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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

That's not true. Battleships were effective in several Pacific surface battles against the Japanese Navy, in shore bombardment during amphibious assaults, and as air-defense escorts for carriers.

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The point wasn't that they couldn't attack ones enemy, it was that they had become vulnerable to attack. The reason they could be used for bombardment was that air superiority had been claimed by carrier based aircraft. I don't recall ever reading of battleships being used for air defence. Have you a source? Smaller ships certainly were but big, slow firing guns that can't point upwards seems like a pointless and wasteful accessory on a huge target.

What kind of source are you looking for? It's right there in any history of WW2 in the Pacific. US battleships were stuffed full of smaller caliber cannons that were very effective for air defense, especially after proximity fuses were introduced.

Most ww2 era battleships had a plethora of smaller guns many of which were antiaircraft. The exception was the Japanese battleships which were relatively light on the smaller guns - which they even attempted to mitigate using shotgun like shells.

Sure, but unguided antiaircraft fire tops out pretty low in effectiveness, and aircraft are dangerous to battleships out of all proportion to their size, quantity, and cost - even if you shoot down ninety-eight out of every hundred, the two you miss can still achieve a mission-kill, if they don't sink you outright. And you'll never shoot down anything close to that proportion.

Battleships sided aircraft carriers for two reasons: one was to thicken their inner defense ring a little, and the other was because battleships alone, without a friendly air wing to keep the other side's strike aircraft away, were doomed.

The problem with military white elephants like battleships or F-35's is not that they aren't effective in their dream engagement it's that they eat so much of the budget that the forces wielding them loose the ability to engage in more dispersed real world engagement against an enemy willing to adopt their strategies.

20% better at 3x the cost is usually a bad bargain in a battlefield increasingly dominated by dispersion strategies and that was what eventually killed the Battleships, they were to expensive for convoy duty and too slow and vulnerable to torpedo and air attacks for the line of battle fighting that actually happened doing WWII.

> Battleships were effective in several Pacific surface battles against the Japanese Navy...

Only because neither the US nor the Japanese had carriers in those engagements. The writing was on the wall when the Brits crippled the Italian gunship fleet with a single obsolete aircraft carrier in 1940.

Pedantic correction: battleship, not gunship.

The reason I said "gunship" is there weren't just battleships in that fleet. But there were no aircraft carriers.

The point is that subs and carriers were far, far more effective than battleships.

That's not so clear, at least in the Atlantic theatre. How would you sink the Bismarck with just subs and carriers? As it happens, the lucky torpedo strike from Ark Royal played a pivotal role in its sinking, but submarines couldn't go fast enough to catch it, and an unescorted carrier would have been extremely vulnerable.

It's hard to say for sure, but in a way it seems that the Hood and the Prince of Wales actually stood a much better chance of causing serious damage to the Bismarck than the Ark Royal did, even if that's not how events happened to play out. (And in fact damage from the Prince of Wales's guns did help to slow the Bismarck down and force it to attempt to go to port to refuel.)

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