One thing I’ve noticed when looking at naval battles in the second world war is that it seemed like battleships in general already had one foot our the door due to the advantages of aircraft carriers, however, almost none of these allegedly outdated ships is that not a single one of them is considered to be a Dreadnought in the same sense of their world war one counterparts.
Why was this? Was it simply a name change back to battleships, or did dreadnoughts somehow become obsolete during the interwar period? Or am I missing something entirely and it happened for another reason? Thank you.
If I understand it correctly, Dreadnoughts were less a new type of ship as much as a class of battleship based on the HMS Dreadnought that came to be the predominate type of battleship.
As to why there were so many fewer in the interwar period that mostly has to do with the five-power treaty which limited the battleship tonnage allowed for the USA, UK, Japan, France, and Italy to 500,000 tons for the USA and UK, 300,000 for Japan, and 175,000 for Italy and France.
The treaty also stipulated that the maximum tonnage for a single battleship was 35,000 and that main batteries could be no larger than 16-inch.
This was well above what the HMS Dreadnought itself was originally. In fact, after WWI almost all battleships shared Dreadnought characteristics making the term obsolete.
All this was based on the book For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United states from 1607-2012 by Alan R. Millet, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis