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The idea was that the big guns would allow it to take out destroyers and smaller cruisers before the battlecruiser ever got into range of their guns or torpedoes, while their speed would enable them to escape enemy battleships, or to swoop on crippled enemy battleships during a fleet action. The idea was mainly conceived by British admiral Jackie Fisher and summed up in his dictum, "speed is armour".
The first battlecruisers were HMS Inflexible, Invincible and Indomitable, all completed in 1908. They had armour 6 or 7 inches (150 to 180 mm) thick along the side of the hull and over the gunhouses, whereas a comparable battleship of the period had armour 11 or 12 inches (280 to 300 mm) thick. Originally known as battle cruisers, these early ships had a top speed of 26 knots (48km/h) compared to 20 to 21 knots (37 to 39 km/h) for contemporary battleships. They were armed with 11" (German) or 12" (British) (281?mm or 305mm) guns, just like battleships. Soon after the British, the Germans started building their own battlecruisers, the first was SMS Von der Tann of 1911. Von der Tann and most later German battlecruisers had only 11" (280mm) guns, but they were better armoured than British battlecruisers of the time.
In practice, battlecruisers rarely saw the type of independent action for which they were designed. In most cases, the temptaton to add extra big guns to the main fleet proved hard to resist, and battlecruiser squadrons were added to the line of battle—a role for which they were not designed and which exposed them to great risk. It was found that their speed wasn't sufficient to protect them from the battleships guns.
The original battlecruiser concept proved successful at the Battle of the Falkland Islands during World War I when the British battlecruisers HMS Inflexible and Invincible did precisely the job they were intended for when they annihilated a German cruiser squadron commanded by Admiral Maximilian Graf Von Spee in the South Atlantic Ocean.
At the Battle of Jutland 18 months later, however, some of the British battlecruisers were employed as fleet units and engaged German battlecruisers and battleships before the arrival of the battleships of the British Grand Fleet. The result was a disaster. HMS InvincibleThe fifth Invincible of the Royal Navy was a battlecruiser, the lead ship of her class of three, and the first ship of her type to be built in the world. The ship was built at Sir W. Armstrong, Whitworth & Co. Ltd on Tyneside. She was laid down in April 1, Queen MaryHMS Queen Mary was a Royal Navy Lion class battlecruiser, armed with eight 13. 5 inch (343 mm) guns, displacing 27,000 tons, and capable of steaming at 28 knots (52 km/h). She was under the command of Captain C. Prowse at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1 and IndefatigableHMS Indefatigable was a battlecruiser of the Royal Navy, the lead ship of her class. She served in the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean and in August 1914 took part in the chase of the Goeben and Breslau''. In 1915 she joined the Grand Flee exploded with the loss of all but a handful of their crews, and LionHMS Lion was a battlecruiser of the Royal Navy launched in 1910, the lead ship of her class. In World War I she fought at the battle of Heligoland Bight, 28 August 1914, and served as David Beatty's flagship at the battles of Dogger Bank, 24 January 1915 only survived by intentionally flooding one of her magazines. The German battlecruisers were better armoured, although LützowSMS Lutzow was a German Kaiserliche Marine battlecruiser under Capt. Harder, flagship of Vice Admiral Franz von Hipper's Scouting Group I battlecruiser fleet in World War I. She was commissioned in 1915, displacing ~27,000 tons with a main armament of 8 x was damaged and had to be scuttled, and Seydlitzbattle of Jutland. SMS Seydlitz was a 25,000 ton battlecruiser of the Imperial German Navy, built at Hamburg, Germany, and commissioned in May 1913. At the battle of Dogger Bank, 24 January 1915, in World War I she was the flagship of Admiral Franz von Hi was heavily damaged. No British or German battleship was sunk during the battle apart from the old German pre-dreadnought Pommern.
Thereafter, the Royal NavyThe Royal Navy is the navy of the United Kingdom. It operates a number of aircraft carriers, destroyers, frigates, fifteen nuclear submarines, and various other ships, as well as aircraft and Britain's amphibious forces, the Royal Marines. The Royal Navy de-emphasized battlecruisers. HMS HoodHMS Hood was a battlecruiser of the Royal Navy. She was one of four Admiral-class ships ordered in mid-1916 under the Emergency War Programme, but her sisters were never completed, and Hood was Britain's last battlecruiser. Construction of Hood began at t, launched in 1918, was the last British battlecruiser to be completed. Many nations chose to reduce their battlecruiser fleet following the Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty rather than scrap valuable battleships. Some battlecruiser hulls were converted into aircraft carriers. (See HMS Glorious and HMS Courageous.) Between the world wars, Hood was the biggest warship in the world. Her armour was stronger than that of earlier battlecruisers, but it also proved a fatal weakness, as she exploded and sank in a duel with Bismarck during World War II.
No other navies completed battlecruisers after this. Japan rebuilt its four existing battlecruisers into "fast battleships" and the US Navy retasked two battlecruiser hulls as aircraft carriers. USS Lexington and Saratoga were both designed as battlecruisers but converted part-way through construction, although this was only considered marginally preferable to scrapping the hulls outright (the remaining four: Constellation, Ranger, Constitution and United States were indeed scrapped). The US later built the battlecruiser-like "large cruisers" USS Alaska and Guam, which served effectively in WWII, although this design evolved from the heavy cruiser, but a planned additional four in the class were cancelled after the war. These two ships were balanced designs armed with and armoured against 12" guns, unlike traditional British-style battlecruisers which were not armoured against their own guns. Like the contemporary Iowa class battleships, their speed made them ultimately more useful as carrier escorts and bombardment ships than as the sea combatants they were developed to be.
Late in World War II, a second battlecruiser-vs.-battleship engagement reinforced the inevitability of Hood
The German Panzerschiffe (" pocket battleships") ( Deutschland, Admiral Scheer, and Admiral Graf Spee), built to meet the 10,000 ton displacement limit of the Treaty of Versailles, were another attempt at a battlecruiser-like concept. Rather than construct a lightweight battleship which sacrificed protection in order to attain high speed, the pocket battleships were relatively small vessels with only six 11 inch guns (279mm) — essentially very heavy cruisers. They attained fairly high speeds of 26 kts (52km/h), and reasonable protection, while staying close to the displacement limit, by using welded rather than riveted construction, triple main armament turrets, and replacing the normal steam turbine power with a pair of massive 9 cylinder diesel engines driving each propellor shaft. The only action of significance they saw was the Battle of the River Plate.
The German Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were labelled battlecruisers, but they traded lighter armament, 11" (279mm) main guns, rather than thinner armor for speed, and are properly classified as light fast battleships. The French Dunkerque and Strasbourg were similar.
Improved engine technology also worked against the battlecruiser formula. The ultimate limit on ship speed was drag from the water displaced (which increases as a cube of speed) rather than weight, so heavier armor slowed World War II battleships by only a couple of knots (4km/h) over their more lightly armored brethren. As it turned out, however, aircraft carriers made both battleships and battlecruisers largely obsolete.
The Soviet Kirov class of Raketny Kreyser (Rocket Cruiser), displacing approximately 26,000 tons, is classified as a battlecruiser in the 1996-7 edition of Jane's Fighting Ships, even though in actuality they are very large missile cruisers. There were four members of the class completed, Kirov, Frunze , Kalinin , and Yuri Andropov . As the ships were named after Communist personalities, after the fall of the USSR they were given traditional names of the Imperial Russian Navy, respectively Admiral Ushakov, Admiral Lazarev, Admiral Nakhimov and Petr Velikiy.
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