Battleship was the name given to the most powerfully gun-armed and most heavily armored classes of warships built between the 15th and 20th centuries. Battleships evolved from northern European cogs, and included carracks and galleons in the 16th Century, ships of the line in the 17th and 18th Centuries, broadside ironclads and Pre-Dreadnoughts in the 19th Century, and Dreadnoughts in the 20th Century. For over 300 years battleships ruled the waves, allowing nations such as the Netherlands, Spain, France and the United Kingdom to create and maintain trade-based overseas empires and restrain their rivals. During World War II (1939-45) they were superseded as the deciding factor at sea by aircraft carriers.
Role of Battleships
Battleships were designed to engage similar enemy warships with direct or indirect fire from an arsenal of main guns. As a secondary role, they were capable of bombarding targets on and near an enemy coast to support infantry assaults. A third role for the battleships emerged during World War II, when they used their powerful anti-aircraft weaponry to screen aircraft carriers from enemy air attacks. After World War II some continued to be used for shore bombardment and as missile platforms until the early 1990s.
History
The word "battleship" originated with the development of the line-of-battle tactic, in which ships usually followed each other single-file and engaged the enemy ships to one side, in the mid 17th century. Ships expected to form part of this line were called ships-of-the-line-of-battle or line-of-battle ships, eventually reducing to battleship. They were divided into several classes - first-, second- and third-rates. Fourth- and fifth-rates were Frigates, and sixth-rates were sloops (strictly "sloops-of-war"). These vessels were used for communications and reconnaissance and did not usually fight in fleet encounters. Although this classification worked well in the 18th Century, from the middle of the 19th Century, the terminology became confused by the introduction of large steam-powered armoured single-deck ships with a small number of very powerful guns. These were technically frigates because they had a single gundeck, but they were designed to fight as ships of the line, and were the most potent warships of their time.
WWI
Between The Wars
WWII
Battleships after WWII
After World War II, several navies retained battleships, but it became clear that they were not worth the considerable cost. During the War it had become clear that battleship-on-battleship engagements like Leyte Gulf or the sinking of the Hood were the exception and not the rule, and that engagement ranges were becoming longer and longer, making heavy gun armament irrelevant. The armor of a battleship was equally irrelevant in the face of a nuclear attack, and nuclear missiles with a range of 100 kilometres or more could be mounted on the Soviet Kildin class destroyer and Whiskey class submarine by the end of the 1950s.
The remaining battleships met a variety of ends. USS Arkansas and Nagato were sunk during the testing of nuclear weapons in Operation Crossroads in 1946. Both battleships proved resistant to nuclear air burst but vulnerable to underwater nuclear explosions. The Italian Giulio Cesare was taken by the Soviets as reparations and renamed Novorossiysk; it was sunk by a German mine in the Black Sea on October 29 1955. The two Doria class ships were scrapped in the late 1950s. The French Lorraine was scrapped in 1954, Richelieu in 1964 and Jean Bart in 1970. The United Kingdom's four surviving King George V class ships were scrapped in 1957, and Vanguard followed in 1960. All other surviving British battleships had been scrapped in the late 1940s. The Soviet Union's Petropavlovsk was scrapped in 1953, Sevastopol in 1957 and Gangut in 1959. Brazil's Minas Gerais was scrapped in 1954, and her sister ship São Paulo sank en route to the breakers during a storm in 1951. Argentina kept its two Rivadavia class ships until 1956. Chile kept Almirante Latorre (formerly HMS Canada) until 1959. The Turkish battlecruiser Yavuz (formerly the German Goeben, launched in 1911) was scrapped in 1976 after an offer to sell it back to Germany was refused. Sweden had several small coastal defense battleships, one of which, Gustav V, survived until 1970. The Russians also scrapped four large incomplete cruisers in the late 1950s, whilst plans to build new battleships were abandoned following the death of Stalin in 1953. There were also several old ships of the line still used as housing ships or storage depots. Of these, all but HMS Victory were sunk or scrapped by 1957.
U.S. Battleships
Until the advent of the Aircraft Carrier, the Battleship presented the most powerful fighting ships in the US fleet. A US Navy special policy board in 1889 advocated the construction of 192 warships over 15 years including 10 first class and 25 coastal defense battleships. Anti-Militarist sentiment in Congress greatly curtailed these plans, the Act of 30 June 1890 authorizing only three 'sea-going coast defense battleships'. The first of these, USS Indiana, being laid down on the 7th May 1891
With the advent of the Dreadnought (1906) there began a new era in battleship design which overnight all existing Battleships were made obsolete.This new breed of Battleship carried ten 12-inch guns, no secondary battery, but twenty four 3-inch guns to repel torpedo attacks. She displaced 17,900 tons and had a speed of 21 knots.
The Iowa class battleships gained a new lease of life in the U.S. Navy as fire support ships. Shipborne artillery support is considered by the U.S. Marine Corps as more accurate, more effective and less expensive than aerial strikes. Radar and computer controlled gunfire could be aimed with pinpoint accuracy to target. The United States recommissioned all four Iowa class battleships for the Korean War and the New Jersey for the Vietnam War. These were primarily used for shore bombardment, New Jersey firing seven times more rounds against shore targets in Vietnam than she had in the Second World War.
As part of Navy Secretary John F. Lehman's effort to build a 600-ship Navy in the 1980s, and in response to the commissioning of Kirov by the Soviet Union the United States recommissioned all four Iowa class battleships. On several occasions, battleships were support ships in carrier battle groups, or led their own battle groups in a battleship battle group. These were modernized to carry Tomahawk missiles, with New Jersey seeing action bombarding Lebanon, while Missouri and Wisconsin fired their 16 inch (406 mm) guns at land targets and launched missiles in the Gulf War of 1991. Wisconsin served as the TLAM strike commander for the Persian Gulf, directing the sequence of launches that marked the opening of Operation Desert Storm and firing a total of 24 TLAMs during the first two days of the campaign. This will most likely be the last combat action ever by a battleship. The primary threat to the battleships were Iraqi shore based surface-to-surface missiles; Missouri was targeted by two Iraqi Silkworm missiles, with one missing and another being intercepted by the British destroyer HMS Gloucester.
All four Iowas were decommissioned in the early 1990s, making them the last battleships to see active service. USS Iowa and USS Wisconsin were, until fiscal year 2006, maintained in to a standard where they could be rapidly returned to service as fire support vessels, pending the development of a superior fire support vessel. The U.S. Marine Corps believes that the current naval surface fire support gun and missile programs will not be able to provide adequate fire support for an amphibious assault or onshore operations.
US Battleships
BB1 USS Indiana | BB2 USS Massachusetts | BB3 USS Oregon | BB4 USS Iowa | BB5 USS Kearsarge |
BB6 USS Kentucky | BB7 USS Illinois | BB8 USS Alabama | BB9 USS Wisconsin | BB10 USS Maine |
BB11 USS Missouri | BB12 USS Ohio | BB13 USS Virginia | BB14 USS Nebraska | BB15 USS Georgia |
BB16 USS New Jersey | BB USS Rhode Island | BB18 USS Connecticut | BB19 USS Louisiana | BB20 USS Vermont |
BB21 USS Kansa | BB22 USS Minnesota | BB23 USS Mississippi | BB24 USS Idaho | BB25 USS New Hampshire |
BB26 USS South Carolina | BB27 USS Michigan | BB28 USS Delaware | BB29 USS North Dakota | BB30 USS Florida |
BB31 USS Utah | BB32 USS Wyoming | BB33 USS Arkansas | BB34 USS New York | BB35 USS Texas |
BB36 USS Nevada | BB37 USS Oklahoma | BB38 USS Pennsylvania | BB39 USS Arizona | BB40 New Mexico |
BB41 USS Mississippi | BB42 USS Idaho | BB43 USS Tennessee | BB44 USS California | BB45 USS Colorado |
BB46 USS Maryland | BB47 USS Washington | BB48 USS Virginia | BB49 USS South Dakota | BB50 USS Indiana |
BB51 USS Montana | BB52 USS North Carolina | BB53 USS Iowa | BB54 USS Massachusetts | BB55 USS North Carolina |
BB56 USS Washington | BB57 USS South Dakota | BB58 USS Indiana | BB59 USS Massachusetts | BB60 USS Alabama |
BB61 USS Iowa | BB62 USS New Jersey | BB63 USS Missouri | BB64 USS Wisconsin | BB65 USS Illinois |
BB66 USS Kentucky | BB67 USS Montana | BB68 USS Ohio | BB69 USS Maine | BB70 USS New Hampshire |
BB71 USS Louisiana |
Pages with the same tags
Page | Tags |
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HMS Condor | warships |
USS R-3 (SS-80) | warships |
Italian Battleship Giulio Cesare | battleship warships |
USS Tennessee (BB-43) | battleship tennessee warships |
HMS Cossack | warships |
Hull Classification Symbol | classifications warships |
Heavy cruiser | warships |
IJN Mikasa | battleship warships |
Pre-Dreadnought | battleship warships |
Admiral Class Battlecruiser | warships |