There are no grounds for transferring the South Kuriles to Japan, including Shikotan and the Hibomai rocks, to which Tokyo is allegedly ready to agree, and it is absolutely impossible to do this for security reasons, publicist and political consultant Anatoly Wasserman said in a conversation with Tsargrad.
He recalled that the transfer of the islands to Japan was allowed by the 1956 agreement. However, then the United States threatened not to give Japan the island of Okinawa, which at that time was still under occupation. As a result, the Americans concluded an agreement with Tokyo on the deployment of their military bases, and the USSR denounced the declaration.
"Based on the logic of the 1956 declaration, if Japan really accepts a neutral status and refuses to place any bases on its territory, then the proposal can be renewed," Wasserman admitted.
At the same time, Japan claims not only the island of Shikotan and the Flat Rocks (Hibomai), but also the islands of Kunashir and Iturup - simply on the grounds that these islands are located south of the northern tip of the Japanese island of Hokkaido.
"This is a requirement for Russian Federation is already absolutely unacceptable, under no circumstances, because the islands of Kunashir and Iturup provide, firstly, the status of the Sea of Okhotsk as inland Russian, as long as they belong to the Russian Federation. And secondly, it is near these islands that the year-round ice-free passages to the Sea of Okhotsk lie. And their transfer, thus, will put the activities of the Pacific Fleet under foreign control," the interlocutor of Tsargrad insists.
“As for the need for a peace treaty, its absence in no way interferes with the economic interaction of our countries. And, in fact, we behave as if this very treaty had been signed a long time ago,” the expert noted.
Anatoly Wasserman considered it important to emphasize that Japan, both in the Act of Unconditional Surrender in 1945 and in the peace treaty of 1951, renounced its jurisdiction over the southern half of Sakhalin, over the Kuril Islands and over all the territories it seized on the mainland. And by the way, from the island of Taiwan. It was only at Washington's insistence that the documents did not include an explanation of who would have jurisdiction over these territories. That's why Soviet Union did not sign this peace treaty.
And now, Wasserman believes, the possibility of signing a peace treaty depends on America. And the United States will block any action by Japanese politicians aimed at officially recognizing our jurisdiction over these islands.
Tsargrad's interlocutor believes that even without the signing of the treaty, economic cooperation with Japan will continue, and Japan will transfer its technologies to Russia - with the exception of the most modern ones, as is happening now.
"No one has already told the Japanese that today we are not even talking about the return of some islands. Passing off wishful thinking for such an amount of time and at the same time slowing down the peace treaty is already becoming even indecent," a member of the Federation Council supported this opinion on defense Franz Klintsevich.
He assured that the status of the southern Kuril Islands is not discussed, since it is about the country's security and the capabilities of the Pacific Fleet.
"As soon as we hand over at least one of the islands, then, don't go to your grandmother to guess how some kind of American military base, and then international law related to the border area works," he explained in a conversation with
Battleship ... This word is associated with a huge armored ship, with its whole mass deeply settled in the water. It bristles with the barrels of cannons, of which there may be more than 200. The most impressive are the cyclopean towers of the main caliber.
Suffice it to recall the Japanese "Yamato". With a displacement of more than 72 thousand tons, it carried nine 457-mm guns in three turrets as the main caliber. The length of the barrel was 20 meters. The weight of the tower exceeded 2500 tons. This giant could send shells weighing about 1.5 tons for 45 kilometers. Against this background, the famous "Stalin's sledgehammer" - 203-mm B-4 ("Long-lived Howitzer") - fired seeds: some 100 kilograms at a distance of about 17 kilometers. The booking of the mastodon was also appropriate. The main belt reached 650 millimeters. The thickness of the armored decks, the conning tower, the main caliber towers was measured in hundreds of millimeters. The system of constructive anti-torpedo protection also looked impressive - more than eight meters in total depth.
“Only the absence of battleships high-explosive shells for the main caliber guns saved American aircraft carriers from complete destruction ”
To match the "Japanese" were his opponents - US battleships. The most advanced of them, the Iowa type, with 65,000 tons of full displacement, had nine 406-mm guns of the main caliber. In constructive protection, the "American" was inferior to the Japanese giant by no more than 10-20 percent, if we take its depth and armor thickness.
But World War II is believed to have put an end to the history of battleships. Their gravediggers, according to naval experts, were aircraft carriers, which began to dominate the sea and ocean spaces. Although the beginning of the departure of battleships in history should be considered the First World War. The fact that the classic general battle of the fleets, which decides the outcome of the struggle at sea, will no longer exist in the world, became obvious following the results of the famous Battle of Jutland, when the main linear forces of the two fleets converged in a limited area (as the situation developed) - English and German. The result was negligible compared to the scale of the forces involved: several capital ships sunk on each side. The time of the classic battles of the fleets, when the opponents, lining up opposite each other, during an artillery duel (at that time they still called "competitions") decided who would be the master of the sea, has passed. But it was for such a battle that battleships were created. The name battleship itself is an abbreviation for a ship of the line, that is, intended for artillery combat in a line.
Who is in charge of the sea
However, military experts did not see an alternative to battleships in the interwar period. Aviation as a whole, deck aviation in particular, was still very weak and was not considered a serious opponent for a freely maneuvering ship. Therefore, battleships as a class continued to develop in all the most developed countries. Naturally, we were no longer talking about a general battle and a classic linear battle. But the battleship, as the most powerful surface ship that determines the outcome of any surface battle in terms of scale, remained the main one in all fleets. The strike of British carrier-based aviation on the base of the Italian fleet in Taranto, the battle in the Coral Sea, the sinking of the Bismarck and other battles showed that another main player appeared - His Majesty the aircraft carrier. And they immediately turned away from the battleships. attach great importance these ships became a sign of bad taste, retrograde.
Meanwhile, battleships faded into the background only in terms of solving one of the tasks of the fleet - gaining superiority at sea by destroying the forces of the enemy fleet, and even then not completely. The landing operations of the American and British fleets were carried out with the active participation of the line forces, which destroyed the powerful fortifications of the enemy with their large-caliber artillery. And far from always, aviation could become a substitute - bombs of a weight comparable to battleship shells were lifted only by heavy bombers. However, in accuracy they were significantly inferior to the first-class artillery of battleships. Aviation was far from always able to "work" according to weather conditions, and battleships fired in any weather.
Their role has been significant in naval battles. Battleships ensured the combat stability of aircraft carrier and other naval formations. The absence of such a large artillery ship sometimes ended fatally even for aircraft carriers. So, in the course of the British attempt to repel the German invasion of Norway on June 8, 1940, the British aircraft carrier Glories, guarded by two destroyers, was sunk by fire from the main caliber of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The battle on October 25, 1944 near the island of Samar, where the main linear forces Japanese fleet went to the area in which the US aircraft carriers covered by destroyers were located, almost ended in the death of most of them. Only the absence of high-explosive shells for the main caliber guns on the battleships of the Japanese fleet and the erroneous decisions of Commander Admiral Kurita saved the American formation from complete destruction.
“The weight of 16 volleys of the battleship Iowa corresponds to the daily work of the Nimitz air group”
Battleships of the Second World War had powerful air defense weapons - from 16 to 24 guns of universal caliber (105-127 mm) and from 40-60 to 120-150 MZA barrels (20-40 mm). It was anti-aircraft artillery, combined with air defense systems of other large artillery ships - cruisers, that was the main means of repelling enemy bombers and torpedo bombers that broke through the fighter screens. The destroyers of that time had incomparably less powerful weapons - from 4-8 to 12-18 MZA guns and could not have a significant impact on the outcome of an anti-aircraft battle. In the United States, this role of battleships was very well understood, so the main operational carrier formations of the American fleet (38th and 58th) included battleships in their composition.
However, after the end of World War II, the construction of battleships ceased. Some exception was conservative England, which after the war completed the construction of battleships of the Vanguard type. However, these ships were withdrawn from the British fleet by 1958 and cut into metal. By 1961, there were no battleships left. Only Turkey retained the Yavuz battle cruiser, the former Goeben, built in 1911 without significant upgrades, in the combat composition of the fleet, however, it was more of a museum value. True, the United States retained the most advanced of the battleships (the Iowa type) by transferring them to the reserve.
The final cross on the fate of the battleships was put by two circumstances: nuclear weapon, guided anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles. The first made it senseless to create a powerful constructive defense of the ship. Rockets have devalued large caliber artillery. All classes of large artillery ships were out of work. Along with the battleships, the classic cruisers also became a thing of the past. In the USA, the last were "Salem", in the USSR - the project 68-bis ("Sverdlov"), completed by the beginning of the 60s. Although it was the battleships that demonstrated exceptionally high resistance to damaging factors nuclear explosion. So, the "Pennsylvania" built during the First World War stayed afloat, being just a kilometer from the epicenter of an underwater nuclear explosion on Bikini Atoll. And the anti-ship missile warheads in the usual equipment for battleships were not as destructive as for ships of other classes, including aircraft carriers.
We weigh the volleys
Meanwhile, it became clear that the conquest of dominance at sea was by no means the only task of the fleets. Behind them is fire support of the coastal flank of the army, landing of amphibious assault forces, strikes against naval bases and other important objects in the coastal strip. In the United States, it was supposed to solve these problems with the main forces of carrier-based aviation. In the USSR, they relied on coastal-based naval aviation, whose actions in this direction were essentially no different from front-line and long-range ones. However, limitations associated with the available flight resource, the ability to act on weather conditions, the accuracy of the weapons used, the reaction time and the organization of interaction with ground forces forced a return to large surface artillery ships. In the USSR, the cruisers of the 68-bis project remained in the fleet almost until the beginning of the 90s. And the United States several times introduced battleships into the combat strength from the reserve for operations in local wars and armed conflicts. These ships were noted in Vietnam. The destructive power of shells weighing 1200 kilograms was amazing. Armor-piercing pierced up to nine meters of concrete floors. And the high-explosive one created a funnel in dense soil with a depth of six and a diameter of 15 meters. When firing at the jungle, the explosion of such a projectile felled trees in an area up to 180 meters, forming a platform for landing helicopters. American battleships also participated in other local wars, in particular against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, providing operational amphibious landings.
It is interesting to compare the fire performance of the Iowa-class battleship with the capabilities of the Nimitz air wing ("Battle of Aircraft Carriers"). The latter carries 60 shock F / A-18C. Taking into account the allocation of the aircraft resource for solving the air defense tasks of the AUG, the possibility of two strikes per day by 40 deckers remains. Applying bombs free fall with a load of four tons per attack aircraft and by concentrating half of the strike air group on combat support tasks, the aircraft carrier is able to bring down 160 tons of bombs on the enemy. And one volley of a battleship weighs about 10 tons (9 shells of 1200 kg each). Making one shot in two minutes, he will solve such a fire problem in half an hour. At the same time, the price of two raids from an aircraft carrier is more than 20 times higher (and this is without taking into account possible losses) than 32 volleys of a battleship. True, the depth of impact is incomparably greater - 800 kilometers against 42.
The situation is no better with high-precision long-range weapons when hitting well-defended targets. This was demonstrated by the Syrian air defense, reflecting the attacks of American and Israeli missiles. But each "Tomahawk" costs about two million dollars. So the use of the WTO and aviation in modern conditions is associated with significant material losses. And they have to go if there is no other way to solve the combat mission.
However, there are tasks that, using such weapons, are the same as hammering nails with a computer: expensive, and most importantly, inconvenient. It's about about areal targets - airfields, strongholds of defense units ground forces, areas of concentration of strike groups and reserves, the location of formations and rear support units, which are many objects that are relatively easy to hit, but distributed over a large area and often capable of maneuvering with varying intensity. The size of such targets varies widely: from 1-1.5 square kilometers (company stronghold in the defense) to 10-20 (airfield or battalion in the concentration area).
To suppress a company in defense, it will be necessary to allocate up to two units of attack aircraft, which is 10 percent of the daily resource of an air wing. The suppression of a battalion in the concentration area will require the involvement of 20-30 vehicles, or 50-70 percent of the daily resource of carrier-based aviation. And we must bear in mind that there will be losses of aircraft. The consumption of SLCMs and ALCMs to hit such targets is enormous. This can be judged from Syria - at the Shayrat airfield, the Americans fired 59 Tomahawks worth about $120 million ("Bearded Tomahawks"). respectively.
What do we have today Russian Navy? The largest caliber of naval artillery is 130 millimeters on destroyers of project 956. The weight of the projectile is about 30 kilograms with a firing range of up to 30 kilometers. This weapon is the most powerful in terms of artillery Russian ship at best, it is capable of solving the problem of suppressing two company strongholds to the depth of tactical antiamphibious defense from the water's edge. This follows directly from a comparison of the area of the kill zone of a 130-mm high-explosive projectile, the destroyer's ammunition load, and the size of a company stronghold of an American or other foreign army. Such a projectile cannot hit fortifications made of thick reinforced concrete and other heavily protected objects, in particular tanks. Therefore, it is necessary to say that our fleet (like, indeed, any other, with the exception of the United States, which retains its battleships as museums, but is ready to return to service at any moment) does not have ships capable of providing effective fire support to the coastal the flank of the army or the landing during the landing, especially to escort the latter in the operational depth. And there is a need for this.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 began 115 years ago. The war, which remained in the shadow of subsequent turning points in the history of Russia - several revolutions, the First World War and the Civil War. The cataclysms of the twentieth century led to the fact that the memory of the participants in the war on Far East began to actively recover only in our days.
1126 fallen
In total, 52.5 thousand Russian soldiers and officers perished and died then. Among them are more than a thousand and a hundred officers of the army and the Separate Corps of the Border Guard. For a whole century, the names of many of them remained forgotten. And only in 2018, finally, it was possible to perpetuate the memory of almost all the officers who died in the Russo-Japanese War in the biographical directory, but, in fact, in a full-fledged Book of Memory 1. Historians, local historians, genealogists, descendants of the participants in those events received a unique reference book that changes their understanding of the events of that conflict.
This happened thanks to the painstaking work of specialists from the Russian State Military Historical Archive (RGVIA) - the main repository of documents on the history of the Russian Imperial Army. The leading role in the project belongs to the researcher of the history of the Russo-Japanese War and the heroic defense of Port Arthur, the author of Rodina, Dmitry Nikolaev. The work required great efforts and stretched out over several years, and even the descendants of officers took part in the preparation of the book.
This is not just a new, socially significant reference publication. This is a real book of destinies of a whole generation of educated people wearing shoulder straps at the beginning of the last century. In total, the directory contains biographies of 1126 officers.
Archive searches
The identification of the officers was like a detective investigation. After the war in 1907-1909. lists of the dead were published on the pages of the Military Collection magazine, but they contained many inaccuracies, to the point that some of those mentioned were alive, while others had their names distorted. Another difficulty was the establishment of the personal data of some officers. As a rule, only the rank of officer and surname were indicated in the documents of that time, which, in the presence of namesakes, led to errors. The compilers of the handbook managed to correct inaccuracies, prepared complete biographical information for each, and, in addition, they found 47 previously unknown officers. It is also important that more than five hundred biographies of fallen officers are provided with portraits, which allows us to present the images of the dead participants in the war. Some of the portraits were not previously known even to specialists; these images were found in the funds of the RGVIA and in the family archives of descendants. Unfortunately, the directory did not include information about the officers of the fleet (such Russo-Japanese War 284 people died and died 2).
An indicator of the demand for the book was that after its release, the compilers began to receive feedback from their descendants and various additions, including more than three dozen new portraits. Collection and systematization of information continues.
Death chose the young
The officers in that unsuccessful war for us showed real sacrifice. After the publication of the handbook, exact figures appeared that most clearly testify to this. In total, no more than 10,000 officers took part in the war, therefore, 11.2% of them died. The total losses of the ground forces amounted to 5.9% of those participating in the hostilities 3 .
A thorough analysis, which was carried out by the authors of the reference book, made it possible to compile a collective portrait of the dead officers. To a large extent, these were people of noble origin or children of chief officers who did not have the rights of hereditary nobility. About half were single. The vast majority served in the infantry (85.8%), a minority of the dead were artillerymen and representatives of the Cossack and irregular units.
It became possible to assess how the losses were distributed. 725 officers died in battles, 286 died of wounds, 115 went missing. Most often, death found the youngest - chief officers. They were usually on the front line. The average age of the dead is 33.4 years. The youngest - 19, the oldest - 57-58 years. There are also seven generals in the lists of the dead, but only six of them died at the hands of the Japanese. One of the generals, the inspector of hospitals of the 3rd Manchurian Army V.M. Timofeev, was brutally killed by his own soldiers (wounded by two bullets and a bayonet), when, during the retreat from Mukden, he tried to stop the looting of army warehouses 4 . The bloodiest battle of the war was Mukden, which claimed the lives of almost a third of the officers. Almost the same number died in the battles on the Shahe River.
"My hand dealt him a fatal blow..."
Behind each figure is a human destiny, a decision made or not made, and often a feat, self-sacrifice.
Centurion of the 2nd Chita Regiment of the Transbaikal Cossack Army Alexander Alexandrovich Zinoviev, 24 years old, son of the St. Petersburg governor, graduate Corps of Pages, an officer of the guards cavalry, volunteered to go to war in an ordinary Cossack regiment. Killed May 10, 1904 in a skirmish with the Japanese. As an eyewitness recalled, “the centurion Zinoviev set out to reconnoiter the main forces of the Japanese near Fynhuangchen at all costs, and there are two of his reports showing that, indeed, he managed to look beyond the outposts. The siding was fired twice; then the officer went on foot with two Cossacks, ordering the rest to disperse and gather outside the sphere [of fire] of the enemy; he himself nevertheless broke through the guard line, but then was surrounded on all sides ... the Japanese staged a raid on him ... Zinoviev was discovered, fired from revolver and was killed ... the patrol survived thanks to the care of his boss; risking himself, he did not want to lose his younger brethren in vain ... Glory and eternal memory to a real hero! As now I see his noble face in front of me ... For this man there was no compromises; the authorities ordered to reconnoiter, and he could only fulfill or perish" 5 .
Zinoviev was also remembered by his classmate B.A. Engelhardt: "A young horse guard with a serious pale face. He will also go to war in Manchuria as a volunteer and put on a Transbaikal chekmen 6 .
He will go to reconnaissance and ... will not return.
It was a unique and touching story.
The Cossacks who were with him said that the centurion climbed the hill alone, shots rang out there, they do not know what happened to him ...
His parents did their best to collect information about his fate, they turned to various embassies, to the Orthodox clergy in Japan, to the International Red Cross ...
Suddenly, a package arrived: a Japanese-made ebony box, and in it was a scroll-letter from the Japanese soldier Minomidani Sataro: "Your son died a hero's death - there were many of us, he was alone and did not want to give up.
My hand dealt him a mortal blow, but I had the honor of being wounded by a hero's hand..."
At the same time, a letter arrived from Sataro's parents. They also wrote about the valiant death of a Russian warrior, expressing confidence that his soul, the soul of a hero, found well-deserved peace and happiness in heaven. They sent a luxurious cover embroidered with gold, which the Japanese, according to custom, put on the altar, praying for the souls of those killed in the war.
Finally, after some time, a photograph of a grave surrounded by a fence in the mountains of Manchuria came, and the message was that the grave was under the protection of the emperor and its desecration was punishable. death penalty"7. The body of the hero was transported to Russia and buried in the estate in the village of Koporye, St. Petersburg province.
The Russian break at the beginning of the last century did not spare this family. The younger brother of the hero, George, died in the battle near Causeni at the very beginning of the First World War. Father and four other brothers emigrated from Russia after civil war. Another of the brothers committed suicide.
With a revolver in one hand and a stone in the other
Striking are the circumstances of the death of the captain of the 34th East Siberian rifle regiment Alexander Alekseevich Samoilov, father of two children, who was killed on August 18, 1904 near Liaoyang. Rota Samoilova did not receive an order to retreat, but the battalion, which she was part of, withdrew. The shooters were surrounded. Samoilov "being already wounded in the leg and jaw in the morning, did not leave his post, did not leave his company, the remnants of which, including 20 people, remained in their trenches, not knowing that they were surrounded by the enemy. Seeing himself cut off, sh[abs ]-captain [itan] Samoilov ordered his riflemen to follow him - to hit the enemy with bayonets, and 20 Russian riflemen, having a twice wounded officer in front of them, went with hostility to hundreds of enemy masses. was the first to jump out of the trench and rushed forward with a revolver in one hand and [with] a stone in the other, the arrows rushed after him, immediately sh[abs]-kap[itan] Samoilov fell, then grabbed, got up, grabbed his saber and fell again and The Japanese, who did not expect the presence of our riflemen in the trenches, lay behind the parapet of the trenches of the 12th company and fired at the remnants of the 3rd battalion of the 34th East [East]-S[iberian] rifle regiment retreating behind the ridge regiment, therefore, when a handful of our soldiers came out against them, at first the extreme ones retreated, but a wave approached her infantry swallowed up a handful of our brave men" 8 .
Heroes forgotten war, thanks to this amazing and very necessary book, find their place in our memory.
1. Officers of the Russian army who died in the war with Japan 1904-1905. Biographical guide. Comp. D.K. Nikolaev, O.V. Chistyakov, M.V. Abashina, N.G. Zakharova, S.A. Kharitonov. M.: Staraya Basmannaya, 2018. 772 p.: tab., ill.
2. Nazarenko K.B. Sunset of the Royal Navy. Naval officers of the First World War. M., 2018. S. 266.
3. Officers of the Russian army. S. 17.
4. Ibid. S. 21.
5. Ibid. S. 231.
6. Chekmen - the uniform of a Cossack officer.
7. Engelgardt B.A. Memoirs of a camera-page / publ. V.A. Avdeeva // Military History Journal. 1993. No. 12. S. 57.
8. Officers of the Russian army. S. 554.
Japan's participation in World War II proved tragic for the empire. Triumphant battles and territorial seizures were replaced by defeats on land and on water, one of which was the loss of the island of Guadalcanal. On January 14, 1943, Japanese troops began to evacuate the island, yielding to the troops of the anti-Hitler coalition. Ahead of Japan were many more lost battles, the most famous of which were in the "RG" selection.
Operation Mo
The battle between the ships of Japan and the United States in the South Pacific, in the Coral Sea in May 1942, historians consider one of the first defeats of the Asian military forces in World War II. Although the outcome of the battle was ambiguous. Prior to this, the Japanese had captured Tulagi Island in the Solomon Islands and planned to occupy Port Moresby in New Guinea (hence the name of Operation Mo Sakusen) to strengthen their position in the ocean. The flotilla was commanded by Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue, who, by the way, was removed from command after the operation. And that's why. They say that in this operation, the enemy ships did not even see each other, aircraft carriers exchanged strikes and attacks. The Japanese sank several American ships, but they also had serious losses. The aircraft carriers Shoho and Shokaku, which played a key role in Operation Mo, were seriously damaged. As a result, Admiral Inoue canceled the attack on Port Moresby, and the remaining ships and aircraft were not enough to win the Battle of Midway. For the Japanese, a "black streak" began in the war.
Battle of Midway
During the naval battle in the area near the Pacific Midway Atoll in June 1942, the Japanese fleet was defeated by the American enemy. Japan attacked the atoll on which US troops were based. two groups: aircraft carriers under the command of Admiral Nagumo and battleships, led by Admiral Yamamoto. Historians believe that the Japanese attack on Midway was actually a trap to lure American destroyers into it. The forces of the imperial army were undermined by the previous battle in the Coral Sea, in addition, the Americans knew their plan and prepared a counteroffensive, striking first. Japan's losses in this battle amounted to five aircraft carriers and cruisers, about 250 aircraft, not counting human casualties. Most importantly, Japan lost its advantage over the enemy in aircraft carriers and aircraft based on them, and since then it has not attacked, but only defended itself.
Capture of Okinawa
The landing operation of the US armed forces in 1945 was codenamed "Iceberg". Its goal was to capture the Japanese island of Okinawa, which was defended by the 32nd Army under the command of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, for the subsequent invasion of troops into the country. The island was guarded by about 100 thousand Japanese, the American offensive was almost three times larger, not counting equipment and aircraft. The assault on Okinawa began on the first of April. Ushijima's troops resisted fiercely until the summer, sending kamikaze into battle. A fleet was sent to help, including the legendary battleship Yamato. One of their main functions was to divert fire on themselves so that suicide pilots could break through to the enemy. All ships were sunk by American aircraft. "Yamato" sank along with 2.5 thousand crew members. At the end of June, the Japanese defenses fell, the lieutenant general and officers of the Japanese headquarters committed ritual suicide - seppuku. Okinawa was occupied by the Americans, for whom the Iceberg was the last landing operation in this war.
Loss of Saipan
Another defeat of the Japanese army in pacific ocean was the lost battle for the island of Saipan in 1944. This battle was part of the American Mariana operation to capture Saipan and two other islands - Tinian and Guam. According to various estimates, Japan lost about 60,000 troops in the battles for the islands. The Americans placed military bases on the occupied islands, blocking the supply of raw materials for the needs of the military and defense industry from the countries of Southeast Asia to the Japanese. After the loss of Saipan, Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo resigned, whose popularity began to decline after the defeat of the imperial troops at Midway. Tojo was later declared a war criminal by his own government and executed. The capture of Saipan and two other islands allowed the Americans to organize offensive operation to the Philippines.
Battle for Iwo Jima
Near the end of the war fighting already underway in Japan. One of the main victories of the Americans on land was the battle for the island of Iwo Jima at the end of the winter of 1945. Iwo Jima was strategically important to the empire. A military base was located there, which prevented the Americans from attacking the enemy from the air. The Japanese were preparing for an attack not only by strengthening ground defenses, but also by equipping underground defenses. The first American attack came from the water, the island was shelled from naval artillery, then bombers joined the battle, and after that, marines landed on Iwo Jima. The campaign was successful, the American flag was planted on Mount Suribachi, and the photograph of this event became a classic of military documentary. The Japanese, by the way, burned their flag so that the enemy would not get it. After the end of the campaign in underground tunnels Japanese soldiers remained, who for a long time waged a guerrilla war with the Americans.
Manchurian operation
The Manchurian operation, organized in 1945 by Soviet and Mongolian troops, effectively put an end to Japan's participation in World War II. The purpose of the operation was to destroy Kwantung Army in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, the Liaodong Peninsula and Korea. The Japanese armed forces were simultaneously dealt two main blows - from the territories of Mongolia and the Soviet Primorye - as well as a number of auxiliary blows. The Blitzkrieg began on August 9, 1945. Aviation began to bomb the Japanese in Harbin, Changchun and Jilin, at the same time the Pacific Fleet in the Sea of Japan attacked naval bases in Ungi, Najin and Chongjin, and soldiers of the Trans-Baikal Front smashed the enemy on land. Having cut off the Japanese troops' retreat, the participants in the operation dismembered their military formations into small groups and surrounded them. On August 19, the Japanese military began to surrender. With the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan was forced to capitulate, the war was over.
Battleship ... This word is associated with a huge armored ship, with its whole mass deeply settled in the water. It bristles with the barrels of cannons, of which there may be more than 200. The most impressive are the cyclopean towers of the main caliber.
Suffice it to recall the Japanese "Yamato". With a displacement of more than 72 thousand tons, it carried nine 457-mm guns in three turrets as the main caliber. The length of the barrel was 20 meters. The weight of the tower exceeded 2500 tons. This giant could send shells weighing about 1.5 tons for 45 kilometers. Against this background, the famous "Stalin's sledgehammer" - 203-mm B-4 ("Long-lived Howitzer") - fired seeds: some 100 kilograms at a distance of about 17 kilometers. The booking of the mastodon was also appropriate. The main belt reached 650 millimeters. The thickness of the armored decks, the conning tower, the main caliber towers was measured in hundreds of millimeters. The constructive anti-torpedo protection system also looked impressive - more than eight meters in total depth.
“Only the absence of high-explosive shells for the main caliber guns on the battleships saved the American aircraft carriers from complete destruction”
To match the "Japanese" were his opponents - US battleships. The most advanced of them, the Iowa type, with 65,000 tons of full displacement, had nine 406-mm main-caliber guns. In constructive protection, the "American" was inferior to the Japanese giant by no more than 10-20 percent, if we take its depth and armor thickness.
But World War II is believed to have put an end to the history of battleships. Their gravediggers, according to naval experts, were aircraft carriers, which began to dominate the sea and ocean spaces. Although the beginning of the departure of battleships in history should be considered the First World War. The fact that the classic general battle of the fleets, which decides the outcome of the struggle at sea, will no longer be in the world, became obvious following the results of the famous Battle of Jutland, when the main linear forces of the two fleets converged in a limited area (as the situation developed) - English and German. The result was negligible compared to the scale of the forces involved: several capital ships sunk on each side. The time of the classic battles of the fleets, when the opponents, lining up opposite each other, during an artillery duel (at that time they still called “competitions”) decided who would be the master of the sea, has passed. But it was for such a battle that battleships were created. The very name battleship is an abbreviation for a ship of the line, that is, intended for artillery combat in a line.
Who is in charge of the sea
However, military experts did not see an alternative to battleships in the interwar period. Aviation as a whole, deck aviation in particular, was still very weak and was not considered a serious opponent for a freely maneuvering ship. Therefore, battleships as a class continued to develop in all the most developed countries. Naturally, we were no longer talking about a general battle and a classic linear battle. But the battleship, as the most powerful surface ship that determines the outcome of any surface battle in terms of scale, remained the main one in all fleets. The strike of British carrier-based aviation on the base of the Italian fleet in Taranto, the battle in the Coral Sea, the sinking of the Bismarck and other battles showed that another main player appeared - His Majesty the aircraft carrier. And they immediately turned away from the battleships. Attaching great importance to these ships has become a sign of bad taste, retrograde.
Meanwhile, battleships faded into the background only in terms of solving one of the tasks of the fleet - gaining superiority at sea by destroying the forces of the enemy fleet, and even then not completely. The landing operations of the American and British fleets were carried out with the active participation of the line forces, which destroyed the powerful fortifications of the enemy with their large-caliber artillery. And far from always, aviation could become a substitute - bombs of a weight comparable to battleship shells were lifted only by heavy bombers. However, in accuracy they were significantly inferior to the first-class artillery of battleships. Aviation was far from always able to “work” according to weather conditions, and battleships fired in any weather.
Their role remained significant in naval battles. Battleships ensured the combat stability of aircraft carrier and other naval formations. The absence of such a large artillery ship sometimes ended fatally even for aircraft carriers. So, during the British attempt to repel the German invasion of Norway on June 8, 1940, the British aircraft carrier Glories, guarded by two destroyers, was sunk by fire from the main caliber of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The battle on October 25, 1944 near the island of Samar, where the main battle forces of the Japanese fleet entered the area in which the US aircraft carriers were covered by destroyers, almost ended in the death of most of them. Only the absence of high-explosive shells for the main caliber guns on the battleships of the Japanese fleet and the erroneous decisions of Commander Admiral Kurita saved the American formation from complete destruction.
“The weight of 16 volleys of the battleship Iowa corresponds to the daily work of the Nimitz air group”
The battleships of the Second World War had powerful air defense weapons - from 16 to 24 universal caliber guns (105–127 mm) and from 40–60 to 120–150 MZA barrels (20–40 mm). It was anti-aircraft artillery, in combination with air defense systems of other large artillery ships - cruisers, that was the main means of repelling enemy bombers and torpedo bombers that had broken through the fighter screens. The destroyers of that time had incomparably less powerful weapons - from 4-8 to 12-18 MZA guns and could not have a significant impact on the outcome of anti-aircraft combat. In the United States, this role of battleships was very well understood, so the main operational carrier formations of the American fleet (38th and 58th) included battleships in their composition.
However, after the end of World War II, the construction of battleships ceased. Some exception was conservative England, which after the war completed the construction of battleships of the Vanguard type. However, these ships were withdrawn from the British fleet by 1958 and cut into metal. By 1961, there were no battleships left. Only Turkey retained the battlecruiser Yavuz, the former Goeben, built in 1911 without significant upgrades, in the combat composition of the fleet, however, it was more of a museum value. True, the United States retained the most advanced of the battleships (the Iowa type) by transferring them to the reserve.
The final cross on the fate of the battleships was put by two circumstances: nuclear weapons, guided anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles. The first made it senseless to create a powerful constructive defense of the ship. Rockets have devalued large caliber artillery. All classes of large artillery ships were out of work. Along with the battleships, the classic cruisers also became a thing of the past. In the USA, the last were Salem, in the USSR - the 68-bis project (Sverdlov), completed by the beginning of the 60s. Although it was the battleships that demonstrated exceptionally high resistance to the damaging factors of a nuclear explosion. Thus, the "Pennsylvania" built during the First World War stayed afloat, being just a kilometer from the epicenter of an underwater nuclear explosion on Bikini Atoll. And the anti-ship missile warheads in the usual equipment for battleships were not as destructive as for ships of other classes, including aircraft carriers.
We weigh the volleys
Meanwhile, it turned out that the conquest of dominance at sea was by no means the only task of the fleets. Behind them is fire support of the coastal flank of the army, landing of amphibious assault forces, strikes against naval bases and other important objects in the coastal strip. In the United States, it was supposed to solve these problems with the main forces of carrier-based aviation. In the USSR, they relied on coastal-based naval aviation, whose actions in this direction were essentially no different from front-line and long-range ones. However, limitations associated with the available flight resource, the ability to act on weather conditions, the accuracy of the weapons used, the reaction time and the organization of interaction with ground forces forced a return to large surface artillery ships. In the USSR, the cruisers of the 68-bis project remained in the fleet almost until the beginning of the 90s. And the United States several times introduced battleships into the combat strength from the reserve for operations in local wars and armed conflicts. These ships were noted in Vietnam. The destructive power of shells weighing 1200 kilograms was amazing. Armor-piercing pierced up to nine meters of concrete floors. And the high-explosive one created a funnel in dense soil with a depth of six and a diameter of 15 meters. When firing at the jungle, the explosion of such a projectile felled trees in an area up to 180 meters, forming a platform for landing helicopters. American battleships also participated in other local wars, in particular against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, providing operational amphibious landings.
It is interesting to compare the fire performance of the Iowa-class battleship with the capabilities of the Nimitz air wing (Battle of Aircraft Carriers). The latter carries 60 shock F / A-18C. Taking into account the allocation of the aircraft resource for solving the air defense tasks of the AUG, the possibility of two strikes per day by 40 deckers remains. Using free-fall bombs with a load of four tons per attack aircraft and concentrating half of the strike air group on combat support tasks, the aircraft carrier is able to bring down 160 tons of bombs on the enemy. And one volley of a battleship weighs about 10 tons (9 shells of 1200 kg each). Making one shot in two minutes, he will solve such a fire problem in half an hour. At the same time, the price of two raids from an aircraft carrier is more than 20 times higher (and this is without taking into account possible losses) than 32 volleys of a battleship. True, the depth of impact is incomparably greater - 800 kilometers against 42.
The situation is no better with high-precision long-range weapons when hitting well-defended targets. This was demonstrated by the Syrian air defense, reflecting the attacks of American and Israeli missiles. But each Tomahawk costs about two million dollars. So the use of the WTO and aviation in modern conditions is associated with significant material losses. And they have to go if there is no other way to solve the combat mission.
However, there are tasks that, using such weapons, are the same as hammering nails with a computer: expensive, and most importantly, inconvenient. We are talking about areal targets - airfields, strongholds of the defense of ground forces, areas of concentration of strike groups and reserves, the location of formations and logistics units, which are many objects that are relatively easily hit, but distributed over a large area and often capable of maneuvering with varying intensity . The size of such targets varies widely: from 1-1.5 square kilometers (company stronghold in the defense) to 10-20 (airfield or battalion in the concentration area).
To suppress a company in defense, it will be necessary to allocate up to two units of attack aircraft, which is 10 percent of the daily resource of an air wing. The suppression of the battalion in the concentration area will require the involvement of 20-30 vehicles, or 50-70 percent of the daily resource of carrier-based aviation. And we must bear in mind that there will be losses of aircraft. The consumption of SLCMs and ALCMs to hit such targets is enormous. This can be judged from Syria - at the Shayrat airfield, the Americans launched 59 Tomahawks worth about $ 120 million (Bearded Tomahawks). The battleship "Iowa" solves such fire missions with the consumption of ammunition of the main caliber of two or three and 10-15 percent, respectively.
What do we have today in the Russian Navy? The largest caliber of naval artillery is 130 millimeters on destroyers of project 956. The weight of the projectile is about 30 kilograms with a firing range of up to 30 kilometers. With this weapon, the most powerful Russian ship in terms of artillery can, at best, solve the problem of suppressing two company strongholds to the depth of tactical antiamphibious defense from the water's edge. This follows directly from a comparison of the area of the kill zone of a 130-mm high-explosive projectile, the destroyer's ammunition load, and the size of a company stronghold of an American or other foreign army. Such a projectile cannot hit fortifications made of thick reinforced concrete and other heavily protected objects, in particular tanks. Therefore, it is necessary to say that our fleet (like, indeed, any other, with the exception of the United States, which retains its battleships as museums, but is ready to return to service at any moment) does not have ships capable of providing effective fire support to the coastal the flank of the army or the landing during the landing, especially to escort the latter in the operational depth. And there is a need for this.