Were battleships a mistake?

>Slow
>Heavy
>Expensive
>Can't turn
>Easily taken out by torpedo boats or aircraft
>Guns are so big, they take forever to reload

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Pretty much. They were primarily designed for a sort of war that tended not to actually happen very often, nor be decisive when it did. Contrary to Mahan's assertions, control of the sea is more often decided by ability to project force widely, not deeply. Battleships were so rarely worth the amount of resources necessary to contstruct them, that it would be impossible to justify their actual employment, and you see a lot of their use was sitting around in port attempting to intimidate an adversary rather than fight real war.

Consider this scenario. Assume this takes place in the early 1900's. You're an aspiring naval power. You have a rival power who you expect to be at war with a some point in the future. You decide NOT to build any battleships, whereas your rival does decide to build them. What now? You're pretty much fucked because the rival power can just roll up his battleships and shell your coastal cities with impunity. Either that, or he'll just blockade you and then you can't do anything at all.

This, it was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. I would say for the most part lighter cruisers and destroyers were the way to go, but you had better have a few battleships on hand.

>What now? You're pretty much fucked because the rival power can just roll up his battleships and shell your coastal cities with impunity.
No, because coastal emplacements were extremely tough to beat, and would remain so until airpower (possibly carrier air power) rendered them obsolete. You can count the number of times that a fleet sailed into or at an enemy port to attack either facilities or the fleets inside on one hand; it was an insanely risky operation. Think of the naval aspect of the Gallipoli campaign, and that was just trying to get up the Dardanelles, nevermind the heavier defenses around Constantinople that was the alleged objective to start shelling.

>Either that, or he'll just blockade you and then you can't do anything at all.
Unless you have a tiny coast a la Germany, it's ridiculously hard to mount an effective blockade. The biggest navy in the world, the RN, had 62 battleships and 10 battlecruisers at the start of WW1. Even ignoring things like operational range and costs of keeping the fleet at sea, imagine trying to blockade the U.S. east coast against no resistance whatsoever. The Atlantic Coast is some 2,069 miles long, and the gulf coastline adds another 1,631 miles. Assuming you want to cover it all evenly, you have 1 capital ship per 51.38 miles of coast. You won't even SEE most of the shit going through, let alone stop it. True, most nations don't have a coast length the size of the U.S., but most navies don't have the resources of the RN either.

Assuming a hypothetical naval war of two roughly even powers, well, the odds of it being decisive at all in the early 20th century aren't good at all. And it certainly won't be won by a grand, Mahanian naval clash. The closest you get to that is Tsushima, and even that was badly overshadowed in scale by land battles like Mukden.

>build submarines instead of battleships
>it's the early 1900s, so sonar and air support haven't emerged as hard counters against subs
>troll your adversary's fleet to death from beneath the waves

Probably go for building one or two, but not going overboard with it and knowing when to stop.

Best example is the Southamerican Dreadnough race.
Chile and Argentina were the primary naval powers, both on a path to a confrontation that would naturally have been fought out mostly at sea, but both were not willing to go for dreadnoughts.
Then Brazil bought one and suddenly became a major naval power just like that. Argentine had to follow as self-proclaimed leading south-american power (while explicitely stating that it was not intended to be ever used against Chile), at which point Chile alone couldnt allow herslef to be left behind and went for dreadnoughts as well, at which argentine now had to buy multiple dreadnoughts, at which Brazil and Chile were forced to follow.....
and at the end all three had thrown all their wealth into a completely pointless arms race and went bankrupt.

They look pretty fucking cool though.

Early submarines were utter shit. Extremely slow, with painfully limited range, and only able to stay underwater for a short period of time. It wasn't until the advent of nuclear power that submarines started being really useful.

>WW2 had nuclear submarines
Or are you going to try to claim they weren't useful then? I mean, in addition to actually being effective convoy attackers, they actually killed more fleet carriers, the REAL capital ship of WW2, than battleships did.

Let's make this more specific. Consider the rival nations of Great Britain and Germany during the period of 1903 - 1913. Now imagine that Britain makes a conscious decision to not construct a single battleship of any type during this period. Now imagine that while this is happening, Germany follows the exact same shipbuilding path they did in actuality. So what happens when 1914 finally rolls around? Well, Britain is utterly fucked, because without their fleet of battleships, they have no way to contain the German fleet as they did in real life. In this scenario, the German High Seas Fleet is able to break out of the North Sea and shell British harbors with impunity. With Britain removed from the game, German is able to easily defeat Russia and France in the land war.

>tfw Battlecruisers were way cooler
>tfw they were kinda shit though

>Well, Britain is utterly fucked, because without their fleet of battleships, they have no way to contain the German fleet as they did in real life.
Well, you know, other than stopping them from re-coaling, which they could easily do since they and their allies controlled just about every single port in the Atlantic or could extend said control easily enough.

>In this scenario, the German High Seas Fleet is able to break out of the North Sea and shell British harbors with impunity.
And then get sunk by British coastal artillery, which costs about 1/100th of a battleship. Remember that time that the British sent 29 battleships and 3 battlecruisers against obsolete Turkish coastal forts and mines and got 4 of them sunk and 3 more heavily damaged while not stopping the Turks at all?

>With Britain removed from the game, German is able to easily defeat Russia and France in the land war.

>Implying that shelling a few harbors knocks anyone out of a total war
>Implying they wouldn't suffer awful attrition attempting to do so
>Implying that the blockade couldn't be maintained with cruisers
>Implying that the German ships have enough range or other accoutrements, like galleys with seats, to actual ability to project force outside the North Sea
>Implying that Germany could in fact beat both Britain and France
>Implying that the U.S. wouldn't be lending money and armaments like nobody's business to France like they did historically
>Implying that the resources spent on 70ish battleships couldn't be redirected towards other uses, like building and maintaining a large, professional land force that would dramatically change the balance of power on the European continent
>Implying that WW1 wouldn't be settled on land just like it was historically.
>Implying that you're actually trying to justify an entire class of ships based on a single interaction between two powers that proved not to be decisive in their conflict.

Seriously, just get over it. Mahan promoted a deeply flawed conception of naval strategy, both economically (The rise of Germany and Russia as powers was considered by him to be impossible), and operationally (You can't actually force an issue with battleship fleets. They have deep power projection, but not wide power projection. In absence of a reliable ability to attack your opponent in harbor, they spend a lot more time staring at each other than anything else. They were shit. They had only moderate tactical use and were nowhere near as efficacious as the cost used to construct them would necessitate.

People assumed that they'd basically just be metal manowars and that only a another metal manowar could destroy it

Weren't they good at beating other conventional cannon armed ships like cruisers?

if they weren't useful, what kind of fleet would be more useful in the 1900s?

There is no one size fits all answer here. Different powers have different interests in naval power, depending on factors such as how extensive their overseas colonial empires are (if any), how far they need to be able to project naval power, how widely they need to be able to project naval power, what kind of ability they have to re-fuel and do repair work as they travel, what their relations are with other rival powers, how willing they are to engage in combat, what they consider "acceptable losses" for a likely spread of conflicts in the near to medium future, and how much they're willing to invest overall in building a fleet.

But in very, broad reductionist terms, you want to work backwards. Ideally, if you have "control of the seas" what does that look like? It means that cargo vessels go where and when you want them, not your rivals, and as needed block off ports from a distance. That in turn means you need to be able to project your fleet very widely, i.e., lots of ships, which implies something cheaper than a battleship, a LOT of corvettes to cruisers spammed everywhere.

battlecruisers

>>Easily taken out by torpedo boats or aircraft

The idea of the battleships came to being before aircraft and air warfare was even conceived of.

Many of WWI and Some WWII ships were planned and built before aircraft was proven as a effective weapon against them.

Battlecruiser as a concept didn't evolve until after Dreadnoughts were built.

You couldn't have battlecruisers without the battleships being built first in effect.

Yeah, if you were facing a battleship on anything but another battleship, you were fucked.

I build 50 torpedo boats for each battleship and unleash the zerg rush

Ehh, as the guy who has been trashing BB, that won't work unless they're too dumb to build escorting vessels. I mean hell, they were originally called "Torpedo boat destroyers" for a reason.

and all of your boats will be sunk by the destroyers screening the battleships, moreover your sailsmen wil be demoralized that they are fighting an "invincible" enemy

WW1 subs were quite effective in stop / deter shipping.

The trouble is that your corvettes wouldn't do shit if I sent a battleship to harass your cargo vessels. A battleship was a vital component of a naval task force simply because nothing else could stop it.

And the same could be said of a smaller, cheaper cruiser with a better range and whose lower cost means I can send 2-3 cruisers out per battleship. You'll notice that the RN never had enough battleships to provide all their convoys with BB cover, and didn't bother, even in an era when they did face enemies armed in kind. They're too much power concentrated in a single point to dominate the seas, since you never have enough resources to build enough of the things to cover everywhere you need to. There's a reason that the RN was much more afraid of a 'freak' fleet of lighter ships than they were of a battleship dominated German navy in either WW1 or 2.

But a single battleship/battlecruiser can overrun an entire convoy easily.

Scatter, sure. But sinking a convoy is hard, which is why even in successful operations like Berlin, with ships that are enormously faster than any WW1 battleship could ever get, couldn't have the S&G eliminate entire convoys. Hell, they "sank" almost as much by forcing convoys to scatter and letting u-boats do the actual sinking.

Actually using battleships to commerce raid is like trying to swat flies with a sledgehammer.

>nothing else could stop it
literal meme

>a single battleship/battlecruiser can overrun an entire convoy easily

double meme

battleship escorts existed for a reason, namely the fact that a lone battleship is an incredibly easy and inviting target

> I would say for the most part lighter cruisers and destroyers were the way to go,

The issue with that line of though is that early lighter cruisers and destroyers just were not that good. All the major navies knew those things had great potential but they needed a lot of design refinement and a much higher tonnage to be effective then any one excepted.

Lets take the River-class as a example...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River-class_destroyer

It was a major step foreword in destroyer design.One important trait to note is that it was the first truly oceangoing destroyer in Royal Navy service.It had a displacement of 580 t. Ten years down the line and the Royal Navy order the Admiralty M class.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_M-class_destroyer

The prewar members of the class were 1010 t in displacement. Put another way the Admiralty M class was 1.74 times the weight of the River-class.

The same thing happened in the USN and the Imperial German Navy, and the growth did not really stop after the war.

Battleships did grow over that period but nowhere near as much. The Canopus class ( work started in 1896) was 13,360 t displacement and the Lord Nelson class ( work started in 1905) was 16,348 t with normal load. Thus a growth of 22% in displacement over a 9 nine year period. If pre-dreadnoughts do not count to you then the HMS Dreadnought was 18,410 t under normal load and the Queen Elizabeth class was 27,500 t. That is a 49% growth over 9 years.

Early Torpedo boats had a very real issue with seaworthiness and so did early torpedo launchers.

Because the Royal Navy, in its infinity wisdom and unperturbed awesomeness, knew that escorted merchant convoys were a very bad idea that did serve not useful purpose and should not be even tried, ever.

>whose lower cost means I can send 2-3 cruisers out per battleship.

Let talk numbers.
HMS Dreadnought... £1,785,683
Bellerophon-class... ~ £1,720,00 per ship
HMS Neptune... £1,668,916
Orion-class... ~£1,900,000 per ship
King George V-class... ~£1,900,000 per ship

If we use a inflation calculator the HMS Dreadnought was about £1,851,819 in 1911 pounds (HMS King George V was Launched late 1911) . The cost over time did not really grow that much, keeping to a range of 1.8 to 1.9 million pounds.

For cruisers

Minotaur class... ~£1,390,000 per ship
Warrior-class... ~£1,190,000 per ship
Duke of Edinburgh-class... ~£1,195,000 per ship

Thing is that the Minotaur class is far more capable then the others so lets just focus on its cost. After inflation adjustment its about £1,441,481 per ship. Meaning a King George V battleship costs 1.32 times what the Minotaur cruiser costs. A cost range of around 3 battleships to 4 capable cruisers. A cruiser made to protect merchant shipping would be a good deal cheaper, but easy pickings for capital ships made for battle.

But if your enemy fleet stays in harbour you've won the naval game.

A blockade isn't making an unbroken line of boats over the coast. It's enough to have your boats in the area ready to BTFO anything that tries to come out, and your larger boats at harbor ready for anything bigger.

>Mahan promoted a deeply flawed conception of naval strategy, both economically (The rise of Germany and Russia as powers was considered by him to be impossible), and operationally (You can't actually force an issue with battleship fleets. They have deep power projection, but not wide power projection. In absence of a reliable ability to attack your opponent in harbor, they spend a lot more time staring at each other than anything else.
Stop the dumb memes. Mahan did not promote battleship fleets, and Mahan died before the Dreadnought was even a thing.
What Mahan proposed was that, throughout history, control of the seas was achieved by having a navy designed to defeat other navies rather than chipping away at enemy shipping via commerce raiding. This was true in WW1 and WW2, as Britain and not Germany had almost total control of the seas in both wars.

In both world wars, Germany made the mistake of trying to build a fleet of battleships only to turn to u-boats later in the war. If Tirpitz had taken all the metal and resources that he used to build German battleships, and devoted it towards increasing u-boat production, the map of Europe might look very different today.

But great for naval bombardment

Those U-boat pens were really costly. And the allies had developed effective counter measures for uboats

>Slow

Yes, but depending on usage and the theater of war, these may be lesser flaws

>Heavy

It stays up on the water. What is the problem?

>Expensive

Yes, but cost effective fighting smaller ships.

>Can't turn

Actually, battleships were quite manoeuvreable. See picture related.

>Easily taken out by torpedo boats

They need to get close to the battleship to torpedo it, risking damage from its medium caliber guns and escorts.

>or aircraft

Need carriers and specialized planes to operate in naval combat. Wasn't a thing until WW2.

>Guns are so big, they take forever to reload

30-45 seconds. Less than many land artillery types.

>It stays up on the water. What is the problem?
It sinks when hit.

By multiple torpedoes maybe, but that would take down any other ship too.