Re: [GZG] Battlecruisers

Ryan Gill wrote:
>> They are usually ships between a heavy cruiser and a battleship. 
Only
>> one navy (the USN) ever built ships like that, and they were called
>> "Large Cruisers" (the Alaska class).
> 
> Germany and Britain made lots.

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.

Any decent World War I naval history will cover the details of the
battles.
The concept was pretty much discredited by World War I, with the
surviving
Battlecruisers of the time either scrapped or upgraded (hence Hood being
reclassed as a 'fast battleship', though she still had the weakness in
her turret design that resulted in her destruction at the hands of the
Bismarck.)  The biggest problem was similar to the same problems that
affected the American Tank Destroyer groups in World War II -- it looked
like a capital ship, and so tended to be thrown into the line of battle,
even when they weren't.  And when it became obvious that 80% of the cost
of a  battleship only bought you 50% of the capability, that was pretty
much it.

As far as I can remember, the only time a battlecruiser squadron was
used
according to doctrine was the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914,
when
two battlecruisers with supporting ships sank a German armoured cruiser
squadron.

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.)

JGH
-- 
Jerry Han - jhan@warpfish.com - 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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