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A battlecruiser is a large gunship, larger than a cruiser and of
comparable size to a battleship. It has the size and guns of a battleship but substantially thinner armor, the weight saving allowing more powerful engines to be fitted to
give it greater speed than a battleship.
The idea was that the big guns would allow it to take out destroyers,
cruisers, and other smaller ships before the battlecruiser ever got into the range of their smaller guns or torpedoes, while its speed would enable it to escape enemy battleships. The idea was mainly
conceived by Admiral Jackie Fisher.
The first battlecruisers were HMS
Inflexible, HMS Invincible and
HMS Indomitable, all completed in 1908. They had armor 6 or 7 inches thick along the side of the hull and over the gunhouses, whereas a comparable
battleship of the period had armor 11 or 12 inches thick. Originally known as battle cruisers, these ships had a top
speed of 26 knots compared to 20 - 21 knots for a contemporary battleship. They were armed with 12 inch (305 mm) guns, just like
battleships. Soon after the British, the Germans started building their own battlecruisers, the first was SMS Von der Tann of
1911. Von der Tann and her sister ships had only 11 inch (280 mm) guns, but they
were better armoured than British battlecruisers of the time.
In practice, battlecruisers rarely saw the type of independent action for which they were designed. In most cases, the
temptaton to add extra big guns to the main fleet proved hard to resist, and battlecruiser squadrons were added to the line of
battle—a role for which they were not designed and which exposed them to great risk.
The original battlecruiser concept proved successful at the Battle of the Falkland Islands during World
War I when the British battlecruisers HMS Inflexible and HMS Invincible annihilated a German cruiser squadron commanded by Admiral Maximilian Graf Von Spee.
At the Battle of Jutland two years later, however, the British
battlecruisers were employed as fleet units and engaged German battlecruisers and battleships before the arrival of the
battleships of the British Grand Fleet. The result was a disaster. HMS
Invincible , HMS Queen Mary and HMS Indefatigable exploded with the loss of all but a handful of
their crews, and HMS Lion only survived by intentionally flooding one of
her magazines. The German battlecruisers were better armoured, but SMS Lutzow sunk from the damage, and SMS Seydlitz was heavily
damaged. No British or German battleship was sunk during the battle (apart from one old pre-dreadnought).
Thereafter, the Royal Navy de-emphasized battlecruisers. HMS Hood, launched in 1920, was the last
British battlecruiser to be completed. Other battlecruiser hulls were converted into aircraft carriers. (See HMS Glorious and
HMS Courageous.) Between the wars, Hood was the
biggest warship in the world. Her armour was stronger than that of earlier battlecruisers, but it also proved a fatal weakness,
as she exploded and sank in a duel with Bismarck during World War II.
Other navies persisted with the battlecruiser concept somewhat longer. Like the Royal Navy, following the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, the US Navy retasked battlecruiser hulls as aircraft carriers.
USS Lexington and USS Saratoga were both designed as battlecruisers but
converted part-way through construction. The US later built the battlecruiser-like "large cruisers" USS Alaska (CB-1) and Guam (CB-2), which served effectively in WWII, but a
planned additional four in the class were cancelled after the war. These two ships were an outgrowth of traditional heavy cruiser
design, and were balanced designs armed with and armored against 12" guns, unlike traditional British-style battlecruisers which
were not armored against their own firepower. Like the contemporary Iowa class battleships, their speed made them ultimately more
useful as carrier escorts and bombardment ships than as the sea combatants they were developed to be.
The German Panzerschiffe (pocket battleships)
(Deutschland, Admiral
Scheer, and Admiral Graf Spee) were another attempt at a
battlecruiser-like concept. Rather than construct a lightweight battleship which sacrificed protection in order to attain high
speed, however, the pocket battleships were relatively small vessels with only six 11 inch guns — essentially very heavy
cruisers. They attained fairly high speed (28 knots) and reasonable protection by
using welded rather than riveted construction and replacing the normal steam
turbine power with a pair of massive 9 cylinder Diesels. The only action of
significance they saw was the Battle of the River
Plate.
The German Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were labelled battlecruisers, but they
traded lighter armament (11-inch main guns) rather than thinner armor for speed, and are equally well classified as small
battleships.
Improved engine technology also worked against the battlecruiser formula. The ultimate limit on ship speed was drag from the
water displaced (which increases as a cube of speed) rather than weight, so heavier armor slowed World War II battleships by only a couple of knots over their more lightly armored brethren. As it
turned out, however, aircraft carriers made both battleships and
battlecruisers largely obsolete.
The Soviet Kirov class of Raketny Kreyser (Rocket Cruiser), displacing approximately 26,000 tons, is
classified as a battlecruiser in the 1996-7 edition of Jane's Fighting Ships. There were four members of the class completed, Kirov, Frunze, Kalinin, and Yuri
Andropov. As the ships were named after Communist personalities, after the fall of the USSR they were given traditional
names of the Imperial Russian Navy, respectively Admiral Ushakov, Admiral Lazarev, Admiral
Nakhimov and Petr Velikiy.
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