“There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today,” said Admiral Beatty as he watched his battlecruisers blow up one by one at the Battle of Jutland [3].
The words were classic British understatement, but 3,000 dead sailors were ample evidence that something was indeed wrong with the vessels that were neither battleships nor cruisers.
It wasn’t supposed to work that way when Britain’s Grand Fleet encountered Imperial Germany’s High Seas Fleet off the Jutland peninsula of Denmark on May 31, 1916. Battlecruisers were meant to be a solution to a problem, not a problem themselves.
The concept seemed logical enough. Battleships were heavily gunned and heavily armored, but too slow to hunt down smaller, faster warships such as cruisers. On the other hands, cruisers lacked the firepower and protection of the battlewagons. So why not combine the two into a battleship-sized vessel armed with the big, long-range guns of a battlewagon, but with the speed of a cruiser? They could use their speed and firepower to chase down lighter enemy warships and commerce raiders. If they encountered enemy battleships, their superior speed would enable them to escape. Battlecruisers were supposed to be a kind of seagoing Muhammad Ali: they would float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
Compare the Royal Navy’s Queen Elizabeth-class battleships and the Renown-class battlecruisers, which fought in both World Wars I and II; they were both armed with fifteen-inch guns, but the battleships had a top speed of twenty-four knots, while the battlecruisers could zip along at thirty-one knots.
However, there is no free lunch in warship design: You can have armor, firepower or speed, but not all three, and armor was the trait that was sacrificed. The battleship HMS Warspite was protected by an armor belt between the deck and waterline that was up to thirteen inches thick. Meanwhile, the battlecruiser HMS Renown had a maximum of just six inches of armor.
