Battleships Are Mighty, But Are They Relevant?

James Holmes

U.S. Navy, Global

Battleships were mighty in their day. But has the advent of airplanes and missiles negated their usefulness?

Here's What To Remember: Battleships were built to a more primal standard. Surveying the age of sail, Alfred Thayer Mahan defined “capital ships” as “the backbone and real power of any navy,” heavy hitters that “by due proportion of defensive and offensive powers, are capable of taking and giving hard knocks.” That is, these were brawny ships able to dish out and absorb heavy hits in duels against rival battle fleets. Gunfire was their chief weapon, stout construction their way of withstanding enemy gunfire and hitting back.

What was it like serving in USS Wisconsin, the Iowa-class battleship that now adorns the Norfolk, Virginia riverside as a maritime museum?

Well, it was life-changing for this junior officer in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I will never forget cruising across the Singing River in Pascagoula, Mississippi in my fire-engine red Honda CRX, and seeing the familiar shape of a battleship’s bow—familiar from old Victory at Sea episodes, and from visiting the USS Alabama museum growing up—heave into view for the first time against the backdrop of the Gulf of Mexico.

Wisconsin lay alongside a pier jutting out of the river’s east bank, home to Ingalls Shipbuilding. Ingalls shipwrights were resuscitating the ship after her thirty-year slumber at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Wisconsin was a 58,000-ton behemoth boasting armor over a foot thick in places exposed to enemy gunfire; big guns capable of lofting projectiles weighing the same as a Volkswagen Bug over twenty miles; a family of guided missiles for assailing hostile fleets or shore targets hundreds of miles away; and a propulsion plant capable of keeping up with a fast aircraft-carrier task force.

But that’s just the outward stuff. However impressive, technical specifications cannot explain why ships command such affection from their crews, or admiration from landlubbers. In short, ships are more than just military capabilities. A “ship” is more than a hunk of steel that rides the bounding main. It is an expression of human ideas and history in steel. It’s a composite of materiel, human beings, and history. Therein lies its allure.

Think about it. A ship of war is a self-propelled weapon—a weapon where you live. It’s home—a small city with all the human variety that typifies cities. And—especially in the case of vintage vessels like battlewagons—it connects the crew to bygone generations of seafarers. Ghosts wander its decks, passageways, and compartments. In the case of Wisconsin those ghosts include figures of some repute, including Richard McKenna, an enlisted engineer and author of The Sand Pebbles, and Elmo Zumwalt, a future chief of naval operations and our navigator during the Korean War.

Keeping company with ancient mariners is just plain cool. Every fighting ship has its own story deriving not just from the vessel’s physical characteristics but from the individual sailors who make up its human contingent, with all their virtues, quirks, and occasional vices, and from past exploits in which it took part.

Battleships were wondrous and awful ships in brute material terms. Wondrous because of the sober fatalism that went into their design philosophy. Missile-age naval doctrine exhorts U.S. naval commanders to strike down a hostile “archer”—a missile-toting ship or warplane—before he can let fly his “arrow,” or missile. Tacticians vector in combat aircraft or fire missiles to engage enemies far away, and preferably before they get off a shot. Warships built by this philosophy are fitted with minimal armor to shield their innards. Lightweight construction earned them the moniker “one-hit ship” because a single missile strike typically puts a modern surface combatant out of action. Fail to stop inbound threats at a distance and you find yourself in deep trouble.

Battleships were built to a more primal standard. Surveying the age of sail, Alfred Thayer Mahan defined “capital ships” as “the backbone and real power of any navy,” heavy hitters that “by due proportion of defensive and offensive powers, are capable of taking and giving hard knocks.” That is, these were brawny ships able to dish out and absorb heavy hits in duels against rival battle fleets. Gunfire was their chief weapon, stout construction their way of withstanding enemy gunfire and hitting back.

Old-school naval architecture proceeded from Mahanian assumptions. Rather than bowmen sniping at one another with arrows from long range, surface combatants in the age of steam were more like armored knights hacking away in close-quarters combat. There was no striking down foes at long range. Blow met counterblow. Hence warriors in the age of chivalry wore heavy armor and bore shields to ward off attack.

Ship designers reared on Mahan, consequently, fashioned capital ships sure in the knowledge that their creations would take heavy hits in action. They needed resilient hulls and internals to stand in a fight. Accordingly, armor thickness on board Iowas exceeded 17 inches in places. An “armored box” encased the propulsion and auxiliary machinery, along with the fire-control plotting rooms for the main guns. A “citadel”—an armored tube that crewmen entered by way of a door resembling those found in bank vaults—enclosed the helm and other bridge stations needed to navigate, pilot, and fight the ship. And on and on. Passive defenses—Mahan’s “defensive power”—were elaborate by any measure.

Rugged construction wasn’t enough, though. Battleships also needed “redundant” systems, and they needed the capacity to reroute steam, electricity, and other vital services around stricken zones. For example, eight boilers generated superheated steam to drive four main propulsion shafts, along with generators and auxiliary systems. A “fire room” housing two boilers was paired up with an adjacent engine room housing a main engine, two generators, and sundry pumps and support equipment. Four shafts, four freestanding plants.

Wisconsin could get by with four boilers under most circumstances, meaning the ship could stand to lose some of them without losing its fighting strength. Likewise, she was outfitted with two or three of most major pieces of gear. Redundancy appears wasteful from the standpoint of efficiency. Why outfit a ship with multiple identical widgets when one will do the job? And that’s a reasonable objection for routine peacetime steaming—but not when a peer dreadnought like Germany’s Bismarck or Japan’s Yamato is blazing away at you in an effort to puncture your hull and make mayhem within.

You need spares in battle. Lose a boiler, pump, or generator and you need another like it to take up the slack. “Two is one and one is none,” as a saying popular with military folk and outdoorsmen goes. Wisconsin had spares. And piping and wiring systems were networked, enabling engineers to “cross-connect” steam, electricity, and other vital fluids between plants. Take a hit in, say, a fire room, and the engineering officer of the watch, or supervisor—my job for a time—could order steam cross-connected from another plant. Bypassing damage supplied the motive force to keep the engine, generators, and other systems running.

So much for the wonders of dreadnought design. What made the Iowas awful? Their advanced age. From time to time battleship proponents, some rather senior, agitate to put the ships back into service, mainly to fill the void in major-caliber naval gunfire support left when they retired in 1991-1992. Enthusiasts note that marines and soldiers going ashore on contested beaches need large volumes of fire support to survive—much as they did at Normandy and Okinawa. And so they do.

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Central to enthusiasts’ brief for battleship recommissioning is the claim that these are actually young vessels despite their calendar age. (Wisconsin turns seventy-five next year.) The mileage on the odometer remains low! And indeed these ships led short service lives. They fought the Imperial Japanese Navy for a year or two, returned to action during the Korean War and a few years’ training duty afterward, and then came back for the last time in the 1980s—again for scant years.

Such claims make superficial sense. Wisconsin plied the sea for just fourteen of her seventy-five years. It stands to reason the old battlewagon has plenty of steaming life left in her. Trouble is: chronological age does matter. To name just one problem, pipe walls and seams between sections of pipe decay while sitting idle for thirty years, as the Iowa class did. Things leak. My first job was overseeing Wisconsin’s firefighters and shipfitters, including the welding and machine shops. My welders and machinists had their hands full keeping our systems tight so that, say, a fuel line didn’t spring a leak and spray the hot face of a steaming boiler.

And yes, that happened once upon a time. Threatening a major conflagration. While the weapons department was handling ammunition.

Or in a similar vein, we sprung a leak in a magazine sprinkler one time after I changed jobs to oversee the ship’s 16-inch main guns. (The “16-inch” nomenclature is misleading. It refers to the width of the bore, the internal sleeve within the barrel. The guns are 67 feet long—by no means petite.) Upon isolating and cracking open the system to troubleshoot the problem, the gunner’s mates discovered the seals were of World War II vintage and made of leather. Leather rots. Designing and fabricating new seals from rubber—in the dead of night, naturally—was great fun, and not time-consuming at all. Trust me.

And that leaves aside the hazards of operating old guns, ammunition handling machinery, and ordnance. Some flaw in the system brought about the 1989 Iowa turret explosion that felled 47 gunners in our sister ship—and nearly gave my wife a heart attack when a TV station in our homeport of Norfolk announced on the air that “a U.S. Navy battleship” had “blown up” in the Atlantic that day. Iowa and Wisconsin were both underway in the same general vicinity at the time, and both for gunnery practice. Investigators never fully solved the mystery of what went wrong on board Iowa.

Age, in short, counts. Try leaving your car in the driveway for a few years with no maintenance, and then imagine the bill from your mechanic to put it back in driving condition. The odometer will remain low, but your wallet will be significantly lighter. It will take far more than the obvious things like fresh fuel, lubricating oil, and water to get your ride back on the road. Seals and insulation will have dry-rotted, paint will have faded or peeled off, rust will have encroached, and on and on. Other problems will lurk undetected.

And that’s in a simple contraption like an automobile. The potential for hidden mechanical woes is an order of magnitude greater in a warship, with its scale and complexity. We managed, and so did the crews of our sister battleships. But those were difficult ships to run—awful at times.

Next let’s turn to the human component of ships like Wisconsin. Admiral Bradley Fiske points out that the skill and élan of a weapon’s user determines how great a percentage of its theoretical combat potential commanders can wring out of the weapon. A skillful crew that gets lots of practice at sea might approach 100 percent—think of Captain Jack Aubrey making his gun crews in HMS Surprise repeat the process of loading, sighting, and discharging their cannon till they achieve a satisfactory rate of fire. Practice makes perfect.

The reciprocal: inexperience kills. If you could pit Surprise coming out of a long shipyard refit against Surprise returning from a long sea voyage, there’s little doubt who would prevail—even though the ship and crew were identical. An untried or less-than-proficient crew devalues even the finest weapon system. Fiske proffers the example of the War of 1812 battle matching the frigate USS Chesapeake against HMS Shannon, a man-of-war almost precisely Chesapeake’s peer in material and manpower terms. For him that sea fight constitutes a parable:

“These two ships were almost identical in size and in the number and kinds of guns, and in the number of officers and crew, and the battle was fought on June 1, 1813, in Massachusetts Bay, under circumstances of weather and other conditions that gave no advantage to either. If material and numbers of personnel were the only factors in the fight, the fight would have continued very long and ended in a draw. Did these things occur? No, the Chesapeake was captured in a little less than fifteen minutes after the first gun was fired, and nearly half her crew were killed or wounded!”

The finest implement is no better than its user, and Shannon commanded brutal superiority in the realms of seamanship and tactical prowess. Never underestimate the human factor. It’s the wellspring of battle efficiency and effectiveness. Battleship sailors liked to tell visitors they were handpicked for duty on board (and of course I was), but the rest of my shipmates seemed to come from the standard cross-section of races, creeds, and colors that comprises the U.S. Navy’s recruiting demographic. We did well, and so did our fellow battleship crews, mainly because we worked hard and honed the human factor.

Working hard wasn’t entirely by choice, mind you. It’s inevitable when you operate machinery with half the manpower its designers envisioned. Some 3,000 officers and sailors handled Wisconsin during World War II, under 1,600 in the 1980s. Automation helped reduce the workload, as did such modifications as removing four of ten secondary gun mounts. Nevertheless—especially in the engineering department—there was only so much automation could do. Designed in the 1930s, the plant was designed for manual operation, with sailors opening and shutting valves, starting and stopping pumps, and the like. It remained largely old-school into the 1980s.

This took its toll. For instance, engineers generally went into “port and starboard” duty when operating boilers and generators at anchor or pierside. Port and starboard means half the crew remains on board at all times, and the other half gets to go home after the workday. (When “shore power” was available things were better. To go on shore power, electricians plug massive cables into receptacles on the ship. Vital services run on electricity supplied from the local power grid.) Being away half the time while in port—and then putting to sea on an extended cruise, and being gone all the time—endeared steam engineers to their families.

Another peculiarity of battleship duty was the older demographics you encountered. The Iowas lay inert for over two decades before the Reagan administration summoned USS New Jersey back to the fleet in the early 1980s, beginning the cycle of reactivations. (New Jersey served briefly on the gun line off Vietnam.) Think about what such a long hiatus does to materiel and human capital. Big guns were no longer in service after the 1950s, our ammunition dated from the 1930s and 1940s, analog fire-control computers had given way to digital computers, and so forth. Our technology was excellent but dated.

And no one in uniform could school us on it. No one wastes time training to operate or overhaul ships that are no longer around. Skills start going stale instantly once a ship class retires from the fleet. Specialists age out of the service over time. To make up for the brain drain, the navy leadership recruited battleship sailors and technical experts from the World War II and especially Korean War eras to help us newcomers master the bygone generation of technology we were grappling with. Veterans taught the teachers.

Which brings us to the historical character of battleship service. These were ships with a past, and those oldtimers constituted a direct link to it. Many of them were accomplished storytellers as well as teachers. Interacting with them made it clear we were part of history, not just functionaries doing a job.

That sense of being part of something larger and older stems in part from the nature of the sea. Admiral Jim Stavridis observes that while the oceans and seas are vast in horizontal, geographical space, there’s also a vertical dimension to seafaring. It undulates back in time. When you walk out on deck, he notes, “you are seeing the same view, the same endless ocean that Alexander the Great saw as he sailed the eastern Mediterranean . . . and that Halsey saw as he lashed his Fast Carrier Task Force into combat in the western Pacific.”

Proclaims Admiral Stavridis, “the sea is one.” Historic ships amplify the effect. Imagine getting to actually take one of Admiral “Bull” Halsey’s fighting ships to sea, and into action against a new foe. That’s precisely what we did in Wisconsin, which reported to Halsey’s Third Fleet at Ulithi Atoll in late 1944, and which we took to the Persian Gulf in 1990. Historic ships, then, are artifacts that connect their crews to past events. They accumulate long traditions, bequeathed from generation to generation through stories and artifacts.

Present-day crews see themselves as keepers of that tradition, and as obligated to carry it on. I can literally say you’re reading these words because my engineering shipmates found a box of old engineering logs from the 1950s in our departmental office or “log room” on the eve of recommissioning, and we spent an evening poring over what our forebears spent their time doing in the same machinery spaces where we toiled. (It wasn’t much different.)

That concrete link to the past started a process that eventually launched me into studying diplomatic history and strategy. Such is the power of history, transmitted through the medium of inanimate objects, through reading, and by word of mouth. One hopes the U.S. Navy will grow younger in the coming years and decades as it adds newfangled platforms and sheds tired ones. Still, a youthful fleet will provide fewer opportunities to acculturate through vintage ships. All the more reason for us oldtimers to view ourselves as stewards of maritime history—and make every effort to pass it down to the next generation.

Spinning yarns about the sea, then, is more than an idle pastime. Stories build and preserve tradition. Let’s learn our history—and be avid storytellers.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and author of “Visualize Chinese Sea Power,” in the current issue of the Naval Institute Proceedings. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Flickr