Been reading the forty year history of this class of ship and it makes for interesting reading.
Admiral Jacky Fisher came up with the concept and referred to them as his glorious cats (probably because a couple of them were called Lion and Tiger).
The idea was to build a class of ship that could roam the oceans and destroy enemy cruisers at will. They were meant to protect the sealanes for British Merchant ships. They were not meant to be used in conjunction with battleships.
They had to be faster than a normal cruiser and also be able to outgun them. The three points of the triangle for warships are guns, armour and speed. To increase one leads to a need to decrease another. In this case, armour was sacrificed for speed.
There were some early critics who fretted over the fact that having guns on a par with the battleships of the day would lead them to be used as battleships and they were right. What made it worse was their vulnerability to long-range fire. Normally, you'd think that the longer the range, the less effective the weapon but with naval gunfire, a longer ranges means a steeper descent (plunging fire). This left the least armoured parts of the battlecruiser open to attack (turret tops, decking etc.).
One of the theories on the destruction of HMS Hood (with only three survivors) was that a shell penetrated the decking or one of the turrets and hit one of the magazines. Hood is also a perfect example of the flaw - a battlecruiser up against a battleship (Bismark). The problem for the Royal Navy was that very few of their big ships could match Bismark's speed. Hood was one of the few but lacked sufficient armour to take on such a beast.
And yet, if they had been used as designed, they should have been the great naval predators - the great white sharks of any navy - that Fisher meant them to be. But there was one flaw in the design that could not be engineered out and that was human nature. If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it must be a duck. If it looks like a battleship and fires like a battleship, it must be a battleship...except when it's a lighter armoured battlecruiser.
And yet, the heroic fascination surrounding this failed concept exists even today. Anybody that's read Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet will know (at least in the first three books that I've read) that it's the battlecruiser that is the star of the show...and all this from an ex-navy man!
So there we have it - the battlecruiser fighting against overwhelming odds, struggling against a greater foe and succumbing in heroic fashion to inevitable defeat....sounds a bit like the whole of Scottish history
Admiral Jacky Fisher came up with the concept and referred to them as his glorious cats (probably because a couple of them were called Lion and Tiger).
The idea was to build a class of ship that could roam the oceans and destroy enemy cruisers at will. They were meant to protect the sealanes for British Merchant ships. They were not meant to be used in conjunction with battleships.
They had to be faster than a normal cruiser and also be able to outgun them. The three points of the triangle for warships are guns, armour and speed. To increase one leads to a need to decrease another. In this case, armour was sacrificed for speed.
There were some early critics who fretted over the fact that having guns on a par with the battleships of the day would lead them to be used as battleships and they were right. What made it worse was their vulnerability to long-range fire. Normally, you'd think that the longer the range, the less effective the weapon but with naval gunfire, a longer ranges means a steeper descent (plunging fire). This left the least armoured parts of the battlecruiser open to attack (turret tops, decking etc.).
One of the theories on the destruction of HMS Hood (with only three survivors) was that a shell penetrated the decking or one of the turrets and hit one of the magazines. Hood is also a perfect example of the flaw - a battlecruiser up against a battleship (Bismark). The problem for the Royal Navy was that very few of their big ships could match Bismark's speed. Hood was one of the few but lacked sufficient armour to take on such a beast.
And yet, if they had been used as designed, they should have been the great naval predators - the great white sharks of any navy - that Fisher meant them to be. But there was one flaw in the design that could not be engineered out and that was human nature. If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it must be a duck. If it looks like a battleship and fires like a battleship, it must be a battleship...except when it's a lighter armoured battlecruiser.
And yet, the heroic fascination surrounding this failed concept exists even today. Anybody that's read Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet will know (at least in the first three books that I've read) that it's the battlecruiser that is the star of the show...and all this from an ex-navy man!
So there we have it - the battlecruiser fighting against overwhelming odds, struggling against a greater foe and succumbing in heroic fashion to inevitable defeat....sounds a bit like the whole of Scottish history
