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At the start of the Second World War the Americans, British, Germans, Japanese and Soviets all had plans for a new generation of ‘super battleships’, none of which were ever completed. This book looks at the design process behind each of these designs, and the eventual fate of the ships involved.
After a brief explanation of standard battleship design processes we move onto the designs themselves. Each nation had a different approach to battleship design and that shows here.
We start with the American Montana class battleships, which would have been a return to the slower more heavily armed and armoured style of US battleships before the Iowa class. This was the preference of the US Navy’s battleship designers for the balance between firepower, armour and speed, and a clear demonstration of why one shouldn’t always give a particular weapon’s community exactly what they want – in this case the Montana class ships were being designed for the sort of stand up slogging match between battleships that hardly ever happened during the Second World War. Their slower speed would have made them of limited use with the fast carrier force, so their main role would probably have been shore bombardment.
The British Lion class ships are the smallest of the types examined here, and wouldn’t have been that much larger than the King George V class (50 feet longer, and as designed around 5,000 tons heavier than the King George Vs, with the gap closing as wartime additions added weight to the earlier ships).
For genuinely massive ‘super-battleships’ we have to turn to Germany and Japan. Although the Germans started with the H-39 class, which would have been enlarged versions of the Bismarck class, they soon moved on to ever larger designs, with the 78,000 ton H-41 class the most likely to have been built after a German victory, and a series of design studies for massive ships, peaking with the 139,264 ton H-44!
Sadly very little is known about the Japanese A-150 class, as the plans were all destroyed at the end of the war. It would have been the same displacement as the Yamato class but with even heavier 20.1in guns,
This isn’t an entirely theoretical study. Although work never began on the Montana class, all five were allocated hull numbers and shipyards. The Japanese never began work on the two A-150 class ships they had planned. However the British laid down the first two Lion class ships, and after the war completed HMS Vanguard to a similar design (although with smaller guns). The Germans laid down the first two H-39 class ships. The Soviets began work on all four Sovetsky Soyuz class battleships.
The Second World War doomed all of these ships. At first the problem was that they would take so long to complete that none would be ready in time to be useful. However as the work went on it became clear that the day of the battleship had passed. This becomes obvious in the passage of counter-factual history at the end of the book that imagines a clash between the Montana and A-150, and which requires immense luck for the Japanese to get anywhere near the American fleet, with extremely bad weather to ground the US carrier aircraft and simple luck to get past the cordon of US submarines watching her port…
We finish with a brief comparison of the five designs, although as none were ever completed this by its nature is somewhat speculative. As one would expect the book is well illustrated, although again as none of these ships were actually built most photographs are of the previous generation, or models of the new ships (the Sovetsky Soyuz is the only exception, and we get two pictures of her incomplete hull).
Although none of these ships were ever built, they are still of interest as the last and most powerful generation of battleships to come close to being built, and this is a good study of these five powerful designs.
Chapters
Battleship Design Practices
- Protection
- Propulsion
- Firepower
The Super-Battleship Classes
- The United States Navy – the Montana-class
- The Royal Navy – the Lion-class
- The Kriegsmarine – the H-class
- The Imperial Japanese Navy – Design A-150
- The Soviet Navy – the Sovetsky Soyuz-class
Author: Mark Stille
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 48
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2022