In the series of articles "Errors of British Shipbuilding", we examined in detail the advantages and disadvantages of the world's first battle cruisers of the "Invincible" class. Now let's look at what happened on the other side of the North Sea.
In February-April 1906, the British began to create Inflexible, Indomitebla and Invincible, announcing to the world the birth of a new class of warships - battle cruisers. And now Germany, a year after these events, begins the construction of a very strange ship - a large cruiser "Blucher", which in its combat qualities was significantly inferior to British ships. How could this have happened?
First, a little history. I must say that the German armored cruisers (with the exception of perhaps the "Furst Bismarck") up to and including "York", if they differed in something from the ships of the same class of other naval powers, it was the complete absence of any distinctive features. "Facelessness and moderation" - this is the phrase that comes to mind when reading the performance characteristics of German armored cruisers. The Furst Bismarck was big because it was specially created for the colonial service, and here a number of interesting analogies could be drawn with the British battleships of the 2nd class, and the Russian Peresvet. But, starting with Prince Henry, the concept of armored cruiser construction in Germany has changed radically - now the Kaiser's naval commanders have decided that they need an armored reconnaissance squadron, one for each battleship squadron.
This is why the armored cruisers in the Kaiserlichmarin were not numerous. From December 1898 to April 1903, only five ships of this class were laid down - Prince Heinrich, two Princes Adalbert and two Roon-class ships. They had a moderate displacement - from 8,887 t "Prince Henry" to 9,533 t "Roona" (hereinafter we are talking about normal displacement), moderate armament - 2 * 240-mm, and starting with the "Princes of Adalbert" - 4 * 210-mm main guns and 10 * 150-mm medium calibers, very moderate armor - the maximum thickness of the armor belt did not exceed 100 mm. The steam engines of these cruisers were supposed to give them a very moderate speed of 20-21 knots, but in fact it turned out even worse. "Prince Henry" "did not reach" the design 20 knots, showing 19, 92 knots, "Prince Adalbert" and "Friedrich Karl" with the planned 21 knots were able to develop only 20, 4 and 20, 5 knots, respectively, and only on ships of the type "York" managed to overcome the curse of not reaching contractual speeds: both cruisers exceeded the planned 21 knots, showing 21, 143 knots (Roon) and even 21, 43 knots ("York"). Nevertheless, and without any doubt, the German armored cruisers, against the background of British and French ships of the same class, looked very ordinary walkers.
On this, the unhurried progressive development of the German armored cruisers ended. The next ships of this class, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, again marked a change in concept and significantly differed from the ships of the previous series.
Firstly, the Germans again considered that they needed heavy ships for colonial service, and therefore tried to increase not only seaworthiness, which, generally speaking, was very good for the previous armored cruisers, but also the speed (up to 22, 5 knots). It was quite an interesting approach: the Germans believed that high speed was an attribute of an ocean raider, not a reconnaissance squadron.
Secondly, the Germans strengthened the armor, increasing the maximum thickness of the armor belt from 100 to 150 mm.
Thirdly, they increased the power of the artillery, adding four more of the same 210-mm cannons to the two 210-mm turrets in the casemate. In order to somehow compensate for the increase in weight, and also not to spend precious tons of displacement on additional armor to expand the casemates for new guns, the designers reduced the average caliber by the same number of barrels, leaving only six 150-mm guns.
All of the above led to the emergence of quite good armored raiders, but, of course, such an improvement in quality led to an increase in the size of ships. The last classic armored cruisers of Germany, which became the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, became significantly larger than the Yorks, with a normal displacement of 11,600 - 11,700 tons. days - January 3, 1905, the laying of the Scharnhorst took place. However, the next German armored cruiser, "Blucher", was laid down only on February 21, 1907, i.e. more than two years after the previous Scharnhorst. Why did it happen?
The fact is that the construction of ships in Kaiser's Germany was carried out in accordance with the "Law on the Fleet", which laid down the laying of new warships by year. At the beginning of the century, the second law was already in force, approved in 1900, and with the armored cruisers when it was adopted, a small problem arose.
Strictly speaking, no armored cruisers existed in Germany, but there were "large cruisers" ("Große Kreuzer"), which, in addition to the armored cruisers themselves, also included large armored cruisers. Alfred von Tirpitz, in those years not yet a Grand Admiral, but a State Secretary of the Navy, wanted to get from the Reichstag a shipbuilding program that would provide Germany by 1920 with a fleet of 38 battleships and 20 large cruisers. However, the Reihag did not agree with such an ambitious plan and the program was slightly curtailed, leaving only 14 large cruisers.
Accordingly, the schedule for their construction provided for the laying of one keel per year up to 1905 inclusive, in this case the number of large cruisers would be just 14, including:
1) Armored cruiser "Kaiserin Augusta" - 1 unit.
2) Armored cruisers of the Victoria Louise class - 5 units.
3) Armored cruisers from Furst Bismarck to Scharnhorst - 8 units.
After that, a pause was envisaged in the construction of large cruisers until 1910, because the next cruisers were to be laid down only to replace those that had already served their time, i.e. for the systematic replacement of ships in order to constantly maintain their number at 14. Accordingly, after the laying of the Scharnhorst, the "large cruisers" were planning a long shipbuilding vacation. However, the situation was corrected by the same restless von Tirpitz - in 1906 he “pushed through” a return to the original 20 “large cruisers” in the fleet, and their construction was resumed.
And here a whole series of questions arise. The fact is that the overwhelming majority of sources and publications describe the birth of the ninth armored cruiser in Germany as follows: the Germans knew about the construction of the Dreadnought and knew that the British had paired them with the latest armored cruisers of the Invincible class. But the British managed to misinform the Germans, and they believed that the Invincibles were like the Dreadnought, only with 234-mm artillery instead of 305-mm. Therefore, the Germans, who did not hesitate, laid a lightweight likeness of the Nassau with 210-mm cannons, and they were a loser, because the 210-mm Blucher, of course, was much inferior to the 305-mm Invincible.
The version is logical, everything seems to be the same in terms of timing - but why then does the same Muzhenikov mention in his monograph that "Blucher" was designed in 1904-1905, when no one had heard of any "Invincibles" yet? And the second question. If von Tirpitz obtained permission to resume the construction of new "large cruisers" in 1906, then why was the "Blucher" laid down only at the beginning of 1907? Unfortunately, in Russian-language sources there are no details of the design of the Blucher, and we can only speculate with varying degrees of reliability.
From publication to publication, a common phrase is quoted that the first German dreadnoughts "Nassau" were designed after it became known about the performance characteristics of the "Dreadnought":
“In the spring of 1906, when Dreadnought had already left the slipway, the design of a new squadron battleship with a total displacement of about 15,500 tons was being completed in Germany. However, having received information about the unprecedented tactical and technical characteristics of the British battleship, the Germans began to design a fundamentally new battleship. "Our Dreadnought has driven Germany into tetanus!" - stated Lord Fischer in a letter to King Edward VII in October 1907"
In fact, everything was "a little" wrong - the Germans came to the "dreadnought" concept and to "Nassau" on their own, although not in the same way as the British. In the early years of the twentieth century, the short era of enthusiasm for rapid-fire medium-caliber artillery was coming to an end. The world began to realize that 152-mm shells were too weak to cause significant damage to the battleship even if many of their hits. Therefore, the idea arose of increasing the average caliber, or supplementing it with larger, 203-234 mm guns. At one time, the first option seemed preferable to the Germans, and they increased the average caliber from 150-mm to 170-mm on their battleships such as "Braunschweig" and "Deutschland". The British took a different path, laying down the King Edward VII series of battleships, which had 10-152-mm and 4-234-mm guns instead of a dozen six-inch guns standard for British battleships.
The Germans could not ignore such powerful guns from their rivals, and so, at the beginning of March 1904, German designers are developing a new project of an battleship with an even more reinforced medium caliber. With a quite moderate displacement of 13,779 tons, the ship was armed with four 280-mm guns in two towers (in the bow and stern) and eight 240-mm guns in four towers in the middle of the ship, two towers on each side. In other words, the artillery in this project was located according to the same scheme as the towers of the "Nassau", but included both 280-mm and 240-mm cannons. The project did not envisage 150-170-mm artillery systems - only an anti-mine battery of 16 88th guns. The steam engines were supposed to provide the ship with a speed of 19.5 knots.
The leadership of the Kaiserlichmarine liked the project as a whole, but … they did not perceive the 240-mm guns as a medium caliber, reasoning quite logically that the battleship offered to their attention had two main calibers. Therefore, they proposed to revise the project in order to exclude the "two-caliber" battleship. It was in this not quite usual way that the Germans … what is most interesting, they never came to the concept of "all-big-gun".
The revised project was submitted for consideration in October 1905, and it looked extremely interesting. The designers replaced the two-gun 240-mm turrets with single-gun 280-mm: thus, the battleship received eight 280-mm guns, of which six could fire on one side. However, having pulled up the "second main caliber" to the "first", the Germans were not at all going to abandon the medium caliber and returned eight 170-mm cannons to the ship, marking them in casemates, which, in fact, does not allow this project to be attributed to the "all- big-gun ". Mine artillery consisted of twenty 88-mm guns. The displacement increased to 15,452 tons.
In principle, already at this stage we can say that the Germans designed their first, albeit a very weak dreadnought. But, having considered at the end of 1905 the submitted project of the 15.5 thousand-ton ship with eight 280-mm guns, the fleet rejected it … due to the weakness of the onboard salvo, in which only 6 main battery guns participated and which should have been made more powerful. After this demand from the fleet, the decision to remake the side towers from one to two-gun suggested itself, and in the end the Germans did just that. In 1906, the G.7.b project appeared, with a dozen 280-mm guns, which later became the "Nassau".
Thus, even before Germany knew the characteristics of the British "Dreadnought", the Germans came up with the concept of a heavy ship, with a speed of about 20 knots, armed with more than eight 280-mm main battery guns. Why, then, there was some delay in the laying of new ships of the line? Prior to that, the Germans, in full accordance with their "Law on the Fleet", annually laid the keels of new battleships, but they laid down their last battleship in 1905 (Schleswig-Holstein), and the first dreadnought only in July 1907.
The point here is not the Dreadnought at all, but the fact that the immediate transition from battleships to battleships of a new type in Germany was hampered by a number of reasons. The increase in the number of barrels of the main caliber required a sharp increase in displacement, and in fact ships do not appear out of nowhere and should not go away from the wall of the plant to nowhere. Before the laying of the Nassau, the Germans created battleships of very limited sizes, their shipyards and naval bases were focused on the construction and maintenance of ships with a normal displacement of no more than 15,000 tons. work, etc. No one in Germany wanted to start creating gigantic battleships in comparison with previous battleships, until there was confidence that the country would be able to build and operate new ships. But all this required money, and in addition to this, the new battleships had to significantly surpass the cost of the old battleships of the squadron, and this, too, had to be somehow regulated.
Why do we devote so much time to the first German dreadnoughts in the article on the armored cruiser Blucher? Only in order to show the dear reader that all the necessary prerequisites for the creation of "Blucher" in the form in which it was built existed already in 1904-1905. Already when designing the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the Germans had an understanding of the need to strengthen the artillery of their armored cruisers, and precisely by increasing the number of 210-mm guns. In 1904, Germany came up with the idea of placing 6 towers according to a rhombic scheme, in 1905 - about placing guns of one (280-mm) caliber in these towers, and at the same time they came to the conclusion that even eight guns located according to this scheme, all not enough.
But why did the Germans undertake to design their next armored cruiser on the eve of the "shipbuilding vacation", after all, after the Scharnhorst, according to the "Law on the Fleet", it was impossible to build new ships of this class until 1910? Von Tirpitz writes in his memoirs that the Reichstag rejected the construction of 6 cruisers "because it should have rejected something" and that in the course of the unfolding debate it was decided to return to re-examining this issue in 1906. In other words, von Tirpitz apparently hoped to return 6 "large cruisers" in the shipbuilding program, and therefore, it is likely that he wished to have a finished project of a new ship by 1906, so that it would be possible to build it without delay - as soon as the Reichstag permission was received.
"But excuse me!" - the attentive reader will note: “If von Tirpitz was in such a hurry to build cruisers, why then was the Blucher laid down not in 1906, but only in 1907? Something doesn't add up here!"
The thing is, the construction of ships in Germany took place a little differently than, for example, in Russia. In our country, the start of construction was usually considered the laying of the ship (although the official date of the laying did not always coincide with the actual start of work). But the Germans had it differently - the official bookmark was preceded by the so-called "Preparation of production and stocks", and this preparation was very long - for example, for "Scharnhorst" and "Gneisenau" it was about 6 months for each ship. This is a very long time for preparatory work and it seems that during the "preparation of production and slipway" the Germans also carried out work on the actual construction of the ship, that is, the date of laying the ship did not coincide with the date of the start of construction. This happened all the time in other countries - for example, built "in one year and one day" "Dreadnought" actually took much longer to build. Simply, the moment of the official bookmarking, from which the notorious "one year and one day" is usually counted, occurred much later than the actual start of construction of the ship - in fact, its creation began not on October 2, 1905 (the date of the official laying), but at the beginning May 1905 Thus, the period of its construction was not 12 months and 1 day, but 20 months, if we consider the end of construction not the date of the ship's acceptance by the fleet, but the date of the launch of sea trials (otherwise it should be admitted that the Dreadnought was under construction for 23 months).
Hence an interesting consequence. If the author of this article is right in his assumptions, then compare the construction time of domestic and German ships "head-on", i.e. from the dates of the bookmark to the date of commissioning is incorrect, since in fact the German ships took longer to build.
But back to Blucher. Unfortunately, Muzhenikov does not indicate the presence and duration of "preparation for production and stocks" for "Blucher", but if we assume the presence of this preparation lasting 5-6 months, by analogy with previous armored cruisers, then, taking into account the date of the laying of "Blucher" (1907-21-02), it is obvious that its creation began much earlier, i.e. back in 1906. Consequently, no "tetanus" happened to the Germans - von Tirpitz convinced the Reichstag of the need for 20 "large cruisers" for the fleet, and soon after that construction work began on the "Blucher"
Still, I would like to note that what has been said about Blucher is not a selection of reliable facts, but the author's reflections and guesses, which could only be clarified by work in the Bundesarchives. But in any case, we see that Muzhenikov's words that the Blucher project was created in 1904-1905 do not at all contradict the general trends in the development of the German navy. And if the author is right in his assumptions, the Invincible project did not have much influence on the Blucher development, since the Germans designed their ship long before information about the first British battle cruisers appeared.
The desire of the British to present the matter as if both "Nassau" and "Blucher" were created under the influence of the achievements of British naval thought, nevertheless, most likely, has no foundation at all. In the case of "Nassau" this can be asserted for sure, as for "Blucher" - in the opinion of the author of this article, this was the case. The Germans quite independently came up with the idea of an armored cruiser with at least 4 twin-turret 210-mm guns and a speed of 25 knots.
Then, when "reliable" data about the Invincible became known - supposedly, this cruiser is a copy of the Dreadnought, with only 234th artillery, the Germans probably congratulated themselves on how perfectly they guessed the development trends of "large cruisers" and approved for Blucher six 210-mm turrets, arranged in a diamond pattern, like the Nassau. And then, when the true tactical and technical characteristics of the Invincible-class ships became clear, they grabbed their heads, because, of course, the Blucher was not equal to them.
