Armoured cruiser

An armoured cruiser is a large cruiser protected by an armoured belt along its sides, and not only by an armoured deck like the lighter protected cruiser. It was meant to operate on its own far from its bases: to guard trade routes, police colonies and scout ahead of the fleet. By the First World War it was already a second-rate ship, and many ships of the type were sunk.

A type that grew old

The armoured cruiser was born in the 19th century as an attempt to combine the armour of a capital ship with a cruiser’s speed and range. The first ship of the type is usually taken to be the Russian General-Admiral, built in 1870–1873. The great navies built them in large numbers around the turn of the century. In 1908, however, they were superseded by the battlecruiser, larger, faster and armed with a battleship’s guns, and after 1910 no new armoured cruiser was built.

At the start of the war many of them were still afloat. They were good enough to fight lighter cruisers and armed merchant ships, and their range suited them to long cruises, but against battlecruisers they stood no chance. They were often old ships, and their crews were largely made up of reservists.

Defeats of the first months

On 22 September 1914 U-9 sank in little more than an hour three British armoured cruisers patrolling the North Sea: Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy. 1,459 sailors died. On 1 November at Coronel the armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau of Admiral Maximilian von Spee sank Good Hope and Monmouth with all hands. Three days later the German Yorck sank on her own side’s mines at the mouth of the Jade.

On 8 December off the Falklands Scharnhorst and Gneisenau ran into the battlecruisers Invincible and Inflexible, which were faster and armed with 305 mm guns against the Germans’ 210 mm. Both went down, as did two of the three light cruisers with them. Spee died with about 1,900 of his sailors. The battle seemed to prove John Fisher right: he had built battlecruisers precisely to destroy armoured cruisers.

Dogger Bank and Jutland

Armoured cruisers also sailed with the main fleets, and there their weakness was most dangerous. On 24 January 1915 at the Dogger Bank the British battlecruisers concentrated their fire on the crippled Blücher, which sank, while Hipper’s battlecruisers escaped.

At Jutland Rear-Admiral Robert Arbuthnot, with the cruisers Defence and Warrior, set off to finish the German light cruiser Wiesbaden and ran under the guns of the German capital ships. Defence blew up with all hands, and the badly damaged Warrior had to be abandoned the next morning. Black Prince, which had lost touch with the fleet, ran straight into the German battleships around midnight.

Mines and torpedoes

Other armoured cruisers were lost to mines and torpedoes, often with almost their entire crews. The Russian Pallada blew up in October 1914, and the French Léon Gambetta sank in April 1915 at the mouth of the Adriatic. On 5 June 1916 Hampshire, carrying Lord Kitchener to Russia, struck a mine off Orkney. As late as August 1918 U-62 torpedoed Dupetit-Thouars while she was escorting a convoy.

After the war most surviving ships of the type went for scrap, partly because of the Washington Treaty of 1922. The only one preserved, the Greek Georgios Averof, is a museum at Palaio Faliro.