Isoroku295

Was the cost to maintain a Battleship fleet strategy really worth it?

Kevinmeath

First question must be when? the battleship started in the 18th century and ended in the 20th.

Nelson's Battleships were well worth it-- if you mean cost effective.
In the late 19th early 20th taht starts to get more complex.

HMS Deadnought lived up to its name!! 'everyone' was feared it and in its day it feared nothing.

OpanaPointer

The big batteries have more uses than just fighting other battleships. von Rundstedt and Rommel both noted that BB gunfire particularly was a major interdictor in their efforts to move units to the coast on D-Day. The general commanding US troops on Okinawa credited 14" gun fire with allowing them to break the Shuri Line. Even the duds were sometimes useful.

pikeshot1600

If one needed a naval strategy, and if others who might impact that strategy had them, you had to have them.

The French tried torpedo boats to counter battleships, and also commerce raiders in the 1880s, but by WW I they were building battleships like everyone else.

Of course not all countries could afford them. Spain laid down three battleships before WW I, and Portugal wanted to build three battleships in around 1913/14 but the costs were beyond them.

In addition, if battleships had to be built, you needed the cruisers to scout for the fleet, and destroyers and torpedo boats to screen it against torpedo attacks. Cha-ching!

Kevinmeath

True and I would say HMS Warspite was worth every penny.

pikeshot1600

Now there is a GI! But I don't think I would have trusted that dud so much.

OpanaPointer

You'll notice there's nobody around except the cameraman?

OpanaPointer

The airforces could fly in, drop some bombs, hope they hit, and fly out. A BB could adjust fire and second love taps out until the target was a black hole candidate. And a 16" round weighed about 17 times what a 8" round weighed. So the impact was noticeably different when the battlewagons were tossing steel. The grunts on Guadalcanal have testified to that.

dragoner

Odd not only is it colorized, but it says "for the homeland" in phonetic Russian in the corner.

OpanaPointer

That's the site where I picked that image. I hadn't seen the colorized one before.

Two stories from the official US Army histories of the Korean War come to mind when I see that picture. One is that a company of NKA had a dud land in their midst. They examined the shell and were so stunned at it that they surrendered. The other is a complaint from North Korea that we were using tactical nukes on them. When their information was compared with ours, it turned out that battleship gunfire had been mistaken for nuclear weapons.