Nazi Germany's Battleship Bismarck vs. America's Montana Class: Who Wins?
Kyle Mizokami
Security, Americas
What would have happened if America had built this monster battleship?
America’s Iowa-class battleships, some of the last battleships ever produced, were also the most powerful. Equipped with nine 16-inch guns, they were floating arsenals capable of duking it out—and winning—against any other ship of their kind. The ships were so powerful they were reactivated in the 1980s, refitted to do battle against the Soviet Union.
As powerful as they were, the Iowas would have been dwarfed by an even larger class—the monster battleships of the Montana class. How would the Montanas, which were tragically never built, have fared against Germany’s greatest battleship, the Bismarck?
The Montanas were to be sailing superlatives. At 921 feet long, they would be longer than the Iowas, and longer than the Essex-class fleet of aircraft carriers by a hundred feet. This class of super battleships was projected to displace seventy thousand tons fully loaded, outweighing the Iowas by the displacement of an entire U.S. heavy cruiser—plus three destroyers thrown in for good measure. They would be so large they were to have been the first American warships unable to transit the Panama Canal. This inability to quickly transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific was likely part of the reason a force of five battleships was envisioned.
The Montana battleships were also much more heavily armored. They were to have sixteen inches’ steel armor at the belt, a third more than their predecessors. Turret armor was increased from a generous sixteen inches to nineteen. Bulkhead armor went from eleven inches to eighteen, increasing their ability overall to absorb and restrict damage.
Each battlewagon would have had twelve 16-inch guns, three more than the Iowa class and two more than the Royal Navy’s King George V class of battleships. The Montanas were to mount the same guns as the Iowas—sixteen-inch diameter Mark 7 guns with a length of fifty calibers, making each sixty-six feet long from breech to muzzle. They would also fire the same shells, particularly a 2,700-pound armor-piercing shell that penetrated twenty inches of steel plate at 11.36 miles.
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