Battlecruiser

Battlecruisers were large warships of the first half of the 20th century. They evolved from armored cruisers and in terms of ship classification they occupy a grey area between cruisers and battleships. Different nations built to widely different designs. Some battlecruisers were smaller than heavy cruisers while others were larger than contemporaneous battleships. The chief similarity was the role specification. They were supposed 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 outgun. 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". However, as technology developed design philosophy changed and led to the creation of more heavily armoured ships with less powerful guns. They were given different labels, but essentially performed the same task.

Problems with the idea

In practice, battlecruisers rarely saw the type of independent action for which they were designed. In most cases, the temptation to add extra big guns to the main fleet proved hard to resist, and battlecruiser squadrons were added to the line of battle — a role for which they were not designed and which exposed them to great risk. It was found that their speed wasn't sufficient to protect them from the battleships' guns. The increase in gunnery technology was so swift in the years following 1905, that there was a blurring of the distiction between the battleship and battlecruiser. At Jutland the guns on Beatty's flagship, HMS Lion were 13.5 inch, larger than most German and many British battleships. However, the armour on a battlecruiser remained that of (or slightly more than) a normal cruiser. Thus the ships could give a lot more than they could take. As a result, during World War II, they were almost all destroyed.

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