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Post by babylon218 on Feb 22, 2021 5:52:30 GMT -6
RE: the Alaska/BC debate, I feel it's worth noting that at no stage did the Imperial German Navy refer to their battlecruisers as such, but as Large Cruisers (Grosser Kreuzers), which reflected the fact that doctrinally these ships were follow-ons from Germany's armoured cruisers - oriented to battlefleet scouting duties first and foremost. Nevertheless, we still refer to them as battlecruisers in the English-speaking world. Just because a ship isn't called a Battlecruiser doesn't necessarily mean it isn't one (and vice versa).
Ironically enough, the very reason Drachinifel cites for why he doesn't view the Alaskas as battlecruisers is the very reason I do see them as such. Ultimately, if we view the Invincible-Class as battlecruisers, then by the same yardstick so are the Alaskas, in my opinion. They were heavily-armed cruisers intended to hunt enemy and completely outmatch other cruisers - they were both intended as 'cruiser-killers'. One could see the Alaskas, Scharnhorsts (despite their official and intended role as battleships), etc. as a resurgence of the battlecruiser starting from the same place as Invincible: a heavily-armed cruiser to sink any other cruisers.
(Un)fortunately, we don't really know how the Scharnhorst twins would have been used if the Kriegsmarine had developed a real battlefleet. It seems probable that either they or the Deutschlands would have been used as advanced surface scouts for the Bismarck and H-Class battleships, but ultimately we never found out because Germany threw all their battleships into the metalgrinder piecemeal, allowing the British to destroy them in detail.
Much is made of the loss of Hood to Bismarck, but let's consider that for the loss of four German battleships over the course of the war (Bismarck, Scharnhorst, Tirpitz, and Gneisenau), Britain lost the HMS Hood. That's, honestly, a pretty good trade. Had all four German battleships sortied out in unison, British losses to direct surface action could have been a lot steeper. Fortunately, that never happened. /tangent
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Post by wlbjork on Feb 22, 2021 12:03:54 GMT -6
Much is made of the loss of Hood to Bismarck, but let's consider that for the loss of four German battleships over the course of the war (Bismarck, Scharnhorst, Tirpitz, and Gneisenau), Britain lost the HMS Hood. That's, honestly, a pretty good trade. Had all four German battleships sortied out in unison, British losses to direct surface action could have been a lot steeper. Fortunately, that never happened. /tangent In point of fact, the British Empire lost HMS Hood, HMS Repulse, HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Barham and HMS Royal Oak. However, it can be stated that 80% of those ships were old WW1 designs, with less effective protection and lower speed than would be achieved more modern designs. Edit: After further thought, I'll remove HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales due to those being sunk by the Japanese forces. It still leaves a 4:3 ratio which isn't exactly one-sided.
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Post by aeson on Feb 22, 2021 12:27:16 GMT -6
In point of fact, the British Empire lost HMS Hood, HMS Repulse, HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Barham and HMS Royal Oak. However, it can be stated that 80% of those ships were old WW1 designs, with less effective protection and lower speed than would be achieved more modern designs. Edit: After further thought, I'll remove HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales due to those being sunk by the Japanese forces. It still leaves a 4:3 ratio which isn't exactly one-sided. Barham and Royal Oak were both sunk by submarines (and Royal Oak was at anchor when it was sunk) while Prince of Wales and Repulse were both sunk by aircraft; thus, if you restrict the question to capital ships sunk in surface actions against other capital ships then babylon's 1 loss for Britain holds, though you'd also have to subtract Tirpitz and Gneisenau from the German tally to be fair.
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Post by babylon218 on Feb 22, 2021 14:44:57 GMT -6
Much is made of the loss of Hood to Bismarck, but let's consider that for the loss of four German battleships over the course of the war (Bismarck, Scharnhorst, Tirpitz, and Gneisenau), Britain lost the HMS Hood. That's, honestly, a pretty good trade. Had all four German battleships sortied out in unison, British losses to direct surface action could have been a lot steeper. Fortunately, that never happened. /tangent In point of fact, the British Empire lost HMS Hood, HMS Repulse, HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Barham and HMS Royal Oak. However, it can be stated that 80% of those ships were old WW1 designs, with less effective protection and lower speed than would be achieved more modern designs. Edit: After further thought, I'll remove HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales due to those being sunk by the Japanese forces. It still leaves a 4:3 ratio which isn't exactly one-sided. I was referring to those ships lost to German surface action, though I'll grant on those terms I probably also shouldn't count Tirpitz and Gneisenau, since they were sunk by the RAF. On those terms though, I probably also wouldn't count Barham - though she was sunk by a German submarine, she was only in that position because of the war with Italy. That being said, you could just as easily argue the only reason Repulse and PoW were vulnerable to the Japanese was because most of the escorts they should have had were tied down fighting Germany and Italy, so yeah... Complicated. My main point, in any event, was that the German surface fleet had far less of an impact on that of the British than it would have if they'd been concentrated instead of deployed separately at different times, sufficient to allow the British to single them out.
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Post by aeson on Feb 22, 2021 15:47:29 GMT -6
That being said, you could just as easily argue the only reason Repulse and PoW were vulnerable to the Japanese was because most of the escorts they should have had were tied down fighting Germany and Italy, so yeah... Complicated. Going with the counterfactual scenario where Germany held onto its major surface units until it could stage an operation using all of them in a single force complicates that further, as I do not think it is necessarily the case that Prince of Wales and Repulse would have been released for service in the Far East had Bismarck not already been sunk - if Bismarck and Tirpitz are potentially operating together, and especially if Scharnhorst and Gneisenau are also potentially involved, then Britain needs to keep an answer to that ready, but the only British capital ships both fast enough and powerful enough to serve in that role are Hood, King George V, Prince of Wales, and Duke of York, and maybe Renown and Repulse in a pinch or perhaps one of Anson or Howe if they can be rushed into service like Prince of Wales was. Hood probably still needs a refit badly if it's not being rebuilt in mid- to late-1941, Duke of York is just entering service in the third quarter of 1941, and Renown and Repulse really don't compare that well with Bismarck and Tirpitz so if they're involved then it'd preferably be against Scharnhorst and Gneisenau rather than against the heavier German battleships; Anson and Howe don't historically get into service until ~mid-1942 and so even if one gets rushed into service like Prince of Wales did I don't think that any time much before the end of 1941 is particularly plausible.
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Post by babylon218 on Feb 22, 2021 16:20:58 GMT -6
That being said, you could just as easily argue the only reason Repulse and PoW were vulnerable to the Japanese was because most of the escorts they should have had were tied down fighting Germany and Italy, so yeah... Complicated. Going with the counterfactual scenario where Germany held onto its major surface units until it could stage an operation using all of them in a single force complicates that further, as I do not think it is necessarily the case that Prince of Wales and Repulse would have been released for service in the Far East had Bismarck not already been sunk - if Bismarck and Tirpitz are potentially operating together, and especially if Scharnhorst and Gneisenau are also potentially involved, then Britain needs to keep an answer to that ready, but the only British capital ships both fast enough and powerful enough to serve in that role are Hood, King George V, Prince of Wales, and Duke of York, and maybe Renown and Repulse in a pinch or perhaps one of Anson or Howe if they can be rushed into service like Prince of Wales was. Hood probably still needs a refit badly if it's not being rebuilt in mid- to late-1941, Duke of York is just entering service in the third quarter of 1941, and Renown and Repulse really don't compare that well with Bismarck and Tirpitz so if they're involved then it'd preferably be against Scharnhorst and Gneisenau rather than against the heavier German battleships; Anson and Howe don't historically get into service until ~mid-1942 and so even if one gets rushed into service like Prince of Wales did I don't think that any time much before the end of 1941 is particularly plausible. Yep, as I said - any consolidated sortie by the KM's battleships would have been a lot more costly than what the RN actually experienced: in reality, the Germans gave Britain a best-case scenario by not consolidating their forces into even a single fleet-in-being, but separating them into lone units where they could be destroyed individually by overwhelming force.
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Post by rimbecano on Feb 22, 2021 22:14:35 GMT -6
RE: the Alaska/BC debate, I feel it's worth noting that at no stage did the Imperial German Navy refer to their battlecruisers as such, but as Large Cruisers (Grosser Kreuzers), which reflected the fact that doctrinally these ships were follow-ons from Germany's armoured cruisers - oriented to battlefleet scouting duties first and foremost. Nevertheless, we still refer to them as battlecruisers in the English-speaking world. Just because a ship isn't called a Battlecruiser doesn't necessarily mean it isn't one (and vice versa). Interestingly, though, for the Germans not having called them Battlecruisers, they were more fit to stand in a battle line than the British BCs. One could even argue for calling them fast BBs. There's doctrine (where none of the original BCs on either side were conceived of as fast battle line elements), and then there's actual usefulness. The concept of the BC as originally developed by Fisher was a ship in an armored cruiser / large cruiser / cruiser-killer role with the same tonnage and main battery caliber as a contemporary battleship. A lot of designs from the interwar/WWII period fulfill the first criterion, but only fulfill the second (especially by the time WWII actually began) if you squint really hard through treaty-colored glasses. Put quite simply, by 1940, 35,000 tons was no longer capital ship tonnage, and 11/12 inches was no longer capital ship caliber. Really, but for the treaty, that was already the case in 1920 for new construction. It would have been the Scharnhorsts, the Deutschlands were a complete dead-end. Pretty much all the new construction BBs of the WWII era could match or exceed their speed.
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