Battleships in World War II Informations

World War II saw the end of the battleship as the dominant force in the worlds navies. On the outbreak of the War, large fleets of battleships—many inherited from the dreadnought era decades before—were one of the decisive forces in naval thinking. By the end of the War, battleship construction was all but halted, and almost every remaining battleship was retired or scrapped within a few years of its end.

Some pre-war commanders had seen the aircraft carrier as the capital ship of the future, a view which was reinforced by the devastating Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. The resultant Pacific War saw aircraft carriers take precedence. There were just two engagements in the Pacific Theater where battleships fought each other, and only three battleship versus battleship engagements in the Atlantic.

Battleships remained the most heavily protected ships afloat; nonetheless, sixteen were sunk or crippled by bombs or torpedoes delivered by aircraft, while three more were sunk by submarine-launched torpedoes. The war also saw the development of the first guided bombs, which would make it much easier for aircraft to sink battleships in the future.

The German pre-dreadnought battleship SMS Schleswig-Holstein fired the first shots of World War II with the bombardment of the Polish garrison at Westerplatte; and the final surrender of the Japanese Empire took place aboard a United States Navy battleship USS Missouri. 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 Atlantic, Pacific and Mediterranean theatres. 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 Battle of the Atlantic, and aircraft carriers determined the outcome of most of the decisive fleet clashes of the Pacific War.

In June 1940 Scharnhorst and Gneisenau surprised and sank the lightly escorted aircraft carrier HMS Glorious off western Norway This engagement marked the first and 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 Algeria with their own heavy guns, and later pursued fleeing French ships with planes from aircraft carriers.

In late 1940 and 1941, a range of engagements saw battleships attacked by carrier aircraft.

The first example of the power of naval aviation was the British air attack on the Italian naval base at 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. In that battle, British carrier-deployed torpedo bombers damaged an Italian battleship sufficiently to force it to withdraw from the main force, and then at night British battleships sank the Italian forces three heavy cruisers.

The Scharnhorst class were the first capital ships, alternatively referred to as battlecruisers or battleships, built for Nazi Germanys Kriegsmarine after World War I. The class comprised two vessels: the lead ship Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Scharnhorst was launched first, and so she is considered to be the lead ship by some sources; however, they are also referred to as the Gneisenau class in some other sources, as Gneisenau was the first to be laid down and commissioned. They marked the beginning of German naval rearmament after the Treaty of Versailles. The ships were armed with nine 28 cm (11 in) SK C/34 guns in three triple turrets, though there were plans to replace these weapons with six 38 cm (15 in) SK C/34 guns in twin turrets.

Scharnhorst was sunk at the Battle of North Cape by a British force of destroyers, cruisers, and the battleship Duke of York. Gneisenau was bombed while in dry dock and never repaired.

The battleship war in the Atlantic was driven by the attempts of German capital ship commerce raiders—two battleships, the Bismarck and the Tirpitz, and two battlecruisers—to influence the 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 as a commerce raider, Bismarck engaged the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Hood. Due primarily to the Bismarcks superior range-finding and accuracy, it soon sank Hood with an apparent hit to her magazines. Bismarck and Prince of Wales hit each other three times, the damage compelling the Prince of Wales to withdraw and the Bismarck to call off its commerce raiding operation, as part of its fuel reserve had been contaminated with salt water. While the Bismarck was heading for St. Nazaire, the Royal Navy continued to hunt it, and eventually an attack by Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers from the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal disabled Bismarcks rudder and significantly reduced her speed. This enabled two Royal Navy battleships, cruisers and destroyers to close in for the kill.

In many of the crucial battles of the Pacific, for instance Coral Sea and 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. The two largest battleships ever constructed, Japans Yamato class, which carried a main battery of nine 18.1-inch (460 millimetre) guns were designed to be a principal strategic weapons, but Yamato fired her main guns in only one engagement, while Musashi never fired her main guns in an engagement. 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).

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 allocating two ships to the defense of Singapore was seen as a compromise. Furthermore, the U.S. Navy later agreed to send its Pacific Fleet with its eight powerful battleships to Singapore in the event of hostilities with Japan.

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 seriously damaged (of those sunk two were total losses). The Japanese thus neutralized the U.S. battleship force in the Pacific by an air attack and showed the vulnerability to air attack of warships lying at anchor, as at Taranto. The loss of the battleships led the US Navy to rely on aircraft carriers as capital ships to make counterattacks against the Japanese such as the Doolittle raid April 1942 and to engage Japanese naval forces at the Battle of the Coral Sea May 1942 and the Battle of Midway June 1942.

The sinking of the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales 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 fighters found and sank them on 10 December 1941. Prince of Wales had the unwanted distinction of being the first modern battleship sunk by aircraft while underway and able to defend herself.

Commonly understood as a victory of carriers, Midway showed up deficiencies in Japanese operational planning. Yamamoto, considering his battleships the most valuable units, kept them far to the rear, in line with traditional practice. This placed them too far away to assist Nagumo (and they would have been too slow to keep up with him in any case). Yet, when Nagumos carriers were sunk, Yamamoto lost an opportunity to salvage something. Carriers, for all their evident potency, were virtually defenseless at night, and Fletcher might have been dealt a crushing blow by Yamato the night of 6–7 June, had Yamamoto stayed closer.

Initially, when the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, none of the nine Pacific Fleet battleships were available. One was being overhauled at Puget Sound Navy Yard from June 1941 until March 1942. Of the eight at Pearl Harbor, two were total losses and six had been sunk or crippled and were sent to West Coast shipyards for repair and reconstruction. With a top speed of only 21 knots, they would not have been able to keep up with the fleet carriers in any case. The new fast battleships of the North Carolina class and South Dakota class were still undergoing trials. North Carolina and South Dakota were ready by summer of 1942 and provided crucial anti-aircraft defense during the Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz Islands carrier battles.

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 two Fusō and two Ise-class battleships, despite their extensive modernization and respectable speeds, were relegated to training and home defense, while the two Nagato and two Yamato class were being saved due to fuel limitations for a "decisive battle", which never came. In fact, the only Japanese battleships to see much action in the early stages were the four Kongō-class battlecruisers, which served mostly as carrier escorts due to their high speed and antiaircraft armament.

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