The Gang of Five
Beyond the Mysterious Beyond => The Fridge => History Section => Topic started by: Chomper98 on August 20, 2012, 04:47:58 AM
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Hello, I was watching a documentary on the battleship Bismarck(possibly the most famous Axis Warship) and noticed that had Britain crippled the Bismarck, destroyed the bridge, and destroyed the guns, they could have siezed it, which would have been a pretty good catch, and infact replace the Hood. Of course German sailors might have scuttled it, but if they didn't Bismarck may have become a new British flagship. Anyone want to add to this?
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I doubt it would've last long in British control. It was about that time in the war that battleships became obsolescent with the arrival of aircraft carriers, which in turn destroyed just about every battleship there was. Bismarck, and her sister ship Tirpitz, the American Pacific Fleet, and nearly every one of Japan's battleships were sunk by aircraft launched by carriers. By the end of the war and the beginning of the Cold War, remaining battleships were used only for land bombardments, and then phased out completely thanks to longer-range aircraft and missile systems.
Also, at this time it became nearly impossible to capture enemy ships in combat, the only exception being the U-Boat that was captured for the Enigma machine and its codes. A battleship with more surface armament, more people, and a long range against other ships would be ten times harder to seize in one piece.
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Battleships had already begun to become dated in WW2. The British attack on Tarent, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, many naval combats throughout the Pacific War (e.g. the sinking of the Musashi and the Yamato) and the sinking of the Tirpitz are some of the examples how the extremely expensive battleships were also very vulnerable to air attacks (to submarine attacks as well). The overall superiority of the Royal Navy with regard to their surface units was never really called into question. The main concern about the Bismarck was that if she encountered a convoy (at that time guarded by destroyers that were no match for any battleship while escort carriers which could have become dangerous weren't introduced until later) she probably would have slaughtered the convoy being less vulnerable and having a much larger range and ammunition supplies than the submarines did which bore the brunt of the battle for the Atlantic. The Bismarck was a rather modern battleship, more modern than many of the British battleships which had been serving for decades and only been modernized (in case of the HMS Hood without sufficient attention to the armouring of the deck), but it is not like the superiority in numbers of the Royal Navy had been in numbers of WW1 remainders only. The King George V class, the Nelson class, and later the HMS Vanguard (the last battleship Great Britain build) were all new battleships, but same as the Bismarck vulnerable to air attacks (as the fate of the Prince of Wales shows) and useless when it came to fighting submarines which posed the main threat to the English in the Atlantic. If the British had captured the Bismarck it might well be that the repairs would have cost nearly as much as the building of a new ship given the heavy damage the Bismarck would have suffered. It wouldn't have meant any notable change in the (im)ballance of power between the Royal Navy and the Kriegsmarine. Maybe the Bismarck would have been scrapped (after all it was a lot of reusable steel), perhaps she would have ended as a target ship (as so many captured or dated ships did after WW2). I guess the main difference a capturing of the Bismarck (if possible at all) would have made would be that perhaps hundreds of people who died in the sinking might have lived. This is a crucial difference of course, the effect for the outcome of the war and the strength of the Royal Navy however would have been negligible.