9.


There were plans to convert Iowa-class battleships into hybrid aircraft carriers


Photo source: baloogancampaign


at potentially doing something similar in the US Navy.


Imagine a ship that has the massive guns of a battleship with the flight deck and power projection capabilities of an aircraft carrier? While this might sound fanciful on the surface, it was actually a proposed project not once, but twice!


Called by some the Iowa-class Battlecarrier, the last two of the planned six Iowa-class battleships were almost turned into one of the strangest ship designs you’ve ever seen. But there was some logic to the apparent madness of the proposal.


The Iowa-class of the battleship was an incredibly powerful ship, but, more importantly, very fast for their size. Fast enough, in fact, to be one


10.


of the few large capital ships able to keep up with aircraft carrier strike groups of the period.


To this end, the unfinished USS Illinois and USS Kentucky were planned to be converted to include some flight decks and armaments similar to the U.S. Navy’s Essex- class of aircraft carriers. However, this never came to pass during the Second World War.


And that, for a time was the end of the story. At least, that is, until the Cold War. When the Soviets developed a hybrid battlecruiser and aircraft carrier known as the Kiev- class (Project 1143 Krechyet) in the 1970s, a fresh look was taken


This prompted a return to the idea of converting some Iowa- class battleships into half-carriers by removing the rear turret and installing an at short take-off and landing aircraft flight deck. The plans would call for the provision of around 20 AV-8B Harrier “Jump Jets” being carried on the ship.


Despite the four existing Iowa-class battleships returning to service in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, the Cold War would come to an end within the decade, rendering both the Iowa-class battleships once again obsolete but also sinking the idea of the Iowa- class carriers once and for all.


The French once made plans for a 100,000-ton cruise liner


During the 1930s,


something of an arms race was underway between two of the largest ocean liner companies of the 20th- century, Cunard and the French Compagnie Generale Transatlantique (CGT). This came to a height with the intense rivalry seen between their top-of-the-line ships the Queen Mary and the Normandie respectively.


The former was faster and more profitable but was the older and more aged vessel of the two. To cement their dominance of the transatlantic liner market, Cunard ordered and completed the Queen Mary’s sister ship, the first Queen Elizabeth, to be completed by 1940.


70 | The Report • June 2022 • Issue 100


CGT needed to do something about this if they were to ever remain relevant and so they put together plans for a new ocean liner that would dwarf both of Cunard’s mighty ships - La Bretagne. This ship was to be massive and, most importantly, had to be faster than either Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth.


According to some remaining plans for the ship, she would have had a displacement of a whopping 100,000 and been able to travel at no less than 35 knots (64 kph). To this end, CGT executives recruited the services of a Russian ship designer by the name of Vladimir Yourkevitch who designed the Normandie.


Photo source: Ocean Liners Blog


He provided two potential designs, one a larger version of the Normandie and another, a much more ambitious design that was very ahead of its time. Opting for the more conventional design, CGT approached the French Government for funding for this massive project - as they had done for her predecessor.


However, this was not to be. The German invasion of France in 1940 the subsequent collapse of the French Republic, not to mention the capture of CGT’s port of Le Harve for the next four years killed the Bretagne project for good. By the time war finally ended, CGT had lost Normandie in a catastrophic fire in New York. Building Bretagne was now ultimately pointless and the project was officially canceled in late 1945.


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