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The Philippines was never considered by Americans to be a true “possession” of the United States, in the sense of the European colonial empires. As a republic, the United States prided itself on not being European and not wanting a colonial empire. The Native American tribes within the boundaries of the United States were treated as scattered wards of the American government who would eventually become Americans. Assimilated into American society, just as had the Spanish, British, French, and Mexican inhabitants of Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, Texas, California, and the desert Southwest.Given the opportunity to conquer parts of settled Canada in 1812, American militia often refused to cross the international border. The Mexican War in 1845 was considered a criminal act by many in the United States. President Polk’s suggestion that the United States annex heavily populated Mexican provinces in 1848 was resisted in the congress and among the citizens. Opponents of empire considered ruling over vast numbers of foreigners “un-american,” European, and evil. Further, prejudiced Americans did not want millions of semi-illiterate Catholic, “non-white” peasants to suddenly be made American citizens.This balance of opinions kept the American government from becoming involved in the world-wide land-grabbing of European nations for the next half-century. When the United States went to war with Spain in 1898, it was to liberate Cuba and drive the last significant European empire from the Western Hemisphere.There was an American internationalist movement with a serious imperialist faction. This faction, in which Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt was a leader, wished to assert American power overseas to advance the nation’s foreign trade. They also wanted to create a large American navy and acquire foreign naval bases for that navy to give the United States more influence in the world. This policy went forward, in 1898, not secretly, but still screened by the higher goal of liberating Cuba.The United States conquered the Philippines from Spain in 1898 to build a coaling station and a harbor to maintain its Pacific naval squadron. The four years of war that followed could have been avoided if the American government had been less divided in its motives and had planned its policy in the Philippines better. It should have been ready to offer the Filipino Independence movement an arrangement similar to that it intended for Cuba.Filipinos revolted in 1898 because the American officials involved in the transfer of power from Spain to the United States had not considered that they would resist being “liberated” from Spain by another foreign power. The Americans and Filipinos were both aware that the Philippines, and particularly the fine harbor at Manila, were being targeted directly by the British and Germans foreign offices and tentatively by every other colonial power, including the rising power of Japan. The British and Germans had cruiser squadrons in Manila Bay days after the victory of Commodore Dewey’s American squadron over the Spanish. Dewey and the British naval commander eventually had to threaten the Germans with another naval battle if they persisted in undercutting American negotiations with the Filipinos.The Filipino-American War saw many terrible actions by the American army to suppress the independence movement. As Americans grew aware of this, many were outraged at the crimes being committed in their name. Theodore Roosevelt, now president of the United States, was also appalled by the bloodshed and suffering, as well as the damage being done to America’s reputation and his. William Howard Taft, the American Governor of the Philippines, was empowered to negotiate a settlement.Taft’s compromise made the Philippines a de facto American protectorate, with limited autonomy, investment in government and economic infrastructure, and full independence at some future time when the colonial empires already dominating Asia were no longer a threat. The Americans kept their military bases around Manila. Legislation passed in the American congress over the next few decades ended American administrative power in the Philippines. By 1934 the Philippine Independence Act made the Philippines fully autonomous, with the official end to American sovereignty scheduled for 1944 and the removal of the American military bases scheduled for 1946.This schedule was badly compromised by the Japanese, who began planning to take the Philippines away from the Americans soon after 1898.By 1905, the threat the superior Japanese navy posed to the American position in East Asia caused Taft, then Secretary of War, to arrange an unofficial compromise: the Americans would mute their criticism of the Japanese aggression in Korea if Japan would cease to plot aggression against the Philippines. The establishment of this agreement on policy kept the Japanese at bay for several decades. However, as militarists seized control of the Japanese government in the 1930s, Japan began planning to expand its empire in the Pacific.The Japanese navy wanted the Philippines. Tentatively, the Imperial Naval Staff planned for an invasion of the Philippines in 1948, two years after the last American naval forces were withdrawn. At that point, the American navy would have no bases in the Pacific nearer to Manila then Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, five thousand miles distant.In 1940, rising tensions over the Japanese invasion of China caused the militarist government in Tokyo to consider a war with the United States to end its support of China. Nazi Germany conquered France in June, and the Americans passed a “Two-Ocean Navy Bill” to create a vast new fleet to defend itself against both Nazi Germany and Japan. Supporting Britain in its war with Germany was part of American defensive strategy, leading, in March of 1941, to the Lend Lease Act, which allowed the United States to proclaim its neutrality while underwriting the British and Chinese war efforts with billions of dollars in war material. Germany and Italy decided to declare war on the United States, but wanted Japan to join them. Japan was still hesitant to attack the Americans, who had ten times its industrial capacity, but the Japanese navy refused to consider a war in the Pacific without Japanese control of the Philippines.Japan eventually attacked the United States, with guarantees of German and Italian support, in December of 1941. They invaded the Philippines a few days after attacking Pearl Harbor. Americans and Filipinos fought the Japanese invaders side by side for six months before surrendering their armies. Filipino and American resistance fighters carried on the struggle against the Japanese for four years. In 1944 and 1945, the Americans returned to the Philippines in great strength and fought to liberate it, week after week, until the Japanese surrender in September of 1945.The official year of Filipino independence, which had been 1944, was delayed two years by the Japanese invasion. Because of the threat posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China, the American military facilities near Manila stayed open throughout the Cold War, closing in 1992.Addenda:As an example of how little the Spanish administration had penetrated the Philippines in three hundred years, consider the problems Manuel Quezon and Douglas MacArthur had forming a national government and military in the 1930s . . .More than anything else, language proved to be an almost insurmountable barrier. It was not unusual for men in one company to speak at least six different dialects, each of which was unintelligible to the other, a military Tower of Babel that guaranteed frustration and inertia . . .A cadre of forty American officers and twenty American NCOs or Philippine Scouts served as the skeleton around which each division was formed. Weapons, ammo, and infrastructure were all substandard. “The men had no individual entrenching tools,” Major Malcolm Fortier, an adviser to the 41st Infantry Division, later wrote. Uniforms were shabby. Leather footgear was ill-suited for the wide tendencies of local feet, causing such bad blisters that, according to Fortier, “many men went bare foot rather than wear them ” . . .Language and cultural problems persisted even for units composed of men from the same region. “They spoke eleven different dialects,” Colonel Glen Townsend, commander of the 11th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Division, later said. “Christian and Pagan had little liking for each other. Although all the enlisted personnel had taken the prescribed five and a half months [of] training, they were proficient only in close-order drill and saluting. The officers, being mainly political appointees, had less training than the men they were supposed to lead.” One of his machine-gun companies proved to be a near total loss because the troops could not begin to communicate with one another. Townsend’s officers resorted to using sign language and diagrams. This reduced training, in the estimation of one captain to “demonstration, application, and supervision.” In another unit, the language gap also bordered on the ridiculous. American officers gave instructions in English to Filipino officers who then translated to their sergeants in Tagalog, who, in turn, translated the Tagalog instructions into a local dialect.Once the Japanese invaders landed, Americans and Filipinos learned on the job quickly enough. Note that the Filipino Scouts, the most professional unit in the allied army, had the traditional colonial organization of American officers and enlisted men salted into a majority of Filipino volunteers. Japanese bullets and shrapnel were indifferent to those distinctions . . .Fierce combat ensued, especially near the once quaint roadside town of Abucay. The brunt of the Japanese assault hit at the juncture of the 41st Division and the 57th Infantry Regiment. The latter was a superb, well-armed regiment of Scouts from the Philippine Division. In the eerie darkness, aided by artillery and mortar fire, the Japanese attacked. “Screaming ‘Banzai,’ in a frenzied fashion, the leading men hurled themselves on the barbed wire and made bridges of their bodies over which the remainder passed,” Captain John Olson, the regimental adjutant, later wrote: “The wire almost became invisible under the weight of dead bodies. They were piled so high our machine guns didn’t have any more field of fire,” PFC Wilburn Snyder said. “We killed them with pistols as they came over. It was horrible. They came with these shrill cries. You killed them or you didn’t stop them.” To Captain Ernest Brown, a company commander, the stunted sugarcane field in front of his unit’s defensive line seemed to “vomit Japanese in great numbers, screaming, howling, yelling ‘Banzai’ as they charged. They continued to come, threw themselves against our wire, and the waves behind them leaped on their comrades up and over. It seemed they were acrobats in the manner they crossed the moon lit stretch of ground between the cane field and our position.” In some cases, enemy soldiers jumped onto the box mines, blowing themselves up to create craters in which others took cover. Artillery shells shrieked in and exploded, sending hot fragments in every direction, blowing some of the Japanese infantrymen to bits. Lieutenant Colonel Philip Fry, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 57th Infantry later said the artillery fire was the “sweetest music I have ever heard.” Seventy-five-millimeter batteries from the Scouts’ 24th Field Artillery Battalion fired from ranges of three hundred yards or less, so close that the gun shields were dented by Japanese bullets. The infantry Scouts added devastating sheets of machine-gun and rifle fire to the roiling mass of running and jumping enemy soldiers.McManus, John C.. Fire and Fortitude. Penguin Publishing Group.

Even though you are casting the question as one about programming, I will answer it in a way that hopefully will be accessible and understandable by non-programmers too.Let’s go back to sometime in the early 80s. Sorry about that! :)People are sporting mullets right and left, the fashion is abysmally bad, pop music is doing its best to compete with fashion for the worst-80s-thing award, people are watching hilariously bad soap operas like Dynasty and Dallas semi-religiously, and no car comes with safety belts for all seats.Ah yes… also amid all these ridiculousnesses, there is a cold war taking place threatening to destroy the world in a gloriously stupid nuclear war scenario. There was that too.Questions as to how we survived the 80s as species aside though, there was at least one development that has stayed with us to this day. The “video game that you could play on your personal computer at home” development.Yes… when people were not headbanging to the sound of Slayer or Metallica, they were playing games at their home.Games like say, Pacman or Space Invaders.Now I am not sure if you know or have heard of it but in those olden days, you simply could not win in those games like Pacman or Space Invaders.They were quite realistic.They kept getting harder and faster until you eventually died.You know, as is the case in real life.Now, where exactly were people playing these remarkably lifelike games?But on 8-bit machines of course!Say, this thing depicted below:A zx spectrum. It came in 2 versions. One with 48k of memory and one with 64k of memory. Later it was replaced with this one:which had 128K and the tape mechanism was not external! Luxurious stuff…Risking the danger of reigniting old feuds… there were better machines of course. Say, the Amstrad CPC 464.So how long would it take to load your game back then? A difficult question to answer due to technicalities, however, what the heck we are kind of nerds; aren’t we? I mean we are QUestioning OR Answering stuff on Quora… a site that its creators named using the highlighted scheme above… we cannot go nerdier in my humble opinion :D.So let’s tackle this briefly. To calculate how long it would take to load a game we first need to know how much space for 0s and 1s was available in those tapes. This is a very difficult calculation because it depends on a myriad of factors. Baud, error correction or not, length of the particular tape, whether byte for analog media should be counted as 10 or 8 bits, and so on. To simplify stuff, for the sake of discussion, know that in general the 0s and 1s were recorded as pulses, but depending on the pulse length the pulse would be interpreted as a 0 or as a 1.A reasonable consensus is that a tape of that era would hold something like 55Kb as the minimum.I checked the very first image above for size, and it is 439kb.8O ←wide eyes wide open mouth face…So we would need several tapes to store it…Well ok, how long would take us to load…say that image above?First of all, we would not be able to…Remember those machines had 48 or 64 or later 128 Kilobytes of memory… total.So we could load only stuff UP to those limits, forget all the other limitations…Now a program that would fill the entire side of the tape would take something between 15 and 30 minutes, depending on what that size was.About 30 minutes for the 54kb. As I said it depends on many factors.Here is a fun discussion on it if you are interested.So… that first image along with the entire answer of mine with all the images, and in fact, ALL the answers to this question put together, they were loaded and presented on your screen at least as far as you can tell, instantly and wirelessly from your router getting the data from some server thousands of miles away. Well, if not instantly then in milliseconds… and we think nothing of it… back then the image would take hours to load - my answer days - and all answers to the question…weeks.So yes you needed a LOT of time to load your game back then.And after you loaded the freaking Ghosts `N Goblins:that in fact at the time on those machines it looked something like this:you would shoot some knives on zombies for a few seconds before one of them ended up touching you because you timed your jumping over a tombstone badly, rendering you armorless - in fact, to add insult to the injury and for ultimate humiliation you were running around in your underpants……for a few more seconds before a zombie touched you again and you died.Back then you would be famous for having SEEN someone finishing this game.Today, btw if you were also wondering about the ending, you can go to youtube and you can watch a speedrun like the above.So… to come back to the point… back then, when you needed anything between 5 to 30 minutes to load a game that was absolutely brutal in difficulty and you would end up dying within anything from less than a minute to 5 minutes… you had to be REALLY HARDCORE to want to play these games. For some of them like say, Green Berret, It would take say 5–10 minutes to load a level and if you died on the second level you had to reload the first level and then the second level again, to reach the same point. All games were by definition, Iron Man games… in fact worse. There was not even a single save. You lost, you start from the very beginning… every time.Everything was an exercise in futility and a test of one’s nerves.Often your mom could see you banging your head on the desk that you had your computer on, assuming that you are simply headbanging to your Iron Maiden a tad overzealously, when in fact you were doing it out of frustration that you needed to wait 10 minutes again to load the previous freaking level.And yet, the gamers of those days, KEPT at it. I mean really really really kept at it. They would think nothing of it. This is how things are, they would say.They would come home from school or work and the thought of loading stuff for an eternity only to lose within seconds to minutes would not even register… they were like:“Oh, oh!! Today it’s the day that I am going to beat it!!”Then better machines came, like the Amstrad CPC 6128, the Commodore 128 etc.Things then started loading in the order of a few minutes even though the capacity of a disk was 128k. So a gamer could practice more easily. You did not need to wait an eternity to load the levels anymore.But practicing more easily, of course, did not matter. Sure now you could go ahead and memorize the timing for the entire Ghosts `N Goblins run because for that game, memorizing the timings was all that was in it. The movements of the monsters were fixed.But if your computer had more memory, then one could write more complex programs having more complex behaviors, like say, in the game Bomb Jack.Now suddenly the enemies were reacting to your movements. They were going after you. They were smart! For Bomb Jack, you would be famous for having seen someone who had heard of someone who finished the game.And yet, the gamers of those days, KEPT at it. I mean really really really kept at it. They would think nothing of it. This is how things are, they would say.They would come home from school or work and the thought of playing something in which they would end up losing within seconds to minutes and was without saves would not even register… they were like:“Oh, oh!! Today it’s the day that I am going to see what level 6 looks like!!”Then even better machines appeared, the early PCs of course, and again risking reigniting long gone feuds, the vastly vastly vastly superior Amiga machines:Now games started getting even MORE difficult, simply because the developers had much much more memory to create even larger and more complex levels. For example, consider the company Psygnosis, a game development studio that was making games for Amiga.A much better name would be Psychosis for them. I mean, look at their games…Say, the Shadow of the Beast series:or the very apropos named Agony:No seriously… go ahead and watch these long runs…It was as if game developers in the early 80s were designing games that would be really really challenging for 10-year-olds but a 15-year-old would be somewhat competent… then saying “oh… those 10-year-olds now they are teenagers, so let's throw something even harder at them. Something that will be difficult even for a teenager or an adult.”Man… you could not get a break.It was something similar to the case of certain modern RPGs where you may be gaining levels but it does not matter because the opponents in the game are gaining levels as well.Encounter a bandit at a location in Skyrim when you are level 1, and they are level 1 or 2.Encounter the same bandit but only later when you are level 15 and they will also be 15–17.And since I mentioned RPGs… yeah, those started coming of age at that point too.We are talking about EPIC stuff like the original Bard’s Tale:or the Eye of The Beholder series:These were dungeon crawler type of RPGs, where the dungeons were mazes that could have invisible walls or walls that were simply illusions, trap doors that would send you to your doom, magic teleportation locations that would instantly transport you to some other place in the current dungeon level or even to an entire previous level, hidden levers that once you found would do something 3 levels below the one you were currently on and so on.And… there was NO MAP for them… You know how modern games have these minimaps usually on a top corner of the screen, that shows you where you are?And also they create the map automatically for you to consult if you are lost?And they have auto journals so that you can track your quests?And they also autosave?Yeah… none of that.You wanted a map back then, you better had some grid paper and a pen or pencil and start drawing mister!Otherwise, you could end up being as lost as whatever it is that this guy is looking for (his keys?)within minutes.In fact, you WERE like that guy every time you died and you had to start from the last save you remembered to make which was like 4 levels prior to the one you just died onand so you needed to figure out where the heck did you put those previous levels maps you ’ve drawn…last week.And yet, the gamers of those days, KEPT at it. I mean really really really kept at it. They would think nothing of it. This is how things are, they would say.They would come home from school or work and the thought of having to replay the last 6 hours of content only to forget to save again before dying at the same place would not even cross their minds… they were like:“Oh, oh!! Today it’s the day that I am going to finally reach the 12th dungeon level!!”By mid-90s, we had games like Civilization and UFO Enemy Unkown, the difficulty of which had absolutely skyrocketed simply because of sheer complexity.Losing before the 3rd level in Bomb Jack took you something like 10 minutes. Then you knew you lost because you know…. you could see the big fat “GAME OVER” message on your screen.Losing after 30 minutes in the Shadow of The Beast was also obvious because again… you would see the “GAME OVER” message on your screen.In fact, your performance on level 1 had no impact on your performance on level 10… if you lost at level 10 even though you arrived there with all your lives intact, it was because you simply failed at that level.Not so for this new breed of games though. These games were a totally different monster being strategic and all. You could have lost within 5 minutes because of a bad build order choice in those games… but you would not become aware of it for hours… or days… or ever…“Hmmm should I go for the Stonehedge wonder or should I build a Granary? What the heck… Stonehedge it is.”Because the impact of your decisions was not immediately obvious you would discover days later that whatever you did was wrong. You would not really know if it was this world wonder or that archer before the granary or going for mathematics, before going for the wheel that resulted in you defending your city with catapults when the attacker had tanks.It could be because you made one wrong decision, or it could be that you made 50…And why that is you ask? Well, the machines had become good enough at that point for very very decent AI. The games were getting deep and strategic and the impact your decisions had was not obvious at all, especially if randomness was involved in the process.So you had to fail A LOT before you even get to the point where you knew if it is already game over or not and you should start again. Suddenly you had to acquire experience through success/failure feedback that was not immediate at all. And it was not a strategy game exclusive phenomenon either.For example, take Diablo and compare the first one, with the last one.Today a gamer not only they do see the end of a diablo game, but often playing only the game’s very last parts is all they do. The famous Diablo runs, Baal runs, etc.In the last Diablo doing boss and endgame runs is your bread and butter.In Diablo 1 you would always crap your pants when you were going near “the Butcher” on the second level.Compare:Diablo 1, Normal difficulty, 2nd level, 1st boss you encounter.Diablo 3, Normal difficulty, end game, last boss you encounter.The problem with the difficulty of Diablo 1 and 2 was not only related to the ferociousness of the monster themselves but also on which skill you raise first, which attribute you should increase and which ones you should completely ignore, in other words, the build order you used… and it was not obvious whether it was a good or bad character build until way later inside the depths of the dungeon when suddenly your previous decision to put one extra point in dexterity of your warrior instead of putting it on vitality... had made a huge difference. Suddenly you were unable to progress, after DAYS of playing that character. You had to start over and build your character differently...And the gamer??Well now, they had to think of it:They had to associate actions to outcomes when the two were really removed from each other timewise. They had to recall build orders; what they have done that failed and what worked:and then….“Oh, oh!! I thought of the perfect build order!! I will try it for the next 17 days…”As computers acquired more power, more memory, better hardware, and their developers better software building tools….Real Time Strategy games were made possible.AI could be written that would react immediately to a player’s actions, and your build order decisions had to be made in real time, not to mention that suddenly the internet was available and you could play with…. humans! Forget AI.Humans can think of the most sneaky strategies, the most cunning counters, the most unexpected build orders.Suddenly you had to consider build orders as you had never done before, scout the opponent to see what they are doing so that you can adjust your build order, and keep doing a million things that you had to do in order to win the match. There is even a metric widely used to measure one aspect of skill: APM, actions per minute.Competitive gaming was born.Warcraft, Warcraft II, Starcraft, Warcraft III, Starcraft II…all require the same skills but with slight differences mostly in matters of convenience that were kept getting progressively more numerous.Now people had to be quick, and cunning and they had to study… you could not win games online vs other people if you were not doing your homework. Read about tactics, strategy, build orders, watching countless replays of others and so on…Countless websites were popping up right and left dedicated precisely on this newly needed aspect of gaming: the having to study about it.And our gamer?“Oh, oh!! I will practice this building order against zerg again and again and again!! What fun!!”Eventually, the modern era of gaming arrived with computers suddenly being able to handle an absurd amount of data and suddenly the gamer was playing games that screenshots of their gameplay were looking better than the drawings of cover boxes from games of the past…The gamer who had played The Ancient Art of War, screenshots of which you can see on the left of the above pictures, was now playing games that look like what you can see on the right, from Rome and Warhammer II of the Total War series.The key to understanding the point that I will make shortly is that the gamer was like this:“Oh, oh!! What fun!!”no matter whether they were playing the Ancient Art of War or Warhammer II.In fact, the gamer was impressed with the graphics on the left when first laid eyes on them because they were spectacular for their time…So why have I used the gamer thus far, instead of the programmer?Well, most people are NOT programmers. At the same time, zounds of people have been or are still gaming. This means that more people will be able to appreciate the point of the answer itself.But what could be the similarity between the two you may ask.Well if you think of it since games are software and in fact the kind of software that has been pushing for better hardware since the dawn of time, they are directly related to programming. People were programming these games back then and they still do today. And the fact is that the evolution of software engineering from back then to today is mirroring the evolution of gaming itself.Here is how and why.Take the history of humanity as an example and the technological advancements humans achieved throughout it.First, observe that for millions of years there was not one iota of technological innovation… people were making stone tools and that’s it. There were some improvements in the complexity or quality of the stone tools but they remained stone tools.Then suddenly in the span of 10 thousand years, they went from what is depicted on the left below to what is depicted on the right:The explosion in innovation had a trigger of course. The dawn of civilization. Settlements.Now let’s see what happen in the case of computation both in software and hardware fields.Ignoring analog computers and concerning ourselves only with digital ones, we can trace the first computer back to the mid 1930s.Then the progress of hardware and software is minimal… exactly like the case with the stone tools. Yeah, some languages are invented, some thingamajig and some thingamabob happened here and there, but nothing that is really revolutionary.People did not have access to computers really. Even though by the late 70s computers were not room size monsters anymore, still very very few people had ever seen a computer, never mind using one.Until the early 80s that is.Then Clive Sinclair had the idea of putting something completely half assy together and call it a home computer, something that had the bare minimum or even less than that, but it was CHEAP. So people started having computers at home.So now a kid could actually write something like10 print “hello” 20 goto 10 in basic and see their monochrome green screen filling with hellos…and they were like:“Oh, oh!! My gosh the stuff that I can do!!”Coming back to our human technological history analogy, these people who coded that as kids have experienced something very similar to what happened in the last 12,000 years of human technological history, but they did so in the span of a single lifetime.It is as if we had people who experienced the development of the very first bronze object, now doing spacewalks.Those who started in 1998, i.e 20 years ago are as if they have experienced the middle ages and now are spacewalking.So what DO these 20–50-year coding people know?Well, first of all, they know that they like coding.They liked it when lines had numbers, and there were no IDEs and no autosave of your work, and no debuggers and no libraries and no internet with Stack Overflow for one to ask questions.They liked it when everything you had to do to create some software was bordering the miraculous.Here is a scene from Star Trek Deep Space 9 that describes a ridiculously difficult mission:Miles O’Brien: So, let me get this straight: all we have to do is get past an enemy fleet, avoid a tachyon detection grid, beam into the middle of Klingon headquarters and avoid the Brotherhood of the Sword long enough to set these things up and activate them in front of Gowron?Worf: If we succeed, there will be many songs sung in our honor.Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 5: Episode 1 – “Apocalypse Rising”Worf’s - who is a Klingon and thus he lives and breathes for doing stuff like that - reaction is that of the old timer coder.“Oh oh, am I going to play the hide and seek with the semicolon “;” trying to debug the non-debugable?”“Oh my…. what fun!!”Well ok, maybe I ’m exaggerating a bit in this last one, as there are no things that cannot be debugged :)But for sure, I recall myself having ants in my pants while at school… wanting to return home and fire up my Amstrad CPC 6128 and code or play… and the excitement of building a simple telephone catalog that would store a name and a phone number in Basic was no less than the excitement I feel now building stuff that I would need a couple of hours to explain to you the idea of the mathematics behind some part of it.Similarly, the excitement I was feeling for playing the game on the left was not different than the excitement I feel from playing the games on the right in the picture below:I was honestly and genuinely thinking back then that the game on the left was just incredible as far as graphics go, and ditto for its gameplay.So as I said, these people know for sure that they love doing it.They also know how to NOT burn out.Consider the case of people going to the gym.There are basically 10 types of such people.Those that go to the gym at the end of May and they want to have a sixpack by the beginning of June, and those who go to the gym for years and for them going to the gym is a way of life. They have the sixpack because they go to the gym, and not going to the gym just to get a sixpack.The rookie newcomer does not know that going to the gym every day is hurting their progress. That resting is just as - if not more - important than lifting weights.That when you lift heavy weights you are training not just your muscle, but also your tendons and your nerves.And unlike the muscle that reacts relatively immediately, the other two need time… a lot of time. If you keep going to the gym like as if you are a berserker, you will burn out, because your nervous system won't be following your muscle progress really.And when you burn out you do not go to the gym anymore.So long sixpacks, we never saw ye.The people who go to the gym for years though, KNOW what they need to do in order to NOT burn out. Burning out is the enemy of success in everything we do in fact.People who keep coding for 40 years are DEMONSTRABLY people who are not burned out. They know when to say “that is not possible” and when to say “that is possible but I ’m going to need lots of time”. They know when to take it easy and when to obsess with whatever they are working on. Evolutionary speaking, the coder in them has survived in the software problem-solving jungle for a long time. This is as important as the coding skills themselves. I do not know about you, but I would like people who I work with to NOT be burned out, but always fresh like a cucumber and ready to jump to a problem like grasshoppers.They also know how to evolve and adapt to change.To… extreme change….Think of it. There is no other area outside computation that is evolving in this sort of timescale. Look at this picture below:Today you have all these things from the 80s in your pocket; they are all replaced by your smartphone. Crazy change right? But how did it happen?We devised better software and we used it to devise better hardware which in turn we used to device better software which allowed us to device better hardware….and so on.And every change in anything was exponential.Here is a graphic that demonstrates the change in processing power:You can find it here.Note that this is using a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis. Which means that this straight line is exponential.People are really really bad at evaluating the impact of exponential functions.To demonstrate to someone what it means for something to, say, double in size every day, all you have to do is to say:If I double the amount of sand in this bucket every day, and it took me 1 trillion years to have it exactly half full, then it will take me 1 day after that to make it full.So imagine that you are this bucket filler dude and you are handling the filling of the bucket every day.The amount of sand that you can carry matters.Maybe you were able to do well until the bucket was 1/4 full, but then the weight was too much for you… and you stopped.Well, the people who still code after 20–50 years have not stopped which means that they managed to adapt to this incredible rate of change.Newcomers often feel intimidated by the change.But the old-timers do not. They have experienced change aplenty, and they can move on, with a “big whoop”… not engender by dismissal but by the comfort that comes with repeated success….Finally, the above mention of repeated successes leads me to the last thing that I ’d like to mention which is the repeated failures.Unless one is born as some sort of savant in some area, one has to fail repeatedly, again and again before they eventually succeed in that area.So these people know how to fail.By that I mean they know how to benefit from their inevitable failures or they would not still be doing what they are doing.I understand that people who follow motorbike racingreally appreciate the skill that is required for one to drive a motorcycle just like that.However, they should also be appreciating the skill that these people have developed of knowing how to fall without dying when they are racing like that. It may be less sexy but it is just as important since you know… they need to remain alive and able to fail again and again before they have the skill to drive the way they do.Now all these observations could be generalized for other fields I suppose. However, as I said, the change in this particular field is enormous compared to that of carpentry or criminal law etc. The only area that I can think of, which had a similar rate of change is that of computer gaming, indeed :)

A HISTORY OF THE BATTLE-CRUISER.(HMS Hood as she appeared on the 17th March 1924 ) The Hood met the Bismarck in what became known as the Battle of the Denmark Straights. How did a shell from the Bismarck battleship penetrate resulting in the Hood exploding with only three survivors? Here we look at the battle-cruiser’s career and the difference between a battle-cruiser and a battle-ship.HMS Hood was launched 22nd August 1918 was on the 15th May 1920, she weighed 46,680 tons. (47, 430 tons fully loaded) During World War Two, she was known as the ‘Mighty Hood,’ and she was the pride of the British fleet. She was the same size as most battleships of her day yet she was not a battleship, she was in fact a battle-cruiser and was not the first of her kind.The battle-cruiser was developed by the British Royal Navy during the first half of the 20th century. Faced with the problem of policing an empire that spanned the globe the British decided that they needed fast ships that could carry the punch of battleship. But to gain speed such vessels would have to sacrifice armour. As such, they were never intended to stand in a line of battle to exchange shots with battleships. The fact that they did was born out of necessity and the results were sometimes tragic.(HMS Invincible, Britain’s first battle-Cruiser.)“What use is a battle fleet to a country called (A) at war with a country called (B) possessing no battleships, but having fast armoured cruisers and clouds of fast torpedo-craft? What damage would (A’s) battleships do to (B’s)? Would (B) wish for a few battleships or more armoured cruisers? Would not (A) willingly exchange a few battleships for more fast armoured cruiser? In such a case, neither side wanting battleships is presumptive evidence that they are not of much value.”(Admiral John ‘Jack,’ Fisher Lord Selborne {First Lord of the Admiralty.}20th October 1904)Fisher’s (25th January 1841 – 10th July 1920) views were reinforced in 1905 at the Battle of Tsushima between Russia and Japan where the Japanese had used their armoured cruisers successfully. Learning from the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War the Japanese designed its four Tsukuba Class (13’750 tons) and the Ibuki Class (14, 636 tons) to carry 12-inch (305-mm) guns, a calibre normally carried on battleships. The United States had already planned its Tennessee Class (14,500 tons) with four 10-inch (254-mm) guns. The British were also considering arming the Minotaur Class (14, 600 tons) with 10 and 12-inch guns before staying with the 9.2-inch (234-mm) guns of the previous class.In 1904, Admiral John Fisher was made First Sea Lord, the most senior officer of the Royal Navy. He had been thinking for some time about developing a new fast, heavily armed and expressed a fondness in the ‘second class battleship,’ Renown, (12, 865 tons) a faster, more lightly armoured battleship. There is an element of confusion in Fisher’s writings about whether he regarded the battleship or the cruiser as a model for future development. He commissioned a design from the Naval architect W. H. Gard for an armoured cruiser that was to be between 14,000 to 15,000 tons, capable of 25 knots (29 mph -46 kph) and was to be armed with four 9.2-inch (233 mm) and twelve 7.5-inch (190 mm) guns mounted in twin turrets protected by 6 inches of armour along her belt and a further 9.2-inch turrets. The ship was to have 4 inches (102 mm) of armour around the 7.5-inch guns, 10 inches (254 mm) on her conning tower and up to 2.5 inches (64 mm) on her decks. However, the main line of British thinking was clearly in favour of battleships in spite of their slow speed and inability to catch the faster cruisers. Lessons could have been learned here from the War of 181, with the United States, when fast American frigates, better armed than their British counterparts used their superior speed to avoid the heavier men-at-war (The battleships of the day) and wracked havoc on British commerce but these lessons seemed to have been ignored.Yet the Japanese proved inclusively at Tsushima the effectiveness of heavy guns and the need for the uniformity in the main calibre on a ship for fire-control. The British however had been thinking along these lines long before the Russo-Japanese war, favouring the 12-inch or 10-inch guns for the pre-Dreadnaughts from the 1890s and armoured cruisers with 9.2-inch guns for the armoured cruisers. The British Royal Navy decided upon 12-inch guns in late 1904 as the main armament for the battleships.Eventually the British would see the need for a fleet that consisted of both battleships and battle cruisers and construction of the new battle cruisers was begun in 1906 and was completed in 1908 just work on a new revolutionary Dreadnaught (18,120 tons) was begun. These were the ships of the Invincible class (17,250 tons) (Invincible, inflexible, indomitable.) though Fisher later claimed that he had agreed for the conciliation of the remaining battleships but his requests were ignored. It was just as well because the HMS Dreadnaught would dominate the seas, making all other types of battleships obsolete.The new battle-cruisers were armed with 8.12-inch MK X guns as opposed to 10 on the Dreadnaught, they had 6 to 7 inches (152 -178 mm) of armour protecting the hull and the gun-turrets compared to 11-12 inches (279 – 3-5 mm) on the Dreadnaught at its thickest.(Admiral John Fisher, as seen in 1915, when he was an Admiral of the Fleet. He was an ardent supporter of the battle-cruiser concept and visioned fleets of such vessels equipping the Royal Navy. )There was almost immediate confusion on how to use these new battleship sized armoured cruisers, even before work began the Admiralty expressed that they were referring to large armoured ships, meaning both battleships and battle-cruisers, in 1906 the navy was referring to both types as capital ships, whereas the Invincible ships were being referred to as ‘Cruiser-battleships,’ Dreadnaught-Cruisers’ the term, ‘battle-cruiser was first used by Fisher in 1908. Fisher’s term for the ships became office on 24th November 1911 with the Admiralty’s weekly Order No. 351, that stipulated that the term ‘battle-cruiser was to be used to distinguish them from armoured cruisers. As the Invincible’s details were being kept secret during the building, meaning that the German Blucher’s (15,842 tons) 8.3-inch (21-centimetre) guns was totally outclassed.A new design was forthcoming, known as the X4 design that combined the full armour and armament of the Dreadnaughts with the 25-knots of the Invincible class but these proved costly and the Admiralty chose instead to go ahead with the slower and cheaper Bellerophon. (18,600 tons) the X4 programme was eventually fulfilled with the launch of the Queen Elizabeth class (27,000) and with later designs and navies.The next battle-cruisers to leave British yards were the Indefatigable class (18,500 toms), (Indefatigable, New Zealand, Australia) three ships with a slight improvement on the Invincible and were built to fundamentality the same specifications, this was partly because of pressure from the politicians to limit costs and partly due to the secrecy of the German battle-cruiser programme, a particulary about the heavy armour on the SMS Von der Tann. (19,370 tons) The Indefatigable class came to be viewed as a mistake and the next classes of British battle cruisers were more powerful. By 1910, the growth of the German naval strength was being viewed upon with alarm in Britain. The rivalry soon outweighed any needs for cost cutting with the Admiralty approving the construction of a further, 8, capital ships between 1909 and 1910, Fisher tried to get all 8 into being battle-cruisers but the politicians would not let him have his way, so the First lord settled for 6 battleships and just two battle-cruisers of the Lion Class. (26, 270) (Lion, Princess Royal) The two Lions had been fitted with 13.5-inch guns (342.9-mm) guns; these were now the standard calibre guns for the new British ‘Super-Dreadnaughts,’ their speed had seen an increase to 27 knots (31 mph) (50 km/h) and in armour protection but they still lacked behind some of the German designs though they were better armed than the previous British ones, being equipped with 9-inch (228.6 mm), an armoured belt and barbettes. The Lions would be followed by the one class ship, the similar Queen Mary. (26,770 tons)Germany had built of their battle-cruisers own by 1911 threatening British naval supremacy, when it came to battle-cruisers, the Kriegsmarine didn’t follow Fisher’s views while the British increased speed and armaments the Germans focused on improved armour and staying power, the Von der Tann carried 8, 11-inch (279.4 mm) guns with 11.1-inch (283-mm)Armour she was far better protected than her British counterparts. The two Moltkes (22,979 tons) (Moltkes, Goeben) were similar to the British invincible but carried 11.1-inch guns of and advanced type. The Seydlitz (24,988 tons) which followed was nothing more than a modified Moltke, only one was hit.The next advances in the Battle-Cruiser development came from Japan. The Japanese falling back on the experiences gained in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 planned the four-ship Kongo class. (27, 384) tons (Kongo, Hiei, kirishima, Haruna) The Japanese knowing that their economy could not support large numbers of warships they were determined that the new ships were to be more powerful than any potential adversaries. At the beginning the class was modelled on the Invincible class but on discovering the British plans for the Lions and that the United States was planning to arm her battleships with 14-inch (360-mm) guns the Japanese came to the decision to change their plans and go one further, by fitting 14-inch guns onto their ship[s and by increasing their speed to 27.5 knots (31.6 mph) (50.9 km/h) and armour, this gave the new ships a small edge in speed and fire-power and over the Lions. The Japanese had also placed the main armaments in better positions than those of other ships, they did not place any of the big guns amidships but instead placed them all fore and aft with one turret behind the other and the rear turret raised so that it could fire over the fore-turret a term that is known in naval jargon as ‘super-firing.’ The Japanese navy was modelled on the British and close ties existed between Great Britain and Japan so it should not come as a surprise when the first ship of the Kongo class was built in Britain but the next three were constructed in Japanese yards. The Japanese would next re-classify the armoured cruisers Tsukuba (13,750 tons) and Ibuki class (14,636 tons) ships as battle-cruisers, though they carried only 12-inch guns, they were weaker and slower than any other battle-cruiser in existence at that time.(The Japanese IJNS Haruna, Kongo class ship seen at Yokosuka on the 11th September 1916, the Kongo class ships were the first to position their main guns in a ‘Super-Firing,’ position. In this is one case 14-inch (356-mm) guns, behind the other, fore and aft of the vessel with the rear guns positioned to fire over the forward guns.)The next class of battle-cruiser to leave British yards was the Tiger (28, 500 tons) the ship had intended to be the fourth ship on the Lion Class but on being redesigned she was designated as a class on her own as a class of her own. The Tiger kept her 8, 13.5-inch guns, the same armament found on her predecessors, but they were positioned the ‘super-firing,’ position like those of the Kongo, and she was faster, making 29 knots (35 mph) (53 Km/h) and she carried more armour.Germany launched the first of the Deffinger, class in 1912; this was a three-ship class (Derfinger, Lutzow, Hindenburg) they were armed like the Tiger with 12-inch guns mounted in the super-firing system yet their armour and speed was the same as the Seydlitz class. In 1913, the Russians joined those countries with battle-cruisers by beginning the first of the four-ship class Borodino Class (32, 500 tons) (Borodino, Siege of Izmail, Battle of Kinburn, battle of Navarino.) they were armed with 14-inch guns with armour 12-inches thick, yet construction was halted with the outbreak of the First world War and they were scrapped after the Russian Civil War.By the outbreak of World War One, most of the World’s biggest navies had numbers of battle-cruisers with the pressure of war newer designs were rushed into production and launched, many in record time. The first clash between battle-cruisers during the conflict came at the Battle of the Heligoland bight fought in August 1914.“No one knows who fired the first shot in the First World War. The gun from the forecastle of the destroyer HMS Lance (965-tons) is at the Imperial War Museum in London, but the name of the gunlayer has vanished both from the records of the Admiralty and from the memories of the few men who sill survive the events of the morning of August 3rd ,1914.”(David Woodard)(The gun that fired the first British shot of World War One; a QF (Quick Firing) 4-inch gun that was mounted on HMS Lance when it fired at the German minelayer Konigin Luise. The German vessels attempted to flee but realizing that she could not escape the Konigin Luise’s Captain scuttled his ship. The gun can now be viewed in the Imperial War Museum in London. )The Battle of Heligoland.“The present war plans for a blockade of the Heligoland Bight by the 1stand 2ndFlotillas supported by the 1, 2, and 3rd Squadrons with the principal objective of…· Preventing raiding expeditions leaving German ports in the earlier stages of hostilities.· Preventing the German fleet putting to sea without the British commander-in-chief it and when it is known to be at sea, conveying him such information as to its movements as will enable it to be brought to action by the British, main fleet.”(A memorandum issued by the commander-in-chief of the British fleet)The battle was fought less than a month after Britain’s declaration of war on Germany on 5thAugust, 1914. Most of the British Expeditionary Force. (BEF) was shipped to France between the 12th and 21stAugust British destroyers and submarines patrolled the Heligoland Bight, an area which German ships would have to pass through after leaving their ports.In search for the troop-carriers were the German U-boats and two German light cruisers, the Stralsund (4,570 tons) and the Strassburg (4570 tons) which were with two U-boats were sent south coming across the British light cruiser HMS Fearless (3,440 tons) with an accompanying destroyer, there was an exchange of fire, after which the British retired out of range.(Commodore Roger Keyes, the British plan at Heligoland was his brainchild. He oversaw the battle from his flag-ship, the destroyer HMS Lurcher.)“I feel sore and sick. Owing to the scattered destroyer disposition, a German cruiser, equal in offensive power to the Fearless, had put 16 destroyers to flight. It is not by such incidents we shall get the right atmosphere.”(Commodore Keyes, in a letter of the Operation Division of the Admiralty)It was basically the same plan that the British had employed against the Spanish and French in the time of Drake, Cornwallis and Nelson.Commodore Roger Keyes (14th October 1872 -26th December 1945) followed up his letter with his own plan for as he termed it creating the ‘right atmosphere.’ British submarine reconnaissance had discovered the German patrols by night and day around Heligoland. Acting on this knowledge Keyes suggested that a group of Royal Navy destroyers should infiltrate the German positions just as night units were in the process of being relieved by the day units. It was hoped that the British destroyers would slip in behind the day patrols and then by turning back get in between them and their base. Three British submarines were ordered to expose themselves on the surface as bait, to lure the German ships further out to sea.The plan was approved by Keyes, though the idea that the battle-cruisers under Vice-Admiral David Beatty (17th January 1871 -11th March 1936) should take part was rejected but as it turned out the battle-cruisers were to be involved.Commodores Keyes and Tyrwhitt (10th May 1870 – 30 may 1951) departed from the Essex port of Harwich abroad the light cruiser HMS Arethusa (3,500 tons) (Tyrwhitt) and the destroyer Lurcher (Keyes) assuming at any big ship that the encountered were most likely to be German, but after they had sailed the Admiralty changed its mind regarding the involvement of the battle-cruiser. Things were going badly for the Allies on the continent, the French and British had been forced out of most of Belgium and the Belgian coast was soon by open to attack by the German army heading from Brussels. To try and prevent this and help out the outnumbered Belgians it was decided to despatch a mere a 3,000 Royal Marines to Ostend. Just what the powers-to-be thought 3,000 men were going to do to stem the German tide must remain a mystery.(HMS Arethusa, Commodore Tyrwhitt’s flagship at the Battle of Heligoland, Keyes was abroad the destroyer Lurcher. She was badly damaged during the battle but was repaired only to strike a mine on the 11th February 1916 of Felixstowe, Suffolk; she drifted ashore and then broke her back. )The need to protect the troops ship was paramount; to this end Beatty’s battle-cruisers were released for the Heligoland action. Beatty was despatched with the battle-cruisers, Lion, Queen Mary and Princess Royal (26,270 tons) and William Goodenough’s 1st Light cruiser Squadron, Southampton, (4,400 tons) the Nottingham (5, 440 tons), Birmingham (5,440 tons) Lowestoft (5, 440 tons) Liverpool (4,800 tons) for the Heligoland Bight.“As the sun rose that day (28thAugust 1914) there were patches of white mist scattered all over the sea. On occasion, visibility from the decks pf the ships were reasonably good, while the lookouts at the mastheads could see little or nothing. At the time the ship’s masts could be seen sticking out of the banks of mist, while the hulls were invisible below.”(David Woodward)Meanwhile the Germans had guessed that the British were planning a naval offensive against them, although they had no idea that the British were deploying any capital ships, mostly their own capital ships were in ports behind the sand-bar at the estuary of the River Jade. Hipper ordered six light cruisers to the bight; these were the Strassburg, Coln (4,915 tons) Ariadne (3,017 tons) Stralsund (4,570 tons) and the Kolberg from the Jade and another two cruisers, the Danzig, and the Munchen out of Brunsbuttelkoog on the Elbe.At around 07, 00, hours a lookout abroad the HMS Arethusa spied the German destroyer G-194 and the Arethusa turned to pursue. The British light cruiser whom had been steaming south towards the anticipated position of the German ships was accompanied by 16 destroyers of the 3rd Flotilla, behind her 2 miles (1.7 nautical miles/ 3.2 kms) back was HMS Fearless, with another 16 destroyers of the 1st Flotilla and behind them, another 8 miles (7.00 nautical miles back/ 13 kms) was Commodore William Goodenough’s (2nd June 1867 -30th January 1945) with the 1st Light cruiser Squadron.Shortly after spotting the G-194 more German destroyers were sighted, the first group was seen on the port bow but moments later another group was seen on the starboard bow, by now the G-194 had radioed to the commander of the German destroyer squadron, Rear-Admiral Leberecht Maas (24th November 1863 – 28 August 1914) Maas in turn informed Rear-Admiral Franz Hipper (13thSeptember 1863 – 25 May 1932) who commanded the German battle-cruiser squadron. The German destroyers headed for the port at full speed with the British warships giving chase. However, laying at anchor off Heligoland was the German light-cruiser Stettin. (3,390 tons) It may seem strange to scholars of the battle today that a large warship on patrol duty should have been an anchor in the open sea fully exposed to submarine attack, but in 1914, the power of the submarine was still very much an unknown commodity.The Stettin, on spying the British weighed anchor and set forth to engage the Arethusa, the exchange of gunfire that then insured lasted 25 minutes. The two ships steamed south firing at each other as they went, the Stettin, an older vessels was a coal-burning ship that sent clouds of smoke coiling upwards into the sky while the more modern Arethusa was an oil-fired ship and its three funnels were crowned with nothing more than a slight heat haze. The Stettin was joined by another German light cruiser, the SMS Frauenlob (3,158 tons) which added its guns to those of the Stettin and soon the Arethusa was hit. Adding to the British problems of two against one was the brand new guns of the Arethusa, untried in combat, two of the QF-4-inch (100-mm) guns jammed and another was put out of action by enemy fire. Soon the only gun still in action abroad the British ship was a single 6-inch gun located on forecastle. However, the Arethusa bravely battled on, the signal officer being killed on the bridge by Commodore Tyrwhitt’s side and her forward engine room was flooded to a depth of three feet, her wireless was out of action and her signal halliards blasted away but the 6-pounder scored a hit on the Frauenlob’s bridge, killing the captain and 36 men, causing both German ships to haul away.(A BL 6-inch Mk XII as seen abroad the HMS Enterprise. During the first engages of gunfire at the Battle of the Heligoland Bight two of the QF-4-inch guns aboard the HMS .Arethusa jammed and one was put out of action leaving the ship with just a single 6-inch gun to fight against two German light-cruisers. Nevertheless, the Arethusa was able to fight off both German vessels, the Stettin and the Frauenlob, at one stage scoring a hit on the Frauenlob’s bridge and killing the captain 36 men,)As the German ships disappeared into the mist, HMS Fearless came up and took position beside the Arethusa and the two ships communicated by semaphore, by which method Tyrwhitt tried to gather his scattered destroyers. As this was done the Arethusa managed to raise steam again and soon the British ships were on the way and they quickly sighted six German destroyers, which fled, however, the much bigger V-187 turned back, she had spotted the two British cruisers, the Nottingham and Lowestoft ahead of her and she was now hoping that she could pass through he screen of British destroyers by stealth and surprise. She was lucky at the beginning but then she ran into Goodenough’s light cruisers and was soon surrounded and after a gallant fight against impossible odds she was pounded by 4-inch shells and set ablaze, most of the V-187’s crew was killed; with a hull torn to pieces she slowly slid beneath the waves amongst clouds of black oily smoke and clouds of steam. The British ships stopped to pick up survivors, however after lowering the boats the Stettin appeared and started firing; the Royal Navy vessels were forced to retire leaving two boats from the HMS Defender. A British submarine, the E-4, observed from a distance before launching a torpedo at the Stettin, which missed, the German cruiser next tried to ram the E-4, which dived and escaped. Later the boats from the Defender were recovered the next morning and its crew and rescued survivors were given biscuits, water and a compass and a course to stir from Heligoland before the E-4 departed.The main British force continued heading southwards; leaving the cause from time to time to give pursuit to reported enemy ships to engage those sighted. Now a state of confusion set in as Keyes destroyer the Lurcher sighted two four funnelled cruisers and still unaware of the presence of Beatty’s ships signalled the Invincible that was chasing two German cruisers. Goodenough received the signal and abandoned his search for enemy ships and steamed to assist Keyes against the two ‘German,’ cruisers which turned out to be the Lowestoft and Nottingham. Keyes now saw Goodenough’s cruisers heading towards him and he now believed that he was being chased by four German cruisers. He tried to lure them towards the guns of the Invincible and New Zealand but after a moment, Keyes recognised the Southampton and the ships returned to re-join Tyrwhitt still abroad the damaged Arethusa.(The German SMS Stettin, she was a steam-powered ship (launched 1907) and clearly obsolete by World War One. One major drawback she had was a coal burning engines, which emitted clouds of billowing smoke from her funnels giving her position away. However, in spite of her smoke problem she took part in the Heligoland actions, as she was powerfully armed and armoured. She survived the war and was ceded to the British on the end of the conflict, only to be scrapped in 1921. )The Strassburg, Coln and the Ariadne had now arrived on the scene with the Strassburg being the first to spot a British ship, the being the damaged Arethusa and attacked with shells and torpedoes but she was driven off by the torpedoes of the destroyers from the Arethusa’s accompany escort.At 11.30 hours, Tyrwhitt’s destroyers stumbled across the German cruiser Mainz and a 20, minute duel insured before the arrival of Goodenough’s destroyers caused the Mainz to attempt an escape.“The Mainz was now attacked by Goodenough’s light cruiser, only half visible through the mist until they fired their broadsides, when the flashes glowed bright. The first salvos fell close to the German ship and the yellow smoke and fumes of the British shells drifted across her deck, mixed with white steam from a broken pipe. A hit aft killed or wounded the crews of the two quarter-deck 4.1-inch guns and their places were taken by others.Another hit aft damaged the Mainz’s rudder and she began to circle round to starboard, a circle interrupted by a crash heavier and lauder than that of her 4.1-inch guns a huge column of dirty grey water rose out of the water alongside, the ship and then settled down on an even keel, torpedoed rapidly losing speed.(Map of the Battle of the Heligoland Bight, showing the movements of the British and German ships between 07.30 and 09.30 during the First phase of the battle. The Battle was a defeat for Germany, with Germany losses 712 killed and three light cruiser, the British lost 35 killed and suffered one light cruiser heavily damaged, the HMS Arethusa. )Mainz was now surrounded by British light cruisers and destroyers. A German survivor afterwards described the light cruisers as firing as if by clockwork. Her main mark came down with a run and the midships and after funnels crashed down on the deck. Smoke and flames and drifted across the ship, and all the time shells were whistling overhead or exploding in the ship or in the water and huge splashes of water were leaping up into the air and slowly falling back again.There was a sudden silence; only one of the German’s twelve 4.1-inch guns was still in action, Kapitan Paschen, the commanding officer of the Mainz, gave the order to sink his ship then but the order miscarried. The pause in the action ended as the British opened fire once more, and it was once clear that these shells were much heavier than the 6-inch guns of the ‘Town,’ Class cruisers which had done the damage so far. Close at hand, through the smoke came Beatty’s battle-cruiser, HMSs, Lion, princess Royal, Queen Mary, New Zealand and Invincible, five times the size of the Mainz was in her great and final agony but she managed to get out a signal telling the high seas fleet and Hipper’s battle-cruisers that the British heavy ships were actually in the Bight.”(David Woodward)The last gallant fight of the Mainz could only have ended in one way, with the silencing of the last gun the order to sink the ship was given once more.“Members of the crew began to jump into the sea and were picked up by the British. But this rescue work took time so Keyes brought the Lurcher alongside the quarter-deck of the German ship so that many of the Germans were able to climb aboard and save their lives. Other destroyers helped and every living person was brought to safety except for one young officer who stood apart and watched the proceedings. Keyes shouted to him that everything possible had been done and urged him to come over to the Lurcher. The young man stood to attention and refused. The Lurcher backed away, her upper deck crowded with survivors and the Mainz sank. One of those rescued was Lieutenant Von Tirpitz, son of the German Minister on Marine.”(David Woodward)The Mainz slid beneath the waves at 1310 hours, the German officer who refused rescue and other were later picked up by the Germans. Three British destroyers were seriously damaged during the action. The Strassburg and Coln now attacked together but they were driven off by the arrival of Beatty’s battle-cruisers.“There straight ahead of us procession, like elephants walking through a pack of… dogs came Lion, Queen Mary, Princess Royal, Invincible and New Zealand… How solid they looked, how utterly earthquaking. We pointed our latest aggressor to them… and we went west while they went east… and just a little later we heard the thunder of their guns.”(British officer on board one of the destroyers.)(The German light cruiser Mainz goes down on the 28th August 1914 at the Battle of the Heligoland Bight. The ship on the left is the HMS Lurcher while the boats picking up survivors are from the HMS Liverpool)The Strassburg managed to disengage from the action and make good her escape but the Coln was not so fortunate. Cut off from escape she fell foul to the Lion, which fired two salvoes at the German cruiser, which settled the Coln’s fate. Yet another of the German light cruisers appeared on the scene, this being the Ariadine.“The five men serving each of the Ariadine’s guns stood unsheathed on deck. The 80 serving each British gun turret stood behind thick protecting walls of plate armour.The next salvos fell astern. The enemy had zigzagged towards them and got their range. And now the gun flashes were directed on the Ariadine from two points. The brown cordite smoke rose like a wall.”(T Plivier, crewman on board the Ariadine.)The British ships closed in on the Ariadine and soon the German cruiser was burning, she was an old ship that had been painted time and time again until the paint on her hull was an inch thick. This was now burning with such fury that it appeared as if the steel plates of the vessel’s hull had caught fire. She limbed back into the mist from which she had appeared and two hours later sank, taking 200 of her crew down with her or leaving them to perish in the cold waters of the North Sea as rescue attempts were interrupted by the appearance of a U-Boat, one survivor was picked up two days later by a German ship, among the dead was Rear-Admiral Leberecht Maas.(The SMS Ariadine, she was an old ship being launched in 1900, after at gallant but futile fight during the Battle of Heligoland she was sunk, with only 59 of her crew of 256 surviving.)“Two boats were still seaworthy, being only knocked about by splinters above the waterline. They were launched. Then the wounded were let down with ropes.The rest of the crew crouched in the bow.Their eyes were inflamed and their voices hoarse.”‘There are still some under armoured decks I and II.’‘And some in the magazine aft.’“All the watertight compartments are flooded.’‘Petty officer Weiss is aft with one or two men.’ A hundred pairs of eyes stared fixedly astern into the raging witch’s cauldron, seething with steam and smoke. The charges and shells lying beside the guns exploded. The hull was burning, red-hot mass. The flimsy armoured deck beneath their feet grew hotter and hotter, so that it was unbearable in the forecastle.An officer’s uniform, four gold stripes on the sleeve – the captain. He spoke just a few words.Why did the German High Seas Fleet not arrive? Why was the Ariadine forced to submit to being shot at till caught fire? He did not answer these questions. He ended with ‘Three Cheers for his Majesty the Emperor.’A shadow fell upon the glassy red chaos, a group of human forms supporting one another and helping one another along. Paul Weiss and his men. Scorched and exhausted, they came towards the bows. The men from the armoured deck were not with them.The Captain gave the order:‘On life belts! Abandon ship!’”(T Plivier)The mist enabled four German cruisers to survive the disaster.“All they saw was that the British did not hesitate to hazard their greatest vessels as well as their light craft in the most daring offensive action and had escaped apparently unscathed. They felt as they should have felt had German destroyers broken into the Solent and their battle-cruiser penetrated as far as the Nab. The results of this action were far reaching. Henceforward, the weight of British naval prestige lay heavy across all German sea enterprise… the German navy was indeed ‘muzzle.’ Except for furtive movement by individual submarines and minelayers, not a dog stirred from August till November.”(Winston Churchill)Battle-cruiser would see further action, the SMS Goeben (22,979) with the light cruisers, SMS Bresalu (4,570 tons) played a cat and mouse game with the British battle-cruisers until arriving safely in Istanbul where the two ships were handed over to the Ottoman Turks Navy, which service the Goeben renamed Yavuz Sultan Salim fought engagements with the Russians in the Black Sea and the British in the Aegean.Battle of the Falklands.December 1914, saw the Battle of the Falklands and the British cruisers, the HMS Inflexible (17,290) and the HMS Invincible doing exactly what they were designed for when they chased down the German East Africa Squadron. The Battle of the Falklands can only be described as a massacre with only 10 British dead compared to 1,871 killed and a further 215 captured to the Germans; whom lost two armoured cruisers (The SMS Scharnhorst {12,985 tons} and the SMS Gneisenau {12,985 tons} two light cruisers (SMS Nurnberg {3,390 tons} and the SMS Leipzig (3,816 tons) sunk and two transports captured and later scuttled, included amongst the dead was Admiral Maximilliam Von Spee (22nd June, 1861 -8th December 1914) and two of his sons, all abroad the Gneisenau. Hits were scored on British ships, the HMS Kent (9,800 tons) received 37 hits and HMS Invincible 23, HMS Cornwell (9, 800 tons) 18 and the HMS Glasgow (4,800 tons) but no serious damage was dThe 1stBattle of Dogger Bank.The 1st Battle of Dogger Bank was fought on the 24th January 1915, saw the sinking of the German armoured cruiser SMS Blucher, the battle ended with 954 German dead and apart from the sinking of the Blucher with the Seydlitz heavily damaged. British casualties were 15 killed, one battle-cruiser and one destroyer damaged.(Maximilliam Von Spee, commander of the German South East Asia Squadron, he died along with two of his sons when the SMS Gneisenau went down during the Battle of the Falklands on the 8th December 1914. )(The British battle-cruiser, HMS Inflexible stops to pick up survivors from the German cruiser Gneisenau, sunk at the Battle of the Falklands on the 8th December 1914. Out of a crew of 764, 598 died, many from exposure after struggling in waters that were 39 F {4 ‘C} {Public Domain, Cotbatfor ---Guide only, due to copywrite.})“The enemy’s destroyers emitted vast columns of smoke to screen their battle-cruisers, and under cover of this letter now appeared to have altered cause to the northward to increase their distance, and certainly the rear-ships hauled out onto the port quarter of their leader, thereby increasing their distance from our line. The Battle-cruisers, therefore, were ordered to form a line bearing N. N. W., and proceed at their utmost speed.Their destroyers then showed evident signs of an attempt to attack ‘lion,’ and ‘Tiger,’ opened fire on them, enabling them to observe and keep touch, or attack any vessel that might fall out of line.At 10, 48 A. M. the ‘Blucher,’ which had dropped astern of the enemy’s line, hauled out to port, steering north with a heavy list, on fire, apparently in a defeated condition. I consequently ordered ‘Indomitable,’ to attack enemy breaking northward. At 10.54, A. M. submarines were reported on the starboard bow, and I personally observed the wash of a periscope, two points on our starboard bow. I immediately turned to port.At 11.3, A. M. an injury to the ‘Lion,’ being reported as incapable of immediate repair, I directed ‘Lion,’ to shape cause N. W. At 11.20 A. M. I called the ‘Attack! Alongside shifting my flag to her at about 11.35 A. M. I proceeded at utmost speed to rejoin the squadron, and met them at noon retiring N. N. W.I boarded and hoisted my flag in ‘Princess Royal,’ at about 12.20 P.M, when Captain Brock acquainted me of what had since ‘Lion,’ fell out of line, namely that ‘Blucher,’ had been sunk and that the enemy battle-cruiser had continued their cause to the eastward in a considerably damaged condition. He also informed me that a Zeppelin and a seaplane had endeavoured to drop bombs on the vessels which went to rescue the survivors of ‘Blucher.’”(Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty on the 1st Battle of the Dogger Bank.)During the battle a near disaster aboard the German flagship, the Seydlitz was afforded when British 13.5-inch shells fired from the Lion hit the aftermost barbette. The shell did not penetrate but it dislodged a piece of the barbette’s armour, this allowed flames rfrom the burst shells to enter the barbette. The propellant charges being lifted upwards were set off and the resulting burst of fire shot upwards into the turret and down into the magazine, this set fire to several charges that had been removed their brass cartridge cases. The crew then attempted to escape into the next turret but this allowed the flash to spread into that turret as well, killing the crews of both turrets. Only by the quick and well-drilled actions of Seydlitz’s crew was the ship saved from destruction by the flooding of her after magazines. This close-call was the result of the way the ammunition was handled that was common to German and British ships and battle-cruisers. After studying the damaged Seydlitz the Germans learned from this and took precautions to insure that the ammunition handling minimised any possible any exposure to flash.Apart from the loss of the Blucher the battle ended inconclusively with the British putting the blame on their failure to win an outright victory on poor gunnery attempted to increase their rate of fire by stockpiling unprotected cordite charges in the hoists and barbettes, this was to have serious consequences.The Battle of Jutland.The Battle of Jutland was fought on the 31st March 1916 and was the biggest naval of the First Wold War and the first major Fleet verse Fleet fought by Britain since the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.“The situation when the main fleets met was influenced by several factors. The foremost was the difficulty faced by the commanders-in-chief in trying to get something like a clear picture of the disposition of their own forces and those of the enemy and through wireless intelligence had been greatly improved since its inception; much was left to guesswork and intuition.After contact between the two fleets had been made, visibility continued to play an important part in all decisions. Both fleets covered large areas, and during its pursuit of the British battle-cruisers, the German fleet stretched over 20 miles from the foremost scouts of the tail of the battle line. The fleet flagships were stationed in central positions, which made observation difficult, but smoke from hundreds of funnels, together with artificial smoke screens, soon aggravated the natural haze. It proved impossible for the commanders-in-chief to keep their own forces in sight, let alone those pf the enemy. Binoculars were of great use and rangefinder helped, but as yet there was nothing like radar, and so the commanders had to relay to a great extent on the reports of their scouting forces, combined with their own intuition and judgement.”(Vice-Admiral Friedrich Ruge.)The Germans, according to Fleet Commander Reinhard Scheer (30th September 1863 – 26th November 1928) had been fighting too defensively. The German Admiralty was cautious knowing that they were outnumbered by the British, but Scheer argued that the Germans had better ships and men that could make up for their inferior numbers. A new strategy was proposed that stipulated that the German navy’s role should be:“To damage the British fleet by offensive against the naval force engaged in watching blockading the German Bight, as well as by mine-laying on the British coast and submarine. Attack whenever possible/ After an equality of strength had been realised as a result of these operations, and all our forces had been made ready and concentrated, an attempt was to be made with our fleet to seek battle under circumstances unfavourable to the enemy.”(Admiral Reinhard Scheer)But the German Admiralty had every right to be cautious as the German possessed 16 Dreadnaught Glass ships compared to 28 available to the British. The Germans therefore turned to a strategy of taking the Royal navy piecemeal, they could conduct raids into the North Sea and shell the English coast with the coal of luring out small squadrons and pickets which then could be destroyed by superior forces or submarines.(HMS Warspite and Malaya seen from the Valiant around 14, 00, hours at Jutland. The Battle was the be the biggest naval clash of the First World War and the first time since 1805 that the British navy was involved in a fleet action.)(The Battle of Jutland, 31st March 1916. Even today, 100 years later historians are still debating who won the battle. The British lost more ships and men than the Germans, but with a larger fleet, the British could better avoid the loss. After Jutland, however, the German fleet never again ventured out into the North Sea.)Following the Battle of Dogger Bank there was a long period of inactivity when for the most part the ships of the Grand Fleet were confined to escort duty and patrolling.“I feel we are so impotent, so incapable for doing anything for lack of opportunity, almost that we are not doing our share and bearing our portion of the burden laid upon the nation.”(Admiral Sir David Beatty.)The Royal Navy coupled with the French navy was finding it relatively easy to enforce their blockade of German ports; this was due to the fact that the German North Sea coast is quite small. Up to 1916 the German High Seas Fleet had been commanded by Admiral Hugo von Pohl (25th August 1855 -23rd February 1916) but he was thought to be too cautious and timid in his app[roach and was seriously ill from liver-cancer, so he was removed from his command in January 1916 a month later he passed away. The man stepping into his shores was the more aggressive Reinhard Scheer whom decided that the blockade had gone on long enough and was doing too much damage to Germany. The new commander of the High Seas Fleet was aiming to lure out parts of the British fleet by using a combination of submarines and surface boats to attack and destroy them.On the night of the 24th/25th of April 1916, German warships shelled the coastal towns of Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth hoping that the British fleet would respond to this.In May, Von Hipper ordered Scheer to sea with 40 ships, with orders to move along the Danish coast. However, the British obtained a copy of the German codebooks from the cruisers SMS Magdeburg (4,570 tons) which had been boarded by the Russians after the ship had ran aground in the Russian waters; because of the British often knew of the German naval movements beforehand. The news that the German fleet was out reached Admiral John Jellico (5th December 1859 -20thNovember 1935) in Rosyth who viewed the movement of such a large force as provocative and ordered the Grand Fleet to Sea to intercept the German ships.“The first axiom appears to me that it is the business of the Grand Fleet to nullify any hostile action on the part of the High Sea (sic) Fleet: Secondly, to cover all surface vessels that are employed either in protecting our own trade or in stopping trade with enemy; thirdly, to stop invasion, or landing raids, in so far as the strategical position of the Grand fleet permits of this.”(Dreadnaughts, of the German High Seas Fleet, at Jutland the Germans had 16 such ships, whereas the British Grand Seas Fleet had 28 )(The British battleship HMS Warspite under fire at Jutland. She would survive the war and would be modernized later. She would later serve in World War Two and would give valuable service acting as convoy escort in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; her guns provided fire support for the landings at Salerno in Italy and at Normandy. Two of her BL-15-Inch guns were eventually removed and placed at the entrench of the Imperial War Museum in London, (Below). She was eventually scrapped in 1947. Painting by G. H Davis.)“So long as the High Seas Fleet is confined to its harbour, the whole of these desiderata are obtained, and although, of cause, total destruction of the High Seas Fleet gives a greater sense of security, it is not, in my opinion, wise to risk unduly the heavy ships of the Grand Fleet in an attempt to hasten the end of the High seas Fleet, particulary, if the risks come, not from the High Seas Fleet itself, but from such attributes as mines and submarines.There is no doubt that, provided there is a chance of destroying some of the enemy’s heavy ships, it is right and proper to run risks with our own heavy ships, but unless the chances are reasonably great, I do not think that such risks should be run, seeing that any real disaster to our heavy ships lays the country open to invasion, and also gives the enemy the opportunity of passing commence destroyers out to the North Sea.”(Admiral John Jellico)Beatty did not share Jellico’s cautious views, he wanted more aggressive action and it is believed that he chaffed under Jellico’s attitude that he was the sort of admiral who would risk all on a single throw of the dice. But none of this was true in all in his letters from the period it is clear that he was well aware of the need to maintain a superiority of numbers over the Germans, that it was the strength of the Royal Navy that kept a German army from Britain’s shores.Jellico led 16 battleships of the 1st and 4th Battle Squadrons of the Grand Fleet eastward along with three battle-cruiser squadron out of Scapa Flow at 22;30 hours on the 30th May. He was heading to meet up with Vice-Admiral Martyn Jerram (6th September 1858 – 19th March 1933) 2nd Battle-Squadron of eight more battleships coming from Cromarty. Hipper’s ships left the Outer Jade Roads at 01:00 hours on the 31st May and headed west of Heligoland island following a channel through the minefields previously cleared by German mine-sweepers. The main German force of 16 battleships belonging to the 1st and 3rd Battles Squadrons departed from the Jade at 02:30 hours, at 04:00 hours they were joined off Heligoland by a further six Dreadnaughts of the 2nd Battle Squadron arriving from the Elbe. The following day Beatty’s faster battle-cruisers of the 5th(HMS Southampton 1916, Painting by Parks Oscar)Battle Squadron left the Firth of the Forth. Jellico was intending to meet up with Beatty (In the HMS Lion) 90 miles (78 nautical miles/ 140 km) west of the estuary of the Skagerrak off the coast of Jutland and wait for the Germans to reveal their intentions.The route of the British battle-cruisers took them through the patrol area of U-32; this submarine sighted the cruisers HMS Galatea (3,500 tons) and HMS Phaeton (3,500 tons) and fired a torpedo at the leading cruiser but missed, the U-32’s periscope then jammed preventing it from being lowered giving away the U-boats position has tried to maneuverer for a second shot. As the lead cruiser dodged the torpedo, the second spied the submarine and rushed towards it at full speed, hoping to ram the U-boat, however the U-32 crashed dived out of the way. Raising his periscope again at 04:10 hours U-32 spotted two battle-cruiser heading southwest belonging to the 2nd battle-cruiser Squadron but they were too far off to attack however the submarine reported their position and heading.The U-66 also reported seeing British ships, at 05:00 hours she had been forced to crash dive when the HMS Duke of Edinburgh (12,590 tons) appeared from the mist heading towards the submarine. The Duke of Edinburgh was followed by the cruiser Boadicea (3,300 tons) and eight battleships. The U-66 got close enough to one of the battleships and attempted a shot but again was forced to crash dive when she was spotted by a destroyer.However the causes reported by the two U-boats were incorrect because of the zig-zagging pattern of the British vessels, the submarines reports coupled with wireless intercepts of more ships leaving Scapa Flow earlier in the night led the German command to believe that the British Fleet up several sections and drifting apart, this was exactly as the Germans hoped to meet in(HMS Duke of Edinburgh. At Jutland she was attached to the 1st Cruiser Squadron and was armed with six BL 9.2-inch (234-mm) and ten BL 6-inch (152-mm) guns, she had a complement of 789 officers and men. The Duke of Edinburg survived the war only to be broken up and scrapped on the 12th April 1920. )Jellico’s ships were more fortunate, they proceeded to their destination but Jellico had been wrongly informed by naval intelligence, which had reported that the German fleet was still in port.At 14:00 hours Jellico’s were heading east on the same latitude as Hipper’s ships, which were heading north, it was only a matter of time until they met and the battle started.It was 14:20 hours when lookout’s on Beatty’s ships first sighted the enemy. In between the two fleets was a neutral merchant man, the Danish streamer N.J. Fjord, both sides moved to investigate her. The British light cruisers sent on this mission found two German destroyers engaged on the same task. The first shots of the Battle of Jutland were fired by the British at 14:28 when the Galatae and the Phaeton of the 1st Light cruiser Squadron fired on the German destroyers (Classified as torpedo-boats by the Germans) which rapidly fled to their own approaching light cruisers. By 14:36 the Germans were firing back and it was they who scored the first hit of the battle when the SMS Elbing (4,390 tons) belong to Rear-Admiral Friedrich Bodicker’s (13th March 1866 – 20th September 1944) Scouting Group II hit the HMS Galatae at extreme range.Meanwhile, Beatty’s battle-cruisers and supporting forces moved southwards aiming to cut the German ships off from their base. The British ordered a seaplane aloft from the seaplane tender HMS Engadine) (1,676 tons) when Lieutenant F. J. Rutland made history when he took off to search for the Germans, piloted the first aircraft ever to do so during a naval engagement. However he headed north after the sound of the gunfire and made no useful contribution to the battle until a burst petrol pipe forced him down, though the aircraft did locate the German ship but attempts to relay the pilot’s reports failed.It is very possible that visibility from the east was better than from the west as Hipper identified the British battle-cruiser at around 15:20 hours, some five minutes before the British spotted the German ships. The two main forces were now 14 miles (12 nautical miles/22 km) apart and slowly drifting towards each other firing as they came. Beatty, having seen Hipper’s five ships heading north, altered cause to try and cut them off.“Then humour broke out again, and everything went on in perfect order and calm. Six tall broad-brimmed giants streaming in two columns. They were still a long way off, but they showed on the horizon abd even at this distance they looked powerful, massive.The six ships which had at first been proceeding in two columns, formed line ahead. Like a herd of prehistoric monsters, they closed in on one another with slow movements, spectre- like, Irresistible. All was ready to open fire, the tension increased every second…”(Hase, gunnery control officer on board the SMS Derfinger)(The Battleship HMS Barham leads the 5th Battle Squadron at Jutland. Jutland was the only fleet on fleet engagement of the First World War, though it ended in a British victory, the British lost more ships and men than the Germans. Painting by Anthony Saunders.)Beatty’s conduct over the next 15 minutes has led to much criticism and puzzlement for a full 10 minutes with the German ships in range he hold his fore, he also failed to use the time available to him to arrange his battle-cruisers into a battle formation with the result that they were still manoeuvring when the fighting started.By 14:48 both fleets were blazing away at each other, this was the first stage of the battle known as the ‘Run to the South,’ in which the British chased the Germans and Hipper deliberately led Beatty to Sheer.The Germans draw first blood, aided by superior visibility, three of the British cruisers being hit, the HMS Tiger was hit three times, a full seven minutes before the British started to register hits on the German vessels.At 16:00 hours, a 12-inch salvo from the Lutzow (26,600 tons) wrecked the ‘Q,’ turret on Beatty’s flagship, the Lion, killing dozens of men instantly. The ship was saved from destruction by the actions of one mortally wounded man, Major Francis Harvey (29th April 1873 – 31st March 1916) of the Royal Marines who ordered that the magazine doors be closed and the magazine flooded with him still inside, preventing a magazine explosion, he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. HMS Indefatigable was not so fortunate, at 16:02 hours, a mere 14 minutes into the battle, she as hit aft by three 11-inch (280-mm) shells from the SMS Van der Tann causing her to be knocked out of the line and detonating the magazine for ‘X,’ turret. Soon after that, at maximum range the Van der Tann put another 11-inch shell into the Indefatigable’s ‘A,’ turret, seconds later the battle-cruiser was blown apart by another magazine explosion; she immediately sank with almost her entire crew of 1,019 officers and men, with only two survivors.At 16:25, the 5th Battle Squadron finally came into range, so now Hipper had to content with gunfire from the four battleships, from the stern as well as five of Beatty’s battle-cruiser to starboard. At 16:08 HMS Barham, (29,150 tons) a battleship, leading the 5thBattle Squadron caught up with the Germans and opened fire at extreme range, scoring a hit from her 15-inch (380-mm) guns on the Van der Tann within one minute.The Queen Mary was the next of the British battle-cruisers to be hit, being struck at 16:25 hours by a salvo from the Derfinger and the Seydlitz, she blow apart when both her magazines exploded, she then slid beneath the waves, taking with her 1,266 of her crew, only 9 survivors being found.“The enemy was shooting superbly. Twice the Derfinger came under their infernal hail and each time she was hit. But the Queen Mary was having a bad time; engaged by the Seydlitz, as well as the Derfinger, she met her doom at 16:26. A vivid red flame shot up from her forepart; then came an explosion forward, followed by a much heavier explosion amidships. Immediately afterwards, she blew up with a terrific explosion, the masts collapsing inwards and the smoke hiding everything.”(Commander Georg von Hase.)“I saw one salvo straddle her. Three shells out of four hit, and the impressions one got of seeing the splinters fly and the dull red burst was as if no damage was being done, but that the armour was keeping the shell out. The next salvo I saw straddled her, and two more shells hit her. As they hit I saw a dull, red glow amidships and then the ship seemed to open out like a puffball or one of those toadstool things when one squeezes it. There was another dull red glow, somewhere forward, and the whole ship seemed to collapse inwards. The funnels and masts fell into the middle and the hull was blown outwards. The roofs of the turrets were blown 100 feet high, then everything was smoke…”(An officer in the conning tower of the Tiger next astern of the Queen Mary.)Since the ‘Run to the South,’ begun at 15:48 hours, 9 hits had been scored on the Lion, 6 on the Princess Royal, 7 on the Queen Mary, 14 on the Tiger, and 1 on the New Zealand, 5 on the Indefatigable and 2 on the Barham, some 43 hits from 11-inch guns in contrast to the British, whom had scored only 11 hits on the Germans, 4 on the Lutzow, 4 on the Seydlitz, 2 on the Moltke and 1 on the Von der Tann.“Up till now I had not noticed any noise, such as being struck by a shell, but afterwards there was a heavy blow, struck, I should imagine, in the after 4 inch battery, and a lot of dust and pieces flying around on the top of 'X' turret.A few more rounds were fired when I took another look through my telescope and there was quite a fair distance between the second ship and what I believed was the fourth ship, due I think to third ship going under. Flames were belching from what I took to be the fourth ship of the line, then came the big explosion which shook us a bit, and on looking at the pressure gauge I saw the pressure had failed. Immediately after that came, what I term, the big smash, and I was dangling in the air on a bowline, which saved me from being thrown down on the floor of the turret.I put my head through the hole in the roof of the turret and nearly fell through again. The after 4 inch battery was smashed out of all recognition, and then I noticed that the ship had got an awful list to port. I dropped back again into the turret and told Lt Ewert the state of affairs. He said, 'Francis, we can do no more than give them a chance, clear the turret.''Clear the turret,' I said, and out they went...I went through the cabinet and out on top and Lt Ewert was following me; suddenly he stopped and went back into the turret. I believe he went back because he thought someone was inside. I cannot say enough for Lt Ewert, nothing I can say would do him justice. He came out of the turret cabinet twice and yelled something to encourage the guns crew, and yelled out to me 'All right, Francis'. He was grand, and I would like to publish this account to the World. It makes me feel sore hearted when I think of Lt Ewert and that fine crowd who were with me in the turret.I was half way down the ladder at the back of the turret when Lt Ewert went back. The ship had an awful list to port by this time, so much so that men getting off the ladder, went sliding down to port. I got to the bottom rung of the ladder and could not, by my own efforts, reach the stanchions lying on the deck from the ship's side, starboard side. I knew if I let go I should go sliding down to port like some of the others must have done, and probably got smashed up sliding down. Two of my turret's crew, seeing my difficulty, came to my assistance. They were AB Long, Turret Trainer, and AB Lane, left gun No 4. Lane held Long at full length from the ship's side and I dropped from the ladder, caught Long's legs and so gained the starboard side. These two men had no thought for their own safety; they knew I wanted assistance and that was good enough for them. They were both worth a VC twice over.When I got to the ship's side, there seemed to be quite a fair crowd, and they didn't appear to be very anxious to take to the water. I called out to them 'Come on you chaps, who's coming for a swim?' Someone answered 'She will float for a long time yet', but something, I don't pretend to know what it was, seemed to be urging me to get away, so I clambered over the slimy bilge keel and fell off into the water, followed I should think by about five more men. I struck away from the ship as hard as I could and must have covered nearly fifty yards when there was a big smash, and stopping and looking round, the air seemed to be full of fragments and flying pieces.A large piece seemed to be right above my head, and acting on impulse, I dipped under to avoid being struck, and stayed under as long as I could, and then came to the top again, and coming behind me I heard a rush of water, which looked very like surf breaking on a beach and I realised it was the suction or backwash from the ship which had just gone. I hardly had time to fill my lungs with air when it was on me. I felt it was no use struggling against it, so I let myself go for a moment or two, then I struck out, but I felt it was a losing game and remarked to myself "What's the use of you struggling, you're done", and I actually ceased my efforts to reach the top, when a small voice seemed to say 'Dig out'.I started afresh, and something bumped against me. I grasped it and afterwards found it was a large hammock, but I felt I was getting very weak and roused myself sufficiently to look around for something more substantial to support me. Floating right in front of me was what I believe to be the centre bulk of our Pattern 4 target. I managed to push myself on the hammock close to the timber and grasped a piece of rope hanging over the side. My next difficulty was to get on top and with a become unconscious When I came to my senses again I was half way off the spar but I managed to get back again. I was very sick and seemed to be full of oil fuel. My eyes were blocked up completely with it and I could not see. I suppose the oil had got a bit crusted and dry. I managed by turning back the sleeve of my jersey, which was thick with oil, to expose a part of the sleeve of my flannel, and thus managed to get the thick oil off my face and eyes, which were aching awfully. Then I looked and I believed I was the only one left of that fine Ship's Company. What had really happened was the Laurel had come and picked up the remainder and not seeing me got away out of the zone of fire, so how long I was in the water I do not know. I was miserably cold, but not without hope of being picked up, as it seemed to me that I had only to keep quiet and a ship would come for me.After what seemed ages to me, some destroyers came racing along, and I got up on the spar, steadied myself the moment, and waved my arms. The Petard, one of our big destroyers saw me and came over, but when I got on the spar to wave to them, the swell rolled the spar over and I rolled off. I was nearly exhausted again getting back. The destroyer came up and a line was thrown to me, which, needless to say, I grabbed hold of for all I was worth, and was quickly hauled up on to the deck of the destroyer. The first words I heard spoken were 'Are you English or German?'"(Petty officer, Ernest Francis of the Queen Mary.)A little after 16:26 Beatty standing on the bridge of the Lion was informed by a signal that Princess Royal had blown up, prompting the now famous quote from Beatty when he turned to his Flag-Captain, Ernle Chatfield. (27th September 1873 – 15th November 1967) “Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.”(The last photograph of the Battle-Cruiser HMS Queen Mary before her destruction as she explodes in a thunderous roar, taking with her to the bottom 1’266 out of a her crew of 1’275 .)At 16:30 hours, the leading ships of Sheer’s squadron came into sight of the battle-cruiser action; a little later, the HMS Southampton of Beatty’s 2ndCruiser Squadron, under the command of Commodore William Goodenough, spied Admiral’s Sheer’s main body of German ships, Goodenough’s lookouts counted 16 dreadnaughts battleships and 6 pre-Dreadnaughts battleships. This was the first inclination that Jellico and Beatty had that Sheer’s battle fleet was out. Meanwhile the destroyers of both fleets were in action between the opposing forces as each side tried to torpedo the capital ships of their enemy and fought to prevent their opposite numbers doing likewise. Torpedoes criss-crossed the area between the two fleets but the big ships managed to turn away until one fired by the HMS Petard (994 tons) hit the SMS Seydlitz though the blow was not mortal and she managed to maintain her speed. Captain Edward Barry Bingham (16th July 1881 -24 September 1939) on board the destroyer HMS Nestor (994 tons) led the British destroyer attacks, the destroyed the German destroyer, V 27 which was abandoned and left to sink and V 29 which was torpedoed by the Petard. The Nestor and the HMS Nomad (994 tons) were both hit and sunk by gunfire from Sheer’s battleships and battle-cruisers. Bingham was picked up by the Germans and later awarded the Victoria Cross for his leadership and gallantry.Beatty now moved his ships north, trying to draw the Germans onto the guns of Jellico’s vessels and what has become known as the ‘Race to the North,’ in which the tables were turned and the Germans chased the British.“After the gradual disappearance of the four battle-cruisers we were still faced with four powerful ships of the fifth battle Squadron, Malaya, Valiant, Barham, Warspite.These ships cannot have developed very high speed during the battle for they soon came within range of our third squadron, and were engaged by the ships at the head of the line, particularly the flagship, the Konig. (25’390 tons) In this way the four English battleships at one time or another came under fire from at least nine German ship, five battle-cruisers and from four to five battleships. According to my gunnery-log, we were firing after 7:16 P.M. at the second battleship from the right, the one immediately astern of the leader. At these great ranges, I fired armour-piercing shell. The second phase passed without any important events as far as we are concerned. In a sense, this part of the action, fought against a numerically inferior but more powerful-armed enemy, who kept us under fire at ranges at which we were helpless, was highly depressing, nerve-wracking and exasperating. Out only means of defence was to leave the line for a short, when we saw that the enemy had our range. As this manoeuvre was imperceptible to the enemy, we extricated ourselves at regular intervals from rthe hail of fire.”(Commander Georg von Hase.)Caught between Hipper’s battle-cruiser to the east and Scheer’s leading battleships, three more of the British battleships were hit, 4 on the Barham from the Derfinger, 2 on the Warspite (33’410 tons) from the Seydlitz and 7 on the Malaya (33’020 tons) from various ships, only the Valiant, (29’150 tons) escaped being hit. However, the battleships were far more able than the battle-cruisers to withstand the pounding and none were lost, though the Malaya suffered an ammunition fire and heavy crew casualties.(HMS Valiant as she appeared in 1939, during the ‘Race to the North,’ at Jutland, she alone of the four battleships (Valiant, Malaya, Barham, Warspite) of the Fifth Battle Squadron escape damage. She was armed with eight BL 16-Inch Mk I and fourteen BL 6-inch guns and had a complement of between 925 to 951 officers and men. {Public Domain, Jarekt --- Guide only, due to copywrite})The 15-inch guns of the four British battleships scored 13 hits on the German battle-cruisers, 4 on the Lutzow, 3 on the Derfinger, 6 on the Seydlitz and 5 on the battleships though only one on the SMS Markgraf (25’390 tons) was there any serious damage done.At 16:05 hours, Rear Admiral Horace Hood’s (2nd October 1870 – May 1960) 3rd Battle-Cruiser Squadron was ordered to speed to the assistance of Beatty’s ships, he was then sailing south-south-east, well in advance of Jellico’s northern force while Rear-Admiral Arbuthnot’s (23rd March 1864 – 31st May 1916) 1st Cruiser Squadron was patrolling the van of Jellico’s main force.At 17:33 hours, HMS Falmouth (5,200 tons) which was steaming about 5 miles (4.3 Nautical miles/ 8. Km) ahead of Beatty sighted the HMS Black Prince (12’590 tons) of Arbuthnot’s squadron establishing the first visual link between the two converging forces of the Grand Fleet.A little later, HMS Chester (5’200 tons tons) which was screening Hood’s cruisers came into the range of the guns from the Rear-Admiral Bodicker’s battle-cruisers whom preceded to pound the British cruiser until she was rescued by Hood’s heavy units. It was here that 16 year old Jack Cornwell (8th January 1900 – 2ndJune 1916) won a posthumous Victoria Cross.“The instance to devotion by boy (1st Class) John Travers Cornwell, who was mortally wounded early in the action, but nevertheless remained standing alone at a most exposed post, quietly awaiting orders until the end of the action, with the gun’s crew dead and wounded around him. He was under 16 and half years old. I regret that he has since died, but I recommend his case for special recognition in justice to his memory and as an acknowledgement of high example set by him.”(Admiral David Beatty’s recommendation for the award of the Victoria Cross to Jack Cornwell.)(SMS Seydlitz, was badly damaged by a torpedo from the British destroyer HMS Petard, and from being struck by eight 15-inch and eight 12-inch shells though, as can be seen from this photograph, she was badly damaged and suffered 98 dead, the wounds were not mortal and she was able to maintain her speed.)There has been some controversy over the award, some people have claimed that Cornwell did not deserve the Victoria Cross, that he stayed at his post not out of bravery but because he did not know what to do, others claim that he was paralysed with shock and that he was too stunned by the terrible events that he had witnessed unfolding around him. We will probably never the real reason that he stayed vat his post, whether it was through shock, indecision or courage, the author leaves the reader here to draw his or her own conclusions.Hood’s flagship, the Invincible scored hits on the SMS Wiesbaden (5’180 tons) bringing it dead in the water, it now became a sitting target for most of the British fleet but it remained afloat and even fired some torpedoes at long range at the passing British ships. As this was going on, Bodicker’s other ships fled towards sheer’s vessels in the mistaken belief that Hood was leading a much larger force of capital ships from the north and east. German destroyers attempted to blunt the arrival of the new ships and the British destroyers came out to engage them, resulting in a chaotic destroyer action fought in the mist and smoke of battle. Hood’s ships somehow managed to dodge all the torpedoes that were fired at them but the destroyer HMS Shark (934 tons) was disabled but for the next hour continued to fire at passing enemy ships until it was eventually torpedoed and sunk (19:02) with all of its crew perishing apart from seven who were picked up by a neutral Danish vessel, the Shark’s Captain Loftus William Jones (13th September 1879 – 31st May 1916) was awarded a posthumous Victories Cross.At 18:15 hours, in one of the most critical actions of the battle, Jellico ordered a deployment to the east meanwhile Hipper’s and Sheer’s ships had come together and were heading north, right for Jellico. Sheer still had no idea that Jellico was out with his fleet let alone that he was heading right for him. Beatty’s four surviving battle-cruisers were now crossing the front of the British battleships to link up with Hood’s three battle-cruiser. A collision was narrowly avoided when the Lion and the Warrior (13;550 tons) cut across Beatty’s bows Numerous British destroyers and cruisers were also crossing each other’s bows and several more narrow escapes occurred, this period of heavy traffic became known as the ‘Windy Corner.’Arbuthnot was now moving in on the SMS Wiesbaden determined to finish it off instead his ship, the HMS Defence along with the Warrior ran right into the gun sighs of Hipper’s and Sheer’s capital ships. The Defence was hit several times and exploded when its magazine detonated in an explosion that left no survivors out 903 officers and men. The Warrior was badly damaged but was spared sharing the fate of the Defence by the ordeal of the battleship Warspitewhich had had its steering gear overheat and jam under heavy load at full speed. The battleship now appeared as a rich target for the German gunners who turned their attention from the Warrior to the Warspite which took 13 hits before being back under control, though she was badly damaged, she would later serve in World War Two but the Warrior was later abandoned and sank.Visibility, now favoured the British; the SMS Derfinger was hit by shells from the HMS Indomitable (17’408 tons) three times and the SMS Seydlitz once, the Lutzow received 10 hits from the Lion, inflexible and the Invincible, two of which were below the water-line, dooming the vessel. The germans then fired salvos at the Invinicible, sinking her in 90 seconds as she exploded with only 6 survivors from her crew of 1,032 officers and men being picked up; among the dead was Rear-Admiral Hood. Of the surviving British battle-cruisers only the Princess Royal was hit by a 12-inch round fired from the Markgraf.Hipper now left his flaship, which was now flooding forward and out of the radio contact, transferring to SMS G39 (1’051) he hoped to board one of his battle-cruisers later.The HMS Iron Duke, then scpored 7 hits on SMS Konig as Sheer could see where his fleet was heading, right into the death-trap made by an arch of British ships and under the cover of smoke and mist he turned the fleet around and a brilliantly executed manoeuvre withdraw.“It was now obvious that we were now confronted by a large portion of the English fleet. The entire arc stretching to the north east was a sea of fire. The flashes from the muzzles of the guns was seen distintly through the mist and smoke on the horizon, although the ships themselves were not distinguishable.”(Vic-Admiral Reinhard Sheer.)(HMS Warspite, seen in the India Ocean in 1942. At Jutland she was badly damaged when her steering overheated and jammed and she received 13 hits from the German ships. )(Artists painting of the wreck of the HMS Invincible. She sunk after her magazine exploded, taking with her 1,026 of her 1,032 crew. )However, aware of the risks to his capital ships, Jellico did not pursue the Germans, at 18: 54 hours, HMS Marlborough (25’000 tons) was struck by a torpedo, possibly fired from the disabled Wiesbaden, reducing her speed.Meanwhile, Sheer, knowing that his ships would suffer terribly in a stern chase, as there was still time to go before darkness set in turned his head about and headed east.“The manoeuvre would be bound to surprise the enemy, to upset his plans for the rest of the day, and if the blow fell heavily and would facilitate the breaking loose at night.”(Vice-Admiral Reinhard sheer.)Yet by turning east, he was heading right towards Jellico.19:15 hours, Goodenough’s ships had crossed Sheer’s T for the second time during the fighting. This time he did more damage, the Konig, Grosser Kurfurst (25’796 tons) Markgraf and the Kaiser (24’724 tons) and the Heligoland (22’ 808 tons) from the 1st Squadron all being hit whilst the Germans scored hits only on the HMS Colossus. (19’680 tons.)Once more sheer turned his outnumbered fleet to the west, the time was now 19:17 hours and his second ‘Gefechtshehrtwendung,’ or ‘battle turn,’ to the west was not as well conducted as the first, being carried out with difficulty as the leading German vessels lost cohesion under the British fire. Sheer now ordered his destroyers to launch a major torpedo attack on the British capital ships in the hope of preventing them from his own vessels.Hipper, still aboard the G 39 was unable to take any part in the command decisions, during the attack, meanwhile the SMS Derfinger led the already badly damaged and limping German battle-cruisers into a hail of fire, where their capital ships received another 37 hits, with the Derfinger in front receiving 14, whilst the British in turn suffered only two hits, the only German battle-cruiser not to be hit was the Moltke.Meanwhile the Germans, in a gallant attack, launched 31 torpedoes at the British capital ships, all of which were successfully evaded, though some narrowly. The British, for their part managed to sink the German destroyer S 35 and the British light forces also sent the V 38 to the bottom, which had previously been brought to a stop by the guns of HMS Shark.Sheer’s ships now laid a smoke screen and withdraw into it whilst the German battle-cruisers draw the British fire. At 20:19 hours, the British battleships caught up with the Germans who were relieved by the arrival of Rear Admiral Franz Mauve (11 November 1864 – 12th December 1931) 2ndSquadrons obsolete pre-Dreadnought battleships. Old or not, the Germans came on, all guns blazing and soon scored a hit on the HMS Princess Royal but received five more on the Seydlitz and three more on other ships. As the last of the day’s light faded, the battleship HMS king George the V (23’000 tons) traded shots with the SMS Westfalen (18’570), however with the unset of darkness the battle was still raging.The night saw several British destroyer flotillas launch torpedo attacks on the German capital ships, but the cost was high, five destroyers going to the bottom (Tipperary {1’700 tons} Ardent {935 tons} Fortune {935 tons) Sparrowhawk {Between 934 to 984 tons} and the Turbulent {1’98 tons) and several others damaged, however they successfully torpedoed the SMS Rostock {4’900 tons) which sank with her entire crew of 839. In the confusion of the darkness three British destroyers collided and one, the HMS Spitfire (Of the Acasta glass 934 to 984 tons) was rammed by the SMS Nassau (18’570 tons) tough she made it back to England 36 hours later.Just after midnight, the HMS Black Prince accidently stumbled right into the middle of the German battle-line after mistaking the German ships for British and was sank after exploding with the loss of her entire crew of 857 officers and men.At 01:45, the Lutzow, badly damaged was torpedoed on the orders of the ship’s captain, Captain Viktor Von Harder by the destroyer G 38 (1’051 tons) after the crew were evacuated. At 02: 15 hours the German destroyer V 4 suddenly had its bow blown off, V 2 and the V 6 took of survivors before the V 2 sank the wreck, the cause of the V 4’s explosion has been put down to a submarine or mine.At 05:20, the SMS Ostfriesland (22’808 tons) struck a mine but made it to port. The SMS Seydlitz also made it back to port. The battle was over.The British lost 6’094 killed, 674 wounded and 177 captured, 3 battle-cruisers, 3 armoured cruisers and 8 destroyers sank, a total of 113’000 tons. The Germans, 2’551 killed and 607 wounded, I battle-cruiser, 1 pre-Dreadnaught battleship, 4 light cruisers, 5 torpedo-boats (destroyers), a total of 62’300 tons. Though the British suffered higher casualties, they were in a better position to take them than the Germans. Throughout the rest of World War One the German High seas fleet did not venture out again in strength, leaving the North Sea under control of the British, giving victory to the Royal Navy.“The disturbing feature of the battle-cruiser action is the fact that the five German battle-cruisers engaging the British vessels of this class after the first twenty-five minutes, although at great range by the fire of four battleships of the ‘Queen Elizabeth,’ class, were yet able to sink the ‘Queen Mary,’ and ‘Indefatigable’… the facts which contributed to the British losses, first were the different armour protection of our battle-cruisers, particularly as regards turret armour, and, second, deck plating and the disadvantage of which our vessels laboured in regard to the light.”(Sir John Jellico.)The cause of the explosions on the British battle-cruisers was extensively studied after World war two.“With the introduction of cordite to replace powder for firing guns, regulations regarding the necessary precautions for handing explosives became unconsciously considerably relaxed, even I regret to say, to a dangerous degree throughout the service. The gradual lapse in the regulations on board ship seemed to be due to two factors. First cordite is a much safer explosive to handle than gun-powder. Second, but most important, the altered construction of the magazine on board led to a feeling of false security… The iron or steel deck, the disappearance of the wood lining, the electric lights fitting inside, the steel doors, open because there was no chute for passing cartridges out, all this gave officers and men a comparative easiness of mind regarding explosives material.”(Alexander Grant, Gunner on board, the HMS Lion.)After World War 1.(The massive Japanese Battleship Yamato was a clear violation of the 1922 Washington treaty, at 65’027 tons she was the biggest battleship ever built. )During the period between the World wars few battle-cruisers were turned out of the major ship building nations ship yards who concentrated on modernizing their existing battle-cruisers, with anti-aircraft guns being and new improved fire-control and radar. Japan, deciding to ignore the 1922 Washington Treaty (For a while the Japanese would stick with the treaty, only later did they decide to ignore it, one prime example that was the huge battleship, the Yamato, {62’27 tons} the biggest battleship ever built.) which restricted the tonnage of battle-cruisers and battleships, it could have been a surprise to few when Japan started to work on four of the impressive Amagi Glass battle-cruisers armed with 16-inch (410-mm) guns, the most powerful armament ever fitted to a battle-cruiser. These were to be the Amagi, (Later converted into an aircraft carrier which was destroyed in an earthquake) (41’212 tons) Akagi, (36’000 tons when converted into an aircraft carrier.) the Atago and the Takao were never completed because of tonnage restrictions imposed by the Washington Treaty.World War Two.During Germany’s invasion of Norway in 1940, the Royal Navy deployed its battle-cruisers which saw action against the KMS Gneisenau (32’100 tons) and the KMS Scharnhorst (32’100 tons) in the fight off the Lofoten islands on the 9thApril 1940 when the German ships were engaged by the HMS Renown. (27’200 tons) the battle took place in bad weather and ended when the Gneisenau was hit by a 15-inch shell that passed through the German battleship’s (Sometimes she is referred to as a battle-cruiser) director-control tower without exploding, though it did break cables and communication wires and destroyed the range-finder for the 5.9-inch (150-mm) guns. The Renown in turn was struck twice but no major damage was done.In 1941 the German battleship Bismarck (41’700 tons) accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prince Eugen (16’970) broke into the north Atlantic clashing with the battle-cruiser HMS Hood and the battleship HMS Prince of Wales (43’786 tons) at the battle of the Denmark Strait.(The Bismarck fires at the Prince of Wales during the Battle of the Demark Strait on the 24th May, 1941.)The HMS Hood was the first of the ships, opening up at 05:52- at the Prince Eugen as Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland (13th September 1887 -24th 1941) mistook her for the Bismarck because of her forward position. He later corrected his fire and aimed at the Bismarck which by now was returning fire. Less than 10 minutes into the battle a shell from the German battleship hit the Hood and pieced the magazine, resulting in a colossal explosion in which only three men from the crew of 1’415 survived.The Prince of Wales battled on alone scoring a hit on the Bismarck but also taking hits before making smoke and disappearing into it. Later the Bismarck was hunted down and sunk.The sinking of the Hood shocked the British people deeply, the shock of the loss of the ship that they called the ‘Mighty Hood,’ to the people of Britain and to their moral can only be compared to the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. That ship that they had believed to be invincible should be sink in a matter of minutes stunned everybody. The same mistake had been made in the Demark straights that had been made at Jutland in 1916, that of sending lightly armoured battle-cruisers against heavily armoured battleships. Yet, as far as the battle-cruisers went there was even more bad knows to come for the British people.The second disaster accrued in the Pacific War when the battle-cruiser, the HMS Repulse (27’200 tons) along with the Prince of Wales was sunk off the coast of Malaya by Japanese aircraft on the 10th December 1941.“I was thankful to be alone. In all the war, I have never received a more direct shock. As I turned over and twisted in bed the full, horror of the news sank upon me. Over all this vast expanse of water Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.”(Winston Churchill on being informed on the sinking of the HMS Repulse and the HMS Prince of Wales.)The next major battle involving battle-cruisers was the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The Guadalcanal campaign started on 7th August 1942 and raged on the sea and in the air and on land for six months. Japanese ships under Vice Admiral Hiroaki Abe (15th March 1889 – 6th February 1949) entered the sound between Savo Island and Guadalcanal at 01:25 hours and prepared to shell Henderson Field which US troops had captured from the Japanese. Several minutes later, the Japanese fleet came into sight of the Americans under Rear-Admiral Daniel J Callaghan. (26th July 1890 – 13th1942) in the confusion of the training at length for action at night and were thus better prepared than the Americans. At 01:48 hours the Japanese destroyer Akatsuki (1’700 tons) and the battle-cruiser Hiei (36’600 tons) turned on their searchlights, lighting up the USS Atlanta on full beam, (6’000 tons) nearly at point-blank range. Ships on both sides opened up, almost immediately. Callaghan could see that his fleet was almost surrounded by the enemy, he ordered that the odd ships were to fire to starboard and even ships to port, this however just caused further confusion as several ships had to switch aim to comply with Callaghan’s orders. The fighting became a confused melee as the night sky was lit up by exploding gun flashes and fireballs as ships were hit.The destroyer Akaksuki which had drawn attention to herself when she had switched on her searchlights was hit repeatedly and exploded. The Atlanta became a target for several Japanese ships, among, among them the Nagara, (5’570 tons) the Inazuma (1,570 tons) and the Ikazuchi. (1’570 tons) The USS Atlanta was heavily damaged by shell fire and all her engineering power was cut by a torpedo hit, it now drifted into the line of fire of the USS San Francisco (9’950) which mistakenly fired on the Atlanta causing even more damage and killing Rear-Admiral Norman Scott (10th August 1889 – 13th November 1942) and many of the bridge crew. Unable to fire her guns and without power the Atlanta was left to drift out of control and out of the fighting. Also caught in the cross-fire was the American destroyer USS Cushing (1’500 tons) which was also hit and disabled. Rear-Admiral Norman was awarded a posthumous Medal of honour.(On the 13th November 1942, the American flagship, the USS San Francisco took 15 major hits from the Japanese vessels, killing Rear-Admiral Callaghan. The San Francisco, badly damaged was able to limp away, disappearing into the darkness.)(The formidable Japanese battle-cruiser Hiei was sunk during the 1st Naval battle of Guadalcanal, 188 of her crew of 1360 perishing. The Hiei was the first Japanese battle-cruiser/ battleship sunk in action, she would not be the last. The Hiei’s wreck lies at the bottom of strait between Guadalcanal, Savo Island and Florida Island, nicknamed Iron Bottom Sound because so many ships were sunk there during the fighting for Guadalcanal. The Hiei was armed with eight 14-inch (356 mm) guns, sixteen 6-inch ( 152-) guns , eight 12-pounder (76 mm) guns and eight torpedo tubes. She also carried various anti-guns of different calibres and two Nakajima E8N ‘Dave’ and Kawanishi E7K ‘Alf,’ float planes.)“For extraordinary heroism and conspicuous intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty during action against enemy Japanese forces off Savo Island on the night of 11–12 October and again on the night of 12–13 November 1942. In the earlier action, intercepting a Japanese Task Force intent upon storming our island positions and landing reinforcements at Guadalcanal, Rear Adm. Scott, with courageous skill and superb coordination of the units under his command, destroyed 8 hostile vessels and put the others to flight. Again challenged, a month later, by the return of a stubborn and persistent foe, he led his force into a desperate battle against tremendous odds, directing close-range operations against the invading enemy until he himself was killed in the furious bombardment by their superior firepower. On each of these occasions his dauntless initiative, inspiring leadership and judicious foresight in a crisis of grave responsibility contributed decisively to the rout of a powerful invasion fleet and to the consequent frustration of a formidable Japanese offensive. He gallantly gave his life in the service of his country.”(Citation for the award of the medal of honour to Read-Admiral Norman Scott)With her nine massive searchlights, the IJN Hiei heading right through the American formation became the target for dozens of guns. The Laffey (1’620 tons) only just missed colliding with the Hiei, the destroyer only escaping because the huge Japanese ship was unable to depress its main guns enough to engage the Laffey but the destroyer was able to rake the Hiei’s superstructure with her 5-inch (127-mm) guns and machine-guns, wounding Rear-Admiral Abe and killing his chief of staff. The USS Steret (1’500 tons) and the USS O’Bannon (2,500 tons) also fired salvos at the Hiei before the American destroyers escaped into the darkness.Unable to engage the destroyers with her big guns the Hiei now concentrated on the USS San Francisco, three other Japanese ships joined in, the battleship Kirishima (36’000 tons) and the destroyers Inazuma and Ikazuchi. Several hits were made on the San Francisco, its steering was damaged and killing Rear-Admiral Callaghan and Captain Cassin Young (6th March 1894 – 13th November 1942) whom had received the Medal of Honour for his actions at Pearl Harbour. As the Japanese had been preparing to shell Henderson Field and had not expected to meet enemy ships they had prepared high explosive for firing and it took them several minutes to switch over to armour piecing, though it fought back gallantly scoring a hit on the Hiei which damaged her steering generators and effected the battle-cruiser’s steering. As the San Francisco tried to withdraw she was joined by the light-cruiser the USS Helena (10’000 tons) that tried to shield the bigger ships as best she could.The US destroyer Cushing was now caught in a hail of fire, unable to fight back, the order to abandon ship was given and she sank several hours later. The Laffey shared the same fate, when after escaping the Hiei she plundered into the Asagumo, (2,730 tons) the Murasame, (1’685 tons) the Samidare (1’685 tons) and perhaps the Teruzuki. (2’700 tons) The American destroyer was pummelled by the Japanese destroyers and hit by a torpedo, which smashed her keel, minutes later she exploded as fires reached her magazine.New the heavy cruiser Portland (9’950 tons) after having helped sink the Japanese destroyer Akatsuki was struck by a torpedo which caused heavy damage to the ship’s stern, this damaged the steering and the Portland could only move in circles and apart from firing four salvoes at the Hiei she played little part in the rest of the battle.The destroyer, the IJN Yudachi (1’685 tons) and the IJN Amatsukaze (2’490 tons) sped after the US force, the Amatsukaze launching two torpedoes at the destroyer USS Bartor (1’620 tons) both of which struck, sinking the destroyer with a heavy loss of life. Another torpedo, also from the Amatsukaze hit the light cruiser USS Juneau (6,000 tons) disabling her, getting under the way again she turned east and limped from the fighting, her keel broken and with most of her systems knocked out.The destroyer USS Monssen (1’630 tons) is next badly hit and abandoned and left to sink. The next ship to go to the bottom was the Yudachi hit by twice by torpedoes. After almost 40 minutes of brutal close in fighting at 02:26, the two sides broke contact and the 1st Naval Battle of Guadalcanal was over. Later the battle-cruiser Hiei mortally damaged during the fighting was abandoned and then scuttled.“The star shell rose, terrible and red. Giant tracer flashed across the night in orange arches… the sea seemed a sheet of polished obsidian on which the warships seemed to have dropped and were immobilized, centered amid concentric circles like shock waves that form around a stone dropped in mud.”(Robert Leckie, US Marine on Guadalcanal.)On the night of the 14/15 November 1942 was fought the 2nd Naval battle of Guadalcanal in which the battle-cruiser IJN Kirishima returned to Guadalcanal where so many ships had been sunk that the straights between Savo island and Florida Island and Guadalcanal was being referred to as iron-Bottom sound. This time, the Kirishima encountered two US battleships, the South Dakota (35’000 tons) and the Washington. (35’000 tons) The Kirishima was badly damaged and with hits below the waterline, three and a half hours later she capsized and sank.Eventually, the Japanese would be forced to evacuate Guadalcanal, giving the Americans their first victory in what would become the Island Hopping campaign.On the 21st November 1944, returning home to Japan after the Battle of Leyte Gulf the IJN Kongo was torpedoed and sunk by the submarine USS Sealion II. (1’526 tons) The last of the Japanese battle-cruisers, the Haruna was subnk at anchor at Kure by aircraft on the 28th July 1945.Towards the beginning of World War Two more important battle-cruisers were planned for the navies of the United States, the Netherlands, and Japan, they were to be designated as ‘super-cruisers,’ or ‘unrestricted cruisers.’ The first of these designs was the Dutch ‘Design 1047,’ that were intended to be despatched to the Dutch East Indies to protect the Dutch colonies rfrom Japanese aggression. The 1047’s were to be built with the assistance of the Italians and the Germans and were heavily influenced by the Scharnhorst glass, carrying the same kind of main armament but less armour, however the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940 prevented the completion of any ships.(The Japanese battle-cruiser, IJN, Kongo as seen in 1931. She was torpedoed by the US submarine, USS Sealion II and sank off Formosa (Taiwan) on 21st December 1944 with a loss of 1’200 officers and men.)(Profile of the IJN Kongo, flagship of a four-ship glass. (Kongo, Hiei, Kirishima, Haruna) Launched in 1912, the Kongo weighed 36,600 toms. She had a crew of 1’360 officers and men and was armed with eight 14-inch (356-mm) and sixteen 6-inch (15-cm) guns, various anti-aircraft guns and eight submerged torpedo tubes.)The only country to actually produce these later battle-cruisers was the United States, with the Alaska Class ‘Large Cruisers,’ of which two were built, the USS Alaska and the USS Guam, (both 29’779 tons) a third, the Hawaii was counciled whilst under construction and three others were never laid down. They were designed to hunt down Japanese battle-cruisers which they were adequately equipped to do so being fitted with 12’2-inch guns but were to avoid fights with battleships.The Japanese started to design the B 64 Class also to be armed with 12.2-inch guns but they decided that their best interest lay in aircraft carriers.Post World War Two.The only country to develop a battle-cruiser after the Second World War was the USSR. The Soviets came up with the project B 2 (Stalingrad Class) which were to weigh 39’900 tons, only the central hull of the Stalingrad was laid down and that was later used for target practice.However, the Soviet Kirov class are sometimes considered as battle-cruisers as they are 24’300 tons. Four ships of the class were built but due to budget restraints, only the Petr Veliky is still operational with the Russian Navy. Partly due to the introduction of the Kirov ships the United States decided to re-commission the Iowa class battleships, the Iowa and the South Dakota.(The Soviet Kirov Class nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser, Frunze, the last of the battle-cruisers. The Frunze was taken out of service in 1999 due to lack of money.)(The Last of the world’s battle-cruisers, the Russian Petr Veliky being escorted by a British destroyer in the English Channel, close to British territorial waters by. The destroyer, the HMS Dragon is in the foreground in an incident in 2014 when a Russian fleet, comprising the Petr Veliky and the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov with an assortment of other vessels entered the English Channel on their way to the Baltic after maneuvers in the Mediterranean. Though they did not enter British territorial waters, they were heavily monitored.)SourcesBooks.1) History of the First World War. Vol 1. Heligoland. The first Sea battle. By David Woodward. Purnell.2) History of the First World War. Vol 1. A German at Heligoland. By T Plivier. Purnell.3) History of the First World War. Vol. II. Battle of the Falklands. By David Mason. Purnell.4) History of the First World War. Vol IV. The Fleets Collide. By Vice-Admiral Friedrich Ruge. Purnell.5) History of the First World War. Vol. IV. Jutland. Prelude to Jutland. By Peter Kemp. Purnell.6) History of the First World War. Vol IV. The battle-Cruisers. By Peter Bradford. Purnell.7) World War II. The rising Sun. 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Wikipedia.112) HMS Marlborough. (1912) Wikipedia.113) SMS Grosser Kurfurst. Wikipedia.114) SMS Kaiser. (1911) Wikipedia.115) SMS Heligoland. Wikipedia.116) HMS Colossus. Wikipedia.117) Franz Mauve. Wikipedia.118) HMS King George V. (1911). Wikipedia.119) SMS Westfalen. Wikipedia.120) SMS Rostock. Wikipedia.121) Acasta Class. Wikipedia.122) HMS Spitfire. (1912) Wikipedia.123) HMS Nassau. Wikipedia.124) SMS Pommen. Wikipedia.125) Night action at Jutland. Wikipedia.126) HMS Tipperary. (1915) Wikipedia.127) HMS Ardent. (1913) Wikipedia.128) HMS fortune. (1916) Wikipedia.129) HMS Sparrowhawk. ((1912) Wikipedia.130) HMS Turbulent (1916) Wikipedia.131) G 38 Wikipedia.132) SMS Ostfriesland. Wikipedia.133) IJN Amagi. Wikipedia.134) IJN Akagi Wikipedia.135) Japanese battleship Yamato. Wikipedia.136) German battleship Gneisenau. Wikipedia.137) German battleship Scharnhorst. Wikipedia.138) Action off Lofoten. Wikipedia.139) HMS Renown. Wikipedia.140) German battleship Bismarck. 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