Warspite vs Vittorio Veneto

Who will win in this epic battle for the Black Sea?

Turkish battlecruiser Yavuz, former World War 1 German battlecruiser Yavuz.

Against Soviet battleship Parizhskaya Kommuna, an old World War 1 Tsarist era Gangut class battleship.

Make sure to look up the specifications before making an assumption. Yavuz’s armour is quite thick for that generation’s battlecruiser.

@Gargantua:

Honestly, what happened to the Hood was probably one of the luckiest shots of the war.

If we were to relive that same historical battle 10 times, I highly doubt we would see that one shot outcome again.

Oh, I’m sure that there are alternate universes out there where Hood was sent to the breakers in 1948, the “Hero of the Battle of the Denmark Strait”. It’s just that the one we share isn’t one of them. Let’s just say that 1941 wasn’t a good year to be sailing on Royal Navy capital ships…

-Midnight_Reaper

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.

@aequitas:

Something??
And you say that you don’t deny the Holocaust??

To underline your arguments you should have evidence of it.
You don’t! So just leave it!!
First you blame the Western Allies for the imaginary Food Blockade, now you are saying it was the beasty Pluto-rusky-soviets??

It is just sad… :-(

And you say that you don’t deny the Holocaust??

Correct. I do not deny the Holocaust.

To underline your arguments you should have evidence of it.

If there are specific factual claims I’ve made for which you’d like to see more evidence, just ask. My typical response to such requests is to provide evidence of my assertions. In supporting such claims, I have never cited pro-Nazi or other far right sources. My rationale is that a far right source could be expected to present the Nazis’ case in the most favorable light, and might even be willing to exaggerate things in the Nazis’ favor. If on the other hand a mainstream (anti-Nazi) source is willing to admit the truth of something which casts a less than 100% favorable light on the Allies’ actions, then that admission is most likely true.

First you blame the Western Allies for the imaginary Food Blockade

After his political career ended, former U.S. president Herbert Hoover wrote a series of books. One of those books was Freedom Betrayed. On page 589 of Freedom Betrayed, Hoover wrote the following:

[In 1939] the Polish Government escaped to London under Prime Minister Wladyslaw Sikorski. He requested me to organize relief for his country. My old colleagues and I did so, but after about one year, during which about $6,000,000 was raised and supplies had been shipped, our work was stopped by the British blockade.

Neville Chamberlain had of course blockaded metals, oil, weapons, ammunition, and other items you’d normally expect to be blockaded. Churchill added food to the list of contraband items. That is why Hoover was able to send food to the starving Poles during the first year of the war, and was unable to send food to them thereafter.

The Wikipedia article expands on the subject of this blockade.

As 1940 drew to a close, the situation for many of Europe’s 525 million people was dire. With the food supply reduced by 15% by the blockade and another 15% by poor harvests, starvation and diseases such as influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhus and cholera were a threat. Germany was forced to send 40 freight cars of emergency supplies into occupied Belgium and France, and American charities such as the Red Cross, the Aldrich Committee, and the American Friends Service Committee began gathering funds to send aid. Former president Herbert Hoover, who had done much to alleviate the hunger of European children during World War I, wrote:[63]

The food situation in the present war is already more desperate than at the same stage in the [First] World War. … If this war is long continued, there is but one implacable end… the greatest famine in history.

Adam Tooze’s book Wages of Destruction has been praised by The Times (London), The Sunday Times (London), The Wall Street Journal, and History Today. The Financial Times called it “masterful.”  On pages 418 - 419 Tooze writes the following:

After 1939 the supply of food in Western Europe was no less constrained than the supply of coal. . . . Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. . . . By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis. . . . By 1941 there were already signs of mounting discontent due to the inadequate food supply. In Belgium and France, the official ration allocated to ‘normal consumers’ of as little as 1,300 calories per day, was an open invitation to resort to the black market.

now you are saying it was the beasty Pluto-rusky-soviets

The food blockade was of course imposed by the Western Allies. Those nations are typically known as democracies, even though a study showed that, in practice, decisions are made on a plutocratic basis. Princeton University found there is zero correlation between what the bottom economic 90% wants and what the federal government actually does. (The data go back a number of decades, but do not go all the way back to WWII. The study therefore represents very strong evidence, but not proof, that the U.S. had been a plutocracy during WWII.)

I regard most politicians as shills for America’s plutocrat class. The brutality of the Allied food blockade was not reflective of a murderous American population. It was reflective of a murderous, evil plutocrat class.

I absolutely agree with you here.  Yamato does have better range with her guns.  But I believe that PoW is better able to place her shots on target at these extreme ranges than Yamato.  Regardless, surprise is crucial for PoW.  Which is why I think the engagement would HAVE to happen at night when radar would help.

@CWO:

@jim010:

Let’s assume a chance encounter in the China sea between the two in 1942 when Churchill wanted British raiders operating the way the Germans had done in the Atlantic. � This is the only possible way I see an encounter between the two happening without other ships and carriers taking part (at least on the British side). � We’ll assume that Japanese carriers are engaged elsewhere and Yamato and other ships are hunting for the British raiders. � Low cloud ceiling, so planes can’t participate. � Prince of Wales was destined for this type of operation, so this match-up MIGHT have happened. � We’ll substitute DoY with PoW. � As the ships are identical, shouldn’t be an issue. � And PoW is most likely to have made this encounter, had she survived.

Interesting analysis, but there’s one other factor that needs to be considered: main gun range.  Yamato’s 18.1-inch guns probably out-ranged PoW’s 14-inchers; Garzke and Dulin’s books would give the exact figures, but I don’t have them on hand at this moment.  If so, Yamato would be able to open fire on PoW long before PoW could do likewise to Yamato.  Or to put it another way, any situation in which PoW is in range to hit Yamato (even at extreme range) would automatically be a situation in which PoW would be well within Yamato’s range.

On the issue of who-spots-whom-first, Japanese inferiority in radar might well be compensated by the IJN’s excellent optical rangefinders, particularly in view of the fact that Yamato’s greater size would place her optical fire-control stations (and perhaps her radars too) at a greater height than those of PoW – so Yamato might actually spot PoW first, since the horizon is further away as you observe it from higher up.  PoW did have a slight edge in speed, but in this situation the main advantage this would confer to PoW would be the ability to get away from a situation in which she was confronted with an opponent way above her weight class.  This was basically the same principle behind the Deutschland-class Panzerschiffe: with a few exceptions (these being the three British battlecruisers they might face), they were more powerful than anything faster and faster than anything more powerful…the latter point meaning that, if they encountered a fully-fledged battleship, they were supposed to run away from it.

The IIIJ has a 50mm L60. I would take that against the Valentine any day.
Might need to hit it in flank, but with the extra 10MPH I would hope I could manoeuvre around it, if my first shell(unluckily) bounced off the frontal armour.
Its puny 2 Pounder would not bother me much I suspect.

Haha, well China invades Russia to secure the Quarantine Zones and the Ruskies use da nukes.  Needless to say, the world goes boom.  Great game, great story!

No. Japan could take Austrailia, but HOLDING it is another story. The US would have treated it as any other island and simply started from hawaii and then taken austrailia instead.