What is the biggest battle cruiser today?

Answer 1

A battle cruiser is a specific type of ship. They were as big as battleships, and usually had main battery guns of the same size as a battleship. But they had less armor, so they could go faster, sacrificing protection for swiftness. This turned out not to be such a good idea, because the temptation was to use battle cruisers with battleships in the fleet, and when they encountered enemy battleships, they were extremely vulnerable to the enemy's guns. This was demonstrated at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, where three British battle cruisers went down with amazing rapidity, and almost all hands. Between the world wars the HMS Hood was the pride of the British Royal Navy. But the Hood, a battle cruiser, lasted less than ten minutes when it encountered the German battleship Bismark in May 1941, leaving three stunned survivors floating on the surface.

Strictly speaking, a true battleship is defined as a ship having sufficient armor to protect itself against guns of the same size it carries. By this definition, the last ten battleships the US built were all battlecruisers, not battleships. These were the co-called "fast battleships" built immediately before and during WWII. The last four of these were the Iowa class - the USS Iowa, USS Wisconsin, USS New Jersey and USS Missouri. These ships were eventually mothballed after WWII, but two of them went to Korea in the early 1950s during the Korean War, to provide gunfire support to troops ashore. The last of them was mothballed again in 1957, and at that time there were no more battleships or battle cruisers in anybody's active fleet anywhere in the world. The New Jersey was brought out of mothballs for a year during the Vietnam War, but the North Vietnamese complained so much about this at the Paris Peace Talks (which dragged on for six years) that New Jersey was put back in mothballs. During the Reagan years all four Iowas were brought back to the active fleet and modernized, which cost four times as much per ship as the entire ships had to start with. After Reagan left office they were mothballed again, but are still part of the Navy's inventory, and could come back yet again, if need be. There is nothing afloat like their 16-inch main guns. The Marines love them - you cant beat a 16 inch shell for what it does to the enemy. The biggest gun the Navy puts on new construction these days is a 5 inch gun. So, the Iowas, being in actuality really "battle cruisers" according to classic naval definition, are the only remaining battle cruisers anywhere.

The WWII US Navy also had light cruisers, with a 6 inch gun main battery, and heavy cruisers, with 8 inch gun main batteries. The US also built two ships which were classified as "battle cruisers" during WWII, mounting a 12 inch gun main battery, the USS Alaska and the USS Guam. These ships were basically worthless and provided no valuable service, while tying up about 2000 personnel each for crew and utilizing steel that might have built two additional, useful fleet aircraft carriers. Franklin Roosevelt had once been Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and loved the Navy dearly, and considered himself competent to decide naval matters. These two white elephants of battle cruisers were Roosevelt's brain children.

The biggest ships classified as "cruisers" today are probably the US Aegis class Guided Missile Cruisers, which have a couple of the autoloading 5 inch/54 caliber guns, but for a main battery rely on the Aegis missile system. They have no armor at all. Nobody builds armored warships anymore.