Armored Cruisers: The Flame
Part Two of The Cruiser Revolution
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Now the Cruiser Revolution really begins…
This series is called The Cruiser Revolution because the development of the “cruiser,” I submit, engendered a radical change in how battle fleets were composed, and drove the shipbuilding game of paper/scissors/rock to a fever pitch before the advent of the all-big-gun battleship in 1905. It is also a story of not planned obsolescence, but built-in obsolescence.
It all started with Russia…
Naval architects and sailors had floated the “armored cruiser” idea for several years, described as a long-range, heavier vessel with speed enough to be a commerce raider and guns and armor enough to have a place in the battle line. The Russian Navy had a requirement for a smaller warship that could range the Pacific, protecting Russian communications with Alaska and Hawaii (there were Russian whaling stations there) and to counter the rising Chinese and Japanese navies.
Russia launched General-Admiral in 1873.
Called an armored corvette or an armored frigate at different times, 5,100 ton General-Admiral had a range of nearly 6,000 miles under sail and steam, with a compliment of 482 officers and men. With a 6 inch armor belt and battery over her iron hull, she could cruise at 10 knots. Though Admiral General was not herself considered a success, she planted the idea for long-legged armored gunslingers.
Britain introduced HMS Shannon in 1875.
Both 5,600-ton Shannon and General-Admiral carried three masts, but Shannon was primarily a sailing ship with half the coal capacity of General-Admiral. The larger but marginally more successful 7,600-ton Nelson class followed Shannon.As precursors of things to come, all three types were excellent demonstrations of the shortcomings of the technology available to meet perceived needs. Britain could afford to experiment while engineering caught up. None of the early armored cruisers could catch most of the big commercial liners in a chase. The early armored cruisers were scaled-down ironclad battleships intended to deal with the AMCs, not stop fast merchantmen.
The French followed with the protected cruiser.
Sfax was laid down in 1882. The protected cruisers that followed their armored cousins were of a different philosophy and with a different mission. With boilers below the waterline or behind tons of coal, protected cruisers also had of face-hardened steel decks to prevent plunging fire from reaching their vitals. Smaller and lighter than their armored counterparts, they were also faster than most warships of the day, but still could not keep up with the fastest liners. Protected cruisers showed the flag, protected harbors and coasts, and in some (smaller) fleets acted as fleet combatants, such as British-built Chilean Esmeralda of 1883.
Then came the test of battle.
In the Sino-Japanese War (1892-4), the Spanish-American War (1898), the Russo- Japanese War (1904-05) and the Italo-Turkish War (1911-12) both of the newer cruiser types had their first major outings, and against each other they were more than adequate. Observers of all nations took away from those conflicts what they saw as useful: it was numbers and gun power that prevailed. Armored ships with over two gun calibers could not carry large enough guns nor enough ammunition to be decisive against a similar vessel unless the enemy was poorly handled. Further developments in power plant design (especially the triple-expansion engine) and in metallurgy (case- hardened Krupp or Harvey steel) made possible even larger, more powerful sail-less cruisers. As the protected cruisers grew in size, by the mid-1890s, the types melded into each other. Admiral Thomas Dewey’s flagship, USS Olympia, is the last surviving protected cruiser in the world, and the last warship afloat to serve in the Spanish-American War and in WWI.
But by WWI, that picture had changed.
HMS Dreadnaught and Indefatigable (a battlecruiser, of which more later) changed naval architecture. The protected cruiser was suitable only for duties not involving combat, as the light cruisers (of which, more later) could out-gun and outrun them; they even had difficulty facing newer destroyers. But at the Broad Fourteens off the Belgian coast in September 1914, one German submarine sank three British armored cruisers, losing over 1,400 men at no cost to the Germans.
But there was worse to come…and better.
At the beginning of WWI, the German Pacific Squadron preyed on Allied shipping from Japan to the coast of South America. But the reality was the five-warship squadron could only operate so far from Germany for a short time, especially after Japan declared war on Germany in within days of Britain and Japan doing so. So the two long-range armored cruisers and three “light” cruisers headed for Germany via Cape Horn, and encountered two British armored cruisers, a “light” cruiser and an AMC off Coronel, off the coast of Chile in November 1914. The result was much like the Broad Fourteens; both British armored cruisers sank and the light cruiser damaged, with a loss of over 1,600 British sailors to negligible German losses. The battle of Coronel was the zenith of the armored cruiser concept of long-ranging warships.
Then came the Falklands…
Alerted by the news of the German squadron’s approach, Britain dispatched two battlecruisers to join other warships at the Falkland Islands. As we will show later, the battlecruiser was meant for just this mission: outrun and outfight armored cruisers. On 8 December, the British squadron met the German just at dawn as the British were waking up. Two British armored cruisers began engaging their German counterparts while the battlecruisers—with much larger guns—commenced fire from the harbor. Though that battle of the Falkland Islands was as one-sided as Coronel, it took longer, cost the Germans four of their five warships and over 2,000 casualties, and the British less than fifty, with no ship losses. The Falklands was the zenith of the battlecruiser concept of stopping the armored cruisers.
Neither type would have a better showing again.
The reason, ironically, was that the huge trained sailor losses in the armored cruisers, already regarded as obsolescent, sidelined the armored cruisers in most navies. This despite the Americans building the largest of the types, the 13,000-ton Pennsylvania and the 15,000-ton Tennessee classes, later re-classed as heavy cruisers. The Americans were the last to build armored cruisers.
The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan
If you ask most people if they know what the B-29s did in WWII, most will say that they delivered the atomic bombs. While true, they delivered orders of magnitude more bombs before August 1945…
The Fire Blitz is a story of the troubled-from-the-start B-29 (which was not designed and built to drop nuclear weapons, but to defend the Panama Canal), Japan as a very hard to hit target, and Curtis LeMay, who figured out a way to make the B-29s effective against Japan. Get The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan from your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
Java Sea/Bismarck Sea Reconsidered
Tokyo 1945 Reconsidered
And Finally…
On 16 March:
1660: The Long Parliament is dissolved. After sitting off-and-on for nearly forty years, Oliver Cromwell, as Lord Protector of England, sent them packing. It was preceded by the Short Parliament, which sat for just three weeks. In the depths of a long series of civil wars and the beheading of a king, it seemed no one got around to, well, sending them home.
1945: Iwo Jima ends. After five weeks and over 26,000 American casualties, the island was declared “secure,” despite there being nearly 3,000 Japanese holdouts in the caves and tunnels of Suribachi and other hills. Unique in the Pacfic War for having more US than Japanese casualties, the battle has been criticised since as being wasteful of American lives to very little strategic advantage.
And today is NATIONAL EVERYTHING YOU DO IS RIGHT DAY. Now, this day comes the day after National Everything You Do Is Wrong Day, to balance the scales, as it were. I didn’t make it up…