For most of the 20th century, battleships were the epitome of naval dominance—gargantuan, heavy-walled, and boasting enormous guns. They were meant to dominate the seas. And yet, history shows these steel giants were not invulnerable. Numerous ones dramatically met their demise, either on intense battlefields or by gruesome accidents. Looking out over the decades of warship history, the following are the seven greatest reasons that battleships sank, starting with the lesser common causes and working up to the most absolute.
7. Tactical Errors and the Hazards of Night Fighting
Not every sinking had been the work of the enemy. Human error was equally deadly at times. The fateful night action off Guadalcanal in November 1942 is one example. Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan led a composite cruiser-destroyer task force in a night assault against a Japanese bombardment group.
Without the stability of the flagship radar, the fleet had to resort to visual spotting and signal lights. In the chaos, orders were confused, torpedo shots overshot the target, and even friendly fire hit a ship. Ships collided with one another, and the coordinated attack, as planned, was now a free-for-all. The “fog of war” could strip away the battlewagon’s advantage in a matter of minutes.
6. The Age of Air Power
The invention of aircraft completely revolutionized naval warfare. Bombing planes and carrier planes by the 1940s could bomb hundreds of miles away and make battleships the target number one. Dreadnoughts like Bismarck, Arizona, and Yamato all sank worthily at the mercy of the air.
The Pearl Harbor attack is, to this day, one of the strongest indications that air power had shifted the balance. Some battleships were sunk or retired from service in a few minutes, showing that even the largest ship was no longer invulnerable to coordinated aerial attacks. Planes did not simply add another weapon—planes revolutionized naval warfare as a whole.
5. Mines: Silent Killers Below the Surface
Mines were an inexpensive but frightfully deadly tool. Hard to locate and fast to use, they would shred even the most resilient armor hull. Battleships have been sunk in so-called safe seas. Russia’s battleship Petropavlovsk and Britain’s HMS Audacious were sunk when they struck buried mines. Unlike torpedoes or shells, mines were indiscriminate. They are hit by surprise, sometimes fatally, and not uncommonly, unexpectedly. For crews of ships, the discovery was too late—shipwrecked.
4. Disaster from Within
Not all disasters had their cause outside. Sometimes the threat was internal. Poor storage of ammunition, accidental fires, or unstable ammunition occasionally led to ruinous explosions. Britain’s HMS Bulwark and Japan’s battleship Mikasa were just a few of the ships that met this fate. At other times, battle damage did cause explosions. Sometimes it was simply bad luck or sloppy procedure. When a magazine in a battleship blew, salvage was out of the question—the damage was instantaneous and total.
3. Shellfire: The Timeless Killer
During the early 20th century, slugging battleships were built, the spewing of salvos until sunk. Horrific shellfire annihilated hundreds, especially during World War I. The Russian Oslyabya and British battlecruiser Hood are legendary for sinking due to direct hits. As armor grew thicker, it required more energy to submerge a battleship all the way through firepower. Yet a fortuitous magazine or burst section hit could kill. As often as not, shells pounded a ship that was to be sunk by torpedo.
2. Torpedoes: The Battleship’s Arch-Nemesis
No armament made battleship destiny more probable than the torpedo. Fired from submarines, aircraft, or fast surface vessels, torpedoes bypassed heavy armor by hitting below the waterline. A single or double blow could submerge a ship or destroy a ship’s spine. Japanese battleship Hiei, for instance, was completed after an evening engagement when torpedoes hit their mark. Accurately and with annihilating power, torpedoes were the battleship’s biggest weakness.
1. Evolution of Technology and Strategy
In the end, it was not a weapon that sent the era afloat in battleships under, but the relentless march of technology. Radar, subs, and most importantly, air carriers revolutionized naval warfare. Fleets that clung to tradition soon had their battleships obsolete. Some were losses, like Guadalcanal, due to a failure to adopt new systems completely. Others never even got a chance at combat—retired as obsolescent or scrapped. The age of the battleships did not end with one great, climactic fight, but in a series which made them out of date and ultimately relics of the past.
Free of myth, the reasons why battleships fell to torpedoes and bombs, and then to mines and gunfire, and even to horrific accidents. Aggregated, though, these losses are part of an overarching history: the seas forgive not, and no warship, no matter how powerful, can halt the tide of technology for long.