Abstract
The ‘big cruisers’ of the mid–late Victorian and Edwardian eras have recently started to draw greater attention than they have hitherto received from naval historians, although they remain one of the most misunderstood types of the era, their sporadic and apparently inconsistent development doing little to bolster their reputation. In this volume, Aidan Dodson takes up the foreboding challenge of assessing the development of the type from a selected genesis, through to the introduction of the all-big-gun types latterly named ‘battlecruisers’. For the purposes of the text, such types are rationalised as a vessel that possessed side armour and/or was of greater than 7,500 tons displacement, ‘not primarily intended for service in the main battle line, that was begun prior to the completion of HMS Invincible’.
As has come to be expected from a Seaforth release, Before the Battlecruiser is a beautifully presented work, heavily illustrated with period images from a variety of sources, including the author’s own collection, and 12 plans across two fold-out pages courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Necessarily heavily reduced from the originals, the latter’s primary value is illustrative of plan, layout and aesthetics as opposed to design details, but they are a welcome addition and the reproduction of all images is of excellent quality. The body of the work itself is divided into two parts plus appendix, notes, five dedicated maps, bibliography and a useful index. Chapters 1–8, forming Part I, provide a condensed history of the big cruiser and its international development, while Part II provides basic technical and career data, presented in the form of a gazetteer of vessel classes by nation in alphabetical order. Structurally the work is straightforward, accessible and suitable for easy review and reference.
Of the two main sections, Part II is the most successful as a reference work, presenting vessel data in a consistent format: an expanded variation of that employed in prior volumes such as Conway’s, Jane’s, and The Naval Annual, with the expected technical information of displacement, dimensions, machinery, armament, protection and compliment. In addition, brief details on builders, laying down, launching, completing and (where relevant) purchasing dates are given in tabulated form, with a note on the ultimate fate of the vessel. Brief career details are also given. Small plans are given showing configuration/rig and changes following refits. Of particular value are those indicating protection, showing the thicknesses and extent of vertical and, critically, horizontal armour. The latter is of great importance for these vessels, many of which, especially in Britain, extensively utilised the protective deck concept, but which is often underplayed. Data is principally culled from archival and contemporary works rather than later reference texts, which adds interest and verisimilitude, while avoiding repetition of errors. The concentration of basic, accurate hard data on these vessels from across the world’s navies into a single volume supplies a long-missed want, and the book deserves a place in the collection of any serious maritime historian of the era as a result.
Part I furnishes a condensed history of the general type and its development. The chosen parameters effectively mean the French Belliqueuse and Almas, along with the British Audacious/Invincibles are taken as the starting point, with the eight chapters following an approximately chronological approach. This proceeds from a brief contextual preamble through the sail–steam era, the shift in capability wrought by the introduction of efficient compound engines, ‘the golden age’ of the type in the final decade of the nineteenth Century, and the final generation of vessels. Three further chapters provide an assessment of combat performance during the early twentieth Century, the gradual dwindling of the big cruiser, and a short retrospective.
Given the extended and convoluted history of the big cruiser, to say nothing of the number of vessels in question, the task the author embarked upon is formidably large for just over 150 pages of modestly sized print and images. As a result the discussion and analysis inevitably lack some depth, and occasionally the format results in disjointed presentation. While in itself reasonable, the selected starting point tends to mask the significance of the first British armour-clads in this role, and the four-page first chapter on the genesis of the type is excessively abbreviated. Warrior and her immediate successors are defined ‘battleships’, despite it being noted that they were frigates in definition. The fact that the Warriors in particular were not designed for the contemporary battle-line but as cruising vessels supplementary to the existing battlefleet is largely missed, and when they and their immediate successors (notably Achilles and the Minotaurs) eventually supplied wooden steam liners as core fleet elements they were ill-suited to the role given their length and poor manoeuvrability. Before the Battlecruiser also falls into the trap of criticising the Royal Navy for building ‘replies’ to foreign cruisers without a clear strategic objective. While aspects of this activity can be critiqued, this was not strictly the case: the propaganda factor was a powerful tool in the nineteenth-century Admiralty’s armoury beyond purely military value, while the service’s partially hidden trade-defence strategy of concentrating cruisers at critical trade confluences (which foreign raiders would by necessity focus upon) increased the chance of interception. The fact that the two Powerful class cruisers were initially stationed in the same geographical region as the vessel(s) they were designed to annihilate was far from coincidental. From a technical perspective, the assessment of protection schemes might also have been usefully expanded or clarified, and aspects of conclusions such as the classification of the Dupuy de Lome, with her soft steel armour, as ‘the prototype of the "classic" big armoured cruiser’ are questionable. The role of armaments companies like Armstrong’s in the rise of the type is noted, though perhaps could have been slightly expanded; likewise, although included, a more detailed assessment on the roles and performance of big cruisers in the first Sino-Japanese, Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese wars would have been welcome, given the critical role played by the vessels in all these conflicts. However, the broad description of the type’s complex development and roles, its place as a form of capital ship, and the assessment of combat performance during the Great War are generally sound, especially the well-judged assessment of the losses at Jutland, while the overall conclusions reasonable.
While not without issues, Before the Battlecruiser is a useful and accessible work, especially the concentrated data for those requiring rapid access to such and the large variety of images. The general background also gives a useful introduction to the type, helping raise its profile and underlining the importance of these vessels to contemporaries. As such it is a worthwhile addition to the historiography.