Turns out that battlecruisers (Kongous were still very much battlecruisers during WW2 no matter how much IJN wished otherwise) tend to fare pretty badly when put in a battleship fight, doubly so if said fight takes place at basically point-blank range.
Turns out that battlecruisers (Kongous were still very much battlecruisers during WW2 no matter how much IJN wished otherwise) tend to fare pretty badly when put in a battleship fight, doubly so if said fight takes place at basically point-blank range.
Referring to page 8; I don't think any BB ever built would have held up very well under that kind of punishment.
Capital gun ships of the era were built with the concept of the zone of immunity: side armor determining minimum safe engagement distance for a given weapon (often designed to defend against their own guns) and deck armor determining the maximum. Shorter ranges punch straight through the side armor, and longer ranges plummet through the deck with the aid of gravity. That's to say, no capital ship was meant to re-enact the slugging broadsides of the age of sail, and doing so would come almost entirely down to speed and accuracy of gunnery and not so much armor or lack thereof.
Just for example, according to Wikipedia the near-final design of the North Carolina-class had an immune zone for 14-inch superheavy shells between 19,000 yards and 30,000 yards, though apparently the belt armor angle was changed from 10 to 15 degrees which would shorten that minimum range. (EDIT: I forgot that the video I linked earlier also has a small snippet of information regarding North Carolina's immune zone.) For comparison, the battleships at Pearl Harbor had minimum ranges of between 14,000 and 18,000 yards versus Japanese 14"/45 guns (PDF, pg 10). Note in the table below that that Kirishima was estimated to have a minimum safe distance of 31,000 yards from 14"/45 guns (though how much American wartime bias plays into those numbers, I don't know), where Washington carried 16"/45 weapons. Washington opened fire on Kirishima at 8,450 yards, well below a range at which either could have smashed through the armor of the other, gunnery being equal...
...Which it certainly wasn't, as Kirishima not only had the electronics disadvantage but she also had her turrets and ammunition hoists set up for shore bombardment resulting in only "getting around to" loading and firing the proper anti-ship AP shells near the end of the engagement. South Dakota received two 14" HE/SAP shells to plating (NavWeaps 1 and 2) which never had much hope of dealing more than superficial damage below the superstructure due to their fusing, two 14" incendiary antiaircraft/shore bombardment shell hits (NavWeaps 1 and 2) which proved very little threat to the ship but did well at setting the radar equipment on fire, one dent/scrape from just the windshield cap of a near-miss 14" AP shell (NavWeaps), and one proper 14" AP shell at a glancing angle to the barbette of the aft turret (NavWeaps); one of the toughest nuts to crack on a battleship, being 5" thicker than the main belt.
Although she did relatively little damage to South Dakota, the gooey center that makes up naval vessels generally doesn't react well to big explosions happening along the hull. 40 were killed and 180 injured, including a 12 year old who lied about his age so as to enlist.
I personally can't recall any armored warship lost or disabled due to running out of crew. Horribly trained damage control, yes, but not to sheer casualties.
I personally can't recall any armored warship lost or disabled due to running out of crew. Horribly trained damage control, yes, but not to sheer casualties.
Bismarck was pretty close to that by the time she sank. Most of her crew were dead and she was largely rendered combat ineffective, but she was still floating until the scuttling charges went off.
