Gneisenau took a turret hit from Renown and the turret was silenced.alecsandros wrote:Indeed.
What is rather surprising is that in the real naval battles of the war, debilitating main turret hits were quite rare.
For example, in the Denmark Strait battle, out of the 15-17 hits obtained by both sides, not one was on a main turret or barbette.
Even during Bismarck's last battle, with the ship barely making 7kts, her main turrets were still pretty much intact at 9:20, even Anton and Bruno firing one last salvo at ~9:30.
In fact, now that I think about it, the only 2 cases when a heavy turret was destroyed by shell fire was Kirishima being blasted at 8km distance and Dunkerque taking a 15" shell hit from Hood at Mers-el-Kebir, distance ~15km, while at anchor.
And both those ships were actualy battlecruisers... not battleships... by WW2 standards... and their turrets were armored as such.
But luck does play a huge role. If you score a hit but just blast off an anchor chain or score a hit and disable a turret the distance between the two spots might be just 20 metres while you might be firing from 15,000 metres. So yes luck can decide the outcome of a battle. But to get serious or decisive hits you obviously want to be getting them from a generally large number of hits in the first place. If you score 25 hits 10 might be vital and silence the enemy so scoring continously and fingers crossed that some will be important is the name of the game. Bismarck scored 4 hits on POW but only one was important. If it could have kept going for just another 5 minutes scoring 2 or 3 hits a minute that's another 10 to 15 hits. If only 3 were serious like silencing turrets or entering boiler rooms then POW might have got into trouble. Which is why Captain leach was right to break off when he did.
Against Washington Bismarck would have twice the rate of fire, twice the chance of getting hits and twice the chance therefore of serious hits so I think it would have the advantage.