Why were cruisers made? What was their purpose...

>Why were cruisers made? What was their purpose? Just to be some kind of regrettable compromise between a destroyer and a battleship? Is that really it?

Attached: 11.jpg (300x291, 11K)

>why dun we jus make every ship duh smallest or duh largest

Attached: 4.png (645x729, 62K)

There was also the fact that the interwar naval treaty heavily restricted the number of battleships that each of the signing powers was permitted to build, but there was no limit imposed on the number of cruisers that nations were allowed to build. The treaty limited the types of weapons that could be put on cruisers, but otherwise left them unrestricted.

>Except Mahan proved your post wrong over 100 years ago.
Mahan didn't prove shit. His theories were never once applied to an actual war, and in large part because they couldn't be. You can't force a decisive battle at sea solely with seapower. You can't sail into an enemy harbor without getting sunk by mines and coastal batteries. You can't blockade an entire enemy fleet; blockades are something done to cut individual ports from the outside, not keep their fleet from coming out if they want to.

>You protect your shipping by having ships that can sink enemy ships harder.
Nope. In fact, battleships were never in any war used to hunt down convoy raiders. They mostly spent wars glaring at each other.

> Once the enemy fleet is destroyed or bottled up, you have the right of way on the seas and a few boats lost here and there are simply incidental damage.
Except that never happens unless

A) You possess a fleet so overwhelmingly stronger than the enemy's that any damn thing you do wins, i.e. RN vs HSF in 1914.

B) You force the enemy to fight a losing battle, often by the threat of projecting land power, i.e. USN vs Japan in the Pacific.

I knew it was a dumb question but it has been bugging me for a long time now. I want a real answer. Destroyers are easy to figure out, they're all about torpedoes; they're small, fast, and agile. Battleships are also easy to figure out, they're all about the guns; they're big, they have big guns, and they're heavily armored. But what is a cruiser all about? It's like they fit in some weird gray area where nothing makes sense.

It's like you started reading about naval history in the late 1930s.

>You can't force a decisive battle at sea solely with seapower
Mahan didn't say anything about forcing a decisive battle dumb shit.

>You can't sail into an enemy harbor without getting sunk by mines and coastal batteries.
> You can't blockade an entire enemy fleet; blockades are something done to cut individual ports from the outside, n
If you had actually read Mahan you would know that one of his examples, namely Nelson's chase of the French fleet, speaks exactly of how to blockade an enemy fleet. Sadly very few people on Veeky Forums actually reads and you can usually tell who don't read by what they say about Mahan.

>Except that never happens, except during the 2 most important wars of the 20th century.
Looks like it happened twice, and both times it had tremendous consequences.

They make sense in a world where long distance communication takes weeks. In WW2, where it didn't, an appropriate response to a cruiser could and was sent immediately and cruisers usually BTFO. In the end cruisers were reduced to glorified and overpriced gun platform.

>Mahan didn't say anything about forcing a decisive battle dumb shit.
You'll also notice that I didn't claim that he did. Learn to read.

>If you had actually read Mahan you would know that one of his examples, namely Nelson's chase of the French fleet, speaks exactly of how to blockade an enemy fleet. Sadly very few people on Veeky Forums actually reads and you can usually tell who don't read by what they say about Mahan.
If you had read so much as a wikipedia article, you'd know that at no point during the Napoloeonic wars was the entire French fleet bottled up in ports.

And in neither case, was it something that battleships accomplished. The Royal Navy of 1914 had more cruisers relative to capital ships than the HSF did. warandsecurity.com/2014/08/04/the-naval-balance-of-power-in-1914/

And the Americans forced a decisive battle by threatening to invade key islands and then staffing them with airplanes, something that cannot be accomplished with battleships.

In no cases did you get a situation that went from relatively even fleets to having a decisive battle which itself tipped the balance of power between them, leading to one force being blockaded up and only THEN did the commerce be interdicted. Instead, what you inevitably see is either one side being massively stronger and interdicting commerce from the get-go, or commerce raids throughout almost the entirety of the war in question.

Based on his study of naval history, Mahan contemplated two main methods in obtaining
and maintaining command of the sea: decisive battle and blockade. He asserted that the primary
mission of a battle fleet is to engage the enemy’s fleet. The one particular result that is the object
of all naval actions is the destruction of the enemy organized force and the establishment of
one’s control of the water. Control of the sea by reducing the enemy navy is the determining
consideration in a naval war

-Cited in Crowl, ―Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,‖ p. 458.

Now shut up you stupid cunt, you obviously have no idea what you're talking about

>The Royal Navy of 1914 had more cruisers relative to capital ships than the HSF did. warandsecurity.com/2014/08/04/the-naval-balance-of-power-in-1914/
Are you retarded? Do you think the HSF was prevented from sorting because of the RN cruisers?

Like a true pleb you are, you don't read the primary source and rely on wikipedia cliffnotes. Sad, really.
In any case nothing in what you quoted talks about forcing a decisive battle. Just because your goal is to engage the enemy fleet doesn't mean you have to idiotically seek a decisive battle at any cost like you postulate.

>The Royal Navy of 1914 had more cruisers relative to capital ships than the HSF did
Understandable given the Royal Navy's larger budget, and British Empire's desire to maintain a global naval presence.

>And the Americans forced a decisive battle by threatening to invade key islands and then staffing them with airplanes
Battleships were obsolete as capital ships after 1930, everybody knows this, you're not really breaking any new ground here. But the same applies to cruisers. Light aircraft carriers like the Independence-class were more useful than cruisers of equivalent tonnage.

>Are you retarded? Do you think the HSF was prevented from sorting because of the RN cruisers?
Are you retarded? Are you capable of addressing the argument posed, instead of a strawman?

>Just because your goal is to engage the enemy fleet doesn't mean you have to idiotically seek a decisive battle at any cost like you postulate.

I guess not. But for the other people reading this thread, I'd point out that the HSF was unable to sortie past about the coast of Ireland because of a lack of operational range even if the Royal Navy does absolutely nothing to stop them. Control of coaling ports pre-war rendered their own battleship blockade superfluous, and those battleships did not prevent the HSF from raiding out into the North Sea and shelling the English coast on repeated occasions. In fact, it wasn't even really a blockade in the normal sense of the word. The HSF was very well capable of entering and leaving Wilhelmshaven.

>a real blockade is when ships form a tight line so nothing can get outside a harbor
Holy fuck you are so ignorant it hurts.

>HSF was unable to sortie past about the coast of Ireland
Why would they even need to go past Ireland?

Attached: compare-power-man_334x500.jpg (334x500, 23K)

>Understandable given the Royal Navy's larger budget, and British Empire's desire to maintain a global naval presence.
And the need for Britain to project power over a wide area. At the outbreak of WW1, they had 62 BB, most of them very old and slow pre-dreads. If they were facing anyone but Germany, who by a quirk of geography, not a weakness of their naval program, they would be enormously hard put to stop raiders from materializing even in a weaker port when there is the possibility of numerous fortified ports from the enemy to stage from. If they had gone to war with say, the U.S. instead, you really expect you can blockade the over 12,000 miles of coastline the Americans can sortie from? You will need to guard your merchant ships, and something as slow and as overkill as a battleship often isn't the best tool for the job.

>Battleships were obsolete as capital ships after 1930, everybody knows this, you're not really breaking any new ground here
That was not what I meant, but I apologize if I wasn't clear. I wasn't drawing a distinction of BB vs CV. Even carriers are at a severe disadvantage when operating against land based planes, and going to raid a port that is well protected by said land based aviation is enormously risky business. It adds a new element, but if the IJN wants to hide in Truk or Tokyo with a zillion zeroes and torpedo bombers around, it's going to be extremely risky and difficult to go in and burn them out with a carrier raid. There's a reason why all the port strikes in World War two that were successful were the ones that achieved total surprise.

What forced the Japanese to come out and fight at a disadvantage was the threat of U.S. transport ships carrying troops that would physically occupy their islands if the Japanese didn't do something about it. The carriers just provided escort to those invasion forces.

>Light aircraft carriers like the Independence-class were more useful than cruisers of equivalent tonnage.
Tonnage isn't a good cost comparison in this instance. An Independence class vessel has almost twice the crew as say a Portland class or a New Orleans class cruiser. And all those CVP and their pilots come at considerable expense.

Yes, that is what a real blockade is. When the term is used on land, you don't get to call it a blockade when you cut most of the traffic into or out of a fortified position.

Because going into coastal waters of the enemy is dangerous as all fuck when they have mines floating about and possibly coastal guns to blast you with, it's the reason why the Home Fleet, with its massive tonnage advantage, iddn't press for a closer blockade than they really did historically. And if you want to stay away from the coast to not lose your fleet to mines, then you're going to have to try to catch these convoys from further out. You don't know where they are or what routes they're taking, so you'll have to patrol. And severely limited range is going to hurt that. Worse, when you're low on fuel, you're going to have to make a direct beeline back home, which lets the RN set up a real death gig if they can do a bit of elementary plotting from the site of your last strike.

All Germany would need to do in order to win the war would be to disrupt the flow of British ships carrying troops and supplies to France. The only reason they didn't do this is because the Royal Navy was stacked enough to keep the HSF contained for the duration of the conflict.

Funny, the HSF managed to get in and out to raid the English coast numerous times, despite the RN's presence. Raids on places like Yarmouth, Scarborough, the action off Lerwick, the second Heigholand Bight battle, etc. all happened. And troopships of the 1st world war aren't exactly armored like battleships. What kept the Germans out of the Channel, where most of the transport was happening, was the same naval mining that made it hard for the Brits to approach German shores too closely. The Brits can mine the channel with or without the RN's battleships.

>Raids on places like Yarmouth, Scarborough, the action off Lerwick, the second Heigholand Bight battle, etc. all happened.
These were all very insignificant things in the context of a war where millions were dying every day.

>The Brits can mine the channel with or without the RN's battleships.
Minefields can be cleared if they aren't properly defended.

>These were all very insignificant things in the context of a war where millions were dying every day.
They are, however, significant when you claim that it's the forces based in Scapa Flow that is preventing the Germans from making a push into the Channel. They weren't. The Germans could beat the British to the English channel if they were really willing to make that kind of a dash. They could probably even get there and get back if they didn't penetrate too far, depending on when exactly in their raid they get spotted.

>Minefields can be cleared if they aren't properly defended.
And coastal batteries can be knocked out with accurate fire. Guess what? In real life war, things don't always go perfectly. A rather lucky and simple minelaying expedition did some nasty damage in the Dardanelles operation, and the Channel defenses were much thicker.

As paradoxical as it sounds, very often control of the land leads to control of the surrounding ocean, not the other way around.

>The Germans could beat the British to the English channel if they were really willing to make that kind of a dash
But just making it there isn't good enough. The German navy would have to actually maintain a presence in the channel in order to stop the British from sending more troops and supplies to France. There would have to be a battle, and the Germans would have to win that battle.

But they never did this because they knew that they couldn't pull it off; the Royal Navy had super-dreadnoughts armed with 15-inch guns, ensuring that the Royal Navy would have the upper-hand.

>But just making it there isn't good enough.
It is entirely good enough. How many minutes do you think an unarmed troopship is going to last when confronted even with a cruiser, nevermind a German dreadnought? Plus, they can do things like shell or mine the harbors, preventing them from being used until they're repaired.

You're not going to stop all of them in one raid, but you go in, you chew some stuff up, you run home befor the RN can respond. There's very little risk if you have the faster response time from the closer home port. Without the mines, there's extremely little risk in the endeavor.

>But they never did this because they knew that they couldn't pull it off;the Royal Navy had super-dreadnoughts armed with 15-inch guns, ensuring that the Royal Navy would have the upper-hand.
More importantly, they had bombs all over the channel and the Germans dind't know where they were. You're asking for a Dardanelles disaster writ large even before you engage the RN. The Royal Navy had dreadnoughts that could go just about anywhere on the water. Those dreadnoughts are just as able to sink German ships in the North Sea or off the English coast as they are in the Channel. Why do you think the Germans raided the former but not the latter?

>How many minutes do you think an unarmed troopship is going to last
I dare to imagine a world where the British empire possesses more than 1 troopship.

>Plus, they can do things like shell or mine the harbors
Attacking harbors directly is risky because there could be coastal artillery in play, and that is difficult for battleships to deal with.

>I dare to imagine a world where the British empire possesses more than 1 troopship.

>You're not going to stop all of them in one raid, but you go in, you chew some stuff up, you run home befor the RN can respond.
Why are you so persistent in thinking in this binary all or nothing mentality? Skipping to a different war entirely, would you say that the raids out of Malta were useless because DAK still got supplies through? Or that Operation Starvation was useless because the Japanese still slipped some shipping thrugh all the submarines and airdropped mines?

Besides, what else do you want to do with these ships. They're not doing you much good sitting around in WIlhelmshaven. Even if a raid doesn't do much to hurt the enemy, it's better tahn sitting around paying your guys to do nothing.

>Attacking harbors directly is risky because there could be coastal artillery in play, and that is difficult for battleships to deal with.
Which is another reason something like the channel is dangerous, but not more open waters. I notice that you didn't actually answer my previous question. How do you use RN dreadnoughts to explain the existence of German raids in one location but not another. Surely those BB can intercept either point.

to be big enough to be self sufficient and destroy random enemy ships or convoys they came across for scouting/raiding/patrol purposes. Battleships are too expensive you can't have one everywhere, and destroyers can't operate on their own that long. Cruiser is ideal for forming the centerpiece of a little naval taskforce that can control a strait or protect a harbour just by adding a couple destroyers and minelayers

Because risking the potential destruction of the High Seas Fleet just to stop the supply ships for 1 day would be insane. Missing a single day of shipments won't put much pressure on the BEF. Obviously, if these disruptions are frequent enough, then they'll add up over time, but that doesn't seem possible. Taking that kind of risk is only justifiable if it could potentially achieve a lasting result. Stopping shipments for a very short period of time isn't a lasting result.

>How do you use RN dreadnoughts to explain the existence of German raids in one location but not another.
It wasn't just the dreadnoughts, but also the battlecruisers. In both situations, big ships with big guns were the key to victory.

Attached: hhhhh.png (262x607, 107K)

>Because risking the potential destruction of the High Seas Fleet just to stop the supply ships for 1 day would be insane.
So you don't send the whole HSF. You send a few cruisers or BCs, and you hit and run, same as most of the other raids.

>It wasn't just the dreadnoughts, but also the battlecruisers. In both situations, big ships with big guns were the key to victory.
You're still ducking the question. Battlecruisers are every bit as effective (or ineffective if you don't think they're any good) in the Channel, in the North Sea, out on the Atlantic, or anywhere else. They'll still be just as poorly armored and with just as big of guns as before. Why were the Germans raiding off of North Sea points but not into the Channel?

The truth is I just don't understand the question, that's why I'm ignoring it. The German raids against the British coast were very insignificant in the grand scheme of things. They were infrequent, inflicted little damage, and targeted coastal towns with no strategic importance. The German navy attacked these areas simply because they were not defended (and therefore carried minimal risk), and because it made it look like they were actually contributing to the war.

>n the end cruisers were reduced to glorified and overpriced gun platform.
This, during WW1 the American act to expand its navy was reconsidered once they realised how fucky Cruisers were and settled for more dreadnoughts instead.

Battlecruisers are underrated

>The truth is I just don't understand the question, that's why I'm ignoring it.
I bring it up because it demonstrates a point. The difference between North Sea targets and English Channel targets is the level of mines and coastal emplacements. The former had very little in the way of those sorts of defenses, while the latter was boarded up very strongly.

Regardless of whether or not you think those raids were effective or not, and I join you in thinking they were pinpricks at best, the reason that the Germans raided into the North Sea and not into the Channel wasn't that they were afraid of RN involvement, but because they were afraid of those mines and other static defenses. Those things were very effective. The corollary is that even if the RN is in a position of battleship parity, or even inferiority, you're STILL not likely to see a German ability to disrupt British troop landings in France or supplying them. Therefore, it wasn't the battleships that stopped them. It was the localized sea control owing to land control that stopped them.

The battleships were still a critical part of the puzzle. Obviously naval mines were also very important.

>The battleships were still a critical part of the puzzle
Exactly how were they? You ever really look at a German dreadnought plan? They didn't have galleys for fuck's sake. They cannot keep at readiness for any length of time; they were designed to sail into the North Sea, fight a big, hopefully successful battle with the RN, and that's pretty much it. Even if they somhow managed to defeat the Home Fleet, they're still not able to meaningfully project that power any appreciable distance. They don't have friendly ports in the Atlantic to re-coal. The only real target in range that's worth anything is the English channel, and that's mined out the ass and therefore inaccessible.

Let me put this another way. In 1914, the ratio of dreadnought to dreadnought between the RN and the HSF was 1.46:1. If you expand that to Dreads and BCs, you have 1.63:1. If you expand still further to all battleships of any class (and battlecruisers) you have 1.73:1. This was unable to break out of the North Sea into the Atlantic.

Scroll ahead to the next war, WW2. If we discount the Schleslien and Schlesweig-Holstein because they were obsolete even in WW1, let alone WW2, then the battleship ratio, discounting the Renown, Repulse, and Hood, is now 7:1. Adding in the battlecruisers and whatever you want to classify the Hood as, it gets even more massive; and that's before you factor in that the only two German "battleships" are heavily restricted weirdo designs with tiny guns for BB. The balance of naval power was favorable to the UK in both instances, but to a colossal degree higher in WW1 than in WW2. And yet it's WW2, not WW1, that the German fleet not once, but repeatedly breaks out into the Atlantic to go a raiding.

>Even if they somhow managed to defeat the Home Fleet, they're still not able to meaningfully project that power any appreciable distance.
If the Home Fleet were destroyed, then Britain would lose the ability to protect the English channel, meaning that Germany would be able to isolate France and win the war.

How are you going to get through the minefields user? How are you going to stop the coastal batteries from both sides sinking your ships?

Just go in at night when the coastal batteries can't see you, drop your own naval mines, then leave before the sun comes up.

Mining operations take a fair amount of time, if you want to cover any appreciable area that is. It took the Nuruset almost all night to sail out from a port about 2 miles from the target zone, lay 26 mines, and then sail back.

If you're starting from Wilhelmshaven, with ships moving as fast as the Derfflinger, It takes you the better part of a day just to get into the English channel, and a similar amount of time to go back. You won't have all night to lay naval mines, not unless you want to start back in the day time and get shot at by those emplacements. And blundering around in the dark is a great way to run into the English mines that they can deploy far more easily and readily and numerously. Nor can you stop them from sending out wooden minesweepers in the daytime with this strategy.

For that matter, if you're capable of such quick raids in and out so easily, why not do it even with the Home Fleet? It's much further for the British holed up in Scapa or spread out over the northern reaches of the North Sea than it is for you to go a quick in and out via your own base.

>For that matter, if you're capable of such quick raids in and out so easily, why not do it even with the Home Fleet?
Because that's an incredibly risky thing to do. The Brits aren't going to just sit back and watch you fuck up their war plans.

Pensacola tries her best please no bully.

Cruisers were for sinking civilian shipping at lower cost than a battleship. Battleships are for sinking cruisers. Hope this helps.

And it's risky BECAUSE of the mines, and coastal emplacements, not the home fleet that can't actually react there in time. I have no idea why you're so resistant to a rather simple idea.

>Battleships are for sinking cruisers.
Not really. They aren't fast enough to do that. Unless you're talking about BC's, which are kind of like BB's but with a much greater emphasis on speed in their design.

>And it's risky BECAUSE of the mines, and coastal emplacements
And because of the very real threat that a massive fleet of BB's and BC's is going to come rape your ass while you're dealing with the localized defenses.

submarines were for sinking enemy commercial ships

destroyers were for sinking enemy submarines, destroyers, escorting commercial ships from the same, and screening friendly capital ships.

Cruisers were for sinking enemy cruisers, destroyers, and escorting carriers with fucktons of AAA.

Carriers were for sinking everything, destroying inland targets.

Battleships were for shore bombardment.

The first destroyer, the Viper, was called a Torpedo-Boat Destroyer, the name being self-explanatory. Same was true of the second destroyer.

The Viper was a coal-burner, and the first ship to go 30, then 31 then 32, then 33 knots on a measured course.

big girl

Attached: Alaska.jpg (2633x2194, 2.18M)

Cruisers are destroyer hunters

cheap Battleships
there's a reason why the Kriegsmarine memed Cruisers as "Pocket Battleships"
you'd be saving time making them than wasting 7 years building a battleship while it took a shorter time to build a ship with a firepower comparable to Battleships

>there's a reason why the Kriegsmarine memed Cruisers as "Pocket Battleships"
Only the Deutschlands were called that

>Battlecruisers are underrated
Battlecruisers are underwater.