Battleship 10 battlecruisers to Germany’s at the time of the Battle of Jutland in 1916 They proved unable to replace cruisers and singularly unable to withstand plunging fire from German battleships At the start of the next naval war in 1939, British battlecruisers were set to fight German pocket battleships They had little luck in finding the enemy Then HMS Hood demonstrated once more that the battlecruiser was a failed concept: she exploded with the loss of all but three crewmen upon being hit by a single shell from DKM Bismarck The Kriegsmarine also failed to learn the lessons of the Great War: it floated the powerful, expensive, sister battlecruisers DKM Scharnhorst and DKM Gneisenau in World War II, neither of which were effective as commerce raiders BATTLE EXHAUSTION See battle stress BATTLE FATIGUE See battle stress BATTLESHIP A capital warship designed to bring to bear maximum firepower from 14″, 15″, or 16″ guns, Only the Imperial Japanese Navy built battleships with bigger guns: the 18″ gun bearing IJN Yamato and IJN Musashi Battleships were protected by heavy armor plating on decks and the hull Speed was thus sacrificed to firepower and armor in these massive, seaborne artillery platforms Battleships of the World War I period were the largest and most complex weapons systems then devised They were intended to project power to the four corners of the earth and to fight enemy battleships By World War II they were already obsolete weapons platforms in most naval battles, where aircraft carriers protected by fast cruisers displaced them They still saw action, notably newer “fast battleships” purpose built to keep up with fast fleet carriers They also performed in coastal bombardments See various battles and naval campaigns See also battlecruisers; Five Power Naval Treaty; Imperial Japanese Navy; Italian Navy; Kriegsmarine; Pearl Harbor; pocket battleship; Royal Navy; Soviet Navy; U.S Navy; Washington Naval Conference BATTLE STRESS British Army term for what U.S forces called “battle fatigue.” Known as “soldier’s heart” in the American Civil War era, it was called “shell shock” by the British during World War I After World War II it was identified as the medical condition “post traumatic stress disorder.” Battle stress manifested many symptoms, including mental and moral debilitation, inaction, and psychological paralysis (convulsions, mutism, fugue states) It was brought on by exposure to the sights, noise, fear, and other stresses and horrors of prolonged combat Western Allied armies generally recognized and treated it as a medical condition during World War II One in four U.S casualties was psychological, wherein mental condition was deemed sufficiently serious to terminate combat fitness Other armies did not take so kind-hearted a view of what traditionalists regarded as hysteria or deemed cowardice Japanese officers did not admit to the effects of battle stress on themselves or their 146