Cruiser
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- For other uses, see Cruiser (disambiguation).
A cruiser (From Dutch Kruiser, "something that crosses") is a classification of large warship. Historically they were generally considered the smallest ships capable of independent operations—destroyers usually requiring outside support such as tenders—but in modern parlance this difference has disappeared. In modern warfare the cruiser has virtually disappeared, supplanted in all roles by the destroyer, but certain ships are still named cruisers for reasons of military function.
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[edit] History
The term "cruiser" was first commonly used in the 17th century to refer to an independent warship. "Cruiser" meant the purpose or mission of a ship, rather than a category of vessel. However, the term was nonetheless generally used to mean a smaller, faster warship. The ship of the line was generally too large, inflexible and expensive to be despatched to the Americas, and too strategically important to be put at risk of fouling and foundering by continual patrol duties. The Dutch navy was noted for its cruisers in the 17th century, while the British and later French and Spanish later caught up in terms of their numbers and deployment. The British Cruizers and Convoys Acts were an attempt by mercantile interests in Parliament to focus the Navy on commerce defence and raiding with cruisers, rather than the more scarce and expensive ships of the line. [1]
The term "cruiser" was replaced in the 18th century by the frigate. Frigates had initially been regarded as a type of cruiser, but the standardisation of the frigate meant the frigate and the sloop became the two distinct kinds of cruising warship, making "cruiser" redundant. A frigate was a small, fast, long range, lightly armed (single gun-deck) ships used for scouting, carrying dispatches, and disrupting enemy trade.
The first ironclads were, because of their single gun decks, still referred to as "frigates", even though they were more powerful than existing ships of the line. By the 1870s, the rapid evolution of ironclad design meant that ironclads were being designed specifically for fast, independent, raiding and patrol. These vessels came to adopt the term armoured cruiser, while their heavier cousins adopted the term battleship. Until the 1890s armoured cruisers were still built with masts for a full sailing rig, to enable them to operate far from friendly coaling stations. [2]
From around 1880 until 1910 smaller ships with considerably less capability were built as protected cruisers. Their armour was distributed as a shaped deck inside the vessel rather than covering the sides, with the ship's coal bunkers (forming part of the hull) giving additional protection against gunfire.
Change occurred so rapidly during the late 19th century battleships only a few years old could be outperformed by cruisers of the next building run. The United States' Great White Fleet was rendered obsolete in this fashion only a few years after it sailed. During this period it was not uncommon for fleets to contain the very latest of an older generation as well as the latest designs, which were generally much larger.
With the development of the steam turbine and oil-fired propulsion, the difference between "armoured" and "protected" cruisers diminished. The Town-class cruiser of 1910 was of a similar size and capability to a protected cruiser, but had an armoured belt, making her '"armoured cruiser" by definition. Since the protected cruiser was now obsolete, the terms heavy cruiser and light cruiser started to be used. These informal terms were codified during the various naval arms limitation treaties. Light cruisers were defined to be armed with 6.1 in (155 mm) guns or smaller and heavy cruisers to be armed with larger calibers, 8 in (203 mm) being particularly common. Eight inches was the largest gun caliber permitted by the Washington Naval Treaty on heavy cruisers of the major treaty signatory nations, and became the de facto international standard for heavy cruisers; only five cruisers would be eventually built with larger guns: three German "pocket battleships" of the Deutschland class and two United States Navy World War II-era Alaska-class "large cruisers".
A more limited type was the auxiliary cruiser, a merchant ship hastily armed with small guns on the outbreak of war. Auxiliary cruisers were used to fill gaps in their long-range lines or provide escort for other cargo ships, although they generally proved to be useless in this role because of their low speed, feeble firepower and lack of armor. In both world wars the Germans also used small merchant ships armed with cruiser guns to surprise Allied merchant ships. Some large liners were armed in the same way. In British service these were known as Armed Merchant Cruisers (AMC). The Germans and French used them in World War I as raiders because of their high speed (around 30 knots (56 km/h)), and they were used again as raiders in World War II by the Germans and Japanese. In both the First World War and in the early part of the Second, they were used as convoy escorts by the British. For many years cruisers filled a sweet spot between very light craft such as the torpedo boat, and the ships intended to take part in fleet combat, later generally referred to as battleships. Cruisers were large enough to fend off attacks from smaller surface ships and self-sufficient enough to roam far from their home bases. Battleships were more powerful in combat, but so slow and (after the introduction of increased engine power), so fuel hungry that long-range operations were difficult. For much of 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the cruiser was a navy's long-range "force projection" weapon, while the larger ships stayed nearer to home. Their main role was to attack enemy merchant vessels, so much so that this task came to be called cruiser warfare. Other roles included reconnaissance, and cruisers were often attached to the battlefleet.
Cruisers were strongly optimized for high speed: the sleek, streamlined hull that best supported these speeds was long and narrow, finely and smoothly tapered at both bow and stern for minimal turbulence in their hydrodynamic flow, giving rise to the term "cruiser hull" to describe it (while battleships tended also to be very long, they were also very broad, in order to provide the greatest possible buoyancy and stability for their big guns).
The British Royal Navy, with maritime responsibilities in almost all the major oceans of the world, was particularly fond of cruisers. A large cruiser fleet allowed the Royal Navy to patrol large swathes of ocean at a reasonable cost. When the cruisers spotted enemy threats, they would either shadow the threat and lead heavy capital units to it or attack it in large numbers. For example, the heavy cruisers HMS Norfolk and Suffolk shadowed the German battleship Bismarck until British battleships and aircraft carriers could intercept and sink her. Against the German pocket battleship (heavy cruiser) Graf Spee at the Battle of the River Plate, one heavy and two light British cruisers were able to split the fire of her heavier guns and although damaged, trail her to port where she was subsequently scuttled rather than risk battle again.
[edit] Battlecruisers
One rule of thumb for warship design was that they should be armored against their own armament: a warship should be able to withstand hits from its own guns. This was considered a "balanced" design. Just prior to World War I, a significant deviation from this rule was tried. The intention was to create a ship which was both much faster than a battleship and with guns that were just as powerful, so that it could hunt down and destroy enemy cruisers.
This battlecruiser role was achieved by building a vessel which had the size and firepower of a battleship but with reduced armour protection; the weight saving used to provide it with more powerful propulsion. (It should be noted that battlecruisers are still considerably more well protected than cruisers; indeed battlecruisers are much closer to battleships than cruisers.) The result was a ship with superior tactical initiative: it could engage and outgun any surface ship up to cruiser size, yet outrun anything that potentially outgunned it.
The concept was successful where battlecruisers were employed in their designed role, as at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914. However the ships proved disastrously vulnerable when they engaged enemy battlecruisers or battleships in a fleet action, as at Jutland in 1916 where three British battlecruisers exploded as a result of German heavy gunfire. The Royal Navy quickly scrapped most of theirs after the war, and upgraded the armor on the rest to the limited extent that was possible. The scrapping was however primary the result of limitations imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty on capital ships numbers and tonnage.
The weakness of the battle cruiser against a battleship was further demonstrated in the Second World War, during the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck by the British fleet in 1940. The battlecruiser HMS Hood, known as "The Mighty Hood", was the pride of the British fleet. Armed with eight 15-inch (380 mm) guns, she presented equal firepower to that of Bismarck. However, her weak deck armour left her vulnerable and during the battle of the Denmark Strait she did not strike the Bismarck before plunging fire penetrated Hood's armour and she exploded. The Hood was split in two and sank rapidly after the spectacular explosion, and only 3 men of the crew of 1,419 survived.
The German Scharnhorst and the Japanese Kirishima, both of which were sometimes classified as battleships and other times as battlecruisers, also fell victim to powerful, heavily-protected battleships. Of these two, the Kirishima was especially under-armored, and the result of the fight with new American battleships indicated as much. The Scharnhorst class were the best protected battlecruisers of the war, but the armor of the British Duke of York was even thicker.
[edit] Later 20th century
The rise of air power during World War II dramatically changed the nature of naval combat. Even the fastest cruisers could not outrun an airplane, which were increasingly able to attack at longer distances over the ocean. This change led to the end of independent operations by single ships or very small task groups, and for the second half of the 20th century naval operations were based around very large fleets able to fend off all but the largest air attacks. This has led most navies to change to fleets designed around ships dedicated to a single role, anti-submarine or anti-aircraft typically, and the large "generalist" ship has disappeared from most forces. The United States Navy, the Russian Navy, and the Peruvian Navy (with the Almirante Grau) are the only remaining navies which operate cruisers. France operates a single cruiser, FN Jeanne d'Arc, which in the NATO pennant number system is classified as an aircraft carrier, but for training purposes only.
In the Soviet Navy, cruisers formed the basis of their combat groups. In the immediate post-war era they built a fleet of large-gun ships, but replaced these fairly quickly with very large ships carrying huge numbers of guided missiles and anti aircraft missiles. The most recent ships of this type, the four Kirovs, were built in the 1970s and 1980s, and, with the exception of the two newest in the class, RFS Pyotr Velikiy and RFS Admiral Nakhimov, are no longer in service today. Russia also operates one Kara-class and four Slava-class cruisers, plus one Kuznetsov-class carrier which is officially designated as a cruiser.
The United States Navy has centered on the aircraft carrier since WWII. The Ticonderoga-class cruisers, built in the 1980s, were originally designed and designated as a class of destroyer, intended to provide a very powerful air-defense in these carrier-centered fleets. The ships were later "mis-named" largely as a public relations move, in order to highlight the capability of the Aegis combat system the ships were designed around. In the years since the launch of USS Ticonderoga in 1981 the class has received a number of upgrades that have dramatically improved their capabilities for anti-submarine and land attack (using the Tomahawk missile). Like their Soviet counterparts, the modern Ticonderogas can also be used as the basis for an entire battle group.
[edit] The US Navy's "cruiser gap"
Prior to the introduction of the Ticonderogas, the US Navy used odd naming conventions that left its fleet seemingly without many cruisers, although a number of their ships were cruisers in all but name. From the 1950s to the 1970s, US Navy "cruisers" were large vessels equipped with heavy offensive missiles (including the Regulus nuclear cruise missile) for wide-ranging combat against land-based and sea-based targets. All save one — USS Long Beach — were converted from World War II Baltimore and Cleveland class cruisers. "Frigates" under this scheme were heavy destroyers almost as large as the cruisers and optimized for anti-aircraft warfare, although they were capable anti-surface warfare combatants as well. In the late 1960s, the US government perceived a "cruiser gap" — at the time, the US Navy possessed six ships designated as "cruisers," compared to 19 for the Soviet Union, even though the USN possessed at the time 21 "frigates" with equal or superior capabilities to the Soviet cruisers — because of this, in 1975 the Navy performed a massive redesignation of its forces:
- CVA/CVAN were redesignated CV/CVN (although USS Midway (CV-41) and USS Coral Sea (CV-43) never embarked anti-submarine squadrons).
- DLG/DLGN (Frigate/Nuclear-powered Frigate) were redesignated CG/CGN (Guided Missile Cruiser/Nuclear-powered Guided Missile Cruiser).
- Farragut-class guided missile frigates (DLG), being smaller and less capable than the others, were redesignated to DDGs (USS Coontz was the first ship of this class to be re-numbered; because of this the class is sometimes called the Coontz class);
- DE/DEG (Ocean Escort/Guided Missile Ocean Escort) were redesignated to FF/FFG (Guided Missile Frigates), bringing the US "Frigate" designation into line with the rest of the world.
Also, a series of Patrol Frigates of the Oliver Hazard Perry class, originally designated PFG, were redesignated into the FFG line. The cruiser-destroyer-frigate realignment and the deletion of the Ocean Escort type brought the US Navy's ship designations into line with the rest of the world's, eliminating confusion with foreign navies. In 1980, the Navy's then-building DDG-47 class destroyers were redesignated as cruisers (CG-47 Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser) to emphasize the additional capability provided by the ships Aegis combat system.
[edit] References
- ^ Rodger, N.A.M: The Command of the Ocean, A Naval History of Britain 1649–1815. Allen Lane, London, 2004. ISBN 0-713-99411-8
- ^ Hill, Richard: War at Sea in the Ironclad Age. Cassell, London, 2000. ISBN 0-304-35273-X
