Fire aboard a ship is quite a hazard, but ships can undergo terrible fires and be repaired.
It is when ships have terrible fires that set off internal explosions that the watertight integrity is often compromised.
That happened quite often in the early part of WWII for our navy, when our damage control techniques had not fully matured. There were a few cases where crews were battling issues with watertight integrity due to torpedo damage or shells that hit below the waterline, but most of the time, it was the progression of fire and uncontrolled explosions that caused us to give up on trying to save a capital ship.
One of the best books on this is "Neptune's Inferno" which describes the sea battles around the Solomon Islands in mid-late 1942.
Our navy learned a lot about damage control from those events. After the Battle of Savo Island, the order went out to all ships to rip up linoleum coverings on decks, get rid of flammable furniture where possible, and chip paint down to bare metal and repaint with a single coat.
Apparently, the furniture and decking found on larger ships produced extremely toxic smoke that made damage control harder, and a lot of those ships had years of paint, inches thick in some places, which caused fires to spread from compartment to compartment, also producing debilitating smoke.
I have often wondered how much the furniture and flooring helped, maybe a little, but having been on some ships in the past that looked like paint had never been removed, only added on, makes me think that was the major part of that effort.
Certainly in the removal of the paint, which must have been a massive job. In Samuel Eliot Morison's "The Two Ocean Navy", he has a reference to that with a paragraph:
"Many lessons were learned from this disastrous battle. Canberra and Astoria might have been saved bu for their heavily upholstered wardroom furniture, and the layers of paint and linoleum on their bulkheads and decks. All inflammable furniture and bedding was now ordered ashore, and every ship in the Navy was ordered to scrape down her interior to bare steel; day and night for the resto of 1942, sounds of chipping hammers were never still. Improved fire-fighting technique and the "fog nozzle", far superior to a solid stream of water, were developed; communications were improved; and officers adopted a more reasonable battle-readiness condition which relieved them and their men from continual tension."
Savo Island was a terrible defeat (almost a thousand men killed in less than one hour between 0143 and 0240 when Mikawa broke off and sortied back to their base) but it sounds to me like that was the genesis of today's excellent damage control our Navy has tried to instill in its crews since then.
Of course, the point you made about the decline of readiness due to purging of the ranks and the implementation of social experimentation in this navy is spot on.
Excellent post! Thank you.
Actually, our damage control prowess dates from US representatives looking at the interned German fleet after WW1 following seeing “inferior” German ships take tons of damage at Jutland but yet still kept floating and fighting. They noticed that the Germans had planned their vessels with damage control first and foremost - the USN took that idea and ran with it.