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The Battle of Jutland was the biggest ever battle between battleships. Two previous small battles were fought between fleets of battleships in the Pacific during the Russo-Japanese war. But, at Jutland the British Grand Fleet had twenty-eight dreadnoughts (really big scary) battle ships. The Germans had sixteen dreadnoughts and six wimpy ordinary battle ships. In the combined fleets there were in all two hundred and fifty ships. One of them was the British seaplane carrier Engadine (no one noticed it).

The warships slugged away on the afternoon of the thirty-first of May 1916. In the morning of the first of June they were at it again. The British sunk eleven German ships (one old battleship) and the Germans sunk fourteen British ships (no battle ships). It was a blood bath since just over six thousand British sailors were killed outright while nearly half that many German sailors were killed. There were very few wounded because when a ship went down in the freezing water the men died of hypothermia.

In fact, it was not a lot to show for banging away at each other for eight hours.

Then in the early 1920’s General William Mitchell’s bombers in a series of demonstrations sank an old American battleship, a German battleship, a submarine, a cruiser and a destroyer. These were not lucky shots -- not five of them. In fact the bombers sank more battleships than were sunk in the Battle of Jutland. The Joint Board of the Army and Navy promptly pronounced, “The battleship is still the backbone of the fleet.” Mitchell insisted that Navy vessels were “Sitting Ducks”. In late 1925 Mitchell was court marshaled for disagreeing openly with senior officers.

In World War II to try to secure the Mediterranean The British Navy attacked the Italian Fleet at Taranto on the night of November eleventh 1940. Twenty-one torpedo bombers from the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious put torpedoes (in water that was supposed to be too shallow for airborne torpedoes) into three battleships. Three sunk in shallow water. Not a shot was fired at an enemy ship during this engagement but the backbone of the Italian fleet was broken. More battleships were sunk at Taranto than at Jutland.

Battleships seemed to be better at being targets than at fighting ships. At Pearl harbor on the morning of December seventh 1941 the U.S. Navy finally conceded Mitchall had been right. In a harbor too shallow for torpedoes four battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers and two auxiliaries were sunk with torpedoes and bombs by the airplanes of a Japanese force of six carriers. Not a surface ship fired at an enemy ship. You couldn’t even see the Japanese carriers from Hawaii.

The last battleship versus battleship engagement was the Battle of Surigao (one of the four Battles of Leyte Gulf) on the twenty-fifth of October in 1944. Two Japanese battleships were sunk by fire from surface ships. Most of the sea battles of World War II were between aircraft from carriers and surface ships.

However, near the end of the war in the Pacific at the battle of Okinawa there was another sort of attack against ships that may have signified the beginning of the end of the aircraft carrier. Between the first of April and the twenty-fifth of May 1945 the Japanese attempted seven Kamikaze attacks comprising over one-thousand-five-hundred airplanes. In these attacks the US Navy suffered more casualties than in any other battle in the war. Forget for a moment about the pilots – these were smart bombs – guided missiles.

Consider the survival potential of an aircraft carrier bigger than Yankee Stadium being attacked by guided flying torpedoes and smart bombs that can hit a circular target less than a foot in diameter. I don’t know how you feel about this but none of it is science fiction -- all these weapons exist.