Grand Fleet Battlecruisers

By Steve Backer

The ShipCraft series provides in-depth information about building and modifying model kits of famous warship types. Lavishly illustrated, each book takes the modeller through a brief history of the subject class, highlighting differences between sister-ships and changes in their appearance over their careers. This includes paint schemes and camouflage, featuring colour profiles and highly-detailed line drawings and scale plans. The modelling section reviews the strengths and weaknesses of available kits, lists commercial accessory sets for super-detailing of the ships, and provides hints on modifying and improving the basic kit. This is followed by an extensive photographic gallery of selected high-quality models in a variety of scales, and the book concludes with a section on research references books, monographs, large-scale plans and relevant websites.rnrnThis volume follows the format of the highly successful Flower Class where the extent has been doubled to include far more illustrations of the many different designs, from the Invincible of 1906 to the Renowns of 1915, and including the hybrid large light cruisers Courageous, Glorious and Furious.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781783469697

Book preview

Design

‘For the first time I experienced the luxury of complete immunity from every form of interference … I was now in a position to enjoy the control officer’s paradise: a good target, no alterations of course, and no ‘next-aheads’ or own smoke to worry one.’

(Lieutenant Commander Rudolf Verner, HMS Inflexible, 8 December 1914)

‘Fore-control out of action. We are all dead and dying up here. Send up some morphia … For God’s sake, put out the fire or we shall all be roasted … Tell my people that I played the game and stuck it out.’

(Commander Rudolf Verner, HMS Inflexible, 18 March1915 – both quotations from Castles of Steel by Robert K Massie)

Rudolf Verner was the gunnery officer of the battlecruiser HMS Inflexible. The first of the statements quoted above reflects his elation in controlling the fire of one of Fisher’s greyhounds in a smashing victory at the Battle of the Falklands. His ship was fulfilling one of the prime roles envisioned for the battle-cruiser by Admiral John Fisher, sweeping the seas of enemy armoured cruisers and other cruisers of lesser breed. Little more than three months later he found himself in the dire position set out in the second quotation. On this occasion the Inflexible was misused in a mission for which she was not designed, engaging strong land fortifications. This ill-advised operation was a solely naval effort to force the Dardanelles and HMS Inflexible paid for it with significant damage and Commander Verner with his life. The battlecruiser as a type, and specifically the battlecruisers of the Royal Navy, led two lives. From their creation in 1906 until 24 May 1916 they were the darlings of the public and fleet. Almost everywhere triumphant, they were by far the most active capital ships in the world. As the lines of expensive British battleships swung at anchor in lonely Scapa Flow, HM battlecruisers steamed across the seas of the world in search of combat with the ships of the King’s enemies. This all changed at the Battle of Jutland when three of their number blew up. They then became outcasts, creatures liable to kill their own crews due to their weakness in armour.

However, many have always loved these magnificent machines. They were – and in the modern mind, are still – more glamorous than their stodgy, slower battleship cousins, and were never truly put out of business until their speed was combined with battleship armour to produce the fast battleship. HMS Hood is regarded as the last battlecruiser but in reality, as her designer acknowledged, she was really the first truly fast battleship. Although the absolute truth will never be known, the loss of three RN battlecruisers at Jutland was in all probability more likely the result of faulty ammunition handling policies and conditions, rather than from thin armour. Hood’s loss was the result of plunging fire through thinner deck armour igniting a magazine and has been used to further condemn the battlecruiser. Yet USS Arizona was destroyed by a bomb penetrating her thinner deck armour and igniting her forward magazine. No one condemned the Arizona for being weakly armoured. Given the combat history of the battlecruiser, versus the static battleships, it could be argued that the type was one of the most cost-effective capital ship types ever created.

‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new’: Indomitable takes pride of place at the King’s review at Spithead, 31 July 1909, outshining the old-style armoured cruisers Drake (astern) and Shannon (to port). (National Maritime Museum P00022)

The epitome of power and speed, Invincible as completed, probably seen in March 1909 when first commissioned. The ship does not yet have range drums fitted to the tops, but note the blast screens behind the 4in guns on A turret.

At one time Jackie Fisher had commanded the Second Class battleship HMS Renown and felt such great attachment to his old command that upon being promoted to admiral the ship became his flagship. The Renown had lighter guns and lighter armour than the First Class battleship but it was faster – and Fisher loved speed. Since the 1890s the world’s navies had been engaged in a cruiser building race concentrated on large expensive armoured cruisers. They were called armoured cruisers because they had a belt of steel armour at the waterline to prevent enemy fire from penetrating the hull. A previous type of design called the protected cruiser was defended by an internal sloping armoured deck that joined the hull below the waterline, thereby shielding the machinery spaces and magazines. Belted cruisers were more expensive because they required more steel for a belt than a similar protected cruiser design. The extra armour meant extra weight and a more powerful machinery to produce the same speed, which increased size. This in turn increased the cost of ships, so that by the early 1900s an armoured cruiser cost only slightly less than the contemporary battleship.

Because other nations were building armoured cruisers the Royal Navy had to build them, and in greater numbers. The 1897/1898 Program authorised the first of six classes of British armoured cruisers, initially armed with a couple of 9.2in guns and a battery of 6in, but the designs grew inexorably in size and firepower. There was one attempt to build a more economical ship with the ten cruisers of the Monmouth class, in which the main armament 9.2in guns were eliminated and a uniform battery of fourteen 6in guns carried, but they were widely criticised (in Fisher’s view ‘the designer had forgotten the guns’). Later ships were much bigger and more powerful, culminating in the three-ship Minotaur class of the 1904/1905 Program, which carried four 9.2in guns and ten 7.5in guns on a displacement of 14,600 tons with a maximum speed of 23kts.

Earlier, when he was Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet in 1902, Fisher and one of his favourites, W H Gard, Chief Constructor of the Malta Dockyard, had drafted plans for a superior armoured cruiser. The design was armed with a uniform 9.2in battery but most remarkably had a top speed of 25kts. Later, when the Royal Navy produced the Minotaur class, it featured most of the details of this design except the uniform 9.2in battery and speed. When Fisher became First Sea Lord in 1904, he organised a committee to consider new capital ships. The first order of business was a new battleship design, which became HMS Dreadnought, but as soon as this design was agreed upon, Fisher turned his attention to his true love, a new armoured cruiser design for the 1905/1906 Program – but an armoured cruiser that would reflect his wishes. The result was HMS Invincible.

The new design retained the 6in armour belt of previous armoured cruiser designs but achieved the 25kts desired by Fisher in 1902. However, the mostly startling characteristic was the uniform main battery, not of 9.2in cruiser guns but 12in/45 guns, the same as mounted in Dreadnought. The Dreadnought carried five twin 12in gun turrets, although only four of the turrets could be fired on each broadside. To save weight the Invincibles received four of the twin turrets. The primary goal was to allow the best end-on fire, as chasing down an enemy was one of the primary requirements. There was a very narrow gap for cross-deck fire in which all four turrets could fire a broadside, but normally only three turrets would fire, as the wing turret on the disengaged side would not fire to prevent blast damage. (However, at the Battle of the Falklands the far side waist turret did fire across deck, to the discomfort of the crew of the nearside turret and resulting in some blast damage to the ship.) Fisher was delighted with the new type and had three of them ordered before the second dreadnought class was even designed.

The raison d’etre of the battlecruiser was threefold: to have armoured ships (1) to act as super-scouting cruisers, ships fast and powerful enough to push home a reconnaissance in the face of an enemy’s big armoured cruisers; (2) fast enough to hunt down and destroy the fastest armed merchant raiders, especially the 23-knot German transatlantic liners, which were known to be carrying guns for commerce destruction in war; (3) to act as a fast wing reinforcing the van or rear of a battle fleet in a general action. The genesis of the type was sound, as the existing armoured cruisers could not fulfill any of these tasks. It is unfortunate that Admiralty statistics often included battlecruisers under dreadnoughts and that the ships came to be called, from 1912, battlecruisers (at first they were known as large armoured cruisers or ‘fast battleships’, and, in 1911, as ‘battleship-cruisers’), for they were not intended to stand up to battleships (certainly not dreadnoughts) not already engaged with other battleships.

(From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, Volume I: The Road to War 1904-1914, by Arthur Marder)

HMS Invincible was the first of this new type of warship, the battlecruiser, a type that was to flourish for only a comparatively short time. However, within that period the type became the epitome of romance and glamour in the Royal Navy. As Marder pointed out, Fisher called the dreadnoughts ‘Old Testament ships’, and the battlecruisers ‘the real gems’ and ‘New Testament ships’, because they fulfilled the promise of the ‘Old Testament ships’. In their short lives, they were also controversial. From the outset some observers were sceptical of the new wonder ships. T A Brassey, for example, prophesised in the 1907 edition of his Naval Annual:

The Invincible class have been given the armament of a battleship, their superiority in speed being compensated for by lighter protection. Vessels of this enormous size and cost are unsuitable for many of the duties of cruisers; but an even stronger objection to the repetition of the type is that an admiral having Invincibles in his fleet will be certain to put them in the line of battle, where their comparatively light protection would be a disadvantage, and their high speed of no value.

Indomitable was the first of the class to commission, in June 1908. Her first mission was to take the Prince of Wales to Canada for the tercentenary celebrations at Quebec, and she is seen here leaving Portsmouth on that service at the end of July.

Inflexible as completed. There are no canvas dodgers fitted to any of the forward superstructure platforms, allowing a clear view of their layout.

Inflexible as completed. The large rectangular object abreast the after superstructure is a water measuring tank, used for water consumption trials, so the photograph may date from the summer of 1908.

Although Fisher was First Sea Lord, the bulk of the Admiralty did not share his unbounded enthusiasm for the giant big-gun armoured cruisers. The 1906 estimates added three more battleships of an improved Dreadnought design, the Bellerophon class, followed in 1907 with a further refinement in the three ships of the St Vincent class. The chief innovation with this class was the introduction of the 12in/50 Mk XI gun. It was only with the 1908 estimates that Fisher got to add more big-gun cruisers as one such ship was approved for the program, which also included one battleship, HMS Neptune, which for the first time departed from the Dreadnought layout. The armoured cruiser became HMS Indefatigable. Fortunately, New Zealand and Australia each offered to fund the construction of one capital ship for this program and Fisher selected two more Indefatigables for these additions, to be named after the contributing countries. For the second time Fisher had a program with three armoured cruisers and only one battleship. Fisher could have made significant improvements to the three-year old Invincible design but failed to do this. The Indefatigable design was merely an enlarged Invincible with the same meagre armour fit. The two amidships turrets were spaced further apart to allow more cross-deck fire, but the main guns were the same as Invincible. The older Mk X 12in/45 were fitted as there were not enough Mk XI 12in/50 to go around and these went to the battleships. The Indefatigable design was 23ft longer and 18ins wider than the Invincible, making it 1500 tons heavier. The extra length allowed for a greater separation between the wing turrets and with the superstructure blocks. Theoretically, this allowed a greater arc of fire across the deck but the decking was still subject to blast damage. Although designed to have the same speed as Invincible, the three ships of the Indefatigable class actually proved slightly faster in service. One other slight improvement in the Indefatigable design was a greater bunker capacity for additional coal, which gave the class an additional 380nm at 10kts range over the Invincible design.

A good close-up of the sighting hoods and other turret and barbette details of Inflexible’s starboard wing, Q turret. Note also the ‘coffee pot’ style searchlight tower abaft – a characteristic wartime fitting. Astern is Indomitable, the squadron being moored in the Forth with the famous railway bridge in the distance.

Indefatigable as completed. The