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wdolson -> RE: What good are battleships? (12/13/2011 5:38:51 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Flying Tiger
Battleships SHOULD HAVE caused havoc at Leyte. But thanks to some remarkably timid Japanese commanders the slaughter was averted. And this at a time when the Allies had absolute control of the air (and mostly of the sea too!).
The center force should have caused more havoc than it did, but the southern force was doomed to fail. The southern force was not well organized, had only two BBs, the US had excellent information about where they were going and when they would arrive, and the US had time to set up a layered defense that forced the Japanese to run the gauntlet of PT boats first, then DDs, then Cruisers, and finally coming under the guns of the bombardment force covering the transports.
When the BBs opened up they did all their shooting by radar and finished off the force that had already been ravaged by the first layers of the defense.
The center force was led by one of the few officers in the IJN who knew the Code of Bushido was bunk. His father was a scholar on medieval Japan and he knew how to read and write ancient Japanese. He knew from original sources what the samurai's code really was and knew that the Code of Bushido was a politically motivated warping of the original code.
Thus he valued saving Japanese lives over stupid suicide missions. He did what damage he could and retired before his force took further damage.
There is a very good book about Leyte I read a few years back. I forget the title right now. I loaned it to my father, so I can't look.
If the center force had turned on the landing ships. They would have run into Olendorf's surface fleet that had defeated the southern force the night before. Olendorf thought Halsey was covering the San Bernardino Straits, so he wasn't positioned to deal with a force coming at him from the north, and many of his ships were low on ammo, but the center force would have been boxed into a narrow space with a very large US surface force and the CVE's off shore would be on alert to send aerial aid. The center force also did not know that Halsey had taken the bait hook line and sinker and his fast mobile forces were finishing off the carriers to the north.
If Halsey had left his battleships covering the San Bernardino Straits, the Battle Off Samar would not have happened. The big gun boys would have found out what would happen if the Yamato squared off against Iowas. I suspect the Americans would have won easily because the Japanese had to go through the Strait single file and would have emerged into a crossed T with every ship spotted on radar and by aircraft long before getting into visual range. The long range gunnery would have been the Yamato and some older Japanese BBs vs something like seven US fast BBs with better radar and in prime position.
Back to the original topic, I saw a 4 part series made in Australia about the history of the battleship. The ship of the line which evolved into the battleship was the core of every modern fleet for several hundred years. The advent of aircraft tilted that playing field, but the senior brass, who had all come of age in battleship navies were slow to adapt to the new playing field.
For the WW II era, about the best role for older battleships was bombardment. Faster BBs could be used as flak platforms. But both of these roles were huge wastes of resources for secondary roles. For the cost and material in one fast BB, the US could have built multiple cruisers with the same total AA armament which cost less to crew and maintain. For bombardment, large caliber guns on slow, largish gunboats would have done an equally good job.
Bill
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