RN Conte di Cavour - Rebuilt Only to See Little Action 

I really hope this is a joke.

@@invadegreece9281 Why is that. I'm just stating the truth. None of the four Iowas saw major action. Missouri and Wisconsin saw no naval action of any form, while Iowa and New jersey........technically served in Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf, but only as carrier escorts in the former engagement and chasing a decoy force while seeing no combat in the latter. Their only extent of action against enemy ships was when Iowa and new Jersey went convoy hunting, during which Iowa sank the training cruiser Katori while New Jersey helped to sink the destroyer Mailkaze and the armed trawler Shonan Maru, and only Iowa scored hits with her main guns. They almost exclusively saw shore bombardment and carrier escorting. Almost all the US standards only saw shore bombardment and convoy escorting, unless you count shooting at a stationary, immobile, refloated wreck of a light battleship in the case of USS Nevada. Only Mississippi and Maryland got to fire their guns at an enemy battleship in a legitimate naval battle, and they did nothing of note, being carried by the heavily modernized and reconstructed USS Tennessee, California, and West Virginia. Tirpitz only fired her main guns in anger when bombarding allied mines on one occasion, and it was all air attacks from there, without ever seeing a single hostile enemy warship. Only the Japanese battleline, Russian black sea and Baltic fleets, a few German pre dreadnoughts, five US battleships, and two Chinese modernized iron clads saw any naval combat. Other than that, it was all peacetime patrol and escorting duties, with the actional shore bombardment here and there. The only combat the four Ises saw were as carrier escorts at Cape Engano, never coming into contact with an enemy battleship throughout their 30 year service Howe only saw a rare shore bombardment mission once in a blue moon, while reports indicate Anson never fired her guns in anger. Dreadnought never fired her guns in anger, and somewhat hilariously her only kill came when she sank the German navy submarine U-17 by ramming it. Musashi only saw action on two occasions, playing a minor role in the battle of the Philippine Sea, and being sunk by 17 bombs and 19-20 torpedoes at Leyte Gulf, never seeing the fleet of US standards she was designed to face.

@@metaknight115 damn you lack braincells, Mfw the standard BB line was directly responsible for deleting Fuso and Yamashiro. Iowa and New Jersey assisted in protecting the carrier fleet. Musashi actually occasionally engaged in combat. The only “right” thing you have there is Tirpitz being most ineffective

Yeah but that wasn’t real communism!!:) .. well said sir.

@@metaknight115 To add onto this, in the case of Iowa and New Jersey they were actively detrimental to their own side at Truk; had they not been there, the last air attack against the already-damaged Japanese ships would not have been called off, resulting in Katori and Maikaze being sunk faster and Nowaki never managing to get away. I have no idea why the Iowas aren’t called out for this fuckup all the time. Yamato at Samar gets criticized all the time for running from a supposedly inferior enemy (that had air superiority), but even discounting the hits on Johnston and the damage to White Plains she objectively performed better against Taffy 3 than Iowa and New Jersey did against the Japanese forces at Truk (albeit that’s a very low bar): she at least didn’t actively benefit the enemy force by being there, while the Iowas at Truk did.

The best improvement the British could have done would be to use the then experimental but understood small tube boilers which would have seen the QE class hit 28 kts even without any changes to the hull

Duilio class*

Scrapped to keep her out of the hands of the Soviets. A fate her sister suffered, ultimately running into a mine in the Black Sea in the 1950's.

Would have more than likely been scrapped anyway as it would have been very unlikely post war Italy would have spent the money necessary to keep them running or mothballed. Would have been nice to keep one Littorio class as a museum ship but museum ships just weren't a thing then. Even as a museum ship money would still be an issue.

​@@wilsonj4705 there were originally plans to keep the Littorios in service, but the Cavours would have been scrapped (in Cesare case sold to the USSR) the Duilios were kept in active service as flagships until the late 1950s and than scrapped in 1960s

Still not as wasteful as all the WWII-gen battleships BUILT for a war they weren’t designed for.

Correct - yet lacking radar was not due to lack of research. In the 20s the Regia had some of the best scientist working at the problem, but priority was the lowest possible as radar was seen as totally useless, as compared to optical spotting and more urgent work on 2-way modern HF radios. Only after the trend was made obvious by British and German devices and tactics the Navy restarted serious work on the issue, but with only 12 Gufo sets available in 1943, too little and too late. So it was not lack of industrial or research capability, the Regia did not _want_ the radar (or to pay for it, a risky and expensive development) and, if possible, this is even worse. Same goes for guns salvos dispersion: the problem was well known and related to munition quality (or lack thereof) not to any problem with the guns themselves. The Navy just did not want to pay for more precise (but much, much more expensive) shells and charges.

@@sandrodunatov485 You’re right on the radar, but the dispersion issues never actually existed. Iachiano made that up during interrogations to cover his own ass and the WAllied historians believed him (in spite of him being the enemy) for no reason, ignoring counter evidence.

Ok no. Italian tanks were shit, but the ships were just as good as any contemporary (better than most in the case of the Duca degli Abruzzi class, which I would regard as slightly inferior to the Edinburgh subclass of the Town Class) and the planes ranged from a few terrible (Ba.88, poor plane doomed to suck) to some of the best the Axis had

Littorio class* And Raimondo Montecuccoli (light cruiser) managed a similar range to Warspite and Scharnhorst

@@lolloblue9646 But didn´t hit anything.