Prinz Eugen

[Cutlass]

But Bismark was sunk at the very beginning.

Tirpitz lasted most of the war, and Iowa was held in the Atlantic to deal with her, should she manage to come out and play. That said, the Bismark class simply wasn't as strong, on paper at any rate, than any of the battleships the US built for WWII. All the American ships had 16"x9 guns. Bismark 15"x8 guns.

Of course, what actually matters most in battle is who gets hit and who gets missed.

 

[r16]

bismark was a very powerful WW I ship that would have suffered in a "modern duel" meaning long range engagements where the shells would be plunging down . Weak deck armour . Even if took out Hood so quickly in the same way as the British ship was urgently trying to close in to negate "her" own weak deck armour . And ı read Ospreys a lot and number suggest the actual hits vs claimed ones seem to be really off-balance in the Japanese case , but one would say they would really sweep the USN off the floor in 1942 . It should have been Yamato down the Slot in Guadalcanal , she might have prolonged the war into the 1946 ...

 

[onejayhawk]

It was also a completely foreseeable damage location. The steering gear of a ship is always its most vulnerable point to torpedoes and the Bismarck's armor protection there was of a pre-Great War style.

When you say "protection there", are you referring to dead astern? In any event, what is your point?

J

 

[Ajidica]

When you say "protection there", are you referring to dead astern? In any event, what is your point?

J

I'm referring to protecting the steering gear from torpedo and gunfire. My main point is that despite the impressive looking guns and size, the Bismarck was underneath all of that an enlarged pre- Great War design with some serious shortcomings. The Royal Navy had an excuse for their crappy battleships - they were either "quantity over quality" pre-war designs or crippled by treaty obligations.

 

[onejayhawk]

All true.

My point is that the same is true of every ship afloat. Sometimes you get lucky and never have a weakness exposed, but every ship has them. Take another example, the Japanese flagship at Midway, Akagi, was sunk by a five or six plane attack. Only one or two direct hits started a fire that destroyed the vessel. One key factor seems to be that a water pumps were damaged by a near miss, preventing the flooding of aft magazines and reducing water pressure to fire hoses.

J

 

[PhroX]

While there are indeed vulnerabilities in every ship, there's a significant difference between the kind of vulnerability exposed by a lucky hit, and the kind of vulnerability exposed under normal combat situations. The Bismark suffered from too many of the latter. Effectively the ship, while difficult to sink, was relatively (by the standards of battleships) easy to mission kill though disabling of key systems which were not properly protected (the steering as previously mentioned, the main battery fire direction, onboard communication etc.), and given the environment she was operating in, a mission kill was highly likely to result in a sinking.

To be fair to the Germans, they did have a pretty good excuse for their ships having many WW1 era design features with some up to date tech bolted on top (and some of that tech was very good) - they missed out on ~15 years of warship development thanks to Versailles, and basically never had a chance to properly study the lessons that WW1 had taught about battleship design. The German naval architects didn't really have enough experience and knowledge to build a battleship with transom stern, four screws, all-or-nothing armour, triple/quad turrets etc.

 

[Wastl]

I'm referring to protecting the steering gear from torpedo and gunfire. My main point is that despite the impressive looking guns and size, the Bismarck was underneath all of that an enlarged pre- Great War design with some serious shortcomings. The Royal Navy had an excuse for their crappy battleships - they were either "quantity over quality" pre-war designs or crippled by treaty obligations.

Meh, that isn't quite true. Yes, there were parts of the design that harked back to the WW1-era, but other parts did not. It wasn't just an enlarged pre-WW1 design, it was a mix of old and new.

Protection of the rudder was most definately a weakness, as was the deck armour, though the latter was deemed not that big of an issue in Germany due to weather conditions on the Atlantic rarely allowing for truly long-range battles that would be most dangerous to that armour. Seeing how much of a pummeling the Bismarck took without actually sinking, the armour seemed to do its job quite well. Which is still of little use when a damaged rudder prevents the ship from moving properly...

Maybe the Bismarck could have escaped to France if Lütjens had known that the British had lost contact for some time. Him breaking radio-silence allowed the British to narrow down the area they had to search in, which led to the ship being found again. Lütjens thought that the British new about this position, so keeping radio-silence wasn't deemed as necessary.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

To be fair to the Germans, they did have a pretty good excuse for their ships having many WW1 era design features with some up to date tech bolted on top (and some of that tech was very good) - they missed out on ~15 years of warship development thanks to Versailles, and basically never had a chance to properly study the lessons that WW1 had taught about battleship design. The German naval architects didn't really have enough experience and knowledge to build a battleship with transom stern, four screws, all-or-nothing armour, triple/quad turrets etc.

Well, the British Navy supposedly had all those things and built the King George V class (Prince of Wales) which was not crippled by any treaty obligations but by the shells coming from the Bismark.

 

[PhroX]

The PoW was hardly crippled by the Bismarck. She withdrew after taking minor damage when her main battery failed due to the mechanical faults that British hadn't had time to fix due to the need to rush her out to meet the Bismarck. The PoWs eventual sinking was a matter of incompetence not design faults.

The Bismark was inefficiently designed due to the architects lack of experience of (for the time) modern warships - the UK, US and Japan would've gotten a much better ship for the cost and tonnage (for example, the KGV class was around 10kt lighter and cost half of a Bismarck while offering comparable performance [similar weight of fire, thicker armour, but slower]) - and had flaws in her protection scheme that ultimately lead to her sinking.

 

[Evie]

The fact that the German conception of "Operational Security" was pretty much "Eh, surely they can't breach Enigma"...likely did not help. The Luftwaffe brilliantly informing one of its general whose son was on the Bismarck of the ship's destination in a message the British could intercept and read...well, it didn't help.

Yamato vs Iowa...is a much more complex issue than bigger guns and better armor, but ultimately depending on when in the war the duel occurs and what condition the duel occurs in, the Iowa has a very serious chance. Yes, hit-by-hit, pound by pound, the Iowa likely loses a pure gunnery duel at visual range (though Japanese shells for the Yamato were subpar). But the Iowa, unlike the Yamato, has a superb fire control-capable radar which enables it to make the fight at extreme visual ranges or even beyond-the-horizon ranges (it has the guns for it). Factor in the extra six knots the Iowa is capable of, and it can easily keep the battle at a range where the Yamster is fighting blindfolded but the Iowa is not. Top it off with the Iowa's superior rate of fire, and the fight becomes a lot more even than the sheer size and shell weight would indicate.

Now move the battle to, say, the waters of the Slot at night, or a situation where the Yam has the Iowa pinned down and unable to use its speed to dictate the range (convoy/landing defense, etc), and the Yamato's excellent optical fire control, heavier shells and heavier armor are very likely to prove a decisive edge.(Or move the battle earlier in the war, with a less powerful radar set on the Iowa making it harder for them to dictate the range).

 

[Broken_Erika]

Yamato vs. Montana(had the Montana been completed)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana-class_battleship

 

[Cutlass]

Montana was just an Iowa with 3 more guns. It's still a 16" gun ship. And so the guns would have trouble with Yamato's armor. The US Navy decided not to build 18" gun battleships because Panamax.

Not that that ultimately matters, since it turned out that you can sink any ship, if you throw enough airplanes at it. By the time they were ready to build the Montanas, someone had enough brainpower to understand that there was no point in doing so. The USN already had more battleships than it needed, and needed more carriers instead.

 

[PhroX]

It's worth nothing that the Mk8 super heavy armour piercing shells the Iowas (and thus the Montanas) fired actually had comparable armour penetration to the Yamato's 18.1" AP shells despite only being about 75% of the weight.

 

[Evie]

Yep. American shells were noted for being some of the best, pound for pound, in the game. Japanese eighteen inch shells were far on the other end: pretty subpar, all things considered.

 

[Kyriakos]

The royal navy command's decisions still get prominent scholars to argue :/

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Humongous H-44 class was the real deal.

Watch this six hours documentary about the construction of the H-44 class.

 

[Evie]

LOL

Fisher was just a little too far ahead of his time. Fast capital ships *were* the way to go, just engine and armor tech weren't quite where they needed to be to strike the right balance. By World War Two, with technology catching up, the battlecruiser concept merged back into the battleship concept to produce fast battleships in general and the Iowa-class in particular, which I would not hesitate to describe as the finest battleships ever built. Yes, one on one depending on circumstances, the Yamato might have managed a win, but ultimately, the Iowa were far more capable warships.

 

[Lexicus]

The advent of the aircraft carrier and aircraft that could reliably destroy ships made battleships into oversized escorts anyway.

 

[PhroX]

Humongous H-44 class was the real deal.

Watch this six hours documentary about the construction of the H-44 class.

The H-44 is basically the naval equivalent of the Ratte. And AFAIK, even it's designers were never actually dumb enough to think it would be built, instead treating it more as a theoretical "what if?" than anything sensible. I've read that one British naval architect (I forget who exactly) described the entire project as the designers trying to make themselves look busy so they didn't get sent to the Eastern Front....

Indeed, the H-classes as a whole were pretty much a total joke that, has they actually been built, would've achieved nothing beyond pandering to Hitler's ego. Well, actually, that's not true. They would've helped the Allied war effort by diverting material and manpower away from useful stuff. The H-39, being a Bismarck writ larger, might've been somewhat usable, albeit not a particularly well designed battleship, but the later designs were just dumb. They did nothing to address the flaws of earlier ships, and instead simply turned what they had up to 11.

 

[Evie]

Which fast battleships were far better suited for being escorts.

One way or another - with planes or without planes - speed *was* a must-have for battleships. With plane, it was the difference between remaining vaguely relevant or completely irrelevant. Without planes, it was the difference between a one-trick pony and a versatile warship that still had good odds against the one-trick pony.