|
The Second World War saw the end of the battleship as the dominant force in the world's navies. On the outbreak of the War, large fleets of battleships—many inherited from the dreadnought era decades before—were one of the decisive forces in naval thinking. By the end of the War, battleship construction was all but halted, and almost every existing battleship was retired or scrapped within a few years of its end. However, some farsighted commanders saw the carrier as the capital ship of the future, which was cemented by the devastating Pearl Harbor attack in 1941; the resultant Pacific War saw aircraft carriers take precedence. There were just two engagements in the Pacific Theater where battleships fought each other.〔The Pearl Harbor attack was a radical development of Japanese strategy that only occurred in 1941. It is also likely the American plan for the Pacific involved a prompt battleship engagement. Evans and Peattie, p.471-7〕 (There were three battleship versus battleship engagements in the Atlantic.) Battleships remained the most heavily protected ships afloat, nonetheless sixteen were sunk or crippled by bombs or torpedoes delivered by aircraft, while three more were sunk by submarine-launched torpedoes.〔The battleships , , , , , , , , , , , , , ''Marat'', and were all put out of commission or destroyed by aerial attack including bombs, air-dropped torpedoes and missiles fired from aircraft.〕 To make matters worse, the war had seen the development of the first guided bombs, which would make it much easier for aircraft to sink battleships in the future. ==Operations== German battleships—obsolete pre-dreadnoughts—fired the first shots of World War II with the bombardment of the Polish garrison at Westerplatte;〔Gibbons, p. 163〕 and the final surrender of the Japanese Empire took place aboard a United States Navy battleship, the . Between the two events, it became clear that battleships were now essentially auxiliary craft, and aircraft carriers were the new principal ships of the fleet. Still, battleships played a part in major engagements in Atlantic, Pacific and Mediterranean theatres. In the Atlantic, the Germans experimented with taking the battleship beyond conventional fleet action, using their pocket battleships as independent commerce raiders. Although there were a few battleship-on-battleship engagements, battleships had little impact on the destroyer and submarine Battle of the Atlantic, and aircraft carriers determined the outcome of most of the decisive fleet clashes of the Pacific War. In the first year of the war, battleships and battlecruisers defied predictions that aircraft would dominate naval warfare. and surprised and sank the lightly escorted aircraft carrier off western Norway in June 1940.〔Gibbons, pp. 246–247〕 The vulnerability of unescorted carriers to attack by other ships meant that carriers almost always had escorts, so this engagement marked the last time surface gunnery sank a fleet carrier. In the Attack on Mers-el-Kébir, British capital ships opened fire on the French battleships harboured in Algeria with their own heavy guns, and later pursued fleeing French ships with planes from aircraft carriers. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Battleships in World War II」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|