User:The ed17/Sandbox/USS Hawaii (CB-3)

If completed, Hawaii would have been the third member of the Alaska-class cruisers, a group of United States Navy ships designed to combat extant treaty cruisers built during the 1930s.

Ordered along with five other ships of the same design in September 1940, Hawaii's keel was laid only in December 1943, having been delayed by higher-priority ships after the beginning of the Second World War. Construction proceeded apace, and its hull was launched in November 1945, months after the surrender of Japan and the end of the conflict. Amid post-war budget cuts, work on the ship was essentially halted until its official cancellation two years later. The US Navy considered various proposals to convert the incomplete hull into a guided missile cruiser and command ship, and money was allocated in the navy's 1952 for the latter. After a change of heart, however, the ship was instead kept in mothballs until 1959, when it was scrapped.

Background
The Alaska class was designed in a time of world turmoil. The Second World War would soon break out in Europe; the Second London Naval Treaty was near breaking, with the US having already invoked an "escalator clause" in the construction of the North Carolina-class battleships; and the United States was worried about the prospect of a war with Japan and its large force of heavy cruisers, which would be capable of raiding shipping and cutting communication lines in the large Pacific Ocean. To the United States Navy, then, a large cruiser-killer ship was very promising. Such a vessel would be able to hunt down, and protect aircraft carrier-centered fleets from, the Japanese cruisers. The need for such a ship only increased after the saga of Germany's GERMAN CRUISER Admiral Graf Spee, which went on a successful commerce-raiding spree in the South Atlantic at the beginning of the war.

The design of these ships emerged from the US Navy's General Board, who in 1938 asked the Bureau of Construction and Repair to conduct a "comprehensive study of all types of naval vessels for consideration for a new and expanded building program". The design process was lengthy, with several widely different alternatives considered, from fast ships with a few 12- or 10-inch guns to slower ships with many 8-inch guns. The General Board went through several of those designs, facing significant problems with providing adequate protection while keeping overwhelming firepower (over the heavy cruisers) and speed (that could keep up with those cruisers and the aircraft carriers then under construction and being designed). The designers were running into the problem that naval historian Normal Friedman calls the "squeeze": the essential elements of a battleship (armament, propulsion machinery, and armor) typically added up to about sixty percent of their design displacement; favoring one of these factors, the "three primary military qualities", would mean accepting compromises in one or both of the others. Here, the squeeze was accommodated with weak underwater anti-torpedo protection, as the navy was unwilling to decrese the ship's speed or armament. The latter seems to have been a particular concern, especially of one of the Alaska's primary champions, Admiral Ernest King. This stemmed from the experience of Graf Spee, which was faced with multiple enemy warships in its final battle, and as a consequence the Alaskas were armed to deal with multiple enemy cruisers, so that they could be expected to succeed if independently deployed.

The design that resulted from this process has been called a battlecruiser by some naval historians, and indeed the ship combined some features of battleships and cruisers. The latter showed most notably in the use of only a single rudder, which relegated the ships to an excessively large tactical circle in service, but also in the poor underwater protextion. On the other hand, the ships were much larger than cruisers, carried 12-inch guns, and had extensive above-water protection, better than the treaty cruisers.