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Oh and dude, So right about the battleships...the BISMARCK was so ahead of its competition it scared the British Shitless such that 1/3 of the Royal Navy was chasing it towards the end, and the only reason it was sunk was a fluke lucky shot torpedoe hitting it in its rudder (which means another foot and the torpedoe would have MISSED entirely) The Bismarck had Radar (the first Ship to have it) and it had the first Computerized Fire-control system...It was the Mercedes Benz of Battleships...Battleships are cool...someone needs to film a porn flick on a Battleship




Possibly. But sea warfare had changed dramatically, even though no one yet knew it. A year or two later the Japanese themselves were utterly amazed at how easy it was to sink Repulse and Prince of Wales off the Malay coast. Only a few fanatical advocates of airpower believed that battleships could be sunk by planes (even though the ships didn't have aircover, I don't know that it would have made a terrible difference in the final outcome). Yamamoto had to scrap quite a few plans after the fall of Singapore since just about everything they believed about sea power was now mooted.

Battleships were on the way out: they cost so much damn money to make and could be sunk by 70 or so cheap planes with torpedoes or covering horizontal bombers. Even a superbattleship like Yamato wound up being a glorified headquarters for Combined Fleet on the Japanese side once they realized how comparatively defenseless battleships were and didn't fire its massive guns (except for land shelling at Guadalcanal) in a surface battle until the rest of the fleet was pretty much wiped out. Yamato's guns were I think the largest in the world at that point and they were barely fired during the war.
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