SPOILER SEASON IS OVER FOR TEiF!!!

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:In WW2 it is clear that the Bismarck and the Yamato were mistakes; but battleships were quite useful for both the US and the British. The final tally of major ships lost by the US in WW2 is 2 battleships (both sunk at Pearl Harbor), 5 heavy carriers and 7 light carriers.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:5 heavy carriers? I count only 4 ("CV-2 Lexington", "CV-5 Yorktown", "CV-7 Wasp", and "CV-8 Hornet"). As far as I know, no Essex class or Midway class carriers were sunk in WWII (though several Essex class carriers were badly damaged).

Wikipedia grouped CV & CVL into what I labeled heavy carriers versus CVE (carrier escorts) into what I labeled light; which moves Princeton (CVL-23, a member of the Independence class that was sunk by a land-based aircraft bomb at the Battle of Leyte Gulf on 24 October 1944) into the heavy class, since it is not a carrier escort. I apologize if I caused confusion by including it with the others you mentioned. Perhaps I should have counted it with the escort carriers, since it is called a light carrier. Or perhaps I should used different names for the groups (like major and minor?).

Please let me know what you think.

I would have accepted 5 fleet carriers (and 7 escort carriers), but the Independence Class were called Light Fleet Carriers and using "Light" for escort carriers is confusing.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:I would have accepted 5 fleet carriers (and 7 escort carriers), but the Independence Class were called Light Fleet Carriers and using "Light" for escort carriers is confusing.

Thanks, I have edited the original post as you suggested.

The Independence class is an interesting war time expedient. In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, additional aircraft carriers were desperately needed; but it was going to take too long to finish the Essex class already being constructed. So based on a prewar interest of FDR, nine Cleveland class light cruisers were quickly converted into the new Independence class (going into service at about the same time as the first of the new Essex class ships). Being based on a light cruiser, they had the speed to move with the fleet (unlike a typical escort carrier). As of October 1944 the normal aircraft complement consisted of 24 F6F Hellcat fighters and 9 TBM Avenger torpedo bombers. USS Princeton was the only one lost in the war.

Jonathan_S wrote:And even after WWII the battleship didn't go away because it was vulnerable to aircraft. It was far less vulnerable than a carrier, cruiser, or any other warship. It went away because a carrier could strike at over 10 times the range of a battleship.

Loren Pechtel wrote:The battleship went away because it was a SDM against the MDM of the carrier aircraft. It doesn't matter that it's a lot tougher and hits far harder, if it can't close to engagement range it's worthless.

Interesting analogy. For the US in WW2, the battleship proved adept at bombardment prior to sending troops ashore. Unfortunately there was no perfect answer to shore bombardment, but a trained battleship crew was better than aircraft dropping bombs. However that proficiency is not sufficient reason to build more.

tlb wrote:Interesting analogy. For the US in WW2, the battleship proved adept at bombardment prior to sending troops ashore. Unfortunately there was no perfect answer to shore bombardment, but a trained battleship crew was better than aircraft dropping bombs. However that proficiency is not sufficient reason to build more.

Nor was it a reason to build dedicated shore bombardment monitors (as the Royal Navy had done in WWI and WWII with things like the Erebus, Marshal Ney, and Roberts classes of monitors)

Instead the US mostly put its battleships into mothballs within a couple years of the end of the war; and assumed it's ex-WWII 8" heavy cruisers would suffice for shore bombardment duties. Even the Iowa's were originally decommissioned by '49 - leaving no battleships for any cold war shore bombardment.

Though it's interesting that every time a shooting conflict started an Iowa or two were hauled back out of mothballs and sent. New Jersey and Iowa coming back in '50 and '51 for the Korean war, before returning to reserve. New Jersey coming back again for a few years in '68 for Vietnam. It was only in the 80s, with the old heavy gun cruisers now worn out, and looking for a platform to mount nuclear armed tomahawk land attack cruise missiles, that the Iowas all started returning to service for their final time; New Jersey in '82, Iowa in '84, Missouri in '86, and Wisconsin in '88.

cthia wrote:Planes were instrumental in ending the era of the battleship, yes. But it was their delivery system, the aircraft carrier, that really sealed their fate. Planes are useless if they cannot get close enough to the enemy.

Interesting point, personally I would take the other side; because it is generally possible for a modern plane based on land to get close to the enemy by use of midair refueling (*). Whereas a carrier without planes is just an expensive curiosity waiting to be sunk. Your point was more correct during WW2, but then the sides with the most aircraft carriers still found battleships useful. After the Second World War no more battleships were built (I believe), because they were special purpose weapons; while the aircraft carrier was more general purpose.

As to the question of the relative importance of the carrier versus its planes, I think it is best to think of it like those pictures that are either two people facing each other or a goblet: what you choose to see depends on what you want to see. Aircraft carriers would not be built if there were no planes that could carry out missions off them; on the other hand there are planes being built for carriers, since having a mobile base means more time on target.

*: Because of weight limitations, there are planes on the modern battlefield that can only be there due to midair refueling.

tlb wrote:Your point was more correct during WW2, but then the sides with the most aircraft carriers still found battleships useful. After the Second World War no more battleships were built (I believe)

Technically it depends on how you define "built".
I'm not aware of any new battleship construction being started after the war - but HMS Vanguard, the Royal Navy's final battleships, wasn't completed and commissioned until 1946.

So she'd been laid down, and worked on intermittently, during the war, but her building completed post-war.

Also I know the Royal Navy had a series of post-war design studies looking at what it would take to build a battleship resistant to any current (non-nuclear) weapon -- which included armored decks sufficient to defeat 12,000 lbs tallboy bombs. So even at the end of the war they weren't yet convinced that they didn't need modern battleships. But ultimately reduced budgets and changing roles for the RN meant that none of their post-war battleship designs were ever authorized for construction.

I haven't seen anything about the US looking seriously at any clean-sheet post-war BB designs, though there were plans on and off for about a decade of completing the 5th Iowa, USS Kentucky, as an anti-air or missile battleship -- but ultimately those also came to naught. And there were plans for more significant refits to the Iowas that also never happened (equipping them with the post-war automatic 3" AA guns; for example)

The Soviets did start construction, in 1951, on the Stalingrad-class battlecruiser (9 12-inch guns and a 7.1 inch main belt); but that was canceled and broken up following Stalin's death. But she'd have been more like an Alaska-class supercruiser than a battleship.

Jonathan_S wrote: It was only in the 80s, with the old heavy gun cruisers now worn out, and looking for a platform to mount nuclear armed tomahawk land attack cruise missiles, that the Iowas all started returning to service for their final time; New Jersey in '82, Iowa in '84, Missouri in '86, and Wisconsin in '88.

The critical issue the Navy had is that they really, really want to be out of the steam propulsion business. I think the USN has less than ten warships using steam, the Wasp Class and the Blue Ridges. And when they are gone they are not going to build any more.

Everything else is gas turbines or diesel. Most use LM2500 turbines, which are not exactly leading edge, based on the DC-10's jet engine.

kzt wrote:The critical issue the Navy had is that they really, really want to be out of the steam propulsion business. I think the USN has less than ten warships using steam, the Wasp Class and the Blue Ridges. And when they are gone they are not going to build any more.

To be completely clear, you mean the ones using oil fired boilers; since all of their nuclear ships are propelled by steam (unless they have snuck a Sterling engine in on a secret silent sub).

tlb wrote:

kzt wrote:The critical issue the Navy had is that they really, really want to be out of the steam propulsion business. I think the USN has less than ten warships using steam, the Wasp Class and the Blue Ridges. And when they are gone they are not going to build any more.

To be completely clear, you mean the ones using oil fired boilers; since all of their nuclear ships are propelled by steam (unless they have snuck a Sterling engine in on a secret silent sub).

Though nuclear propulsion steam is much lower pressure & temperature steam than was the norm in USN builds of late 30s and 40s. The nuclear reactor needs to be kept to temperatures well below what the superheat cycle of a boiler would raise conventional steam powerplants to.

So, even ignoring the obvious difference that the navy doesn't have to train people on boilers for nuclear steam propulsion, the steam side of the plants is different enough that the skills and training there isn't identical either.



Though the Soviets did make that idiosyncratic design for the Kirov-class guided missile cruisers with a combined nuclear & boiler power plant. Wikipedia implies that they can run on nuclear alone, but I've heard claims that they use their conventional boilers to superheat the steam produced by the reactors; and that turbines designs for superheated dry steam are going to be inefficient and even suffer damage if provided the lower temperature/pressure "wet" steam directly from a reactor -- implying that they really can't function properly unless both the reactors and the conventional boilers are online.

kzt wrote:The critical issue the Navy had is that they really, really want to be out of the steam propulsion business. I think the USN has less than ten warships using steam, the Wasp Class and the Blue Ridges. And when they are gone they are not going to build any more.

tlb wrote:To be completely clear, you mean the ones using oil fired boilers; since all of their nuclear ships are propelled by steam (unless they have snuck a Sterling engine in on a secret silent sub).

Jonathan_S wrote:Though nuclear propulsion steam is much lower pressure & temperature steam than was the norm in USN builds of late 30s and 40s. The nuclear reactor needs to be kept to temperatures well below what the superheat cycle of a boiler would raise conventional steam powerplants to.

So, even ignoring the obvious difference that the navy doesn't have to train people on boilers for nuclear steam propulsion, the steam side of the plants is different enough that the skills and training there isn't identical either.



Though the Soviets did make that idiosyncratic design for the Kirov-class guided missile cruisers with a combined nuclear & boiler power plant. Wikipedia implies that they can run on nuclear alone, but I've heard claims that they use their conventional boilers to superheat the steam produced by the reactors; and that turbines designs for superheated dry steam are going to be inefficient and even suffer damage if provided the lower temperature/pressure "wet" steam directly from a reactor -- implying that they really can't function properly unless both the reactors and the conventional boilers are online.

Both the Soviets and the USA have experimented with liquid metal cooled reactors to permit higher temperatures. The USS Seawolf had its liquid sodium cooled reactor replaced with a pressurized water unit for standardization.