What was the actual cause of the disaster for the Royal Navy’s battlecruisers in the Battle of Jutland?

score:13

Accepted answer

All of the factors you mentioned did play a role in the loss of the ships. But the largest factor in the ships themselves actually blowing up was the absolute horrendousness in the ammunition handling of the battle-cruisers and basically every other British ship. To that point, the battle-cruisers also had less armour than battleships which made it easier for shells to penetrate the ship, which then set off the badly-placed cordite charges in the turret and ammunition shafts.

In the loss of the Indefatigable and Queen Mary, the problems in signalling (to Evan-Thomas's battleships) had more of a hand. However, the presence of battleships might not have made too much of a difference since the Defence, an older "armoured cruiser", and Invincible were lost while steaming with the main battlefleet.

I must also note that the Germans had also had a problem with ammunition flash explosions in a previous battle (Dogger Bank I think it was) and they instituted a system to prevent that from happening again. So, even though the Germans had a few errors on their part in the battle, none of their battle-cruisers blew up.

In all, the largest cause of the loss of the British battle-cruisers was the problems in ammunition handling which was exploited by the lack of armour on those ships and the others which also exploded (Defence and Black Prince). On the Hood, the largest problem was that her armour was not up to par with the weapons she faced, permitting a shell to go into her magazines.

If you like, here is a documentary that goes into more detail on what caused the explosions.

I must say that I have probably overstudied this battle for too many years.

Upvote:4

Out of all the ones that you've mentioned gunnery was the biggest factor, since the quality of the British battlecruiser gunnery at Jutland was recognized as atrocious by the Admiralty themselves and lead directly to another of the issue on your list.

It was worse than the Germans before the war for the very British reason that their captains could suffer career consequences if they got caught without their ship looking "smart" and nothing messes up the paint-job like firing the big guns, so they'd literally try to schedule gunnery drills only before a re-paint was scheduled, while the Germans were a lot more pragmatic in this respect and practiced more often.

During the war, the British battlecruisers had to be based in Rosyth to counter the German ones and due to the confined anchorage, couldn't practice their gunnery at all, so their comparative quality just plummeted even further. The British were aware of this and tried rotating their battlecruisers to Scapa Flow for gunnery practice whenever possible, but couldn't do it very often logistically.

The battlecruiser commanders were aware of the issue and decided to make the best of a bad situation, by having their crews continuously practice loading, which they could do in Rosyth and this also lead to the disastrous ammo handling protocols, because they intentionally bypassed safety protocols to increase their rate of fire to the max, to make up for what they knew would be inferior accuracy with sheer volume of fire. Unfortunately for them, their accuracy was so dismal due to lack of practice at that point that it couldn't.

The dreadnaughts of the Grand Fleet had all of the other issues, like fire control tables, ammo quality, etc. but had no issues giving a great account of themselves, simply because they'd been practicing a lot of gunnery for 2 years before the battle.

More post

Search Posts

Related post