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Originally Posted by Cohaagen
As for the Iowas, they're magnificent ships, but utterly superfluous and in fact a drain on a naval budget that could have better spent the money on the real American area of expertise - carriers.
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The problem there is that they were authorised in 1937, ordered in 1939 and laid down mid-1940; all long before the superiority of airpower was recognized. Taranto was in 1940, Pearl Harbor in December '41 and Midway in June '42, by which time the four ships were well on their way to completion.
Besides, Congress recognized that they had plenty of money to spread around, and they completed more than 100 aircraft carriers during the war. Would more have been built - or needed - if the
Iowas had been cancelled. Also consider that the existence of
Yamato and
Musashi were part of the justification for those ships, and they made sure that the US ships outnumbered the big Japanese ships 2-to-1.