Bismarck vs. Yamato

I have to agree. A couple of examples for anyone (he probably won't bother) who still has doubts.
Battle of Guilford Court House - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
and
Battle of New Orleans - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
They won one and lost one but an American army of the time could never have done as well in their position.

Concur completly.

 

I don't agree with Dahlhorse, except on one point; the British were kicked out of the American colonies. BTW, Dahlhorse was referencing the American Revolution, so let's stick to events during that period. That eliminates the Battle of New Orleans

The British weren't sissies, and they did fight hard to hang on. They did not fight "smart"; if they had they might have won.

The Americans won several battles, and by 1780, man for man, the American Regular Army was the equal of the British Army.

American victories during the Revolution included the following;

Concord, 1775
Fort Ticonderoga, 1775
Siege of Boston, 1776
Battle of Trenton, 1776
Battle of Princeton, 1777
Battle of Ridgefield, 1777
Battle of Bennington, 1777
Battle of Saratoga, 1777
Stony Point, 1779
King's Mountain, 1780
Battle of Cowpens, 1781
Battle of Eutaw Springs, 1781
Yorktown, 1781

The Battles of Bunker Hill and Guilford Courthouse were, at best, draws and each cost the British so dearly that several contemporary observers remarked that a few more such "victories" would finish the British Army.

In my opinion, the Americans generally had better field leadership in men like Benedict Arnold, Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, and Danial Morgan, but the Real problem for the British was they had no coordinated plan for achieving victory.

 

Personaly I think that the Yamato would sink the Bismarck as it had many times the armor and 1 more gun and her's were also a lot bigger caliber then the bismarck also the IJN could send out a few carrier based biplane scouts

 

You should be aware that the Yamato's armor design was flawed in that the structure supporting the armor was not strong enough, nor was it attached to the internal structure of the vessel strongly enough, to prevent shock and damage being transmitted to the main hull girder when the armor was hit by projectiles. When the Yamato was torpedoed by an American submarine in December, 1943, this flaw was discovered, but the repairs to correct it were so extensive that they were never completed.

The Yamato's main guns were 18.1 inch while the Bismarck's main guns were only 15 inch, so the Yamato has an advantage there. But whether or not the Yamato would even be able to hit the Bismarck is questionable. The Yamato was a notoriously poor gunnery ship with a gunnery crew that was, at best, ill-trained and inexperienced. Furthermore, the Yamato's Fire Control system was less sophisticated than that of the Bismarck with no RPC (Bismarck had only partial RPC). Both ships had rudimentary FC radar from mid-war on, but neither the Japanese nor the Germans had much confidence in radar-controlled FC, and neither crew was well trained in it's use. Much would depend on which ship had the better of the existing visibility, but it's entirely possible that neither ship would be able to hit the other with any consistency.

In a one-on-one battleship duel, neither ship would have carrier-based aircraft support. The Yamato seldom operated in close coordination with Japanese carriers. However, both ships carried their own aircraft for the purpose of reconnaisance and spotting shell splashes, so both ships would likely to be able to put up aircraft.

Because few battleships during WW II fought other battleships
we don't have much emperical data on which to base models of one-on-one battleship battles. Paper comparisons of specifications are almost useless and even simulations which can be run over and over are more or less worthless because we have so little detailed data regarding the design and construction of the Yamato and the Bismarck and because we have little information on how projectiles and heavy armor interact with each other.

The best that can be said is that either ship could win, it would mostly be a matter of random luck.

 

To that i must say i agree completely with it being random chance I suppose it would be decided by who got the first hit and where on the enemy the shell struck but if the Bismark and the Yamato were involved in a 1on1 naval battle I think (after close study of both ships design and flaws) that the more versitile Bismark might come out the winner however if the Yamato had better trained gunners they might win

 

As an historical note, Bismarck was in two surface naval actions before being sunk. In both she was on target obtaining straddles before the British did. In the second action the Rodney was lucky not to have been hit as Bismarck obtained at least two straddle salvos on her before her main director position was hit ending any real possibility of Bismarck getting further hits on her opponets.

I would argue that Yamato would find herself in trouble pretty quickly given the much lower efficency of her fire control system.

 

the most desperate manuver of war at sea a suicidal charge at the enemy followed by a torpedo attack or a kamikizi attack by ramming the Bismarck with the Yamato

 

Not likely to happen. The Bismarck was at least 3-4 knots faster than the Yamato.

 

Hmmm. Straddles without hits don't produce target damage. They do, however, indicate that Bismarck may have had dispersion issues. Yamato (assuming her suspect armor holds up) has the advantage in this matchup, of being able to withstand far more hits by the Bismarck than the Bismarck can absorb from the Yamato. So the putative gunnery advantage of Bismarck may be nullified. Yamato claims to have hit a "cruiser" (actually an American destroyer) at Samar with her 6" secondaries at about 10,000 yards; if true, it means Yamato wasn't a complete bust as a gunnery ship.

As I said earlier, much depends on the visibility conditions and which ship has the better visibility situation. Frankly, neither ship, in my opinion, was particularly effective as a battleship.

 

true send in the Iowa classes

 

Hi DA. For the most part I do agree but on rare occasions it can create some damage. Of course this sort of thing is more common with a 500 or 1000lb bomb dropped from an aircraft. Personally, I believe it was a 5" shell from Kalinin Bay who's near miss cooked off the Torpedoes that sunk HIJNS Suzuya at Samar

 

Straddles don't normally produce damage to an armored ship unless the shell lands near enough to spray the superstructure with splinters and even then the damage is usually superficial, so yes it's possible but very unlikely. Continually achieving straddles, but failing to get a solid hit may indicate a dispersion problem (i.e. your salvo patterns are too loose, the shells landing over too wide an area). It's a possibility for the Bismarck although I've never heard any authority claim that. Bismarck did suffer, like many other German warships in WW II, from poor fuse performance in her shells at Denmark Straits.

At Samar, several US naval officers claimed that the Japanese cruisers would have achieved far more hits had their patterns not been grouped so tightly, the opposite of dispersion problems. I've heard more than once source claim the Kalinin Bay sank the Suzuya with a 5" hit in, or very near, her torpedo tubes. It would be an interesting commentary on the Type 93 torpedo if it could be proved.

 

But some would argue the Bismark's was even more so. Especially against a ship like Yamato.

I don't think she fired her guns enough to be notoriously good, poor, or mediocre. She apparently got straddles in her first salvos off Samar.

As for her fire control she had the longest baseline by far and optics that were probably as good or better than Bismark.

Several Japanese cruisers were lost due to taking damage near their torpedo tubes. You really don't want to have pure Oxygen near a source of fuel and a fire at the same time.

 

This really doesn't make much as difference as many people seem to think. The accuracy of any optical rangefinder can be determined by the formula:

e = 58.2R^2/BM

where:

e = the error in yards
R = range in thousands of yards
B = Base of the rangefinder in yards
M = the magnifying power of the optics.

Range being a square function dominates the equation overwhelming the other factors. By the time you reach 20,000 yards the error is measurable in hundreds of yards usually. This is about 10 to 100 times worse than a good radar set. Hence the switch to radar for rangefinding.

Feel free to play with the formula. As a note, most rangefinders are around 20x for magnification.

Other serious factors here are:

The vision quality of the operator, particularly depth perception and stereoscopic vision. A poor operator equals a poor range estimate.
Pupillary distance has to be compensated for on the insturment. Many rangefinders have fixed or uncalibrated adjustable eye pieces. If these are set wrong by as little as a few millimeters the readings will be off.
The way in which the insturment is marked off. This effects operator accuracy.
The calibration of the insturment. Here what needs to be known is how often the insturment is calibrated and the accuracy of that calibration. One critical item in calibration is knowing exactly where the ship is in relation to the calibration marks or targets on a range. If this is off the insturment will be off.

 

Yes, some people would argue anything about the Bismarck, but they have trouble convincing people. There's no real evidence Bismarck's armor was flawed, at least not in the same way as the Yamato's was. The Japanese KNEW beyond a shadow of a doubt that, if hit hard enough in particular places, Yamato's armor would react in ways that were not good for the ship's structure because they had seen it when she was torpedoed. Bismarck's armor flaws were all theoretical.

That's the theory. But that's not what her crew claims. The claim is made that Yamato got HITS with her first salvo at Samar. Big difference there.

And Yamato did fire her guns enough to convince Yamamoto that she wasn't good enough to be his flagship in early 1942. She went back to the firing range for more practice. You can ake all the excuses you want for Yamato, she didn't have a reputation in the IJN for crack gunnery.

So what? Optics are only a small part of any FC system and often not even the most important part. What about her stable verticals? What about deflection? What about transmitting the data to the guns? All of that matters, and matters a lot. What matters even more than the hardware is the crew's ability and their confidence in their equipment. neither the Bismarck's, nor the Yamato's gunnery crews were all that well trained and it's anybody's guess which ship would be able to hit the other first.

 

Bismarks armor scheme was such that a hit almost anywhere was going to initiate the fuze of a BB caliber AP round. At least in theory. IE her armor scheme was basically a WWI armor scheme. Yamato's flaw showed up if she were hit by a torpedo and it was corrected at least to some extent.

As far as the quality of her shooting no it's not.

So at one point in time she wasn't shooting well. That doesn't mean she wasn't after the additional practice.

I never claimed she had.

And how does this compare to Bismark? I don't think either of them had stable verticles. The articles I've read on Japanese firecontrol seam to have been relativly positive about her fire control.

 

Well, that IS something. What you are saying is that a shell hitting Bismarck's armor (assuming the fuse functioned as it should) would go off. Well, guess what? The same would be true of every other armored ship in the world. As for the antecedents of Bismarck's armor, yeah it were based on the armor schemes of WW I capital ships, so what? That doesn't make it ineffective, nor any worse than any modern capital ship. In fact some of the more modern schemes turned out to be worse than the older armor designs.

With regard to Yamato's armor defects, the problem was inherent in the way the armor was built into the ship. It did not matter if the impact was from a torpedo, an aerial bomb, or a shell, any one could potentially inflict serious damage on the ship even if the armor itself defeated the projectile. It's interesting to note that the Yamato's sister Musashi, when hit by aerial bombs at Sibuyan Sea was so badly shaken that her main FC director was put out of operation. Russell Spear writes in "A Glorious Way to Die" That Yamato's armor wasn't repaired after being torpedoed because in order to repair it, the ship would have to be redesigned, and rebuilt.

There's no proof Yamato either got straddles or hits at Samar; it's just a theory that some people have advanced to explain why hits were claimed when we know they didn't happen. A ship with a good gunnery crew knows when they are hitting and when they aren't. Obviously, Yamato's crew didn't.

Well, Yamato never seems to have shot well, yet you seem to want to make her into a crack gunnery ship. Perhaps you can cite an occasion when Yamato did shoot well? It certainly wasn't at Samar; the Heermann engaged Yamato and Nagato simultaneously at between 4,000 to 10,000 yards for about 40 minutes. The Heermann hit both Nagato and Yamato numerous times, yet wasn't touched by either ship.

You can't have it both ways. Either Yamato was a good gunnery ship, or she wasn't. Her record shows she never did well in gunnery exercises. In her only battle against surface ships, she claimed hits at a time when the record shows no US ships were hit. There is no other convincing evidence she managed to hit any other ships. That may be encouraging to you, but to me I'd say her record is highly suspect and, frankly, I wouldn't bet anything on her ability to hit a surface target. That's not saying she couldn't or wouldn't, just that I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

A stable vertical is a way of using gyroscopes to obtain an "artificial horizon" for the purpose of aiming the guns. There has to be some way of determining when the ship has rolled level in relation to the horizon, otherwise it's impossible to tell when the guns are pointing at the correct angle above the horizon. The stable vertical elements for both the Japanese and Germans were very rudimentary; they couldn't stay locked on to a target while maneuvering radically, for example.

Japanese fire control was not very advanced, but neither, for that matter, was German fire control. That doesn't mean they couldn't do quite well with it, but it was highly dependent on training, experience, natural aptitude, and variables like visibility, range, and....well, luck. The Japanese did not have RPC, lack of which tends to introduce a lot of human error into the process, and puts a premium on training and experience. The Bismarck did not have full RPC either, I understand they could transmit range directly to the guns but I think that is only optical range, not radar range. What I am saying is that the crew was at least as important as the hardware and for non-RPC FC systems, even more so.

It might help if you would post some of the references from those articles you mention on the Yamato's FC system, I'd be interested in reading them, especially the positive ones.

 

Here's the Japanese fire control system laid out in detail:

http://www.fischer-tropsch.org/prim...Reports/USNTMJ-200F-0023-0085 Report O-31.pdf

 

You are either missing or ignoring my point. Everyone but Germans when they built WWII BBs used all or nothing armor. The idea was that if an AP shell hit an unarmored area there wouldn't be sufficient metal to initiate the fuze. With the weight save from not armoring portions of the ship you put thicker armor over the vitals. The result of this is that Yamato can penetrate Bismarks belt at ranges well over 30,000 yards and her deck down to around 20,000 yards. Meaning no immune zone at all.

I can believe that how the blow was delivered didn't matter but the force of it would. Torpedoes tend to deliver pretty massive blows when they detonate. It's not clear to me that shells would be enough to cause the problems you suggest.

Yamato's observation plane apparently radioed back that they straddled and hit on the first salvo. White planes suffered a near miss and stradle on the first salvo fired at her. This is consistent except for the hit which can easily be explaned for mistaking smoke for a hit.

A good crew can make mistakes of this sort as readily as a poor one. Perhaps even more so as they'll be putting rounds closer to their opponents where such mistakes are easier to make.

No I don't. You keep trying to put words in my mouth. I've simly said that there is not enough evidence to call her a poor gunnery ship for her entire life. There is a tremendous difference.

This anecdote by itself proves little. First round straddles at the ranges Yamato opened using optical fire control are a good indicator. Yamato is credited with a number of hits off Samar how it affects ones rating of her gunnery depends on quite a few factors many subjective.

Why not. We are talking about a period of several years here.

Never? Do you have referances to those records for all her exercisses?

I've been told by others whose knowledge in the area I trust that there is. I'll see what I can find

Which implies that when you are comparing them there isn't much of a difference.

Which again means it's almost a wash.

OK now we have at least a minor difference.

I'll agree with that. Although I'll also point out that most times I've seen these discussion people tend to talk more about the ship than the crew. Perhaps because crew tend to chance so much over time and it also gets into areas of natioanl pride very quickly.

I believe there are a couple at the navweapons site and other linked there. Will look them up when I get a chance.