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Actually, Invincible, which Blucher was designed to confront, was officially an armored cruiser just like the Blucher. I don't think Blucher is going win against Invincible.

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Invincible was an armored cruiser on steroids, sporting Battleships guns - which is what gave her the edge. As the next logical progression of the design, Blucher may have been the ultimate armored cruiser. Her design was partially in response to mis-information leaked about the Invincible class, which is why she had lighter guns. Besides, with Invincibles paltry armor, Blucher could have gotten lucky - Von Spee almost did.

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Martin

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday." John Wayne

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Actually, technically many WWII era heavy cruisers and light cruisers qualify as armored cruisers under traditional definition of that class by having a real armor belt and some attempt at underwater protection even though they really evolved out of old protected cruisers catagory. By traditional definition an armored cruiser is simply a cruiser protected by a substantial waterline belt, some form of torpedo defence, usually coal bunkers, in addition to armored deck. A cruiser that has only an armored deck but no belt or underwater defence would be called a protected cruiser.

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Chuck,

I agree. My definition of cruiser classes was based on main armament, not protection schemes. When protection arrangements are used to define the class, they are indeed armored cruisers (at least light and heavy cruisers).

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Les Foran
On the Oregon Trail

I agree,

In an Invincible vs. Blucher match, its a toss up who would win. Invincible has a slight edge in speed, but in the early stages of the war her gun range wasn't much further than the German 8.2". Remember, Von Spee got into gun range several times vs. Sturdee.

I'd expect poor British gunnery and sloppy shell/powder handling to cope with the absolute storm of 8.2"s shells from the crack German gunners.

How would the 8.2" inch guns put up more of a storm then British 12" guns?

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Rate of Fire,

All sources I have seen put the German 8.2" gun's ROF at 4-5 rounds a minute. The 12"/45s on Invincible were capable of 1-2 rounds a minute.

Assuming the action is a Falklands or Dogger Bank style stern chase, Blucher has 6 8.2" guns availible vs. 4 (6 is doubtful) 12" guns. Blucher puts twice as many shells in the air every minute, and nobody can argue the skill of WW1 German gunners.

IMO, the battle ends like this. Invincible blows up due to lucky hit or fires buring out of control. However, Blucher is still a buring (although floating) wreck.

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Actually, I can. According to John Campbell and Norman Friedman, a careful shot by shot analysis of major caliber fire at Jutland shows that while the German battle cruisers scored sooner, the overall British hit rate (hits per shells fired) throughout the battle, after one eliminate close range fire against sitting targets like British armored cruisers and the German cruiser Weinsbaden, was higher than what was achieved by the Germans. The British flag ship Iron Duke was able to find the range with the first salvo and score something like hits with 40% of shells fired within a very short visibility window at about 7,500 yards. Her performance was unrivaled by any German performance during this war or the next. Friedman then also did an analysis of the actual design and capabilities of the entire German WWI fire control system, as oppose to just the single, much harped on, range finder basis length. For what it's worth he concluded that the British system for keeping range and controlling fire was in fact considerably more advanced. The German system was actually quite primitive, with only partially centralized fire control that requires each turret to actually estimating its own range and lay its own guns. The German system is said to had been optimized to score sooner during approach, but had more trouble holding onto a good solution in normal battle.

[Chuck edited to correct some factual information]

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I haven't reviewed Friedman or Cambell's work on Jutland,

So I really can't comment on that, but perhaps my statement needs revising. At the Battle of the Falklands, and at Dogger Bank, British shooting was poor.

At the Falklands, IIRC, Sturdee's ships were scoring so few hits early on that they were in danger of running out of ammo before destroying Von Spee's ships.

At Dogger Bank, despite having the odds in their favor, they scored 3 hits. 2 on Seydlitz, 1 on Derfflinger. Now that doesn't count Blucher, but the vast majority of hits on Blucher were pot shots at a burning hulk. And they had the advantage of scoring hits on Blucher early with no return fire. Lets also not forget how badly the British blundered with range finding and target shifting, the 2nd ship in line firing 3,000 yrds over the Germans, and leaving Moltke untargeted.

I'll touch on Jutland a bit, I'm willing concede that my blanket statement about German gunnery is incorrect. But you also cannot say that all British shooting at Jutland was top notch...

Beatty BC's still shot poorly (poor range finding). Evan Thomas' ships did most of the damage on the Run to the North. And the Grand Fleet had the weather advantage against the HSF, Scheer couldn't even see the the Grand Fleet, his ships were aiming at muzzle flashes.

I would still give the gunnery advantage to the Germans in a 1 vs. 1 battle.

But that is just my personal opinion.

Invincible might be lightly armored, but that is using battleship fire as a standard. Against 8.2 inch guns its armor is certainly better than Blucher's would be against 12" fire. British practice, as oppose to British design, certainly made penetration of turret very dangerous. But it would have to be a very luck day for a 8.2 inch gun to penetrate into INvincible's turret. Blucher's ammunition supply system, on the other hand, can easily be penetrated by Invincible's 12" guns. What is more, the design of Blucher's ammunition supply system is very shoddy and almost set up to enable a single hit anywhere between the 4 midship turrets to disable all 4 turrets at once, as a single British hit did actually do in Dogger Bank.

Blucher uses conventional vertical ammunition hoists to directly supply the forward pair of wing turrets. However, unlike any sane design, there is no direct ammunition supply to the aft pair of wing turrets. Instead the aft turrets are supplied via a system of horizontal overhead rails from the two front turrets. Therefore the rate of fire of the mid-ship turrets would be severely constrained by the need to use one set of hoists to supply 2 turrets.

Furthermore, how the ammunition actually moves from the front pair to the rear pair of wing turrets is really insane. There is a system of horizontal overhead rails that emerge from the barbette of the front wing turrets, merge into one single track and travels back along the ship before spliting again into two to meet the aft pair of wing turrets. During combat there would be a steady chain of sailors pushing shell and powder suspended from these tracks from the front to the rear turret pairs. Any hit in this region would start a huge ammunition fire that would flash from charge to charge along the overhead rail system and reach all 4 wing turrets to destroy them. In dogger bank Blucher was hit in this manner, and 30-40 complete charges flashed over, started a huge fire, and knocked out all 4 wing turrets.

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Absolutely spot-on recollection.

The British battlecruisers have only tiny patches of 1905-level battleship armor. The balance of these giant ships is armored like any other British armored cruiser at best. They are giant, lightly armored targets. Odds are the German would reduce the British speed due to hits in the machinery spaces. Heaven knows what fires spreading from there would do. My guess is that the German would control the engagement with speed after that point and break off, leaving the British ship afire and unable to steam at high speed.

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If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)

5 real German battlecruisers equipped with 11" and 12" only ever managed to only slow down a single British battlecruiser, the Lion, once, through a machinery hit in two intense and lengthy engagements. The Germans were unable to inflict any other damage that seriously and directly effected the speed of a British battle cruiser during Falkland, Doggerbank, and Jutland. British fire, on the other hand, did manage to slow down several German battlecruisers in Jutland to 18-21 knots, to say nothing of what they did to the battlecruiserette Blucher. No British battlecruiser really experienced any uncontrolled fire despite lengthy pounding by 11" and 12" guns. Ammunition flash down, yes. Uncontrolled fire? No. The battlecruiserette Blucher's chance of being able to do this with 8.2 inch guns in a solitary engagement against the invincible would be zero for all practical purposes. Blucher's protection is far more inadaquate against Invinvible's 12" guns than Invincible against Blucher's 8.2". Blucher stands little chance of being able to run, and even less chance of being able to pervail in a fight.

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Certainly true except perhaps under the most exceptional circumstances.

At Dogger Bank, the German RF equipment was quite outclassed and the British shells devastating, the way they would appear on paper.

The German after action comments for this battle speak of British shells being most effective when they passed over the armor and entered the decks above, thus speaking to the very long range of this engagement (beyond German RF markings on the spotting scopes in many cases) and the relatively low striking velocities of the very large and steady 13.5" gun. The same comments would obviously not apply to 12-inch guns of Invincible, whose shells tended to tumble in flight and therefore were limited in effective range. Perhaps these characteristics explain the near-exhaustion of shells at Falklands against Spee.

British after-action reports speak to the relative uselessness of the Dreyer Table and the huge manual corrections applied, especially at long ranges. Like most battles, the loser adopted lessons learned, but the winner was less eager for expensive refits.

It seems like Dogger Bank and Falklands were fought in exceptional conditions of weather. Ranges of 20,000 yards were certainly not to be expected in the North Sea. I believe the Kaiser's ships were designed for realistic battle at ranges of 10,000 to 15,000 yards. At the lower ranges, Blucher's rate of fire may have canceled the smaller size of her shells when facing Invincible.

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If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)

According to many of the post battle reports and highlighted by both Bennett and Massie both sides suffered badly from impaired spotting and range taking because of the copious amounts of smoke generated . At Dogger bank Hippers ships suffered badly because of this.
Dave Wooley

I thought that there was a consensus that the 1908 British-built Russian Riurik II was the best armoured cruiser ever built.

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Jean-Paul Binot

Weren't Rurik and Averoff and an Italian armored cruiser (Pisa Class) all built to the same basic design?

Jack

Agreed. Although not turbine powered as intended Rurik was more Battle cruiser than cruiser and was fitted with a number of novel features like cross flooding ducts in the double bottom and a magazine spraying and flooding arrangement. Also the 4x 10inch /50 s and the 8 x8inch /50 were an interesting combination. Alas the ship was never really put to the test but it remains one of those naval might have beens. In a hypothetical one to one on Blucher, it would have been to close to call but in the hands of the RN Rurik would have sent Blucher to the bottom in short order.
Dave Wooley

I have no idea who the designer of the Averoff or the Pisa class was But Rurik was designed by Owen Thurston and built at Barrow -in- Furness . One of the two 1:48th scale builders models still exists and can be found at Barrow.
Dave Wooley

This type of second-class battleship was not employed on the distant protection, scouting or trade route duties for which they were intended. Therefore, I would have to say the entire lot of armored cruisers/battle cruisers were a failure because tactically they became either a wing of the battle fleet or attached as battle scouts, where they lacked the range.

We also must remember these bear no connection to the WW.II heavy cruiser, which wound up being a proxy for battleships because the latter were too expensive and in too short a supply to be risked with any frequency. The rather large pool of CAs and CLs fit this role nicely.

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If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)

The Kaiser's ships were in fact originally designed to fight primarily at 6000 - 8000 yards, distance at which torpedoes and 5.9 inch guns are considered to be able to exert a decisive effect. The elevation of the guns on many German capital ships can scarcely allow them to reach out to 15,000 yards. Actual performance of German long range fire often seem to be inferior even to those of the Russians, whose dreadnoughts and even pre-dreadnoughts often held their own against the Goeben. German fire control was designed with consideration towards being able to find the range quickly while the range is changing rapidly, as they would be when the German fleet close in quickly on the opposing line while striving to attain the ideal 6-8000 meter range. Hence German ability to score sooner than the British at moderate ranges, and unusual German tactics such as keeping destroyers on the disengaged side the battleline, to burst through gaps between battleships to launch torpedoes at the decisive moment.

German fire control during WWI was not without its strengths. But on the whole I think it's been overestimated.

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