Were 20th century battleships pointless?

[molly bloom]

No, battleships made good target practice for dive bombers and torpedo bombers.

[Patroklos]

DD = A/D/M 12/8/5

BB = A/D/M 18/12/5

Case closed

[Agathon]

Originally posted by TheStinger
It is now thought that Hood was sunk by the Price Eugen and that a shell went down the funnel. It wasn't a Jutland type destruction.

IIRC Hood had its upper deck armanent improved to BB standards

The Prinz Eugen theory has been discredited IIRC.

William Jurens has an incredibly detailed account of the Hood's destruction. The shells would have had to have an extremely high angle of penetration, but the Prinz Eugen was not at the right distance to effect such an angle, and without that, it's shells could not have penetrated Hood's armour. The funnell hypothesis seems to suffer from the same problem.

Link to Part 3 of Juren's excellent article

[Agathon]

Originally posted by PLATO
I think Obsolete might be a bit to harsh. Certainly their effectiveness for their original mission was degraded drastically, but I feel that not enough credit is given to their effectiveness in their secondary missions. Airpower came a long way in WWII, but IMHO, it was the missle that was the end of the Battleship era and not the airplane.

That is a fair comment, and is what I intended to say. In terms of their original mission, they were pretty hopeless.

Apologies for my vagueness.

[PLATO]

Originally posted by Agathon


That is a fair comment, and is what I intended to say. In terms of their original mission, they were pretty hopeless.

Apologies for my vagueness.

Hey, np!


I agree that they were pretty hopeless in pitched battles to control sealanes once the aircraft carrier and the accompanying aircraft made the scene. It is hard to fight when your range of armament is 25 miles and the enemies is 200.