12 wrote:

Well, I don't know about that, as the Marines and the Army were pretty happy in the first Gulf War with the battleship fire support!  In fact, it was SO effective for those guys heading up the coast to Kuwait City that they had to tell the battleships to 'cease fire,' because their shells were altering the terrain so much, the maps of the area were no good anymore (and that's the God's honest truth!)!!!!  Add to that the multiple cruise missiles they carry, and you have a really good 'all-rounder!'  One final note in favor of battleships, which is something that just seems to have been lost in the calculations over the years...... Battleships can not only dish it out, but (and perhaps more importantly) they can TAKE it as well, and keep on going!  I mean, when you think about it, there is not much difference between a 500, or 1000 Lbs bomb dropped by a plane (as in WW2), as a Tomahawk or other missile.  The only difference is in the delivery, not the warhead.  That being the case, to take out a decent battleship, you had best expect to have to hit it at least a half-dozen, or maybe a dozen times with that kind of hardware, otherwise, all you are going to do is make a battleship angry, and God help you if you can't dodge its counterpunch!!  Now take a modern warship and its 'combat survivability.'  Think about what happened to the HMS Sheffield at the Falklands.  ONE hit by an Exocet missile, and the whole damned ship is half busted in two, on fire and sinking.... I for one, am NOT impressed!  And i seem the same vulnerability in just about EVERY modern warship built since the '60's.... No armor, none at all!!  In fact, the factories don't even EXIST anymore that could roll out armor plates of that kind of size and thickness! Yes, it's nice to talk about how much a particular weapons platform (any weapons platform!) can dish out in terms of weaponry, but to me, that is only HALF of the equation, and the other half has been lost, mostly because of the assumption that at the end of the day, nothing can withstand a nuke.  True!  But how often have nukes been used since WW2????  Gimme the armor and survivability any day, and if you can add some whacking big guns and missiles too, I ain't afraid o' no ghosts, nor anybody else!

Norman Friedman (or was it Norman Polmar, regardless it was one of the Normans) wrote an excellent piece in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute a short while ago.   In it he gave some economic reasons why the Navy cannot afford to reactivate the battleships however romantic the thought might be.    I have summarized his arguments below. 

The IOWAs were built in the 1940s for ship-to-ship combat.  Through most of their part in the war the fast battleships ran with the carriers and provided additional anti-air capabilities.   The slow battleships provided most of the amphibious gunfire support.  After the war, with their primary mission eliminated the remaining fast battleships found limited use into the early-90s as costal gunfire support.  To return the ships to active service would be expensive and provide virtually no military benefit.

Manning:  Each IOWA requires a crew of about 1500.   This compares to 335 for a Burke-class DDG or 125 to 175 for the proposed DD(X).    Thus, the people - the most expensive line item in the Navy's budget - needed for one battleship would man about  5 Burkes or about 10 DD(X)s.  Personnel cost include both the crewman as well as the benefits for the family (housing, health care, etc).

Training:  There are no active duty naval personnel rated in the steam plant, weapons systems, and fire control systems on the IOWAs.  The Navy's training pipeline would have to be completely retooled to train 2+ crews.  Additional personnel would be required to run the training pipeline. (That old personnel cost bug-a-boo again).

Guns:  An IOWA's 16-inch guns have a maximum range of about 27 miles.   Assuming a 10 mile stand-off distance for the battleship, to provide sufficient deep water for maneuvering and avoidance of shallow water mines,  the guns could reach only about 17 miles inland.  Just how far inland is Bagdhad or Falujah?  The DD(X)'s 155mm guns will shoot much farther, with more accuracy, at a higher rate of fire than the old 16-inch guns.  (Still not to Bagdhad)

Missiles:  The battleships were armed with 32 Tomahawk land-attack missiles.  The 62 Burke-class destroyers in the Navy's inventory each carry 90 missiles.  Allowing that half the missile inventory on a Burke could be allocated to anti-air roles, that still allows 45 land attack missiles per hull (45x62 = 2790) .  The Burke is a better land attack platform with longer range than the 16 inch guns.

Mission:  The battleship is a single-mission ship with no ASW capability, and little organic AAW capability versus today's air threat.  When a battleship is deployed it must be escorted by destroyers and cruisers.  These represent additional resources which must be allocated as most of the current cruiser & destroyer fleet are already assigned to CVBG or MEU task groups.   This is also represents an additional personnel cost to man the ships.    (Damn, more personnel costs!)

Protection:  The battleship is the most heavily armored warship afloat and can survive hits from conventional projectiles.   Armor penetrating waheads are a known technology and the cost and time to develop a cruise missile with such a warhead is less than the time required to reactivate the battleship.    Studies have shown that a few hits with napalm weapons would burn the ship's antennas resulting in a mission kill.   Unlike modern ships, the battleships have no protection for their crews from chemial or biological weapons.

Fuel Consumption:  The battleship's power plant was designed in the thirtys and is an oil guzzler.   A battleship steaming at 20 knots will burn 14 tons of fuel per hour   By comparison, a Burke will burn 5 tons.   At 30 knots the battleship burns 51 tons versus 16 tons.  The DD(X) will be even more efficient.

Cost:  The cost to the Navy to reactivate the four IOWAs in the 1980s was in excess of 2 billion dollars.   The cost to reactivate, update their sensors,  replace obsolete parts (including remanufacture items no longer made), and train a crew would probably cost more than 2 billion dollars per ship.   For 2 billion, the force commander can have a battleship with all the attendant problems or two Burkes with their capabilities.

--EDIT:

The author was Norman Polmar and the article appeared in the August 2005 issue of Proceedings.  The article is titled "The Battleship: Phoenix or Museum Piece?"

An additional point which Polmar made which I didn't include was that each of the four planned Trident SSGNs will be capable of carrying 154 Tomahawk missiles.   This further obviates the need for the battleship in the missile launch platform role

Well said, Ed.

The Iowa-class battleships are beautiful, imposing ships, and the sight of one of them languishing in mothballs is indeed a sad one.  But navies can't base their operations and policies on considerations like that.

In several major senses these ships were dinosaurs from the moment they were launched.  As Ed pointed out, they were designed primarily to fire their 16" guns at enemy warships - specifically enemy battlships.  I may be mistaken on this point, but so far as I'm aware none of the Iowa-class ships has ever fired her main battery at an enemy warship.  That's quite a commentary on a group of ships that cost so much money to build and maintain - for such a long time.

It's often struck me that all the political fuss and rhetoric about reactivating these ships - for Vietnam, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf - has obscured a basic point:  for many years the U.S. Navy, and the government agencies funding and directing it, neglected an important potential mission.  There is indeed, and has been since World War II, a legitimate need for a ship that can sit off an enemy coastline and fire heavy-duty weapons at targets several miles inland.  But such a ship does not have to be 887 feet long, displace 45,000 tons, move at 33 knots, or be manned by 1500 people. 

In the years leading up to World War I several countries got interested in "monitor"-type warships - slow, shallow-draft, relatively small vessels, each armed with a couple of heavy guns.  They were designed for one purpose:  to provide fire support for land forces during amphibious operations.  The idea got discarded after some unpleasant experiences (e.g., the sinking of several monitors by a single German battlecruiser in a couple of hours), but the basic concept has a lot going for it - especially in a context where there's no serious threat from an enemy navy or air force.  I suspect the soldiers and Marines in Vietnam would have been delighted to have one of those ugly old British monitors, with its two 15" guns (and an updated fire control system, of course), sitting a few miles off shore.  And a ship designed (on the conceptual level) like that (suitably updated) would be perfectly capable of firing cruise missiles and defending itself against any threat it would be likely to encounter in the twenty-first century world.  But to assign an Iowa-class battleship to such a duty would be, and always was, a ludicrous misuse of money, technology, and manpower.

It sounds like the Navy has now found a solution to the problem; that's good news.  Maybe everybody can now acknowledge that the day of the battleship is over.  It in fact ended, to all intents and purposes, sometime shortly after World War I, though few naval officers or politicians recognized that fact at the time. 

I'm glad some battleships have been preserved; I'm a regular visitor to the North Carolina, and I've been on board several of the other survivors. And I get a bit of a twinge whenever I'm driving down Waterside Drive in Norfolk and suddenly find the bow of the Wisconsin looming over me.  (So does my wife - and ships don't normally impress her.)  I think the failure of the British to save any of their major WWI or WWII combatant ships is a major tragedy.  But I do hope the debate over resurrecting these grand old ships as "modern combatants" is over for once and for all.

Yeah, what Ed and John said. I love the image of a battleship off the coast of Iran, say, hurling massive broadsides far inland with pinpoint accuracy ... but images don't support the grunts in the field when they need gunfire support in one frickin' hurry.

At least the Iowa class hasn't all been melted down into razor blades, and can serve as great teaching tools for future generations, and for those who were part of that generation to pause and reflect. 

These are all very cogent arguments, with much going for them, and I have heard them all before.  HOWEVER..... Before we write off the whole subject, allow me to make a few last points...

Most of the arguments about manning, training of crews, etc. are essentially a 'chicken or egg' scenario.  If the ships (any ships, for that matter!) were in continuous service, then there would be a continuous supply of such people (and this is why so few other navies have fleet carriers).  Same goes for powerplants, armor production, etc, as the 'gear up' time required to produce any large and complicated piece of machinery is quite extensive, quite expensive, and only pays off through time and volume.  In other words, if battleships had CONTINUED to be produced, or at least remained in commission, then the ships we MIGHT have had currently would not only be far more economical, but far more capable as well, and fully staffed with experienced personnel (but I fully agree, the surviving battleships really are relicts at this point).  How expensive and troublesome do you suppose it would be if we decided for some reason to mothball all our fighter planes for 20 years, and then decided to reactivate the air-fleet?  Where are the pilots?  Where are the mechanics?  Where are the spare parts?  This is going to cost a LOT!  See what I mean?

But the REAL point I would like to make involves the CONCEPT of the battleship, and frankly, I don't think that concept ever became less viable, but was just PERCEIVED to be.  Over and over again you see it written about how battleships had become 'obsolete' even before WW2.  The disasters at Taranto and Pearl Harbor certainly indicated that under the right circumstances, they were in fact not the invulnerable juggernauts they had been considered to be prior to this time.  BUT, a closer look reveals that in fact battleships had ALWAYS been vulnerable to SOMETHING (submarines, torpedo boats, mines, etc, and each time it was considered the 'end' of the battleship!), just as EVERY weapon system has its weak points.  However, I suggest that the battle experience of the battleships in WW2 reveals less about their mission capability and viablity, and more about the STRATEGIC and TACTICAL abilities of its proponents.  Namely, battleships were NEVER designed or intended to be 'single ship all-powerful entities,' but to be used in squadrons and fleets, but almost NEVER were during all of WW2.

To explain further, consider the German Reichsmarine.  In WW2, the Germans never had more than two battleships and two battlecruisers.  Hardly sufficient when confronting the Royal Navy, let alone the US Navy as well.  Yet they STILL managed to confront some significant elements of the Royal Navy, caused some casualties (Hood, POW, etc), and had opportunities for even more mischief, even if they didn't quite work out as planned.  Considering the odds they faced, it is surprising they ever put out to sea at all, and certainly there was never an opportunity to operated as designed, as a squadron.  At the same time, just by their EXISTENCE, large parts of the Royal Navy were tied down as necessary counters, just in case the German ships broke out again.  And the ships designated for such oversight duties were not just carriers and their planes, but other battleships, cruiser, destroyers and submarines, and thus represented a significant portion of allied 'combat capability' devoted to just one purpose; to keep those few ships bottled up, and/or destroy them where they lay.  With this firmly in mind, is it any wonder, at least in regards to the German vs British Navy that 'battleship vs battleship' confrontations were few?

As regards the Japanese, this is more of a mystery, and appears to be more a fault of employment, rather than capability.  After examining the Pacific campaigns for many years now, it appears that 'battleship vs battleship' confrontations didn't happen often primarily because the Japanese simply didn't commit their battleships, but kept them in home waters at anchor for most of the war.  In fact, with the exception of some coastal bombardment at Guadalcanal, and a couple night actions using no more than a couple essentially unsupported battlecruisers, the Japanese didn't use their battleships for much of anything until Leyte Gulf, and by that time, they had so little control of the air that the whole affair was desperately pointless, regardless of what ships they could or could'nt have mustered. 

In other words, the battleships of WW2 were NEVER used in their intended role, i.e., in a squadron, pushing forward to confront an enemy squadron to achieve control of a piece of ocean, not that opportunities to do so failed to present themselves.  So you see, it is hard to say they were 'obsolete' if they were not used as intended.... This is not because they couldn't, or that such action would not have been effective, but because they CHOSE not to!  There were MULTIPLE surface ship gun battles in the Guadalcanal arena, mostly involving cruisers and destroyers, only two of which involved battleships, and only one of which involved a single Japanese battlecruiser, vs TWO US battleships.  What if the Washington and South Dakota had not encountered just the Kirishima and a couple heavy cruisers, but a COLUMN with the Nagato, Mutsu, Ise and Hyuga, let alone Yamato?  I don't think we would be having this discussion if such HAD happened!

Further, it is interesting to note that even when EVERYTHING was stacked against any possible success by the Japanese fleet regardless of the operation, in their last great effort at Leyte, the Japanese battleship Yamashiro managed to drive against all odds, through aircraft, MTB's, ranks of destroyers and cruisers, ONLY to be finally destroyed by the assembled gun line of Oldendorf's 'old' US battleships, sailing as a squadron in 'line ahead' and 'crossing the T,' exactly as they were intended when first laid down.  One can only wonder what the outcome might have been if it had not been ONE Japanese battleship, but a half-dozen operating together as as squadron, not separated by miles of ocean, dying one by one as unsupported individual ships.....

Finally, as far as the concept of the current employment of a battleship, I submit to you that it is not necessary for a battleship to lie 10 miles offshore to do bombardment duty.  A battleship can get as close to shore as the sea-bottom allows.  Certainly many places are shoal, which would preclude such a close approach (and monitors were designed with this in mind), but you could certainly approach with a mile or two in MOST places.  And mines are for minesweepers. Yes, the battleship would attract fire, and that is the point.  On one hand, it would be able to ABSORB such punishment, but more importantly, would be able to counterpunch such attacks (counterbattery fire) very effectively, and with pinpoint accuracy once they revealed their locations by firing at the battleship.  Oh, and one more thing, a 16" shell does not cost several million dollars, as does a single Tomahawk, and it can be sent downrange on request literally in a matter of seconds, and God help whatever it hits!  And yes, a standard 16" shell can hit targets 27 miles away, but RAP (rocket assisted shells) more than double, or even three times that distance, and really, if you need to hit a target THAT far away from the seacoast, you should be calling on air support, not a ship!

The lastest craze is for the 'Littoral Combat Support Ship,' which is that peculiar stealth thing you see pictures of on occasion.  While I am sure it can dodge lots of Radar, and unleash a lot of missiles, I wonder how many shells and missiles it can absorb?  Yes, armor piercing warheads are dangerous to armor, and they have been around a long time, both for bombs, shells and missiles, and I am not saying a battleship, or any weapon system is invulverable to them, just that it takes a LOT of them to stop a battleship (HOW many bombs and torpedoes was Yamato hit by before she sank???).