This is to follow up on taamvan’s post. Any sea fight in any era, including the period running from WWI to WWII, is subject to so many factors and so many imponderables, all interacting with each other in ways that are often unique, that its outcome can never be predicted with complete accuracy. Just to give a couple of examples of factors that are in no way obvious when one looks at the raw statistics of a ship’s specifications:
One of the factors that contributed to the loss of the British battlecruisers at Jutland in 1916 was the absence of anti-flash shutters on their main gun turrets. This allowed blast effects from enemy hits to propagate into the ammunition magazines, with lethal results. And ironically, the presence of anti-flash shutters (more specifically, of overly-complicated ones) on Prince of Wales during the Bismarck engagement in 1941 proved to be a disadvantage because they tended to jam the main guns.
One of the (literally) hard-to-notice factors that potentially affects warship performance is whether or not they have a foul bottom. If a ship has been at sea for a long time, it may – despite the use of anti-fouling paint – have accumulated marine growths on its hull which compromise its speed. This is actually one of the factors that might have worked against the Graf Spee if it had tried to reach Germany from Montevideo after the Battle of the River Plate, if Langsdorff had been intepid enough (or foolish enough) to try it.
A set of very important factors affecting any sea fight, and which similarly don’t show up in ship design statistics, are those that involve the officers and crew: their training, their morale, the tactics they use, the operational orders under which they are functioning, and the doctrines that govern their naval service. These vary greatly from navy to navy, and from era to era within a navy, and there’s also a lot of variation in terms of how well these doctrines are (or are not) applied in a given battle by the officers and crew of a given ship. European naval officers studied with great interest the results of the Russo-Japanese War (notably the Battle of Tsushima) for many reasons, one of these being that the Japanese navy was trained in the British naval tradition and the Russian navy was trained in the French naval tradition – so it was no suprise that the British Admiralty took great satisfaction from the fact that Japanese clobbered the Russians.
All of that being said, ship design does matter. Speaking in terms of broad averages, a properly handled superior ship design will tend to do better against a properly handled inferior ship design, even if one can never exclude possible wild cards like lucky shots by the gunners or brief (but disproportionately serious in their consequences) lapses in judgment by the officers.
For certain, wargames and speculation are just mind games, they don’t fully resemble real life, they shouldn’t, and can’t. As I’m sure most here will agree, that doesn’t mean they lack potential insight.
Further on your ammo explosion point, I’ve read several sources that say the British Fleet at Jutland emphasized a rapid rate of fire with unimpressive accuracy, and this led to risky handling practices being retained or revived in spite of safety measures put in place after catastrophic losses.
Japanese Cruisers were equipped with longlance turrets, this was an expensive choice that on paper would make the ship “more powerfulâ€. However, Cruisers and heavier ships torpedo fire wasn’t all that accurate, more difficult for them to get in position, and an incidental hit on an pure oxygen torpedo could cause a catastrophic loss.
A lot of ships had radars or critical electrical systems that failed under fire and reliance on systems like this could leave a ship an iron tub firing with 1880s technology and with accuracy to match.
In the age of sail, Britain spent the equivalent of modern billions on cladding of various types, which was outrageously expensive but gave them a key edge, as you point out.
So that tech can be a mixed bag, a lot of cost-benefit analysis that can only be examined in hindsight and after experience.
There weren’t any US vs Germany capital ship confrontations in WW2, that I know of. Tons of DD vs sub and raider vs AMC actions but none of the interesting situations that US Japan had in the Pacific War, so its cool to imagine. A huge part of the hypothetical would rely on what era it is set in and the war situation, since these setting elements are key; if Germany was being pounded into defeat, the captain would run like hell…Does he know what type of enemy he is facing? Exactly what its capabilities are? How? And whether help is close, or far away, whether ammunition and fuel are available or not…all these fog of war elements play on every decision that is made, in real life. And in a really good simulation too.
USS Alaska vs KM Scharnhost
There’s something meatier to ponder in US vs German surface ships.
DKM Scharnhorst wins that
USS Alaska vs KM Scharnhost
There’s something meatier to ponder in US vs German surface ships.
The Battle-Cruiser Scharnhost wins over heavy cruiser Alaska. How does the Scharnhost hold up against the old U.S Battleship Texas?
Alaska Class vs the big boys its a pretty even match we’ve posed there. Germans win ties. (See Austin Powers Rule).
USS Texas is a “slow” BB, he’s kinda an old guy during the period contemplated. The ones they used for bombardments were usually recognized as unable to keep up with the carriers (and their purpose-built escorts) as they moved around. islands and coasts cant run away so there is plenty of time to get in position and its much safer to deploy the ship under circumstances of overwhelming sea and air superiority rather than risk a ww1 style catastrophe where older, slower ships were destroyed by mines or submarines.
The “fast” battleships, battlecruisers, fleet carriers and ww2 era heavy cruisers were so much faster than the Texas-era/WW1 line battleship that they could choose either to run away or confront the enemy with the advantage of position. The WW1 BBs were slow enough that the action was rarely still going on by the time they caught up and the carrier groups already moved on.
but that doesn’t mean useless…big guns…giant platform…Roll 4 or better to hit the beach.
@ABWorsham:
The Battle-Cruiser Scharnhorst wins over heavy cruiser Alaska.
Calling the Alaska a heavy cruiser is like calling the Admiral Scheer a battleship… or thinking the Scharnhorst is just the same as any other battleship… it was undergunned for its size and tonnage. There’s a a lot of silly names floated about for ships that stretch, exceed or fail to live up to what more traditional ships of that class are known as… to just simply go “hands down, the Scharnhorst Battleship beats the Alaska Heavy Cruiser” really tells me you’re not looking at anything remotely close to what either of these ships were capable of or not but rather going by half-hazard ship classifications.
When a question like an out of date treaty ship such as the Scheer is put up against a far more modern and capable Baltimore and that draws more debate then two ships that are almost complete equals, you guys aren’t putting any thought into answers.
Let me clear the air, because some people clearly don’t know the differences (or lack thereof) with these ships.
DKM Scharnhorst (undergunned battleship or overweight battlecruiser, you choose)
Displacement: 32,600 t
Length: 234.9 m (771 ft)
Speed: 31 knots (57 km/h; 36 mph)
Crew: 1,669
Main Armament: 9 × 280 mm/54.5 (11 inch) SK C/34
Armor (Belt/Deck/Turrets): 13.8 in (350 mm) / 2 in (50 mm) / 7.9 to 14.2 in (200 to 360 mm)
USS Alaska (biggest heavy cruiser ever built in world history or battlecruiser by any other name)
Displacement: 30,257 t
Length: 246.4 m (808 ft)
Speed: 33 knots (61 km/h; 38 mph)
Crew: 1,517
Main Armament: 9 × 12-inch/50 caliber (305 mm)
Armor (Belt/Deck/Turrets): 9 in (229 mm) / 4 in (102 mm) / 12.8 in (325 mm)
I never stated which ship is superior, but obviously, these ships are very closely matched in pretty much every category, and yet people toss out “oh the Alaska doesn’t stand a chance at all” in seconds of decision making without even realizing just how closely matched these ships are. Another really long-standing problem with German shipbuilding that went across the board from their smaller ships to the biggest ships was too much armor on the waterline and not enough on the upper decks to prevent plunging fire damage and/or turrets getting knocked out (something that happened often and quickly in surface duels with German ships). Always nice that your ship can float, but bad when it can’t fight back.
Slap naming conventions around all you want… the numbers tell a different story… Hell, the Alaska was longer, faster and carried a bigger main armament than the Scharnhorst, yet people just think its not even a contest.
I would think it would require a little more thought… go ahead, raise your hand if you had no clue how closely these ships were to each other in every category.
I said it was an even match :)
People who aren’t as interested in quantitative analysis or naval history don’t have that much basis to analyze this. I’m certainly not a professional historian, just another armchair admiral, someone who has read the Wikipedia article on every ship to ship combat since 1890 and every individual ship bigger than a destroyer and a couple dozen nonfiction books to back that up…
“Calm seas, daylight, 25 miles apart, good visibility, two virtually equal ships facing each other on a collision course, in full knowledge of 1) the capabilities, presence and identity of the foe, 2) in total isolation of any political or morale situation, 3) without knowledge of the presence of nearby allies or enemies, or land or bases, 4) no technical problems, capable of to the decimal point same speed and rate and accuracy of fire as on trials”
This set of vanilla, isolating conditions that would permit us to locally analyze the situation has never come up a single time in real life, so our analysis is about as accurate as a video game is.
I said it was an even match :)
My main point was aimed at the previous reply, not yours…
however… you threw in Mojo, baby!
I see your German Mojo and throw in the fact that American ships have superior radar, fire control and turrets that don’t usually go out of action 5 seconds into every encounter like German ships do (or tail sections that break off, another German trait).
How do you believe an engagement between the elderly Malaya and the Scharnhorst and her sister on the Gibraltar-Cape Town convoy route in March 1941?
There is an interesting report by the US Office of Naval Intelligence on the Battle of the River Plate, with quite a few photos and ship damage reports. It can be found here, at the Combined Arms Research Library Digital Library, and downloaded for free.
http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org
As for a battle between the Admiral Scheer and a Baltimore–class cruiser, I would bet on the Baltimore-class ship, unless the Scheer got some early lucky hits on gun turrets, as the Spee did on the HMS Exeter. The USS Salt Lake City, one of our two oldest heavy cruisers in World War 2, with an older gunfire control system than the Baltimores, was able to score hits on the IJN Nachi at ranges in excess of 21,000 yards. The following comment from the ONI report applies to the Spee’s gunnery.
German shooting was described as quite good, initially, but the accuracy fell off rapidly.
(a) 11-inch opened with two 3-gun salvos, very close and on in deflection.
(b) 5.9-inch also fired at Exeter; no definite hits determined, but many splinters came aboard.
