"1914 Alternate Naval Scenario Idea" Topic

The classic is to have Italy fight with the Central Powers in 1914, with Goeben joining the Italian and Austro-Hungarian Fleets to challenge France for supremacy in the Mediterranean and prevent the French armies in Africa being brought back to Europe. Turkey stays neutral because the Brits don't nick their battleships so the RN has two fewer dreadnoughts and can spare little, if anything, for the Med while facing off against the High Seas Fleet.

My favorite WWI what-if. I've gamed parts of this situation as mini-campaigns, and tried a few different ways to write it into a full campaign. I have all the ships to play it in 1/6000.

I didn't give the Turks (or South Americans) their battleships, because I don't think the UK would have let them go – especially not if Italy honored the Triple Alliance. Turkey was just not a big enough threat to Europe (and least of all Britain) to be worth giving up naval domination. The only way the Royal Navy was going to let go of Agincourt, Canada and Erin was if the war started after they were delivered. Trying to work out how the strategic situation would have changed to effect those circumstances was beyond me, and probably still is.

Rather, I did assume that the Triple Alliance naval agglomeration would present a strategic crisis to France and Britain, and the RN would have to send more forces to Gibraltar or Malta. I painted up a huge force of the most modern pre-dreadnoughts as one option, and a mixed force of older BCs (Invincible/Inflexible classes) and older dreadnoughts (Dreadnought, Neptune, the Bellerophons and the Colossi) as another. I assumed the force of pre-dreadnoughts could be any size desired to balance the scenario, but keep the numbers down for the BC/BB option (2-3x BCs & one division of 4x BBs).

I am especially attached to the idea of HMS Dreadnought serving in the Med. She was hopelessly obsolete in the North Sea, but still in rough parity with Dante Alighieri, and possibly the Teghettoffs.

For both sides, coordination would have been a serious problem. I would give an edge to the British & French over any force containing Italians, and to any force of purely German-speaking ships. My favorite idea is to have each nation controlled by a separate player, make the most competent naval gamers German & British, and give each player slightly divergent goals, so that players naturally tend to ruin each other's plans out of self-interest. I never got to test any of these ideas in play, unfortunately.

- Ix

One of the other fun things to contemplate: if the Royal Navy sends a significant force to the Med to support France and protect the Suez/Malta/Gibraltar lifeline, the forces in the North Sea become a lot more even, and engagement with the HSF more perilous for Britain.

- Ix

This game was based on that premise, done about 6 years ago:

link

And again about 4 years ago:
link

"This fleet action is based on the Triple Alliance naval convention of 1913, as described in "The Great War at Sea" by Sondhaus. The plan was for the Italian and Austro-Hungarian fleets and any German ships in the Mediterranean to engage the French Fleet and block the Algerian troop transports. This scenario assumes that the war starts in February 1914, and that the British Mediterranean squadron joins the French."

You could also consider some alternates with Coronel.

An actual historic possibility using existing OOB's could have happened with Craddock falling back on Canopus although your rules probably need to reflect her miserable condition.

Another could be where Churchill actually isn't a doofus about the condition/utility of Canopus and sends several of the most modern of the armored cruisers such as Defense, Warrior and Shannon and you could also postulate that the Germans realized Blucher was unsuited to run with the battle cruisers and have sent her to Spee.

Blücher should have been relegated to the Baltic, but I had a what-if that gave her to Souchon in the Med, where she's more of an even match with potential enemies. This then provides the nucleus of a powerful German cruiser squadron when von Spee skirts around the Falklands without bombarding it, sneaks through the Strait of Gibraltar at night, and drops anchor in the Adriatic alongside Göben in early 1915. I even had a scenario planned where the Triple Alliance runs a bunch of large raids simultaneously to draw off British and French naval forces and give von Spee a better change to enter the Mediterranean without interception. Unfortunately, I never painted von Spee's squadron, so I haven't actually gamed this out.

- Ix

The odds in the North Sea were never closer than in the first months of the war. It was very close to a 1:1 ratio for several months, where battleships were concerned.

The older battlecruisers generally started the war abroad, fulfilling their design function to seek and destroy cruisers. They only came to the UK as the oceans emptied of German heavy cruisers.

I didn't consider it much of a stretch to posit them being gathered in the Med instead, to counter a growing German cruiser force such as the one I proposed above (Souchon plus von Spee) and bolster the French navy against it's Triple Alliance opponents. The newer battlecruisers (Lions, Tiger, Queen Mary) were more than a match for their German HSF counterparts, and keeping up in numbers. Invincibles and Indefatigables would have been reasonably effective in the cockpit of the Mediterranean, and more than a match for the lighter Triple Alliance armored cruiser designs, and until a Jutland-style disaster they'd have been considered a reasonable match for many of the Triple Alliance dreadnoughts.

- Ix

Hi nine pound round,
IIRC (please don't ask me to unearth my files on this; God knows where they are at this point) but I believe that November 1915 was Germany's best opportunity, with the Grand Fleet undergoing a troublesome "consideritis" epidemic with several drednoughts laid up for repairs.

Try Corbett and/or Jellicoe's "Grand Fleet" for details.

B

Hi Yellow Admiral,
IIRC, Invincible and Inflexible were at Cromarty in the beginning of Nov 1914. Orders (issued by Fisher) for Sturdee to take command of Invincible and Inflexible and urgently proceed to South American waters to hunt down von Spee were issued after news of the Coronel debacle had been received at the Admiralty.

FWIW.

B

Inflexible, Indomitable and Indefatigable were stationed in the Med until taking up duties (individually) in the UK during 1915; HMAS Australia was in the Pacific and didn't reach the UK until 1915; New Zealand and Invincible were in the UK in Aug 1914, but Invincible was finishing a refit for the first week, and a couple months later in November was sent away to hunt von Spee, returning to the UK in early 1915. I stand by my generalization that they "started the war abroad, fulfilling their design function to seek and destroy cruisers".

All that said, Fisher's theory of their use was proven right, and even brilliant. The battlecruisers started the war at imperial home bases (UK, Med and Australia), were able to rebase quickly to far-flung reaches of the globe to hunt enemy raiders, and had the entire world's oceans cleared of armored enemy ships in less than half a year. As he had advocated, they did indeed obviate the need for a global network of extensive (and expensive) foreign stations full of battleships and heavy cruisers.

- Ix

To elaborate on that theme a bit:

Royal Navy battlecruisers were kept in the Med until it was certain that Göben was neutralized; the last BC (Inflexible) wasn't released until the Dardanelles was fully blockaded by battleships (and subs, cruisers, torpedo craft, mines, etc.). This is part of my support for reasoning that in a Triple Alliance nightmare scenario, the Royal Navy would have assembled a Mediterranean squadron at least superior to the German squadron of the Triple Alliance fleet (minimum 2x BCs plus ACs), and preferably superior to any individual squadron of the entire Triple Alliance fleet. I think a squadron of 4x BCs would have been seen as such (until/unless a Jutland-style disaster proved otherwise), and sufficient to back up a very large fleet of pre-dreadnought battleships (12-16? maybe more?). As the Grand Fleet filled up with newer battleships, some of the older (and/or odder) dreadnoughts could have been assembled in the Med to provide a British dreadnought squadron there as well. Assuming France didn't fall too quickly, I think it's safe to posit British battlefleets in both the North Sea and the Mediterranean sufficiently powerful to face the HSF and the Triple Alliance without assistance.

In the event that France fell to the Triple Alliance, it may also not be much of a stretch to assume some sort of WWII-style "Free French" force absconding to Britain to continue fighting. Anti-German resentment was built into the French character, and WWII showed that the French would rather scuttle their ships than allow them to become German or Italian fleet units. I doubt there would have been any whole fleets defecting, but it's fun to imagine individual ships or even squadrons surrendering after a token "resistance" to British ships and sailing meekly to British ports for internment. Surrendered French dreadnoughts would almost certainly have been incorporated into the Royal Navy as prizes, perhaps even with French crews volunteering to re-enlist in the Royal Navy.

I freely use WWII as a guide to WWI alternative histories (and vice versa, actually). Tactics and political ideologies morphed, but the general strategic problems were very similar, and either war can serve as a rough "do over" guide for the other.

- Ix

It's worth considering the land campaigns that would have resulted from Italy joining the war in mid-1914. Land campaigns tend to guide naval campaigns.

Italy probably would have opened a French front as soon as possible. This is a severe danger to France, and if France falls early our naval campaign is probably over. Historically, Italy was slow to mobilize, so the offensive-minded French army might have opened the front first, but I would expect the French side of the Italian front to be purely defensive until much later in the war. For maximum naval gaming fun, I have always posited a quick French reaction to build the Italian front into a gigantic fortress of mountain passes and trench systems which could be held by smaller forces using murderous modern technology (MGs and artillery), resulting in a situation as static as the Italian/Austro-Hungarian front was IRL. I also assumed the A-H troops mostly going east and south to match Austria-Hungary's own interests in Balkans and Russia (and perhaps shortening the land campaigns in those areas).

I presume a North African theater would arise. A quick conquest of Libya by French and British colonial troops seems to be the most likely result, but there are a couple hitches worth considering. France and Britain were both strapped for ground troops in 1914, whereas Italy's army had only one front to fight on, and would have outnumbered its opponent there. It's just possible Italy might have been able to spare troops to send to Libya, either to defend it or to attack Egypt or Tunisia or something. The naval component of this campaign is a fun thought exercise. The old Italian battleships Italia and Lepanto were designed to haul an entire division of troops each; they were completely decommissioned as warships long before 1914, but still in reserve, and could quickly have been converted to fast troop transports with their own integral artillery support.

Italy had a strong irredentist (revanchist) movement and entered WWI to "take back" territories. IRL that meant taking Istria/Trieste, Dalmatia and a bunch of Adriatic islands from Austria-Hungary; in the Triple Alliance, that would probably mean trying for North African colonies, Malta, Corsica, parts of Alpine or transalpine France (e.g. the old "Italian" regions of Nice and Savoy Italy ceded to Napoleon III's France), and so on.

British Malta would also have been the same impediment to Italian communications with Africa as it was in WWII (though naval only, no airpower), making it a doubly attractive target for invasion. A WWI amphibious operation to capture Malta is a whole campaign by itself, and might make a mighty interesting wargame. Gallipoli and Operation Albion would be good guides for how that might go, though I doubt the WWI Italian army would be as efficient as the Allies or Germans.

Going in the other direction, the Allies might attempt an invasion of Sicily as a way to tie down Italian forces, relieve pressure on Allied Mediterranean possessions, and threaten southern Italian ports (especially Messina, Palermo and Syracuse). The WWII campaign for Sicily can give a lot of insights into how this might have gone – esp. landing sites, important ports, naval supply lines, amphibious flank attacks around static defensive lines, etc. (Side note: there were no eruptions of Etna during WWI, but nobody at the time could have predicted that, so a volcanic eruption could be a random event with campaign effects. Earthquakes in Sicily can also be very destructive.)

Finally, it's a good idea to study the maps for unexpected strategic locations. We might naturally assume the Triple Alliance main base would be Trieste, Pola or Taranto, but a very bold Triple Alliance naval C-in-C might prefer to stage the fleet closer to French waters and Malta, such as Augusta or Palermo (Sicily), or Cagliari (Sardinia).

- Ix

Turkey is the, ah, key
If they get their ships, they stay neutral and given their historical ties with Britain, there is a good chance the Dardanelles will stay open. I'd see the Russian Black SEa fleet crossing into the Med, while Austria Hungary's situatin gets more desperate as more Russian land forces can be brought to bear. Russia can also receive from the West the weapons it lacked, making it doubly interesting for the Triple Alliance.
The Western Front stays Germany's best bet of winning the war, given the France has to mind its Itallian front, but if we can draw comparisons with WW2, an Italian offensive has no assurance of success. If the Schlieffen plan doesn't deliver, we get on the whole a more favourable situation for the Entente, with French and Russians checking the Italian and Austrian naval forces in the Med….

Hi YA,
Please know that I have zero desire to start any sort of debate. I fully agree with your point that the primary function of the first generation of Dreadnought Armoured Cruisers, as conceived by Fisher, was to clear the imperial oceanic trade lanes of enemy raiding cruisers in time of war. Sir Roger Bacon, who was literally at the scene of events, made that quite clear in his biography of Fisher

My intent was simply to clarify time-lines related to the dispatch of Invincible and Inflexible to the Falklands.

B

YA,

The question of Italy honoring its alliance commitments has been a fascinating one for me ever since I discovered Avalon Hill's "1914" contained counters for three Italian corps. The challenges of an offensive against France would be as great as they were against Austria, but the absence of an Italian front would be an enormous relief to the Dual Monarchy.

If you can read French, you might find this website, illustrating pre-Maginot French fortifications, to be interesting; if not, you will certainly find the photos and maps to be fascinating:

fortiffsere.fr/index.htm

Blutarski,

I checked Marder, who puts the battleships at 17 to 15, and the battle cruisers at 5 to 4, plus Blucher. I would say that is very close. I think the Brits would have been handicapped with bad shells at that point, but not so sure about the flash problems- IIRC, the removal of the magazine scuttles and the storage of unprotected charges outside the magazines were post-Dogger Bank measures. So if you want a really close match, at a point when it could have exercised decisive impact on the course of the war, October, 1914 is it.

Hi Nine pound round,
Based upon my studies, it is my opinion that SOME at least of the unpleasant issues that manifested themselves at Jutland would have been in play in November 1915 -

> (For certain) Bad British AP projectiles – i.e.
(a) shell body prone to break up at obliquity angles greater than 20deg to any plate =/> one-third projectile caliber; (b) lyddite filling prone to premature detonation due to shock of initial impact against heavy armor. This is not to say that the shells were useless, but their effect could/would be very considerably reduced when striking armor.

> (For certain) Cordite volatility and risk of violent deflagration. This phenomenon had multiple parents: the formulation of WW1 Cordite (altered post-WW1); contamination problems found with wartime industrially mass-produced Cordite + lax shipboard ammunition handling habits that arose from the mistaken belief that Cordite was a "safe" propellant (i.e. – would burn but not violently deflagrate).

> Stowage of "ready use" ammunition (a half-dozen rounds in the main battery turrets or twenty rounds or so per 6-inch gun in each casemate, for example, was common practice; the secondary 6-inch battery hoists could only supply at a rate three rounds per minute (separate loading), while the guns could fire at 5-6 rpm.

I agree that a Q4 1915 time-line would provide a "spine-tingling" scenario. Glad to know that my memory still works reasonably well.

Send us an AAR!

B

P.S. – Did not Mussolini's army bump their heads against those same French defenses on the Franco-Italian border in 1940?

B,

I am unfortunately reliant on secondary sources (Marder and Friedman in particular), so I would be interested to hear your views. Marder seemed to think the point of closest parity came in October, 1914, and the numbers I cited above reflect that judgment. I tend to accept Friedman's judgment that the catastrophic casualties at Jutland followed not just from the cordite instability issue, but from the removal of flashtight protection after Dogger Bank. There certainly were ammunition fires in ships throughout the war, but it seems like they did not necessarily result in a catastrophic deflagration in cases where there was not a clear path to an open magazine (e.g., "Warspite's" 6" battery at Jutland, "Kent's" small fire at the Falklands, "Lion" at Jutland). The cases of catastrophic deflagration outside of that action seem to have come from either the spontaneous combustion of deteriorating ammunition in a magazine ("Vanguard" or "Natal") or careless stowage of ammunition with a clear path to a magazine, and some lost incident that translates into a fatal casualty ("Bulwark").

It's been awhile since I read "Up the Hawse Pipe," but my recollection is that while Grant certainly convinced the officers aboard "Lion" that more care was needed in the handling of propellant, I cannot for the life of me recall whether he persuaded them to re-install anti flash measures (and whether those measures contributed to her survival). I feel like he at least persuaded them to keep the magazine doors shut, but not certain about that.

More later-

The interesting thing about a fall 1914 scenario is that it represents just about the best chance for Germany to achieve a short-run victory. I would guess that the Germans enjoy a very slight qualitative edge in some areas, but both fleets are essentially prewar- it is the classic "Armageddon" envisioned by Fisher and Tirpitz, but I will have some work to do in getting those ships painted.

You're right about the French border fortifications: they were sufficient to hold off the Italians for a short time, but as with the Maginot Line, the real action was elsewhere. One interesting aspect to their history is how many of the interwar French and Italian fortifications remained in some kind of limited commission on their respective eastern frontiers through the end of the Cold War- sometimes as storage points, but also, I suspect, as last ditches against a Soviet breakthrough.

I recently played a boardgame that explores some of these issues, Decision Games "Nine Navies War" (2007); Three Times.

War at Sea for WW I basically.

The biggest problem is the Tactical 1st Turn Gunnery advantage the Germans (Only) receive; Given the known flaws in British shells, not unrealistic, but the one time I achieved a "Der Tag" in the North Atlantic, it went very, very badly for Jellicoe.

The entire 5th BS (QE Class, except the Queen Elizabeth herself), sunk. Oops. Plus other losses.

Even without (German) captured ex-French ships, I am not sure if the British have enough forces to co divert to the Mediterranean to control the Italians & Austrians. There are just so many Italian & Austrian pre-dreadnoughts and CD ships, lots of sailors dog paddling while singing their National Anthems.

The "best" strategy seems to be for the British to avoid the High Seas Fleet, while trying to control the Mediterranean. Research will continue.

Was going to set up "Jutland" using it over the weekend, but my second vaccination shot pretty much wiped me out.

Nice, simplistic map for a campaign game too.

Hi Nine pound round,
My apologies. You are absolutely correct that it was Oct/Nov 1914 when the strength gap between the GF and the HSF was at its narrowest.

Per Jellicoe's "Grand Fleet 1914-1916" (pg 151) -

"The Grand Fleet was considerably weakened at this time apart from the loss of the Audacious. The Ajax had developed condenser defects; the Iron Duke had similar troubles; the Orion had to be sent to Greenock for examination of the turbine supports, which appeared to be defective; the Conqueror was at Devonport refitting, and the New Zealand was in dock at Cromarty. The Erin and Agincourt, having been newly commissioned, cound not yet be regarded as efficient, so that the Dreadnought Fleet only consisted of 17 effective battleships and 5 battle cruisers; the German Dreadnought Fleet at the time comprised 15 battleships and 4 battle cruisers, with the Blucher in addition. The margin of superiority was, therefore, unpleasantly small in view of the fact that the High Sea Fleet possessed 88 destroyers and the Grand Fleet only 42."

B

BTW, if you do not have a copy of Jellicoe's a/m book, you can get a free PDF download from Archive.org.

B

That's exactly the information Marder included. Thanks for the advice re: Jellicoe, I will have to check it out.

9pr wrote -
I am unfortunately reliant on secondary sources (Marder and Friedman in particular), so I would be interested to hear your views.

>>>>> Anyone studying this period is reliant upon secondary sources, myself included; primary source archival material is hard to access and definitely represents a minority of my collection. As far as secondary sources go, there has IMO been a renaissance of high quality secondary work over recent decades whose beginning can probably be marked by Campbell's "Jutland: an Analysis of the Fighting" published back in the 80s. And God bless Gary Staff for his work on Imperial German Navy

- – -

Marder seemed to think the point of closest parity came in October, 1914, and the numbers I cited above reflect that judgment.

>>>>> See my earlier 'mea culpa' post … :-)

- – -

I tend to accept Friedman's judgment that the catastrophic casualties at Jutland followed not just from the cordite instability issue, but from the removal of flashtight protection after Dogger Bank.

>>>>> I think that the propellant disasters experienced by the RN during the period in question was the result of a 'conspiracy' of multiple factors:
> Cordite, introduced circa 1890 as a great breakthrough in chemical science was, apart from its immensely greater power compared to the existing mechanical powders (black powder, brown powder, prismatic powders, etc) was also viewed as a much safer powder than the old mechanical powders. Black powder was HIGHLY dangerous and required the most careful handling. Going back at least to the 18th century, RN warship magazines were fitted with rotating flash-proof scuttles through which charges were passed out in time of action; charges while in transport to the guns were carried in leather cases. Early scientific tests appeared to demonstrate that, once set alight, cordite would burn but not violently deflagrate (unfortunately the tests did not address the case of large amounts of cordite burning in confined spaces. See Frederick Noble's lecture on cordite in "Artillery and Explosives" for the gory details – in essence, cordite, once set alight, would "burn" even underwater or in the absence of oxygen. In doing so, it would converted itself into a mixture of volatile gases that would themselves violently deflagrate when a certain pressure had been achieved – hence the importance of confined spaces in producing a violent deflagration event.
> The perceived 'safety' of cordite inspired the idea within the navy that much higher rates of fire (we are talking pre-1914 thinking here) were now achievable without the need for time-consuming special measures previously observed in handling mechanical powders. A number of officers felt that an occasional 'fire' was an acceptable risk in exchange for an overall material increase in rate of fire; the possibility of 'explosion' was never considered in any of the correspondence I have read on this issue. Rapidity of fire ultimately became a watch-phrase in the navy.
> Over-enthusiastic (and perhaps lax) handling of propellant on the part of those responsible for ammunition handling almost certainly played an important role. Magazine doors were left open; excessive numbers of charges were removed from their (presumably) flash-proof cases and piled bare all around the handing rooms to ensure that supply to the guns would not falter. I'm sure that circumvention and outright removal of anti-flash hardware also came into play

- – -

There certainly were ammunition fires in ships throughout the war, but it seems like they did not necessarily result in a catastrophic deflagration in cases where there was not a clear path to an open magazine (e.g., "Warspite's" 6" battery at Jutland, "Kent's" small fire at the Falklands, "Lion" at Jutland).

>>>>> Indeed, there were numerous cases of propellant fires in secondary batteries. Re HMS Kent at the Falklands – The following account is taken from the book "The Enemy Fought Splendidly", T. B. Dixon's published diary of his service aboard HMS Kent – "The fore passage shook again and again to explosions which seemed just above our heads. We had closed down to 3,000 yards I had heard afterwards. Two badly burnet men came down to us after this and we heard how a shell had come into the A3 casemate, set fire to the cordite there [ready-use ammunition!] and every man in the casemate was burnet, one man being dead. <snip> Down below we went over to the starboard side therefore and found the passage running with water which had come down from A3 in the efforts to put the fire out. Sergeant Mayes did an act here which I hope will get him the V.C. A flaming cordite charge came down the hoist with a sheet of flame. The ammunition party retreated at once. The sergeant, however, seized the flaming cordite and threw it clear of the other cordite lying in the passage and then closed the watertight doors, thus saving an explosion and severe fire." Lucky ship.

Both Warspite and Malaya suffered propellant fires [more ready-use ammunition] in 6-inch secondary casemate batteries; in the case of Malaya, her entire starboard battery was burnt out. To the best of my knowledge, no British ship was explicitly lost to a fire in her secondary battery

Main battery hits were another matter, however, and sparked a heated post-battle exchange of correspondence between Beatty and the Admiralty. Despite my disdain for Beatty as a combat leader, he was IMO a highly intelligent and insightful man [you may be able to find the correspondence @ Tone Lovell's "Dreadnought Project website]. Beatty made a compelling argument, pointing out that all the major British warships (5, nearly 6) lost at Jutland had succumbed to catastrophic main battery magazine explosions (the term ‘deflagration' sounds a bit snobbish to me after a while) after relatively short periods under fire. By comparison, no German warship sunk by British gunfire during the entire war had been lost to magazine explosion; this included Gneisenau at the Falklands and Blucher at Dogger Bank – both literally shot to smithereens at point blank range by major caliber gunfire, and Lutzow and Seydlitz at Jutland – each having suffered numerous major caliber hits (20+ each?) over the course of the battle. [Lutzow was still afloat and scuttled by torpedo after proving untowable].

The Admiralty chose to lay the blame on inadequate armor protection rather than concede that their standard service propellant was dangerously unstable. Nevertheless the RN closely analyzed the German RP/C12 propellant soon after the war and altered the formulation of cordite [Cordite MD > Cordite SC] to incorporate several special chemical additives found in the German propellant.

Another important factor in the cordite drama is that the huge expansion of cordite production after the outbreak of the war represented something that Great Britain was not really equipped to undertake; no domestic chemical manufacturing enterprises had either the necessary physical production capacity or a management sufficiently experienced to manage such a program. As a result, gigantic new production facilities were created from scratch in a great rush, overseen by inexperienced management and staffed by workers wholly ignorant of the chemical industry (many women, for example, were put to work in this field). Studies of the quality of cordite produced over the first half or so of the war turned up many cases of poor quality. At first it was the use of waste cotton; this was soon replaced by clean carded cotton. But the worst was the discovery of contamination by fine iron particles, which would chemically react with ingredients in the finished cordite and de-stabilize it.

- – -

The cases of catastrophic deflagration outside of that action seem to have come from either the spontaneous combustion of deteriorating ammunition in a magazine ("Vanguard" or "Natal") or careless stowage of ammunition with a clear path to a magazine, and some lost incident that translates into a fatal casualty ("Bulwark").

>>>>> Could easily have been both culprits operating simultaneously at Jutland. Also, although I cannot point to any smoking gun (to coin a phrase) evidence, I have over the years run across occasional passing references to wartime issuance of stocks of "old" cordite Mark 1, which was a much hotter burning propellant (very high nitroglycerine content compared to the ‘de-tuned' cordite MD). Cordite Mark 1 had been dropped because it was found to be playing havoc with barrel life. Just tossing it out there.

- – -

It's been awhile since I read "Up the Hawse Pipe," but my recollection is that while Grant certainly convinced the officers aboard "Lion" that more care was needed in the handling of propellant, I cannot for the life of me recall whether he persuaded them to re-install anti flash measures (and whether those measures contributed to her survival). I feel like he at least persuaded them to keep the magazine doors shut, but not certain about that.

>>>>> IIRC, Grant's story (some dispute Grant's account; I stand neutral) is that when he was assigned to Lion he found the conduct of the gun crews dangerously and unacceptably lax in connection with management of the magazines. Compartments left unlocked, smoking in unauthorized areas, poor custody of keys to sensitive compartments, dangerous propellant handling habits in firing practices (un-casing large numbers of cordite from their cases in the handing rooms before they were actually needed), creating a hopeless confusion of mixed up powder indexes (which would adversely affect gun accuracy. So bad was the index problem, Grant claimed that he had the entire propellant allotment of HMS Lion off-loaded and replaced by fresh, properly indexed charges. This brought him to the attention of his superior aboard Lion (Chatfield? Longhurst? can't remember) who was none too pleased about the uproar. Grant made his case, and his boss IIUC basically told him that if he could maintain the existing rate of fire standard under the safer handling procedures, he would be agreeable – which Grant says he was able to accomplish.

Based upon what I've read about Lion's Q Turret experience, what saved Lion was that the magazine had been flooded. Supposedly, the magazine door and magazine bulkhead (without the backing of the water in the magazine proper) were capable of withstanding fire, but not the blast over-pressure when the four charges in the turret hoists deflagrated.

Whew ….. long post.

B

Postscript – After Dogger Bank, Beatty and Chatfield were very unhappy about the poor performance the BCs had put on and concluded that rapidity of fire had to be dramatically increased. In that sense, they were enthusiastic supporters of the idea of rapid fire, just not really the originators.

I have been looking for the gunnery/spotting instructions formulated for the BCF by Chatfield between Dogger Bank and Jutland for 30+ years without success. I would REALLY like to see them, if any copy indeed still exists.

B

Re: spotting instructions

Chatfield, "The Navy and Defence," Chapter XV, page 138:
"There were no universal, or standardised rules for spotting the salvoes on to the enemy. Almost every gunnery officer, certainly every squadron, had its own idea. It was not, however, until after the Battle of Jutland that we solved the problem with unanimity. Meanwhile certain rules for spotting were established in the battle-cruisers by a committee of gunnery officers I set up under Commander Bailey. About the same time the Battle-Fleets, using our experience, took a corresponding step and eventually a standard system of spotting rules was ordained for the whole Grand Fleet."

It is not clear to me if ‘Meanwhile' refers to before or after Jutland. Are these the instructions you mentioned? It certainly would be useful to see them.

PS: Item 169 in the Beatty Papers (Vol I) says that the committee was set up in response to Beatty's order of 31 May 1916. The advance report is dated 22 June 1916, and does include some spotting suggestions. Presumably you are looking for something earlier that would have been used at Jutland.

Hi NCC1717,

Re: spotting instructions
Chatfield, "The Navy and Defence," Chapter XV, page 138:
"There were no universal, or standardised rules for spotting the salvoes on to the enemy. Almost every gunnery officer, certainly every squadron, had its own idea."

>>>>> Frederic Dreyer ("The Sea Heritage") makes very much the same comment regarding the state of gunnery affairs in the GF prior to Jutland.

"It was not, however, until after the Battle of Jutland that we solved the problem with unanimity. Meanwhile certain rules for spotting were established in the battle-cruisers by a committee of gunnery officers I set up under Commander Bailey. About the same time the Battle-Fleets, using our experience, took a corresponding step and eventually a standard system of spotting rules was ordained for the whole Grand Fleet."

It is not clear to me if ‘Meanwhile' refers to before or after Jutland. Are these the instructions you mentioned? It certainly would be useful to see them.

PS: Item 169 in the Beatty Papers (Vol I) says that the committee was set up in response to Beatty's order of 31 May 1916. The advance report is dated 22 June 1916, and does include some spotting suggestions. Presumably you are looking for something earlier that would have been used at Jutland.

>>>>> I do not believe that Item 169 in the "Beatty Papers" relates to Chatfield's page 138 passage in "The Navy and Defence". Chatfield's use of the term "meanwhile" suggests a time prior to Jutland and I suspect that the 31 May authorization of Beatty may actually relate to the underlined phrase below. I might be wrong, but it is difficult to imagine that the very first truly long-range battle-cruiser engagement in the history of mankind was not very closely examined after the fact … especially given the unsatisfactory gunnery experience experienced by the British. Strictly my opinion, of course.

Based upon the official copy (CB272), the post-Jutland "Spotting Rules 1916", derived from the proceedings of ‘The final Committee on spotting rules", were authorized in September 1916 under Jellicoe's authority, apparently consisting of analysis and discussion by up to three different committees. Jellicoe's CB272 introductory reads as follows -

"The attached report of the final Committee on spotting rules, in which I fully concur, is circulated for information and guidance.

The first two Committees were representative in every respect, and were in practical agreement with the conclusions reached.

2. It is my direction that the system and rules described, which are based upon the experience of action, are to be adopted at once in every ship of the Grand Fleet, and the control parties are to be thoroughly exercised in carrying out this procedure.

3. I must once more lay the strongest emphasis on the fact that nothing less than absolute perfection in drill and organization and condition of materiel can be accepted if full value is to be obtained from our fire."

I am actually interested in what I believe to have been earlier proceedings of BCF "gunnery committees" organized by Chatfield and under the supervision of Cdr Sidney Bailey, as mentioned in Chatfield's memoir "The Navy and Defence". The language of the relevant paragraph, which you so kindly provided (IMO) dates the creation of these committees after Dogger Bank, but well before Jutland. One would assume that these groups were not idle during that period. I would be greatly interested to learn what conclusions were drawn, what alterations, if any, in existing gunnery method were adopted, and whether any of it was put to use at Jutland. According to Yates, the BCF records were massively ‘sanitized' in the course of the post-WW1 political contretemps between the Beatty and Jellicoe factions over who was ‘responsible' for Jutland; Sidney Bailey appears to have unfortunately left no document archive for posterity.

B

The interesting thing, in my mind, is the ammunition handling and the flashlight measures. A lot of sources suggest that both were relaxed in the BCF after Dogger Bank, but I haven't ever seen a memo that proves it (or, for that matter, shows that the procedures had become too lax before Dogger Bank, which is also possible).

Friedman's "British Battleships, 1906-1945" is categorical in putting the blame on handling practices and flashtight measures. Interestingly, he quotes from Jellicoe's memoirs on the practice of keeping every cage and holding position in the turret trunks full, suggesting that this was not just a BCF issue, but a wider practice in the Grand Fleet (which I don't think I have seen before- I tend to remember it being attributed specifically to the BCF). Friedman agrees with the DNO's view, which was that bad magazine practices caused the loss of three BCs, and he views Jellicoe and Beatty's post-battle emphasis on protection as an effort to divert attention away from practices they were both responsible for (although the same could be said about DNO's responsibility for powder quality, I suppose). Friedman also notes that a lot of documentation relating to the magazine and ammo handling practices failed to survive, but that there were definitely orders given after Jutland to reinstall flashtight protections that had been removed.

None of which answers the question we are interested in, unfortunately- but it does make you think about how chillingly close Lion and (probably) Tiger came to disaster at Jutland. I suppose the controversy around Grant's account stems from the statement in his memoir that he gave the order to flood Q Turret (rather than Maj Harvey, who was posthumously decorated for giving the same order). I don't know about that, but his description of sorting out intermixed powder lots (and his appreciation for what that would do to accuracy) rings very true to me. It is not an uncommon problem.

One other point of possible interest- I pulled out John Roberts' "Battlecruisers," which gives a fairly good description of the Q turret deflagration in Lion. He says that eight full charges ignited. His description of the ignition is interesting: ""….about thirty minutes after the initial explosion, ignited the charges at the top of the loading system. This quickly communicated itself down through the charges in the working chamber, central cages and magazine hoppers sending a sheet of flame high into the air through the open roof." He gives the total weight of those eight charges as 2344 lbs.

He also notes that the flash penetrated into the magazine "past the edges of the vent plates at the top of the magazine bulkhead without, fortunately, doing harm to the contents (it would seem that the compartment was not fully flooded at this time)."

That being said, eight full charges doesn't necessarily seem like a huge number for a ship in action, but looking at the diagrams I can find (R A Burt) for the 13.5" turret, it's not clear how effectively the interior of the barbette was compartmentalized.

Hi 9pr,
I thought Campbell also provided a good description of Lion's Q turret hit in his "Warship Special 1 – Battle Cruisers", which I transcribe below in case anyone is interested -

"In return she [Lion] was hit 9 – 12in based fused HE from the Lutzow coming from the portside, and by 4 – 12in from the Lutzow and 1 – 5.9in from starboard. There was only one really damaging hit, that on Q turret by one of the above 9 from port. The range was about 16500 yds and the shell struck the right upper corner of the left gun port which was formed by the junction of the 9in centre face plate and the 3.25in roof. A piece of 9in armour was driven into the gunhouse and the shell also entered, was deflected slightly on the gun collars, and burst about 3ft from impact over the left gun. All in the gunhouse were killed or wounded, and the front roof plate and centre face plate blown off. A fire occurred in the gunhouse ehich the fire party though they had extinguished from above. The magazine doors were closed and the magazine flooded. The position was now that a full 13.5in charge ws in the right gun loading cage 4ft above the working chamber, in the left cage in the working chamber, in both waiting positions in the working chamber, in both lower hoist cages which were down, and in both magazine hoppers in the handing room, a total of 8 full charges. Twenty-eight minutes after the hit, the fire in the turret which had continued to smoulder spread to the working chamber; it is not known how. Although venting was increased by part of the turret roof being off and the handing room hatch open, the 8 charges, all of which were in authorized positions, ignited so violently that Q magazine bulkheads were considerably buckled and bulged inwards though supported by the flooding water in the magazine. A venting plate admitted flame into the magazine but no harm was done. If the doors had not been closed, Lion would without doubt have blown up, and she very probably would have done so if the doors had been closed and the magazine not flooded, as the doors were by no means flash tight."

- – -

Re battleship turret construction, try "The Big Gun – Battleship Main Armament 1860-1945" by Peter Hodges. FWIW, Hodges commented as follows re Lion's turret design – "There seems to be an impression that British heavy caliber gun mountings were devoid of any anti-flash arrangements prior to the disasters at Jutland but this is not the case. In this particular 13.5in mounting there were automatic flash doors between the top of the trunk and the reception trays, and on the entry ports of cordite compartments of the gunloading cage. In addition, a large flash door closed over the gunloading cage as it reached working chamber level to seal that compartment from the gunhouse. These arrangements may have been sadly inadequate, but it is wrong to suppose that they did not exist at all."

- – -

Eight charges = 2344 lbs = slightly more than a long ton. That's not a trivial amount!

- – -

Aside a related aside, here is a real Lion mystery. Go to page 136 of Chatfield's "The Navy and Defence". He wrote as follows about Lion at Dogger Bank – "The very first eleven-inch shell that hit the ship passed through the five-inch belt armour near the water-line abreast "X" turret. It penetrated the hoist leading to the "13.5" magazine, failed to explode, was deflected upwards and was found lying almost intact on the deck above. The fuse in the base had unscrewed and so failed to detonate the shell. If it had not so failed the "13.5" magazine would almost certainly have been ignited and the ship lost."

I have not run across this elsewhere. Most interesting indeed, if accurate.

FWIW.

B

Hi NCC1717 and 9 pound round,
Thought I would post a very brief extract from a 24 November 1916 letter written by Adm Jellicoe to an Admiralty committee investigating the deadly magazine explosions at Jutland …..

"The drill and custom then in force was to keep all cages and waiting positions loaded and the magazine doors open, and all the evidence seems to show that if a turret was pierced by a shell which exploded inside it, the magazine was almost certain to blow up."

B

The question of Italy honoring its alliance commitments has been a fascinating one for me ever since I discovered Avalon Hill's "1914" contained counters for three Italian corps. The challenges of an offensive against France would be as great as they were against Austria, but the absence of an Italian front would be an enormous relief to the Dual Monarchy.

If you can read French, you might find this website, illustrating pre-Maginot French fortifications, to be interesting; if not, you will certainly find the photos and maps to be fascinating:

fortiffsere.fr/index.htm

Brillante! Merci beaucoup! I wish I'd had this web site 2 decades ago. My French is actually awful, even for a tourist, but I don't mind wrestling through it for good info.

- Ix

I checked Marder, who puts the battleships at 17 to 15, and the battle cruisers at 5 to 4, plus Blucher.

Too close for comfort. It would have been 15 to 15 if the UK gave up the Turkish dreadnoughts. I doubt anyone in Britain would have considered the Russian Black Sea fleet of old pre-dreadnoughts shambling about the Mediterranean to be a good trade for those, but that is a sort of fun campaign to try to work out. What would the Russians have done? Where would they have based? How would they rearm after expending ammo?

- Ix

Tiger sustained a similar hit at Jutland- an 11" penetration on X barbette that fortunately dudded out. Had it not, the odds that she would have exploded seem uncomfortably high.

Hi 9pr,
What took me by surprise was Chatfield's description of the hit as a potentially mortal threat to Lion. Chatfield's claim was news to me, so I re-read same other sources for the sake of good order.

I checked Campbell's "Warship Special 1 – Battle Cruisers" (what a handy little reference!) and found the following entry (Campbell lists it as hit number 4 rather than hit number 1) – "11in from Moltke at about 18,000 yds. Struck water about 15ft from side, ricocheted and pierced 5in armout aft, about two feet above deep wl, making a hole about 24in x 18in, then passed through escapes and vent trunks of 4in magazines, into which a piece of the shell dropped, through the 1/4in main deck, was deflected upwards and final dropped unexploded on the main deck. The after low power switchboard compartment was flooded, eventually causing 2 of the ship's 3 dynamos to be shorted."

Lion was a pretty lucky ship.

- – -

Also read up on the hit on Tiger's X turret that you mentioned (once again from Moltke). According to Campbell, the shell holed the barbette just at upper deck level, passed through intact and lodged in the lower rotating structure of the turret. The shell's explosive filling did ignite but failed to detonate and consequently caused relatively minor damage; the turret was back into a semblance of action about seven minutes after the hit.

According to Campbell, Tiger was hit seven times in the first seven minutes of the action (!!!) with three more hits within a few minutes thereafter – remarkable shooting on the part of the Germans, if you ask me.

- – -

One other point re that excerpt from the Jellicoe letter – it strongly suggests that ammunition handling practices in the GF were likely to have been broadly comparable to those in use by the BCF.

B

I remember reading a comment in one of Garzke's books (I think it was the explanation for how POW's bent propeller shaft damaged her watertight integrity) something to the effect that the casualty under study demonstrates how conventional survivability analysis may not always be relevant," because it's hard for designers to take into account all of the things that can happen. I tend to think that the British battlecruisers take a lot of undeserved heat over alleged design issues, when the real flaws lie elsewhere: powder composition, flashtight measures, and ammunition handling all reduced their defensive strength, while shell quality reduced their offensive strength.

The amount of damage they inflicted on the 1st SG (admittedly with a strong assist from the Battle Fleet) at Jutland was nevertheless impressive, and I tend to think (had the issues above been addressed) the lost ships might well have survived in a comparable state to the others.

But I certainly agree that Jellicoe's letter suggests the practices were as widespread at Scapa as at Rosyth, which makes me increasingly inclined to believe that they predated Dogger Bank.

Hi 9pr,
You make a very good point IMO re analyses of survivability; it really cannot (IMO) be deemed an exact science. Too many statistical outliers point to the great difficulty of anticipating every possible interaction among a ship's various systems. A warship is a highly complex organism. There is some interesting new material on the web about the loss of PoW where a recent expedition had a diver make his way through the shaft alley inside the ship and the dire effect of the runaway prop shaft was found to have much greater than originally assumed. Maybe you have already seen it.

Re your comment on when "rapid fire" was embraced by the navy, Jellicoe's 1914 Grand Fleet Battle Instructions and indeed those of his predecessor in command both stressed the importance of a high rate of fire (when effective range was reached). So, we are talking pre-1914 at this point.

Re British battle-cruisers, I was blessed to have had the opportunity to correspond with DK Brown in his later years. He was of the opinion that, but for the unstable cordite, they all would have survived the battle and been able to return to Rosyth. FWIW.

B

Bringing this back around to the topic at hand: how does this knowledge affect the campaign between Anglo-French naval forces fighting the combined might of Italy & Austria-Hungary (and a few German vessels)?

The French navy had it's own problems with unstable cordite before the war. They seem to have largely addressed spontaneous explosions by instituting a maximum age of 4 years on powder charges, but if they had faced a situation as dire as the one in the North Sea, they might also have tried a policy change to speed up rate of fire (charges/shells stacked in "ready" areas, fire doors open, etc.) with similar results. Since French battleships in the Great War faced more danger from ennui than enemy shells, we don't really know.

Conversely, the problems with ammo handling in British capital ships were a result of Grand Fleet orders and practices, so might not have applied to ships on detached command in the Mediterranean. Unstable propellant and finicky shells still would be.

I have always played with vulnerable British BCs until after Jutland or a similar precipitating event in the campaign, but now I'm not so sure. It certainly never occurred to me that the French might have a similar vulnerability.

OTOH, this might be like US torpedoes in WWII – if the rules represent the problems accurately, players change behavior ahistorically.

- Ix

The British probably didn't understand how unstable their propellant was until after Jutland. At one point before Jutland, Grant swept a magazine for a couple of "Lion's" officers and then lit the contents, to demonstrate the need for care in handling powder. That does not suggest that there were a whole lot of intuitive barriers in the way when the idea of removing flashtight measures came up for discussion. The circumstance that generally led to a catastrophic explosion was penetration of a main armament barbette in action. The only places in WWI that really happened were at Jutland and the Dogger Bank. So I don't think it's implausible to saddle the Brits with that particular liability.

For the French, I think it's the reverse case. Having correctly diagnosed the problem, and realized the potential consequences, I don't see that as a risk anyone would chose to run. Why? When the probability is unknown but nonzero, but the potential consequences are catastrophic, people shy away from catastrophic risk, particularly at a systemic level. It's one thing for a turret officer to tell his crew, "keep the damn doors open," another entirely to tell the fleet to accept a risk like that. Under those types of circumstances, people look in every other direction they can for other solutions to avoid a known catastrophic risk.

In game terms, I think it simply becomes an enhanced vulnerability; that's hardest to control for.

The degree of vulnerability in the BCF at Jutland is pretty astonishing. It wasn't invariably the case that a barbette penetration translated into a catastrophic explosion, but there was an unacceptably high chance- I haven't counted up the turret hits on the BCF, but my guess is it's not out of the ballpark to suggest that 10% of the penetrating hits on a battle cruiser turret resulted in an explosion. It may well be more. That's a lot, when the consequences are so severe. The localization of those consequences to one action has always suggested to me that something particular was going on in the BCF, since the only other time that I can think of where similar casualty consequences were attained was at Coronel, which was a gross overmatch. That has always made me wonder whether the BCF didn't "take it up a notch," but the datasets we're dealing with are so small that it's hard to draw conclusions from the outcomes alone.

The strangest quality about big-ship actions in WWI is the chess like pace of the campaigns. Every navy was so afraid of losing battleships that the actions tended to settle into stasis very, very quickly. Some of this is a "peacetime mentality" problem, some of it is vulnerability to mines and torpedoes, but some of it is also geography: within the first three months of the war, the Allies bottled up the dreadnought fleets in the North Sea, the Adriatic, and the Dardanelles (and the Russians bottled themselves into the Baltic, but that's another story).

Bringing Italy in changes all that- the French fleet would (I assume) have been based on Toulon or possibly Corsica. Because the balance in the North Sea would be so tight in 1914, I think the British battlecruisers, operating out of Malta, would be the natural choose to form a "fast wing" of a combined fleet. The geography of the Italian peninsula suggests that raids on coastal points might be a strategy for luring the Italian fleet out for a decisive battle. There should also be restrictions on Austria-Italian cooperation- there was simply too much history there (and too many divergent interests) for them to cooperate well, and both sides would be looking to conserve their own fleet for the inevitable showdown.

And of course, the RN has to keep the sea lanes open to Egypt, for Canal access, and to supply the forces there against the possibility, however remote, of an Italian invasion of Egypt. I suspect the British and French would cooperate to some degree to reduce the Italian possessions in the Med.

Incidentally, my favorite "what if" is the one the Brits sought first (and which was in some ways more natural)- an Anglo-German alliance late in the pre-dreadnought era, pitted against Russia, France, and Italy, say around 1903-4. THAT would have been a free-for-all!

Regarding the RN's relationship with cordite, I think it's fair to say that, until the loss of "Bulwark", which could very reasonably have been discounted as a "one-off", the RN arguably had no inkling that they faced a propellant problem at the beginning of the war. Coronel may have been able to provide a hint in that direction, had anyone in authority survived to raise the issue. In the event, however, it took the almost melodramatic events of Jutland to really raise the alarm.

While attention has focused intensively upon the BCF's experience at Jutland whenever the cordite issue arises, it does not follow that the GF was necessarily exempt from risk. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as they say; the GF was never effectively engaged at Jutland, hence suffered very little damage at all. It is fair to say that its ammunition handling methods were therefore never really tested in combat.

Strictly my opinion, of course.

B

"Bulwark," incidentally, strikes me from the little I have found on her loss, as likely an accident: charges left unattended in passages with magazine doors open while the crew went to breakfast. All a situation like that required was one illicit cigarette in the wrong place.

"Natal" and "Vanguard" both seem plausibly like cases of decaying cordite, perhaps brought to a head by some commonplace event, like a fire smoldering in a coal bunker.

It has been awhile (and there are competing versions, as you no doubt remember) but one of the potential contributory causes of the 1989 explosion on the "Iowa" was the previous storage of the powder under conditions that made it less stable. I have always read that American propellant was significantly more stable than British cordite, but if it gets to be old enough, and it's stored at high temperatures, powder can get funny. I remember shooting old lots that generated very wide variations in muzzle velocity and fall of shot- a frustrating and dangerous experience.

Catching up on a couple of topics –

Re HMS Bulwark, I could swear that I have some material regarding the inquiry into her loss, but cannot for the life of me put my hands upon it. Will keep looking.

- – -

Re the post-Jutland investigation which culminated in the adoption of the 1916 Spotting Rules, I took another closer look into item 169 in the Beatty Papers (p.346) that you pointed out in an earlier post on this thread. According to the text, Beatty does appear to have instructed Chatfield to undertake the project on 31 May 1916. Given that this was the very date of the great battle, something about the gunnery performance of the BCF on that day apparently inspired Beatty to place such high priority on the matter. Both Chatfield and Sidney Bailey signed the report, which was in Beatty's hands only three weeks after his request.

Re Sidney Bailey, despite having reached out to a couple of UK based naval historian acquaintances, I have been unable to fix the exact date when Bailey was officially attached to the BCF. Consequently, I am still unable to pin him down as having been involved in any post-Dogger Bank / pre-Jutland gunnery studies undertaken by the BCF. Very frustrating!

- – -

What I would like to draw attention to is Item 122 in the Beatty Papers (p.230) – Chatfield's communication to Beatty, dated barely a week after Dogger Bank, in which he assesses the BCF's gunnery performance in that battle. Most interesting to me is Chatfield's recommendations for changes in gunnery method, found on p.232 –

quote –

8. Recommendations for Control – the chief lessons to be learnt here are –

[ a ] That rapidity of fire is essential. Te difficulties in controlling it are nothing compared to the disadvantages that ensure once the enemy's volume of shorts is greater than your own.
[ b ] That it is absolutely misleading to think hits will be seen, at any rate at long ranges. Shorts ar the only guide, and the great value of them must be impressed on control officers. The main object when opening fire must not be the straddle, but to obtain a big volume of fire short, then work it up by small ‘ups' till hitting commences. If shots go over they are lost, and very large corrections must at once be resorted to.
Fairly reliable corrections for all ranges are: ‘down, 1,000'; or ‘up 200'
When being hit, the enemy will undoubtedly alter course towards or away, which will require the larger down correction in the former case in order to get short, hence the reason for 1,000 yards, even after straddling.
[ c ] Spotting is so vital and so tiring that additional spotters in various positions are essential.
[ d ] Salvos when gunlaying are impracticable, as, owing to interference with aim, the rate of fire becomes a minimum.
[ e ] Directors must fire rapid double salvos as soon as range is found.
Derfflinger and Moltke at the end fired about two salvos a minute, i.e., from their seven turrets, fourteen shots a minute at Lion, whose rate of fire at that time was about two rounds a minute.
[ f ] That no enemy must be left unfired at must be further driven home.
[ g ] Sights of 13.5-inch guns and all corresponding instruments, time of flight watches, &C, to be graduated up to 25,000 yards.
- unquote
Here is an interesting question – What became of Chatfield's above proposals? What if they formed the basis for development of a new BCF-specific gunnery method to be first tested in action a year or so later at Jutland? It is, of course, impossible to know (for lack of any further relevant documentation) whether it was pursued at all, or, if so, to what degree, if any, it may have been refined or altered in the period leading up to Jutland. Whatever transpired, the Jutland gunnery logs of the surviving 1BCS and 2BCS battle-cruisers appear to indicate a remarkably high incidence of the use of double-salvoes – to the extent that they appear to have been the standard fire method.

Note – The gunnery logs mentioned can be found in the Gunnery section of the Jutland Despatches. The Jutland Despatches can be freely D/Led in searchable PDF format from archive.org.

B

B:

Regarding the posting of Sidney Bailey to the BCF, Chatfield (p137) says that while Lion was under repair after Dogger Bank,

"A new gunnery commander, Sidney Bailey, was also to join the staff…"

Unless there was some delay in his arrival, that would make it prior to April 7, 1915, when (according to Burt) Lion rejoined the BCF.

OTOH, the wiki article on Bailey says he joined the staff in 1916. I can't follow the wiki references cited, and don't trust it much without them.

Hi NCC1717,
I agree with you. That is what Chatfield wrote in "The Navy and Defence", where he mentions both Bentinck and Bailey as a group. Marder confirms Bentinck joining the BCF in February 1915 as Beatty's Chief of Staff. Chatfield DEFINITELY makes it sound like the two men joined Beatty's command more or less contemporaneously in 1915, but I have been unable to get locate a second confirmation of Bailey's date of signing. Jellicoe ("Jellicoe Papers") doesn't mention Bailey; neither does Marder ("Dreadnought to Scapa Flow") nor does Corbett in the Official History. However, Goldrick does refer to Bailey's assignment to the battle-cruisers in "The King's Ships were at Sea". No exact date is given, but Goldrick's book is focused upon events up to February 1915. If I had to lay a bet, I would say that Bailey did join Chatfield in early 1915, but I would love to have a confirming source with an exact date "for the sake of good order".

Re Wikipedia, it undeniably contains a lot of good information, but it is also a bloody minefield.

B

Re "Through the Hawse-Pipe" Alexander Grant aboard HMS Lion, I ran across the following passage in Goldrick's book "The King's Ships were at Sea" (page 309) that touches upon Grant, HMS Lion and the general ammunition handling situation aboard Lion -

"In the Lion herself, possibly chastened by the small fire in "A" turret lobby and the false alarm which had caused "A" magazine to be partially flooded, the Chief Gunner, Alexander Grant, on his own initiative introduced a routine that a strictly limited number of cartridges should be outside the magazine at any one time and that the magazine doors should normally be closed. Strangely enough, though this decision played a major part in saving the Lion at Jutland, it does not seem to have been passed on to the other battle cruisers or to the Admiralty.

The problem lay in two areas, the firs of which was the propellant itself. The Royal Navy's heavy ships stowed their cordite charges in silk bags. Each quarter charge had a 16-ounce fine-grain black powder detonator, and this meant that such charges "needed very complete flash precautions to be safe in action." In fact, there were no such complete flash precautions and when such a situation was combined with a tendency to have large numbers lying around in the handling spaces in order to ensure a rapid supply to the guns, only disaster could result. It was a highly dangerous policy because any flame could cause a flashback which would spread up to the turret and down to the magazines proper. This was where the major weakness in British design came into play. There had once been self-sealing scuttles which opened only to pass a charge up to the turret, but, in the interests of a faster supply, they had been omitted from the entrance to the magazines. Instead a "working chamber" was inserted into the chain between gun and magazine. This system was dangerous enough at the best of times, since flash from a cordite explosion can travel hundreds of feet. It was suicidal when large amounts of exposed cordite were left lying about in the working chamber itself. Perhaps the one surprising thing is that only three of the battle cruisers would be los by this cause."

FWIW.

B

In Friedman's footnotes, he quotes a post-Jutland memo from Jellicoe saying, in essence, "if any ship has removed anti-flash safeguards, they should be restored." That wording- and the degree of uncertainty it implies- strongly sugggests to me that official guidance on removing flashtight scuttles and similar measures had not been given in any detailed memorandum. Jellicoe was a pretty serious and responsible guy, and I suspect if he had given specific orders to modify or remove physical components of the ship, he would have rescinded those orders specifically- to not do so would have been the kind of responsibility-dodging move that the fleet would have picked up on. I also tend to think it would have been wholly at odds with what we know of the man's character. Reading the language Friedman notes, I wonder if they genuinely didn't know how far the fleet had taken it.

Ultimately, my suspicion is that, under pressure to increase the rate of fire, commanders first took to accumulating charges in the intermediate positions to ensure an uninterrupted supply; only later would they have resorted to removing shutters and scuttles. The question of who and how and when is tantalizing, but there's probably not a certain answer.