At the beginning of this century the standard capital ship, developed over a period of 40 years, was a 15,000 ton vessel equipped with 4-12" and a variety of lesser weapons. The Russians and the British began in the 1870’s to develop a companion type in the large, or armored, cruiser. This type evolved by 1900 into a vessel substantially as large as the battleship, though much more modestly armed (8" or 10") and armored (5" to 7"). In return for forbearance in those qualities, armored cruisers were capable of several knots advantage over battleships, say 22 knots to 18. Their functions were to serve as scouts powerful enough to punch through the enemy’s screen to within sight of his battle line; to form, when necessary, a “fast wing” of the battle line; and to cruise on distant stations, for their speed was sufficient to catch enemy raiders and their guns powerful enough to dispatch them. In general, the armored cruisers performed these tasks adequately in the naval wars of the predreadnought era.
The coming of the Dreadnought in 1906 spoiled all this. Not only was she able to out- gun any battleship afloat but she was able to match, knot for knot, many of the armored cruisers then in existence. Lord Fisher, creator of the Dreadnought, solved the matter by providing a super armored-cruiser companion worthy of his new super battleship.1 His three Invincibles, begun in the year of Dreadnought’s appearance and completed in two year’s time, approximated that ship in size and gun battery. Their speed was greater by a good many knots (designed for 25 knots, their best was over 28); but their protection was far inferior, being about equal to that of their armored cruiser predecessors. The intended functions of these ships were identical to those of the armored cruisers.
The Invincibles so pleased Fisher that he followed them with three similar ships of the Indefatigable class. Then came Lion and Princess Royal with 13.5", all eight guns on the center line. Curiously, in these ships the third turret, instead of being mounted in S position, where it might easily have gone, was placed amidships in Q position, where its stern fire was blanked. The Queen Mary, which came next, had the same turret arrangement, but Tiger, originally planned as a sister to Queen Mary, emerged from the builders in 1914 quite differently. Even though her third turret was rather far forward, it had unhampered stern fire.
In Kiel, a few months after the then-secret Invincibles were laid down, Admiral Tirpitz began the Blücher, to be the largest and fastest armored cruiser in the world. Completed in 1909, she was all that was intended, a 15,500 ton ship with a dozen 8.2" and a designed speed of 24½ knots, but she was outclassed from the beginning by Fisher’s dreadnought armored cruisers.
Tirpitz’ first battle cruiser, Von der Tann, entered service in 1910, a year or so before the term “battle cruiser” came into general use. She set the style for the succeeding German classes, being much lower in silhouette than the British ships, shorter, and beamier. The German ships were in general not so fast nor so heavily armed as their British opposites. Nor, for that matter, was their armor thicker to any striking degree, though the area covered was likely to be more extensive. The excellence of the German battleships and battle cruisers seems to have been in damage control rather than in damage resistance. In any event Von der Tann was followed by Moltke and Goeben and then by Seydlitz. With Derfflinger (1913) the Germans went from 11" to 12", a move made some years earlier in the battleships, and all guns were finally on the center line. Her sister, Lutzow, joined in 1915 and Hindenburg in 1917. A fourth, Mackensen, was never completed.
The Salamis, a 14" battle cruiser under construction in Germany for Greece, was another ship never to be completed, for her guns were to come from America. Those weapons, undeliverable after war broke out, went to sea before long on some of the new British monitors. Of the other powers, only Russia and Japan were interested in battle cruisers. The Russian Ganguts were occasionally referred to as battle cruisers, but have generally been recognized as lightly- armored dreadnoughts. The four big (32,200 ton) Borodinos, to be named Borodino, Ismail, Kinburn, and Navarin, had not progressed far when the war broke out, and none were ever finished.
The four Japanese ships, designed by Sir George Thurston, much resembled HMS Tiger, but mounted 14" rather than 13.5". Kongo was built in England, while Haruna’s armor came from this country. These ships were rather well provided with armor and damage control facilities. Though brand- new, they did little of value in World War I. Modernized between wars and re-rated as battleships, they were the most useful and hard-working of Japan’s battleships in the conflict in the Pacific. After World War I the Japanese prepared to build eight 42,000- ton battle cruisers, but the Washington disarmament treaty quashed those plans. One of the eight, Akagi, became an aircraft carrier. Another, the Amagi, was so badly damaged by the 1923 earthquake that construction was abandoned. She was replaced as a carrier by the Kaga, which had been begun as one of eight giant battleships.
The Americans, with an annual program of only one or two capital ships, did not feel that they could afford the luxury of battle cruisers at the expense of ships of the line. Then, with the big Preparedness Program of 1916, the Navy Department ordered six 35,000 ton battle cruisers, bigger than any warship then afloat. These huge ships, with seven tall smoke stacks, were to have boilers on two decks, giving a speed of 35 knots. All work was suspended while we were at war, and then the plans were entirely recast to provide for 43,500 ton ships nearly 900 feet long and armed with 8-16". The thin armor originally planned, was, in light of events at Jutland, thickened considerably at the expense of the extra 8,500 tons displacement and a knot or two of speed. The Washington Treaty of 1922 caused the cancellation of four of these vessels. Two others, Saratoga and Lexington, were completed in 1927 as aircraft carriers.
When the war began in August, 1914, the Goeben departed from the Austrian port of Pola, shelled cities on the coast of French North Africa, disrupted the trans-Mediterranean troop convoys, escaped the shadowing Indomitable and Indefatigable, and got away to Constantinople. Her presence (along with the light cruiser Breslau) and an unauthorized raid on Russian Black Sea ports were major causes of Turkey’s entry into the war on the side of Germany. This development blocked off all communication between Russia and her western allies and the consequences of that, as we know, have been immense. Churchill’s plan to open the Dardanelles by force foundered in 1915 on the rocks of dissension, distrust, and incompetence. During the course of this painful fiasco the thin-skinned Inflexible was mined and nearly lost in the Straits while shelling Turkish fortifications. That was proper duty for slow, old battleships, of which there were a multitude, but not for such rare and easily- wounded vessels as she.
Goeben, with a Turkish flag and a German crew, dueled Russian battleships at long range on occasion in the Black Sea, with neither side pressing the matter nor gaining advantage. Twice heavily mined, she survived and late in the war she sank a couple of British monitors in a dashing raid into the Aegean.
After Admiral Christopher Cradock’s defeat at Coronel in November, 1914, Fisher sent Inflexible and Invincible off to intercept the victorious Graf Spee’s cruisers when they entered the South Atlantic. This occurred only a month later, at the Falklands. Sturdee, with the whole day before him, chose to fight beyond range of the German 8.2". It took longer that way, but by dark Graf Spee and his larger units were destroyed while the battle cruisers were still fit for the long cruise back to the British Isles.
Meanwhile the British managed a profitable affair in Helgoland Bight when light forces lured several German light cruisers and destroyers into a fight. Then David Beatty’s five battle cruisers appeared out of the mist and snapped up all the available targets2 at no cost to themselves.
In December, 1914, the German battle cruisers under Franz Hipper demonstrated the peculiar German misunderstanding of war by raiding the British seaside towns of Scarborough and Hartlepool. This raid earned the Germans nothing but some excitement and the title “Baby Killer” for their admiral, who deserved better than that. The second time out, in January, Beatty caught them with a superior force near Dogger Bank. A chase ensued which cost the Germans the Blücher, which had been tacked onto the raiding force though she could match her consorts neither in speed, nor in protection, nor in firepower. Several other ships, Lion and Seydlitz in particular, suffered heavy damage.
Finally came the big fight at Jutland in 1916. The British battle cruisers achieved their purpose of developing the German battle line, though in the process they lost Indefaligable and Queen Mary, in spectacular explosions at the hands of Hipper’s squadron. A third British battle cruiser, Invincible, went the same way some hours later when, acting out the “fast wing” concept, she and two companions came under Hipper’s fire. At nightfall Beatty’s surviving giants finally got in some good licks against half a dozen obsolete pre-dreadnoughts which had been permitted to tag along with the German fleet.
Hipper’s five ships hammered Beatty’s six in excellent style, as we have noted, and lured them almost into the arms of the German battle line. Then Beatty led Hipper in turn (and Scheer too) right into the center of the British fleet. The German “T” was capped. Scheer sent the battle cruisers on their “death ride” while he extricated his fleet from the trap, even though the battle cruiser squadron had already been hard hit by the 15" of Evan-Thomas’ fast battleships. By dark all Hipper’s ships were bloody wrecks. Lutzow had to be abandoned before dawn, but the others all made it into the Jade, very much the worse for the experience.
For the rest of the war there was only a brief scrape in the mists off Norway in 1917. This involved Fisher’s lightly-built battle cruisers and “large light cruisers” of the Repulse and Courageous classes, but nothing serious developed even though some German battleships were on the scene. Before long came the Armistice, the self-destruction of the German fleet at Scapa Flow, the postwar scrapping of the victorious fleets, and then the disarmament treaties.
By the time the new war began in 1939, the battle cruiser type, because of the heavy losses at Jutland, was in deep disfavor and only four were in existence. Two of these, Renown and Repulse, were considered sources of weakness at Britain’s expense. On the other hand the Hood, the Royal Navy’s giant post-war battle cruiser, was believed to be the perfect warship. All three of these ships provided some interesting surprises in the new war. Now they, too, are gone, along with Lion, Tiger, and Invincible, Von der Tann, Seydlitz, and Lutzow, Salamis, Kongo, and Saratoga. Only one survives, the Yavuz, which, flying the Star and Crescent, frequently moors in the Bosphorus off Constantinople. She is the old Goeben.
1. The dreadnought and battle cruiser types were recommended by a committee on design composed of seven civilians and eight officers. Fisher was chairman and author of the committee’s report.
2. Two light cruisers. A third light cruiser and a destroyer fell before their British opposites.