Scorpid said:
I agree this article is crap. No offense but mentioning only ships that maybe the average person can come up with in a pinch isn't worth the effort. Make a list that gives people some knowledge.
Beastro, I like your list but you need to make room for two ships IMO the Turbina (*though it might be stretching the definition of modern, and warship) and the SMS Goebon, it might not of ruled the waves but you would be hard pressed to find another modern ship that effected the directly politics of a war and better served her country then that one. The fact its not on this list is an insult to the proposition of the article.
Without the flight of the Goebon Greece joins the war 1915 and Austria gets overrun from the south by Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians and Greeks. Russia puts the entire weight of her army on AH and Germany; and GB and France don't waste valuable time and resources with Gallipoli.
Turbinia wasn't a warship, just a technological demonstrator. She carried no armament nor was a commissioned ship.
As for Goeben, the seizure of their two battleships under construction by the British government had more to do Ottoman entry into the war than she did.
The RN was strong enough throughout the WW2 to contain the the German and Italian fleets and to keep the Japanese out of the Indian ocean allowing the US to concentrate all its major surface units in the pacific.
Cept they didn't keep the Japanese out of the Indian Ocean. After Pearl the Kido Butai returned to the Western Pacific and went south to run the RN out of the Indian Ocean before they turned back East for Midway. The RN was stretched and only had Warspite, four of the old, unmordenized R class BBs, old, small and slow Hermes and two new armoured carriers to defend with and they chose to flee West than test the six Japanese carriers losing Hermes and many lesser warships in the process.
That tied into the massive blunder Britain did after El Alamein at Churchill's insistence by pressing on the offensive in North Africa by striping their Eastern defences of men, aircraft and ships that allowed the Japanese to storm the Malayan Peninsula. Churchill may have been a great man but he had great faults and this pretty much acts as the single event which destroyed the British Empire.
It meant that for the first time in decades, a main line combat ship could have fully co-ordinated fire control on all of her weapons at once. Since all the main guns were of the same type, they had roughly equivalent fire trajectories, and thus could be controlled from the same range finding station. It vastly simplified command for gunnery fire, and reloading and supply for the vessel as well.
Fire control wasn't much needed before Dreadnought because battles took place within 10,000 yards, after her they extended to 20,000 and beyond.
But thats the point, this article was about some of the most famous ships, and until you mentioned the above ships, I hadnt heard of them. Please understand, that I am not belittling their contributions or whether they deserve a place in history, I am just saying this list was about some of the most famous.
You don't have to be defensive, I'm not criticizing or anything, I actually really had when people overlord and bully others with knowledge, I was simply correcting error or what I felt were error. When it comes to history, especially military history, I become very pedantic because it's so distorted in popular culture (see news articles calling anything that floats with a gun a battleship). When I see a title like this list had, it triggers an itch I really need to scratch.
The emphasis on battleships is a little underwhelming. Battleships never really did 'rule the sea'. Almost as soon as they were created in their modern form, the world became so shit scared of them that everyone was too chicken to actually use them. Jutland was like a game of naval dodgeball where everyone throws about three balls and then goes home. All through WW1 it was the submarines that really dominated the oceans and nearly crippled one or more sides.
And yet they ruled for centuries. What we call battleships were for centuries called Ships of the Line in the Age of Sail. The first battleships as we know them were in fact Ships of the Line with steam engines installed before the creation of the "Armored Frigate" and the rest of the ironclad types which followed.
Battle ships were extensively used in these times, it's just that those of the 19th Century existed in a time largely of widespread peace. It was because of that peace that many different types of battleships were developed from armoured frigates, to center battery ships to turreted ones like USS Monitor as people struggled to figure out what was good with the rapidly changing technology with few wars to prove their theories in. It's for this reason why the secon half of the 19th Century was called the Age of Uncertainty in naval circles with only the First Sino-Japanese War and US Civil War having any real naval action take place, but then largely unique circumstances like the former being against secondary powers, one with a heavily out of date, corrupt and inefficient navy against a very modern one and the latter being one which took place mostly in rivers and restricted seas along Eastern Seaboards island chains.
Jutland was due to Britain having no need to press home their advantage because of the distant blockade and because Kaiser Wilhelm was too scared of losing his bath toys. Beyond that the rest of the RN and the Entente quickly hunted down the rest of the German surface naval abroad and kept the Mediterranean clear.
Subs didn't dominate over battleships or any others. It was the British distant blockade which kept the High Seas Fleet bottled while they and the French, and eventually the Italians, kept the Austro-Hungarians and Ottomans sealed tight in the Adriatic and Black Sea.
Subs were of little use to the Entente because their oppositions navies weren't very active while the Central Powers were forced to use them in a Guerre de Course which didn't do nearly as much damage as is commonly thought to Britain, though the U-Boats were a greater threat in WWI than in WWII.
Continuing in this vein, the first major disarmament treaty was all about limiting battleships, and that just pushed people into making 'battlecruisers' to get around the tonnage limits, as well as aircraft carriers.
Battlecruisers were an outgrowth of Dreadnought when Jack Fisher created the first Dreadnought Armoured Cruiser, Invincible, commonly called the first Battlecruiser. Battlecruisers are very mercurial, at least the term is and were very short lived, their heyday being only a few years before and during WWI. After that engine technology caught up and allowed navies to equip their battleships with enough speed to compliment their armour and firepower to make battlecruisers as a type obsolete. The last one completed, Hood, was modified after Jutland to become a fast battleship, though the Queen Elizabeth Class were the first to really be that, however much slower they were.
It wasn't about limiting battleships, it was about limiting costs. Most nations wanted to spot spending money, most of all the US and sought to restrict all types of ships across the board. It's for that reason that Heavy Cruisers came into existence and Light Cruisers were twisted into the form we know them as in WWII. All ship types were restricted in one or another including carriers and all navies were given a limit on how much tonnage they could build.
In WW2 it was the carriers that did all the heavy lifting, as well as the continued submarine warfare.
Only in the second half of the war. In the first half battleships were the primary assets and it's then that most of the gun battles took place. Even after you had battleships active in select areas like the Solomons fighting when carriers couldn't - at night.
Along those lines carriers only became active in the sub war in the Atlantic in 1943 and they were misused at first as the first escort carriers were sent out in hunter-killer squadrons instead of tied to convoys where the U-Boats would come to them. Before and during their time Destroyers and other lesser warships types carried the U-Boat burden while the older RN battleships like the R Class and the little or unmodernized Queen Elizabeth's escorted convoys to keep Germany's heavy hitters from striking.
Yamamoto was basically used in the same way that desperate CoH players use their King Tiger: fling it at the entire enemy army and hope for a miracle.
He had no other choice, the Army and Emperor had already made it for him. All he saw was that he had a better chance to doing leading the Navy than anyone else and threw his dice.
The USS Texas is the last Dreadnought class battleship.
And she's like... 8 minutes away.
I love that ship.
She might not be for long if money isn't found to give her the Mikasa treatment and encase her in a bed of concrete.
Salt waters eating her hull and in many places she's rotted through. The same is also happening to USS Lexington because she sits on a sand bar at low tide.
