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Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah, one of the legit edges that the Kriegsmarine had going into WW1 over the Royal Navy had to do with redundancy in design with their dreadnaughts. It's been a while since I read up on it, but poo poo like how compartmentalized they were. KM ships would be broken up into many more sub-compartments than the RN ships, which in turn meant that it was easier to isolate flooding and fires. They also had some superior ammo handling procedures that led to a lower risk of catastrophic magazine explosions, although I'm hazy on the details of what that involved. Maybe one of the actual naval historians will be around to expand/correct me. German battleships in the WWI period (Kaiserliche Marine, not Kriegsmarine) generally had more compartments than their British counterparts, yes. This didn't necessarily make them more survivable than the British ships, especially when it came to flooding. While there were more compartments, there were also more things like voice pipes and ventilation trunks penetrating the bulkheads between compartments, providing paths through which water could flow between the compartments. The German ships also had a major vulnerability in that they had more submerged torpedo tubes. A submerged torpedo tube requires a large compartment, unbroken by any watertight bulkhead. German ships typically had four submerged tubes, one each in the lightly armoured bow and stern, and two in a single unbroken flat between both sides of the ship beneath A turret, pointing to either flank. British ships just had the two flank tubes. Flooding of these torpedo flats, especially the bow flat, was responsible for the sinking of Lützow at Jutland. British ships were generally more resilient to flooding than German ships, especially after damage control procedures were refined following the loss of Audacious to a mine in October 1914. At Jutland, four British ships suffered serious flooding: Malaya, Marlborough, Warspite and Tiger. In all four ships, the flooding never reached a level where it was overwhelming the pumps, barring a single brief crisis aboard Marlborough when a pump became clogged by loose coal. In comparison, seven German ships suffered severe flooding. On four of them, the flooding could not effectively be controlled by the ship's pumps. Lützow would sink, while Seydlitz and Derfflinger would likely have sunk had the weather been worse, or if the journey home had been longer (when she reached home, Seydlitz had no buoyancy in her bows, and they were beginning to dip into the water, while Derfflinger was only saved from the same fate because her bow torpedo flat did not have time to flood before she reached port). The ammunition handling procedures are a similarly complex issue. The two navies used different propellants. For the Royal Navy, this was Cordite MD45 (30% nitrogycerine and 65% nitrocellulose with 5% petroleum jelly as a stabiliser), while for the Germans, it was RP C/12 (25% nitroglycerine, 69% nitrocellulose, 4–7% Centralite, which acted as solvent, stabiliser and flame moderator, and 0.5% other stabilisers). Cordite was, as the name suggests, extruded as a cord, while RP C/12 was extruded as a hollow tube. This meant that RP C/12 burnt cooler than British propellants and produced lower pressures. Cordite used a volatile solvent, while the Centralite used in RP C/12 was non-volatile. This meant that cordite had a certain shelf life. Gunnery officers were supposed to check the cordite in their magazines to ensure that there was no unsafe cordite aboard, but this duty was often neglected. Cordite was also frequently poorly stored, leading to a number of accidental explosions in port. The RN did not have a culture of safety around their propellants - Alexander Grant, gunner of HMS Lion at Jutland, claims to have found stokers in one of the ship's magazines, wearing hob-nailed boots, and carrying matches and cigarettes. This likely results from insufficient testing and knowledge of the danger of cordite; small scale tests suggested that cordite fires would not spread to other charges, and while the one large-scale test carried out suggested that large fires would be dangerous, it was ignored because it was felt there was no way for a small-scale fire to transition to a larger one. Gunnery Branch officers and warrant officers viewed cordite as considerably safer than black powder, and this view transferred to non-experts as cordite being almost completely safe, leading to carelessness. As a result, many British ships had a dangerous proportion of unsafe propellant aboard. It was not uncommon for ships to have charges up to ten years out of date. RP C/12 did not have a shelf-life, and could be stored indefinitely. The German propellant charges were also contained in brass cases (like a big cartridge case), and had smaller black powder igniters than British charges, making them better protected against fire. Even so, this did not necessarily make MD45 more dangerous than RP C/12. The RN had more stringent, though still insufficient, passive safety features aimed at preventing fires reaching the magazines from the turrets: when the RN inspected the surrendered High Seas Fleet in 1918, they found that the flash doors in the hoists were not up to the British standards in place in 1916, let alone those in place in 1918 after the experience of Jutland. The main thing that caused magazine explosions were fires in the turrets and working chambers (the compartment immediately below the turret where charges were removed from the hoists to the magazines and placed in hoists to the turret). If these fires could flash down the hoists to the magazines, there was little that could be done. The RN nearly had an early wakeup call for this during the Battle of the Falkland Islands. A shell hit to one of the gun positions (casemates) aboard the older armoured cruiser HMS Kent ignited charges, which flashed down to the magazines. However, thanks to quick thinking by a Royal Marine Sergeant, Charles Mayes, and a lack of charges in the ammunition passage that lead to the magazines, the fire was extinguished before it could ignite more charges. While Mays would be recommended for the VC for his quick thinking (he would ultimately receive the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal), the incident brought few repercussions. The main danger came when a shell hit a turret that was full of charges. The first such hit in the war came on a German ship at the Battle of Dogger Bank. At about 10:40, a hit from Lion ignited charges in the working chamber for D turret (the aftmost turret) aboard Seydlitz. As the chamber was overly loaded with charges, a flash fire started, quickly passing down the hoists into the magazine for D turret. With these charges ignited, the expanding gases blew open the doors to the magazine for C turret, igniting charges there. Sixty-two charges ignited, sending flames shooting out through the turrets as high as Seydlitz's mast, and killing 165 men. The magazines were swiftly flooded, saving the ship from probable destruction. The main conclusion the Germans drew from the fire aboard Seydlitz was that they needed to greatly reduce the number of charges in the turrets, working chambers and hoists. The British drew a very different conclusion from the battle. During the engagement, the British battlecruisers had achieved hit rates of ~2%, abysmally low even by the standards of WWI naval gunnery. This was because the Battle Cruiser Force (BCF) did not have a gunnery base at its base at Rosyth, to which it had been moved following German raids on the British coast. Rosyth did not have a gunnery range within its protected waters, while the waters around it were too full of mines and U-boats for it to be worth risking detaching a battlecruiser on gunnery practice. To compensate for the poor hit rates, Admiral Beatty, commanding the BCF, pushed for increased rates of fire. For most gunnery crews, the only way to achieve this was to increase the number of charges stored in the turrets, in the hoists and in the working chambers. Some crews might even have removed or disabled the flash doors and magazine doors to increase the rate of fire. On only one ship were safety procedures properly followed - Lion. Grant, who had been brought in following the dismissal of Lion's earlier gunner for lying about safety testing the cordite in her magazines, instituted a new set of routines for loading. Grant's routines allowed for an increase in rate of fire without increasing the number of charges in the system. Grant also fully changed Lion's load of cordite for new cordite, ensuring that every charge was fresh and stable. At Jutland, Grant was proven right. Aboard Queen Mary, Indefatigable and Invincible, where turrets and working chambers were filled with charges, and where old, unsafe charges were mixed in, turret hits caused flash fires and magazine explosions. Lion took a similar hit to her Q (amidships) turret. This started a small fire which smouldered for just under half an hour, despite efforts to extinguish it. After half an hour, it reached eight charges which had been in the hoists and working chamber, causing a major flash fire. However, the slow burning of the initial fire gave plenty of warning, allowing the magazine doors to be closed and the magazine to be flooded, preventing a Seydlitz-style fire, or even an explosion. The Germans, having minimised the number of charges in dangerous positions, were in little danger from propellant fires. British hits caused five turret fires in German ships. Three were minor, but the remaining two, both aboard Derfflinger, where the new regulations were not strictly observed, were more serious. The fires, which ignited an excess of charges stored in the turrets and working chambers, killed 143 men. However, thanks to the greater stability of the German propellants, and the lack of charges in the hoists down to the magazines, neither managed to reach the magazines. The explosions aboard RN battlecruisers were largely down to two factors: the composition of Cordite MD45, which was unstable and burnt at high temperatures likely to ignite other charges, and the ignoring of proper safety precautions to increase the rate of fire. Had the RN used safer propellants, like RP C/12, the impact of fires would have been reduced, even if the procedures were ignored; the results would have been closer to those experienced by Seydlitz at Dogger Bank. Similarly, if the RN had followed safe procedures, reducing the number of charges outside the magazine, turret hits would only have caused fires like those aboard Lion at Jutland. Either would have caused many casualties, but no ships would have been lost. If both had been true, then the effects of turret fires would have been small.
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Oct 30, 2018 13:49
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Jobbo_Fett posted:So apparently the Admiral Kusznetsov(?) sank at drydock. Whats the last aircraft carrier to be lost before it? The Kuznetsov's not sunk, only the floating drydock with it in. This is a known hazard of floating drydocks. Back in 1944, HMS Valiant was heavily damaged by a collapsing drydock in Trincomalee, and never fully repaired, though that was more down to Britain's dire financial straits at the time.
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Oct 30, 2018 20:52
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BalloonFish posted:Naval interest in the chemistry behind the action of the copper plates largely ended once the decision to copper-fasten the entire fleet had been made as it solved the issue from a practical seamanship perspective. Davy's experiments (and invention of the sacrificial anode) were to try and solve the slow corrosion of the copper sheathing itself rather than the bolts. He was entirely successful in this, but it was found that the way the copper gradually sloughed off it surface layer to reveal a fresh surface (until all the sheet was gone) was key to preventing the marine growth getting a good hold. It's interesting that the sacrificial anode was invented so early, as it doesn't seem to have been in use in the RN in the mid-19th Century. HMS Prince Consort (laid down 1862) was an ironclad, but was given copper sheathing beneath the waterline, as on a wooden ship. Of course, galvanic action caused corrosion of the iron armour. To prevent this, rather than adding a sacrificial anode, they replaced the copper sheathing with sheathing made from Muntz metal (60% copper, 40% zinc). This had reduced anti-fouling properties compared to pure copper, but did not cause as much corrosion. This was used on most British ironclads. On the Inconstant class frigates (built from 1866), which had to be fast to catch the USN's Wampanoag class frigates, copper was used. These were iron-hulled ships, but were given an outer sheathing of oak. This both acted to give the ship a modicum of armouring (as they did not carry any iron armour), and prevented galvanic corrosion of the iron hull. The wood sheathing was in two layers. The first was screwed into the iron hull using iron nails; the second was then attached to the first using brass screws. Finally, the copper was nailed to the outer layer using copper nails. It was a highly successful system. Inconstant would survive afloat for just under a century, with few corrosion issues, being scrapped in 1956. After steel was introduced, the RN still struggled with corrosion, especially on lighter craft. The torpedo boat TB 13, built in the late 1870s, was given a brass hull. This would be found to be successful, but far to expensive for real service.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:23
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BalloonFish posted:I think it was probably the usual RN (and more general military) problem of being very practical-minded and letting your technology stagnate when you're in a position of dominance. The success of copper plate as an anti-fouling measure was known in general for centuries, was specifically proposed to the RN in 1708 and the solution to electrolytic corrosion was well understood by 1765. But it wasn't until it became a pressing matter in a time of war, 20 years later, that the technology was implemented. Once it was, all ships were copper-plated, all existing ones were progressively rebuilt with copper bolts and all new-builds were constructed that way, the problem was solved and that method was standardised across the navy. The sacrificial anode was of no practical benefit to the RN and had 'failed' in the task for which it was invented. So there was no need to adopt the anode. I suspect that with Prince Consort they were concerned with making the copper too inert which, as with the original anode trials, actually made it redundant as an antifouling method. Muntz brass was a compromise - less effective in antifouling (but better than copper neutralised with an anode) but also much less electrolytically active. I don't entirely agree that the RN let its technology stagnate in the 19th Century. They were at the leading edge of a lot of naval development, particularly in terms of shipbuilding and design. The argument that they were more interested in keeping anti-fouling properties over electrolytic ones is more convincing, though. zoux posted:At what point did the British stop considering us as potential foes in their planning While the Royal Navy has always had plans for war with the US, I'd argue that the point where it stops considering the US as a likely foe comes in the 1930s. In the late 1910s and 1920s, there were quite a few RN officers who considered the US as the most likely enemy in Britain's next war. After all, Germany had been defeated, Japan, Italy and France were allies, and the Soviet Union had been crippled by the Russian Civil War. The US, in comparison, had shown themselves to be very interested in preventing people carrying out commerce warfare. The RN felt that commerce warfare was a key part of its playbook, especially in a war with a European nation. There were few fears that the US would declare war on Britain for no reason; instead, the two nations would come to blows over Britain's actions during a war with a third partner. For much of the 1920s, RN planning was focused on Japan, with the US coming a close second. War with the USA was generally understood to be a difficult affair, one that neither would come off well from. In the 1930s, however, the rise of Germany and Italy as threats to the UK forced a reorientation towards European threats, and the likelihood of war with the US dropped off.
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Dec 4, 2018 20:07
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:If you look at the situation in 1941, Fleet Air Arm isn't really equipped for carrier warfare. To my knowledge, the Brits don't have any practice with mass carrier operations and mostly use them as fighter platforms. The carriers themselves have small hangars and are operating questionably modern aircraft like Fulmars and Albacores. Ironically, the best chances for the RN would have been air radar-guided night attacks. This isn't quite right; the RN had been planning for mass carrier operations since the 1930s. There were two reasons why they didn't really put this into action during the early years of the war: firstly, the sheer number of carriers lost or damaged and secondly, the vast amount of commitments the RN had to make. Even so, they did so where they could. Ark Royal, Glorious and Furious operated together off the Norwegian coast in April-May 1940, while the Taranto raid was supposed to be carried out by both Illustrious and Eagle (though the latter had to drop out due to fuel system problems). During Operation Pedestal, the RN operated four carriers together with only minimal work-up, while the USN had shortly before struggled with operating two together at Midway. The RN was well aware that it's best chances came with night air attacks, and had put considerable effort into training for and preparing for them, unlike any other navy. This is why Taranto was a night attack, while Pearl Harbor was a daylight strike. The Royal Navy's carrier tactics against the IJN were well displayed by Somerville's response to the Indian Ocean Raid - bringing his modern carriers together, stalking the IJN's carrier force, and moving into a position to launch a night strike. The only reason one wasn't launched was that the IJN CAP drove off the RN aircraft shadowing Kido Butai, meaning Somerville was not sufficiently confident of its location that he felt comfortable launching a strike.
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Feb 22, 2019 01:18
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FrangibleCover posted:People have dealt with other bits of your question but I'm going to pick this out. Repulse was not only not the most modern battleship in the fleet but not a battleship at all, but that's a nitpick. Originally Force Z was supposed to include Indomitable to provide organic air cover but she ran aground in the Caribbean and was unavailable. The rest of Britain's fleet carriers were all engaged in an immediate fight for national survival against countries that Britain was actually at war with and couldn't be detached to posture against a hypothetical Japanese attack. Hermes was also on her way but doesn't seem to have arrived in time, so air cover for Force Z was supposed to be provided by the Buffalos of the RAF. That didn't work out in the end but I think it's probably silly to say that the Navy that invented the torpedo bomber, scored the first ever dive-bombing kill on a ship and had already crippled a battleship and a heavy cruiser at sea in air attacks was unaware of the potential risk to battleships operating without air cover. Three's a couple of mistakes here. Firstly, the RN during WWII did not draw a large distinction between the battlecruiser and battleship. Both were considered 'Capital Ships', and were seen as being capable of carrying out the same duties. While Repulse had been built as a battlecruiser, by WWII, it is fair to consider her a battleship. She definitely wasn't modern, having not been modernised like her sister ship, though. Secondly, while it's a common claim that Indomitable was intended to form part of Force Z, this is incorrect. Indomitable never received any such orders, and even if she had, she could not have been in Malaya in early December without cutting short her planned work-up in Jamaica. When Indomitable completed her repairs after running aground, she was sent back to the Caribbean to work up, rather than being sent to join the Eastern Fleet, as would be expected if she had originally been planned to join it. There's no evidence in RN records that Indomitable was intended to join Force Z or the Eastern Fleet, and discussions between Phillips and Admiral Hart of the US Eastern Fleet on the 6th December 1941 contain no indication that Phillips expected Indomitable to join him. Churchill did advocate for a carrier to be sent eastwards with Force Z, and there may have been informal discussions on the topic, but there's no evidence of concrete plans to send a carrier east in the second half of 1941.
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Feb 26, 2019 18:36
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FrangibleCover posted:Interesting stuff. I've also heard claims that Illustrious was earmarked for Eastern Fleet service but that doesn't seem to stand up to scrutiny either. It makes sense, carriers were rare and valuable in 1941 and every one of them available was needed at home or in the Med. I'm always a little surprised that Prince of Wales got sent, frankly. It was always planned to send Illustrious and Formidable back to the Mediterranean once their repairs were complete, which isn't surprising. Had Ark Royal not been sunk, though, there's some evidence that she would have been sent to the Far East in April 1942, following a planned refit in the US.
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Feb 27, 2019 00:20
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Urcinius posted:When I found out Churchill offered Illustrious in addition to Vicky for the Pacific on 2 Dec. 1942, I wondered if anything noticeably different would have happened in the Pacific. I wasn't able to come up with much of anything. Maybe a night carrier raid on Rabaul. What can y'all come up with? I don't think you would have seen much different in the Pacific; the RN carriers had little experience operating alongside the USN, and so most of the time Victorious spent in the Pacific was spent exercising with Saratoga. Adding Illustrious wouldn't have changed much. Having the extra carrier might have allowed the Allies to be a bit more aggressive, but I think a raid on Rabaul would be a step too far. Sicily would not have been affected, but Salerno might. If Indomitable is still torpedoed off Sicily, then there would not be an easily available spare carrier to fill in for her. This would likely have delayed the operation until either Illustrious could be recalled from the Pacific - the other option would be sending Furious south, which the RN is unlikely to do if Scharnhorst or Tirpitz are still about threatening the Norwegian convoy routes. Raenir Salazar posted:So what's up with the British in WWII sending ships to be refit to Jamaica or the US? Lack of capacity at the home islands? Better tools/repair people there? Available technology? Safety from German bombers? Ships were not refitted/repaired in Jamaica - a few ships were sent to do shakedown cruises in the safer waters there. The RN's use of American shipyards for repairs and refits was mostly caused by your first and last reasons. Much of Britain's shipyard capacity was taken up with producing merchant shipping and ASW escorts, especially in the critical period of the Battle of the Atlantic from 1940-42. This single-minded focus allowed the RN to construct 82 destroyer escorts and 152 corvettes, sloops and frigates (plus another 88 in Canadian yards) between 1939 and 1942, as well as millions of tons of merchant shipping. However, it also meant that major warships under construction were often delayed, to allow workers to focus on the more vital areas. Similarly, many refits were delayed or overran as a result. German bombing raids were not the biggest threat to British shipyards, as they more commonly targeted the merchant ports rather than the naval shipyards. Even so, there were several raids that struck naval yards, with Thorneycroft's yard at Woolston and various yards on the Clyde taking the biggest hits. During one of these raids, the cruiser Sussex, refitting at Clydeside, was struck by a bomb which started a major fire in her engine rooms. Had she been at sea and the fire been allowed to reach the state it did, it is likely she would have sunk; as it was, she required 21 months of repairs. Repairing and refitting major units in the US removed this risk.
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Feb 27, 2019 15:42
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A lot of the POW escapes relied upon guards not being familiar enough with the documents to really question them; one of my favourites is the RN officer who made an escape attempt as a Bulgarian officer. While nobody in the camp knew what a Bulgarian naval uniform or documentation looked like, they reasoned that none of the Germans would be either, so they just made versions of the RN uniform, ID cards and so on in poorly-translated Bulgarian. It worked well enough that he was able to spend a night in a German military canteen without arousing any suspicion.
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Jun 22, 2019 10:23
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A good microcosm of the problems with the Italian war effort comes in the Red Sea. They had a destroyer flotilla and a submarine squadron based here, to raid British shipping running through the Red Sea to Suez. This was vaguely sensible, except that they ran into trouble even before the war began. The British intercepted the message sent by the Italian high command warning the forces in the Red Sea that war was about to start, and sent more ships to the area. The sub force gets sent out to take up stations so they can be ready when the war starts; but then they start to have problems. The subs have been fitted with air conditioning, to keep their electronics at operating temperature in the warmer waters of the Red Sea. This air conditioning system doesn't use Freon, because that's expensive. Instead, it uses chloromethane, which causes intoxication when breathed in, and can be poisonous at higher concentrations; just what you want in a sealed metal tube. Chloromethane intoxication causes a couple of subs to run aground, one of which isn't recoverable. Another is forced to surface by it when trying to evade a British ASW patrol, and is captured. Two more subs were located and sunk by the British, either as a result of information taken from the captured sub, or from radio intercepts. The rest of the subs don't get up to much more, and end up leaving the Red Sea and heading for France after Italian East Africa falls to Allied forces. With the subs useless, it's the turn of the destroyer flotilla. This makes a whole bunch of attempts at raiding British convoys that go nowhere because they never locate the convoy. When they do run into one, BN 7, half their force never actually makes contact with the convoy, and the other half are forced off by the escort. One of the destroyers is then chased down and sunk by the British. This nearly repeats itself four months later; part of the Italian force locates the convoy, fires a wildly-aimed torpedo salvo, and heads home, having done no damage at all. With fuel running low and the Allies starting to close in on the base at Massawa, the flotilla plans to raid the British bases at Port Suez and Port Sudan. The force to raid Port Suez sets off, and one of the ships promptly runs aground and has to be abandoned. The rest of the force turns back and joins the squadron heading to Port Sudan. One of these ships has to drop out and be scuttled due to mechanical failures; the others get to about 30 miles from Port Sudan, but then the Fleet Air Arm turns up. The British, expecting the Italians to make such a move, have moved the air group from the carrier Eagle to the area. Two of the destroyers are sunk, the other two are beached on the Arabian coast. The last actions of the Italian fleet in the Red Sea is to scuttle a whole bunch of ships in Massawa harbour, and for one of the old torpedo boats based there to torpedo and heavily damage a British cruiser.
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Jul 12, 2019 08:57
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Solaris 2.0 posted:So I'm going to CineD this thread a little. One of the most accurate naval films I've seen is the Battle of the River Plate, which follows as closely as possible to the real battle. Of the four British ships that took part in the battle, two were still around to 'play' themselves in the film (the other two ships also engaged a cruiser of the same class as Graf Spee in the Battle of the Barents Sea). The use of real ships let the filmmakers show the procedures very accurately, and they worked with survivors of the battle to make sure that it was well-portrayed too.
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Jul 12, 2019 22:22
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Agean90 posted:Animals on ships is a super underappreciated part of naval history.my favorite was the elephant a bunch of sailors "acquired" and taught it what ropes to hold Up until the middle of WWII, the Royal Navy had a zoo on Whale Island in Portsmouth, to hold all the animals it had collected that were too big to fit on the ships that acquired them. The main attraction were a couple of polar bears and a small pride of lions, but it had all sorts of creatures.
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Jul 15, 2019 15:50
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Fly Molo posted:Holy poo poo, that armor gives no fucks whatsoever. That's from a British heavy cruiser, HMS Sussex. She had just a 1" belt (with ~4" over her magazines), making it even more impressive.
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Jul 24, 2019 16:53
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:On a different note, my impression is that battlecruisers are basically battleships with thin armor. I mean, ship classification is a pretty fuzzy topic, but is that a dangerously invalid impression? At the moment I plan to group ships as DD destroyer, CA cruiser, BB battleship, SS submarine, CV carrier, plus transports, patrol boats, and amphibious craft. Organizationally it's easier for uneducated players if there aren't too many categories, especially of the ships that they themselves are allowed to build. Since you'll be allowed to decide how much weight to allocate to armor, you should be able to make a battlecruiser by just skimping on armor and not using up the resulting spare displacement on more guns. Battlecruisers are complicated, and there's a lot of differing historical interpretations. A lot of people will argue that a battlecruiser is a battleship that's traded armour or weapons for speed. They'll also argue that battlecruisers were intended to fight cruisers, not battleships. I'd argue that this is false; battlecruisers were intended to fight battleships, and technical factors were relatively uninformative as to what was and wasn't considered a battlecruiser. The role prescribed for the battlecruiser in WWI doctrine was for the battlecruiser to act only with the battlefleet. They were to back up the scouting line of light cruisers, and destroy the enemy's scouting line. Once this had been done, the battlecruiser squadron would form a 'fast wing' for the main battleline during the main fleet engagement. This fast wing would try to outflank the enemy's line. If the enemy tried to manoeuvre to avoid the fast wing, they would put themselves at a disadvantage relative to the main battleline; if they ignored the fast wing to focus on the battleline, then the fast wing could cross the 'T' of the enemy line. The idea that battlecruisers weren't capable of fighting battleships comes from Jutland, where three British battlecruisers blew up following hits from thier German counterparts. These explosions were caused more by British carelessness with cordite than by anything inherent to the ships. Battlecruisers that didn't explode were capable of taking significant punishment. Tiger took 15 hits, more than any British capital ship bar Warspite (which took the same number of hits). She was still capable of fighting, and in better shape than Warspite. Lion took 13 hits, and despite her Q turret being burned out, was never at significant risk of sinking. The German ships proved similarly survivable, with Seydlitz and Derfflinger surviving 22 and 21 hits respectively, far more than any German battleship. As far as technical factors go, armour and armament played little part in what was considered a battlecruiser. As an extreme example, most historians will define a battlecruiser as being purely dreadnought-type ships, but the IJN considered their semi-dreadnought armoured cruisers of the Tsukuba class to be battlecruisers from 1912. The British battlecruiser Hood was as heavily armoured as any contemporary British battleship (and devoted a greater proportion of her displacement to armour than many previous battleship classes), and had the same 8*15in armament as the Queen Elizabeth and Revenge class battleships. In 1914, Admiral Jellicoe would attempt to persuade the Admiralty to reclassify the Queen Elizabeths as battlecruisers, to give the Royal Navy a decisive edge in battlecruiser numbers over the Germans. As far as most naval thinkers in the WWI era were concerned, the defining feature of a battlecruiser was that it was fast enough to fulfil the demands of the role. Complicating this is the fact that, by 1939, things had changed. Improvements in engine technology, combined with the increased size of battleships in this period, meant that every battleship built at this time had battlecruiser speeds. Meanwhile, you start to get ships like the French Dunkerques, German Scharnhorsts and American Alaskas (as well as a number of unbuilt Japanese, Dutch and Soviet designs). These are relatively large ships, with armour and armament comparable to the battlecruisers built in the run-up to WWI. These ships weren't intended for the classical battlecruiser role; they were never expected to fight modern battleships. Instead, they were mainly intended to fight either similar ships, or the smaller 'treaty' heavy cruisers that most navies had built in the 1920s-30s. While these ships are often considered to be battlecruisers, I prefer to use the term the USN used for the Alaskas - large cruisers. This is because they were intended to, and often did, fulfil cruiser roles; attacking trade (the Scharnhorsts), protecting it (the Dunkerques), or scouting (the Alaskas).
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Aug 21, 2019 12:26
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I think we are all getting two different factors confused - the first being "when Invincible was drawn, what was her intended use" and "how were battlecruisers actually used in WWI" This ignores the fact that a lot of people viewed the armoured cruiser (especially the large 'First Class' ones) not as commerce raiders, but as an essential part of the battleline. Rear Admiral Samuel Long, one of the first people in the Royal Navy to use the term battlecruiser, would write, in 1893 when the first armoured cruisers were being developed, "it is possible first-class or battle-cruisers may be attached to fleets to play the part assigned by Lord Howe to his fast-sailing battle-ships on May 28, 1794, so well described by Captain Mahan". The design for the Cressy-class cruisers had, as the first priority, "capacity for close action, as adjuncts to battleships". RN cruisers with 9.2in guns were seen as fully capable of joining the line of battle; this was a key reason why the RN kept a 9.2in armament on its First Class cruisers, despite the advantages of newer 7.5in guns. Even Fisher himself was thinking in these terms, writing in 1900 that "the armoured cruiser of the first class is a battleship in disguise'" and to draw a difference between them would be like trying to 'define when a kitten becomes a cat'. These views were further reinforced by the results of exercises which showed the value of having a fast wing. The Japanese success in using such ships in the battleline during the Russo-Japanese War may have also influenced Fisher. Fisher's protege, Reginald Bacon, would describe the battlecruiser as 'being able to form a fast light squadron to supplement the battleships in action, and worry the ships in van or rear of the enemy’s line'. While Bacon emphasises that this was a secondary priority, he was writing post-Jutland at a time when people were assigning blame for the RN's failure to destroy the German fleet. He was attempting to defend his mentor's conceptions against charges that they had failed at the battle - if they were being misused, then it would be Beatty and Jellicoe's failure, not Fisher's. We can also consider geopolitics. When Invincible was being designed, Britain was working towards an alliance with France against Germany. The RN would no longer be facing France's large force of armoured cruisers, with world-wide bases from which to strike against Britain's trade. Instead, it would be facing Germany, which had few cruisers, even fewer places to base them, and a large fleet geared towards fighting a fleet action in the North Sea. Building a large fleet of expensive ships to counter the few German cruisers based outside Europe would make no sense. When Invincible entered service, she was not deployed to one of the RN's foreign stations, as would make sense if her role was just commerce defence. Instead, she was kept with the RN's main fleet in the Atlantic. Such a deployment only seems reasonable if she was intended for fleet work,.
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Aug 22, 2019 00:01
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Do I know you IRL? Probably not. I'm an enthusiastic amateur who's read a lot on this topic, rather than a professional.
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Aug 22, 2019 00:23
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:It's just for an enthusiastic amateur you've done better on battlecruiser origins than a lot of my fellow professionals. Thanks! I suspect we've read a lot of the same books, but any recommendations for more reading?
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Aug 22, 2019 00:39
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