For almost the whole of the 20th century, battleships stood for navy dominance—hulking gun emplacements, thick-metal skin, roving fortresses with promises of unlimited domination of the oceans. But by World War II, they were being eclipsed, their thundering broadsides outpaced by plane speed and the dark specter of submarines. To understand why battleships went out of fashion teaches us something greater than nostalgia; it’s a lesson in the manner in which technology, strategy, and industrial needs direct military power.
Building a battleship was never an engineering problem. For America, in World War II, the United States waged a miraculous shipbuilding campaign, building from destroyers to fleet carriers. It was with unmatched industrial power that limitations were inevitable.
Production of the great armor plating, heavy naval guns, and sophisticated machinery needed specialized plants, which were, with some exceptions, on the East Coast. Transporting these behemoth components to West Coast shipyards depended on scarce rail space and time and constituted a chronic logistics logjam.
Even around-the-clock activity couldn’t fully overcome these constraints—complex systems like radar, fire control, and anti-aircraft armament often slowed construction, sometimes stretching build times rather than diminishing them.
Incompletion battleships are a story of changing priorities and hard decisions. Navies started hulls that never would sail. In the US, the Montana class, the largest and most heavily armed battleships in historywase disposed of as carriers, destroyers, and amphibious ships to be used for the final assault on Japan were prioritized.
Even the last two Iowa-class ships, Illinois and Kentucky, hadn’t yet been built and were ultimately scrapped or used as spares, to be recycled later. Other nations were no better: Germany’s H-39 class, to be a bigger Bismarck, never left the slipways, and the Soviet Kronshtadt and Sovietsky Soyuz schemes were also dropped, leaving incomplete hulls behind. Elsewhere, here are these examples to show that only when steel, energy, and willpower exist will a blueprint become a battleship.
For battleships that did make it to the sea, cost justification was always in doubt. Fighters like Bismarck, Iowa, and Yamato were highly respected but lowly influential. Bismarck’s destruction of HMS Hood entered into myth, perhaps even enhanced by fortune. Yamato, the largest battleship in the world, had but a single documented kill before being put out to pasture by waves of planes.
Iowa, technologically advanced, spent the majority of its time firing shore bombardments or serving as a deterrent, never firing a conventional ship-to-ship battle regularly. Submarines and carriers were the game-stoppers, whose results no battleship could even approach, at the end of the era.
The battleship’s downfall was overseen as much by strategy as by technology. The hitherto unchallengeable Royal Navy lagged behind America in numbers and technology. Treaties like the 1921 Washington Naval Treaty made Britain scrap ships and agree to parity, interservice rivalry, and peacetime finances, further limiting naval expansion. The surprise to psychology and strategy of losing Repulse and Prince of Wales to Japanese planes in 1941 meant that aerial and submarine peril now dominated the seas.
Naval planners like Julian Corbett had always assumed it as axiomatic that British power rested on an equilibrated naval policy: mastery of sea communications and smashing of peripheral rather than costly head-on battles. Experience proved, however, that even the best strategy can be undone by novel technology and the unplanned necessities of total war.
The history of battleship days remains relevant to this day. The war planners must balance the allure of the flashy hardware with the requirements of the manufacturing, logistics, and evolving threats. The battleships demonstrate that no weapon is so powerful that it cannot become obsolete. The real sea power does not come from steel and guns but from responsiveness, imagination, and learning from history.