Worlds oldest man dies at 113 years old

[John Kepler]

I think that in every case you mentioned, and several that I did...the vessels were being used inappropriately for their design, which brings the subject immediately to the issue of the wisdom of the entire concept. In every case of a battlecruiser getting a lot of good seamen killed...it was engaged in a battle it simply couldn't win due to terrible cases of "mission creep"...based in large measure by the illusion that NOTHING that big could possibly be that vulnerable!

The part that I have always found interesting was how the US Navy recognized the "flawed logic" of the battlecruiser concept (even though, if you think about it, it's a concept we invented back in the early days of the Republic with the "Constitution-class Super-Frigates"), and largely rejected it (we eventually and reluctantly started a pair of them....enthusiastically dumped them in the Washington Naval Treaty and turned the hulls into the CV's Lexington and Saratoga), concentrating instead on development of a truly fast battleship...the Iowa's.

In closing, I think one of the things that gets lost in the historical shuffle is the massively important work that the US Navy Bureau of Ordnance did between the wars on a shoe-string budget. The US Navy entered WWII with unquestionable the best suite of Naval guns on the planet, developed by BuOrd and it's contract partners. The 5"/38 dual-purpose was the standard nobody else matched. The 6"/47 our Light Cruisers carried was a reliable, fast-firing, "gnat's eyelash" accurate, high-velocity gun that was disproportionately effective "on target" due to it's concentration on the "V" of the old Newtonian equation, F=1/2MV2. And with 15 of them on a Brooklyn-class, these were ton-for-ton some of the most potent vessels the US Navy ever built. The 8"/55's on the "Treaty-class" Heavies, culminating with the Baltimore-class was also as disproportionately effective. One last point to stress is not only the effectiveness of the US Navy guns, but their reliability...I have never read of any extensive malfunctions of US Naval armament in combat, while finding numerous cites for malfunctioning guns in others (British, German, some Japanese). Apparently, our Naval guns were like the Energizer Bunny, and some of the round-counts these vessels fired in combat were staggering (USS Portland, USS Helena; Naval Battle of Guadalcanal).

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