Battleships did did nothing in ww2

[thedab 644]

except for being target practice,for planes and submarines and doing a bit of shore bombardment.

 

they were complete waste of time and resources.

 

most of the work was done by Destroyers and smaller vessels.

 

It's time to face up to facts folks,Battleships were a waste of time in ww2.

[slinkywinkyeye 129]

That is why they are not in warthunder.

[neutrino109 4,376]

Funny thing is even if the Japanese permanently sank all the battleships at Pearl Harbor the United States navy barely used them in comparison to other ships.

 

Another funny thing is that some of those raised battleships which saw first action at the beginning of the war, also saw the last battleship to battleship battle in Leyte.

 

Let's see Tirpitz did nothing but get rekt in harbor.

 

Quite a letdown we didn't have anything close to Jutland, which was a letdown in itself.

 

Maybe battleships would be more powerful at night when it would be harder for planes to get em, but then again we have submarines.

 

I guess they were quite useful escorting carriers with all the flak they had, combined the ships posed more of a defense.

[TT33a 4,656]

https://web.archive.org/web/20071010091138/http://www.warship.org/no11994.htm

**Also in addition to sinking the enemy, the Scharnhorst established a record of 24,200 m, one of the longest recorded hits in the history of naval gunfire in the same battle

 

 

 

.

Edited January 12 by TT33a

[Wallia_Marseille 113]

Hmm,why i remeber there was a german BB that sank 1 brittish BB and and damaged other very badly.But i guess i am wrong.

Also biggest Battle between BBs:

• Battle of Savo Island, 9 August 1942
• Battle of Cape Esperance, 11–12 October 1942

Quite major battles both......Yes did nothing.

Edited January 12 by Wallia_Marseille

[Hunter12396 3,110]

despite being invaluable for pounding the islands of the Pacific...yeah "nothing"
maybe you should do some reading, how about the Battle of the Surigao Strait? where West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Tennessee, and California worked together with a couple dozen PT boats to sink the Japanese battleships Yamashiro and Fuso

this was not a one time thing; battleships and PT boats were important in WW2

/thread

[*ko102crew 386]

The Bar Room Brawl.

 

http://www.beyondships.com/files/hguadaarticler.pdf

 

 

[AmirHamzah 17]

Battleship serve as the command center for the fleet since its the strongest ship compared to destroyer & cruisers. Nobody will place the Chief Admiral of the fleet on the PT boat and expecting him to be safe and be able to do his job of coordinating the fleet.

[Eden_Earhart 2,930]

You are right in saying that BBs weren't the most important. 

 

It was definitely the ships even bigger than BBs, the carriers. 

All the large scale battles in the pacific involved carries and usually battleships, boats suspiciously absent, but you couldn't really expect to sail one of those tiny things across the pacific. 

In the European seas, battleships were much more important. Almost every major naval battle involved a battleship. 

Hunt for the Bismarck, Mers El Kebir, North Cape, Sinking the HMS Glorious, Second battle of Narvik, and so on

 

Major battles between boats include...?

[thedab 644]

1 hour ago, Wallia_Marseille said:

Hmm,why i remeber there was a german BB that sank 1 brittish BB and and damaged other very badly.But i guess i am wrong.

Also biggest Battle between BBs:

• Battle of Savo Island, 9 August 1942
• Battle of Cape Esperance, 11–12 October 1942

Quite major battles both......Yes did nothing.

Lol both of them battles no battleships were used

[Warbirdpeter 57]

Eden_Earhart,allow me to help you on the part of major battles involving battleships. Now I've seen a lot of military history documentaries on YouTube,& what I can tell you that there were still instances of heavy fights involving 'BB's from both the U.S. & Japan. One was the night-fight at Guadalcanal on Nov.13-14,1942,which involved USS South Dakota (BB-57),& USS Washington (BB-56) going up against the IJN Kirishima.In that fight,USS South Dakota took some extensive damage from 'Kirishima's guns,due to the fact that she had no power caused by a broken 5-inch gun ring main...but in came 'Washington',& just unleashed a major beating on the 'Kirishima'...Eventually,the Japanese battleship was so torn apart by 'Washington's guns,including 9 '16-inch' shell hits,that she had to be scuttled. The admiral on board 'Kirishima' at the time,Nobutake Kondo,chose to go down with his ship. This night victory by the U.S. Navy helped seal the deal in which U.S. forces evicted the Japanese off Guadalcanal...That 6-month-long fight ended in February,1943!

          The other fight involving the battleships of those two nations occurred,as you already know,in the Surigao Strait on October 24-25,1944. There,a large Japanese naval task force,led by Adm. Shoji Nishimura,tried to run the gauntlet of American warships which included 6 old battleships...5 of them survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor almost 3 years before. Rear-Adm. Jesse Oldendorf,commander of these units attached to U.S. 7th Fleet,was ready & waiting...Using the classic 'crossing the "T" ' manoeuver,the American force ripped apart Nishimura's Southern Force...As mentioned in another text I read, the battleships 'Fuso' & 'Yamashiro' were among those getting gunned down...& Adm.Nishimura chose to go down with the 'Yamashiro',which was his flagship of the Japanese Southern Force. This fight,part of 'The Battle of Leyte Gulf',was the last battle where battleships took on battleships on the high seas. After that,the only battleship that would've been worth mentioning was Japan's monster named 'Yamato'...which would meet its demise in the Sea of Japan on April 7,1945. P.S.: I haven't forgotten 'Yamato''s sister ship 'Musashi',which was sunk by U.S. carrier planes in the Sibuyan Sea on Oct.25,1944. Hope this mountain of info helps you out well!!!

[sabaton_ 3,702]

What am I reading???

Of course they did a lot:

 

German battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst sunk the birtish carrier HMS Glorious

The Bismarck sunk the HMS Hood

HMS King George V and HMS Rodney sunk the Bismarck

HMS Duke of York sunk the Scharnhorst

Japanese battleships Yamashiro and Fuso were sunk during the battle of Surigao Strait by 6 american battleships. Plus they damaged the heavy cruiser Mogami, so it was scuttled.

 

Those are the ones I can remember.

Plus they shot down tons of planes, damaged many ships during the large battles in the Pacific, bombed the islands to cover landings, provided cover for other ships, american ones bombed the shores of Japan at the end of the war, etc.

[thedab 644]

4 minutes ago, sabaton_ said:

What am I reading???

Of course they did a lot:

 

German battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst sunk the birtish carrier HMS Glorious

The Bismarck sunk the HMS Hood

HMS King George V and HMS Rodney sunk the Bismarck

HMS Duke of York sunk the Scharnhorst

Japanese battleships Yamashiro and Fuso were sunk during the battle of Surigao Strait by 6 american battleships. Plus they damaged the heavy cruiser Mogami, so it was scuttled.

 

Those are the ones I can remember.

Plus they shot down tons of planes, damaged many ships during the large battles in the Pacific, bombed the islands to cover landings, provided cover for other ships, american ones bombed the shores of Japan at the end of the war, etc.

all that in 6 years of war,and them Japanese battleships were first crippled by American Destroyers,the Bismarck was first crippled by a Swordfish,and the Hood was over 20 years old,by time it sank.

[Josephs_Piano 1,750]

Something people forget is why the Bismark was such a nightmare for the British, and why they went to such efforts against the Tirpitz - it was because of the commerce raiding by Scharnhorst & Gneisenau early 1941 - Operation Berlin in which they sank several ships and dispersed a couple of convoys allowing Uboats to sink some more - the British convoys protected by battleships (yes, they had Battleships on convoy escort!) were safe from the 2 German ships which did not want to engage other capital ships.

 

In the context of British commerce in 1941 that was very important.

[Eden_Earhart 2,930]

1 hour ago, thedab said:

all that in 6 years of war,and them Japanese battleships were first engaged by American Destroyers and then totally beaten by the American battleships,the Bismarck was first crippled by Battleship HMS Prince of Wales,and the Hood was (Along with dozens of other WW1 vintage battleships) over 20 years old,by time it sank.

Also just to point out HMS Hood wasn't a battleship either ^^ 

[Josephs_Piano 1,750]

Most ppl said she was a fast battleship - with more protection than he Queen Elizabeth class - just not the RN!

[Eden_Earhart 2,930]

11 minutes ago, Josephs_Piano said:

Most ppl said she was a fast battleship - with more protection than he Queen Elizabeth class - just not the RN!

They did have an odd way of classifying ships, but captain's orders! 

[the_suztown 1,158]

To say they did nothing is quite the understatement, as people have shown they've done a considerable amount, unlike the boats we currently are getting..

[Stahlvormund101 8,781]

Reminds me of the suggestion that Heavy Tanks did nothing.

While they werent of that much importance compared to the masses of medium and lighter vehicles, once such a Heavy was in the field it was another variable the enemy had to deal with.

[Josephs_Piano 1,750]

16 hours ago, the_suztown said:

To say they did nothing is quite the understatement, as people have shown they've done a considerable amount, unlike the boats we currently are getting..

 

That's also a silly understatement!!

 

Sheesh - what is it with people who feel the need to make sweeping generalisations - do't you know that generalisatoins are always wrong??

 

[Fallenkezef 4,593]

WW2 was the Battleship's swansong and they did good service in all the major seafaring nations.

[Stahlvormund101 8,781]

3 hours ago, Fallenkezef said:

WW2 was the Battleship's swansong and they did good service in all the major seafaring nations.

Pretty much. Their time had come figuratively and literally.

[Fallenkezef 4,593]

5 hours ago, Stahlvormund101 said:

Pretty much. Their time had come figuratively and literally.

 

Aye, the yanks got some more service out of battleships by converting them to guided missle and artillery platforms post war.

 

WW2 was a tipping point. In 1939 to around the end of 1943 they where valuable and exceedingly useful. 

 

After 1944 there was nothing a Battleship could do that a carrier group could not do better

[Kazumi_ 6,557]

14 hours ago, Josephs_Piano said:

 

That's also a silly understatement!!

 

Sheesh - what is it with people who feel the need to make sweeping generalisations - do't you know that generalisatoins are always wrong??

 

 

 

 

The reason we have destroyers backing up landing craft during amphibious assaults were to ward off small, fast and light attack vessels. AKA Torpedo Boats.

Edited January 13 by Kazumi_

[bellezza03 4,855]

tell that to the marines that had to assault beaches and bunkers in Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Not even telling about Guadalcanal where the at the end the 2 US battleship decided who dominated guadalcanl waters. And if Japan didn't lost all his carriers at Midway in only one assault we would have seen a battle the the Yutland would have been nothing by comparison. Also battleships where really good in the fleet in being concept which was really well adopted by the Italian Battleships. Yes the BBs where no more the gods, but with air cover, a battleship was the most dangerous treath you could face