Battle of Jutland.

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What Jellicoe needed was air recon. He had seaplane carriers in 1916, and they've had two years experience since the Dec. 1914 raids.


SaparotRob said:
The RN would have accomplished it's mission.
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The people wanted a new Trafalgar, not a strategic win. A Trafalgar-like victory may have caused revolt against the Kaiser.
Capt. Vick said:
"Battlecruisers exploding to early." Maybe they shouldn't be exploding at all, but I don't claim to be a naval architect.
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That's why you have more than one, you're supposed to expect and plan to lose some.
 
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GrauGeist said:
Battlecruisers traded armor for speed, so they were vulnerable to hits that a battleship/dreadnaught would have shrugged off.
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But can they actually hit anything at battleship ranges when utilising their vaunted speed? If not, the very concept seems flawed.
 
Talking about battle cruisers is a total box of frogs.

Cos we have the Tiger which is good and the Indefatigable which not so good. The Indefatigable was not ideal as a capital ship as it's armour was far too thin against 11 or 12 inch shells.

The main role was as a cruiser killer and in that role it did well. Against the Blucher, against Graf Spee's East Asia Squadron. When the Goeben ran from the Minotaur class and so on.

The Kongo class ship Hiei was badly damaged by cruiser fire and that showed the weakness of the bsttlecruiser concept.

So battle cruisers are a six a one half dozen of the other so to say they are bad at some aspects is correct but they were not designed initially as battleships.

So they should not be slugging it out with battleship grade guns but that's in the perfect world.
 
GrauGeist said:
Battlecruisers traded armor for speed, so they were vulnerable to hits that a battleship/dreadnaught would have shrugged off.
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Not the German variety it seems. Their battlecruisers took Warspite-like damage and but for one scuttled by German destroyer torpedoes they all made it home from Jutland.

Here's the German battlecruiser Seydlitz, hit by twenty-one heavy-caliber shells, twice by secondary battery shells, and once by a torpedo. By October 1916 the ship was repaired and operational once more.



Swap out Scharnhorst and Gneisenau at the Dec 1914 Battle of the Falklands with a single battlecruiser and I'd say Admiral Sturdee is in deep trouble.
 
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The Battlecruiser was a good idea on paper, but then again, it was born of a time when the world's navies were looking for an upper hand against the other.

And if it weren't for the Washington treaty, several of those Battlecruisers would not have been converted to Carriers: IJN Akagi, USS Lexington, USS Saratoga, HMS Glorious and HMS Courageous, for example.
 
Had British shells worked as advertised then very few of the German Battlecruisers are coming home. The shells were acting as HE and not AP.

Fair play to the Germans but it different. The German Battlecruisers were designed to go up against HMS Invincible so they had to be up armoured. Their guns were short on range and the 11 inch gun was found to be not up to scratch.

HMS Tiger took a few hits too and survived.

The four IJN carriers at Midway were all scuttled so dont matter. If it's on the bottom of the sea then that's a loss. Even if like Mutsui it blows up in port.

A kill is a kill. It weakens the enemy.

Had Von Spee had a Battlecruiser then the Battle of Coronel wouldn't have happened and the RN would have sent far more substantial forces in the first place.

May have gone via Africa rather than Cape Horn.

Glorious was never a Battlecruiser. It deserved a new designation. Overgrown tin can with oversized guns is a good name
 
I think it's been stated in the thread but I'll reiterate, battlecruisers were never designed nor meant to go head to head with battleships. They were a design concept to catch and destroy cruisers, generally with a main battery caliber of 8in or less. They had the speed to catch any cruiser they came across and the armor to shrug off most if not all the hits such a cruiser could land. The 12in gun was perfectly capable of destroying any 8in gunned cruiser from range... on paper.

In practice however, trying to lay your range finder through heavy coal and gun smoke from a vibrating platform atop a tripod mast at 25+ knots was not as easy as initially thought. We can pro and con all day long, in the end, Sturdee's two original battlecruisers took out Von Spee's heavy cruisers (8in gun variety), so yes, the design concept was a sound one. With better range finding and gun laying, Von Spee's ships would never have lasted as long as they did.

And yes, German philosophy for battle cruisers was different than the Royal Navy, they were uparmored and could take punishment better ostensibly. Tiger and Lion were both hit pretty hard at Jutland (Lion 13 and Tiger 15), with Lion actually coming within a whisker of blowing up but for the quick thinking of the fellow that flooded the magazines when he knew they were in trouble. And while Tiger took 15 hits, she fairly shrugged them off and was in the fight from start to finish and ready to go again on June 1. Again, it's also entirely possible that poor shell/charge handling by the British battlecruisers was to blame for the three losses as much as any perceived design flaw.
 
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During the Battle of Dogger Bank SMS Seydlits had lost its rear turrets with their crews by one 13.5in hit because of an ammo fire, a last minute flooding of the rear magazines saved the ship. The Germans learned from this the importance of flash protection and acted on that, making mods and reminded the gun and ammo crews the importance of following anti-flash instructions. British learned the same only at Jutland.
 
The Basket said:
Glorious was never a Battlecruiser. It deserved a new designation. Overgrown tin can with oversized guns is a good name
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The Courageous class were designed as fast, shallow draft monitors, intended to hit shore targets rather than fight other warships. They're essentially the Erebus class (shown below) with twice the guns and twice the speed, but the same mission.

 
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Peter Gunn said:
I think it's been stated in the thread but I'll reiterate, battlecruisers were never designed nor meant to go head to head with battleships.
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Nor against other battlecruisers.

Once the Germans switched over from building ACRs to battlecruisers with the laying down of SMS Von der Tann in 1907 (enters service in 1910) the British should have moved their focus to the fast battleship. So, the RN's last battlecruisers should have been the Indefatigable class. Everything afterwards should be a fast battleship, essentially 25 knot capable, 13.5" armed mini-QEs.

BTW, a great resource is Haze Gray & Underway World Battleship Lists
 
Oh boy! Lotsa' good stuff here. I have a fondness for monitors.
 
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