The Battleship Book. Robert M. Farley
Fisher was not content with the invention of Dreadnought, the all big gun battleship which would render the fleets of the world obsolete. Indeed, even before the construction of Dreadnought Fisher had favored he development of a larger, faster warship. The mission of the Royal Navy was not limited to the destruction of the enemy battlefleet, and Fisher worried that smaller, less capable navies might attack British trade through the use of commerce raiding armored cruisers. These cruisers (examples of which existed in the French, Russian, German, American, and Japanese navies) could outpace even Dreadnought, making the defense of Britain’s trade lifeline difficult. Accordingly, before Dreadnought even left the slip, Fisher commissioned a design for a new kind of ship, the battlecruiser. HMS Invincible was the first of this kind.
Although roughly the same size as Dreadnought, Invincible sacrificed one turret and a lot of armor for six extra knots of speed. She carried one turret fore, one aft, and one on each wing. At her commissioning, Invincible could either outgun or outrun any ship in the world. She was almost literally invincible against armored cruisers, with huge advantages in speed and firepower. Facing battleships, she could use her speed to harass and withdraw. The Royal Navy would build eleven more battlecruisers, culminating in HMS Hood. The German Navy, feeling the need to match the British, built seven, while the Japanese eventually constructed four.
Invincible anchored at Spithead, 1909.
HMS Invincible began the war with the First Battlecruiser Squadron, based in Britain. Her first action was the Battle of Heligoland Bight, in which a group of British battlecruisers intercepted and destroyed a few patrolling German light cruisers. Developments in the Far East, however, drew HMS Invincible away. At the beginning of World War I, Germany controlled a naval base at Tsingtao. A crack German squadron including Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, Germany’s best two armored cruisers, had been stationed in Tsingtao before the war. The German position in Asia was untenable, however, as British and Russian forces could easily occupy the German territory, and Japan clearly coveted Germany’s Pacific empire. Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee decided to take his squadron into the Pacific in an effort to do as much damage as possible before being caught. There was a small chance, if the German ships were lucky, that they might make it back to Germany. Spee’s squadron wreaked havoc in the Southeast Pacific for a couple of months before the British were finally available to collect the ships necessary to track it down. The first Royal Navy effort ended in disaster, however: The British cruisers became separated from a pre-dreadnought battleship, and were destroyed at the Battle of Coronel. This defeat outraged British public opinion, and the Admiralty decided to deal with Spee by sending HMS Invincible and HMS Inflexible to the South Atlantic.
Admiral Graf von Spee’s squadron attacked Stanley, in the Falkland Islands, on the morning of December 8, 1914. The admiral had no idea that Inflexible and Invincible were in port. Had the Germans launched an immediate and all-out attack, they might have had a chance of seriously damaging or even crippling the British ships. On the other hand, Admiral Graf von Spee can hardly be blamed for retreating before an overwhelmingly superior force. The British Admiral, Frederick Sturdee, was unfazed by the initial German attack, and ordered the crew to take in breakfast while the battlecruisers raised steam. When Inflexible and Invincible were ready, they proceeded to leave Stanley, track down the German cruisers (they had an advantage of 3-4 knots) and destroy them at range. The ensuing battle was deeply unsporting, but Scharnhorst and Gneisenau did manage to score a number of hits on their poor-shooting hunters before sinking.
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HMS Invincible, 1907.
HMS Invincible returned to Great Britain, but missed the Battle of Dogger Bank. In May 1916, Invincible was flagship of the Third Battlecruiser Squadron, temporarily operating with the Grand Fleet out of Scapa Flow rather than with the rest of the battlecruiser squadrons. Her commander was Read Admiral Horace Hood, part of a family with a long history in the Royal Navy. Invincible did not arrive at Jutland early enough to participate in the “Run to the South.” Hood led the Third Battlecruiser Squadron into the fight ahead of the Grand Fleet, joining his ships to Beatty’s surviving battlecruisers. Invincible began to hammer SMS Lutzow, the flagship of Admiral Hipper’s German battlecruiser squadron, with uncanny accuracy.
HMS Inflexible
Unfortunately, the Germans noticed Invincible’s excellent gunnery, which distinguished her from the rest of Beatty’s battlecruisers. Lutzow and Derfflinger poured fire onto Invincible, and a salvo from Lutzow hit the British ship on its middle turret. Invincible was not designed to take heavy fire from battleships, but the admirals of neither the Grand Fleet nor the High Seas Fleet could resist pressing their battlecruisers into front line combat. Invincible exploded and sank, taking all but six of her crew of 1,021 with her, including Admiral Hood. That was twice the number of survivors of the battlecruiser Hood, destroyed almost twenty-five years later. A much larger number of sailors probably survived the initial explosion, but it was not the policy of the Royal Navy to pick up survivors during battle. Invincible came to rest in two pieces, with her stern protruding just above the water. As the rest of the Grand Fleet passed by, the name Invincible was clearly visible on the stern of the wreck.
HMS Invincible in poor condition, Battle of Jutland, May 31, 1916.
Author’s Note
In the years after Jutland, examination of the details of the losses of the three battlecruisers indicated that weapons storage and handling played a major role in the fatal explosions. Still, the eggshell thin armor on the early ships (such as Invincible) surely contributed to their loss. The passage of time would serve to vindicate Fisher’s interest in the battlecruiser type, however, as faster ships consistently played a more active role in naval warfare (in both world wars), than their slower, more well-armored cousins.
HMS Invincible.
The United Kingdom has insisted on retaining the name Invincible for its capital ships, despite the embarrassing loss of the battlecruiser at Jutland. The most recent Invincible, a light carrier, served honorably in the Falklands War, just as her namesake had served seventy years earlier.
Related Entries:
Contemporary of… HMS Dreadnought
Inspired… SMS Goeben,
Sunk by… SMS Lutzow
São Paulo
Laid Down: 1907
Launched: 1909
Completed: July, 1910
Displacement: 19,000 tons
Main Armament: twelve 12” guns (six twin turrets)
Secondary Armament: twenty-two 4.7” guns (casemates, individual mounts)
Speed: 21.5 knots
Major Actions: Revolt of the Lash
Treaty: Pre-Washington Naval Treaty
Fate: Sank while en route to scrapping, 1951
The commissioning of Dreadnought set the navies of the world to zero, or close enough. Dreadnought represented no great technical revolution. Rather, she combined a set of available technologies in a single platform, resulting in a ship that was simply larger, faster, and more heavily armed than any predecessor. The capacity to build a dreadnought type battleship was easily within the capabilities of any nation that could construct and maintain pre-dreadnoughts. Accordingly, the French, Russian,