Post JUTLAND - a british perspective

[ingura]

...

[Lesforan]

Middle_watch,

A "wooley-pulley" is a pullover sweater in the US Coast Guard, too.
In fact, that is the official name of this uniform item.

[Guest]

It is a crime to send good men into battle with defective equipment.

Its a crime only if you know it is defective beforehand!

Uhhh, all equipment are defective in one way or another. If this standard is rigorously applied there will be no war. Which may be a good thing, but I am certain that is not what you are driving at.

[Guest]

Leadership is standing in the weather in your oilskins, drenched by spray and as the third ship of your squadron explodes in your binoculars, you say "Something is bloody wrong with our ships today!"

In one act he demonstrated fearlessness in the face of the enemy, seamanship and a real appreciation of the technical problem. Would have made an excellent P.M. (Oh, wait. He was divorced and re-married to Ethel Field of Lake Forest, Illinois).

The Oil skin and the sprays are apocryphal.

"There is something wrong" may indeed suggest a much deeper level of technical understand than is typically exhibited in the public arena, but to say that such a depth of understand constitutes any kind of real understanding is taking it a little too far.

[Guest]

He was leading the Germans toward the Grand Fleet so they could be overwelmed. IE Battlecruisers as bait.

German battlecruisers were bait as well, to lure Beatty towards the Highsea fleet. But German bait had a more effective bite.

[Werner]

Its a crime only if you know it is defective beforehand!

Uhhh, all equipment are defective in one way or another. If this standard is rigorously applied there will be no war. Which may be a good thing, but I am certain that is not what you are driving at.

It was known perfectly well before the war that British lyddite filled APC was unlikely to pierce heavy armour.... the best that could be expected ... [was] a 'considerable' effect in rear of the plate.... What was perhaps not so well realized was the liability of the shell to break up at less oblique impact on heavy armour (<30 degrees), or to burst or detonate from a cuncussion explosion of the lyddite before it had penetrated far into the plate, so that although the armour might be holed, no fragments enterrd the ship.

These defects in the British APC were due to the use of lyddite as the burster for which it was quite unsuitable, and to the shells being too brittle, while the fuses, which also had no delay, were also unsatisfactory, and would seem carelessly manufactured by Woolwich.

[bengtsson]

Don't beat me up on this one because I am not a shell and armor expert. Nor is long range gunnery versus armor protection a subject I study closely.
Anyways, it is my understanding that the British Battle Cruiser as a weapons system was never designed to stand in the Line of Battle and slug it out in Battleship fashion. Jacky Fisher asked for this design in order to sweep the seas clean of any ship under the level of a full Battleship. They were meant to insure the Royal Navy could control all the world's sea lanes and sweep up any surface raider be it Armoured Cruiser, Light Cruiser or Armed Merchant Cruiser. In this role they performed as Jacky Fisher wanted them to. Falklands being the perfect example.
They could also be used as a fast wing of the Battle Fleet after carrying out the role of heavy armed scouting. {i.e pounce on damaged ships and a wing of the enemy's fleet allready in trouble}. At Jutland, the British BCs did the scouting role very well. The problem for the design came when the Germans built lighter armed but heavily armored fast Battleships instead of lightly armored BCs.
Jutland turned into a mini fleet battleline action between the BCs of both sides. The German ships were better suited for this and they had the experience of Seydlitz at Dogger Bank to consider as regards ammunition fires. The lack of close support from the 5th BS was the big problem during the BC actions. Had that squadron been kept close at hand with the BCs, the Royal Navy wins the BC action as well as the fleet action.
I don't fault the RN BC design, because it was never meant to fight the BC design that the German Navy built. That is what the fabulous "Queen Elizabeth" class BB was meant to do or at least capable of doing.
It was perhaps too much to ask that the British BCs with 12 and 13.5 in guns would not become a part of the Battle Line. But Fisher never intended them to do this so they were not designed to do this.

Bob B.

[Werner]

Given the way history works, and now that those with original information have "moved on", we are pretty much stuck with one impression of Fisher: "bigger guns and faster hulls; who cares for armour?" and "Speed IS armour!"

I get the impression from recent writings that the Germans were working to merge the two lines into a fast battleship just as were the British. The difference is the German ship would have been a faster battleship and the British solution was Hood, a much larger but only slightly better protected cruiser.

So, my answer is, if Fisher had come back and there had been no WW.I in 1914, I think you would have seen six new 15-inch battlecruisers a year based on the Renown for several years. In this fictional RN, the battleship would be passe. Jackie would have begun paying them off to reserve and putting them on the sales list, certainly the first generation Dreadnoughts as quickly as he did the armoured cruisers.

[Guest]

I get the impression from recent writings that the Germans were working to merge the two lines into a fast battleship just as were the British. The difference is the German ship would have been a faster battleship and the British solution was Hood, a much larger but only slightly better protected cruiser.

Completely untrue. If quantity and thickness were to be the yard stick, then Hood would be far better protected than any German battlecruiser actually built. Yes, her armor likely contributed to her loss in 1941, but that was due to a singular flaw in the armor layout, not due to any stinginess in the quantity and thickness of armor applied. Her protection would also have compared very favorably with her unfinished German equivalents.

The term "fast battleship" is obviously relative. With Hood in the picture the German battlecruisers could hardly qualify as "fast battleships" as all of them would be both less well protected and very substantially slower. In the world war one era the Hood was the fast battleship to end all fast battleships.

It was clear that the trends going into 1916 and 1917 were that German and British battleships and battlecruisers were converging towards comparable armor and firepower, but British were converging towards a speed in each class that were a good 3-4 knots faster, and were also accepting correspondingly larger hulls.

[Guest]

So, my answer is, if Fisher had come back and there had been no WW.I in 1914, I think you would have seen six new 15-inch battlecruisers a year based on the Renown for several years. In this fictional RN, the battleship would be passe. Jackie would have begun paying them off to reserve and putting them on the sales list, certainly the first generation Dreadnoughts as quickly as he did the armoured cruisers.

Fisher did not neglect battleships. He did not think battleships passe. He judged that RN had sufficient edge in battleships to counter highsea fleet in a pitched battle, and he needed battlecruisers to bring the war to Germany if the highsea fleet refuse to come out and fight.

[Werner]

Before 1910 both admiralties concluded the British would conduct a distant blockade of Germany from the North and West. In such a case, battlefleets are passe. You need to do something else with them.

The Germans wanted to open the commerce hole that would supply her forces and keep her people from starving. Under Fisher, he had developed (but not elucidated clearly to anyone) a Dardenelles-like plan which would have put British ground forces ashore hundreds of KM east of Jutland. Such an operation would require light draft, hard hitting ships. The superdreadnoughts were enough "to hold open the stopper" between the Baltic and the North Sea, according to him. Battlecruisers could be the first line to deflect any German forces which would come out of the Jade minefield. It may have been daffy or genius, but it would have used the fleet.

There were simply not enough skilled naval personnel for this type of thing unless all the armored cruisers and the first 8 battleships were gone.

[Guest]

I suspect that had WWI not intervened, the 26-27 knot battleships and 30 knot well protected battlecruisers of the later Japanese 8-8 program would have been most indicative of the type of ships to be expected from Britain in the context of continued Anglo-German race. Japan and Britain were close allies during the war and there are much indication that Japan had detailed access to British naval thinking. I would not have been surprised at all if the the broad outlines of 8-8 designs were based on Japanese interpretation of unrealized British construction projects that had been aborted by WWI.

[Werner]

Chuck, I wish you would log in.

If the Admiralty stayed as it was after Fisher's first departure, you are probably right. The Japanese ideas are closely aligned (but not in appearance) to British practice.

If Fisher is back 1914-19?? (1921?), we could expect more ships like Renown or logical developments along those lines, and very lightly built cruisers which were in essence no more than larger destroyer leaders, not suitable for British practice.

[Guest]

Neither side expected the war to be long. I suspect neither side expected any blockade to be decisive. Both sides would have expected some sort of pitched battle. Britain would have wanted to force the decisive battle because the last thing Britain wanted was a Germany whose fleet remained intact and whose army was victorious on the continent.

Part of the rational of the distant blockade was to give British fleet time to assemble should Highsea fleet sortie to challenge the blockade. In many ways the British were looking back to the French Revolutionary wars rather than the Napoleonic wars for inspiration.

[Werner]

Neither side expected the war to be long. I suspect neither side expected any blockade to be decisive. Both sides would have expected some sort of pitched battle. Britain would have wanted to force the decisive battle because the last thing Britain wanted was a Germany whose fleet remained intact and whose army was victorious on the continent.

Part of the rational of the distant blockade was to give British fleet time to assemble should Highsea fleet sortie to challenge the blockade. In many ways the British were looking back to the French Revolutionary wars rather than the Napoleonic wars for inspiration.

Chuck, you ought to read a few of the sources. Castles of Steel & Dreadnought are good examples.

From a Naval standpoint, the British always expected to play a waiting game. They had concluded a battle was too risky in the 1910 timeframe, but had to keep building the battleships as a pretense and in case they were wrong.

Germany ecpected a "Copenhagen" close blockade of their fleet, and were dumbfounded by the intelligence coming from Britain which said Whitehall would avoid a decisive battle. For months after August 1914, they continued to deploy their plan expecting to be "Copenhagened". That's why there was such intense interest in very short range torpedo craft and submarines in their pre-war fleet makeup. Half the 1914/5 German destroyers did not have the range to get to Norway and back.

[Guest]

Neither side expected the war to be long. I suspect neither side expected any blockade to be decisive. Both sides would have expected some sort of pitched battle. Britain would have wanted to force the decisive battle because the last thing Britain wanted was a Germany whose fleet remained intact and whose army was victorious on the continent.

Part of the rational of the distant blockade was to give British fleet time to assemble should Highsea fleet sortie to challenge the blockade. In many ways the British were looking back to the French Revolutionary wars rather than the Napoleonic wars for inspiration.

Chuck, you ought to read a few of the sources. Castles of Steel & Dreadnought are good examples.

From a Naval standpoint, the British always expected to play a waiting game. They had concluded a battle was too risky in the 1910 timeframe, but had to keep building the battleships as a pretense and in case they were wrong.

Germany ecpected a "Copenhagen" close blockade of their fleet, and were dumbfounded by the intelligence coming from Britain which said Whitehall would avoid a decisive battle. For months after August 1914, they continued to deploy their plan expecting to be "Copenhagened". That's why there was such intense interest in very short range torpedo craft and submarines in their pre-war fleet makeup. Half the 1914/5 German destroyers did not have the range to get to Norway and back.

I've read it. There are always several different stains of thinking in any major navy planning office. There were also points earlier in 1880s when it had occurred to the British that a battle fleet action would be too dangerous in light of light torpedo craft. But those thinkings were back of the mind precepts and not the singular guiding principle of British naval thinking.

The only way distant blockade could have been the central tenant of British naval thinking at all was if England had been very confident of a long drawn out stalemate in a continental war. In every other case there must be plans for a major naval engagement. There could not have been such confidence because it was perceived everywhere else that industrial era and experience of 1860s-1870s has made quick war more likely. In another plausible scenario for which distant blockade would have been a terrible option would be a relatively quick central power victory leaving Germany in political control of the continent.

[Werner]

There are always several different stains of thinking in any major navy planning office.

Only if Clinton was involved. Too late for a DNA analysis?

[Werner]

The battleship torpedo did not lose confidence before or after Jutland.

At Jutland, squadrons approached the launch point against capital ships many times.

What killed the battleship-borne submerged torpedo is the vast increase in launch speed combined with the flooding and explosion dangers outside the armoured box.

Your question ought to be would a man ignorant of the advances of long range gunfire like Fisher care about these issues at all? Would any of the Lords of the Admiralty go against Fisher without a bulldog like Churchill to control the dogfight?

I'm sure Britain's Admiralty position was that once the RN had established utter command of all the seas outside the Jade, the French and a token BEF ought to have put a fine point on the idea of starvation to the Kaiser.

[Guest]

There are always several different stains of thinking in any major navy planning office.

Only if Clinton was involved. Too late for a DNA analysis?

No, it takes Bush who :censored_2: in his pants.

[Werner]

You know, you could minimize these episodes by switching your posts to English.