Diving_Hawk, that's one of the great ironies of WWII. The battleship was well on it's way out as the primary naval combatant when the Iowa class came into service, since Pearl Harbor and the subsequent naval battles showed that the aircraft carrier and her air group had become the preferred striking weapon. The closest we really get to an honest battleship vs. battleship fight was during the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal when the USS Washington and USS South Dakota and four escorting destroyers squared off against the BB Kirishima, CA's Atago and Takeo, CLs Nagara and Sendai, plus nine destroyers. Considering the US lost 3 of 4 destroyers and the South Dakota badly damaged, it certainly wasn't a 'slam dunk'. But the new technologies of radar and computer plotted gunnery solutions allowed the Washington to close to point blank range before devastating Kirishima with her main battery. Kirishima was scuttled the next day.
The only other BB vs BB action was, of course, the Battle of Surigao Strait when Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf old battleships pummeled a task force led by the BBs Yamashiro and Fuso. Wish the exception of USS Mississippi, all of his BBs had been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor. This was the real avenging of Pearl Harbor, and has always been that way in my mind. Using the strait to his advantage, the Japanese ships were engaged first with Destroyers lining the shores of the strait firing torpedoes, then into a kill zone consisting of where the range of all the heavy and medium guns and proceeded to dismantle the Japanese surface action task force.
In all of WWII, the 'ideal' battle of pre-war naval thinking only came about on two occasions out of either desperation or embarrassment of material riches that allowed a precise answer to a tactical question without need to consider more economical alternatives. It is obvious now, sitting in the year 2012, to see that the concept of the battleship was obsolete the day it became the most powerful weapon on the waves. After that point, all development that wasn't towards making them stronger was focused on destroying them. Once Pearl Harbor, and to a lesser extent Taranto, demonstrated the ease in which economy killing behemoths (BBs, lol) can be nullified by an airplane and torpedo which costs maybe $100,000 all together, they became nothing more then monuments to a concept as out dated as land armies standing in lines and shooting at each other in the age of machine guns.
Thank the maker for games such and IL2, Hearts of Iron III, War in the Pacific:Admirals Edition, and War Plan Orange: Dreadnoughts in the Pacific 1922 - 1930; which allow us students of history to play out the 'what if' scenarios and pit these ships against each other. Who says PC games can't enrich peoples lives?
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Topic: WIP Iowa BB61 (Read 46572 times)
