ORIGINAL: warspite1
ORIGINAL: geofflambert
This is a lot of blow about basic theory. Everyone is looking for something that makes the Dreadnought obsolete. As I have said, I believe the Queen Elizabeths to be exactly what everyone was looking for. Everything else was experiments and prototypes. The QEs were every bit as much a revolution as the Dreadnought]. Hood was superb in many ways but it couldn't take receiving shells lesser than the ones she was hurling herself. Once armoured sufficiently, while sacrificing speed, she would be the equal of most other WWII BBs, and shouldn't have feared any so much as to not engage. The POW was very well designed but undergunned. If handled correctly they should have defeated Bismark.
All that aside, how do simple threads like the one that was started here morph into what we see before us? The answer is, we do this because we can.
warspite1
That's a very sweeping statement. So what practically should Holland have done to avoid his ship being blown to smithereens? You know that PoW was suffering teething problems with her main guns (she still had dockyard workers aboard so quickly did she sail)?
And, as I recall she took a number of penetrating hits, and only withdrew after one of her quadruple turrets jammed.
At the end of the Battle of Denmark Strait PoW was left with a demoralized crew who had just watched, or at least heard about, the catastrophic loss of Hood and the Task Forces CO, was taking on water, and had a significant percentage of her armament no longer able to put shells on the enemy. There is no fault in withdrawing under those circumstances.
In fact, there is more fault to be had in Lutjens behavior that day. Not only did Lindermann have to disobey Lutjens orders not to fire so that his ship would "not be shot from under my ass", but Lutjens also refused to let Lindermann press PoW when she was trying to withdraw.
Playing at war is a far better vocation than making people fight in them.
