One classic problem with weapons systems is that the march of technology renders them obsolete, and the faster the technology advances the shorter the useful life of the system. Via a wikiwander I have found perhaps the ultimate example of this: the SMS Hessen.
The German Kaisar was a big naval enthusiast and so built up a fleet of cutting edge battleships (including the Hessen). Then the Royal Navy introduced the HMS Dreadnought which completely changed the game. All existing battleships were instantly obsolete - including the Hessen which had only been commissioned a year previously.
Interestingly, the SMS Hessen remained in one form of service or another in the German fleet and then later in the Soviet fleet until 1960 when it was scrapped. That is 55 years of obsolescence embodied in one warship. That has got to be some sort of record.
There's some interesting stuff on the Wiki page for WWII Battleships. One that caught my eye was a ship with an even longer life than the Hessen: the Turkish battleship Turgut Reis which began its service as the German battleship SMS Weissenberg in 1894 which was sold to Turkey in 1910 but wasn't scrapped until 1957 - 63 years later. At least the Weissenberg wasn't obsolete for the first 12 years of its service.
To close out this post, Glen Filthie found a lego stop motion video of the hunt for the Bismark. Recommended.
7 comments:
There's always USS Dolphin from the 1890s.
https://laststandonzombieisland.com/2022/07/06/warship-wednesday-july-6-2022-dispatches-from-the-new-navy/
I love the effort the kids put into it. What are those planes? Kingfishers? They look more like the originals than the originals did! This kind of stuff captures the imaginations of the young ones in ways that the stuffy older documentaries cannot. It's doubly important for the kids to know that the world was not always fake and gay as it is now...
Glen, the planes that torpedoed the Bismarck and crippled it's ability to steer were Faery Swordfish.
Wikipedia must consider HMS Hood to be a battlecruiser and not a fast battleship, since it didn't make the list. Seems like a cop-out since Hood was just as powerful and well armored as most of the ships on this list.
Except for deck armor, she was essentially Bismarck's equivalent. And nobody is out there claiming Bismarck was a battlecruiser. History does Hood dirty.
Yep, the Faery's got the Bismarck with a torp that locked the rudder over. Those guys clanked when they walked!!!
Goober,
The Hood has been labeled a battlecruiser more than it has a battleship, since it was built. I forget the details, but various features seemed to make it fit either group, depending on how you held your head while looking. As was the Bismarck, to some extent. Battlecruiser/pocket battleship tended to be interchangeable labels. The two main variables seemed to be amount of armor and gun size, and a third was speed. Heavy guns, light armor, and high speed generally made one a battlecruiser, as the intent was to be able to run from any single opponent that could beat your armor to pieces.
Will, I agree, but the Hood hardly had "light" armor. She had a 12 inch sloped main belt, which was fractionally the same as Bismarck, and close to a friggin Iowa class.
The only place Hood was "weak" in armor was in her Deck armor, which would have been a severe disadvantage at 22,000 yard-plus engagements, but never came into play her entire career, even in her last stand against Bismarck, her Deck armor never came into play, since the engagement started below the range that a plunging round could have hit her deck.
An example, they had the Japanese Kongo class in that list, which started life as Battlecruisers, got upgrades to be "fast battleships" but in name only, they only ever had 9 inches of main belt, which didn't even make it proof to 8" cruiser guns, yet they made the list. So why wouldn't Hood, a full 15,000 tons heaver, with full battleship armament, and 33% thicker main belt make the list?
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