[Oztrich Boy]

For example, how much more money would it take to armor and operate an armored ship with no aluminum? How many more lightly built ships could you build with cheaper material? Then, there’s politics, I’m sure aluminum suppliers were big spenders on the campaign trail and offered jobs to retiring well-placed procurement types.

Aluminium was not the problem. HMS Sheffield was all steel. Look at the photo - no structural damage.

The problem was use of flammable materials and internal fires.

[fremont_steve]

I did some reading on the subject. There were 3 ships sunk that had Aluminium superstructures, i.e. the top part of the ship. The Sheffield was not one of them.

The single biggest problem seems to have been the missile cutting the fire-fighting main H2O supply when it hit. Most of not all of the fire suppression systems were cut off simply by where the missile hit.

Another contributing factor was the strike was near a diesel bunker that caught on fire. Lastly, there was no significant damage control effort because the fire mains were cut. The ship was almost immediately abandoned.