alt Hacker News>The British Navy had a fad for light cruisers at one point, "eggshells armed with sledgehammers".
Do you mean 'battle cruisers'?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser
'Light cruisers' were different again.
>No Japanese or German battleship in WWII survived a determined air attack. Yamato, Tirpiz, Bismark - all lost to air attack.
Bismark was finished off by surface ships after the initial air attack.
Tirpitz took many sorties to sink.
The sinking of the British Prince of Wales and Repulse by the Japanese is probably a better example of how battleships became vulnerable to airpower.
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The Bismark was also attacked by biplanes with defective torpedos (thankfully, that saved HMS Sheffield). Basically only two torpedos even hit the german battleship.
Presumably because the british torpedos were so awful, Tirpitz was attacked with regular bombs, which meant they were using the worst method of sinking a ship, from the top down, and so it didn't do much until they whipped out the ultra heavy ones. And it's not like the attacks were going poorly, Tirpitz was taking the hits because it could not kill the planes.
Worth noting that the attack on the Bismarck was by biplane Gloucester gladiators which were outdated even at the start of the war.
Compare them to the planes that carried out attacks in the Pacific theatre. The Grumman Avenger was maybe 2 generations newer (and actually remained in service until the 1960s(
The story ahead of the Tirpiz sinking is fascinating [0], right up there with the account in Blind Man's Bluff of Ivy Bells [1].
> The sinking of the British Prince of Wales and Repulse by the Japanese is probably a better example of how battleships became vulnerable to airpower.
In retrospect the Japanese got a bit lucky there; subsequent air attacks on battleships show they can be remarkably tough. Musashi took 19 torpedo and 17 bomb hits to sink.