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[2] The List of ships of World War II contains major military vessels of the war, arranged alphabetically and by type. The list includes armed vessels that served during the war and in the immediate aftermath, inclusive of localized ongoing combat operations, garrison surrenders, post-surrender occupation, colony re-occupation, troop and ...
Battlecruisers were put into action again during World War II, and only one survived to the end. There was also renewed interest in large "cruiser-killer" type warships, but few were ever begun, as construction of battleships and battlecruisers were curtailed in favor of more-needed convoy escorts, aircraft carriers, and cargo ships.
The largest heavy cruisers were the Alaska-class large cruisers, which were designed as "cruiser killers". They resembled contemporary battlecruisers or battleships in general appearance, as well as having main armament and displacement equal or greater than that of capital ships of the First World War. However, they were actually upscaled ...
Most of the heavy cruisers were used as commerce raiders during World War II, of which Admiral Scheer was the most successful; Admiral Graf Spee was scuttled after the Battle of the River Plate. Blücher was sunk by Norwegian coastal batteries during Operation Weserübung , the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, just four days after the ...
The US Navy's main impetus for the Alaska class was the threat posed by Japanese cruisers raiding its lines of communication in the event of war. Heavy cruisers were also the most likely surface threat to aircraft carriers making independent raids, so a cruiser-killer was also an ideal carrier escort. [3]
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The Alaska-class were six large cruisers ordered before World War II for the United States Navy (USN), of which only two were completed and saw service late in the war. The USN designation for the ships of this class was 'large cruiser' (CB), a designation unique to the Alaska-class, and the majority of leading reference works consider them as such.
However, in the 1970s, the Soviet Union began the construction of a class of very large guided missile cruisers, much larger than any other surface combatant [N 1] built since the Second World War. This new type, the Kirov -class , although designated as a "heavy nuclear-powered missile cruiser" by the Soviet Navy, was generally referred to in ...