The Battle Fleets of 1950
By 
By U.S. Navy – Official U.S. Navy photo NH 61246 from the U.S. Navy Naval History and Heritage Command, Public Domain, Link
For a fun little project, I wrote up what all of the world’s battlefleets might have looked like in 1950 if World War II had not intervened…
he late 1930s promised a renewed era of battleship construction, similar in some ways to the bonanza that immediately followed the construction of the HMS Dreadnought. The “naval holiday” restrictions imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty system were relaxing, and in any case Japan and Italy had determined to abandon the system, reducing the constraints on Britain, France and the United States. Moreover, Germany and the Soviet Union were preparing to re-enter the battleship construction game.
Events intervened, of course, but it’s worth thinking about what the battlefleets of the world might have looked like in 1950 if the demands of the Second World War had not pulled resources away from battleship construction, while at the same time demonstrating that technology had passed the great warships by.