Posted on 08/15/2016 6:48:21 AM PDT by C19fan
Can we imagine a scenario in which two titans of World War II, the German battleship Bismarck and the Japanese battleship Yamato, would come into conflict? Difficult, but not impossible. Had the Battle of the Marne gone the other way, Germany might have forced France from the World War I in the early fall of 1914, just as it did in the spring of 1940.
(Excerpt) Read more at warisboring.com ...
She was a sitting duck for KGV and Rodney when they arrived.
Bismarck yes...Yamato no.
Yamato was too well armored and armed over the Iowas.
The military history geek version of bar arguments.
Sure I read it. And I will ask again, where do you come up with the supposition that Germany would make super amazing battleships just because the Washington treaty wasn’t in place? What evidence leads to this conclusion? Why would German make this investment when there is no indication they had that level of interest in sea power?
Even if they had built an H44 how would they have gotten it to the Pacific intact? And in hypothetical land you might as well assume the Japanese built at A-150 to match it. Know why everyone agreed to Washington? Because few people really wanted to spend that much. Had the treaty not happened who knows what would have been built by who. You can’t assume Germany would make double super dreadnaughts and no one else would. Removing the Washington treaty changes the ‘what if’ so far beyond reasonable speculation that you can’t just assume something like that.
“The military history geek version of bar arguments.”
Lol.
5.56mm
Did you ever read the book “Dreadnought”?
Assuming Germany won WW1 on land it still would have lost the naval war at Jutland. With the continent securely in German hands the German Navy would have been forced to either outcompete the British or else accept British control of German trade on the high seas.
Meaning that the pre-WW1 arms race between the two powers would be back on. Given the German penchant for outlandish designs it makes sense that their naval planners would build a massive submarine and capital ship navy...perhaps even with some aircraft carriers.
The Bismarck and Tirpitz were the result of cheating limitations imposed by treaty. Absent those limitations the Germans would have built bigger. The H class ships (two of which were laid down but never completed) were indicative of the momentum to ignore the treaty limititations but the H class were limited by the size of the shipyards.
Had there been no such limitations there would have been bigger shipyards built like were built in the US, UK, and Japan.
The more important thought to my original post is that with Imperial Germany secure on land and triumphant over France and Russia the Germans would necessarily turn their sights on the sea.
What’s also to be noted is that a Germany that was triumphant in WW1 would not have seen the rise of either communism or National Socialism. Hitler’s whole reason for becoming who who became would have been erased and he’d have been happy that his country had won the war.
Thus his influence on the German Navy would be gone from history. The Bismarck and Tirpitz we know would have never existed.
Everything would be different and the Germans would have built bigger battleships, lots more submarines, they probably would have built four-engine long range bombers, and they would have been using jet engines long before the UK or the US did. Their whole focus would be different if they had won WW1.
Your thinking would assume that Germany would win WW1 and then concede to the same treaties and limitations as if they’d lost. That doesn’t make any sense.
Versaiiles and Washington would have never happened with Germany winning WW1.
What neutral Spain would have done in that case would've been an entirely different matter for speculation.
Exactly. LOL, this IS indeed a naval geek version of “bar arguments”!
In my opinion, the fire control, radar implementation, and tactics were so completely far ahead of anything the Japanese had in WWII.
The IJN had superb seamen and ship handlers, and in the early engagements where we weren’t employing radar effectively, they cleaned our clock in just about every single way imaginable. Their destroyer captains and crews were nearly unmatched for intelligence, aggressiveness and war fighting capability, best in the world early in the war.
But, we learned our lessons, for the most part. We learned how to use the radar, when it worked, when it didn’t, and how to employ it in surface actions. (Interestingly, the lessons of the Long Lance torpedo took a long, long time to percolate to everyone. There were still senior officers in 1943 who were discussing naval tactics without updating their “theories” with the capabilities of the Long Lance we discovered oh so well and were still discovering into the late Autumn of 1942. The superior capabilities were known, but we apparently weren’t disseminating that information to our captains and crews effectively. I wonder how much of it was simple word of mouth versus official discussion...
We also learned damage control until the US Navy was the best in the world, bar none, and I still believe we are to this day (or were until they began putting women on US Navy vessels, I don’t know after that)
The Japanese were pretty good shipbuilders before the war and early on, and their training and tactics were excellent. However, as the war wore on, they quality of both went downhill.
I think an Iowa class, with a 1944 crew and the technology on the vessel, would prevail in a match against either the Bismark or the Yamato. It had the advantage in nearly everything except perhaps throw weight.
I would not want to go up against a Yamato with a Bismarck or even with a North Carolina class, radar or no. Maybe at night, if the radar worked.
But Japs burned their economy up preparing for a war, sank a bunch of obsolescent BBs at Pearl, and didn’t even scratch the capacity to build and launch those ships. Their technological lead (more like parity) started slipping the day after Pearl Harbor.
From an old Saturday Night Live “What If Skit”:
Little Tommy Tucker from Fort Wayne, Indiana writes: What if Napoleon had had a B-52 fully armed with nuclear bombs at the Battle of Waterloo”
later
An interesting website that discusses this very topic!
http://combinedfleet.com/baddest.htm
Interesting link, though I have to say, I was surprised to see the Iowa class tied with the Bismarck for sea keeping. I understood the Bismarck was completely unsatisfactory out of the gates because she tended to bury her bow, and they had to do some work to her, but it never fixed it completely (can’t remember the source on that)
The Iowas OTOH, were reputed to have very good seakeeping ability, unless you were in typhoon.
I am not surprised the Yamato did better there, she was big enough. I spent time on a carrier, and the big ones still move, but you get the feeling they could ride out anything. LOL, wouldn’t want to try it, though.
Takao and Kirishima, right?
To those of us who get in to this sort of thing, hashing out the capabilities of various World War II battleships is just as stimulating as looking at that picture.
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