Why didn't get a lot of cool battleship vs battleship fights in WW2 like in the age of sail?

Not exactly.

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>pocket
>>>battleship
oh nonono ahahaha

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If this thread is still around in 4 hours when I get off watch, I will go into detail just exactly how fucking retarded the Deutschland-class was.

kek, you call that hair pulling a battle?

Its a battlecruiser
A stopgap design 40 years ago
I mean i know the g*rmans had to follow the whetever battleship convention but even the nips found a way to circumvent that

Why are they bad? I hate Germans as much as anybody else but for 10,000 tons they're not a bad design, especially given they were more than a decade old in WW2. They'e certainly better than the atrocious Hipper class, which took 16.000 tons to be able to roughly equal the 10.000 ton Algérie.

It was designed around the limitations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Also, the Germans never called it a "pocket battleship." That was a nicknamed applied by the British press.

Commerce raiding with a battleship is like swatting flies with a sledgehammer.

How effective exactly was the Regina Marina? Like if Italy had had a few more years to prepare for war like they wanted could they ever have challenged the Royal Navy in the Med or beyond?

The Deutschland-class was well above 10,000-tons. It was closer to 15,000-tons. Of course, the German government listed the ship's official tonnage as 10,000-tons on public documents. They were tricky like that. Japan and Italy did the same kind of thing, although neither was as blatant about it as Germany.

The answer is that they lacked 2 critical things for a WW2 navy: 1. Aircraft carriers 2. Oil. That second one is especially important here. They fought reasonably well, but eventually they just ran out of oil and had no way to get more. The lack of aircraft carriers also put them at a big disadvantage against the British.

Not him, but not very; for a number of reasons.

First off, no matter how well the Regia Maria ever does, it can't leave the Mediterranean unless the Axis somehow either secure Suez to get out of the canal on that end, or secure Gibraltar so they cna go out the west end (Unless they enjoy running the minefield, but historically they never attempted something that suicidally dangerous except with a few Italian submarines)

Secondly, like most portions of the Italian military, and government at large, standards of training and morale were bad, existing from the top down. You had a generally unstable government with a poor grasp of strategy and made appointments with an eye towards keeping the leader on the throne rather than actual merit or drive.

Thirdly, you have the fuel situation.Once the Soviets stopped shipping oil, the sum total of the Axis oil supply available to them was what they could drill in Ploesti, a few tiny wells in the Austrian Alps and in southern Germany, what the Iraqis sent to Vichy before the British overran the country, and the ersatz stuff the Germans were making in synth plants. It wasn't nearly enough to keep going as it was, and the Italian warfleet was just about at the bottom of the fuel priority list, which meant that in practice, they could only sail for very limited amounts of time, and didn't have the capacity to patrol fully.

There were also a few minor technical details; Italian torpedo defense was crap, etc. But overall, they were much less effective than their force of relatively modern battleships would indicate.

Carriers were not tremendously effective in the Mediterranean. Naval aviation there was much more dominated by land based planes, the dramatic raid on Taranto nonwithstanding. In all honesty, Italy probably made the right call there.

OP is wrong though, there was a LOT of battleship vs. battleship fights.

This leads me to a problem on this site. Sometimes the OP will assert something with blind confidence and everyone will just decide to try to answer his question instead of questioning the rationale behind the making of the question in the first place.

In this case, OP is wrong. There were many battleship fights, you ever heard of the Bismarck? I don't even hear that ship mentioned.

That final fight with the Bismarck is unbelievably epic.

>OP is wrong though, there was a LOT of battleship vs. battleship fights.
No there weren't.

>That final fight with the Bismarck is unbelievably epic.
You mean the part where the Rodney and King George the Fifth move in and threaten a vessel already crippled by CVP from the Ark Royal and then the Bismarck scuttles itself?

>No there weren't.
Yes there were. Frequently, almost constantly.

The Bismarck was the most remarkable battleship constructed. By ANY side in the war. Its sinking was a long affair, yes it was weakened, by the British in the first place. The British had been trying to sink the Bismarck for A WHILE at that point.

Considering the number of battleships involved in the conflict, and the duration of it, no, you really don't see it that often. Of the German BB, only the Scharnhorst and the Bismarck ever engaged another battleship in WW2. None of the French BB would ever see combat with a BB unless you count the attack on Mers El Kebir. None of the Soviet battleships would see combat with another similar vessel. Of the British battleships, Iron Duke, Queen Elizabeth, Barham, Malaya, Ramilles, Resolution, Revenge, Valiant, Royal Oak, Royal Sovereign, Nelson, Anson, and Howe, i.e. 13 of the 19 battleships the British operated, would never fire on another battleship. The Americans and Japanese had similar numbers.

Yes, they occurred, and yes, they occurred throughout most of the war, but they were utterly dwarfed by the number of cruiser engagements, or naval aviation engagements, or submarine and anti-submarine actions. They were certainly not common.

>The Bismarck was the most remarkable battleship constructed. By ANY side in the war.
By what possible idiotic metric do you have that? It was an overdesigned ship, being basically an equivalent of a KGV class but displacing considerably more. The two ships constructed of the class were abject failures.

>they're battlecruisers
>they're designed around Versailles
>They'e certainly better than the atrocious Hipper class, which took 16.000 tons to be able to roughly equal the 10.000 ton Algérie.

That's the thing, they weren't. The Hippers were objectively a better class, because they accomplished their design aspects much better.

Think back, what was the Deustchland's primary mission? Why were they equipped with diesel engines? Certainly not for speed and not because they were cheaper. They had diesels because they were economical, because the Deutschland's primary job was convoy raiding. That's right: the 15,000 ton capital ship armed with 11 inch guns was tasked with CONVOY RAIDING as its main job.

Now, ordinarily, that's not a bad thing. Those 11 inch guns would certainly outgun any cruiser that managed to force them into battle. The Scharnhorsts were also armed with 11 inch guns. However, they had two major advantages over the Deutschlands: they had an actual battleship armor scheme (no shit, check it out, they had heavier armor than the Bismarck. The Bismarck only had them beat in deck armor.), and they had an extra turret.

This is where the Deutschlands failed. Their main armament was concentrated into two turrets. Two HEAVY turrets that could neither traverse very fast, or effectively bracket more than one target. This weakness is exactly what the British exploited at the Battle of the River Platte. The British could concentrate their fire, but the Graf Spee could not effectively split its fire to pursue the faster light cruisers engaging it once it had beat the shit out of the Exeter. All the British had to do to neutralize the ship, even with light cruisers, was engage it with two or more ships, a tactic they had practiced extensively before the war.

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Good shit user
Not a bad thing to see pocket battleship being brought around and see them abjectly failed

Furthermore, the 11 inch guns she had were overkill for her job. Most of the time she finished off merchant ships with her 5.9 inch guns or a torpedo because the 11 inchers were too valuable to waste on a mere merchantman. She would have been much better served if they had saved the tonnage to mount 8 inch guns. Not only would they have been able to mount more guns in more turrets, they could have carried more shells for them.

The Deutschlands were largely a waste. They were simultaneously overgunned for their job as commerce raiders, and undergunned for their status as capital ships. They were an important step for the German Navy relearning shipbuilding, but they were still a very flawed design. Especially since they only had a fucking 3 inch armor belt.

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>Yes there were. Frequently, almost constantly.
No, there weren't. Battleships were obsolete long before WW2, and the bongs allowing battleship foppery to influence their naval thinking was one of their many, many blunders.

Naval doctrine evolved. The goal was not to sink the ships, but to secure sea communications. The most effective way was to have short,but decisive battles.

>there was a LOT of battleship vs. battleship fights.
compared to WW1, maybe. But still nowhere near the cruiser vs cruiser engagements.

>Furthermore, the 11 inch guns she had were overkill for her job.
Not if you're up against heavy cruisers and need something that can out-range 8-inch guns. Also, developing the 11-inch guns for the Deutschland-class meant that the Germans had something ready to go when the Scharnhorst-class was built.

>age of sail
How do you define that?

>Not if you're up against heavy cruisers and need something that can out-range 8-inch guns.
But she was armored like a heavy cruiser. She could not stand to face anything that would require those 11 inch guns. The Germans already learned this from WW1, and had long applied it to their own battlecruiser construction doctrine.

>Also, developing the 11-inch guns for the Deutschland-class meant that the Germans had something ready to go when the Scharnhorst-class was built.
Point, but I don't think it saved them much time. Either way the gun was based on already existing WW1 11 inch gun designs..

Can someone tell me which British battleship is referenced?

Prince of Wales.

Yup. She was the newest battleship in the Royal Navy, the one that was with Hood when she was sunk, and the one that had recently carried Churchill to meet with Roosevelt. She wasn't even a year old.

WW2 was when people discovered just how insanely good Aircraft Carriers were. All the benefits of aircraft (range, accuracy, able to use bombers or fighters, etc.) combined with all the benefits of watercraft (able to blockade, excellent storage capacities, etc.). This, side-by-side with the nowhere near as versatile battleships.

British heavy cruisers were fast enough that they would be able to keep up with the Deutschland-class without any difficulty. A raiding vessel needs to be able to outgun anything that it can't outrun, hence the need for 11-inch guns.

When did the Hipper-class cruisers take on 3 enemy cruisers and damage one extremely and damage the other one, while itself only being moderately damaged? Obviously the German ship lost in the end, but if a Hipper class cruiser was put in the same scenario it would have gone much worse for it. And Hippers are even larger than the Deutschlands, even with the larger figures for the Deutschlands - 18,000-19,000 tons as compared to "only" 15,000 tons, so while not knowing the nature of the cost of the two ships, I'd suspect the Hippers were more expensive. Their combat records are even less glorious : sunk by obsolete Norwegian coastal defenses, failing to make any impact on Allied commerce, and then sailing around in the Baltic bombarding shore targets.

And naturally the Scharnhorsts are better : they're 32,000 tons at least, more than twice as heavy. Just large and powerful enough to pretend to be a battleship without having the armament to fight one.

There are some evident flaws in the Deutschlands such as their low speed, but then they were also designed nearly a decade earlier than the HIppers so lost out on technological advances concerning propulsion systems. They're still better ships anyway, the only things the Hippers have over them despite being thousands of tons heavier and built the better part of a decade later is their speed advantage, which is a design choice for the Deutschlands for greater range.

>3 inch armored belt
And the even larger Hippers with the same armor belt are thus good by comparison how...?

The Deutschland-class was spooky enough that it prompted France to build the Dunkerque-class battleships in order to counter the new German "pocket battleships."

Because this was the age of aircraft where you can take out a battleship without engaging with your own.

Daily reminder that there were more battleship vs battleship battles in WW2 than carrier vs carrier battles.

That might have something to do with the fact that only one of the Axis nations built carriers. And if you look at the Pacific war, you see more carrier to carrier battles than battleship to battleship ones.

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sun's out
guns out

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I like that brutalist bridge, but the turret arrangement is washing your hadns before takign a shit.

I imagine it went something like this

>but admiral, if we arrange the turrets like that the last one won't be able to fire forward OR aft! common practice is to have at least one set of big guns aft... just in case....
>FOR THE LAST FUCKING I WANT *ALL* THE FUCKING BIG GUNS AT THE FRONT SUNS OUT GUNS OUT MOTHERFUCKER

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