Some eighty years ago the Battleship Era ended in a flurry of bombs and torpedoes that sank the two capital ships of the Royal Navy's Force Z.
Yes, aircraft had been involved in sinking the most capital of capital ships prior to December 10, 1941. But the circumstances allowed battleship fans to temporize.
An aerial torpedo ensured the doom of Bismarck, but the actual sinking occurred during a surface gun action. Battleships were sunk by aircraft at Taranto and Pearl Harbor, but those were surprise attacks on unsuspecting moored warships.
There was no gray area on December 10. Aircraft found and sank two of the Royal Navy's heavy units, one, Prince of Wales, one of the newest and most powerful British battleships extant.
The "moral" I've always been told that this story taught was that in the 90 minutes it took the air attack to sink both Prince of Wales and Repulse the battleship era ended and any naval organization that pursued heavy gunpower rather than carrier airpower was foolishly incompetent.
What's kind of intriguing about one "counterfactual" is that Force Z had come within five miles of an IJN task force consisting of "six cruisers" - I've been unable to discover which six these were, but at least one was Chōkai (鳥海), a Takao-class heavy cruiser.
Neither task force was using radar effectively. The Japanese because IJN radar technology was crippled throughout the Second World War, the British because Prince of Wales' radar had gone down earlier in the mission, supposedly through overheating in the tropical heat and humidity.
(Worth noting that in this the PoW lived up to her reputation as a "hard-luck ship"...)
Let's assume that at least three or four of the other "six cruisers" out that night were also heavies. The Japanese heavy cruisers were beasts, especially heavily armed with the big 24-inch torpedoes, and the IJN trained extensively in night gun and torpedo action as the encounters off Guadalcanal the following year proved.
Let's suppose that the two task forces had, instead, bumped into each other in the night.
The British weight of metal would probably have torn the Japanese cruisers apart, but the IJN night fighting and torpedo tactics might well have either sunk or badly damaged the British capital ships to the point where their sinking by aircraft the following morning could be written off the same way that the battleship aficionados wrote off Bismarck, Taranto, and Pearl Harbor.
The "end of the battleship era" might now be attributed to the naval and naval air actions off the Philippines in 1944.
No real point here other than to consider how things we take for received wisdom often turn on small, nearly insignificant events, like the failure of the British radar the night of December 9/10.
Thoughts?
18 comments:
I think it's less cut-and-dry as simply battleship era over hurr-durr. Sure it shows that aircover was pretty essential but at the same time the Japanese needed a very large number of aircraft to polish off these 'defenceless' ships.
The attack begins with 8 bombers which score 1 hit on the Repulse causing little damage. 17 torpedo bombers arrive next with 8 attacking Repulse and achieve no hits, 9 attacking Prince of Wales and getting a single hit which unluckily hit it near a propeller shaft that drastically dropped its speed (essentially she got Bismarck'ed). The hit also knocked out power and the list all contributed to a drastic reduction to her ability to throw out flak. A following 26 torpedo bombers only managed 3 torp hits regardless of PoW's damaged state. A separate bomber group attacked Repulse which dodged 11 more torps before finally getting caught by 4 torps in an anvil attack which finished her off. PoW was then hit by level bombers which finally resulted in her capsizing. So 49 torps launched with 8 hits (4 on each ship). Hardly fish in a barrel.
Furthermore (and I believe I got this from Drachinefel's excellent naval history channel) that the British at this time didn't carry enough/any tracers in their AA batteries which drastically limited their effectiveness against the bombers. The tracers presence would normally cause 'emotional discomfort' to attacking pilots either causing them to break off or interfering with their aim. Had the ships been properly equipped their AA fire likely would have been more effective in degrading Japanese aim and might have preserved both ships.
Certainly battleships alone were very vulnerable and needed air cover (if nothing else but to break up incoming air attacks) but it still took considerable effort to sink a battleship. Yamato took 11 torps and 6 bombs to sink. And Surigao Straits showed that there were areas that gun warships had their place (e.g. night actions). The battleship era was over and it was the dawn of the carrier age but its not like the big gun ships were useless the moment Taranto occurred.
Biggest problem was RN overconfidence in their ability to fend off air attacks based on their experience against land-based bombers in the Mediterranean. What they did not know was that the IJN aviation based in Indo-China were not an ordinary formation of aircraft but were a force especially trained and equipped as “ship killers”. And the Japanese knew they were coming. The Gensan and Kanoya air groups were lying in wait specifically for arrival of the PoW & Repulse in Singapore. It was a trap. Other than that:
No air cover.
Only four destroyers to accompany two battleships? Plus the Repulse and two of the destroyers were WW1 relics with obsolete AA armament.
The tactics of the torpedo attack "was unlike any that the antiaircraft crews had drilled for or experienced in combat with Italian torpedo planes during Operation Halberd in the Mediterranean."
Deterioration of AA ammo and fire control radars due to extreme heat & humidity in Malayan waters.
The type 91 torpedo used by the Japanese was the best aerial torpedo in the world at that time. Even with a small warhead it caused grievous damage. The first Type 91 torpedo hit caused a 'mobility kill' on the PoW.
After that first torpedo hit on the PoW there were severe power losses that affected operation of the 5.25-inch dual-purpose guns as well as the Pom-Poms and their fire control radars, and comms.
Undetected shock damage on PoW port shaft flanges from an August 1940 near miss bomb attack per the 2008/2012 forensics survey could conceivably have contributed to the 'mobility kill' from that first torpedo.
Poor design of the PoW in using centerline bulkheads, which can cause major listing when flooded. IJN had the same problem. American and French designers did not.
Poor design of the PoW in not having multi-layer torpedo protection.
Poor design of the PoW ventilation system.
You both add some well-made points, guys - thanks.
My sense is that none of the naval combatants had any real sense of what sort of defensive AAA their capital ships needed when the war broke out. Most of the secondary and tertiary batteries aboard WW1-era vessels were designed to target light surface enemies, i.e. torpedo boats. Neither the guns themselves nor the fire direction gear (where there even was any) weren't really up to hitting fast-moving aircraft.
And the tactical organization of the various navies hadn't been modernized to reflect the danger of aerial attack. Mike makes a good point; Force Z was like a sledgehammer with a 2-inch long handle. Four escorts? Compare that to the multi-layered AAA defensive screen of a 1944 or 1945 USN carrier air group, with picket destroyers on the outer ring, light and heavy cruisers inside that with possibly a battleship or two on the inside (and compare the AAA armament of the 1944 Iowa-class with the Pennsylvania-class of 1941...) The organization of TF58.3 during the Philippine Sea included a heavy cruiser, 4 light cruisers, and 13 destroyers to act as AA and anti-submarine escorts.
That said, as Leon points out, the other thing is that air attack in the Forties was prodigiously wasteful. You had to, in the immortal words of Steve Bannon, "flood the zone with shit" (or in this case, aircraft...) because a hell of a lot of bombs and torpedoes would miss, even a large target like a battleship if the target and its escorts were maneuvering actively and putting up as much flak as possible.
So kind of buried in the post was my thought the Leon leads with; the "CW" - that the sinking of the Force Z heavies wasn't the "world turned upside down" that we're usually told is the "moral of the story". Yes, all the naval actions of WW2 drove home the point that the Battleship Era - in terms of the battleship as the Ultima Ratio Regis was over - didn't just end in a day. The big gun ships were simply demoted from their position at the pinnacle of naval combat to part of a team that had to include some sort of air force, whether carrier-borne (the most convenient) to land-based, and that having some sort of layered, effective AAA capability - that included your own aircraft, radars, and AAA artillery (and it's worth noting that one of the single biggest upgrade the USN AAA cannons got in WW2 was the proximity fuse - compare the AAA effects on the attacking Japanese aircraft at Midway with those of the engagements around the Philippines and Iwo Jima and Okinawa)
Tho I can't miss the opportunity to re-use the supposed credo of the torpedo bomber wing-wipers (because I just like it):
"If you want to fill a ship with smoke, hit it with a bomb.
If you want to fill it with water?
Hit it with a torpedo."
Wonder if any Jack Tars on those two doomed ships were lucky enough to go AWOL before they sailed?
She's my Singapore silk torpedo
Wearing satin slit high to her yodo
So I jumped ship to the shore
For a life without war
And my sweet Singapore silk torpedo
Dunno about Repulse, but Prince of Wales is supposed to have built up the reputation as a "hard luck" or "jinx" ship in the short time she existed, and sailors - given the extent to which their lives are at the mercy of the sea - tend to be pretty superstitious. If I'd have been one of her crew I'd certainly have been trying to get transferred to the oldest, nastiest fleet oiler if it meant getting off that ship...
I think your article makes a very real and very good point! To begin with, I was not aware of the details of the two forces missing each other the previous night, and combined with the hypothetical scenario where they had actually met, indeed the "battleship aficionados" would be able to keep believing in battleship supremacy until 1944. Perhaps they could even support their thesis past 1944, dismissing those events as cases where the battleships were not employed correctly / used to their full potential due the IJN being on the decline by then.
So I think a point that comes out is that really theses should be tested in the field and not arbitrarily supported based on sentimentality, group think, established process (which may have become obsolete), or attachment to existing organisations. On the latter I mean that unfortunately it is only human that the battleship captains who dominated the navy would support their battleships, even though they should at least not be dismissive of other possibilities (and should not have been ever since Mitchel's tests in the '20s). They should be playing for "team USN (or better yet, team USA; same for RN etc.)", not "team battleship"; forgetting this may lead to unpleasant surprises (and many dead sailors - apparently that is indeed the mindset of Admiral Philipps that contributed to the specific disaster).
As for the above comments regarding of whether this was truly the end of the battleship, it is an interesting discussion. You could say the events of December 10 support this thesis, but you could counter-argue that even if partially true, the pendulum swung back towards the ships with improved AA armament and tactics, but then you could counter-counter-argue that is swung back again towards air power with the introduction of guided missiles, with battleships being sunk by them by 1943. Definitely I would say the pendulum took a big swing towards air power that day and (aside from the (very interesting) details of how is swung the next few years) it is not surprising that investment in and construction of battleships ended soon after the war.
I'm not a battleship fan, for the 21st Century anyway. But let's face it, they did stalwart service in the 20th. The US lost no battleships after Pearl Harbor. And Nimitz successfully salvaged six (or seven?) of the nine that were sunk or damaged there. Yet we lost five fleet carriers (CV), one light carrier (CVL) and six escort carriers (CVE) during the war. Admirals Halsey and Spruance who commanded Carrier Task Forces in the Pacific had been battleship sailors prior to WW2. They both successfully used battleships that had been beefed up with AAA as escorts for their carriers. Admiral Turner who commanded the Amphibious Force Pacific had also cut his teeth on battleships. He used their 16 inch guns as floating artillery. Unfortunately he was a little skittish of IJN submarines so gave them only a short time to take on dug-in shore fortifications. In the Atlantic battleships were used to escort lend-lease convoys and troop transports, plus naval gunfire support for Torch, Overlord and Dragoon.
There were two interesting battleship on battleship actions in the Pacific. In the 2nd Battle of Guadalcanal USS Washington sank the Kirishima. The Washington's sister ship the USS South Dakota was significantly damaged when she took 27 hits including a 14 incher. But she survived and a few months later was on North Atlantic patrol. At the Battle of Surigao Strait BBs West Virginia, Tennessee and California, all scarred retreaded veterans of Pearl Harbor crippled the Yamashiro, and she was then given the coup de grace and sunk by torpedo.
I'm not a fan of General Mitchell. He was a disciple of Douhet, and a wannabee prophet of strategic bombing. He made as many enemies in the Army as he did in the Navy. It was the Army that court-martialed him for insubordination before a 13 judge panel of Army generals. He proselytized and barnstormed in favor of more investment for the air arm at the expense of the other combat arms of the Army. He suggested that once the enemy had surrendered because of strategic bombing that ground troops could finally be used but solely as occupation troops. And in the Navy he angered as many or more naval aviators as he did the battleship mafia. He even got in a tiff with the father of naval aviation Admiral Moffett. Unfortunately his legacy lived on in Curtis LeMay's firebombing of Tokyo and Truman's use of nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I wrote up that 1942 engagement back in 2012 - https://firedirectioncenter.blogspot.com/2012/11/decisive-battles-second-naval-battle-of.html - and the weirdest part of that story is the catastrophic electrical failures that crippled USS South Dakota just as the serious shooting began. Supposedly it was because of human error - one of the ship's engineering crew had locked a circuit breaker open, and a cascading short knocked out damn near every electrical system - including radar and gun direction - in a matter of moments.
That engagement was a perfect example of the two navies strengths and weaknesses;
1) The IJN searchlight-and-main-gun techniques worked a treat, but
2) Their radar was useless and the Washington's was excellent, which allowed the USN battleship to smash the old battlecruiser.
3) And the Japanese admiral - Nobutake Kondō - exhibited that same weird defeatist attitude that the IJN showed time and again, in particular after the First Battle of Savo Island, where the IJN task force pretty much destroyed the Allied covering force but turned back instead of pressing ahead to sink the Marine landing ships.
It also shows the effects of random chance. At some time between 2330 and midnight the two USN battleships were sailing in line ahead through an area where the USN and IJN light vessels had exchanged fire and left several USN destroyers smashed and burning. USS Washington put her helm over to port and passed behind the burning ships. The command team aboard USS South Dakota wasn't as alert, missed the opportunity to make the same turn and had to put her helm to starboard, passing in front of the burning DDs. This silhouetted her perfectly and immediately the Kirishima and her escorting heavy cruisers HIJMS Atago and Takao shot the living hell out of her.
Mitchell was another of those airpower maniacs that crop up in the Twenties and Thirties, inspired by Douhet. I'm not surprised that he managed to create s legion of enemies - the man had a gift. But his enthusiasm for victory through air power was a fairly common mania at the time; it wasn't enough to demonstrate the usefulness of aerial support for ground or sea actions. It had to be airpower and airpower alone. You can see how that'd put backs in the Army and Navy...
The two Brit battleships and four destroyers of Force Z mirrored the two and four of Task Force 64 at 2nd Guadalcanal but with completely different results.
Another good write-up of that Guadalcanal engagement is here: https://www.rebellionresearch.com/guadalcanal-1942-the-battle-of-saturday-the-14th
Some takeaways that I had never known or had not considered previously:
1] Halsey took a major risk by detaching the two battleship and four destroyers from the Enterprise, which was the last operational U.S. fleet carrier in the Pacific. He violated every lesson learned from U.S. Naval War College war games as he himself later said.
2] Task Force 64 commander on the Washington, Admiral ‘Ching’ Lee, was a master of naval gunnery. And reportedly he knew more about radar than the radar operators.
3] Due to fuel shortages Kondo held back his other two battleships, Kongo and Huruna. Otherwise, the Washington could have been facing three IJN battleships instead of just one.
4] IJN search planes early on bungled the ID of the Washington and South Dakota, reporting them as cruisers. And later lookouts on destroyers in the Kondo’s Sweep Group also reported them as cruisers. Even at midnight when advised of US battleships Kondo refused to believe it. Perhaps he thought they were all destroyed at Pearl?
5] Amazing that every one of the two dozen or so Long Lance torpedoes fired at Washington and South Dakota missed. Not so just two weeks later at Tassafronga when Admiral Tanaka’s destroyers sank the heavy cruiser Northampton and severely damaged three others.
Mike Allen: Good points all. One thing I'd like to point up (and did in the battle piece) was how Kondo, like many of the other high-ranking IJN officers, seemed thoroughly convinced that his outfit was going to lose. His tactical actions were timid, and his reaction to the discovery of the US battleships was to think first of getting away from them. Even after Kirishima was crippled, he had both the Takao-class heavy cruisers. Had he sent them hunting Washington? Enough of those big torpedoes and someone had to get a hit...
The IJN seemed to have a weird combination of overconfidence and a total LACK of confidence, and each emerged at weird times...
Kondo was at Midway. So he knew how deadly USN air was in daylight. He had no air support himself as IJN/IJA airfields were too far north of Guadalcanal. He may or may not have known where the Enterprise was, but he knew about the shore based air nearby at Henderson Field, plus longer range air from Queensland and maybe Espiritu Santu. Like most sailors he really didn't give a rat's a$$ about shelling shore installations. And he wanted to get out of Dodge before sunrise or lose his four cruisers and however many destroyers he had left.
But the whole point of the operation was destroying the US foothold on Guadalcanal. IF they held onto it (and, worse, expanded it) then it didn't matter how many ships Kondo saved that night - the air power projected from the US lodgement would mean that there would be no way for those ships to ever sail unharmed within flying distance of the island.
In other words, it would have been worth risking the task force if it could put the airfield out of business. It was a big risk...but Kondo, like so many other IJN senior officers, seemed unwilling to take those risks when the war hung on them. By 1944 they were willing to ride and die for the Emperor, an ultimately worthless sacrifice. But their unwillingness to get stuck in in '42 is what brought them to '44 (well, that, and piss-poor comsec and failing to keep their technical edge...)
Abe was cashiered. Yet Kondo was promoted, he must have had strong mojo or maybe a brother in the Navy Ministry.
In any case it is hard to put an airfield permanently out of business with the ordnance available at that time. And the Cactus Air Force at Henderson Field had a secret weapon: the Seabees of the 6th Naval Construction Battalion. On the night of 13/14 October battlewagons Kongo and Haruna with eight 14" guns each bombarded Henderson. They put almost 1000 rounds of 14" fragmentation shells on and around the airstrip and "heavily damaged both runways, burned almost all of the available aviation fuel, destroyed 48 of the CAF's 90 aircraft, and killed 46 men, including nine pilots." In spite of that the damage to the airstrip was quickly repaired and it was operational in a few hours. Replacement aircraft were flown in from Espiritu Santo. Damaged aircraft were cannibalized to repair others. Avgas was ferried in by transport aircraft in 55 gallon drums.
They also had to put up with nighttime shelling by cruisers and destroyers during part of September and much of October. Ditto for air raids, sometimes twice daily by 30+ plane formations of twin engine G4M Betty bombers (same aircraft used by the Kanoya Airgroup on 10 December 1941 that helped sink HMS PoW). And ditto for IJA 5.9 inch howitzers shelling the field from hidden locations in the hills. IJA snipers were a problem also.
The Seabees had to build three additional strips nearby in addition to Henderson for when that field was under repair, which seemed to be constantly. During much of this time their meager rations were augmented by captured weevil-ridden Japanese rice like everyone else on the island. There is a good read on the Seabees at Henderson at the link below in chapter four.
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/dam/museums/Seabee/UnitListPages/NCB/006%20NCB.pdf
(Comment in two parts due to length)
Re: the downfall of battleships, what often gets ignored is that while the battleship could still operate as part of a carrier-based task force and be outfitted with far more air defence capabilities, this would fail to justify having a battleship in the force, simply due to the fact it wasn’t filling any role that wasn’t already filled. It comes down to two things-range and strategic expenditure.
On the range part, what really killed the battleship as the arbiter of sea power wasn't that it could be sunk from the air, but that it could be attacked from the air without being able to attack the platform the aircraft took off from. The most powerful battleship main guns in WWII had maximum ranges of only around 40,000-45,000 yards; and their actual effective range was significantly less, around 20,000-25,000 yards, beyond which fire control computers were not accurate enough for effective gunnery (due to the fact hits would be so infrequent that the battleship would run out of main battery shells before the target was sunk). Even late-war American fire control computers, with targeting data input from advanced (for the time) radars and the ability to remotely control the turrets without human intermediaries, failed to have a sufficiently high hit rate in live-fire tests at ranges of 30,000 yards or more (see http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_16-50_mk7.php#Accuracy_During_World_War_II). Aircraft, however, could fly hundreds of miles to strike a target, far beyond the reach of a battleship, and as they were guided by human pilots much closer to their targets before dropping their payload, their accuracy was much greater as well: in other words, aircraft carriers and land-based airfields had both a theoretical and effective range literally an order of magnitude greater than those of battleships.
And in the case of aircraft carriers-at least those in the form of fleet carriers-things were even more skewed against battleships, since a fleet carrier was a mobile strike platform and a swift-moving one at that. Provided that the commanding officer understood the concept of a carrier (see the loss of Glorious for what happens if the commanding officer literally does not know that the point of a carrier is to operate aircraft at very long range), a fleet carrier was able to find a surface-based enemy force much more quickly than the enemy force could find it, and then maintain its distance of several hundred miles from said enemy surface fleet even as it launched and recovered aircraft, effectively rendering it immune to surface attack for the simple fact surface-based attackers couldn’t get to it. The speed of virtually all fleet carriers in WWII was such that even an Iowa would take a very long time to close the carrier’s lead of a few hundred miles, and some were fast enough that they would actually outpace a pursuing Iowa if placed in that situation. Even at times where the carrier was unable to launch aircraft (night, fog, etc), its massive head start still made it unrealistic at best for enemy surface vessels to locate it let alone close the distance. Thus, adding more anti-aircraft capabilities to a battleship did not make it a relevant capital ship if aircraft carriers were present on either side, simply due to the battle range becoming extended to the point the battleship was incapable of engaging the enemy during the battle. It would be relegated to the role of providing AA fire cover for any friendly fleet carriers or fire support.
(Part 2 of my comment)
Which is where the strategic costs come into play. Battleships are a significant enough investment that they are only strategically justified if they can be used as the primary naval units of a fleet, and indeed, all battleships ever built were designed around some variation or other of the idea of the gun-based capital ship that either sank enemy capital ships or deterred them, so that smaller naval units could carry out various other operations. Even the Iowas were designed around the goal of providing a fast element to the American battleship force, to run down enemy capital ships that were too fast for the remainder of the battlefleet, or to engage any enemy battleships or battlecruisers that attacked American fleet carriers (a role that, for aforementioned reasons, was never viable to begin with). What battleships actually ended up doing in WWII was the same thing those smaller naval units ended up doing, supporting roles such as fire support, anti-aircraft fire and (for the Germans) commerce raiding. And they were far too big of an expenditure to justify building for such roles, especially since they were already covered by other naval units. The US, for example, would have been far better off building more destroyers and light cruisers (or even building another four Essexes, to provide more fighter cover) than completing the four Iowas to use in an air defence role for a fast carrier strike force. Likewise, for most shore bombardment applications cruisers and even destroyers already packed enough firepower to deal with even fortified positions, as cases like Omaha Beach and Operation Husky indicate; on the rare occasions a battleship was actually necessary to finish off enemy positions, most navies already had more than enough old, already-existing battleships in the late 1930s to do the job, further rendering new battleship construction unnecessary. As for battleships as commerce raiders, the Kriegsmarine surface fleet’s failures on that front are self-explanatory.
So I would argue that the moment battleships became obsolete was sometime during the tail end of the 1930s, roughly around the start of WWII, when aircraft (including some naval aircraft) first became effective at long-range strikes using airborne ordnance capable of causing significant damage to battleships. From that point on, none of the advantages battleships had over airpower or the defensive capabilities of battleships could have swung the overall situation back in favour of battleships, for at the end of the day the battleship was unable to hurt a target that was several hundred miles away, while airpower could hurt a battleship from several hundred miles away. Once that happened, the sheer strategic costs of battleships and the existence of less costly alternatives rendered them unjustifiable even with their ability to play supporting roles in a carrier-dominated environment.
(Un)Fortunately, newly built battleships were under construction or just entering service at this very point they became conceptually obsolete, collectively leading to what is arguably the biggest military procurement disaster in history-a total of 29 battleships (10 American, 6 British, 4 German, 4 French, 3 Italian and 2 Japanese) entering service right as or after there was no need for them and they were a strategic net negative for all of the navies that had built them.
Not sure if the naval aviation of the 1930s was quite ready. Most navies still operated biplanes off their carrier decks; the TBD ("Devastator" of Midway tragedy) was the sleekest aircraft of the time and it was obsolete six years later; the Martin BM and Curtis SBC - both biplanes - were the service bombers of the USN, the IJN was still using the old "Jean" Yokosuka B4Y biplane torpedo bomber, and of course the RN was still flying the Fairey Swordfish, the "stringbag"...
But there's no question that the trend was running strong against the battleship even then. Obviously by 1940-41 their day was done, and it was because you're right; aircraft could deliver more ordnance further, faster than the battleship could.
Still...it's important not to elide the power of imagination and tradition. The heavy gun ship had been the Queen of Battle for at least ten or more generations, beginning with the three-decked man-o-war. It was damn difficult for the old naval heads to just walk away from the battleship, so the lessons of Force Z had to be relearned several times...
I do agree that naval aircraft of the late 1930s were less capable than those just a few years later, but even then, some like the Swordfish and the B5N “Kate” carrier-based torpedo bomber (the Kate first saw active service in 1938) were at least capable enough to actually pose threats to capital ships. More importantly, the very fact naval aircraft existed meant that carriers were at least able to launch air attacks without fear of being shelled, even if the amount of damage they could inflict was much more limited compared to what they could achieve a few years later. Even a relatively incapable naval strike aircraft is going to be much more relevant in a battleship vs. carrier situation than the big guns that are unable to even open fire for want of range.
And yes, nobody recognized the writing on the wall until it was too late (to the extent the British decided to complete and commission a battleship right after the end of the war), but IMO, there needs to be a distinction between the point where a weapons system or a doctrine becomes obsolete, and the point where militaries recognize it. As you said, traditionalism, and what I’d argue to be a systematic denial of reality in multiple different navies on both sides, meant that people kept coming up with excuses and justifications even as case studies built up. “The ship was in harbour” for Taranto and Pearl, “the ship was only damaged at sea and surface action had to finish the job” for Cape Matapan and the Bismarck chase (never mind that this was in large part a self-fulfilling prophecy, due to the RN thinking carriers couldn’t actually sink capital ships so not even giving them the chance for it), “the ships were sunk by land-based rather than carrier aircraft and it still took a large number of aircraft” for Force Z (doesn’t really change the fundamental advantages aviation has over battleships”, “the Japanese had no good light AA weapons and it still took a very large number of aircraft, our battleships with better AA should be fine” for Ten-Go (still doesn’t change the fact that good AA isn’t going to enable a battleship to effectively fight back against a carrier, and IIRC there have been some exercises done with Iowa indicating that even the AA capabilities of an Iowa weren’t sufficient against an enemy with a reasonably large number of trained pilots they could throw at the battleship unless the battleship had friendly air cover, at which point said air cover’s going to make the battleship irrelevant).
The bottom line is that battleships became obsolete well before people realized they were done. Which is why no less than 29 of them entered service after they had already become obsolete-because apparently not enough people on either side of WWII could see the strategic disasters those 29 ships really were.
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