It's interesting that the O-class battlecruiser is also an evolution of a Panzerschiff concept just like Scharnhorst and Gneissenau were, being now a derivative of the P-class compared to the D-class that lead to the Sisters. As for the heavier armor on the Scharnhorst sisters, they were a response to Dunkerque, and thus would need armor expected to stand up against at least the French 13" gun on her. Although ironically Dunkerque herself had a greater immunity zone against the Scharnhorst's guns despite her much lighter armor than the Scharnhorst's had against her 13" quads. And then the up-armored Strassbourg in response to the two.
The belt difference between Bismarck and Scharnhorst is a misprint. They were the same. Scharnhorst also had much thinner upper belt, and slightly thinner horisontal armor and turret armor. The 11-inch guns had some advantages; long range, very good penetration for the size, very accurate, high ROF and less impact on the ship itself. The surviving crew from Glorious said that even the first salvo from "the twins", fired from about 26-27,000 meters, was frightening close. It was the third salvo from Scharnhorst that hit first at a range of around 25-26,000 - shared longest range hit in WW2 together with Warspite vs. Italian battleship Giulio Cesare. Ironically enough, the two longest range hits were scored from the smallest BB gun of the war, and one of the oldest.
@Caeric wrong...a renown [aka repair/refit] couldn't stand up to her 1v1 let alone renown meeting the twins together, renown was great on paper in 1929...not 1935
@@ywe3 Maybe you should look up the action around Lofoten, Norway, she scored damaging hits on Gneissenau whilst the two sisters failed to damage Renown.. the only damage Renown suffered was due to rough seas. Secondly, even in a dead calm Renown could choose to safely maintain range and inflict far more damage through the decks and superstructure of either of the two could hope to achive through her 5" deck in comparison at that range
@@Arthion 1. Scharnhorst could range as far as either of the refits [27000 yds is not short] 2. The ships could ABSOLUTELY stand toe to toe with the renown (clearly the hit scored wasn't deadly [or repeatable]). 3. The twins RARELY left port separated they almost always worked in tandem so it's 1 renown vs 2 sharnhorsts before 1942 after its a much more fair fight. 18x11in guns beats 6 15in
@@Arthion also when looking at any of the actions around Norway one must include the weather as a factor almost always in rough seas the twins have a speed and stability advantage
@@CorePathway Seriously, it's worse than heavy cruiser. Imagine if Alaska survived as a museum ship, "come see Battlecruiser Alaska!" Sounds a hell of a lot better than "come see Large Cruiser Alaska"
@@SRR-5657 SuperHeavy Cruiser or just SuperCruiser. Those 12” guns with heavy shells and high ROF were superior to WW1 era 14” guns, she’ll always be a BattleCruiser to me. And it was 30,000 tons, ferchrissake!
That is an emotional investiture in a designation that is not substantiated the United States Navy did not consider the Alaska's to be battle Cruisers so in the story they're not they're large Cruisers that mounted 12-inch guns that's about it the battle cruiser died in conceptual Effectiveness after the first world war and HMS Hood was proof that the battle cruiser in the end was an incorrectly utilized concept
11:57 yeah the British had Renown, Repulse and Hood which arguably despite being old ships are more than adequate for the job of cruiser killing as that was what they were designed to do
An in principle had HMS Hood been modernized she would have been more effective but as she was she was merely an outdated obsolete World War 1 ERA battlecruiser with detrimental armor that was highly susceptible to plunging fire and was not adequately armored against her own caliber gun
22:25 If you struggle to determine the italian BBs calibre in inches, you can simply use metric and say that they have a calibre of either 320 mm or 32 cm.
Sadly Americans are not ever going to change their strange measurements, so I think it's futile to suggest they think the same way as ever other country in the world.
@@Dave_Sisson Well, the british, who started this whole measurement mess, did also switch to metric (in the 70s i think). But i have recognized, that the british also switch back to imperial whenever they talk about gun calibres.
The point of Scharnhorst's heavy armor was that she could take damage on a commerce raiding mission and and not be mission killed by cruisers or heavier escorts
Pretty sure Drachinifel brought up that despite having fewer guns, Renown and Repulse had rather accurate gunnery comparable to their battleship counterparts
Yes. Also, DoY was firing six gun salvos from her forward armament only at Scharnhorst during the high speed chase at the Battle of the North Cape. I think that having large numbers of guns becomes less important once gunfire comes under radar control.
I though Gneisenau's magazine explosion happened in dry dock where they were repairing the damage from the Channel Dash, so there was plenty of air for the blast to dissipate to. If the ship had been afloat it would have been destroyed.
Kronshtadt and Alaska have nearly the same armor thickness, same 9-9,1" belt, 3,5"-4" deck. I dunno if the internal protection and bulkheads were better, but frankly it's very much comparable to a large cruiser in protection. And Stalingrad also has less armor than Kronshtadt (7,1" belt 2+ 2,8" decks), although it's a fair bit faster.
But don't forget that Germans had different thinking what a Battlecruiser is. WW1 german battlecruisers was exactly the other way of british ones. British less armor for more speed. Germans less guns or smaller guns for more speed. In that sense Scharnhorst is a WW1-like battlecruiser. Scharnhorst class was heavily influenced by Ersatz Yorck-class WW1 battlecruiser design.
Regarding the question of whether the U.S. Navy should have kept the Alaska and Guam as active ships following the end of World War II as compared to the Des Moines or Iowas, I think a very crucial factor is crew size. Allied navies did not want to compete with the peacetime economy for labor after the war. USS Alaska had a crew of 1,517 and Iowa a crew of 2,788 while the Baltimore had a crew of 1,142. As Richard Worth summarized in Fleets of World War II, the Alaskas had the size of a battleship and the capabilities of a cruiser. I will grant that the Des Moines had a listed crew of 1,799, but I suspect they could have run the ship with fewer in peacetime conditions. I'm guessing, it would have used less fuel than the Alaskas and so been cheaper to run. Also as you mentioned regarding the Iowas, with only two Alaskas there would be no other ships from which to poach spare parts as compared to four Iowas and more than a dozen Baltimores. I recall seeing pictures of HMS Vanguard visiting foreign ports with several turrets discretely mothballed for lack of crew. Overall, a very interesting discussion! Thank you Ryan and Jack!
Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were fast battleships they were supposed to have 15 inch guns but Germany didn't have any 15 inch guns built when they were built. They were going to have 15 inch guns put in later and use the 11 inch guns on there p class cruisers
Ryan, do you think you could possibly try and restrain the childish insults? It makes an interesting topic somewhat tedious. Renown and Repulse did sterling service over two world wars spanning several decades with one crew suffering hundred of casualties and despite your opinion on the lack of accuracy because of the reduced firepower, the superb accuracy of these ships with the 15" 42 was common knowledge. There was a good reason the twins were under orders not to engage RN capital units. In the action at Lefoten, Gneissenau had a turret disabled, Scharnhorst lost her radar and if it hadn't been for storm damage to Renown's torpedo bulge, it's doubtful both would have managed to escape.
I think the Dunkuerke and Strasbourg were under armored ....Dunkuerke as built had a much thinner belt compared to her sister...Strasbourg was slighly better off. They were built to counter Panzer Schift not Scharnhorst
Tank enthusiasts have these same discussions regarding the juxtaposition of protection, mobility and firepower. It seems that the tank community is a lot less pedantic about the categories of light, medium and heavy tanks than you ship guys are when you argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin 😛
Scharnhorst would have been harder for the British to defeat at River Plate, but they were too range limited to be used as commerce raiders that far from Germany and would have been harder to logistically support.
It would be stopped from (non diesel) fuel exhaustion. If it had two tankers and fuel it would have been able to *out run* the cruisers especially if the Atlantic weather deteriorated. Getting home in good shape ought to have been a bigger priority for Langsdorff.
I suppose it would have definitely survived / won the battle, but it needs more reular refueling due to it's much shorter range, so operating it in the southern atlantic is not really a good option. But i doubt that the two british cruisers would have readily jumped into battle against this warship.
Well I dont the Scharnie wouldve been attacked quite aggressively by 3 cruisers the way they got after Spee, meaning I dont think Scharnie tales the damage that pushes her to a neutral port. But as someone else stated, Scharnie wouldnt do a mission like Spee due to the lack of range because of Spees Diesel engines
Consider that Captain Langsdorf got psyched out by the British, and was suckered into believing there was a swarm of enemy ships just off the coast, waiting to finish him off. I think almost no matter which German ship he had under him (maybe excepting Bismarck or Tirpitz) he would have done the same thing. There was only the one German ship, with no destroyers or other protective ships to act as a screen, he was led to believe there were several, many Royal Navy ships waiting for him, and he believed there severe adverse odds not in his favor. I think he would have scuttled Scharnhorst as well. He just didn't know what he was up against.
Conceptually the subjective nature of worship design implementation and construction was pretty well thoroughly exemplified there's always going to be overlap between different ships and different nations and their ideologies of what pertaining characteristics a warship of any category ought to have Any conclusion on that fact the USS Alaska and her siblings were large Cruisers CB means large Cruiser for intensive Naval study even with their 9 12-inch guns and adequate subdivision the Alaska's are still large Cruisers they're not battle Cruisers because they were not made to be battle Cruisers and the United States Navy did not refer to them or classify them as battle Cruisers Like it's been set time and time again folks want to try to make the HMS Hood a fast battleship in order to elevate it the same is true here with the Alaska's however the HMS hood is a battle cruiser of the Admiral class the Royal Navy never altered her designation or changed it the hood and her siblings were meant to counter the German mackensens class series of battle Cruisers during the first World War and unlike the battlecruiser HMS Hood the large Cruisers of the Alaska class did find purpose and Outlets. But truth be told, Hood was obsolete by the time World War II started she ought to have been converted into an aircraft carrier, which would have been more viable.
The Germans classified Scharnhorst as a Battleship.......not Grosser Krueser like the Germans used for BC in WWI...definately a capital ship and not a cruiser...an anemic fast battleship.
@@scharnhorst_42 they are just large heavy cruisers. The design gave them long range and made the good for commerce raiding which is a cruiser role. Plus they have large 11” guns but only 2 and heavy cruiser armor.
@@sskuk1095 A year later, lol, glad you're still around and hope the year was good. I think the German term Panzerschiff works well for the class if you'd like to distinguish them.
"KGV an awful stop gap" .............you do realise that it was Winston C who ordered the suspension of work on large capital ships and in case you didn't realise, we were in a world war getting bombed every night. There wasn't time to develop a 16" turret as the construction was too far along. The UK was sticking to the treaty limits as was the US. You had time to redesign and implement 16 turrets, the UK did not have that luxury, the ships were needed as fast as possible, indeed the Prince Of Wales was sent out with shipyard workers still on board trying to sort the turret problems but there wasn't any other option at the time. The God awful stop gap Duke Of York obliterated The Scharnhorst during an arctic storm without getting any damage in return since Scharnhorst was effectively blind and helpless to the meagre 14" shells that turned her into a flaming wreck in short order, terrible way for her crew to die. You guys talk about gun size like its a flag measuring contest.
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It's interesting that the O-class battlecruiser is also an evolution of a Panzerschiff concept just like Scharnhorst and Gneissenau were, being now a derivative of the P-class compared to the D-class that lead to the Sisters.
As for the heavier armor on the Scharnhorst sisters, they were a response to Dunkerque, and thus would need armor expected to stand up against at least the French 13" gun on her. Although ironically Dunkerque herself had a greater immunity zone against the Scharnhorst's guns despite her much lighter armor than the Scharnhorst's had against her 13" quads. And then the up-armored Strassbourg in response to the two.
The Germans referred to their ships as "he"
The belt difference between Bismarck and Scharnhorst is a misprint. They were the same. Scharnhorst also had much thinner upper belt, and slightly thinner horisontal armor and turret armor. The 11-inch guns had some advantages; long range, very good penetration for the size, very accurate, high ROF and less impact on the ship itself.
The surviving crew from Glorious said that even the first salvo from "the twins", fired from about 26-27,000 meters, was frightening close. It was the third salvo from Scharnhorst that hit first at a range of around 25-26,000 - shared longest range hit in WW2 together with Warspite vs. Italian battleship Giulio Cesare. Ironically enough, the two longest range hits were scored from the smallest BB gun of the war, and one of the oldest.
They were pretty potent for their size, but unfortunately not potent enough to win a gun battle even with the Renowns
@Caeric wrong...a renown [aka repair/refit] couldn't stand up to her 1v1 let alone renown meeting the twins together, renown was great on paper in 1929...not 1935
@@ywe3 Maybe you should look up the action around Lofoten, Norway, she scored damaging hits on Gneissenau whilst the two sisters failed to damage Renown.. the only damage Renown suffered was due to rough seas.
Secondly, even in a dead calm Renown could choose to safely maintain range and inflict far more damage through the decks and superstructure of either of the two could hope to achive through her 5" deck in comparison at that range
@@Arthion 1. Scharnhorst could range as far as either of the refits [27000 yds is not short]
2. The ships could ABSOLUTELY stand toe to toe with the renown (clearly the hit scored wasn't deadly [or repeatable]).
3. The twins RARELY left port separated they almost always worked in tandem so it's 1 renown vs 2 sharnhorsts before 1942 after its a much more fair fight. 18x11in guns beats 6 15in
@@Arthion also when looking at any of the actions around Norway one must include the weather as a factor almost always in rough seas the twins have a speed and stability advantage
Battlecruiser sounds the coolest and the Alaska's are the coolest ships so they're Battlecruisers. Solved.
Large Cruiser is so uninspiring.
@@CorePathway Seriously, it's worse than heavy cruiser. Imagine if Alaska survived as a museum ship, "come see Battlecruiser Alaska!" Sounds a hell of a lot better than "come see Large Cruiser Alaska"
@@SRR-5657 SuperHeavy Cruiser or just SuperCruiser. Those 12” guns with heavy shells and high ROF were superior to WW1 era 14” guns, she’ll always be a BattleCruiser to me. And it was 30,000 tons, ferchrissake!
I like Heavy Cruiser.
That is an emotional investiture in a designation that is not substantiated the United States Navy did not consider the Alaska's to be battle Cruisers so in the story they're not they're large Cruisers that mounted 12-inch guns that's about it the battle cruiser died in conceptual Effectiveness after the first world war and HMS Hood was proof that the battle cruiser in the end was an incorrectly utilized concept
11:57 yeah the British had Renown, Repulse and Hood which arguably despite being old ships are more than adequate for the job of cruiser killing as that was what they were designed to do
Although sadly only Renown ever got the chance to receive the full modernisation they deserved.
@@Arthion Yeah as a modernised Hood would have been a major problem
An in principle had HMS Hood been modernized she would have been more effective but as she was she was merely an outdated obsolete World War 1 ERA battlecruiser with detrimental armor that was highly susceptible to plunging fire and was not adequately armored against her own caliber gun
22:25 If you struggle to determine the italian BBs calibre in inches, you can simply use metric and say that they have a calibre of either 320 mm or 32 cm.
Sadly Americans are not ever going to change their strange measurements, so I think it's futile to suggest they think the same way as ever other country in the world.
@@Dave_Sisson Well, the british, who started this whole measurement mess, did also switch to metric (in the 70s i think). But i have recognized, that the british also switch back to imperial whenever they talk about gun calibres.
The point of Scharnhorst's heavy armor was that she could take damage on a commerce raiding mission and and not be mission killed by cruisers or heavier escorts
Didn’t 6 gunned Renown hit Scharnhorst and Gneisenau before they got away? The 6 gun sums seem to have worked then.
It did
Pretty sure Drachinifel brought up that despite having fewer guns, Renown and Repulse had rather accurate gunnery comparable to their battleship counterparts
@@Arthion Hi C, I rarely watch his stuff, I like the big in depth and formal history sites.
Yes. Also, DoY was firing six gun salvos from her forward armament only at Scharnhorst during the high speed chase at the Battle of the North Cape. I think that having large numbers of guns becomes less important once gunfire comes under radar control.
I think after you're on target it's a matter of statistics.
Older Italian BBs were upgunned from 12' to about 12.6"
I though Gneisenau's magazine explosion happened in dry dock where they were repairing the damage from the Channel Dash, so there was plenty of air for the blast to dissipate to. If the ship had been afloat it would have been destroyed.
I like the WoWs screenshots too, they have great Models im that game.
Kronshtadt and Alaska have nearly the same armor thickness, same 9-9,1" belt, 3,5"-4" deck. I dunno if the internal protection and bulkheads were better, but frankly it's very much comparable to a large cruiser in protection. And Stalingrad also has less armor than Kronshtadt (7,1" belt 2+ 2,8" decks), although it's a fair bit faster.
Pretty cool, tks for sharing!
But don't forget that Germans had different thinking what a Battlecruiser is. WW1 german battlecruisers was exactly the other way of british ones. British less armor for more speed. Germans less guns or smaller guns for more speed. In that sense Scharnhorst is a WW1-like battlecruiser. Scharnhorst class was heavily influenced by Ersatz Yorck-class WW1 battlecruiser design.
Yet the Germans referred to them as battleships
Regarding the question of whether the U.S. Navy should have kept the Alaska and Guam as active ships following the end of World War II as compared to the Des Moines or Iowas, I think a very crucial factor is crew size. Allied navies did not want to compete with the peacetime economy for labor after the war. USS Alaska had a crew of 1,517 and Iowa a crew of 2,788 while the Baltimore had a crew of 1,142. As Richard Worth summarized in Fleets of World War II, the Alaskas had the size of a battleship and the capabilities of a cruiser.
I will grant that the Des Moines had a listed crew of 1,799, but I suspect they could have run the ship with fewer in peacetime conditions. I'm guessing, it would have used less fuel than the Alaskas and so been cheaper to run.
Also as you mentioned regarding the Iowas, with only two Alaskas there would be no other ships from which to poach spare parts as compared to four Iowas and more than a dozen Baltimores.
I recall seeing pictures of HMS Vanguard visiting foreign ports with several turrets discretely mothballed for lack of crew.
Overall, a very interesting discussion! Thank you Ryan and Jack!
Didn’t need all that small Ack-ack crew.
Great video and talk. Where are you getting the screen shots of the ships from?
We missed your question, unfortunately. These screenshots come from the World of Warships. Thanks for watching and taking the time to comment.
Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were fast battleships they were supposed to have 15 inch guns but Germany didn't have any 15 inch guns built when they were built. They were going to have 15 inch guns put in later and use the 11 inch guns on there p class cruisers
Ryan, do you think you could possibly try and restrain the childish insults? It makes an interesting topic somewhat tedious. Renown and Repulse did sterling service over two world wars spanning several decades with one crew suffering hundred of casualties and despite your opinion on the lack of accuracy because of the reduced firepower, the superb accuracy of these ships with the 15" 42 was common knowledge. There was a good reason the twins were under orders not to engage RN capital units. In the action at Lefoten, Gneissenau had a turret disabled, Scharnhorst lost her radar and if it hadn't been for storm damage to Renown's torpedo bulge, it's doubtful both would have managed to escape.
Is it a BattleCruiser or a Large Cruiser? I dunno, But Alaska and find out.
Welp, I’ve unexpectedly gotten to hear Ryan Szimanski say penis. Life goal I never knew I had: fulfilled.
I think the Dunkuerke and Strasbourg were under armored ....Dunkuerke as built had a much thinner belt compared to her sister...Strasbourg was slighly better off. They were built to counter Panzer Schift not Scharnhorst
KGV is similar to Scharnhorst in that it was armored against guns superior to what they carried
Tank enthusiasts have these same discussions regarding the juxtaposition of protection, mobility and firepower. It seems that the tank community is a lot less pedantic about the categories of light, medium and heavy tanks than you ship guys are when you argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin 😛
I wonder what the outcome would be if you swapped scharnhorst for graf spee in the battle of the River plate
Scharnhorst would have been harder for the British to defeat at River Plate, but they were too range limited to be used as commerce raiders that far from Germany and would have been harder to logistically support.
It would be stopped from (non diesel) fuel exhaustion. If it had two tankers and fuel it would have been able to *out run* the cruisers especially if the Atlantic weather deteriorated. Getting home in good shape ought to have been a bigger priority for Langsdorff.
I suppose it would have definitely survived / won the battle, but it needs more reular refueling due to it's much shorter range, so operating it in the southern atlantic is not really a good option. But i doubt that the two british cruisers would have readily jumped into battle against this warship.
Well I dont the Scharnie wouldve been attacked quite aggressively by 3 cruisers the way they got after Spee, meaning I dont think Scharnie tales the damage that pushes her to a neutral port. But as someone else stated, Scharnie wouldnt do a mission like Spee due to the lack of range because of Spees Diesel engines
Consider that Captain Langsdorf got psyched out by the British, and was suckered into believing there was a swarm of enemy ships just off the coast, waiting to finish him off. I think almost no matter which German ship he had under him (maybe excepting Bismarck or Tirpitz) he would have done the same thing. There was only the one German ship, with no destroyers or other protective ships to act as a screen, he was led to believe there were several, many Royal Navy ships waiting for him, and he believed there severe adverse odds not in his favor. I think he would have scuttled Scharnhorst as well. He just didn't know what he was up against.
Conceptually the subjective nature of worship design implementation and construction was pretty well thoroughly exemplified there's always going to be overlap between different ships and different nations and their ideologies of what pertaining characteristics a warship of any category ought to have
Any conclusion on that fact the USS Alaska and her siblings were large Cruisers CB means large Cruiser for intensive Naval study even with their 9 12-inch guns and adequate subdivision the Alaska's are still large Cruisers they're not battle Cruisers because they were not made to be battle Cruisers and the United States Navy did not refer to them or classify them as battle Cruisers
Like it's been set time and time again folks want to try to make the HMS Hood a fast battleship in order to elevate it the same is true here with the Alaska's however the HMS hood is a battle cruiser of the Admiral class the Royal Navy never altered her designation or changed it the hood and her siblings were meant to counter the German mackensens class series of battle Cruisers during the first World War and unlike the battlecruiser HMS Hood the large Cruisers of the Alaska class did find purpose and Outlets.
But truth be told, Hood was obsolete by the time World War II started she ought to have been converted into an aircraft carrier, which would have been more viable.
The Germans classified Scharnhorst as a Battleship.......not Grosser Krueser like the Germans used for BC in WWI...definately a capital ship and not a cruiser...an anemic fast battleship.
11” guns disqualifies BB designation. Full stop. And if Alaska had 14” guns it would no doubt be a BattleCruiser.
In my opinion, the Sharnhorst kind of deserves the term pocket battleship, not the deutschland class!
What would you call the Deutchlands then, super cruisers?
@@scharnhorst_42 they are just large heavy cruisers. The design gave them long range and made the good for commerce raiding which is a cruiser role. Plus they have large 11” guns but only 2 and heavy cruiser armor.
@@stevenmcgee9588 Even on the light side as far as later post-treaty heavy cruisers go at a mere 80-100mm..
@@scharnhorst_42 Maybe. You can even invent a name just for them!
@@sskuk1095 A year later, lol, glad you're still around and hope the year was good. I think the German term Panzerschiff works well for the class if you'd like to distinguish them.
12.6 inch
The Soviet navy is a complete acid trip.
"KGV an awful stop gap" .............you do realise that it was Winston C who ordered the suspension of work on large capital ships and in case you didn't realise, we were in a world war getting bombed every night. There wasn't time to develop a 16" turret as the construction was too far along. The UK was sticking to the treaty limits as was the US. You had time to redesign and implement 16 turrets, the UK did not have that luxury, the ships were needed as fast as possible, indeed the Prince Of Wales was sent out with shipyard workers still on board trying to sort the turret problems but there wasn't any other option at the time. The God awful stop gap Duke Of York obliterated The Scharnhorst during an arctic storm without getting any damage in return since Scharnhorst was effectively blind and helpless to the meagre 14" shells that turned her into a flaming wreck in short order, terrible way for her crew to die. You guys talk about gun size like its a flag measuring contest.