Much like battlecruisers, battleships typically sank with large loss of life if and when they were destroyed in battle. The first battleship to be sunk by gunfire alone, the , sank with half of her crew at the Battle of Tsushima when the ship was pummeled by a seemingly endless stream of Japanese shells striking the ship repeatedly, killing crew with direct hits to several guns, the conning tower, and the water line or below it, which became the cause of the ship's sinking. Battleships also proved to be very vulnerable to mines, as was evidenced in the Russo-Japanese War and both World Wars. After the
Battle of Port Arthur, a number of Russian and Japanese vessels were struck by mines and either sank or were scuttled to prevent their capture. A decade later, the
Marine Nationale and
Royal Navy lost three battleships, , , and , to Turkish mines in the waters of the Dardanelles. Torpedoes were also very capable of sinking battleships. On 21 November 1944, sank with over 1200 casualties. was struck by three torpedoes fired from .
Barham could not make an attempt to dodge the incoming torpedoes and sank with 862 fatalities as a result of several magazine explosions that occurred after she had initially been hit by
U-331s torpedoes. Although mines and torpedoes constantly threatened the battleship's dominance, it was the refinement of aerial technology and tactics that led to the replacement of the battleship with the aircraft carrier as the most important naval vessel. Initially, the large scale use of aircraft in naval combat was underrated and the idea that they could destroy battleships was dismissed. Still, the United States and the Japanese Empire experimented with offensive roles for aircraft carriers in their fleets. One pioneer of aviation in a naval role was US Army General
Billy Mitchell, who commandeered for testing of his theory in July 1921. Though these tests did not impress his contemporaries, they forced the US Navy to begin diverting some of its budget towards researching the matter further. The belief that the aircraft carrier was junior to the battleship began to evaporate when the
Imperial Japanese Navy, in a surprise attack, nearly destroyed the
United States Pacific Fleet while it was at anchor at
Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. The captain of the ,
Ernst Lindemann, had almost dodged the
Royal Navy until he was undone by British reconnaissance aircraft. Although almost every sea battle in
World War II involved gunfire between surface warships to some degree, their time as the senior ship of a nation's fleet had run its course. Those battleships belonging to the
Central Powers that survived World War I often did not survive its aftermath. The German
High Seas Fleet was
scuttled at
Scapa Flow by its sailors in June 1919 following their surrender and internment the previous November. On 1 November 1918, as the Austrian battleship was being transferred to the
State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, she was mined and sunk at
Pola by two Italian frogmen, and
Raffaele Rossetti, who were unaware of the transfer. On 27 November 1942 the
Vichy French government
scuttled the majority of the French fleet at
Toulon.
Sunk in combat Converted battleships Lost at sea Scuttled battleships Expended as targets == See also ==