wadinga wrote: ↑Thu Sep 17, 2020 2:07 am
Hi There HMSVF,
Splendid, some spirited debate to take our minds off the depressing state of the world at the moment.
Breyer I don't think mentions one bad design
I am not surprised, German warships,
as weapons systems alone, were probably unmatched. Unhindered by tradition and working from a blank sheet of paper but with the advantage of learning from the mistakes of others. Better subdivision for a start, enabling considerably superior damage control. Several German warships staggered home with severe torpedo or mine damage but a single mine saw off HMS Audacious, for instance. Intrinsically safer propellant handling with brass cased charges. Superior range finders. Vorsprung Durch Teknik.
An oft expressed excuse (spin) for British warships' design shortcomings was superior habitability. It has some truth. They were not designed solely around short range North Sea combat but were supposed to operate anywhere around the world giving crews reasonable living conditions. The Grand Fleet ships were sole residences for their crews in the bleak landscape of Scapa for month after month. Would German warship crews have remained efficient living in their tightly subdivided boxes for years on end in similar conditions? On this site there have been questions about German crews living in shoreside barracks for at least part of the time. Wilhelmshaven is not Scapa.
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f you are compiling a list of British capital ships which are complete clunkers, how can you leave out Fisher's last generation aberrations? HMS Spurious, Outrageous and Uproarious? Not to mention HMS Refit and Repair. Their manifold shortcomings are itemised in the books I recommended. Fisher had correctly identified speed as a vital tactical advantage, seeing how Togo had sailed rings round the Russians at Tsushima, but it was never "protection".
As for Scheer "spinning" his lacklustre performance in post war reflections on the Skagerrakschlacht, it is to be expected, but just as Jellicoe and Beatty's shortcomings have been mercilessly exposed, the job of commentators like Frost and Staff should be to fairly subject German commanders to equal scrutiny. I suspect there was a touch of "Pulling the Lion's Tail" in Frost's account as an officer in a "friendly" rival navy. I find the bias in Staff's writing absolutely unconscionable. He writes as if he was employed in the Propaganda Kompanie of the Second Reich, 100 years after it was disbanded.
I think it's best getting various sources tbh and making deductions from that. I think that my experiences on this board over the last few years have confirmed this for me.
This is one of the wisest observations yet made. As we all interact on various matters we bring different points of view garnered from different sources. Anomalies may be identified, correlations confirmed and reality better defined.
All the best
wadinga
Good Morning Wadinga!
I
am not surprised, German warships, as weapons systems alone, were probably unmatched. Unhindered by tradition and working from a blank sheet of paper but with the advantage of learning from the mistakes of others. Better subdivision for a start, enabling considerably superior damage control. Several German warships staggered home with severe torpedo or mine damage but a single mine saw off HMS Audacious, for instance. Intrinsically safer propellant handling with brass cased charges. Superior range finders. Vorsprung Durch Teknik
A fair point though I don't think the Nassau's were a brilliant design IMHO with their hexagonal layout. That said Dreadnought wasn't a flawless start I suppose. In regards to damage taken I would say that the German battlecruisers took an awful lot of hits and as you say got home. The caveat however was that British ammunition was poor. A lot of the time shells simply didn't work as planned or designed, hence the "Green Boy redesign. When they trialled them against Baden they knocked some fairly impressive holes in her.Had those shells been around on May 31st 1916 I think that there was a fair chance that Luitzow would have been joined by Seydlitz and possibly Von Der Tann. Audacious was unlucky in the fact that the mine couldn't have struck in worse place, but was let down by poor damage control. So its horses for courses.
An oft expressed excuse (spin) for British warships' design shortcomings was superior habitability. It has some truth. They were not designed solely around short range North Sea combat but were supposed to operate anywhere around the world giving crews reasonable living conditions. The Grand Fleet ships were sole residences for their crews in the bleak landscape of Scapa for month after month. Would German warship crews have remained efficient living in their tightly subdivided boxes for years on end in similar conditions? On this site there have been questions about German crews living in shoreside barracks for at least part of the time. Wilhelmshaven is not Scapa
I would also say that to "bang out as many as possible" they repeated the same designs "Bellerophon" to "St Vincent" class,"Invincible" to "Indefatigable"(albeit a stretched Invincible). The basis for the "Lion" class battlecruisers were the "Orion" class battleships. It certainly helped produce the numbers. The Germans did incrementally improve their designs, though whether they were a little late in increasing the gun calibers? Well that's a matter of conjecture.
If you are compiling a list of British capital ships which are complete clunkers, how can you leave out Fisher's last generation aberrations? HMS Spurious, Outrageous and Uproarious? Not to mention HMS Refit and Repair. Their manifold shortcomings are itemised in the books I recommended. Fisher had correctly identified speed as a vital tactical advantage, seeing how Togo had sailed rings round the Russians at Tsushima, but it was never "protection".
The "Large light cruisers"
. They are one of those designs that seem great on paper but poor in practice! The idea that you can have a large, fast,well armed super cruiser seems sound enough. The problem being that they were probably over gunned in terms of calibre and under gunned in terms of actual numbers of barrels! 4 x 15 inch sounds impressive but I believe that its an issue for salvo firing. Now if they had been armed with say 6 x 12 inch or 8 x 9.2inch they would probably been better ships. In regards to Refit and Repair....
I don't think that they were that bad. There was an obvious hullabaloo after Jutland in regards to the perceived protection of British battlecruisers and these 2 were protected along the lines of the Invincible class with their 6 inch belt. However...
IMHO the loss of those 3 battlecruisers was more than likely due to very sloppy magazine practices. HMS Tiger & Lion took a fair few hits (Tiger 18 + ?) yet carried on till the end. Had it not been for the gunnery officer, Grant, Lion may well have gone up like Indefatigable before Major Harvey had time to order the magazines to be flooded. To me it comes down to 3 factors. You have armour to keep out the shells, tight control and adherence to magazine drill,a stable propellant.
Now if you armour is pierced, but you have the other two factors, you should be safe. If your armour is pierced and you have good magazine practice you can mitigate against the volatility of cordite.
The BCF managed to scupper themselves by having ships that could have their armour penetrated, crowding of the working spaces of the turrets with extra charges, probably leaving the scuttles/interlocks open to allow a fast rate of fire, whilst using a propellant that was known to require extra caution (as witnessed by the losses of HMS Bulwark and Natal in the preceding 2 years). Given this cavalier approach,Beatty was lucky not to have lost all of his battlecruisers. At Dogger Bank both sides took different lessons from the battle. The Germans learnt the importance of magazine protocol and security, the British decided that the best way to finish the Germans off given a second chance was to fire as quickly as possible. Its pretty obvious which lesson was correct in retrospect !
Repulse and Renown remained useful warships post WW1,when you add in HMS Hood you have (in theory) a 32kt, 15inch armed squadron that was unmatched apart from possibly the Kongo class - which were arguably a generation behind before their many reconstructions. Would I have put them up against a battleship squadron? No. Would I feel comfortable against cruisers? Yes. Could they keep up with Furious/Glorious/Courageous carrier conversions? Easily. You could have a very powerful squadron there when you add in cruisers and destroyers. Renown in her final guise did sterling work and managed to chase off 2 vessels of similar size despite being 20 years older.
My bets noirs are Hercules,Collosus and the Orions (ok not so much the Orions) because of the hideous and completely useless funnel/tripod set up. Who in their right mind thought that having the spotting top above and behind the first funnel was a good idea? I believe that it was done to for ships boat handling purposes a lot of the time (by having the derrick attached to the main vertical pole of the tripod meaning that second mast wasn't needed). Personally I put boat handling down at the bottom of requisites I would like when building a battleship!
They also looked bloody awful!
This is one of the wisest observations yet made. As we all interact on various matters we bring different points of view garnered from different sources. Anomalies may be identified, correlations confirmed and reality better defined
You guys know far more about Bismarck,Denmark Strait and the intricate complexities of the Hood & Bismarck. I always felt 'uncomfortable' (for want of a better word) in the pushing of one sides officers being accepted as 'right' and infallible and the other sides being essentially 'wrong'. It's very easy with the Mk1 retroscope to say X,Y and Z about the actions of people in a period of crisis or life threatening experience. I was reading Paul Cadogans piece on the timing of Hoods loss a few nights ago and he made a really valid point in regards to what they saw. When HMS Hood exploded they were not armed with a notebook or dictaphone anticipating it. They were doing their jobs when the unthinkable happened and their focus was taken away from what they had been doing to what had just occurred. Witness testimony IMHO is frequently unreliable. Its not that people are lying, its just that they are being asked to recall an event that may have occurred months/years earlier that lasted only seconds/minutes. Thats why I prefer the gathering of multiple accounts and give a degree of slack to those who say recorded stuff at the time. They weren't documenting information on the premise that 70 to 100 years later people would be using digital technology to decipher an event!
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Best wishes HMSVF