"HMS Lion" Topic

Nice job!

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From here
dioramasempire.skyrock.com

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Amicalement
Armand

Beautiful model of a badly designed ship.

Glad you like it my friend!. (smile)

Amicalement
ARmand

Yep – a beautiful and very flawed ship – well modeled (or did someone already say that?).

Glad you like it too my friend.

Amicalmeent
Armand

Badly designed??

The current view is that the British BCs exploded at Jutland due to bad ammunition handling practices, allowing turret penetrations to ignite improperly stowed cordite, leading to magazine explosions. These practices were implemented after Dogger Bank in an attempt to increase rate of hitting. The BCs' loss is now not thought to be due to deck or side armor penetrations. It has been plausibly suggested that none would have sunk otherwise. For example, it has been suggested that one reason why HMS Lion survived is that her captain had not allowed these bad ammunition handling practices. As a result the crew had time to secure the Q-turret magazine after the turret penetration. These practices had nothing to do with the basic design, and were apparently covered up after the battle to preserve the professional reputations of certain individuals.

For example, see Friedman at smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1591141885/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Mark H.

Inspection of LION after Jutland revealed a few technical faults in LION's turret design :
1 – The absence of flash-proof scuttles to pass charges from the magazine to the ammunition handling space meant that the magazine door had to be kept open while in action.
2 – The magazine was found not to be fully flash-proof, even though the door had been closed and clipped shut.
3 – The magazine bulkheads were found to have been buckled by the ammunition explosion, even though supported by the flooded volume behind.

Over-emphasis on rate of fire at the expense of prudent gun drill, wartime increases of ammunition outfits beyond the abilities of the ships to safely stow it, and a generally lax attitude toward Cordite brought upon by incorrect pre-war assurances that Cordite was a "safe" propellant (i.e. would not explode/deflagrate outside the confines of a gun breech) ….. all were indeed contributory causes ….. but IMO the principal factor in the losses of five ships by magazine explosion at Jutland was the unappreciated volatility of Cordite in the open when exposed to flash/flame. Official relaxation of the strict magazine and ammunition handling protocols handed down from the era of black powder propellant can be seen as early as the pre-WW1 pre-Jellicoe GFBO's which stated that the desirability of a rapid rate of fire outweighed the potential risk of an ammunition <<<FIRE>>> if hit; the notion of an explosion was not anywhere in the authors' calculus. Unhappily, Cordite proved to be much more volatile than limited pre-war industry and scientific tests appeared to indicate.

Re LION's experience of her near-fatal hit at Jutland, I recommend reading the Chapter 14 excerpt of Alexander Grant's memoir "Through the Hawsepipe". It's a freebie on the web.

FWIW.

B

Thanks for the reference to the Commander Grant account, which confirms what I read about the different ammunition handling practices used in Lion. Lion apparently had 30 minutes grace from the time of the hit to the time when charges started burning in the handling room (next to the then-mostly-flooded magazine). The other 3 BCs had from 4 minutes down to seconds, based on eyewitness accounts.

With respect to Lion's technical faults, note that German ships (and probably everyone else's for that matter) also had technical faults in this area. See page 163 of Staff's "German Battlecruisers of World War One", discussing post Dogger Bank changes made to Seydlitz. However, detail imperfections like this, which almost resulted in the loss of the ship, don't mean that Seydlitz was in general "badly designed".

Also, IMHO, British propellant issues are logically separate from the design of the ships themselves.

EDIT: Page 163 of "Fighting The Great War At Sea": "After Dogger Bank the fleet's solution was largely to turn a blind eye to magazine regulations. Visits by divers to the wreck of the Queen Mary confirmed that bare cartridges were strewn about her turrets, in direct violation of magazine regulations. Bare charges were placed in the turrets, in the working chambers, in the handling rooms below the turrets (placed there to break up the direct path between turret and magazine) and at the bottoms of the hoists. In effect the working chambers and handling rooms became ready-use magazines carrying unprotected charges. This was certainly done in the battlecruisers and apparently also on board some battleships. At least in some ships, doors between magazines and handling rooms were removed so that ships could fire more rapidly."

Mark H.

Hi Mark – I was not suggesting that Lion was a "badly designed" ship. I was only pointing out the technical faults identified in the turret design as remarked upon by post-battle inspection.

I do suggest, however, that there was a relationship between the new propellant and ship design. Whereas "black powder" had been in service use for literally several centuries and its dangerous nature quite well understood, nitrocellulose-based propellants were in their technological infancy. Cordite was enthusiastically adopted by the services because it offered so many important advantages over black powder, but its safety was unfortunately over-estimated. This over-estimation (IMO) led to certain assumptions about how ammunitions spaces for storage and handling of cordite might be most efficiently and economically designed for new construction intended to be armed with guns utilizing cordite propellant. Like everything else new, there was an inevitable learning curve, but progress along this particular learning curve unfortunately came at a considerable cost in lives.

Agree re the (in retrospect) wildly unsafe ammunition handling practices in the RN. It is pretty certain that these were in broad practice within the BCF. The situation in the GF remains uncertain, as, apart from Defence and Black Prince, no "notable events" occurred that would have drawn similar attention to the dreadnought line. There is, however, anecdotal evidence from a visitor aboard Agincourt that her situation was every bit as bad. Dreyer ("Sea Heritage") was pretty open in his commentary that up through Jutland there was no uniform code in place governing gunnery – every squadron or division or ship was apparently free to organize themselves in whatever way they saw fit.

FWIW.

B

In "Jutland 1916," (Steel, Nigel and Hart, Peter, Chapter 5, page 223), there is another anecdotal report of dangerous cordite handling in the Grand Fleet. A sailor in the working chamber of a turret in HMS Conqueror says there were dozens of cordite charges removed from cases to avoid slowing the rate of fire.