Why is a battleships’s underwater armor important? Battlewagons hurled big cannon shells at each other, not torpedoes, which is why battleships tended to be more heavily armored above the waterline.

Key Points and Summary - The U.S. Navy’s Iowa-class and Japan’s Yamato-class embodied different answers to the same problem: survive enemy gunfire long enough to land decisive hits. Yamato carried the ...

In the end, a Yamato versus Iowa duel might have been a fascinating but futile curiosity. In 1945 the era of the battlewagon was already ending, sinking beneath the weight of swarms of aircraft. In ...

Key Points and Summary - This piece explores a great naval “what if”: a gun duel between America’s never-built Montana-class battleships and Japan’s Yamato-class behemoths. -Designed as larger, better ...