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Battlecruisers were large warships of the first half of the 20th century first introduced by the British Royal Navy. They evolved from armored cruisers and in terms of ship classification they occupy a grey area between cruisers and battleships. Generally, battlecruisers were similar in layout and armament to battleships but with significantly less armour allowing for gains in speed. British battlecruisers can easily be differentiated from battleships in having one fewer deck and in nearly all cases the same caliber main guns as contemporary battleships but one fewer turret. However, with ships built for other navies the distinction between large cruiser, battlecruiser and battleship is often blurred. Some battlecruisers were smaller than battleships while others were larger than contemporary battleships. Examples of ships that cause confusion include the German Graf Spee and Schnarhorst classes and the U.S. Alaska classes, all of which are frequently classified as battlecruisers but do not fit the British model of a battlecruiser. The chief similarity was the role specification. They were designed to hunt down and outgun smaller warships (or merchant ships in the case of the pocket battleships), and outrun larger warships that they could not outslug Originally, to achieve this, they deviated from the standard practice of providing a ship with sufficient armour to protect against its own guns. The weight saving from the reduced armour allowed more powerful engines to be fitted. This idea was mainly conceived by British Admiral Jackie Fisher who believed "speed is the best protection". Fisher's idea centred on battlecruisers operating with the fleet, the intention being that they would hunt down enemy cruiser squadrons and evade the battleships. Germany's navy by contrast sacrificed gun calibre instead of armour in order to raise speed. Despite the major difference in design philosophy, both performed the same task. Battlecruisers were superceded by the beginning World War II as advances in design and technology allowed fast battleships to be developed, which combined or even exceeded the best features of World War I battlecruisers and slow battleships. First battlecruisers
Battle of Heligoland Bight A force of British light cruisers and destroyers entered the Heligoland Bight to attack German shipping during World War I. When they met opposition from German cruisers, Admiral Beatty took his squadron of four battlecruisers into the bight and turned the battle, ultimately sinking three German light cruisers and killing a German commander, Rear Admiral Leberecht Maass. Battle of the Falklands The original battlecruiser concept proved successful at the Battle of the Falkland Islands when the British battlecruisers ''Inflexible'' and ''Invincible'' did precisely the job they were intended for when they annihilated a German cruiser squadron, consisting of the armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau with some light cruisers, commanded by Admiral Maximilian Graf Von Spee in the South Atlantic Ocean. Battle of Dogger Bank During the Battle of Dogger Bank, the after turret of the German flagship ''Seydlitz'' was pierced by a British 13.5 inch shell which detonated in the working chamber. The charges being hoisted upwards were detonated, and the explosion flashed up into the turret and down into the magazine, setting fire to charges in the process of being handled. The gun crew tried to escape into the next turret, allowing the flash to spread, destroying both turrets internally. Seydlitz was saved form near-certain destruction only by emergency flooding of her after magazines. This near-disaster was due to the way that ammunition handling was arranged and was common to both German and British battleships and battlecruisers, but the lighter protection on the latter made them more vulnerable to the turret or barbette being pierced. The "working chamber" had been introduced in HMS ''Formidable'' (1898) and was intended to prevent such a dangerous flash, but instead made such an event more likely. The Germans learned from investigating the damaged Seydlitz and instituted improved measures to ensure ammunition handling was flash tight. The British remained unaware of the weakness, to their great misfortune at the Battle of Jutland. Battle of Jutland At the Battle of Jutland 18 months later, both British and German battlecruisers were employed as fleet units. The British battlecruisers became engaged with both their German counterparts, the battlecruisers, and then German battleships before the arrival of the battleships of the British Grand Fleet. The result was a disaster for the Royal Navy's battlecruiser squadrons: ''Invincible'', ''Queen Mary'' and ''Indefatigable'' exploded with the loss of all but a handful of their crews. This was due to the vulnerability of the working chamber which the Germans had discovered after the near-loss of Seydlitz at Dogger Bank and had taken preventative measures against. The lightly armoured British ships did not have flash tight ammunition handling arrangements and each was lost to a single salvo penetrating the working chamber. The better armoured and flash tight German battlecruisers fared better, in part due to poor performance of British shells, although ''Lützow'' was damaged and had to be scuttled, the other German Battlecruisers, ''Moltke'', ''Von der Tann'', ''Seydlitz'', ''Derfflinger'' were all heavily damaged and required extensive repairs after the battle. No British or German battleship was sunk during the battle with the exception of the old German pre-dreadnought Pommern. Post-war developments Following the end of World War I many navies re-evaluated their ship designs. This led to a number of changes as many nations chose to reduce their battlecruiser fleet following the Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty rather than scrap valuable battleships. British designs The British had planned 4 G3 battlecruisers, which were cancelled by the Washington Treaty in 1922. They would have been superior to any World War I battleship and the battlecruiser name came from their high speed and armour relative to the planned N3 battleships they would serve alongside. The Royal Navy de-emphasized battlecruisers in the original sense of the word and all but three were scrapped by the mid-1930s. In the Royal Navy, the term was applied to ships with heavy armour, but that were still capable of speeds in excess of 25 knots. HMS ''Hood'', launched in 1918, was the last British battlecruiser to be completed, her three sisters of the Admiral class were cancelled. However, Hood was completed with armour that was thought to be capable of resisting her own weapons, the classic measure of a "balanced" battleship and her armour weaknesses were recognized and tackled to some extent during refits - the onset of the Second World War preventing her last planned rebuild. The other two battlecruisers retained, HMS ''Renown'' and HMS Repulse were modernized significantly in a series of refits between 1920 and 1939. Like other elderly British capital ships, Renown underwent a total reconstruction between 1937 and 1939, to make her suitable for acting as a fast consort for aircraft carriers. Similar "large repairs" planned for Renown and Hood were cancelled by the event of war. Of the three specialist battlecruisers, "large light cruisers" in the Royal Navy's terms, ships of substantial size but with only the armour of light cruisers intended to be armed with a few battleship calibre guns for operations in the Baltic ''Furious'' had already been converted to an aircraft carrier during the war. ''Glorious'' and ''Courageous'' too big and too heavily armed to fit in with the treaty definition of cruisers, followed rather than being scrapped. Japanese Designs The Imperial Japanese Navy improved the four battlecruisers of the ''Kongō'' class (''Hiei'', ''Haruna'', ''Kirishima'' and ''Kongō'') by increasing the elevation of the guns to 40 degrees, adding anti-torpedo bulges and additional armour, and building on a "pagoda" mast. The 3,800 tons of additional armour slowed their speed, but between 1933 and 1940 replacement of heavy equipment and an increase in the length of the hull by 26 ft (8 m) allowed them to reach up to 30 knots once again. They were reclassified as "fast battleships", although their armour and guns still fell short compared to surviving World War 1-era battleships in American or British navies. In battle against true fast battleships of the ''South Dakota'' and ''North Carolina'' classes, the "fast battleship" refit would prove inferior to the real thing. The Imperial Japanese Navy scrapped three of the four Amagi class battlecruisers (which were under construction), and converted the fourth, ''Akagi'', into an aircraft carrier in 1927. US Designs The United States Navy retasked two battlecruiser hulls as aircraft carriers: USS ''Lexington'' and ''Saratoga'' were both designed as battlecruisers (the hull designations were originally CC-1 and CC-3) but converted part-way through construction, although this was only considered marginally preferable to scrapping the hulls outright (the remaining four: Constellation, Ranger, Constitution and United States were indeed scrapped). The Lexington class battlecruisers if completed would have been closer in concept to the later fast battleships, being both swift and well-armored without sacrificing firepower. They were planned to be armed with eight 16" guns in four turrets and armored against light battleship-caliber weapons; the engines required to propel these vessels at 33 knots (their design speed) made them into fast, flexible and tough aircraft carriers with large growth margins. The heavy use of Saratoga during World War II, however (at one point she and ''Enterprise'' were the only carriers in the Pacific), precluded her from having a postwar career: Severe and repeated bomb and torpedo damage took their toll and by 1946 the hull was simply worn out. She was thus used as a target in the Bikini atomic experiments in 1946. Rearmament As war became more likely nations began to rebuild their forces. At first lip-service was paid to the Treaty of Versailles and the Washington Naval Treaty, but as war became more likely the designs became more ambitious. German designs The German pocket battleships (German:Panzerschiffe - armored ship: ''Deutschland'', ''Admiral Scheer'', and ''Admiral Graf Spee''), built to meet the 10,000 ton displacement limit of the Treaty of Versailles, were another attempt at a battlecruiser-like concept. Rather than construct a lightweight battleship which sacrificed protection in order to attain high speed, the pocket battleships were relatively small vessels with only six 11 inch (280 mm) guns — essentially large heavy cruisers. They attained fairly high speeds of 26 knots (52 km/h), and reasonable protection, while staying close to the displacement limit, by using welded rather than riveted construction, triple main armament turrets, and replacing the normal steam turbine power with a pair of massive 9 cylinder diesel engines driving each propeller shaft. They were later reclassified as "heavy cruisers", having heavier guns and armour than regular heavy cruisers at the cost of speed. Unfortunately, they were outclassed by British WW1-era true battlecruisers in speed, weaponry, and protection. (They in fact had basic cruiser armour, except for the turrets.) Two more ships were built later in the 1930s, the ''Scharnhorst'' and ''Gneisenau'', which were considerably more powerful. At 38,900 tons full load they were somewhat larger than the French Dunkerque class and very well armoured. They were designed to carry six 15 inch (380 mm) guns in three twin turrets, but instead was fitted with 11 inch (280 mm) guns in three triple turrets instead (it was planned to rearm them during the war, but this plan was abandoned). At the time, treaty requirements allowed the production 12+ inch guns at 1 a year, which along with the very time consuming production of naval guns, kept these two ships with 11 inch guns. The Royal Navy categorised them as battlecruisers since they followed the Imperial German Navy design lineage of trading off gun size for protection and speed. The German Navy nonetheless categorised them as battleships. French designs As a response to the German pocket battleships the French decided to build the ''Dunkerque'' class in the 1930s. They were labelled "fast battleships" and were armed with 13 inch (330mm) guns arranged in two quadruple turrets located forward. They were considerably larger, faster and more powerfuly armed than the ships they were designed to hunt. This last design illustrated inter-war technological developments. The ultimate limit on ship speed was drag from the water displaced (which increases as a cube of speed) rather than weight, so heavier armour slowed World War II battleships by only a couple of knots (4 km/h) over their more lightly armoured brethren. Heavy guns mounted on fast and well armoured fast battleships invalidated the concept of the battlecruiser as a ship class in its own right, although the development of the aircraft carrier overshadowed all big-gun vessels including the fast battleship. Commerce raiding In the early years of the war the German ships each had a measure of success hunting merchant ships in the Atlantic. The pocket battleships were deployed alone and sank a number of vessels, causing disruption to the trade routes which supplied the UK. They were pursued by the Royal Navy and on one occasion, at the Battle of the River Plate in 1939, the hunter became the hunted. The Graf Spee had been at sea at the start of WWII and engaged in a successful commerce raiding spree. Off the coast of South America, the Graf Spee encountered the British cruisers Exeter, Achilles and Ajax. Apparently mistaking the cruisers for destroyers, the Graf Spee did not employ the battlecruiser doctrine and flee before the superior force. While the Graf Spee inflicted heavy damage on the Exeter, it was forced to retire to neutral Uraguay where the crew scuttled her to avoid internment. Allied battlecruisers such as ''Renown'', ''Repulse'', ''Dunkerque'' and ''Strasbourg'' were employed on operations to hunt down the commerce raiding German battlecruisers, but they rarely got close to their targets. The exception was when the ''Bismarck'' was sent out as a raider and was intercepted by HMS ''Hood'' and the battleship ''Prince of Wales'' in May 1941. However, the modern German battleship was not suitable prey for the elderly British battlecruiser and the Bismarck’s 15 inch shells caused a magazine explosion reminiscent of the Battle of Jutland. Only three men survived. The ''Gneisenau'' and the ''Scharnhorst'' hunted together and were initially successful at commerce raiding, sinking the British armed merchant cruiser ''Rawalpindi'' in 1939. Following repairs from damage during the Norwegian campaign, the two battlecruisers set out commerce raiding once again in 1941 and sank 22 merchant ships. They returned to Brest in northern France but found this port was vulnerable to Royal Air Force attacks and were obliged to return to Germany. They did so in the Channel Dash, a daring and successful run up the English Channel. However, they were both damaged by mines and although Scharnhorst was repaired, Gneisenau was damaged again in RAF bombing raids and was eventually disarmed and sunk as a blockship. ''Scharnhorst'' was employed once more to attack commerce and attempted to raid the Arctic convoys in December 1943. However, she was cornered by the battleship HMS ''Duke of York'' with the heavy cruisers ''Jamaica'', ''Norfolk'' and ''Belfast'' at the Battle of North Cape and sunk on 26 December 1943. The use of battlecruisers as commerce raiders was curtailed following an attack by the ''Admiral Scheer'' on a convoy guarded by the HMS ''Jervis Bay'', an armed merchant cruiser. It persuaded the British Admiralty that convoys had to be guarded by battleships (or battlecruisers). The older R-class battleships and the un-upgraded Queen Elizabeths (''Malaya'' and ''Barham'') were used for this task, and subsequently the smaller German ships were forced away from their quarry. Additionally, the air gap over the North Atlantic closed, Huff-Duff (radio triangulation equipment) improved, airborne centimetric radar was introduced and convoys received escort carrier protection. The results of some of these developments were illustrated by the successful defence of convoys at the Battle of the Barents Sea and the Battle of the North Cape. Norwegian campaign
Mediterranean The French battlecruisers had fled to North Africa following the fall of France. In July 1940 Force H under Admiral James Somerville was ordered to force their surrender or destroy them. The ''Dunkerque'' was damaged by shells from HMS ''Hood'' at Mers-el-Kebir but escaped to join the ''Strasbourg'' at Toulon. Both ships were scuttled on 27 November 1942, although Strasbourg was raised and used by the Italian navy before being sunk again in an air attack on 18 August 1944. Pacific War The first battlecruiser to see action in the Pacific War was ''Repulse'' when she was sunk near Singapore on December 10 1941 whilst in company with HMS ''Prince of Wales''. She had received a refit to give extra anti-aircraft protection and extra armour between the wars, however despite these additions and her agility, without aerial protection she was unable to avoid the continuous waves of Japanese torpedo bombers indefinitely. The Japanese Kongō class "fast battleships" were used extensively as carrier escorts for most of their wartime career. However, in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal on 12 November the ''Hiei'' was sent out to bombard US positions. She was badly damaged by gunfire from US cruisers and destroyers. She was attacked by US aircraft from Guadalcanal’s American held airfield (Henderson Field) the next day and left to sink north of Savo Island. A few days later on 15 November 1942 ''Kirishima'', engaged the U.S. battleships ''South Dakota'' and ''Washington'', and was scuttled following damage from 75 hits inflicted by the Washington and supporting heavy cruisers. In contrast South Dakota survived 42 hits and was back in operation four months later. She did, however, lose all electric power in the action and did not contribute to the destruction of the Japanese force. The ''Kongō'' survived the Battle of Leyte Gulf, but was eventually sunk on 21 November 1944 in the Formosa Strait by three torpedoes from the U.S. submarine ''Sealion''. ''Haruna'' was involved in bombardment operations at Guadalcanal, the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the Battle of Leyte Gulf. She was attacked by American carrier aircraft of Task Force 38 and B-24 bombers of the United States Army Air Forces while at Kure on 28 July 1945 and sank at her moorings. New US designs Part way through the war the US built the two ''Alaska'' class "large cruisers", ''Alaska'' and ''Guam'' with a main armament of nine twelve-inch guns in three triple turrets. They were designed to hunt down the Japanese heavy cruisers. They were built to cruiser standards, with a cruiser-like secondary battery and they lacked the armoured belt and torpedo defense system of true capital ships. Their percentage of armor tonnage at 16% was similar to that of contemporary cruisers and far less than that of true battlecruisers and battleships (the HMS Hood had 33%, while the German Bismarck and USS North Carolina had 40% weight in armor). Their protection could only withstand fire from their own caliber of gun in a very narrow range band. As with the never-completed ''Lexington'' class battlecruisers, the Alaska class ships were an outgrowth of contemporary American cruiser design, rather than being a new battlecruiser class to occupy the middle ground between heavy cruisers and fast battleships. However, they resembled contemporary battleships in appearance and tonnage, with the familiar 2-A-1 main battery, massive columnar mast and cluster of 5"/38 DP guns along the sides of the superstructure. The easiest way to tell the Alaska class ships from the battleships was by the dual 5"/38 mount superfiring over the fore and aft main batteries. Like the contemporary ''Iowa''-class fast battleships, their speed made them ultimately more useful as carrier escorts and bombardment ships than as the sea combatants they were developed to be, as well as the ignominious defeat of the fleets of Japanese heavy cruisers that were their raison d'être. (In fact, the majority of Japanese heavy cruisers were sunk by aircraft or submarines instead of surface combat.) A planned additional four ships of the Alaska class were cancelled after the war. Along with ''Renown'', the two Alaskas were the only "battlecruisers" to survive WWII (not including Turkish Yavuz - ex SMS Goeben, which did not fight during the war). Cold War designs The Soviet Union planned to build several large cruiser classes, that would be a response for Scharnhorst, then Alaska classes in the 1940s and early 1950s, but these plans were abandoned. In Russia, they were called "heavy cruisers" (thyazholyi kreyser). The first design were project 69 (Kronshtadt) cruisers, with 35,240 tons standard load, 9 guns 305 mm (12 in) and a speed of 32 knots. Two ships were laid in 1939. In 1940 it was decided to complete them according to the project 69I, with 6 guns 380 mm (15 in), bought in Germany, but the German attack on the USSR put an end to these plans and all works were canceled in a favour of more useful ship types, such as submarines. Next design were project 82 (Stalingrad) cruisers, with 36,500 tons standard load (42,300 tons full load), 9 guns 305 mm and a speed of 35 knots. Three ships were laid in 1951–52, but after Stalin's death they were canceled in April 1953. Apart from high costs, the main reason was, that gun-armed ships became obsolete with an advent of guided missiles. Only a central armoured hull section of the first cruiser Stalingrad was launched in 1954 and then used as a target for rockets. The Soviet ''Kirov'' class of Raketny Kreyser (Missile Cruiser), displacing approximately 26,000 tons, is classified as a battlecruiser in the 1996–7 edition of Jane's Fighting Ships, even though in actuality they are very large missile cruisers. Their classification as battlecruisers arises from their displacement, which is roughly equal to that of a World War I battleship, and the fact that they possess more firepower than nearly every other surface ship. However, the Kirov-class lacks the heavy armour that distinguishes battlecruisers from regular cruisers and they are classified as "heavy missile cruisers" in Russia. There were four members of the class completed, ''Kirov'', ''Frunze'', ''Kalinin'', and ''Yuri Andropov''. As the ships were named after Communist personalities, after the fall of the USSR they were given traditional names of the Imperial Russian Navy, respectively Admiral Ushakov, Admiral Lazarev, Admiral Nakhimov, and Petr Velikiy. Due to budget constraints two members of this class have been decommissioned, although Petr Velikiy and Admiral Nakhimov are in active service and funds are being gathered for possible repair of Admiral Lazarev. Nakhimov was returned to service early, at the beginning of 2006, possibly due to increasing tensions in the Middle East and potential Russian naval involvement therein. Problems with the idea In practice, battlecruisers rarely saw the type of independent action for which they were designed. The increase in gunnery technology was so swift in the years following 1905, that there was a blurring of the distinction between the battleship and battlecruiser. At Jutland the guns on Beatty's flagship, HMS ''Lion'' were 13.5 inch, which was larger than most German and many British battleships. In most cases, the temptation to add extra big guns to the main fleet proved hard to resist. As a result, battlecruiser squadrons were added to the line of battle — a role for which they were not designed and one that exposed them to great risk. The armour on a battlecruiser remained that of (or slightly more than) a normal cruiser. Thus the ships could dish out a lot more punishment than they could absorb. Any advantage they had in speed was lost when locked into formation at the speed of the slowest battleship in the line of battle. Heavy shells from opposing capital ships could easily penetrate their thinner armour. During Jutland, both British and German battlecruisers scored hits on each other. The British ships came off poorly, where the German ships' fared better due to better internal protection and poor performance of the British shells. During the Second World War large-scale close range fleet actions did not occur. Battlecruisers were paired with battleships in roles such as raiding (German), convoy escort, or as part of task forces. In operations where battlecruisers did fight battleships, such as Hood and Bismarck, Scharnhorst and Duke of York, Kirishima and Washington, the battlecruiser was destroyed by gunfire. They were equally vulnerable to aircraft, and during World War II many were lost in this way. Science fiction In science fiction, the meaning of the word "battlecruiser" is generally somewhat different. Usually it denotes a spaceship more comparable to the fast battleships of World War II: A large, fast and tough vessel with both high firepower and enough protection to dish out and take considerable amounts of damage. In many science fiction universes, a battlecruiser is either a ship specifically in-between a heavy cruiser and a battleship in design, without the specific requirement that it can either outgun or evade any other capital ship, or the term is interchangeable with "heavy cruiser", with the distinction that the "good guys" use heavy cruisers and the "bad guys" use battlecruisers. 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