Question to McP - why wasn't Enterprise saved?
Same reason as Warspite wasn't. Incompetence and
too expensive to render safe for museum purposes. Both warships took incredible amounts of damage that rendered them economically unfit for that kind of fate.
Slade's facts may be disorganized, his opinions unpopular. But the damage cited and the real results remained (US navy ship's bills) that the conclusions were drawn from and still are all too real.
And besides citing British government records to further underpin and confirm the USN repair conclusions
from the same source used to refute them ought to be worth looking at for the absolute hilarity involved.
HMS Belfast? Preserved as a private effort. Notable reason? IWM wanted to preserve a 6 in gun turret to match the 15 in ones they got from scrapped British battleships, and that ballooned out to preserve a whole ship. Why should she have been preserved? Battle of North Cape. How about USS Salem? As far as I can tell, for about the same reason as the HMS Belfast was picked to represent British WW II cruisers, she was just picked at random as a cold war era survivor to be an example of a US WWII era heavy cruiser.
Funny thing is that unlike Belfast, she did her career as a Mediterranean showboat. At least Belfast shot at somebody. I would have loved USS San Francisco to have made it. Now THAT was a cruiser.
McP