Talk:Battle of Jutland/Archive 9

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Battle of the Battlecruisers & Sourced Materials

Sandpiper, I realize your computer malfunctioned on the 25th of July, the date in which the "Battlecruisers" was deleted (for the second time), "due to lack of proper referencing." So it's been returned. Wikipedia's: Verifiability policies have been adhered to, to the letter. Anything I write is either referenced by a reputable source (in this case Osprey Publications and author John Keegan) or personal military combat experience. If either of those two elements are missing...I don't print it!

Your deletion on 10 May 2010 (which was sourced) stated: "Delete argument about battlecruisers being out matched, they weren't in that battle." Response: Jutland was a battlecruiser action; 6 (or more) battlecruisers lost in action makes it a battlecruiser fight; especially when no Dreadnoughts were lost (the one lost pre-dreadnought was not a dreadnought). If you were talking about Tsushima, battlecruisers didn't exist then. And note, the whole issue is not about battlecruisers...it was about the MEN (Commanders) that misunderstood what they studied (or went off half-cocked/went off with partial knowledge). Remember, Scheer & Jellicoe had never fought a battleship fleet action before. Everything they knew came from books.

Your deletion on 25 July 2010 (which was sourced) has already been explained away as a computer glitch (a good faith edit). However, your comments about sources not being "demonstrated" properly deserves a few points:

1. Wikipedia's policy was complied with. 2. The purpose of "referenced material" is so that the WRITER or CONTESTER of the article or subject, CAN READ IT HIMSELF. 3. If the initial author provides the contester with an exact quote (providing he still has the book) what's to keep the "contester" from replying with, "I still don't believe ya!" 4. That's why Wikipedia made that policy; so "YOU" don't have to believe what the writer says...YOU CAN SEE IT YOURSELF!

Now, not having a photographic memory; The Osprey book almost exactly says what the former deleted portion of the Wikipedia article says; why re-type it again here, when you can read the actual article? Remember, I have to buy the book, or check it out from a library, and give you a letter by letter (word by word) quote...and it's quite possible, you still won't believe it. It has been known that some writer's become so involved with a subject that it becomes "their pet project" and no-one is going to interfere with it...meaning they don't want to believe the facts, they've already got their minds made up.

John Keegan's book, which was also DELETED from the reference section, generally stated, that "...navies somehow came to the unfortunate belief that battlecruisers should also engage battleships, along with their other duties...", and "at Jutland suffered terrible losses because of it..."

Sandpiper, in the military, a good commander (if he wants to survive and/or not be relieved of command) "always wants to see it in writing", if he can't, due to any number of reasons, then he takes what advice his staff has to offer, then makes a decision based upon that input, his experience, and his MISSION. Victory or defeat, the commander is responsible, no one else (in the 20th century; can't speak for the 21st century). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.105.32.38 (talk) 07:52, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

It is hardly surprising that navies came to the conclusion that battlecruisers should engage battleships. It was after all part of the reason for having them. See Marder From dreadnought to Scapa Flow Volume I, pages 44-45:

"The Raison d'être of the battel cruiser was threefold:

(1) to act as super-scouting cruisers, ships fast and powerful enough to push home a reconnaissance in the face of an enemy's big armoured cruisers;

(2) fast enough to hunt down and destroy the fastest armed merchant raiders, especially the 23-knot German transatlantic liners, which were known to carrying guns fr commerce destruction in war;

(3) to act as a fast wing reinforcing the van or rear of a battlefleet in a general action."

"Admiralty statistics often included battle cruisers under dreadnoughts... the ships came to be known, from 1912, battle cruisers (at first they were known as large armoured cruisers or fast battleships', and in 1911 as 'batttleship cruisers')".

"[T]hey were not intended to stand up to battleships (certainly not dreadnoughts) not already engaged with other battleships."

"The principle of the battle cruiser was not new. The fast armoured cruisers of the pre-dreadnought era differed from the pre-dreadnought battleships of that date in much the same way as the battle cruisers differed from the dreadnoughts, that is they were fast but less powerful. And just as Togo, in the Russo-Japanese War counted his squadron of armoured cruisers as 'capital ships' and put them into the line of battle, but manoeuvred them more or less independently of his heavy ships to take advantage of their higher speed, so the Royal Navy planned to use it battle cruisers."

"The term capital ships for dreadnoughts and battle cruisers collectively was introduced tentatively by the Admiralty in the 1909 navy scare and caught on by 1912. The term dates back to the reign of Charles II and referred to ships capable of lying in the line of battle."

What Marder says about armoured cruisers contains a small error: in the Russo-Japanese War, the Kasuga and Nishin were generally used with the battleships, and not manoeuvred separately. (See HW Wilson Battleships in Action various pages.) The Kasuga and Nishin were different from their other armoured cruisers; the Kasuga and Nishin were of the Italian Garibaldi-type. --Toddy1 (talk) 11:39, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

75., first off, the reason wiki asks people to create user names for themselves is because it is difficult to follow a debate with someone if you cannot be sure the comments you are addressing are from the same person. Do you have a fixed IP, so we can tell that if this same IP comes up as posting it will be you?

Now, what exactly are you complaining about? Referencing is considered a necessary condition for material to be included in articles (when challenged), but it is by no means a sufficient one. There is plenty of rubbish written in books which we do not include just because someone has written it down and it has been published. Just today I was reading Chalmers biography of Beatty, where he explains the fortuitous circumstances of how the british fleet happened to be at sea because submarines had been sighted leading them to think a german operation was in hand. Total nonsense, and he knew it when he wrote it. The british knew because room 40 was busily translating all german radio messages.

Somewhere above you quote keegan as saying (I am assuming it was you), John Keegan's "The First World War"; p. 262 supported Osprey's book, in that p. 262/263 said that the navies at Jutland "unfortunately" believed that battlecruisers "should" engage BBs/suffering terrible losses and pointlessness because of those beliefs. However, Keegan doesn't present evidence of how/why those "navies" came to those beliefs.

So how does this support your argument? The battlecruisers at jutland did not suffer terrible losses because they engaged battleships. This is a fact about the battle. It is unreasonable to suggest we should report Keegan's view when he is claiming something happened which did not. Whatever beliefs the admirals might have had, the British battlecruisers did not suffer from engaging battleships but from other battlecruisers. This is entirely separate from the question of whether british admirals really did have the view that battlecruisers should be used interchangeably with battleships. But since they never were used in this way at Jutland, firstly, what evidence does it provide that they believed this, and secondly what is the relevance of such a view even if they had it (because, plainly they did not act upon it)? If we are considering German battlecruisers, they similarly only deliberately engaged other battlecruisers. When they were used against battleships, it was as an act of desperation. But in any event they performed rather well in this role allowing for the fact they were always outnumbered.

As to Forchyk, I asked for more explanation of what he had said to see if he has a presentable argument. You seem to be saying he only said what you inserted into the article. This does not agree (as I have just said) with the facts of the battle, but also does not agree with what I have read from other authors. I do not think any of the british admirals thought battlecruisers and battleships were interchangeable. Beatty certainly had an unrealistic belief in the capabilities of his ships and used them unwisely, but he only pitted them against ships which on paper had similar capabilities. Surely you are not saying he was wrong to use his battlecruisers to engage enemy battlecruisers?

Er, four battlecruisers were lost, though certainly a couple more of the German ones were very badly damaged.Sandpiper (talk) 20:08, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Incidentally, was it you who editing as 24.10.75.150 added a vast number of references to different articles from forchyks book? Sandpiper (talk) 21:11, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Ok, here we go again. having got hold of a copy of Forczyk, what he actually says is, 'the japanese decision to use armoured cruisers as substitute battleships was a risky choice that they got away with in 1904-05, causing other navies to draw the post-war conclusion that this was an acceptable tactical option. Instead, during World war I british and German armoured cruisers that tried to go toe to toe with battleships were quickly blasted to pieces.'

I dont know exactly how Forczyk intended this to be understood, but to me there is a distinction between an 'armoured cruiser' and a 'battlecruiser'. A batlecruiser is a stripped down battleship with a souped up engine. An armoured cruiser is a light fast ship with added armour. Generally, armoured cruisers had a poor record in the war because they did indeed suffer very badly in conflicts with larger ships. They tended to have big crews meaning there were big losses if one sank, but were not suitable for more than patrol duties. These are just names, and what is actualy meant changed as designs improved, but another example was demonstrated at the battle of the falkland islands, where the highly successful german raiding squadron of Von Spee which had as its principle ships the armoured cruisers scharnhorst and Gneisenau was destroyed by a British squadron whose principle ships were the battlecruisers invincible and inflexible. The british ships used rather a lot of ammunition, but they stood off taking shots at the German ships at a safe distance until the Germans sank. The battlecruisers were designed to deal with armoured cruisers. In turn, the German armoured crusiers were designed as commerce raiders, and were very succesful at this until eventually run to ground. Conceptually Fisher imagined battlecruisers as having the longest possible range guns and faster engines than any battleships they might meet, so that they had the choice to decline action until it was to their advantage to engage. By the way, having found a copy, I quite like Forczyk's book. Now what i need is a copy of Corbett's Maritime operations in the russo-japanese war, but that seems likely to be harder to get hands on. Sandpiper (talk) 15:39, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Sandpiper, simmer down, that IP address has no less that four warnings on it. If said user is unwilling to stop hiding I see no reason to validate his ranting with a reply. Given past behavior I'd be inclined to ignore and revert given reason. No Admiral on either side misunderstood the delta between armored cruisers and battle-cruisers that I am aware of at Jutland.Tirronan (talk) 15:27, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

12" Gun performance

It has come up in the past about range vs. angle and deck hits thereby. I ran across this when doing a bit of research on the Alaska Class for my kid. The gun system is going to perform more like a 14" gun than a 12" because of the super-heavy shell design but it certainly answers questions that I have had about deck hit probabilities and deck armor penetration questions.

http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_12-50_mk8.htm

anything above 20k yards and the % of deck hits is going to rise, @ 25k yards you'll get a lot of them, @ 35k yards most of them will be.Tirronan (talk) 14:59, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

yes but see the equivalent page actually for von der tann [1], or any of the other german ships. VdT page says maximum range 22,000 yards. It says the same guns were later used in a battery where thay could be elevated to 49 degrees and achieved 40,000 yards.....because on ship they were intended to fire on very flat trajectories, which they did. Alaska seems to have been designed to elevate guns to 45 degrees. As built Vdt turrets could only elevate the guns to 20 degrees, 20,000 yards but this was increased at a refit in 1916. Dont know how much, but judging from the alaska tables probably less than 5 degrees? I think there is a ballistic calculator on the website somewhere or a table for descent angle.

On the Seydlitz/moltke page[2] it says maximum elevation as built was 13.5 degrees, which was then increased to 16 dgerees (21,000 yards)! Shells didnt plunge! Sandpiper (talk) 19:54, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

I believe that most of the BC to BC fire was in the 15k range, however that wasn't the only fire of the day I believe. 5BS was firing at much longer ranges at both the German BC during the later half of the run to the south and BB's at the run to the north.Tirronan (talk) 03:02, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

But they werent firing at british ships, the debate then and here was about whether thin deck armour was a weakness of british ships at the time. Did the germans complained about the weakness of deck armour on their ships? The website says the QE guns could only elevate to 20 degrees. Sandpiper (talk) 00:45, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Every ship out there had thin horizontal armor.Tirronan (talk) 02:07, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

British (and german) ships did not have thin armour because thin armour was thought better at keeping out shells than thick armour, but because everything is a tradeoff. It was a design choice to place thin armour on deck because this was where thick armour was least needed. Someone, somewhere did a calculation about the penetrating ability of a low angle shell hitting the deck and decided one inch or so was enough to keep it out. The ships were not designed to deal with plunging fire from ww2 battleships firing at 45 degree elevation, because these did not exist. The design mistake was not thin deck armour. It was thin turret armour, or bad ammunition handling system, or bad propellant chemistry. It was the ammunition explosions which destroyed the british ships, not the enemy projectiles per se. At the time blame was placed on plunging fire penetrating decks and reaching vital areas but without evidence (since then, the wrecks have been examined). The reality seems to be flash fires spreading into the propellant store. If you wanted to improve those ship you needed to address the cause of their loss, and it was not thin deck armour. Extra deck armour was added to ships post jutland, but at the cost of something else to compensate the extra weight (probably fuel/patrol endurance). The German ships had safer propellant. Some of it caught fire but no ships were lost in massive explosions. On the whole, the design decisions (including thin deck armour) worked out well for them, despite the relatively greater 'plunge' of British shells with higher elevations. Sandpiper (talk) 07:56, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

If you are waiting for me to defend the use of Cordite you'd have a very long and lonely wait. It wasn't a great propellant from a safety aspect and any country using it suffered from spontaneous detonation issues. Nor did cordite like being near explosions. German RP powder burned it didn't explode. However, if the thin deck armor was such a smart choice, why did ever battleship building nation on earth move smartly away from a banded armor system? There being one exception being the Bismark class and it proved to be very vulnerable to soft kill due to its "smart" armor choices. I'm not sure the Brit BC's are a great choice in that they didn't have great armor, nor great flash protection, and what protection they did have would seem to have been circumvented by clipping open hatches down to the magazines and storing excess powder in the ammo handling rooms. Nor was plunging fire ever a factor in the bc/bc fight as they started at 15,5k yard range.Tirronan (talk) 12:41, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Improved deck amour became a priority because whilst Jutland was mostly fought at what are now considered "medium" ranges, some of the gunnery was taking place and achieving hits at much greater ranges than had been considered practical when the ships were designed. It was obvious that long ranged hits falling at 20 degrees or more meant that future vessels would require thicker decks, even if their horizontal protection was (just) adequate against hits landing at 15-20 degrees. 195.217.166.8 (talk) 15:40, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Bellady (talk) 19:42, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Archived per WP:TALK, disusccion unreated to improving the article.
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
This a family memory which may help readers to understand a tiny bit of what the ordinary seamen were dealing with. My grandfather, Frederick William Reginald Tapp joined the Royal Navy in 1910 at the age of eighteen. He served in HMS Hercules which was part of the 6th division under Admiral Jellicoe. He was a non-commissioned seaman and in fact was a stoker. The ship was steam driven so he had to work very hard. Thw boilers at that time were pressurised by a fan blowing air from above. My grandfather's colleague panicked and wanted to escape. My grandfather knew that if he opened the hatch the boiler pressure would drop and the ship would not have the power she needed. Apparently he hit the bloke over the head with his shovel! This story was told to me by my uncle, my grandfather's son. Bellady (talk) 19:42, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Post-Jutland sorties by the High Seas Fleet

This article asserts (as does at least one other I have seen on Wikipedia) that after Jutland, the High Seas Fleet made only two further large-scale sorties: one on August 19, 1916, and the other in October of the same year. My understanding has always been that the Germans sortied on April 24, 1918 in an attempt to annihilate the division of dreadnoughts assigned to escort the Scandinavian Convoy (which, fortunately for the British/Americans, was not out that day), and that the Grand Fleet only narrowly missed a chance at another Jutland the next morning. Jrt989 (talk) 00:14, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

You are correct. For what it's worth, Massie's Castles of Steel has an account of the operation on pages 747-748. Parsecboy (talk) 02:35, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Tons or tonnes?

This discussion has been closed, and the problem in question has been fixed. Please do not modify it.
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
In the info box of this article, an amount in 'tons' is given for casualties on both sides. However, there is no clear definition of precisely which unit this is, and I would recommend we find out and add the relevant conversions as recommended under the 'Units of measurement' section of the Wikipedia style manual. There are the American short tons (2000 lb), the tonnes—known as 'metric tons' in the US (1000 kg), or the now-defunct long tons (2240 lb) or 'Imperial tons' which were used in the past within the British Empire and her colonies. Can someone who owns the book cited as the source confirm which unit this is? A clue may be where the book was first published or who it was written by, depending on where they came from of course. Regards, Γιάννης Α. ✆|☑ 17:10, 8 September 2010 (UTC) I notice that although this is the British version of Wikipedia it seems somehow necessary to impose US weights and measures as though they were in daily use in Europe. I also note the frequency with which the ton (the real ton, not the short change American version) is referred to as "defunct". Whilst I admit that the tonne is now used almost entirely, the difference in weight between the ton and the tonne (2240 vs 2205 pounds) is negligible for many purposes, so hardly defunct. To most people, merely a change of spelling. And, believe it or not, people in the UK frequently weigh themselves in stones and pounds without being thrown into paroxisms of doubt because the unit are neither American nor Metric. Drg40 (talk) 15:28, 10 September 2010 (UTC) Last time I checked there was no "British Wikipedia" - just the English (as in the language) one. Parsecboy (talk) 19:18, 10 September 2010 (UTC) Well he has sarcasm covered pretty well.Tirronan (talk) 23:11, 10 September 2010 (UTC) No, I wouldn't call it a simply change of spelling. The average person has no need to use such large measurements for anything, just the companies do. The ton, from my personal experience, has not been taught in British schools since its usage stopped. The tonne however, has, and it has existed in Germany for a long, long time. Think of it like this; a newspaper such as The Times writes an article on a prestigious or important building currently being built, and decides to put some facts about the building on the side. The facts will be the official specifications that, say, the architects provide about the building, which by law have to be written in tonnes. That's just an example; just think of its use amongst shipping companies! Therefore, we can only call the long ton extinct, as they are never used by commoners. The short ton is used in Britain only when citing specifications of buildings in the US or [maybe] Canada. But because such units never used by commoners, the source material is of importance here. And in Britain, the source material is tonnes unless it's an article about something in North America. And as I've mentioned before, Germany was a major participant in this battle, and it needs to be represented as Germany has been counting with this unit for over a hundred years! Γιάννης Α. ✆|☑ 22:35, 11 September 2010 (UTC) Tons are the standard avoirdupois measurement of weight. A ton consists of 2240 pounds. They are not defunct. It is possible that some readers might not know what a ton is, just as it is possible that they might not know what frequency means. A dictionary is the answer.--Toddy1 (talk) 06:55, 11 September 2010 (UTC) Actually, they are, as all the countries that used the long tons (did you even read what I posted?) have switched to tonnes. And that's Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the rest of them. Guys, I did not ask for a debate, just for someone to check, say, where the book is from or who published it so we can translate it to tonnes correctly. Γιάννης Α. ✆|☑ 22:35, 11 September 2010 (UTC) It is completely normal for current books on warships to use tons of 2240 pounds. There is no need to translate to tonnes - there is a French wikipedia.--Toddy1 (talk) 17:17, 12 September 2010 (UTC) I think we could have been spared some trouble if the originator of the thread had taken his own advice and seen where the figures came from. A reference (”Naismith”)is given, and at the foot of the article, one of the sources listed is “Naismith” ; that was published in Canada in 1919 , so clearly we are dealing in Imperial units. I have added a link to long ton to help mitigate any confusion, but I don’t think it would be sensible to give a metric equivalent. The difference between the two units is trivial, and almost certainly less than the difference between quoted and actual displacements. A 1970 German book on dreadnoughts (“Battleships and Battle Cruisers 1905-1970” S Breyer (trans A Kurti) Macdonald and Janes, London 1973, ISBN 0356 04191 3) after explaining the calculational bases for various displacements which might be quoted (standard/type, design, max) goes on to explain (its page 10) Important note in connection with the above : all the figures published so far, some of which varied widely, were converted into English tons. A uniform alignment to standard or type displacement was not possible and this figure is therefore not available for about half the ships dealt with. The information best suited for comparison purposes is that relating to the maximum displacement which, however, could not be ascertained for all ships.. All figures quoted have only a purely theoretical value; as a rule they are based on official or semi-official national publications which in most cases applied only to the original design. In nearly all cases the quoted displacement values increased, in some cases substantially, as a result of subsequent modifications, refits, reconstructions, etc. Apart from a few exceptions, these increased weights remained unknown.... (Additionally (for some navies under some regimes) the official displacement might have been deliberately misstated. For example the German 'pocket battleships' of WW2 supposedly came in under a 10 000 ton limit; Breyer gives a design displacement of over 13 000 tons) It should also be clear from the quote above that whilst they have indeed had tonnes in Germany for a long time, even there -as others have pointed out- the use of long tons is standard when discussing the displacement of warships . The Washington Treaty limits were certainly specified in long tons , and (for example) the following reputable reference gives displacements for current US warships in “tons” (only), and means ‘long tons’ (Polmar, Norman (2004). The Naval Institute guide to the ships and aircraft of the U.S. fleet. Naval Institute Press. p. 112. ISBN 978-1591146858.). Whatever the status of long tons in general applications, for warship displacements they are not defunct, they continue to be the standard usage / term of the trade. Wikipedia guidance gives a clear exemption for non-SI units where they are the standard terms of the trade. Furthermore, the Wikipedia entry for tonne would appear to countenance use of the older spelling for the modern unit where the distinction is not vital , which it isn’t here, so I would hope no non-specialist is irrecoverably thrown by the use of the term of the trade, any more than they might be thrown by non-transliterated Greek.Rjccumbria (talk) 21:52, 12 September 2010 (UTC) That seemed somewhat like a personal attack, but I suppose we have solved our little problem. And I did actually check where the source was from after I posted in the Talk, but I didn't want to carry people away into a 'metric versus Imperial' measurements debate, which is what this discussion was heading into. I didn't know there was an international standard on how ship weight was measured, so the long ton is still 'alive' in that respect. I also did not know about what units of measurement they had in Canada at the time, and also if they had used the long or the short ton due to influence from the US. You have done the right thing by adding a link to which variation of the ton the infobox was in reference to. I'll update the article on the long ton with the relevant information, and I'll now archive this discussion as we have solved our problem. I suppose that no-one has a problem with this. --Γιάννης Α. ✆|☑ 01:10, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Jutland, Historys Greatest Battlecruiser Action

Having read many of the comments by Wikipedia Editors, I question the soundness of down playing such reknown historians such a John Keegan and Mr. Forczyk. Both of those gentlemen have excellent writing credentials.

Secondly, if battleships played such a small role at Jutland, other than just being there in large numbers, and battlecruisers performed nearly all of the action, to include losses of both sailors and warships, then Jutland, it would appear, would be histories greatest Battlecruiser Battle; and not a great clash of battleships.

I might add, that many readers might consider "running away" to be a disgraceful act, as the German battleships did at Jutland, even though historians "sugar-coated" the act by calling it a masterful retreat; they ran like a rabbit. For the British battleships, they embarrassingly couldn't relocate their enemy! Such actions on the part of both the German and British battleship forces should delete them from the Jutland battle as major participants.

The Battlecruisers fought well! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.93.176.154 (talk) 18:57, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

The French!

This question probably won't be too relevant to the article, but I thought I'd ask anyway. Assume the battle went really, really badly for the British. Would this really have made any real difference to the war? Because wouldn't the French navy just take over the blockade? -OOPSIE- (talk) 07:57, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes--Toddy1 (talk) 06:56, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure how the French could have taken over the blockade; they had only 7 front-line battleships in 1916, and the French couldn't really afford leaving the bottling up of the Austro-Hungarians to just the Italians. They also had insufficient light forces (i.e, light cruisers, modern destroyers) to protect a fleet on the high seas. If we're going to assume that "really, really badly for the British" means heavy British losses with few German losses, there's really no way the French could reestablish the blockade. Parsecboy (talk) 12:19, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

At the time of Jutland they had six Dantons, four Courbets, and two Bretagnes, with another Bretagne nearing completion. All of these ships were similar in quality to the German and British dreadnoughts.

If the Germans had inflicted heavy losses on the British at Jutland, the job of bottling up the Austrians would have had to have been left to the Italians with some help from British and French light forces, submarines and mines.

Presumably there would also have been an appeal to Britain's Japanese allies. That the Japanese declined to send heavy forces to help the British in 1914 is understandable when it was not obvious that they were really needed. That situation would have changed with the British suffering heavy losses at Jutland. It would have become politically advantageous to have wrung maximum concessions out of Britain and France in return for the Japanese to have got them out of trouble.--Toddy1 (talk) 12:39, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

The Dantons weren't dreadnoughts, and wouldn't have been able to stand up to even a Nassau class battleship. It seems that by 1916, the French dreadnoughts were more or less immobilized due to their crews being transferred to ASW vessels - read the ship articles on the Courbets for further information.

As for Japan, they had but the four Ises and Fusos and the four Kongos - even with the 12 French BBs (assuming they could mobilize enough men to crew them), you've got a non-homogenous fleet of 20 capital ships from two different countries, half of which just sailed around the world. The Americans had a hard enough time merging into the Grand Fleet in 1918, and they all spoke the same language. How hard do you think it'd be to run a fleet with French and Japanese warships?

Moreover, the French were already stretched thin on light forces, they couldn't disperse their fleet any more and still keep the German/Austrian U-boats in the Mediterranean even somewhat in check. The French just didn't have the assets to cover the Mediterranean and establish a blockade of the North Sea.

On the German side, if Jutland had really gone that badly for the British, Scheer could have easily sortied by August and crushed whatever British opposition was left - hell, they might have even landed troops in Scapa a la Operation Albion, and without Scapa, there's really no possibility of an Allied blockade. Parsecboy (talk) 13:31, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Correction: Ise was commissioned in November 1916, Hyuga not until April 1918, and Yamashiro entered service in March 1917. So at the time of Jutland, Japan had five modern capital ships to commit to any expeditionary force. Parsecboy (talk) 13:46, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

They'd have been better off getting the American fleet over though it would have been a tough proposition. In any case when the two main fleets met there wasn't any doubt which side was comming off worse.Tirronan (talk) 17:43, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, the US still had a year before they entered the war, and who knows what would have happened if Germany had broken the British blockade - there might not have been a war for them to join. Parsecboy (talk) 17:45, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

(deindent) I Dont see any real evidence from the battle for any way the Germans could have a significant fleet victory except by sheer luck. The british (some of them, anyway) were overconfident and suffered as a result. The battle confirmed the German view they couldn't win a major ship engagement, but it also seems to have confirmed the british view that there was no point in taking the slightest risk, and their post-jutland policy was not to bother with further engagements. Both sides were fast becoming too scared of losing capital ships to mines or submarines to send them to sea. So if the entire british battleship fleet had suddenly vanished, would the Germans really have dared sortie significantly with their capital ships? The battleship was fast becoming obsolete. The Germans post jutland effectively gave up on their surface fleet. Would britain have been able to switch over to submarine/mine/destroyer warfare to contain the German capital ships (which was what was happening slowly anyway)? Sandpiper (talk) 12:06, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Despite the fact that Beatty's BC's didn't work so well, that didn't stop the rest of the Grand Fleet from perfoming quite well with the few minutes of battle they got. One of the things that again seems a bit underplayed in the article is that much of the German fleet wasn't in good shape for battle damage. The entirety of the BC's with one exception was a floating wreck, and more than a few BB's were mangled as well. Engagement the next day would have been the end of the HSF. Also I didn't notice anyone being all that careless with CV's in the next war, no one gets careless with capital assets. That is all that you are seeing. I noticed that the entire GF did rush out twice more and went where they would regardless submarines and mines. The CV made the BB obsolete.Tirronan (talk) 15:38, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

I think proper interpretation of the German response to jutland is not that thereafter they decided not to sortie, but that they would only do so when conditions were ideal. After a couple more attempts they concluded this was never going to happen, but Im not sure they ever really gave up on the idea of using their ships, the attempts just petered out. On 19 august Jellicoe sailed with the fleet to intercept a raid by scheer, but turned back pretty much on a reverse course because of a suspected new minefield. They only resumed advancing on the Germans when confident there were no mines. On 18-19 October another German raid was planned, as usual the british knew in advance but this time did not choose to sail. As it happened the Germans turned back because one of their ships was hit by torpedo, but the British did not know this would happen before it did. They chose not to attempt to engage the Germans. They had decided the best thing to do was stay in port. Both sides were risking ships to incidental losses from mine or torpedo every time they sailed. It was fast approaching a stalemate rather than a british victory. It wasnt going to happen, but it seems worth thinking about how well the british might have been able to contain the German battleships without using battleships of their own. Navies had been considering the issue of how to defeat big ships with small ones for decades, thoug Im not sure the british ever addressed this seriously, having a big investment in battleships. Sandpiper (talk) 20:09, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Remember also that much of this was driven by the unique conditions of the small area of deployment. Much of the area is very shallow and almost land locked. I remember sailing around Denmark in the USS Coontz with all of us pouring over the maps and sonar in frantic mode. Nor was there a ASW weapon worthy of the name. Still if one could make an argument for the early obsolete BB then one could make the same argument for the obsolete CV, how many were sunk by torpedo in WW2? What ultimately made the BB obsolete wasn't that it could be sunk by mine/torpedo what made it obsolete was it wasn't the super heavy hitter with the longest range in the surface force any longer. When an SBD can deliver a 500/1000 lbs. bomb 150 miles the game was over, and most of the need was lost except for those all too rare occasions.Tirronan (talk) 21:02, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but all the abbreviations you use turn the conversation somewhat into alphabet soup. They do not appear in the sorts of books I read, probably exactly for that reason. so what the heck is SBD? The initial threat to battleship supremacy came from the torpedo, which drove technological improvements in gun range to outpace torpedo range. Then the submarine meant torpedos could be delivered again from less than gun range using surprise to get close. This tussel was still going on in ww1 and ww2, indeed, even in the Falklands war with the general belgrano. But it had become a fight between big ships and little ones. Obviously little ones are cheaper. German battleships proved to be pretty much worthless in the blockade war which was fought. Yes, because they were outnumbered, but what would have been the result had all that money been invested in submarine R&D instead of battleships? A fleet of 1000 german submarines? A carrier has the same issues with submarines as does a battleship, but its attack range is much greater, which is why we still have them. Once airpower at a distance becomes possible without carriers we will drop them like a shot because of their vulnerability. The question is whether by WW1 the battleship had already reached this tipping point where its vulnerabilty outweighed its usefulness. Just as an example, I noticed in Beesly's book on room 40 (he was in naval intelligence in ww2 tracking submarines) he starts the chapter on Jutland, 'The battle of jutland was fought on 31 may 1916. It was the swan song of the of the mighty dreadnought battleship.' The debate on carriers is in full flood right now with the current arguments about new carriers for the UK. It seems probable they will be built because much of the money has already been spent. But the tail chasing going on which seems to amount to 'the budget must be cut because there is no money, but nothing can be cut because everything is vital', is pretty ridiculous. What are the real benefits of carriers to the UK now? By the time of WW2 with major land based air power, were they of any benefit defending the UK from Germany? Sandpiper (talk) 08:48, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

An SDB is a Dauntless dive-bomber. Parsecboy (talk) 12:11, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

I was definitely going to guess that oneSandpiper (talk) 20:58, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Sorry I was using US Navy designations, BB = Battleship, CV = Carrier, SBD Parsecboy got right, it was followed by the SB2C 2,000 lb bomb over longer ranges.--Tirronan (talk) 15:40, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

German battleships proved to be useless against the blockade because the Germans chose not to use them aggressively. Even if they had 1,000 submarines, it doesn't necessarily follow that they would have brought Britain to her knees: If the World Wars showed us anything it was that the Submarine Menace could be mastered.

As to this comment, "Navies had been considering the issue of how to defeat big ships with small ones for decades, though Im not sure the british ever addressed this seriously, having a big investment in battleships." it has been argued that the British devoted a disproportionate amount of thought to flotilla defence from 1900 onwards, i.e. to submarines and destroyers, culminating in the cancelling of a battleship of the 1914 programme before the war began in order to order more destroyers. --Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 09:49, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

I seem to recall reading somewhere that Fisher's ultimate goal was to transition to flotilla defense for the UK and rely on the flying squadrons of battlecruisers for colonial defense/trade protection/etc. Parsecboy (talk) 11:28, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

[deindent] I dont really know what they are up to, but the uk government right now seems to be running exactly the opposite strategy, disposing of small ships so as to run a couple of large ones. The aircraftless carriers, a novel peacenik military development. presumably the German view by WW2 was that a better submarine fleet would have been highly effective in WW1 and this was their main naval approach from the outset second time around. In WWI they only turned to the submarine as it demonstrated surprising effectiveness. Clearly it is true that once one party adopts a new weapon, then the other turns all its attention on countering it and new developments come along. So the submarine had a limited shelf life as an unstoppable weapon. Yet it is still with us: technology has not done away with it. I think it right the best way to use a new weapon is to hold back until you have overwhelming force to apply before any counter can be developed, but also think this runs counter to both the trial and error development cycle and human nature. In both wars the most effective weapon against the submarine was in fact the wireless intercept, something which the Germans could have corrected.

H, you are right, the high seas fleet was untested in its effectiveness as a blockade force because it stood in fear of the larger grand fleet. So it is a theoretical question what it would have done if faced with no opposing battleships but a much larger destroyer/ submarine/ minelayer fleet. It would still have faced the difficult issue of attempting to operate west of Britain from Germany. How long would 20 or 40 irreplaceable battleships really have lasted? Craddocks greatest achievement at Coronel was to use up half the German ammunition in sinkng his ships.Sandpiper (talk) 01:26, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

I can't speak to the UK's defense thinking, in the US we have 11 heavy carriers and we continue to have the same arguments over and over. They are hellishly expensive, the aircraft that you need to make them useful even more so. This is followed by 1 billion dollar DDG-51 Agesis destroyers needed to keep the things floating. The problem with getting rid of them is what will you replace them with? One can not get air superiority from a gunboat. Missile boats have been touted as an answer to the US Heavy Metal fleet and the few times it was tried this resulted in increased flotsam and jetsam. More success has been had with aircraft and AsM missiles ie USS Stark but when used against a fully alerted fleet the success ratio sinks to zero.Tirronan (talk) 15:40, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Its not just us then. Though the bigger scale you operate on, the more reasonable it becomes to invest in big scale weapons. The current talk of having new carriers is combined with a policy of cutting the smalller ships, which on the basis of the outdated naval strategy I know anything about makes no sense. Plus the statement that though we cant afford the planes to go with them, we may 'borrow' some if there is a war. My impression of carriers is they are an offensive weapon, not defensive, and latterly have never been used against remotely comparable enemies where some embarrassing sinkings might be expected. Germany was outclassed in WW1 but not by such a margin the british could afford any complacency. Now how did this thread begin? Ah..whether the French could supply the deficiencies of the british fleet...by lending them aeroplanes for their carriers....er, old battleships. Makes about as much sense. Sandpiper (talk) 07:25, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

This will be my last entry to this subheading, you are right we are way off topic. I've tapped into some friends and have done some reading on this as well. What I am going to say is likely to hurt some feelings and for that I am sorry. When I operated with the Brit Navy back in the 75-80 range of years they did have a lot of escort ships. The state of the art was the type 42 destroyers and the Broadsword ASW frigates. The Brit Navy had been sized and shaped as an ASW fleet with the US Navy providing the heavy punch where and when needed. So far as operations against the Soviet Union it made sense. This is the hard part so forgive me please, many of the weapons that the Brit Navy sailed with were very out of date even in my day. Sonars that matched designs that were 1950's standards in the US Navy were common place. The mighty Sea Dart had some very big holes that had never been really addressed. Ships were actually putting to sea with Sea Cat missile systems as a primary short range defense. The Royal Navy has both 1st Class officers and men, and that makes up for a lot but sending good men on obsolete ships and weaponry that should have been retired decades ago is a crime. I give you the Falklands, when I asked what would it take for the US to pull off the same Maneuver, the answer was: 1 Carrier, 2 LHA's (helo carriers), 5 LPD's (Landing ships), 5 destroyers, 2 SSN (Hunter Killer subs). Frankly, there wouldn't have been many US losses. What I am trying to say is that what the Royal Navy is losing isn't all that much in the old ships. I am not as certain what is the right answer in those closed in seas where the AsM, ASW, threat is sky high. I am certain that the Royal Navy is getting great ships in the type 45's and that she should continue with them.--Tirronan (talk) 15:16, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Mr. Keegan & Forczyk are Reputable Historians

From past discussions, now probably archived, some editors felt that their opinions, without the reputable referrences to support them, out weighed noted authors John Keegan and Forczyk. Keegan is the holder of the Samuel Eliot Morison and Forczyk writes for one of the most respected publishing houses in the world, Osprey. If those two historians state that British & German naval officers used "cruisers" to engage battleships during WWI, from lessons learned from the battle of Tsushima then most readers will probably agree that unless those editors can cite the authoritive and reliable source to contradict Forczyk and Keegan; Admiral Togo's actions should be "returned" to the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.140.216.78 (talk) 22:55, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Just out of curiosity, what are the specific quotes from Keegan and Forcyzk (I'm assuming you have access to them)? I've done a good deal of reading on the German battlecruiser force (having written Featured Articles on each ship and class for Wiki and a 50-page thesis on the British and German BC squadrons), as well as biographies/memoirs/etc. on Scheer and Hipper, and have seen no direct (or even indirect) link between the German squadron's tactical choices and Tsushima. I'd wager a guess that they're only speculating on the connection and have little to no hard evidence to support their assertion.

As an aside, the German BCs went up directly against British BBs only in their "death ride" to save the rest of the fleet, which is something of a special situation. The other engagements (namely against 5th BS during the run to the north) were well within the norm for any warship engaged in a running battle - one wouldn't fault light cruisers for firing on a target of opportunity that happened to be a battleship. To my memory the British BCs didn't engage the German line all that much - all three ships were sunk by their opposites, not battleships. Parsecboy (talk) 03:40, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

If memory serves, the armor on a German BC was fairly close to a British Battleship of the period. That being said I concur that mostly the BC's of each side shot at each other and it was the British Battleships firing at the German Battle-cruisers when/if they could.Tirronan (talk) 05:06, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

For the British at least, the Grand Fleet Battle Orders specifically state that under normal circumstances the battle cruisers were not to form part of the battle line unless specifically ordered to. Funny that Osprey gets mentioned, as it means I can do a plug - I haven't yet read British Dreadnought vs German Dreadnought by Mark Stile, part of the "Duel" series, but I am obliquely mentioned in the acknowledgements: "Special thanks go to Keith Allen and friends who graciously reviewed the text and clarified many technical points." Stile's fire control knowledge was a bit squiffy and hopefully has been corrected. --Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 08:25, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Apparently Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote an article in Marine-Rundschau in January 1904 in which he criticized the growth in size of armored cruisers, but acknowledged the necessity that they be able to effectively engage the enemy reconnaissance screen, and argued that they be able to join the battle line due to Germany's numerical inferiority. This pre-dates Tsushima by over a year. See Gary Staff's German Battlecruisers 1914–1918 (another Osprey publication). Parsecboy (talk) 11:58, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

• Apparently the debate over the "growth of warships" began before 1904. Alfred Thayer Mahan remarked to the US Secretary of the Navy in 1898, "that on the path we were treading, I saw no reason why we should not reach 20,000 tons, nor why stop there." Mahan also wrote later, that battleship "guns" and "speed", as Admiral Jacky Fisher had argued, were not the reasons for Togo's victory as Tsusima; but rather the "relative positioning of the two adversaries." Reflections, Historic and Other, Suggested by the Battle of the Japan Sea." (Tsushima) By Captain A. T. Mahan, USN. US Naval Proceedings magazine, June 1906, Volume XXXVI, No. 2. US Naval Institute. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.93.176.154 (talk) 19:11, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

repair of high seas fleet after battle

The article says: The High Seas Fleet survived as a fleet in being. Most of its losses were made good within a month — even Seydlitz, the most badly damaged ship to survive the battle, was repaired by October and officially back in service by November

were they? when I was looking up info for the raid on 19 August it said only Von der Tann and Moltke were serviceable for that raid, hence they sent battleships to take part with them. Im not sure how the german battleships fared at Jutland? In general i think the asessment section underplays the degree of damage to german ships and gives an impression the survivors got off relatively unscathed?Sandpiper (talk) 10:03, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

According to John Campbell, Seydlitz's repairs were completed on 16 September. As for the rest, König was the most badly damaged battleship, and her repairs were completed by 21 July. Really, only König, Grosser Kurfürst and Markgraf were hit by more than one or two shells, having been hit 10, 8, and 5 times respectively. Kaiser and Helgoland were hit twice and once, respectively. The only other damage incurred was a handful of secondary gun hits (which are of negligible importance) and the mining of Ostfriesland on the trip back (the only ship whose repair extended into August - finished on the 2nd). Of the High Seas Fleet, only Seydlitz and Derfflinger were unavailable for the 19 August raid. Parsecboy (talk) 11:57, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

So 4 Battleships fairly damaged which was 25% of the German Dreadnought fleet.Tirronan (talk) 21:04, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

mmm, it was the 'most of its losses made good in a month bit' i was bothered about. So if the conclusion is 25% still out of service 1 month later, that isnt true. Not to mention lutzow and pommern sunk. Sandpiper (talk) 23:11, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

I was talking more about the damage at the morning at the end of the battle being that effect and effectiveness of the German fleet at that point. 1 BC and 12 BB effectively untouched at the end of the fight.Tirronan (talk) 00:43, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Here are the completion dates for repair work to the damaged ships according to Campbell:

• Helgoland: 16 June
• Nassau: 10 July
• Rheinland: 10 June
• Westfalen: 17 June
• Kaiser & Oldenburg: not recorded (though it appears that the two hits on Kaiser were ineffectual, so I can't imagine repairs lasting terribly long)

I wouldn't bother including Pommern in any figuring - the ship was hardly a front-line unit, just as the three armored cruisers lost were hopelessly obsolete. Parsecboy (talk) 00:59, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

• Sandpiper, While scanning various sea battles...I don't know if you are a Mahan admirer or not, but you two gentlemen are the only two people I've ever read about that came to the same conclusion; the Russians had only one chance at Tsushima, to retreat. My hats off to you! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.93.176.154 (talk) 02:43, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

er, is this post in the wrong place?Sandpiper (talk) 09:10, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

"Pommern... - the ship was hardly a front-line unit, just as the three armored cruisers lost were hopelessly obsolete"

This is exaggerated language - which is unhelpful with a publication like Wikipedia. Armoured cruisers were valuable assets all through the war - and medium size cruisers with armour and 6-8in guns were built into the 1960s, so the concept was still valid for sixty years or so after Jutland. As for Pommern, she must by definition have been a front-line unit or should would not have been at Jutland.--Toddy1 (talk) 07:29, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

The British Armoured Cruisers weren't really fit for the rôle they were given, i.e. "engaging the cruisers and light forces of the enemy" and, from the van, operating "against the enemy's Battlefleet from a position of advantage, or against his minelayers, light-cruisers or destroyers threatening our line" and from the rear, and "endeavour to act against the enemy's battlefleet as well as against light craft". (G.F.B.O. XXIV. 8.), especially when at the van of the battle line.

If Scheer's post-war apologia is anything to go by, he took the Second Squadron out of nothing but sentimental reasons. If he wanted extra ships, he should have waited for König Albert to come back into service, and for Bayern to join the fleet, a wait measured in days. --Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 10:55, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

It's also telling that Scheer left the II BS home on 18–19 August. The logic that Pommern's presence at Jutland makes her a front-line unit is fallacious - one could make a similar conclusion about Schleswig-Holstein being a front-line unit given her activities during the invasion of Poland.

As for the armored cruisers, they had no business in the middle of a fleet battle, as Simon points out. Yes, armored cruisers were still highly valuable vessels for secondary duties (just as pre-dreadnoughts were useful at Gallipoli, the Baltic and Black Seas, etc.) No one is saying that once a ship can't (or shouldn't) serve with the battlefleet it's immediately and totally useless and should be turned into paper clips. There are just situations in which older ships should never find themselves. Parsecboy (talk) 13:17, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

It was unfortunate that the armored cruisers were at Jutland at all. They packed a 1000 men each in them and they were almost helpless in some situations, including submarine rich waters and fleet battles. Any thoughts that the type should be continued was discarded once and for all after Jutland. If memory serves they were some of the 1st types scrapped wholesale after the war.Tirronan (talk) 20:12, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

I wouldn't go so far as to say that armoured cruisers "had no business in the middle of a fleet battle" - not in mid-1916 at any rate. It's bad policy not to make use of ships, and Jellicoe, as indicated, had a use for them. At least the armoured cruisers wouldn't limit the speed of the fleet like Scheer's Second Squadron. The situation after Jutland shows a completely different situation, with the armoured cruisers shifted to convoy and patrol duties and with the Courageous class and many more light cruisers in service with the Grand Fleet with different priorities - rather than gunfire the emphasis is much more on torpedo attacks on the German line. As to the notion of building more armoured cruisers, the last British armoured cruisers (the battle cruiser aside) had been laid down in 1905, over a decade before Jutland. --Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 20:39, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

As a back up to a destroyer in a convoy it had uses, but the classes deployments after Jutland still point out that they were seen as 2nd class units. However it was war and you use what you must. In the next war Wickes and Clemson Class WW1 US destroyers would be used in convoy duty for much the same reason by Britian.Tirronan (talk) 11:16, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Fleet Communications

Simon lets discuss what the paragraph is about here, I think it came from the Admiralty review which did point out fleet communications as one of the issues it thought had negatively effected the battle. Now I am working off a memory since I am at work and at the start of a 12 hour shift so I can't check facts and being the old fart that I am I do suffer that (can't remember shit) syndrome from time to time, but that is what I recall. I think I remember that Massie's book had that in it.Tirronan (talk) 14:15, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

My copy of Massie is in storage (hopefully the pages are freezing together), so if you can come up with a ref at some point, please do. I for one can recall no Admiralty review on the matter. I had a quick flick through Marder earlier, and I'll check Gordon now. --Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 14:24, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Whats in the article now is:

* Communication between ships and the British commander-in-chief were comparatively poor. For most of the battle Jellicoe had no idea where the German ships were, even though British ships were in contact. They failed to report enemy positions, contrary to the Grand Fleet's Battle Plan. Some of the most important signalling was carried out solely by flag instead of wireless or using redundant methods to ensure communications— a questionable procedure given the mixture of haze and smoke that obscured the battlefield, and a foreshadowing of similar failures by habit-bound and conservatively-minded professional officers of rank to take advantage of new technology in World War II.

:<!-This paragraph is nonsense. What Admiralty examination refers to communications? What instances of "important signalling being carried solely by flag" are there, other than those notably perpetrated by Beatty's Flag Lieutenant? Unless anyone has something in defence of this, it's going in a week. User:Simon Harley-->

Im sure that 'communication was poor' is a classic agreed statement about the british at jutland. Jellicoe not knowing where the germans were and ships not reporting enemy contact goes through the battle. All this business about deploying towards the enemy or deploying away which depended on good information. Yes, he had some idea so maybe 'no idea' is an exaggeration. Not sure what standing orders and battle plan say about reporting enemy, but I suspect they do say to do it. Beatty et al may be the main point where there were issues, but he is hardly negligible being the second most important person at the battle and the one controlling the action during most of the time there was any between capital ships. During the night action several ships failed to report enemy contact which might have tipped Jellicoe off that the Germans were leaving early. Im not sure this was entirely a failure by the ships concerned, or merely an interpretation of their orders to keep radio silence, which orders therefore in effect said to let the germans go unreported. Built-in signal failure. At night the ships relied on unsecure lamp signals, leading to recognition signals being copied. I dont know off hand if any of the scouts attached to the grand fleet failed to report properly during the day when they had german contact? Sandpiper (talk) 08:51, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Most of your post has nothing to do with the quoted section Sandpiper, which is what is at issue here. --Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 09:10, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Some of the most important signalling was carried out solely by flag instead of wireless... a questionable procedure given the mixture of haze and smoke that obscured the battlefield. This POV in this statement is anachronistic. In 1916 communication was often by flag, because communicating by flag was quick, and WT was slow (this is explained in Andrew' Gordon's The Rules of the Game). Use of flag communication wasn't questionable at all, in the circumstances where it was used at Jutland in 1916.

I think that it would be much better if all these articles were more nearly based on what sources say, with lots of small quotations and citations.--Toddy1 (talk) 10:24, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Simon, what are you objecting to?

*Communication between ships and the British commander-in-chief were comparatively poor.It depends on which bits are meant, but it was. Particularly certain critical information. For most of the battle Jellicoe had no idea where the German ships were, even though British ships were in contact. 'No idea' is an exageration, but broadly this is correct. It is a well rehearsed argument that scouts failed to report back properly. By wireless. It is not anachronistic to argue the british failed to make best use of wireless. I suspect this was partly due to their very good ability to read enemy wireless, which made them afraid to use it themselves, but it was within the technological capabilities to use it better. Tryon went to the bottom in 189something arguing that flag signals were outdated and took with him hopes for reform. (see 'rules of the game'?)They failed to report enemy positions, contrary to the Grand Fleet's Battle Plan. True? Some of the most important signalling was carried out solely by flag instead of wireless or using redundant methods to ensure communications— It was, particularly Beatty/Seymour I presume is meant, but Beatty was part of the fleet and this was a critical failure of communications. Nothing had been done to 'fix' Seymour despite his being a recognised problem. a questionable procedure given the mixture of haze and smoke that obscured the battlefield, - I dont think haze and smoke was the real issue, it might have made things worse on the day but this was an ordinary everyday problem with flags and always had to be expected. The real point was that nothing had been done - nothing anyway which worked on the day - to use wireless where it was appropriate instead of flags. This does not seem to be even mainly a technological problem but one of people choosing not to use wireless. and a foreshadowing of similar failures by habit-bound and conservatively-minded professional officers of rank to take advantage of new technology in World War II. this last might be an interesting observation but I dont know what supports it. Sandpiper (talk) 11:38, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

You have misunderstood Sir George Tryon's TA scheme. Tryon was not arguing that flag signals were obsolete and therefore ships should use something else. The idea of the TA scheme was to manoeuvre squadrons without any signals at all.

The issue of cruisers (including battlecruisers) not communicating the location of the German fleet back to Jellicoe is one that consideration of TA is not relevant to.

if you want a section on the failure to communicate - then good sources would include: The Harper Record and The Truth about Jutland by JET Harper.--Toddy1 (talk) 13:07, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

There seems to be some confusion about what you are objecting to Simon, could you outline for us clearly what you are objecting to? I am objecting to the WWII comment section of the statement it is far to broad and reaching without citation to that effect. Even with citation it wouldn't belong in the Jutland article.Tirronan (talk) 02:30, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

I will go through the offending paragraph then:

• Communication between ships and the British commander-in-chief were comparatively poor. - Compared to what?

• For most of the battle Jellicoe had no idea where the German ships were, even though British ships were in contact. - Scheer knew any better?

• They failed to report enemy positions, contrary to the Grand Fleet's Battle Plan. - Conveniently vague, the fallback for someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.

• Some of the most important signalling was carried out solely by flag instead of wireless or using redundant methods to ensure communications— a questionable procedure given the mixture of haze and smoke that obscured the battlefield, and a foreshadowing of similar failures by habit-bound and conservatively-minded professional officers of rank to take advantage of new technology in World War II. - Examples of "important signalling" being carried out solely by flag? Who considered the use of "redundant communications" a "questionable procedure"? The part regarding the Second World War is completely irrelevant, and the reference to "habit-bound and conservatively-minded professional officer" is beneath comment. --Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 07:41, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

As regards your response Sandpiper, you continue to deal in broad generalisations, and the one regarding Tryon isn't correct. TA was meant to compliment the use of the use of the Signal Book in the fleet, not to supersede it. Tryon went to the bottom as you put it because the gouty idiot made a mistake and paid for it with his life (and no, expecting Markham not to follow his orders doesn't count as a mistake). --Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 07:41, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Simon, I would expect that I would be informed of the relative bearing, speed, and course, of the Enemy fleet from my scouting command. I would expect continuous updates. I would expect my scouting group to update me on their present position. Even as a Seaman in the US Navy I knew damn well what was expected of me in reporting contacts and why. I don't know of any commander of any fleet that would expect anything less. You know this as well. Beatty had a few errors in his actions that day but most of them were committed in failure to communicate clearly and consistently. I know of no modern historian that doesn't touch on this. He did leave his commander guessing, and given the fact that he had 5 radios under his command it wasn't very much to expect more. I agree that Scheer didn't know anything more, in fact he knew less but his scouting group was being pasted so hard that it wasn't in position to warn him when they stubbled into the Grand Fleet. I believe that the comment about flag communications only were in regards to Beatty and his run to the south. I see many of the issues being C3I problems in as much as sightings at night were not reported for fear of giving the fleet's position away. I am pretty sure that was what they were referring to. However I see much of that as more in keeping with Beatty's fox hunting nature when in battle.Tirronan (talk) 06:17, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

None of this addresses my earlier question - what is the "official Admiralty examination" referred to in the article, preceding the paragraph quoted earlier, which ostensibly lends it credence? I've had a look in Massie and he makes barely any mention of signalling. --Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 19:03, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

I apologize Simon, I am still working 12 hour shifts and seeing the family through the holidays. I'll get back to this as soon as feasible.Tirronan (talk) 14:02, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

No worries, Tirronan. Season's Greetings to you. --Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 17:40, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

I've looked I don't see it either, I thought I remembered something from the book but I guess I read it here. Lets us consider a rewrite of the offending section.Tirronan (talk) 13:36, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Simon I found a report on your wiki that should suffice and I have added that and replaced the sentence in question. I want a log in to that wiki darn it!Tirronan (talk) 16:57, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Cordite and British Ammo

I found this the other day when I was rooting around for new sources. None of it has been confirmed for me so treat it accordingly but the topic has come up from time to time on these talk pages. I thought you all might enjoy the read and I will see if I can find anything about these tests run by the US Navy's Bu of Ordinance. https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/46765/1/Nathan_Ott_Thesis.pdf Tirronan (talk) 15:39, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

here is a bit more on the propellants, interesting to note that the USN's BuOrd considered cordite to be unacceptable. http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-100.htm

It has been a red letter day in the research of today. I found this report: http://books.google.com/books?id=ZZzJoYNBHEEC&pg=PA143&lpg=PA143&dq=BuOrd+Cordite+Flash+Test&source=bl&ots=VYk8RYo6Lt&sig=ugkANKWDCZL-vzIyUsmSam2Cmjc&hl=en&ei=hjNPTb2KLYO-sAOdupCACw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDAQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

High Seas Fleet "never again contested control of the high seas"

The above comment should be removed from the opening paragraph. Whilst the idea that the HSF never sortied again is enshrined in popular mythology, it is patently false. The Germans sortied again in August 1916 and it was probably this narrowly avoided fleet action that convinced Scheer that he couldn't sortie into the North Sea without the entire Grand fleet coming out. None of which stopped the HSF operating very sucessfully in the Baltic in 1917. If no one objects then I intend to remove the offending sentence. Getztashida (talk) 12:31, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Seeing as no objection has been raised, I have removed the offending fragment. Getztashida (talk) 12:31, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

It would have been more defensible had it read "never again contested control of the North Sea." But never mind. --Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 14:42, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

It would still have been incorrect. The two sorties in August and October 1916 were both into the North sea. Getztashida (talk) 15:09, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

And the sortie in April, 1918, as well. But it was hardly contesting control of the sea, was it? --Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 15:11, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

The April 1918 sortie was a return to the "original plan", namely to isolate a detached squadron of battleships and destroy it. That certainly seems like an attempt to wrest control from the British. Parsecboy (talk) 15:14, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

I agree, the basic plan for all three sorties was the same as Jutland - isolate a unit of the RN and annihilate it before the Grand Fleet catches up with you. If they were not attempts to "contest" the North Sea, then nor was Jutland. Getztashida (talk) 16:17, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

I'd like to say that I didn't like that sentence much either but we are missing the point that was trying to be made which is that the HSF wasn't interested in any serious confrontations after the unplanned Jutland fiasco. Coming back into port with a large part of your battle fleet shot up wasn't the idea in the 1st place. Despite trying to claim it as a victory, I'm sure that the starving German liked the propaganda, but it changed nothing. Pursuing a Naval option in pursuit of a greater Empire set up the German/British confrontation that she could not win. The blockade contributed much to the defeat of the Central Powers and Jutland did nothing to help Germany's cause.Tirronan (talk) 17:52, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm going to quibble about whether fighting for control of the baltic counts as 'contesting the high seas'. It was an ongoing serious contentest but not one for control of any wider stretch of water than the baltic itself. But I agree with Tironan that what was intended was to say the germans had no intention to have a head on fight of the two main fleets such as might clear the way for German surface ships to operate freely, and went to increasing pains to avoid another after Jutland. I think you would have to say the Germans did contest the high seas at Jutland if only by accident because the two fleets met for the one and only time. The prize was access to the world's oceans. I dont know what the Germans acually thought, but I strongly suspect after Jutland they had only limited gains in mind when sending out surface raiding parties. Now, if you consider submarines, the war to rest control only seriously got going later on.Sandpiper (talk) 19:45, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Even at Jutland the aim had never changed, the German High Command wanted to catch a Battle-Cruiser or Battleship Squadron or two, alone with the entire High Seas Fleet. At least one of the sorties was against the convoy escort which at the time was 6th Battle Squadron, the US Battleships. If memory serves, one of the German BC's threw a propeller and wrecked the planned festivities. However this wouldn't have accomplished much except to get the US to show up with it's entire battle line looking for revenge. We are even worse than the British when it comes to that sort of thing.Tirronan (talk) 14:38, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Good points all, but the to return to the original point - whilst we can quibble over the exact meaning of the phrase "contesting" the "high seas" - the orginal sentence implied that the HSF did not sortie again - which is false. Getztashida (talk) 18:24, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, they never did again contest control of the high seas, at least not with surface ships and never even with submarines in the sense of trying to assert control so their own ships could pass freely. So that bit seems correct. I am not sure if what happened at Jutland counted as contesting control, because it was not precisely their intention to do this and the two fleets meeting was something they tried to avoid. On the other hand, at that time they still did have the plan of sufficient ship by ship attrition of the british navy so that a head on battle was possible. Surely the point about Jutland was it was then this aim was acknowledged as entirely unrealistic? But having said all that somewhat to the effect that I disagree with you, I do agree the article too much gives the impression the germans totally gave up after Jutland, because they did not. I added some mention of later raids myself and wrote up an article on one of them. last I checked there were still some more post-jutland incidents which ought to have been mentioned and maybe have their own articles. Sandpiper (talk) 20:03, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Cordite and British Ammo handling

Well after one heck of a lot of reading I have made some additions the the page. What I have not included was the cover up of the BCF abandonment of safety proceedures being well understood by the RN but then being covered up and thin armor blamed. Jelico specifically mentions cordite as a probable cause for the losses, Beatty ordered an gunnery committee report. The case that Cordite was the wrong propellant to be used by a warship is pretty substantial made much worse by the stacking of charges up and down the turret ammo handling rooms and working chambers. I think a Historiography section is warranted.Tirronan (talk) 05:40, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Still looks like Grant saved the ship. Did he get a reward or get sat upon to keep quiet? As I recall, there is the question of to what degree Beatty might be considered responsible for demanding quick firing. If Grant really immediately understood the danger it is hardly credible no one else did, yet this situation arose. This has been disucssed before, but as regards Betty's culpability there is the question of whether these practices existed in the rest of the fleet too. Though having better armoured turrets battleships were inherently safer from the same calibre fire as the battlecruisers were receiving. Sandpiper (talk) 20:12, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Grant did save the Lion, she took a pasting and survived and had the rest of the BCF followed suit, there might have been far fewer losses. Still there is always going to be propellent charges in train to the gunhouse, inward opening doors, vents that allowed flash inside the magazines, and weak bulkheads all made the ships less survivable, how much less, my magic ball isn't that good. One thing that gets clear if you read some of the sources as well, if cordite started to go bad it went bad very quickly indeed and tended to explode if exposed to shock.Tirronan (talk) 20:47, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Grant started his career as a rating, and retired a captain. That looks like a successful career.--Toddy1 (talk) 10:04, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I think you addded some refs to 'British battlecruisers' by Burr and Bryan. What did you think of the book? I tried to find some reviews and to summarise got 'interesting but short'. Do they list references for further information? Did you come across any further info regarding whether these problems of poor safety practices were uniquely amongst the battlecruisers rather than the battleships? Sandpiper (talk) 10:47, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Things that don't say what you think they say

I ran across a dubious claim in the section "Battlecruiser losses".

An impression was formed by Jellicoe, Beatty and other senior officers that the cause of the ships' loss had been their relatively weak armour. This led to calls for armour to be increased and an additional 1 in (2.5 cm) was placed over the relatively thin decks above magazines. To compensate the increase in weight, ships had to carry correspondingly less fuel, water and other supplies. Whether or not thin deck armour was a potential weakness of British ships, the battle provided no evidence that it was the case. At least amongst the surviving ships, no enemy shell was found to have penetrated deck armour anywhere.[121] The design of a new battlecruiser HMS Hood (which had started building at the time of the battle) was altered to give her 5,000 long tons (5,100 t) of additional armour.

The comment about lack of "penetrated deck armor" among the survivors being evidence against the need to strengthen deck armor is a fatally flawed example of observer bias. It's like claiming that soldiers in firefights don't need head protection because almost none of the survivors had gunshot wounds to the head. It's probably very likely that the ships which had sunk would have shown evidence to the contrary, but they sunk in the process of acquiring the evidence. -- 70.57.21.66 (talk) 21:42, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

There were four relatively modern heavy ships sunk, the German BC was lost to uncontrollable flooding forward. The three British BC were lost because they were packed from the turret to the magazines with uncased cordite charges with igniter pads leaking gunpowder. Cordite, if it began to deteriorate (and it could do so very quickly) had a tendency to explode if exposed to shock, and a shell through the turret armor would more than provide that. So, lack of deck armor didn't have a thing to do with the loss of the British BC's. the lack of turret face/roof armor did have a great deal to do with it, as did unsafe cordite handling. Now had the BC's been subjected to long range plugning fire it would have been another story, however the armoring systems until USS Nevada didn't provide for horizotal protection in any BC or Dreadnought design. As for Jellico's and Beatty's (and others) comments, it was a cover up for an incredably stupid practice that was allowed to develope in the Battle Cruiser Fleet. It was admitted by Jellico, The Third Lord of the Admirality, and Beatty commisioned a review team he was so certain. The mistakes where many but admitting that you lost multiple ships to bad management isn't a grade many senior officers wanted. It was the biggest cover up in the battle history.Tirronan (talk) 16:07, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

I think it says what I think it says. It says there was no deck penetration amongst the survivors. 'whether or not thin deck armour was a potential weakness, the battle provided no evidence that it was. Sandpiper (talk) 19:39, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I know that isn't correct, why did we have reports from fireman that the grates above them suffered shell hits throwing bodies around the boiler rooms? I see the citation but from that statement alone its crap. Tirronan (talk) 14:59, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

The 5th BS would have opened up on the German BC's at about 22,500 yards (max range at the angle of elevation at that time) at that range the British 15" gun and shell in use at that time gives about a 29 degree angle of fall, that is enough to start getting some plunging fire. Most of the firing was done between the BCs on both sides at about 15,000 yard where only verticle armor counts.Tirronan (talk) 15:31, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Where are these report of flying bodies? I take it by grate you mean some sort grating in the roof rather than fire grate inside a boiler? Simply taking what you say, then a shell hit a grate, which is not a deck, and caused damage. Wherin lies the discrepancy? Maybe we need a little finessing that the decks were ok but openings etc werent as well protected (which is not unlike the debate that turrets were insufficiently protected and represented an opening down into the ship). I think there is also probably a distinction between a deck which was notionally armoured, which some were, and one which was simply for walking on, which most were. Superstructures generally got blown to pieces. I seem to remember something about shells deflected down through decks, ie their trajectory was turned down by hitting something else and then they penetrated decks which they could not have done given their arrival angle. Was I foolish enough to suggest various sources are not contradictory? Sandpiper (talk) 10:24, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

One would hope that a light superstructure wouldn't turn a AP shell that much or they should have moved smartly to a spaced armor concept and been perfectly safe. My limited understanding was that the overhead of the boiler rooms was covered by a grate (for ventilation I am assuming, even in 1980 an engine room was hellishly hot) and that shells were striking them, again in Massie which means I have to drag the damn thing out again. I doubt there were many hits by plunging fire, this due more to the visual limitations weather, most of the shots even between fleets were rarely over 15k, but we do have the 5th shooting from max range and that all but ensures there were a few on the German BCs. Now you are not for a moment suggesting that our many sources have errors and in some deliberate misrepresentations are you? I thought I would check because I agree, the biggest lie of all was that the loss of any of the British BCs was very preventable, or that Beatty's squadrons crap shooting was anything but his fault. Yes I agree.Tirronan (talk) 16:05, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Cambell reports some ricochets, I dont remember the exact details. Im sure they understood they could make better deck armour, but it is a question of weight and someone decided it was more important to place armour on the side than on the top, and I am convinced that person was correct. The boiler rooms were pressurised with fans to make a forced draft through the boilers, so ventilation must have been deliberately limited to make this possible. We have discussed plunging fire at length, and I am convinced it comes under the heading of potentially true but in fact misleading explanations of what happened on the day. I just posted above, the more descriptions I read of the battle (or any other specific topic), the more contradictions I am aware of. My experience of life is that people automatically try to cover up their mistakes and have their own perspectives to push, so none of this is surprising! I'm not quite sure I would go so far as to say the losses were very preventable. I think they were due to bad practice, but people do not normally deliberately set out to create bad practice for malicious reasons, but by accident and trying to achieve good aims. I think that was what happened here. Any consideration of whether something is 'preventable' needs to take into account that they were trying to do something helpful, and human beings will naturally do this. Human ability to cock something up is difficult to prevent. Sandpiper (talk) 09:29, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I am formally protesting the statement in the article (An impression was formed by Jellicoe, Beatty and other senior officers that the cause of the ships' loss had been their relatively weak armour.) it was a cover up for ammo handling practice that had been allowed to rise in the BC Fleet, and both Officers closer to the event admitted as much. I want that sentence amended and I am asking for consensus on the matter.Tirronan (talk) 16:36, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I'd agree with that. Lambert makes it pretty clear that both Jellicoe and Beatty actively attempted to suppress findings that placed blame on the turret crews and their own insistence on achieving greater rapidity of fire. Parsecboy (talk) 16:51, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I also agree, there doesn't seem to be much doubt that both commanders suppressed any talk of cordite handling being the culprit after the event. Getztashida (talk) 23:28, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I dont have any information, but I would strongly suspect any cover up would go further than Jellicoe and Beatty. This would be the sort of thing which absolutely could not be said in wartime but ought to be known about at the very top. I think the 'an impression was formed, etc,' is broadly the official line from the time, has been (is) widely accepted and as such is the simple explanation to put into an article - which satisfies rules about referencing, etc which I complain about above. However I agree it is probably also false. The article ought to explain as best we can the real situation and extent of a cover up. But... the best excuses are ones which happen to be true. I think there was a miscalculation in the strength of the turret armour, which was a clear design weakness (the shells had to get in to start a fire), and as we have discussed, plunging fire was becoming an issue because battles were happening at increasing ranges and clearly this would become more important in the future even if it was not the issue here. Sandpiper (talk) 09:29, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Various suppressions about Jutland happened when Jellicoe was First Sea Lord (30 Nov 1916 - 10 Jan 1918) and when Beatty was First Sea Lord (1 Nov 1919 - 30 Jul 1927). Apart from the First Lord (a civilian politician), the First Sea Lord was the man at the top.--Toddy1 (talk) 10:49, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, but at the time of battle Jellicoe was only in charge of the fleet. Would he have taken it upon himself to institute a coverup? It would seem Beatty immediately instituted a damage limitation exercise by briefing journalist Arthur Pollen. I dont know at what point (navy) people would have realised what happened. Having his ship nearly blow up might have concentrated Beatty's thinking remarkably. How quickly was Harvey chosen as hero of the hour? The official story of his heroic deeds is just plain wrong and must have been formalised quickly. I can't imagine it would have suited to say Lion did not blow up because just months before Grant had insisted on shifting all the charges back into the magazines. Rather begs the question of why he did and others didnt. Thus the need for a hero from the day. Not to be too down on Harvey, he was there and did pay with his life, but being dead must have also made him a good choice. Churchill was called in and briefed on what happened immediately after the battle to help draft a statement. I wonder if by that point anyone had started considering what really happened. It must have been well up in everyones mind exactly how those ships came to blow up. If you were Jellicoe or Beatty it must have been pretty horrible to realise what had happened and that you might have done something about it. To what extent was all this an unspoken subtext to the arguments between Jellicoe, Beatty and their followers over the conduct of the battle? Sandpiper (talk) 17:26, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Jellico made a statement after the battle to the effect that he was certain that cordite was responsible, later he would deign that that was his intent at all and issued a formal statement about the BC's armor. Sandpiper is right, the lack of Turret face armor did precipitate the disaster. Beatty was absolutely sure what caused the problem and started a "committee" and I included it in the article as well as the statement by the Third Lord of the Admiralty to Cabinate ministers, that Cordite mismanagement caused the losses. Make no mistake, they absolutely knew what the issues were. When you hear all that going on about flash tight fittings and following procedures. This wasn't just about flash but also making damn well sure that there was not one more charge in the train than was needed. I'd be guessing but the BC's most likely had between 4 to 8 tons of cordite stacked up between the working chamber and the handling room with doors to the magazines clipped open. Actually that isn't much of a guess. Now you can't tell me that the Beatty didn't know. In my mind there are some issues that are just flat cover ups:

• Bad visibility: in the run to the south it was claimed that the visibility was the factor in the miserable shoots by Beatty's force. Evan Thomas' 5th BS shoots 2.64% at a longer range in the same light as Beatty's doing 1.43%. Bullshit, a cover up for not taking the bull by the horns earlier, he knew his BC Fleet wasn't up to par.
• According to that thesis I linked to: At Dogger Bank 70% or there about, of the British shells shot under-performed, either breaking up entirely or exploding outside the armor of the target. That matches exactly with the tests run by the Admiralty and we might get something worked in there. Gentlemen that is like US sending its submarines to War II with the Mark 14 torpedo, expensive and very humane though it might be. No one on either side thought much of the shells the British Battle-line brought to war. That needs further investigation, we have covered some of it.
• I propose rewriting the contested section as: An impression was given by Jellico and Beatty, as well as other senior officers that the loss of the Battlecruisers was caused by weak armour, despite proof by two committees, and earlier statements by Jellico and other senior officers that Cordite and its management were to blame. That covers the fact that 1, yes the armor did fail, and two the real reason that ship sank was... cordite mismanagement. I'm not wedded to the verbiage, if someone wishes to make another proposed sentence?Tirronan (talk) 18:22, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Had to think about that in context, but in the section seems to run ok. Beter than previous. I would suggest 'evidence' rather then 'proof' since the matter is not utterly cut and dried. Changing the sentence like this alters the impression it gives of Jellicoe being misled to Jellicoe leading a conspiracy. Im not entirely happy about that: as someone being misled it fair enough not to mention who is doing the misleading, but as a named conspirator, it is potentially unfair if he was not the one who instigated this conspiracy.

Re your other points, I cant call up numbers now and Im not about to spend the rest of the evening reading Campbell and others, maybe brooks. (though that kind of statement is usuallly followed by an 'oh hell' and a hunt for books...) but I remember coming to the conclusion that the british shells and gunfire where not so spectacularly worse than the German. The british ships were not torn up near to sinking as were the Germans, but sank because of the ammunition explosions. They self destructed well before the Germans had reduced them to a sinking state. The bad visibility is an excuse for bad shooting, but the bad shooting and duff ammunition are also excuses for the german ships not exploding in the way the british did. But the british explosions had nothng to do with superior German gunnery or ammunition. I think Campbell says that although the Germans had better AP shells, some of them chose not to use AP anyway. Sandpiper (talk) 21:18, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Yeah as for shell performance, sorry way to many sources are agreeing and the actions the Fleet took after again seem to support a major issue with them. When the German's are laughing at the shell performance, they and Massie has them doing it before the war was over, I'm going to crawl out on a limb and say they problably weren't part of a shell excuse for a British cover up. According to the Thesis, they were putting whole shells back together out of pieces found on the decks of German BC's after Dogger bank. I'm going to have to see something pretty convincing at this point, but it has happened to me on this battle twice already. One thing I ain't budging on though, cordite is one shitty propellant and they had no business using it when there were better alternatives available.Tirronan (talk) 21:32, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I dont know anything about shells at dogger to be able to comment. I could point out it was a stern chase, so shells would be impacting at an angle sideways as well as vertically. The problem with AP shells gets worse the more obliquely they impact. I dont know what kind of shells they were shooting (they had different types). I'm not saying there was no problem with shells at Jutland, just that once again this was exaggerated because it was acceptable to talk about. I see no evidence the German shells did much better turning british ships into swiss cheese than the british did to the German. Took about 25 hits to sink a German battlecruiser. No british battlecruisers were sunk by holing. There is an estimate, I think in the article, I think I put it there, anyway I remember looking into it, that had the british had the new shells at Jutland they would have sunk more ships because the hits they achieved would have been more effective. I do not disagree. But this was not the issue we are discussing, the catastrophic loss of the british ships. Also, I dont think we have gone into this, but there was a chronic shortage of shells of every description during the war...because people kept shooting them! The priority was to have any kind of shell. yes, probably not much harder to make a good shell than a bad one, but still, during a war, someone would have to use resources to design it instead of doing something else. Again this was not the disastrous critical failure. Sandpiper (talk) 00:15, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I see where you are going but it still doesn't change the fact that we can't seem to find anyone saying "the shells worked just fine" but we can find lots saying "The shells broke up, exploded prematurely,..." from multiple sources on both sides of the fight, and you are not showing me anything that changes that. I am not claiming 6 more ships would be sunk, that is guessing but where are the opposing opinions by experts, I sure didn't test them or witness it, it is all we have to go on.Tirronan (talk) 04:23, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure, there might be something in Campbell about the shells not being so very bad, or it might be my own conclusions from his data. I am not sure without checking whether the british were using AP shells anyway, both sides feeling that explosive shells intended to cause mayhem on decks were valuable as they could still significantly disable a ship, perhaps more so because they had a bigger explosion rather than a hole punched in the side. Some of the destroyer accounts noteably mention shells punching through one side of a ship and then out the other, whereas had they exploded onboard would have done more damage. If the ships are choosing to use HE, then it doesnt matter whether the AP are good or bad. But I am not disagreeing this was a fixable issue which they did address and ended up with better shells. Nor that it would have produced a better result on the day. But similarly they improved rangefinders etc to improve accuracy. Both these are issues known about before the battle and in a sense accepted. They might have got better shells or better rangefinders, and someone somewhere had worked on these problems and probably still was. The magazine explosions was quantitatively different. They knew shells were sometimes duds, they knew the optics could be better, but they did not expect the ships to just blow up.

Incidentally, and going back to a point you made, there are good reasons for continuing to use the propellant they did: it works much better than sawdust. German companies were refusing to supply the material they were selling to the German navy. What explosives to use in all armaments was a big issue because of shortages, and frankly because German technical and chemical expertise was better then british. There is a piece in Lloyd George's biography where as minister of munitions or somesuch he was agonising over whether they could trust a hungarian jewish ex-pat chemist to make explosives for them. I mean, there was no home grown expertise. This whole war was about damned good German technology and the economic boom it brought to the country, both in fostering expectations of a bigger place in world affairs, and in providing the money and material to make it happen. Tirpitz knew they had a technological edge and was counting on it to make up for numbers. In 1900 Churchill in his book on the mahdist wars in Egypt was moaning about the fact that Britain made rubbish steam trains compared to some they got from america. Britain was falling behind world standards in technology. Fisher pushed through dreadnought, but he did it against a complacent admiralty and was by no means the first to come up with the ideas embodied in the ships. Parsons had been trying to get the navy to adopt turbines for years.Sandpiper (talk) 11:33, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

According to Campbell, all of the 12in shells that hit heavy armor are believed to be AP, and every single one either broke up or burst on impact. The type of the 15in shells are largely unknown, the one that pierced Derfflinger's barbette was AP, but the rest are possibly CPC. Campbell definitely does not think the shells were fine: "...indicate the inadequacy of the British APC...", "The failings of this shell, however, are best shown..." (both on pg 387). There were pre-war tests which showed the AP shells tended to break up or burst on impact at angles of impact of 30 degrees (though the tendency presented itself at lower angles, the tests just didn't reveal it). Parsecboy (talk) 13:25, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

HE, or in US Navy HC (High Capacity) shells wouldn't be used on heavily armored ships. The reason, ask USS South Dakota, you can stun a battleship but you can't sink one with HE. Basically, no matter how hard it hits that type of shell is designed to blow up at or shortly before/after I.E. airburst or you want to penetrate earth a bit. It is useless against hard fortifications or armor. If they went out to hunt armored ships they were firing AP. If you are firing at an unarmored ship your best ammo is probably HE, the CVE's at Leyete Gulf survived because the AP shells were passing straight through. So yes an AP shell fired at a destroyer is most likely going to make a nice 12" hole. It is also the reasoning behind the all or nothing armor scheme. As to the other point, the US Navy was using a single based Nitrocell propellant that was much safer, and you can't tell me that the US wouldn't have shared the formula, they were still using Cordite through WW2 when the US was sharing everything with the UK and visa versa. Even in WW1 they were crawling through each others ships to learn from one another. They had options.Tirronan (talk) 16:39, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Different navies had different policies, and sometimes changed their policies. In the 1890s and early 1900s the British and Japanese favoured firing common shell or HE to destroy the unarmoured upperworks of enemy battleships.--Toddy1 (talk) 22:06, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Campbell has shells fired:- New Zealand 172 APC, 76 cpc, 172 HE. Inflexible 10 APC, 59 CPC, 19 HE. Indomitable 99 APC, 10 CPC, 66 HE. Lion 326 APC. Campbell contradicts himself about Princess Royal, Tiger and Queen Mary, but says QM is believed to have fired about 150 APC, Tiger 303 and Princess Royal 230 mainly or entirely APC. Indefatigable about 40 type unknown and Invicible about 110 unknown. For the German ships he gives totals for SAP fired, explaining they are base fused HE shells equivalent to SAP:- Lutzow 200 (all she had). Derfflinger 87. The German fleet as a whole fired 3160 APC shells and 437 SAP. The 1st sea Group achieved 3.9% hits while the 1st and 2nd BCS scored 1.43%, 3rd BCS 4.3% and 5BS 2.6% The 1st sea group enjoyed better visibility than did Beatty with the 1&2 BCS, however Campbell judged Beatty similar conditions to the 5BS and I seem to recall generally 5BS were operating at maximum range. 5BS were also noted to have very narrow spread on a salvo, but I think he is also suggesting the guns were technically superior to those on the battlecruisers. Valiant and Barham together were achieving 3.7% against a variety of different ships and Lutzow got up to 5%, but with the benefit of the better light on the german side. Moltke opened very effectively. Scattered about is information on hits received where Campbell says lion had at least 9 hits of SAP from Lutzow. I have a comment elsewhere which may be in Campbell also, that the engine room flooding of Lion at dogger bank which disabled her was not due to the side armour being pentrated, but poor design of the supporting frames which gave way where a sharp edge of the struck armour pressed against them. Sandpiper (talk) 19:44, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes and the German shells were undersized, and the British shells were not working all that well, however food for thought, 9 16" shells from USS Washington put IJN Kirishima to the bottom, just nine, 2700 lbs, but a 15" is 1,700-2,000. A well designed shell working the way it was supposed to would have made a large difference.Tirronan (talk) 05:13, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Your claims about the damage inflicted on the Japanese battleship Kirishima are not consistent with the Wikipedia article. If you are right, perhaps you could make corrections to the article giving sources.--Toddy1 (talk) 12:53, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

In the major battle that followed, Kirishima was badly damaged and disabled by Washington’s larger 16-inch guns. In only seven minutes, Washington fired 75 16-inch rounds and 107 5-inch rounds at various ranges, from 8,400 to 12,650 yards. Washington scored at least nine 16-inch hits on Kirishima, along with approximately 40 hits with her 5-inch batteries, causing major damage to the Japanese battleship. Kirishima’s relatively thin armor protection evidently could not withstand Washington’s large guns. Although Washington was not damaged during the confrontation, another American battleship in the task force, USS South Dakota (BB-57), was hit repeatedly and suffered heavy damage, as well as the loss of 38 men killed and 60 wounded. But South Dakota was able to steam away under her own power and was eventually repaired. Kirishima, on the other hand, was left burning and exploding. She eventually had to be abandoned and was scuttled several miles west of Savo Island.http://navalwarfare.blogspot.com/2010/03/ijn-kirishima.html

My understanding is a total of 42 rounds, appr 3 minutes at a range of 8500 lowering to 5500 at night. Againt WW2 systems gave orders of magnatude better performance and admittly the late model 16" shell was probably one of the most destructive ever made but it gives an idea of how distructive a round could be. The wiki article says 9 salvos hit which would be 9x9 or 81 shells, which would be the singular best performace ever turned in by a battleship in history, not terribly likely. I think the sentence should be amended but I am not on a crusade.Tirronan (talk) 18:15, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Being hit by a salvo means that at least one projectile of the salvo hit you.--Toddy1 (talk) 20:24, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

then I suspect that I am not in variance with the wiki article then.Tirronan (talk) 20:46, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

explosive break

Have been reading a bit about the issue of self destructing battelcruisers. The truth is what happened depended upon a lot of factors. The one factor which was directly within the control of the ships crews was how they handled the cordite in battle. It is clear they got this wrong, but as it was a matter of how they were doing things, it was also one of the simplest things to correct. I do not have enough information to be certain of what happened, but if we believe Grant, then there were clear multiple safety failings. If we do not believe Grant, how much independant information is there proving that there was universal bad practice? Anyway, as regards what happened next, there ought not to have been much fuss about correcting unsafe handling. Just issue some new orders. Then the proper course during a war would undoubtedly be to deny or forget there ever was a problem, so as to minimise the propaganda or tactical value of the failings.

Having dealt with that, what other issues were there? German cordite was supposedly safer than british. yet this was not a simple clear explanation. German cordite was copied and became british cordite for WW2. It still caught fire. Hood, anyone? It is possible the cordite onboard british ships was being mishandled as regards using in rotation, respecting shelf life and storing it in the right conditions to prevent premature aging. This somewhat brings us back to handling procedures with regard to storage as opposed to during a battle. There is some suggestion bad manufacturing might have led to cordite which aged prematurely, but as far as I can see this too ought to be checkable by regular inspections and testing. It may be that cordite could explode or catch fire spontaneously and this would very likely come into effect during a battle if concussions within a magazine or turret from incoming fire might then set off charges in bad condition whereas those in good condition would not have gone off. Again, this is not precisely something which can be blamed upon a bad choice of propellant. It may not have been fool proof, but it was the fools failing to respect its limitations causing the problem.

Charge design was an issue. British charges were less well protected than German because only contained in silk bags. There seem to have been experiments to determine how much protection a silk bag gives, and the results were surprisingly quite a bit. But other experiments did not agree. I would guess it depends on the conditions. A big enough blast preumably could force burning material through a bag, igniting the content, whereas without pressure behind it, a simple bag might resist burning gases outside from getting inside. British charges had powder igniters either end, whereas german had none. I see sources disagree over whether this mattered or not. I find I cannot believe it did not matter, because the issue concerned getting a sufficient quantity of propellant burning at once. Cordite or its german equivalent was designed to burn slowly for something containing an explosive and I find it difficult to see how its design could fundamentally have failed in this regard. Thus in order to destroy a ship, what was needed was to get a sufficient quantity all burning at once, the fire spreading very fast.

Protective equipment. Neither side did briliantly with regard to flashproof equipment designed to limit fires. Yet at Dogger bank the Germans seem to have done pretty badly in handling charges and restricting flash, but the ship did not explode. This did not seem to have been the critical difference. Yet again, the issue is to create a sufficiently large blast as to destroy a ship and this has to be done by overcoming the relatively slow burning of the material, which means any factor which means the fire would spread faster is making matters worse.

Armour. There seems to have been considerable debate after Jutland regarding inadequate armour. It seems to me this debate may reflect more the difficulty of finding a solution than a concerted attempt at coverup. The battle cruiser was designed as a compromise. It was a given that it did not have the armour of a battleship. It was a given that it was not designed to prevent shell entry, but to resist as well as possible. Deliberate compromises were made which chose to make decks and upper areas more weakly armoured knowing they would not resist AP shells under good conditions, but knowing this was less important for the survival of the ship than resisting the main threat, broadside attacks on the main armour and critical machinery enclosed there. It seems turret armour was a critical failing, but this does not seem to have been a failing in the original design considerations. Turrets were clearly designed to be expendible. The difficulty was the spread of an explosion thereafter, which was not anticipated. Jellicoe et al seems to have ended up arguing about perceived failings in armour and going over the same ground as the original ships designers, going through the various reasons why armour levels were chosen. It was decided to revise armour schemes on new ships and this was publicised. I still think that armour was an officially acceptable excuse for the ships loss and as such was publicised to show that something was being done. This was coupled with the notion that german shells were much better than british ones, so were more effective than had been expected. Something the designers could not have known or be blamed for. Assumptions about british designs were based on british tests using british shells fired against british armour. Once it was demonstrated that better shells were possible, someone set about designing some. Again, shell design was itself a compromise between an existing design and the necessary resources to improve it. British shells were shown to behave poorly at steep incident angles, but one of the original design assumptions must have been the traditional concept of two ships firing broadsides at each other, at relatively close range, which was what was expected when the ships were designed.

I found a curious statistic in 'the grand fleet' by Brown. He says that comparing Tiger and hindenburg, The Germans managed to generate 19.8 shp per ton of machinery, whereas the british only managed 14.4 shp/ton. This seems to equate to 1500 tons additional weight on the british ship to produce the same power, which might otherwise have been dedicated to armour on a slightly shorter ship because the machinery also needed less space. The british did catch up, and apparently two designs for Hood differed in weight by 3500 tons and length by 45ft because the lighter design used more efficient small tube boilers. This seems to be another explanation of better survivability of the German battlecruisers. Sandpiper (talk) 22:48, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

As I see it, in regards to the British BC this seems to have resolved itself to me. First as regards to cordite management in the BC squadrons, this isn't really a question, an examination of the wreck of the Queen Mary showed stacked uncased cordite charges in the working chamber and shell handing rooms. So the question of if should not be a question, it did happen and the proof is still on the ocean floor. As I have relayed in the article itself interviews of the battle-cruiser gun crews after Jutland revealed that this had become a common practice. There is no evidence that this went any further that the BC squadrons, if there is evidence that this was a general practice I have yet to find it. British ammo handling procedures propagated throughout the fleet strictly forbade what was happening.

Cordite, some things should be clear, first two charges of cordite were contained in a metallic container, they were no more susceptible to flash than the German charges until opened. If the cordite was in good shape then, provided you didn't open the container until it was time to load it, it was no more sensitive to flash than the German RP/12. That was not what happened, we had uncased cordite in silk bags with the 16oz igniter charges exposed. The gunpowder igniter bags leaked powder on top of everything else. So again I repeat, a flammable and possibly explosive powder train existed from the turret, through the working chamber, to the handling room, all the way to the magazine door and the doors were clipped open. The cordite itself had a few issues, 1st as Simon pointed out, some of the cordite was of an older make and therefor suspicious. This being said, pristine cordite with no defect would flash 75 times more than the equivalent US propellant. I've listed the US Navy's BuOrd test in the article. The other issue is when cordite started going bad it could go bad very quickly indeed. I have 1908 test results showing a test of a lot of cordite going from fine to bad in 4 months. It was susceptible to changes in temperature, and acid degradation was fairly rapid once it set in. Make no mistake, when cordite went bad it was not a propellant anymore it was an outright explosive. So even while in the case, the cordite was no more or less flash worthy than the German RP/12, however it IF the cordite had started to deteriorate, it was FAR more sensitive to shock. Now that question will never be answered but it might have contributed.Tirronan (talk) 19:01, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Armor, the lie was that the BC deck armor was the primary factor. To the best of my knowledge, the average range to target on the British BC squadrons was about 15,500 yards, this demands that almost all the hits were hitting the belt armor and front of the turret faces. The belt armor was sufficient to keep the undersized German shell out of the magazines. The turret face armor was not sufficient to keep shells out of the turret in as much as anything else this was the other major contributing factor to the loss of the British BCs.Tirronan (talk) 19:01, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Opposing design consideration: The German BC was designed to be fast enough and to take its place in the main Battle Line. The British BC was designed as a fast scout and cruiser killer. A more modern example would be the Alaska Class which used a CB designation to delineate its super heavy cruiser role. What was not anticipated by the designers however was the overwhelming pressure to use the BC large guns as battle-line assets. The German BC was much more like the later fast battleship than the British cruiser killer. That being said, it would have not coast all that much, weight wise to put 12" of armor on the turret faces with a 3" roof armor on the turrets.Tirronan (talk) 19:01, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree they missed a trick there, but I would guess the design consideration was not to over-armour any particular place. It was not expected that turret penetration would have such disastrous consequences. I have always agreed that deck armour was deemed an acceptable public explanation of what happened, but this does mot exactly make it a lie. Technological advances were making the decks more vulnerable both to long distance shelling and air attacks. I found another mention about German ship design, which although I didnt understand exactly what was meant, said they were using more technically complex construction (and slower and more expensive) which reduced internal weight and general hull plating thickness, which meant they could use more weight in armour. Also a comment that battlecruiser torpedoes were more a liability than a help on both sides, since they never really got used but had to have large compartments susceptible to flooding, as on seydlitz and lutzow. Also the british battlecruisers did not fail in the line of battle, but against nominally equal opponents, ie german battlecruisers. Sandpiper (talk)

I'd be the last to argue that the deck armor wasn't a needed upgrade as much of the limitations in range at Jutland were wearther/visability limitations and accurate results could be received as far as 22,500 yards. However neither Jelico nor Beatty wanted to admit they lost 3,000 lives to bad management and that in all probablity they didn't need to lose any of the BCs.Tirronan (talk) 20:11, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

again in a more modern armor scheme, the Alaska's carried a 9" belt, but the turret faces were 12.8" thick and the roof was 5.25 to 6" thick. You'd not get that in the old BC but it gives an idea where in an under armored design the evolution of the cruiser killer armor went in the future and how critical turret armor was considered, the ghosts of Jutland still echoed I think.Tirronan (talk) 23:13, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Since you got me moving on this I have been reading more brown/grand fleet. He says that the level of armour which was provided on the battlecruisers was debated at the time and some were arguing for lighter armoured and armed ships. For all the good reasons of making cheaper ships and because it was recognised they were not battleships. The indefatigables were deliberately not significantly upgraded from the invincibles (though there was lots of PR that they had been), despite what was known about German building plans for uprated counter ships. They had a scouting role and combat role against relatively light ships. Conceptually they were hit and run ships in their scouting role. Fisher seems to have been quite keen on moving to all destroyer defence. A very modern perspective, all in all.

I'd say it would have been unthinkable for the royal navy to admit that it had lost three ships because of incompetence. Everyone would have tried their absolute best to prevent any suggestion of this leaking to the press. The reputation of the royal navy was in itself a national military asset. It encouraged countries to join the allied side and it even scared the German fleet who were intimidated by the RN's reputation. A pretty much unearned reputation since the navy had not been in any significant actions, but generally triumphed from sheer numbers - and reputation. The entire british empire ran on a reputation of being unbeatable rather than any military reality to support this. If Jellicoe or Beatty had been minded to go down to a newspaper office and admit they had caused the losses through incompetent handling, they would have been arrested as traitors and silenced.

Its not that designers didn't think about the consequences of turret fires: they did tests on scrap ships to see what would happen and some of these were ongoing when war intervened. It is clear that at Jutland propellant was not being handled as the ship designers intended. It may be ships would still have exploded if handling had been perfect, but I dont think we have evidence for that? There is some evidence that the designs were not simply restricted by money, though battlecruisers were costing more than battleships already, but by the logistics of sheer size of ships and where they could be docked. Limits on size means limits on weight, means limits on armour. Battlecruisers were designed to operate world wide, or at least the british ones were. They were already low in endurance (=weight of fuel) for a world spanning role.

Alaska compared to Lion was 100 ft longer, 3,000 tons heavier, had twice the range, twice the developed power,(which in part would be due to improved engine efficiency), on the stats here looks as thought the side armour might have been similar but deck and turret significantly increased. Very much what the designers of Lion might have chosen to build given 30 years more experience, particularly the experience of what did happen in WW1. The main belt is still inadequate to withstand main battery fire, even more so considering it is a WW2 ship when guns were generally bigger than in WW1, when they only faced German 12 in? Aside from the lesson about turrets and the different and increased risk of plunging fire, both shell and bomb from aircraft, it seems to have much the same design considerations. Lightest armour they reckoned they could get away with. Sandpiper (talk) 15:41, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

The guns on that class were ultra-modern by the standard of the day throwing an 1,140 AP shell that would have measured up against any WW1 14". But, what brought me to use them as examples, in another Navy they suffered all the same issues. they were neither fish nor foul, it might have been a match for the IJN Kirishima class, but other than that they were just over-sized cruisers that had to avoid Battleships. Again, for a bit more money you could have had another two Iowa Class BBs and the US Navy put them to pasture awfully quick. It wasn't a mistake that HMS Hood was the last of her type.Tirronan (talk) 17:06, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

convenience break

OK, OK, so that we get something out of this discussion... I am proposing that this replace the opposed sentence:

An impression was given by Jellico and Beatty, as well as other senior officers that the loss of the Battlecruisers was caused by weak armour, despite proof by two committees, and earlier statements by Jellico and other senior officers that Cordite and its management were to blame.

Yes, No, or hell no?Tirronan (talk) 16:05, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

• I already said, yes but replace 'proof' with 'evidence' or perhaps 'reports'. Sandpiper (talk) 20:36, 3 March 2011 (UTC)