Overshadowed by the Dreadnought battleships, it was Admiral Fisher's Battlecruisers of the Royal Navy that patrolled the oceans in the last days of the British Empire.
In 1906, Admiral Fisher, First Sea Lord of Britain, oversaw the launch of the Dreadnought, a revolutionary new class of battleship. With massive armor and armed with only heavy, long-range guns, the Dreadnought outclassed any other fighting ship in the world at the time.
Despite this, Admiral Fisher saw the need for a different type of armored fighting ship, one better suited to the vast distances involved in policing the British Empire. To that end, he commissioned the development of a new class of ship to be called the Battlecruiser. Based on the fighting principles of the Dreadnought, Battlecruisers would sacrifice some of the guns and armor for major improvements in speed, operational range, and communications equipment.
In the years leading up to and including World War I, these Battlecruisers would become the face of the Royal Navy overseas, able to patrol and operate well beyond the range of their larger battleship cousins.
Between 1906 – 1916, Britain produced 15 Battlecruisers in a number of different classes.
1907: Invincible, Indomitable, Inflexible
1909: Indefatigable
1910: New Zealand+, Australia*, Lion
1911: Princess Royal
1912: Queen Mary
1913: Tiger
1916: Renown, Repulse, Courageous, Glorious, Furious
+ New Zealand was constructed at the request of the country of New Zealand and given as a gift to the Royal Navy
* Australia was owned and operated by the Royal Australian Navy though during World War I it served with the British Fleets.
With the outbreak of the Great War, the Battlecruisers became a major part of the fighting force arrayed against the German fleet. In early actions such as Heligoland Bight, The Battle of the Falklands, and the Battle of Dogger Bank the British Battlecruisers showed off the advantages of their greater speed and gun range over their German cruiser counterparts. However, despite these advantages, the gunnery systems of the Battlecruisers proved unequal to the task of modern ship combat and none of these fights proved as decisive as they could have been.
The Battlecruisers also played a large part in the Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle in history. During this battle three of the Battlecruisers, Invincible, Queen Mary, and Indefatigable were destroyed. In some, if not every case, these ships exploded when penetrating German shells ignited carelessly stacked ammunition. Although suffering these heavy losses, Jutland was a strategic victory for the British as the German fleet remained trapped.
Although some historians have claimed that British Battlecruisers were a flawed design, little actual evidence supports this claim. The ships were primarily designed to patrol the vast oceans and the far-flung corners of the British Empire. In this capacity they performed admirably.
