I still can't believe they made Beatty First Sea Lord, AFTER Jutland. The douchebag's own actions and orders caused Britain to lose three capital ships and over three thousand men, and jeopardized the entire ability of Britain to decisively win the engagement, and he gets PROMOTED for it.

And then he throws Flag Officer Seymour under the bus so as to avoid criticism against himself, so the guy commits suicide later. Not that Seymour was at all good at his job, but guess whose fault it was that he had that job, and for so long?

Probably because he was skilled at ass-kissing and self-advertising, plus he had a wealthy heiress wife who kept him financially independent. If any admiral deserved to be court-martialed and shot like Byng, it was him. But Britain seems to have a history of rewarding incompetence. Eventually it dragged them down to “has been” status.

Well they managed to shoot all their rounds in a fraction of a second, so mission accomplished, I guess...

duracell said:
I still can't believe they made Beatty First Sea Lord, AFTER Jutland. The douchebag's own actions and orders caused Britain to lose three capital ships and over three thousand men, and jeopardized the entire ability of Britain to decisively win the engagement, and he gets PROMOTED for it.

And then he throws Flag Officer Seymour under the bus so as to avoid criticism against himself, so the guy commits suicide later. Not that Seymour was at all good at his job, but guess whose fault it was that he had that job, and for so long?

Came for porn. Got a history blurb about WW1 naval history.

Nice

88miker said:
Came for porn. Got a history blurb about WW1 naval history.

Nice

It's amazing the places you can find an education.

So they can shoot faster? Rookie error
evrywon knows paintin it red makes it shoot fastah

duracell said:
I still can't believe they made Beatty First Sea Lord, AFTER Jutland. The douchebag's own actions and orders caused Britain to lose three capital ships and over three thousand men, and jeopardized the entire ability of Britain to decisively win the engagement, and he gets PROMOTED for it.

And then he throws Flag Officer Seymour under the bus so as to avoid criticism against himself, so the guy commits suicide later. Not that Seymour was at all good at his job, but guess whose fault it was that he had that job, and for so long?

Oh, so this is based off of a historical event?

...good lord.

dakkadude said:
Oh, so this is based off of a historical event?

...good lord.

Yyyyep. Gather 'round and let me tell you of the First Battlecruiser Squadron. It WILL be a little long.

In World War 1, Britain held a decisive naval advantage over Germany, but had been leaning on their naval advantage as a crutch for far too long. As a result, in a world where capital ships could now do 27 knots and thus response times were out of date, Britain's coastal defenses had been sorely neglected and the Germans launched a number of coastal raids that did little damage but frightened the PISS out of the British public.

In response, the British moved their battlecruiser force--the fastest capital ships in the fleet--south from the main anchorage at Scapa Flow to the Firth of Forth (the big bay that Edinburgh is on). This area would allow them faster response time and thus prevent further coastal raids. However, it compounded a pre-existing problem.

British gunnery was absolutely atrocious. No navy in the world was really accurate per se at this point, but the British had seriously fallen behind in that department because they hadn't had to fight a real naval conflict since the Napoleonic Wars a hundred years ago, so big was their fleet advantage. As a result, gunnery practice--being expensive and dirty--fell off in the "peacetime" Royal Navy and by the start of the First World War, the Brits' naval accuracy was extremely bad. The development of the Scapa Flow anchorage, which was on a desolate island north of Scotland, started to help correct this, since there was plenty of room and nobody to bother with massive cannons going off up there.

However, now that the battlecruisers were stationed south again, they had less room and way more windows to shatter, so practice fell off. Recognizing the accuracy problem, the RN's commanders unofficially settled on an idea--trying to increase rate of fire, to compensate for inaccuracy with increased shells on target. This was not exclusively Admiral David Beatty's idea, nor was it restricted to the battlecruisers, but if he didn't actively encourage it, he did absolutely nothing to DIScourage it in the ships under his command.

This, however, presented a new problem. Ships are designed to hit a certain rate of fire because of the need to install safety measures in the powder and ammunition handling systems, to make sure you don't get catastrophic chain reactions. Flash shutters to prevent explosions' fireballs from racing down into the magazines, etc.. These limited the maximum fire rate. So a disgustingly large number of captains, or crew of their own accord, disabled them. Propping open flash doors, and even--as shown here--stacking propellant charges in unarmored and unsecured corridors near the turret so as to not have to wait for the lift to bring them up.

This was an unbelievably disastrous decision, and it cost the British dearly. At Jutland, Beatty's battlecruisers engaged the German ones, and while one of the Germans took what would ultimately be a fatal hit, three of Beatty's ships--Indefatigable, Queen Mary, and Invincible--took hits to their turrets and suffered catastrophic magazine detonations that sank them in the span of minutes. All three had crews well over a thousand men, and all three of them had survivor counts in the single digits.

This was hardly Beatty's only fault that day or arguably even the most disastrous one--his grotesque failures in signaling, some of which stemmed from his incompetent flag officer Seymour who I mentioned, caused huge problems for the British fleet and may have prevented the engagement from being decisive. But they were absolutely the most dramatic and life-expensive ones, and would have shocking effects on the British that wouldn't go away until after the Second World War.

jfrankparnell said:
Probably because he was skilled at ass-kissing and self-advertising, plus he had a wealthy heiress wife who kept him financially independent. If any admiral deserved to be court-martialed and shot like Byng, it was him. But Britain seems to have a history of rewarding incompetence. Eventually it dragged them down to “has been” status.

Actually their “history of rewarding incompetence” had nothing to do with that. That was just the result of the United States deciding to be the best.