Total aside to the thread subject, but I forgot to ask your views on this in the thread dedicated to it....
I wonder if the "story" of the BCs is as much driven by how the German BCs did not blown up, as the Brits did.
That, and the myth that the RN battlecruiser blew up because of their thin belt armor. That was Beatty's position, and he had the authority to push his own agenda, thereby disguising the fact that his own orders doomed at least two of the three BCs lost.
They got absolutely pummeled as well, but they didn't just blow up and sink.
I've read that was the result of
A) Luck. One of the German BCs was on the verge of a catastrophic explosion and some quick action at the very last moment saved it. No quick action, or the guy doing it was a bit more injured, and its likely at least on the German BCs would have had a catastrophic result as well.
B) The Germans had smaller guns, but much better armor and overall survivability. The Brits counted on heavier guns and better gunnery to take out the enemy BCs before they were badly damaged. Turns out, in this case, better armor won out over bigger/better guns
C) In regards to B, it would seem that the British ammunition was actually flawed? The fuses did not work right, and their heavier guns shells simply exploded on initial contact, causing a lot of external but superficial (to the integrity of the ship anyway) damage. So maybe this is actually kind of part of B - maybe B would have worked had the guns actually performed as expected?
D) The engagement itself. Beatty had a job to do, to pull in the HSF into range of the GF, and he did it, but that meant subjecting his ships to fire far longer then they were designed.
Any thoughts on those? Some of them, all of them, some more then others?
A) The German BC that almost had a "magazine explosion" was the
Seydlitz at the battle of Dogger Bank. Instead, it had a propellant fire that took out both after turrets when the magazines were flooded. The Germans realized that the flaw had been excessive accumulation of ready powder charges, and changed procedures after the battle to reduce the flow of charges to the rate at which they were used. The British did the opposite, as Beatty had concluded that only increasing his ships rate of fire would allow them to defeat the German First Scouting Group before the Germans could get away. Their slowest ships were several knots faster than his slowest ships, and if he left his slowest ships behind they would outnumber him. This would come back to haunt the British at Jutland, as three ships (and almost a another, with Beatty aboard) were lost to turret hits that travelled down the excess powder accumulation and into the magazines.
B) The German battlecruiser designs were derived from their battleship designs, not armored cruiser designs like the British ones. They thus had a lot more compartmentalization, which increased survivability at the cost of habitability and a bit of range. In addition, they had effective shells and their powder came in cases, not bags. The latter took much more effort to burn, and, with magazine venting (again, the British didn't have) meant that their magazines were much less a danger to the ship. They'd have fires, not explosions. Plus, of course, much better armor (though it wasn't lack of armor that doomed the British battlecruisers).
C) Yes, in a situation weirdly like the US WW2 torpedo fiasco, the British discovered too late that their Cordite B shell charges were actually detonating on contact with German armor (due to the compression of the shell as it hit the armor) rather than detonating when the fuse went off. By 1918, they had replaced their entire stock of shells with the Greenboy shell, which used the much less volatile Cordite D. The Germans would likely have been far worse hurt had the British shells performed as advertised. British gunnery was as good as German, and they had a lot more guns.
D) Yes, sort of. Remember that Invincible was not with Beatty, but with Jellicoe, and it also suffered the turret-hit-travels-to-magazine catastrophe. Beatty lost the two ships he lost quite early in the action (Indefatigable fourteen minutes in and Queen Mary 42 minutes in). The whole action until the Grand Fleet arrived last about two-and-one-half hours. You could certainly argue that the early British battlecruisers were not designed to be used the way Beatty had to use them (they were, after all, designed to fight nothing larger than a cruiser and were initially called "Dreadnought Armored Cruisers"). That they were misused was largely a factor of the decision to call them (as well as the better-armored "Cats") "battlecruisers," which allowed the RN to completely fool itself as to the adequacy of its battlecruiser numbers. Beatty took three battlecruisers and six dreadnought armored cruisers to hunt the five German battlecruisers, for the most part, and was probably lucky that he never found them. At Jutland he was fortunate to have three battlecruisers three dreadnought armored cruisers, and four fast battleships.
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