Auxiliary cruiser

“ She had for her principal armament twelve six-inch quick-firers. The other cruisers were the "Aurora," of a little over 6000 tons, the "Svietlana," of nearly 4000, the "Jemschug," and "Izumrud," of 3000 tons (these two armed with 47 quick-firing guns) , and the "Almaz," of 3285, a "scout" of good speed, carrying nothing heavier than 12-pounders. There was one auxiliary cruiser, the "Ural," [26] a flotilla of nine destroyers, four transports, two repairing ships, and two hospital steamers. ”

“ Eight or nine German cruisers are believed to be at large in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Oceans. Searching for these vessels and working in concert under the various Commanders-in-Chief are upwards of 70 British (including Australian) , Japanese, French, and Russian cruisers, not including auxiliary cruisers. Among these are a number of the fastest British cruisers. The vast expanses of sea and ocean and the many thousand islands of the archipelagos offer an almost infinite choice of movement to the enemy’s ships. ”

“ They were designed to have an extreme speed of 20 knots, but a sustained speed of about 16 knots an hour on the ocean is probably the most that can be attained, A lighter armament would probably render these vessels more efficient as cruisers. There is no doubt, however, that we are in a better condition for protecting our vast commerce at the present time than we have been during any portion of the last half-century, independent of the aid we should receive from the conversion of some of the fastest merchant steamers into auxiliary cruisers. ”

“ Cruisers proper in our navy are now officially classed in three main divisions—"battle-cruisers", "cruisers", and "light cruisers", though a very short time ago they were subdivided into "armoured cruisers", "first-class protected cruisers", "second-class protected cruisers", "third-class protected cruisers", "unarmoured cruisers", "lightly-armoured cruisers", and "scouts".
The battle-cruiser is a hybrid and, as this war has proved, a most useful war-vessel. She is not so heavily armed or armoured as a battleship of equivalent age, but has much greater speed. ”

“ The engines had been so placed as to be exposed above water-line, which was condemned as a serious mistake in a war-vessel without armor-protection. It was realized, too, that the essential characteristic in an unarmored cruiser is great speed. The function she is expected to perform is to destroy commerce; and if she is slower than the merchant-vessels it is useless for her to go to sea; and if she is slower than the iron-clads, and consequently cannot escape from them, she could not long continue her service. ”

“ Now for the present, sufficient cruisers, first class, do not exist to meet the requirements of supplying ships to take the place of smaller obsolete ones, and also for reserve purposes.
For the present a large proportion of cruisers, second class, must be retained, but it is hoped that these will in time be replaced by cruisers, first class, in the proportion of one cruiser, first class, to three cruisers, second or third class. No one can argue that one first class cruiser is not a superior fighting unit to three cruisers second or third class. ”

“ Flashes break from their sides also, and the noise of the firing swells into a steady roll of sound rising and falling on the wind. We again increase speed. Black smoke billows from our funnels, the bow wave rises higher, and now and again a cloud of spray swishes over our decks. Then "Cra—ash!" The fore-turret has spoken. The ship trembles from stem to stern. We are striking in to the assistance of our scouting cruiser. Through the glasses appears what looks like an iceberg towering over the enemy's nearest cruiser. ”

“ High speed, wide radius of action and great battery strength are the characteristics of this type; and to meet these requirements the battle cruiser is planned of a size considerably larger than the battleship.
The protected cruiser is a later development of naval construction. Its distinguishing features are certain modifications in the distribution of the mass of protective armor of the ship.
Light cruisers are vessels of from 1,500 to 7,500 tons, used in scouting, as commerce destroyers, etc. They are outside the armored class. ”

“ Later, although convinced that in any war involving this country and its colonies the chief combats must be fought in European waters, naval opinion saw the necessity for a type of ship designed primarily for the defence and attack of commerce: a speedy, lightly armed and protected type capable of overhauling and injuring a weaker, or of escaping from a more powerful enemy. The American War of ’62, in which no general sea action was fought, gave the impulse to the construction of the type which eventually became known as the cruiser. ”

“ The weakest class of all is composed of the unprotected cruisers, which have neither armour-belt nor protective deck, and carry only light batteries of rapid-fire guns. When these vessels are slow, like the Detroit, they are intended for long voyages and for duty in foreign countries, and are of little use in a sea fight. The very fast unprotected cruiser, like the American line steamers, St. Paul and St. Louis, attach little importance to their armament, and rely for protection upon stowing the coal behind the place occupied by the armour belt in other vessels. ”

“ The chief kinds of fighting craft in the Grand Fleet can be told off on the fingers of one hand. First, the Battleships and Battle Cruisers. These are to our own fleets what ships-of-the-line-of-battle were to Nelson's, that is, they are the biggest and strongest, with the biggest and strongest guns and the thickest armour. The battle cruiser is faster than the battleship, and therefore not so strong; because to be faster you must thin your heavy armour to let you put in bigger engines. All the ships of this first kind were either Dreadnoughts or super-Dreadnoughts ”

“ The Glasgow, Carnarvon, and Bristol were of great use in the Falklands fight, the first-named having already fought against the heavy batteries of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off the coast of Chile, while later on she sank the Dresden; while the Sydney won undying fame by defeating and driving on shore the notorious commerce-destroyer Emden.
Another distinctly modern type of cruiser is the "light cruiser", a fast unprotected vessel with light guns of 4-inch calibre, which has proved of immense value in the area of "liveliness" in the North Sea. ”

“ Besides employing these old battleships on convoy, we had also at the end of August sent three others abroad as rallying points for our cruisers in case a German heavy cruiser should break out: thus the Glory was sent to Halifax, the Albion to Gibraltar and the Canopus to the Cape de Verde station. Naval history afforded numerous good examples of the use of a protective battleship to give security and defensive superiority to a cruiser force—to serve, in fact, as a floating fortress round which the faster vessels could manœuvre, and on which they could fall back. ”

“ A very remarkable feature of German policy has been the persistency with which cruisers have been built even at a time when other naval Powers, including Great Britain, were inactive. As a matter of course, during the period when the German Government was content to provide a fleet mainly for the purposes of coast defence, great importance was attached to the efficiency and adequacy of the cruiser squadrons. ”

“ The German battle-cruisers were now close enough for their hulls to be distinguishable. The outline of each ship stood forth, clear-cut and black, against the sky-line. Each was rushing forward at its topmost speed, bearing down with inevitable precision upon the defenceless cargo ship, which, like an exhausted, hunted animal, strained every bolt, bar and rivet to save herself from unutterable disaster. Suddenly, it became apparent that, in addition to the Dreadnought cruisers, the sea was alive with a host of smaller craft--light cruisers and torpedo-boat-destroyers. ”

“ Every nation has its own classification of warships, and the varieties of modern warships are so numerous, and the estimates of their effectiveness so much at variance, that it is little wonder the descriptions assigned to the vessels do not agree. Thus the American Maine, sunk at Havana, was described with equal accuracy as a cruiser and as a second-class battleship. But the nations have, for the most part, adopted the British classification of cruisers, though they have not failed to modify it to suit their own views. ”

“ Not a Russian or Japanese battle ship has been sunk by a torpedo boat, or by gunfire, while among the less protected ships, cruiser after cruiser has been destroyed whenever the hostile squadrons have gotten within range of one another's weapons. There will always be a large field of usefulness for cruisers, especially of the more formidable type. We need to increase the number of torpedo-boat destroyers, paying less heed to their having a knot or two extra speed than to their capacity to keep the seas for weeks, and, if necessary, for months at a time. ”

“ The incident was seized upon by those who still favoured the older methods which had done duty for so many hundreds of years, as an argument for the retention of sail power for the ships of the Royal Navy, and the modernists replied that such incidents were few and far between, and with the improvements in mechanism which science was continually making would become virtually impossible.
Naval experts do not always agree as to the differences between a battleship and a cruiser. ”

“ It is of the utmost importance that his message should not be delivered; the British fleet 108is not quite ready to strike, and it does not wish the enemy to know this. Onward steams the cruiser, the fastest vessel of her class in the world. It is broad daylight, and she can be seen by our own cruisers who, unhappily, are half a knot slower than she is. British destroyers have attempted to torpedo her as she steams quickly by, but her quick-firing guns and her attendant torpedo craft have so far foiled their purpose and the daylight is against them. ”

“ Acting in unison with those of France and Japan, they have swept German commerce and German cruisers from the face of the ocean, and so far, except for shore bombardments and submarine attacks, have been the only war-vessels engaged on either side. At the time of writing no battleships have as yet been in action against one another, for we may regard all those ships which have been reported in action at sea as cruisers, from the big battle-cruiser Lion down to the destroyers—and even, perhaps, our submarines, which are very useful scouts. ”

“ The duties of the modern cruiser are multifarious. She has to be no less a commerce protector than a commerce destroyer, and while at one end of the scale she may be little more than a glorified gunboat, she may at the other end have to be able to take her place in the line of battle and help her more powerful sisters. Whatever her duties, speed is regarded as of great importance.
The Iris, in 1878, attained a speed of eighteen and a half knots, but more than seventeen years elapsed before this speed was equalled by any of the cruisers. ”

“ The British Admiralty boards eventually threw aside their prejudices, and adopted long twenty-fours with sights on them in place of unsighted long eighteens. They have done even more than that, for when in these last years the swift armored cruiser New York, with her eight-inch rifles in turrets, was added to the American navy, giving us the most powerful cruiser in the world, they at once laid down four armored cruisers that were larger in displacement and carried more powerful engines, thicker turrets, and a more powerful armament than the New York. ”

“ I was too late to stop the last bevy of these inferior vessels, but I gave directions to design the new flotilla to realise 35 knots speed without giving up anything in gun-power, torpedoes or seaworthiness. I proposed to the Board that if money ran short we should take sixteen of these rather than twenty of the others. Building slow destroyers! One might as well breed slow racehorses.
The cruisers were much more difficult. The duties of a British cruiser are very varied: now scouting for the Battle Fleet; now convoying merchantmen; now fighting an action with another cruiser squadron ”

“ All desirable features cannot be concentrated in any one ship; the special duty for which the vessel is to be used controls the selection. The sea-going armored cruiser is expected to keep the sea for a lengthened period: she must have large coal endurance. She may be called on to sustain more than one engagement: her supply of ammunition must be large. Her speed must equal that of the fastest sea-going vessels of similar type to enable her to pursue an equal or to avoid a superior force: hence much space and displacement must be assigned to engines and boilers. ”

“ THE 'IMPERIEUSE.'
22-ton guns and thicker armour than any of the early ironclads. It is more the service on which they are to be employed than any special form of construction which has put them in the cruiser category. No more ships of this type have been built. In this country the further development of the cruiser has been in the direction of giving up external armour, and devoting all weight we can give to protection to a steel deck for the whole length of the ship, varying in thickness according to her size. ”

“ The armoured variety represents, roughly speaking, the value of three cruisers of ordinary type, and is manned by a crew almost proportionately larger. When first designed, it was possible to build these large cruisers of a speed superior to that of the smaller vessels, and having this monopoly, the French invented the type in pursuance of the idea that a sea war that consisted chiefly of attacks on commerce, promised brighter prospects than one which could not succeed unless based on battle-fleet supremacy. ”