RoG Bismarck, Pray for me!

Firecaptain wrote:

So like 9 pages and no in progress pics....

Please the "Bis" is one of four kits to be recieving some bench time lately, there's not alot to see.  Hull, bridge & con, funnel, upper deck, aft/ fire cont & hangers are assembled. These are undergoing, carveing, shaveing & sanding to ready them for, PE hatches, doors and ladders etc.  When I have something cool to see I will post WIP's.  I feel I've bitten off a lot to chew with this kit as the threads subtitle ("pray for me !") attests, lots of correcting & refineing as well as an ambitous(autum 1940 Baltic sea trials camo scheme.)are in the works.  Thanks for your intrest though.

So like 9 pages and no in progress pics....discussing subs now.....WTH? 

Oh yes!  Subs DEFINITELY have a very valuable role to play, no doubt about it, and are more deadly today than at any other time... (and the Argies found that out when the Belgrano went down)

my grandfather was on the ark when she got hit. she didnt blow up at all she sank next day while under tow purely because the dmg control wasnt upto scratch alot of lessons were learned from that

ps im on your side about the battleship having a place in modern navies we wouldve benifitted in the falklands

pps the argies were terrified of our subs or more accurately the POSSIBILITY that attack subs were in the area they got an incorrect intel report saying we had them in the area early on (we didnt) and they changed their planning because of this!

Depends on the battleship.  Late designs often had triple bottoms and very elaborate anti-torpedo defenses, both internally, and with bulges, compression tubes, you name it..... The South Dakotas and Iowas also had their outside props and shafts built into a large skeg, thus protecting the inner prop shafts from torpedoes as well (which was not the case for Bismarck).....

Out of pure curiousity, does anyone have any information as to the thickness of the typical BB's hull bottom?

I don't think anyone here has made any claims that the battleship is the 'be all, end all' in any way shape or form.  What HAS been said is that there is no other ship that can do what it does (just like there is no other ship that can do what a carrier does, or a submarine does, etc.).  And the carrier will undoubtedly survive, as long as there is a need for 'force projection' that requires multiple on-call sorties by aircraft just about anywhere in the world.  And that mission is unlikely to change until combat aircraft no longer require fuel, or re-arming.....  As for the Taiho..... Boom!  One torpedo, scratch one flattop (and that one even had armored decks!).  USS Lexington blew up just like Taiho, and for the same reason... fuel explosions!  USS Wasp = three torpedoes, then... Boom!  Akagi = one bomb.... Boom!  HMS Ark Royal = one torpedo.... Boom!!!  Soryu = three bombs....Boom!!  Hiryu = four bombs.....Boom!!!  Shokaku = three torpedoes..... Boom!!!!  Does this sound like a trend to you??  You never get that kind of vulnerability to battle damage in a battleship at sea, no, not ever!  And THAT is what makes a battleship unique and unmatched for its job.... 

Yes, aircraft carriers are venerable because of their large capacities of aviation fuel on board. I, nor anyone else, ever made the claim that they weren't.
The battleships tactical and strategic usefulness has past. That is a fact, sad to some obviously, but a fact none the less. If battleships were the be all, end all ships some would hope, they would be produced today. There is no such concept as "cost prohibitive" when it comes to military spending, even when a weapon is a dud, as long as it has dedicated champions backing it (V22).
The aircraft carrier will reach obsolete status one day, sooner than its die hard supporters would like to be sure, but that won't change the facts or the outcome.
They will have served their purpose, with distinction and honor, and will be remembered fondly, but retire they will.

Actualy Taiho did not "blow sky high" from single torpedo hit that she took, at least not immediately. But she did explode later as a result of fuel vapors that resulted from her torpedo damage, the same as USS Lexington at Coral Sea. Taiho was first able to launch her air group after taking the torpedo hit. 

I suppose a discussion of battleship survivabilty against torpedos is in order... after all Bismark was damaged enough by a single torpedo to allow surface groups to close and sink her.

ddp59 wrote:

searat, i think it will take more then 1 hit to do what you describe. look at cvn enterprise & forrestal & possibly others of the supercarriers that have had massive explosions & fire that are still around years later in service or now decommisioned/sinkex.

Tell that to the captain of the 'Taiho,' hit by one torpedo and blew skyhigh....

DerOberst wrote:

Mansteins revenge wrote: we are now going in circles...   Oddly, this is exactly what the Captain of the Bismark said....

And with this comment, we have come full circle back to the Bismark. WHEW!

Mansteins revenge wrote:

we are now going in circles...

 

Oddly, this is exactly what the Captain of the Bismark said....

searat, i think it will take more then 1 hit to do what you describe. look at cvn enterprise & forrestal & possibly others of the supercarriers that have had massive explosions & fire that are still around years later in service or now decommisioned/sinkex.

PaintsWithBrush wrote:

warshipguy, As Manstein's revenge pointed out in an earlier post, carriers were sunk in a greater number because the screening ships were bypassed in order to hit the highest value target, i.e., the ones they feared the most, the aircraft carrier. By that line of reasoning, the Japanese soldiers who were on the islands bypassed during the island hopping campaign could claim the enemy was too terrified of their fighting ability to engage them directly.

....And of course, a carrier is a huge floating fuel and explosives depot with no armor to speak of, which will go up like a roman candle with just a single hit!

I'm sure we could find some use for the sabre and the gatling gun, but will it ever be seen on a modern battlefield today? I am now ending my participation in this spirited and lively debate as we are now going in circles...

I hope that you read my last post in its entirety . . . I said that it would be ridiculous to say that a particular type of warship is obsolete based upon its rate of being sunk by another form of warfare.  To say that battleships are obsolete because some were sunk or damaged by airpower is just as problematic as saying that, because an even larger number of aircraft carriers were sunk by aircraft, they are obsolete.

And, look at your history . . . American aircraft carriers were heavily protected by multi-layers of protection, including their CAP, and the screen of radar picket ships, destroyers, cruisers, and battleships.  In fact, BB AA fire was instrumental in protecting those carriers by mid-1943.  Carriers were not hit because aircraft ignored their screening vessels; most aircraft could not get through the screen.  USS Franklin was hit by a single kamikaze that did get through.  Imagine the destruction had more been able to do so.

As Searat12 has repeatedly pointed out, there are roles for the different types of ships.  Carriers cannot perform the functions of destroyers and cruisers, let alone those of submarines. Nor can those ships fulfil the roles of carriers. And, these roles change with changes in technology and tactical thought.  Are carriers obsolete because they are no longer the "eyes" of the fleet? Are submarines obsolete for the same reason?  And, will we ever see another torpedo attack by a force of destroyers? Of course not!  Their roles have changed beyond that. It is very simplistic to take an "either/or" approach and say that one type is obsolete because technology changed.  Like it or not, many more men would have been killed and many more carriers would have been sunk had the battleships not been there.

Bill Morrison

warshipguy,
As Manstein's revenge pointed out in an earlier post, carriers were sunk in a greater number because the screening ships were bypassed in order to hit the highest value target, i.e., the ones they feared the most, the aircraft carrier.
By that line of reasoning, the Japanese soldiers who were on the islands bypassed during the island hopping campaign could claim the enemy was too terrified of their fighting ability to engage them directly.

Manny,

That is not my point at all.  Air power sank half of Japan' battleships but so did surface ships.  Airpower sank one Italian battleship at sea and two in port.  Air power sank two British battleships, actually one battleship and one battlecruiser.  It did not sink 23 American battleships nor did it sink 16 British battleships. It failed to sink 4 Italian battleships and 2 German battleships and battlecruisers.

On the other hand, airpower did sink most Japanese aircraft carriers and three American carriers.  In fact more carriers were sunk by airpower at Midway and, again, at the Philippine Sea than at Pearl Harbor or Taranto.  Do you question the obsolescence of carriers based on how many were sunk by air power? I think not! That would be absurd.  But, that is the standard that you apply to battleships. 

Quickly relegated to second line duty?  Seems to me they were the primary shore bombardment force, and the other 'old' battleships that were not at Pearl (The New Mexico class BB's) were sent all the way around from the Atlantic poste-haste, and constituted the only battlegroup defense in the Pacific in the event the Japanese decided to follow-up their air bombardment of Pearl with a more substantial force.... Why would they do that, if the battleships were 'obviously' obsolete (and apparently had JUST been proved so, so dramatically?)  As for 'mixed results' for battleship shore bombardment, besides the American efforts, the Japanese battleships and cruisers  kept the Marines and Army Air Corps on Guadalcanal in a constant state of alarm, disruption and destruction, with Henderson field under almost nightly bombardment, destroying hundreds of planes, cratering the airfield, blowing up fuel supplies, and killing hundreds of soldiers, Marines and airmen.  If it was not for the amazing efforts of the 'Seabees' and the constant flow of replacement aircraft shuttled in by the USS Enterprise and others, Guadalcanal could well have become a terrible defeat for the US!  And what finally stopped this carnage?  The USS Washington and the USS South Dakota!

Again, I am not saying that battleships are in any way 'better' than either aircraft carriers, or submarines, or any other weapon system for that matter.  Battleships had, and still have a role which no other ship can fulfill, and that is to sail directly into 'harm's way,' deliver the goods, and come out the other end regardless of incoming shells, missiles, planes, bombs, torpedoes, whatever.  The only thing that can effectively stop a squadron of battleships with its usual escort destroyers, etc, is another squadron of battleships..... They were never designed to operate as single ships, or really in groups less than four, and those that were lost at sea to air or submarine assets, were not being operated as designed, and so therefore these losses were both avoidable and to be expected (if you operate a submarine in war exclusively on the surface, it will be sunk, and very quickly, because it was not being operated as designed, yes?  Combat aircraft operated individually by themselves will soon be shot down by aircraft flying in groups, yes?  Same for battleships!).  In other words, you can  use a monkey wrench as a hammer, it just isn't a very good one!  I think I have said enough on this subject, and will now leave it to others to continue this discussion...

manny, the aircraft carrier was the main offensive weapon of us naval activties in the pacific especially guadacanal. battleships, both types of cruisers & destroyers were mostly used for aa support for the aircraft carriers & used to pound the beaches for invasion with the exception for the battle for the philippines. there the ships sunk at pearl harbour crossed the "t" of a japanese force & almost wiped it out except i think 1 destroyer.

...Sure, I'll dig it out...Your last post, however, argues more against your point-of-view than it does against other's in here, IMO...you basically conceed that air-power was the primary adversary of BB's---a point I tried to make a long time ago...we agree...thus, naval aviation and the CA took the place of the BB as the main offensive spearhead...and who cares how many toros and bombs it took to sink the Yamato--point is that she was sunk because the Japanese lost control of the air and had a field day (although how many hits she took is still disputed)...again, we are back to air-power...In addition, every hstory book I have read cites the Japanese control of the air as the reason POW and Repulse were sunk, the Japanese land bombers destroyed them at their leisure...

Manny wrote . . .many battleships were sunk at sea with less than that and the Franklin suffered a lot more damage and survived (I paraphrase).  Remember, Franklin was hit by one kamikaze and was put out of the war for good (with over 800 dead).  No battleship was put out of the war after suffering only one kamikaze hit  . . . I can't even think of one that was forced out of action.

Let's see . . . Yamato and Musashi each took almost 20 torpedo hits and 11 bomb hits before going down.  Ise and Hyuga were overwhelmed by hundreds of aircraft and took many bomb hits and torpedo hits while in port.  Kirishima was virtually destroyed by Washington before being sunk.  Hiei was heavily damaged by surface forces, losing all fire control and steering capabilities; she was then sunk by aircraft. Kongo was sunk by submarines, Yamashiro and Fuso were sunk solely by surface forces, and Haruna was sunk in port by overwhelming numbers of aircraft.  Given that Japanese AA fire control and the associated guns were very bad, it is not surprising that most were lost to aircraft in some way.  (5 sunk by AC, 4 sunk by surface forces, 1 by submarine)

But, no British or American battleship was lost to airpower after PoW and Repulse. Oh yeah, Repulse had no real AA capabilities and PoW had few close-in weapons; they were sunk by land-based aircraft.  Those battleships that were hit tended to shake off the resulting minor damage and fight on.

One Italian battleship was sunk at sea by German land-based bombers.

So, where were the many battleships sunk by airpower?  Mostly in port.  When at sea, aircraft affected battleships to some extent, but not in the dramatic way claimed by many.

As for most historians agreeing that repairing the battleships damaged at Pearl Harbor being a national pride issue, I have read none who made that claim.  May we have sources to support it?

Bill Morrison

 

searat12 wrote:

Why were the old battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor raised, modernized, and put back into service just as quickly as possible?

Most historians agree that it was a National Pride issue that they were salvaged at all...In the event, they were quickly relegated to second-line duty and participated in some of the shore bomardment that seems to have taken up so much of the batteships' time in WW2, to very mixed results...

No matter what the reasoniong, the fact remains that Bismark was sunk by surface ships after being damaged by a torpedo. Could Ark Royal's air group have delivered enough ordinance on target to sink Bismark by themselves is debateable. Until Leyte Gulf, no battleship at sea was sunk by carrier airpower alone. And prior to that, the only battleships sunk at sea solely by airpower were by land based aircraft (Prince of Wales/Repulse). IIRC, the Navy was very much against the Mitchell bombing tests, arguing that the tests were not conducted under artificial conditions that would not be realistic in wartime (i.e. ship stationary and not shooting back at the attackiong aircraft). While some in the Navy may have seen that the aircraft would be the weapon of the future, even the basic aircraft carrier was still in the future for the USN.

I still haven't heard of any weapon system, besides a hardened silo in Nebraska that can take the kind of punishment that a battleship can.  And a hardened silo can't move!   As for the 'claim' reference the Bismarck, did aircraft sink the ship?  No, they did not, it was surface ships, including two battleships that sank the Bismarck.  Yes, aircraft MIGHT have been used to do so, but in point of fact, they were not (nor is there any guarantee they would have been able to hit the ship anyways, given how much Bismarck was slewing around).  As for 'the end was known by the end of WW1,' if that was the case, then why were SO many huge new battleships and battlecruisers planned and started?  Only the treaties, pushed by the Brits, stopped the battleships.  As for Mitchell getting his 'chance' to bomb the old German battleship, anchored, unmanned and unarmed, and never designed to deal with aircraft in any way, Mitchell had to fight to get that opportunity!  And even though he DID eventually sink it, if battleships were therefore 'instantly obsolete,' then why did everyone continue to come up with new designs and new production?  Why were the old battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor raised, modernized, and put back into service just as quickly as possible?  Same for the Italian battleships at Taranto, for that matter.... Not the sort of treatment you would expect in wartime for a heavily damaged and 'obviously obsolete' weapon system!

Again, the reason there were no battleships built after WW2 was simply because no-one else besides the US could afford them, and the US had such a preponderance in everything, that there was no chance that any other nation could possibly 'catch up' to challenge the US in a naval arms race.  As the US battleships very quickly HAD no equivalent opponents to deal with, there was not a lot of reason to either keep them in service, or create new ones, just keep the ones they had and periodically update them as needed.  The industry to produce battleships and most particularly, battleship armor all disappeared, either victim of the massive destruction of the war years (Europe and Japan), or conversion after the war to other production (as was the case with the US).  There is currently no foundry or steel rolling mill in the world that can produce large armor plates 12" or more in thickness (hasn't been for more than 40 years), and the cost of reproducing such an industry is so cost-prohibitive, that it is highly unlikely that anyone will ever build a battleship from scratch again.  But again, that does not mean the battleship is, or was obsolete; it means it has been SO successful, that at least in the case of the US Navy, it has defeated ALL challengers, and can therefore retire gracefully, as no further challengers have arisen, or are likely to.  Not torpedoes, not kamikazis, not bombers, not missiles, not submarines, not carriers, and not nukes.  Funny how often those old battleships keep coming out of mothballs periodically for new duty; I don't recall any old submarines, or old carriers, or old cruisers, or old anything else coming back into service after decades, can you?

As far as the claim that it took surface ships to "do the deed" against the Bismark:
The surface ships were used as a "point of honor". Your battleship sank our battleship so we must sink your battleship with our other battleship.
Even as early as the end of WWI, the end was known. Why would the U.S. Navy have allowed Billy Mitchell to use the captured battleships as targets for his air superiority theory? Could it have possibly been a tacit acknowledgement of their new "target status"?

searat12 wrote:

There, ya see?  Other than the hardened missile silo in Nebraska, nobody has come up with a weapon system that can take 6 x 1000 Lbs hits and still keep fighting, and that's kinda the point.  I have already discussed why no-one has built any battleships since WW2 elsewhere in this thread, and won't go into it again.  As for the Bismark (Oh yeah!  That's what this thread is supposed to be about!), yes, it was hit by one torpedo from a Swordfish.  But before that, it had been hit be several 14" shells from the POW, had sunk the Hood, and was all by itself.  And after the torpedo hit, the ship didn't sink, it was unsteerable (one of the bad points of German battleship design were the exposed rudders), but it took HMS Rodney, the KGV, several cruisers and destyroyers the best part of a day shelling and torpedoing the thing before it finally went down, and that was while it was essentially defenseless because it couldn't aim its guns while slewing all over the ocean!  The Swordfish's single torpedo was merely the catalyst for the destruction of the Bismarck, not the cause (you could claim as much for the 14" hit that caused the ship to leak so much oil, allowing it to be tracked by the cruisers....)

Less than 2hrs is hardly the better part of a day. Rodney opened up at 0847 and by 0931 Bismarck fired her last main gun turret C. She sank at 1039.  

searat12 wrote:

There, ya see?  Other than the hardened missile silo in Nebraska, nobody has come up with a weapon system that can take 6 x 1000 Lbs hits and still keep fighting, and that's kinda the point.  I have already discussed why no-one has built any battleships since WW2 elsewhere in this thread, and won't go into it again.  As for the Bismark (Oh yeah!  That's what this thread is supposed to be about!), yes, it was hit by one torpedo from a Swordfish.  But before that, it had been hit be several 14" shells from the POW, had sunk the Hood, and was all by itself.  And after the torpedo hit, the ship didn't sink, it was unsteerable (one of the bad points of German battleship design were the exposed rudders), but it took HMS Rodney, the KGV, several cruisers and destyroyers the best part of a day shelling and torpedoing the thing before it finally went down, and that was while it was essentially defenseless because it couldn't aim its guns while slewing all over the ocean!  The Swordfish's single torpedo was merely the catalyst for the destruction of the Bismarck, not the cause (you could claim as much for the 14" hit that caused the ship to leak so much oil, allowing it to be tracked by the cruisers....)

Well unless you are going back on your word, your supposed to say, "The battleship is obsolete."  You asked for just one weapons system and you got it...waiting...

There, ya see?  Other than the hardened missile silo in Nebraska, nobody has come up with a weapon system that can take 6 x 1000 Lbs hits and still keep fighting, and that's kinda the point.  I have already discussed why no-one has built any battleships since WW2 elsewhere in this thread, and won't go into it again.  As for the Bismark (Oh yeah!  That's what this thread is supposed to be about!), yes, it was hit by one torpedo from a Swordfish.  But before that, it had been hit be several 14" shells from the POW, had sunk the Hood, and was all by itself.  And after the torpedo hit, the ship didn't sink, it was unsteerable (one of the bad points of German battleship design were the exposed rudders), but it took HMS Rodney, the KGV, several cruisers and destyroyers the best part of a day shelling and torpedoing the thing before it finally went down, and that was while it was essentially defenseless because it couldn't aim its guns while slewing all over the ocean!  The Swordfish's single torpedo was merely the catalyst for the destruction of the Bismarck, not the cause (you could claim as much for the 14" hit that caused the ship to leak so much oil, allowing it to be tracked by the cruisers....)