British Cruiser Development Between WW1 & WW2 - Honestly not raiders 'guv!

hello everybody this is tricking FL as you probably guess since this is a video on my channel now today we're going to be discussing how the Royal Navy developed its cruise of force and doctrine from the end of the first world war through to the start of the Second World War so I'm afraid for those of you who want to learn about His Majesty's great machine gun the HMS Minotaur theoretical design we won't be covering that today unfortunately but we will be covering a number of other very interesting ships and joining me is dr. Alexander Clark AC naval history on Twitter he also has his own YouTube channel which will be linked in the description below I highly suggest you subscribe there so thank you very much donating your time and perhaps you just give us a brief introduction who you are thank you very much famiiy and well my name is Clark I'm a naval historian by inclination hobby in life I did my PhD at King's College London under Andrew Lambert and I currently mainly teach history of engineering and academic skills at Kings mercy but I'm in the process of writing book on tribal battle and they're in class destroyers I have presented far too many papers on cruisers and I started a YouTube channel because well it was a longer-term plan and happened we know we've got kovat 19 stuff going on and I'd already started doing Twitter events which would have morphed into having videos for things like unmarked 80 all these things and then once you have those videos he might've put them somewhere of people to go looking after it's done which started a YouTube channel and then I thought well I'm not doing that properly so now I'm doing it properly as covin 19 is giving me the opportunity to spend some time at home and record some live stuff where I'm answering people's quick which is quite yeah yes that's that either I must do it that's been a great thing for me to watch as well so yeah I again and do enjoyed the question so just so everyone's aware and you probably hopefully seen some of the videos that have we've done previously in this formats videos like the zero so it's going to be similar format this time I'm going to be asking some questions dr. Cox can be providing the answers and I might throw in the odd comment or additional question on the way so shall we begin then so the its kind of we're going to be a chronological thing but we might jump around a little bit so first question would be what was the state of the Royal Navy's Cruiser force in the post Washington treaty environment obviously you had Lexington South Dakota g 3n 3m our guitar etc canceled did the Royal Navy have what it wanted or needed in terms of its Cruiser force at that point or did the treaty cause it to miss out on ships that it had perhaps designed but hadn't quite got around to building yet The Washington treaty is an interesting circumstance for the wrong what happens is prize that is being built most its cruisers are legacy of World War one they are some of them a prize model one but especially the c-class and D class light cruisers coming through our legacies of World War one so they are the to me of World War one experience but the wrong name is already going hang on these aren't and necessarily what we need but they also know that there isn't much funding so they had the casino scenario where they're not necessarily getting the Cruiser force they want a very built but no one else is going to be building that as well which gives them time to take out to start thinking about what they need and what they want and they start doing an aggressive series of exercises lots of study lots of thinking lots of retrospective investigation of events so yes they don't necessarily have the cruiser force they want but they also are able to use the cruiser force they have to do most of the duties they want to do and start working out what this is the cruiser for stay neat and that's the important thing because the Royal Navy or mount little one ends the wall namely starts thinking about next war and crucially one of the first things they decide and this is a study put through by Jellico included by BT and all sorts of things involved is that it's unlikely to be like the first one looking at next old wall they seen first old wars being very European theater centric thinking terms of naval warfare that any huge war is going to be far more global because first world war had actually been global it have had the battles of Portland's Cornell had operations with the Japanese at Tsingtao in China it had had all sorts of stuff in the Mediterranean and of course the Dardanelles campaign and various things in the try and supply Russia this meant that cruisers had had to go a long way and so they were looking at a future war being global now this was then complicated by another scenario the moment you lose the ability to build battle and that's what the treaties basically stopped you doing I stopped you building battleship you take a holiday yes you're building Nelson and Rodney but those are the only two you're going to get and even they are compromised to death for you your cruisers suddenly become your status they're the ones which are the biggest ships you can build the status that puts a different emphasis on the cruiser there is a force is not only going to have to build the cruiser duty they're going to have to fulfill the status and that's in many ways where the county class cruisers come from because they are these big beautiful statue airships they're very very much presence in mind and very much status in mind and they the globe-trotting representations of British power and that's what they need because their Britain needs the safety symbol to go around the world as well as to do the crew surgery so you need to start bouncing these two things the crew seduced a mistake a symbol and that it's going to affect the crews of rebuilt post Washington right so well I suppose that that kind of address is a part of the second question which was that the first post Washington cruisers being the county class what was their role in the fleet so I guess you've got the other status symbol role but something expanding on on that further I suppose everybody post Washington is mostly building 80 inch cruisers so there's a certain logic there but how did the York's play into that as well as obviously the county's generals I understand how do y'all explain to it you have to go back to beginning account now the counties are actually also incredibly innovative in many respects and one of the things is that the role may be actually it's always thinking this thong as using its 8-inch guns anti-aircraft you this is why the first bachelor county there 8-inch guns can elevate 270 degrees now we can all imagine that poor fighter pilot or single seater aircraft pilots face if an 8-inch shell goes past in midair it would not have been pretty and probably what would happen to this aircraft wouldn't be pretty but hit but leaving that to one side the counties have a lot of innovation packed into them and they're big and they're beautiful and all these they're everything the Royal Navy wants for going out to face up against the Japanese they're going out in the Far East of dealing with the Americans in the North Atlantic to being a status symbol versus the Italians in the Mediterranean these are the sort of boots are looking at but the trouble is the wrong Navy needs to get more of them for its tonnage louts and the wrong Navy likes to build right up to the limits of tonnage and this is where the york's come in because the york's are in many ways supposed to be the lighter cheaper type be cruiser the one that the wrong maybe can afford to get in far greater numbers that will provide convoy protection there in wartime so if you consider them the counties are you're in animes your post washington surface raiders they're what the wrong eggs looking at for doing it aggressive economic warfare in times but their beats hype bees the your class are supposed to be these vessels which are going to be protecting the conference they've got enough firepower at most surface raiders are going to keep away from because a surface raider doesn't want to get their surface arena gets damages got to go home that's a mission kill no matter how much or win it achieves to mission kill if it's damaged so they have to sort of they're sort of balancing these things in the your class are in many ways response to the greatness of the counties to your class are meant to encapsulate the important parts of that the less and as part of this they're supposed to be using a lighter turret which can't do 270 degrees elevation which actually turns out to be actually heavier so it doesn't really work that way but it was a nice idea it had lots of good ideas to try and make it lighter the trouble is none of them worked in making lighter they all work very well as a turret they didn't work in making so give it given the the weak given that when you got to the World War two period there were various upgrades very quickly applied to the counties such as belt armor upgrading over the boxed armor and such like is that a look which looks very like a town class cruiser in term here superstructure shape yes so it is is that kind of upgrade given that it seemed to go pretty quickly almost as if it was planned from the start yeah those who say is is this an example of deliberately fitting for but not with in order to comply with peacetime requirements in terms of displacement and such like with the treaties extent yes but also it's an extensive and oh god sometimes I do stand like a prophet for this guy Admiral Henderson when he becomes First Sea Lord in 1933 as charged by just then for the salad or the thirsty Lord Chatfield with preparing the Royal Navy for war and for a global war and he does this by free strand Worstell he looks at what the fleet needs in terms of ships and starts trying to build those ships for operations secondly he starts in terms of what kind of equipment they're going to need in terms of weaponry and how you can refine improve those guns and that's where the 4.5 inch gun comes from eventually and the one which produces the mark 6 post-world war ii is this amazing gun which is fitted to everything because for about 40 years it is the best gun system in the world and these sort of thing but also third strand is what can we do the ships we have to improve them to make them what we need them to be and you get the C class being turned into anti-aircraft cruisers because you need more anti-aircraft ships and you also get plans for how to evolve the county and it's no surprise that part of the plan prevailed in the county involves what's the superstructure we've got for a cruiser which is the best structure we have for doing the cruiser job at the moment and it's the town class one it's been developed Bordertown class the town class are also roughly 10,000 tons that are roughly the same size and displacement as the caddies today for you can take a lot of the ideas from the town class quite easily and retrofit them to the counties and you have a modernized County which works really well see so yeah that's a good example of forward thinking there it's its example of forward thinking but also it's an example of the wrong may be going we have to do with what we have available you can't just the raw made he knows that it can't fight a global war in his very conscious or I did the video yesterday the conversation was all about their plans for global and the Royal Navy's plans for global war were always based around the concept of we're going to end up fighting how do we make the best the case we can we'll ship almost part of our overall also they're going to be doing and cruisers are critical but facing ugly or because you need them to do the convoy protection and you need and also to do the convoy interdiction ie the trade wall so that both sides that they're the shield and sword of the trade wall and that's going to be critical in any global war because the whole point of the global war for Britain as a Empire which was based around the world was to keep its trade flowing while stopping the enemy's trade being able to move around so their economies would crumble while this economy will keep going it's the same strategy which it works against Napoleonic France same strategy which the British had many many times in the history and it worked what they were planning on doing but cruisers are critical so building on that theme given that obviously everyone's building a tidge cruisers in the 1920s and then with a London Naval Treaty making the distinction between the heavy and light cruisers suddenly you've got things like the Brooklyn's the maga Me's although we know that Japanese were actually planning on making them 8-inch later on but well you've got all these 6-inch cruisers appearing in the 1930s 'is this purely down to the London Naval Treaty or is there also advances in technology that are perhaps persuading people that the 6-inch is the way to go over the eight it's quite simple people realizing about engagement if I just quickly because I go not gonna try and remember this off my head but an Excel spreadsheet eczema the gun raid engagement ranges were normally when you're talking about when they're doing exercises they were finding out that most the engagement ranges were around about 18 kilometers at the max so then the row name is looking at sort of 18,000 meters they're roughly maximum engagement crews that can be fighting a battle and usually it's less not use it's less than 15 and so because they're dependent upon sight they're not they haven't got radar control gunnery in yet and so they are still using visual aids and that's what they're looking at when you start looking at that you start to realize that the eight-inch got an 8-inch gun cruiser because of the rate of fire you can achieve of an 8-inch gun versus six-inch only has an advantage in the first salvo in the first minute fighting goes on longer than a minute the 6-inch guns especially if you have enough of them ie you are a town class with 12 you will start to outpace them now the problem is when you are first and looking at this in the six-inch gun navies are looking at how to again maximize their tonnage you see in their Lance usage and the raw Navy is deathly in really keen on this and you get the Leander class you get the arethusa class um you get these sort of these small distress small cruisers which are focused on trying to eke out every time you can from your tonnage allowance but they of course have fewer 6-inch guns they have usually eight of them and you know these things slowly work and slowly help them sort of there but the trouble is with eight turrets and with eight guns in four turrets the same as the county class they actually are never going to achieve the full use of their range of firepower and they can't really maximize their firepower until you start looking at the town at the later designs which are sort of the for treble turrets to 12 guns and then they can really really outpace the county that's the talisman in light of those those ideas we when everyone's building these of 12 and 15 guns 6-inch cruisers the Royal Navy is obviously building the Landers and the amphibians and the Aerith users with it it's the six six inch guns so what exactly is their role within the Royal Navy because obviously we've we've said there's all sorts of ideas advanced there for convoy protection trade protection etc but it seems slightly illogical to have a cruiser that is purely designed to sea off so converted our merchant cruises and stuff like that I'm I'm sure they had some other role in in mind for them as well well you have little like Cruiser it has four potential roles in war okay it can be to scout for your main force it can be your trade protection vessel it can be your presents vessel in secondary theatres ie the South Atlantic and it can be your destroyer leader your flagship for the rear admiral destroyers so it's the ship which can be Cruiser which can best match destroyer performance X so it can go in with them to provide firepower and possible now the trouble is we've [Music] the latter option that whilst it's a nice idea and whilst it had been used a lot in World War one Alice destroyers themselves grown size and especially when you get the tribal destroyers come in that doesn't really become a useful role in World War two it's not really one which is used in fact the rear admiral destroyers tends to be fine themselves as a sort of Task Force Commander often commanding from battles or heavy cruisers and having a whole force under their charge most famously rear animal burrows in the Mediterranean other thing ends up doing that quite a bit for the other duties they are perfect and they are necessary it's gonna sound very very sort of big theory here and weird but sometimes the most important parts of war are not just the front and main theater but the raw Navy if it lost control and lost presence in a secondary theater ie the South Atlantic other areas like that it would have been a facing major problems in terms of diplomacy because British diplomacy is present in the world and a supporter could guarantee from the rest the world was mostly based upon the Royal Navy will still have effective command of the ocean effective ability to use the oceans will and therefore if you want to continue your global trade you need to keep us onside it's done in a very nice very diplomatic very dinner-party manner but it means that the South Atlantic is critical for that yes there's the Treaty of Panama yes there's these scenarios which take place and there are various things in Africa as well but if the Royal Navy needs to maintain presence there because otherwise the British government would be at a massive disadvantage so having ships which are powerful enough that if a surface Raider does chop they can fight them again like they did at the River Plate pact but they did it is useful but their main principle role is actually by as part of the sort of the 70 cruiser strategy of world fighting it's actually to provide that extra support in the background to make sure those secondary theaters do not get lost do not get dropped and that's a critical role or the nature of national security in terms of getting the supplies and getting the support it needs from other nations now that's very interesting because often you tend to hear comments like they were only good for convoy escort duty like any other cruiser would have beaten them in a fight some destroyers could have been the minified they were useless etc etc they were critical for that you needed them and also and please have this one and the thing you always have to remember when you're dealing with surface radar is that a surface Road especially a scenario like the graphs Bay operating so far away from home the moment it gets damaged it's a mission kill so these ships are carrying torpedoes these ships carry their 6-inch guns and yes 6-inch gunfire does a lot of damage to the grass space you can tell that by the report from the Uruguayan authorities because some of the directions in areas the shells have hit could not have been done by Exeter cuz she wasn't in the position to do it so they were getting damaged by 6-inch shellfire they were getting they had the threat of torpedoes to deal with these are things which cause a loss of trouble and if a mish effort it doesn't matter for the Royal Navy and we're for that grafts pays sunk or if it's just badly damaged because the moment it has that it either has to seek port in South Atlantic in which case it's going to be effectively mission killed because even if it does get out by the time it gets out the raw Navy will be there and they'll be waiting in force and they will take it down or it will have to try and limp home either way it's no longer causing trouble for their all Navy in the South Atlantic so there are Navy these ships yes if you're looking at them in a Top Trumps fashion match up but they don't need to match up it's the raw Navy in a way applying the risk fleet strategy that the high seas fleet applied west of the grand seeing the grand fleet I if they are not if there are enough combat power they can cause you damage you don't want any damage you'll keep away from ya and I suppose that's the thing is the yeah anyone can point to say the river plane say oh yes well the 16 shells bounced off the graph phase main on belt or whatever but there's an awful lot more systems on a warship that aren't behind the main armor by the time of World War 2 there any anything that happens to those can be equally critical I'm thinking like maybe in that they lost the last battle of Bismarck Rockne taking out his fire control system so early for example and Norfolk Sheffield and belfast doing the same thing - Sean horse these are things you can't you cannot put under four or five six inches plus of armor but a six inch shell is just as capable of taking of wrecking those on a ship like crafts Bay as anything else and the biggest damage to the grass bagels its water distillery plant and it's it's it's galleys yeah I don't know about that you can't water when I suppose yeah with it with its diesel conversion plant and its water distillery plunk out of action it wasn't going anywhere fast yeah so that point yeah it's it yeah at that point the six-inch gun it doesn't matter yes in the nicest way in one-on-one fight graphs patient of waited a six-inch destroy a six-inch Cruiser but the reason I've bought destroido's because of course there's the famous line where you know they've they think they're engaging a destroy two destroyers on a cruiser because of the way they're being handled now this actually idea comes from Harwood looking at what Henderson's been talking about and it granny trouble class destroys and them being used as cruisers well the idea goes if you can use the destroyers the cruiser you can use a cruiser as a destroyer and that is literally what they're doing that tactic where he divides and starts from snare that would look strange to maybe son but if you're a destroyer commander from mobile one if you do got any experience in destroyers in little one that was your standard tactic your most powerful unit goes one side to fix the others pair off and go an attack from the other side that was what the forces down in oh the I'm forgetting another force down in the south remember the name Oh under twit our which force were specialists in the Harwich force was obsessed with doing that and they did it very well what they're doing and they're doing at the Babel room plate they're doing what the Harwich force would have done to a superior opponent weave destroys but they're just doing cruises and it works right so um I suppose that that brings us around to our next question which is that oh no so I think we've covered a lot of this but obviously in the latter part or mid to late 1930s when everybody's heading back to building 8-inch cruisers the Japanese office building that cows and the Tonys the Americans building the New Orleans or however they're pronouncing it these days the Royal Navy is obviously bringing out the town class with its 6-inch guns we've covered that of the split between the 6th and 8th inch contemporaries already but outside of the that the rate of fire versus an 8 inch gun cruiser what is the primary purpose of the town class within Royal Navy fleet doctrine where where do they envisage using them their surface rodas everywhere through their marketing just the anti-surface rode a ship the ship which will go out and save trade lanes with their aircraft and hunt down surface raiders and sink them but all those same skills and if you think about it I actually make them all sextant surface Raiders and they're actually used more often as surface freighters err famously HMS little local during a summer ma ruins where she picks out this Japanese liner in the middle of the ocean not far at sea from the Japanese coast and goes we're taking the German passengers you've got aboard who are Joan merchant sailors off you now and there is nothing you can do about it this is what they were for they the raw Navy politically can never procure anything which was called a surface they couldn't it would look bad it wouldn't go for a fly and it was also considered an a a missus of weakness but there are Nathan knew they needed them because they needed them for economic warfare and for global war for fighting the war on global scale so that was where the town class cruisers came in they were surf account asserted that they were the surface raiders they also were very useful counter surface traders and they were very useful for the exercises in when they're all near he was trying to practice its counter service rating tactic and in World War 2 they found himself being used a lot as flagships as the vessels which providing a lot of firepower in fighting forces in the Mediterranean and in North Atlantic they were critical during the Bismarck and Scarn Horse events all these things they find themselves useful but principally every time it goes back to these ships their role is to be the frontline cruisers and to be epitome of what the wrong Navy needs be and this is why they went with the six inch guns because a six inch system allow them to carry more shells and also make it and slightly lighter so they could have more they could have tonnage which they could allocate to other things they could allocate it to machinery plus they could allocate it to armor they get allocated to all the things that are things that the ship needed to be a very good all-round Cruiser and this is because their cruises are starting adding things like directors like all sorts of systems which are getting far bigger and far heavier and one of the interesting things you find in town classes they've got a lot of but stuff put in place for providing them electrical power which fruits critical when radar comes because they've got this inbuilt stability in them they've got the space in the hull to put it in and they wouldn't have had that if they'd taken the same hole and put in eight inch and the machinery for 18 because you'd have had less tonnage available for that that sort of you'd have had less space available for that sort of because the 18 carats and the 8 inch cut shells do take up more space and stick the other thing you also have to remember at the Town glass is they are designed to operate with the next generation of aircraft carriers so whilst yes they do have the space for carrying multiple aircraft themselves it's expected that they'll be operating the far-east with HMS unicorn and unicorn of course is not alike carrier she's a forward aviation support ship but she's the best which is going to replace hermès an eagle in terms of the far-east rotation in terms of the china squadron okay which makes sense because she's the one which is going to have almost the facilities to support the aircraft out than themselves which is what the wrong maybe she's been having the main trouble of getting modern aircraft out to the Far East has been actually providing the support infrastructure because the airfields out there aren't really built up to support modern aircraft is an illusion it's a kind of a floating repair shop effectively yes it's a light carrier combined with floating repair shop that can mean maintain your force at peak levels out in the Far East yeah I suppose that that's almost own I know probably getting onto carriers rather than cruisers but I suppose briefly that's again an example of a very different doctrine whereas the the American approaches string a bunch of spare parts and spare aircraft from the ceilings of our carriers to replenish them there and then on the fleet carriers the Royal Navy's thinking more in terms of having its own a completely dedicated ship to doing that behind the lines which allows your your actual your forward based fleet carries they're getting involved in the in the fight to just concentrate on on the actual action rather than worrying about having to do complex maintenance and repair all the time as well a naturist unicorn would always be moving with the fleet where it was remember this isn't very important when you're a navy which is gonna be fighting the other side of the world from industrial base you can do the American technique when your industrial base is literally just the other side in the ocean but when it's your nicest way your industrial base is free oceans away it's a different concerts hmm it's a-you know you've got all that travel time back before so you have the idea I think was that most aircraft were going to be brought into Singapore and in from Singapore they would be taya's spare aircraft and all things would be aboard HMS unicorn and unicorn would also be acting as a little light carrier but also doing the maintenance and running backwards and forwards to the main foot of the forward fleet now that's in a major war in peacetime she would of course be supporting the Cruiser forces providing them with cover all sorts of things forward in the China squadron and she would have done that job excellently and the raw maybe could have possibly afforded to have deployed a second carry out there to back up the cruiser force and probably would have done so if their peace have continued into the 1940s because it was very much a cruiser carrier partnership the Royal Navy wasn't looking at just its cruisers for the cruiser roll and wasn't looking at its carriers just for the Carrier Strike bro it was also looking at them as past the economic warfare package about this you know this continuous in air presence of scouting aircraft of having the strike to widen out the force and the idea of having a cruiser carrier partnership try and carrying out economic warfare it's very very critical to the Royal Navy's ideas of how to prosecute a war against Japanese machine the early phases for a global war and so you can't in a way it's nice discussed cruisers as an individual but honestly you always have to discuss them as past the whole force approach and what the Royal Navy is looking at the force to it because sometimes it goes we don't need our cruisers to do this because we have this and this but saucy with and sometimes it goes right listen this aren't sufficient on their own so we do need our cruisers to also do this and one of those things when they do that is course torpedos and Royal Navy keeps torpedoes on his cruisers far longer than any other Navy duck because they are so critical as part of the wrong A's idea of offsetting any advantages that other navies might have in having large guns on their cruisers because you're still going to get have to get moving the same engagement range and when you're getting that engagement range you can also get hit by a torpedo and if you make a big hole in a ship it tends to sink yeah so with with that in mind so when the dido class is conceived I know in actually the videos I've done on both the tribal and the dido they have this common ancestor that splits to give a slightly larger version of itself which becomes the dido and a slightly smaller version of itself which becomes the tribal even though it starts out as a small Cruiser so where does that that dido class that eventually comes about actually sit within that the up the Royal Navy's plans if they've got the big 8 inch counties they've got the rapid-fire six inch towns and and the barest diminutive z' they're all for both so what where where did these ships come in as as the five point two five inch ships well the 5.25 ships are in many ways your AAA cruisers they're trying to maximize firepower bus aircraft but they're also trying to maximize your firepower but it destroys and in turn sent the Dinos our a product of the raw Navy needing Task Force cruisers that's their theory they're looking again at the ranges in the Pacific they're looking at the ranges of putting a fleet around the world and you so you're looking at a there's a small Cruiser study which is basically about building a task for ship [ __ ] what is going to protect carriers protect battleships from smaller ships and you know basically enable the carriers and the battleships to concentrate on engaging the enemies carriers and battleships without worrying about being under attack so they're all maybe starts this small Cruiser study they also have and the reason they're looking at a small Cruiser for it is again they're trying to maximize tonnage they're trying to maximize the amount of space they can get the amount of [ __ ] their hulls they can get for the tonnage they're allowed on the rarest treaties and they are looking at sort of replacing the C's in the D glasses slowly built a getting rid of the World War one legacy of vessels that's where the leaders come this study does split down two ways one because the triggered the later London treaty gives the wrong name dis opportunity for destroy leaders which is amazing Baris Henderson and a couple of us concerned because it allows them to build the big general-purpose Cruiser ish fighting destroys the Royal Navy needs or fighting in a lot of time [Music] Dido's also get produced on a slightly bigger version sort of this task force food [ __ ] and they are both supposed to protect sales forces they're both supposed to involved and they're both looking at a four in the far east in fact I might my instinct is often is that the raw Navy was looking at a ran flotilla of tribals even prior to World War two and the Canadians were looking at a photo of them as well I have a feeling that even if war hadn't started you'd have had the ran flotilla out operating with HMS unicorn or whichever carrier was out in the China squadron as that task for ship and they might well have been joined by a Dido class as the sort of flotilla leader slash big muscle to protect that carrier and that's very much what the Royal Navy is looking at also the Dido class were supposed to be their vessels which would take on the rear admiral destroyer asteroids role but the big problem with this is sometimes I call tribal class destroyers to be cruiser destroyers because they have space they have to shape the form the role of a cruiser the dido class in many ways could be called destroyer cruiser because they are so crammed full of everything they are in the end the only way they can find for actually sorting out their top wait for actually putting stuff in it's they have to start taking weapons off because they are so crammed full of everything the design is so full and packed in and densely occupied he doesn't have the space for development as time goes on and this is part of the thing with the bigger ships versus the smaller ships when you're built of the reason the town class the crown colony class the reason these classes keep going and survive so long and service and provide the basis in many ways the tide class and all sort of the subsequent British ships cruisers they are very much a lot of space in them allowing them to be developed for them to be improved for them to be modernized for them to take on the new features and new equipment the IDA class don't really have that they don't have the space they are said to destroy cruisers yeah I think the Americans have had the same issue with the Atlanta's which kind of their rough equivalent thereof in in as much as hear they got overloaded with equipment they had started eating things when the trouble is a cruiser has to do so many roles and has to be so independent go go around the world you have to put a lot of equipment in it and the moment you're putting this in to a smaller hull as you can fit it in you don't have no space for anything else and even if you walk around a trans belfast which is the largest of the town class cruisers you know the largest type karenina at la the really big ones they were the flagships and I'm ever thinking suspicions they would have been the flagships of the china squadron and probably the probably you'd have had one in the Mediterranean and one in the China station if peacetime had continued if it hadn't gone straight since war and the changes having me go border you still feel this a lot of debt cease pacts machine spaces there isn't a lot of free space there's a lot of stuff ground in there there is though still much more than there was available on the Dido clock a lot more available class and that oh when you think about how little there is on the town class even the largest of the town class that really almost scares you when you think about how crammed the theatre classroom yeah so obviously that that the the D dough's in towns and crown colonies are sort of thought the last pre-war Royal Navy cruisers that that get onto the stocks but we know there are a number of speculative designs that indicated a return to the heavy cruiser format so you've got the surrey some designs with triple eight-inch turrets and of course the infamous various designs with the 9.2 inch guns so what do those plans reflect regarding Royal Navy thinking at the upper end of the first of the cruiser firepower bracket and how likely with a two of be built had war not broken out indy sort of 1939 early 1940s I have to say I'm always skeptical about 9.2 in the mainly use and I'm skeptical about that is because the Royal Navy the whole way in the 1930 it's very much standing down a path of trying to look at using logistics in terms of they've got a four inch high angle anti-aircraft and a 4.7 inch remain gunner for destroyers and they're trying to standbys onto a four point five inch so that they can have both and all the capital ships and everyone on the same gun and middly they then go against this by having the five point two five inch butted Eidos class but just consider them as special Toledo's they are trying to make a far better performance a a gun or a cruiser and it's got to be a heavier anti-aircraft gun they try the six inch they don't want to go through the mechanisms of the 8 inch and they settle on the five point two five inch they're not really happy with that from a logistics perspective but it makes sense from a neighbor perspective this means I look at the 9.2 inch and I go would the raw Navy have really considered that enough of an advantage to take on another type of shells another logistics train all the arrestee issues to actually put it into service I think it was looked at I think it was studied I think it was something which was definitely interesting to but I don't think it would have happened in under wartime conditions because they needed to pare down to keep the logistics guy but a large 8-inch cruisers they'll arith reaction in many ways to the fear of facing the Japanese and what they think they're going to be terms of fighting but as war goes on its considered that the cruisers especially heavy contributors and the Americans building of even bigger cruise remember the Americans are building 14,000 tons super cruisers at this point which are pretty much pal cruisers but name the Royal Navy is looking at them going Oh perhaps we should build massive big cruise as well they're doing it why are they doing it what are we building what's they building it for what and they're looking at it and there's army and every time they're looking at the point of are we going to order ship and they sit down and decide not and it doesn't actually get followed through or it does get you know nothing gets past really the contract stage and the reason is ultimately because the wrong name is going well what do we need these ships for and what are we using our construction for and is it really worthwhile us constructing or can we do it better with other ways can we fulfill this role better adequately with the cruisers we'll get building and that seems to be a decision they make they make the idea that the six-inch cruisers they're building are more than adequate for the job and when we do need a bigger ship for it a bigger gun where you've got battleship so if you want to build a battleship replacement cruiser that makes sense but the wrong name is building a battleship and they're not really building that because he don't they're looking at it and going do we really need the answer is yes we do need it which is why they build a trance Vanguard but their answer Danny is going well if we're building a battleship and we're building the others bigger ships do we need the eight-inch do we need the 9.2 inch cruise remember and a moment when you have enough working counties you don't need it I have a feeling that if I have a feeling that if the British had been in better financial position post Second World War war and had decided again to keep more of a Navy and not cut it down quite so much I have a feeling den you might well have seen a a thin Cruiser maybe even a 10-inch Cruiser appear in wrong Navy weapon stance certainly potentially a nine point because post Second World War when they're reducing Cruiser numbers if you are going to retain a heavy cruiser all it makes sense to go for something with a decent gun caliber and that's actually one reasons why in the cruiser idea of the having a cruiser armed with a load of mark six turrets of 4.5 inch doesn't work because honestly there's no chance of it working really versus despoiled of class which is what the Russians are building hmm so I have a feeling if the raw Navy had been going critter II and I do I have studied lots of the response to snowball and the raw Navy does free sort of things one they look at the cruisers they've gotten construction they start rapidly pushing them through and they start modernizing them and upgrading them secondly they produced a Buccaneer to make sure the carrier's the cable against them and thirdly they're looking at their intelligence and the submarine arm but they also are do look at the crew heavy cruiser options and look at dusting them off and in the end they decide they don't need to because they've got the other things to fit in the role and they're all Navy is very brutal in its path they'd not realize always they've got a limited amount of money and they've got to do a lot of work so they always go do we really need to do this role or do we have our things which already cover these duty thinking so but they are nice to look at on paper yes yeah and with regards keeping with the theme of weapons with the US Navy obviously they ditched torpedoes from all of their cruisers by the atlanta's the the Japanese Navy goes a little bit all in on the torpedo side with their cruisers the Royal Navy has this sort of balance in as much as they retain their torpedo launchers they don't carry quite as many as the Japanese though so what what's the thinking behind that kind of balance bit of torpedo armament the thinking behind this sort of balanced approach is always that the Royal Navy is looking at fighting our war and they don't know what fret they're gonna be facing so any cruiser which meets a threat which it can't outrun and it can't out gun a torpedo is always a balance of threat a torpedo is always something they have to be worried about but you don't want to have so many torpedoes you limit your gun arm until you limit your performance of the shipping or race because it's important to produce a balanced ship the Americans in many ways getting rid of the torpedoes allows them to better balance their ships in other ways and machinery armor also Sphinx torpedoes are a lot of weight the Japanese by focusing so much on torpedoes actually limit themselves well they theoretically limit themselves but if they were paying more attention sure they were following the closely the wrong maybe who are always trying to at least look like they are paying treaties but when you look at the actual figures there are Navy occasionally seems to be a little bit fast and blue so the tribal class destroyers are a great example this and that there is supposed to be 1,850 ton in terms of standard displacement don't think I've found a single one which actually all seem to be slightly over by about 30 or 40 which is fine it's fine it's only 30 or 40 tons but this is the Royal Navy who are supposed to be super law-abiding and they're not and that by the way stats comes from reading the archives of shipyards which built which I trust quite a bit more than I trust something it's the same with the cruisers the raw Navy is looking at who's a design looking at their cruiser while they're going to do they're looking at them as an offset strategy they look at torpedoes as this offset stress and you've got to think about this in them know there are times in the met reign Ian there's times that the Italian battleships are held off and don't engage even when they have an advantage because they're worried about the raw Navy's torpedoes they're worried about the damage they can do and then America and the Germans and Italians are always very worried about losing ships because they have leaders who are obsessed with the idea of losing ships and seeing as a massive loss to national prestige if you lose a ship whereas the Royal Navy seems to be in British government's more pragmatic I were gonna fight a war we're gonna lose [ __ ] we don't want to lose them but we are but they work out very quickly that having torpedoes aboard their ships and having a sort of balance profile and having little beaters able to fire it sort of 360 degrees around the ship means that you're going to be less likely to lose those ships because no one really wants to close in to try and kill them because if you close in to the closest range did really wipe them out they might get some torpedoes off and be lucky strangely enough though the Royal Navy has this theory and yet it's the Italians who actually managed to enact this idea most often especially on the you know one battle I think was recently put up with tango a tarantino where the italian destroyer thinks hms mohawk our tribal class destroy with a lucky torpedo shot in the middle of night after she'd been disabled and they thought that she was sinking in out of action he still had a working tissue files of spread torpedoes and a torpedo lands and a spotted shouldn't they well the exact were a spot and in a second one lands and that the next worst spot and the poor destroy gets sunk the the history of all and then accidentally pedo from a ship that's thought now of action seems to be relatively storied i know there are a couple of couple of those happened at Jutland and of course both Scharnhorst and Gneisenau end up eating torpedos in their sinking of glorious yeah this destroys so that brings us on to our last question at the moment which is that it given that actually as at the time of this recording you obviously just done a video yesterday about fighting across the across the world but given that the Royal Navy ended up fighting more than just the expected enemy of Japan the slightly less but by the end of the nineteen thirties expected enemy of Germany and then having to throw the Italians into the mix as well so they're now fighting three different navies and the French get knocked out so they don't have the French to help them in the Mediterranean or the West the eastern Atlantic how did the Royal Navy's cruisers and cruiser doctrine stand up to the tests of World War two now that they're being dragged all across the planet to fight practically everybody the Royal Navy could have ever thought of fighting at the same time to be honest the cruiser doctrine stands up pretty well the main problem the wrong maybe have is that there because of the effects of war because of losing ship they've had to modify the doctrine they can't put it in full face and they've also got problems in that they have been of issues in terms of getting the cruisers properly put in and properly organized for what they want to be the wrong maybe has a problem with getting the funding through one reasons the town class becomes a town class it's because the Royal Navy is fighting a big battle for getting the numbers of cruises it needs so well when I say financial engine I mean governments which are trying to get the most bang for their buck so the raw Navy is always thinking what are we going to do in terms of what are we going to use it the Royal Navy go to the town class names them town class because if the town class aren't gonna get canceled because no one's going to cancel the ship which is named bitchin that's the theory I can't comment about the current type 26 this frigates and the wrong maybes plan for that one naming them city [ __ ] when they do get involved they start off by having to react to the wall so they start off by recalling the town class cruisers from the Far East the County class and the cruisers going around the world get reduced so they can't do the economic warfare they planned against the Japanese because they need those ships do do the economic warfare they planned again the Germans and the Italians which is fine that's fitting in a doctrine but the wrong Navy doesn't have enough those ships in service to do what it needs to do it's been taking time to upgrade and to because of treaty in part but also because of government spending spending contingency to get the ships in it needs the destroyers try and step up and fill them and certainly the tribal class destroyers in Norway of course most things but in very something are stepping up and filling in the role that you normally you do ruse so pretty much inclusion is the raw Navy Cruiser doctrine stands up fairly well the cruisers are used as their expected to be used but the trouble is the wrong AV never has enough of them available to really do all the stuff it needs to do it never does achieve 70 cruisers they want 70 they never do really achieve some degrees because to get 70 working cruisers you need to really need about 80 and serve because of maintenance refit training these things all have a factor and yeah well it works but it can only ever work on a limited circuit it makes sense given that there they have it as you said they're having to do do the best they can it's off maximum enemies not enough cruisers that that they wanted to have in the first place and of course everybody has the has the discourtesy to declare war at different times meaning that the raw may be had discussed this yesterday the raw maybes worst nightmare with world war ii would have been starting in for the japanese to start it the Royal Navy fleet to be transitioned to the Far East and then the Italians piled in and then the Germans joined in art Italian it happened it actually turned out to be the exact opposite but that meant the Royal Navy had had to withdraw forces from elsewhere to cover Europe and then the Italians joined in so there may have been require all forces to cover the Mediterranean and then the Japanese joined in and by that point they've lost forces they've got the forces all out of place and there are maybe just going oh we now just hate and then they scrambling do you put in a good force into the interne Indian Ocean they do put good forces out there but they can't go and do the offensive operations which they depend on them they can't do any economic warfare which we do wonder if the raw Navy had been doing the anti merchant ship surface raving would be it would the Japanese Navy have been able to do what it did to support the Army in their movements towards Singapore if the Japanese Navy hadn't been able to provide a support to the forces goin around Singapore or going toward Singapore the army would have been slowed down that meant the British would have been far more organised hopefully by the time the defence of Singapore took place which meant Singapore might not have fallen and that then that changes are all sorts of history yeah I must be at UITs um I was discussing this I think last week with military history visualised I don't know exactly when this photo will go live so if it has already people might seen that if it has if his video hasn't gone live yet then spoilers but we were discussing the impact of the Italian Navy on a world war 2 because obviously there's that there's there is a tendency amongst some sucker oh yeah the Italians they weren't really up to much they're kind of the third wheel of the axis but one of the points we did raise was the fact that you know when when Somerville goes into the Indian Ocean he has mostly our class plus Warspite and a handful of carriers whereas you look at the several hundred ships that the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy have got pinned down trying to fend off the Italians in the Mediterranean just how many carriers get cycled through there how many battleships are operating there and then you've got the cruisers and destroyers and that's a hundred plus ships that get lost in the Mediterranean to various enemy actions and then you sit back and go right well what could Somerville have done if he'd been in the Indian Ocean but he'd got the majority of what the Royal Navy was committing to pinning the Italians down deployed with him and then suddenly it's like oh hang on a minute that's three or four armored carriers that's half a dozen if not more battleships not including the ours a lot more cruisers and destroyers that suddenly a force that's going to make the Japanese sit up and go hang on yeah it's in nicest way the Italian fleet is a has advantages of geography and being which mean that they don't have to worry too much about long supply lines and be they had this thing the wrong Navy can't the thoughts not support the army as as cunning puts it it takes three years to build a ship 300 years to build a tradition the army depends on the Royal Navy to get there and depends on the Royal Navy securing its flank you imagine the North African campaign if the Italian Navy had completely unfettered access to the north african coast if the Royal Navy hadn't be managed to get the supplies backwards and forwards to Malta if they're all maybe hadn't been making the Italian Navy hath this keep thinking so that the Italian Navy couldn't force its way through and again that's another issue okay it might sound like a longshot but what would have happened if the Italian Navy had managed to force its way out of the Mediterranean got to the French coast and linked up with the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and linked up with the powerful German force and you suddenly got a German Italian task force in the Atlantic now it never happens and actually it happening it would have been an extreme long shot and they were wrongly putting all sorts of forces in place to stop that happening and that she being a possibility but if that sort of task force had been in the Atlantic that's a very scary prospect for the Royal Navy to deal with so that's why Doron they what's the force it does in place yeah so well yeah that on that note I think we can can wrap up this video it's certainly been very interesting I hope everyone else who's listening is finding it very interesting as well and let me know in the comments below what you what you think and if you if you're liking this format we can hopefully revisit it with maybe looking at all time cruises in more depth post war cruisers who knows I'm sure dr. Clarke has many things he would be quite happy to discuss when it comes to the Royal Navy and it's uh it's technology and tactics throughout this period I do basically live in a library so what I do Ellen they are lovely places yeah okay so I will I will wrap this video up here so thank you very much for your time and take everyone else for listening and hope see again on another video Thank You Raj that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 277,286

Keywords: wows, world of warships, world war 1, world war 2, County class, York class, Town class, Leander class, Arethusa class, Dido class, Surrey class, cruisers, Royal Navy, Admiral Henderson

Id: uB7u-mqwxSc

Length: 61min 54sec (3714 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020