Re: [GZG] Battlecruisers

[Jerry Han <jhan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ryan Gill wrote:
> At 9:04 PM -0500 12/23/06, Jerry Han wrote:
> > Yup.  Britain created the concept of the Battlecruiser (it was part of 
> > Admiral
> > Fisher's reform program for the Royal Navy at the turn of the century.)
> > Germany responded by building its own Battlecruisers, in the naval arms
> > race that lead up to World War I.
>
> One could argue that BC's would have been ideal in hunting down the 
> heavier German Commerce Raiders, the Pocket Battleships as they were.

The thing is though, those were different eras.  In World War I, German
commerce raiders were, for the most part, converted merchant cruisers.
Thus, usually, any decent crewed light cruiser could handle them.

The German Pocket Battleships were, in a sense, 'light' battlecruisers,
as they carried 11" guns on essentially a heavy cruiser hull.  BCs would
have been useful in hunting down the pocket battleships, but, by World
War 2, there were many other countermeasures, all of which were much more
flexible than battlecruisers.  (Air power, submarines, fast battleships,
heavy 8" cruisers, destroyers with reliable torpedoes, etc.)

> > Most naval historians (at least,  all the once I've encountered) look
> > rather askance at the Alaska class cruisers built by the United States
> > at the end of World War II; to this day, from all the sources I've read,
> > nobody is still quite sure what they were intended to do, especially
> > when in the same Navy you had ships that were just as fast, mounted
> > larger guns, and had twice the belt armour thickness.  (The Iowas.)
>
> Well, the Alaskas would have been quote useful in the situations where 
> the Japanese sent a bigger ship in to fight against US DDs and CLs. 
> Something with some more punch could have turned the tide in several 
> battles.

But that's the point -- if you needed bigger ships with more punch, it was
always more cost effective to send a battleship than a battlecruiser, or
send a division of heavy cruisers.  The classic battlecruiser was neither
fish nor fowl, overkill against heavy cruisers, hopelessly outclassed against
any battleship, especially when battleships were capable of matching
battlecruiser speeds.

It's an appealing concept, as demonstrated by the number of game systems
and novels trying to implement a version of the battlecruiser that
makes sense, but, it takes a certain mix of technology to make it
really useful I believe, and that mix wasn't present in World War I / II era.
The problem is that the phrase "able to catch what you can destroy, able
to run away from what you can't" isn't just a definition of a ship class,
it's one of the defining rules of the tactical matrix of combat, naval or
otherwise.  There are certain sweet spots for size and capability defined by 
the era, and the battlecruiser never quite fit into any of those sweet
spots in naval history.

IMHO, of course.  (8-)

JGH
--
Jerry Han - jhan@xxxxxxxxxxxx - http://www.warpfish.com/jhan - TBFTGOGGI
"Wake me, let me see the daylight, save me from this half-life;
                            Let's you and I escape, escape from time..."
                                            -- Duncan Sheik, "Half-life"
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