World War II Battleship on Battleship Engagements

That kirishima damage analysis is highly controversial. It is inconceivable that Washington' 16" shells, fired from almost point blank range, and would have touched sea at almost a tangent to the surface, could fail to ricochet off the of the water surface and instead hit kirishima a significant depth under water.

There are also other elements of the same damage analysis which strongly suggest the author has a serious lack of understanding of the physics of sea water. For example, he suggested kirishima suffered a magazine explosion after coming to rest on the bottom, and thereby scattered numerous cartridges across a fairly large expanse of the sea floor. This is also patently impossible given the drag of the sea water. He also suggested the anchor and chain, belivened to be those of kirishima and found to be wrapped around the propeller shaft of the upside down wreck of the kirishima, must have fallen onto the wreck after the wreck first landed intact upside down. Given the density of the solid steel anchor and chain, it is also inconceivable these would have travelled through the water column slower than the much less dense hull of kirishima, and arrived on the bottom after the hull has already made land fall.

Lezt said:

Battleship engagements were rare, but not that rare.

there is around 10 battle where a battleship / battlecrusier fired on another.

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TDS starts to appear on everything as large as a cruiser.

I think around 80% of all ships sunk in ww2 was by torpedos. the reason is fairly simple, a torpedo hit generally opens a massive hole in the magnitude of 10 meters diameter that floods and therefore sink the ship quickly and there is nothing that damage control crew can do.

Gunfire doesn't really punch that many holes to allow water ingress and the majority is above the waterline. given that the magazine is well protected, unless a lucky shell blows it up, the ship won't really sink even if the superstructure is burning. you have to remeber how strong these ships were built. Yamashiro or Fuso, both sunk at the Surigao Strait. but the battleship stayed afloat after it was split into 2 parts and burned through out the night. if the bulkhead holds, the ship won't sink -> as in the case of the Bismark as well.

Ultimately, it is better not to be hit by a torpedo than to rely on the TDS

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And in this case with torpedoes more lethals why in general BBS don' t have also TL especialy Japanese with her very good Long Lance curious ?

Exist pics of Surigao Strait battle ? and interior view/pics of Yamato especialy main turrets ?

Richard Santos said:

That kirishima damage analysis is highly controversial. It is inconceivable that Washington' 16" shells, fired from almost point blank range, and would have touched sea at almost a tangent to the surface, could fail to ricochet off the of the water surface and instead hit kirishima a significant depth under water.

There are also other elements of the same damage analysis which strongly suggest the author has a serious lack of understanding of the physics of sea water. For example, he suggested kirishima suffered a magazine explosion after coming to rest on the bottom, and thereby scattered numerous cartridges across a fairly large expanse of the sea floor. This is also patently impossible given the drag of the sea water. He also suggested the anchor and chain, belivened to be those of kirishima and found to be wrapped around the propeller shaft of the upside down wreck of the kirishima, must have fallen onto the wreck after the wreck first landed intact upside down. Given the density of the solid steel anchor and chain, it is also inconceivable these would have travelled through the water column slower than the much less dense hull of kirishima, and arrived on the bottom after the hull has already made land fall.

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Well, point blank is not literally point blank, point blank in battleship terms is around 10-12 km in this engagement. USS Washington with the 16" 45 cal, will be having a angle of fall of 6.8 deg at 10,000 yards to 11.7 deg at 15,000 yards. coupled with the rapid deceleration of a shell when it hits water, the shell could easily have dived deep.

I won't just so quickly to discredit the author, how things came to be is his theory.

as you know, the propellant magazine is located beneath the shell magazine. HE shells can explode under water while propellant cant or is very hard to be ignited under water. Thus if the ship is flooded, the shells can still explode and since the ship was upside down and on the sea bed, the pressure can only force upwards pushing out the propellant magazine. the theory is sound.

So nobody knew why the chain was draped over the stern, the author didn't say it was wrapped around the propeller not did his sketch show so. The author's theory was that Krishima first rolled over, then the front of the bow of the ship broke off from the rest of the vessel. now the bow of the vessel is where the anchor chain is fixed to or wound up against. So can the rest of the ship sink before the bow of the ship? Now as the anchor chain is heavy, it will slowly unwind from the sprocket/spool and could this take longer to happen than the rear of the ship sinking? there is no reason why the chain must sink first.

So its not a definite historic account of what have happened, but the theory is physics wise sound.

FORBIN said:

And in this case with torpedoes more lethals why in general BBS don' t have also TL especialy Japanese with her very good Long Lance curious ?

Exist pics of Surigao Strait battle ? and interior view/pics of Yamato especialy main turrets ?

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Simple reason why torpedo launchers tend to explode nastily when hit. you do not want a crusier/destroyer hitting a rack of torpedo on the deck of the battleship and have it explode. a launcher of 4 is 1000 kg of high explosive + fuel i.e. it is a very big bomb.

FORBIN said:

And in this case with torpedoes more lethals why in general BBS don' t have also TL especialy Japanese with her very good Long Lance curious ?

Exist pics of Surigao Strait battle ? and interior view/pics of Yamato especialy main turrets ?

Click to expand...

By TL you mean torpedo launcher? battleships built prior to 1925 almost universally have underwater torpedo tubes, usually 2-3 firing in the broadside direction, and 1-2 firing dead ahead. However, it was recognized during WWI that underwater torpedo severely compromises a ship's underwater damage resistance. It was also recognized that effective torpedo firing requires usual conditions and special maneuvering not conducive to good gunnery tactics.

So it was generally determined after WWI that torpedo tubes on battleship is not worth their weight and is in fact a severe liability, and torpedos are better used from destroyers.

Lezt said:

Simple reason why torpedo launchers tend to explode nastily when hit. you do not want a crusier/destroyer hitting a rack of torpedo on the deck of the battleship and have it explode. a launcher of 4 is 1000 kg of high explosive + fuel i.e. it is a very big bomb.

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As Japanese Long Lance very good but dangerous for the ship with oxygen and possible during Samar Battle one heavy cruiser destroyed a rack of torpedo hitted.

Torpedo is only really dangerous if they are stowed on deck, or protected only by light armor susceptible to easy pentration. They are no more dangerous than the ship's powder magazine if they are given the same level of armor protection as the magazine. This is why of all the pre-1925 battleships that had underwater torpedos, none AFAIK is known to have been lost to its own torpedo.

The problem with underwater torpedo tubes on battleships is two fold:

1. Because the torpedo tubes are not trainable, the chances of their being aimed in the right direction at the right moment is slim, especially if the battleship is maneuvering as part of s line of battle to gain gunnery advantage. Remember this is before gyroscope controlled torpedos that can be set to turn in the water after launch, so torpedos can only track straight, hopefully.

2. Torpedo tubes penetrating hull sides and the TDS greatly weakens the TDS. Furthermore, because torpedo tubes are long, and require another long compartment behind it for torpedo handling, underwater torpedo tubes also create large unsubdivided space that makes flooding in their vicinity hard to control. Indeed uncontrolled flooding through torpedo handling space contributed greatly to the loss of the German battlecruiser Lutzow in Jutland.

As to the concept of battleship packing serious torpedo firepower, the concept was seriously considered by both the US and Tsarist Russian navies just before WWI. The US concept was a battleship sized vessel, but with very low slung hull designed to be hard to hit, protected by very thick, highly inclined armor that was expected to deflect any shells that hit. It was armed with a massive underwater torpedo battery of 40-50 tubes on each side. The idea was this ship would be hard to hit, and hard to damage with shell hits, and can approach the intact enemy battleline far closer than normal battleship would dare, and smoother the enemy line with massive solves of torpedos. In the end the concept was judged unworkable because the very low sling design that would help them weather enemy shell fire also makes them very poor sea boats. In any sort of moderate to heavy sea they lack the sea keeping quality to keep up with own battlefleet or maneuver into range with the enemy.

The Russian torpedo battleship involve a more conventional and sea worthy hull, and resemble a conventional battleship or battlecruiser, but armed with only cruiser sized guns above water. Underwater it is similarly armed with massive batteries of boardside torpedo tubes. This concept was also not pursued because it became clear it's undersized gun turrets would be easily recognizable, and the enemy will no doubt concentrat all fire to destroy it before it can approach to torpedo range.

Oh how can we forget IJN kitakami?



5 launcher per side, each with 4 long lance torpedos. I.e. 20 torpedo per broadside.

Richard, many bb had torpedo tubes in ww1. In ww2, its only the scharnhorst class n the tirpitz. And they had launchers for your mentioned reasons. But ultimately, its that for point blank, battleship guns is seeimg 10 km. What good is it for torpedos with a typical range of <8 km?

Normal Torpedo range can be 20km, Japanese oxygen torpedos can go 50kms, depending on their speed setting. The problem isn't the range. The problem is even at the highest speed settings, torpedos don't go all that fast, 45 knots tops. It takes a far longer to reach the target at anything more than 2-3kms than it take for the target to move out of the way. If the enemy sees a torpedo launch from more than a few km away, or just suspect there had been a launch, they could easily change course and cause the torpedos to miss by a large margin.

Hence the range at which torpedos have high probability of hitting is just a few Kms at most, regardless of how far the torpedo can keep moving.