Thanks for all the fine videos info and insight. Lately I've been wondering based solely on the status imagining all still floating, and upgrades ending with the completion of the H.M.S. Vanguard could the Vanguard be called the best battleship ever made?
@@abialo2010 In a pre-radar age the masts were there to keep a lookout from. And during battle, to observe the fall of shot around the enemy ships and correct your aim accordingly.
ConradsStudio At the time, Zeppelins were quite feared, as no effective means of fighting them, such as gun elevation and a Zeppelins relative speed, were readily to hand.
@@Falconer1523 yeah seriously. Prior to the invention of the interrupter gear, allowing for forward firing machine guns, aerial warfare bore a rather alarming resemblance to something out of a Mad Max movie.
Very interesting - my grandfather was on board the British Ship, 'Undaunted" during the battle of the dogger bank. His ship did rescue survivors of the sinking of the Blucher. I have two (2) seamans 'tallys' ( i.d. discs) retrieved from two of the survivors after the battle. I also have the safety pin taken from a shell prior to firing, and that shell actually hit the Blucher. (or so the hand written note says.) I have notified the German Embassy in Canberra, Australia, but they were unable to locate any living relatives in reference to the numbered 'tallys'. Very sad for someones forebears.
This ship is one of my favorite 1/700 scale models I've built since 2015. With the photo-etch kit it comes with and the after market brass 8 inch barrels, it's a very beautiful looking model. Brass gun barrels are always better than the plastic or resin barrels models almost always come with.
I read the ship was supposed to have turbines, but as they weren't available, they went with triple expansion engines instead. This meant no room for magazines for the forward wing turrets. Instead, there was a conveyor system under the armored deck from the rear magazines. Lion, I think, dropped a 13.5" shell right onto that conveyor and set off 40 charges and started a raging fire. Also cut off the main communication trunk, so that was a critical hit.
Dogger Bank is notable for having the following two friendly fire situations in a short while: 1. Russian ships attack fishers and each other. 2. German Zeppelin attacks destroyers rescuing friendly sailors.
Very excellent and well presented documentary! A true naval comedy of errors, from her launch (to fight inexistent British counterparts) to her sinking (passing as a much larger battle cruiser).
Actually the heavy cruisers grew out of the long line of british light cruisers that were developed in parallel with the battlecruisers. Armoured cruisers were made obsolete. The Germans continued to build light cruisers which kept the British in the game. The final british light cruisers of that period were the Hawkins class mounting 7.5 inch guns. Hawkins became the template for the washington treaty heavy cruisers and was copied in the japanese furutaka class.
Considering that Blucher was something of a red-headed stepchild, she definitely deserves membership in the “Iron Dogs” club. If for no other reason than being one of the earliest examples of the German style of surface combatants; i.e. “Taking an absurdly heavy pounding from vastly superior forces before *finally* deciding to sink.” Also, shout-out to the crew of that zeppelin for going above and beyond in their efforts to prove that military airships aren’t just an epic fail on land, but at sea as well. “Team-killing fucktards” indeed.
The Zeppelins provided the High Seas Fleet with a huge amount of useful recon information. They also made mistakes just like everyone has done throughout military history. Don't criticise something you haven't understood the history of.
It seems that, compared to the age of sail or the ironclad era, it was difficult to establish when an enemy was neutralised and you could move on, and it also seems that commanders where either reluctant to surrender, or were unable to communicate their surrender to the enemy. Sinkings like Blucher's just seem vicious, on the surface, with the disabled ship being hammered because an isolated gun crew inside a single turret which has lost communication with the rest of the ship doesn't realise that honour has been satisfied, and that it's time to stop.
Hearing Drach narrate the last stand of the Bismarck was very chilling to hear, for just that reason. Hundreds of sailors trying to abandon ship, yet the British keep firing because the ship is a massive inferno and no one can actually surrender the ship in any way.
I think part of it has to do with the changing characteristics of the warships themselves. A wooden “ship of the line” is actually pretty difficult to sink if you’re only using solid shot and black powder muzzle-loaders. Unless you intentionally focus fire at the waterline, manage to start a fire too big for the crew to put out, or set off the ship’s magazine, chances are it’ll actually be easier to render a wooden ship of the line “combat ineffective” than to sink it. Additionally, a ship of that time period will start to lose the ability to fight back very quickly once the crew starts taking heavy losses. The more casualties, the fewer guns can be fired because there just aren’t the men left to actually fire them. And if the ship’s masts or rudder are damaged, it will become far more difficult to bring its guns to bear on the enemy. Add to that the fact that a ship with a badly reduced crew, damaged masts or rudder has much less chance of surviving any storms that might appear, and it makes sense that crews would be less stubborn about surrendering once their ship could no longer fight effectively. And considering how long and expensive a process building new warships was, many navies would rather *capture* an enemy warship than sink it. In more modern conflicts, several things changed: armored warships made entirely of steel are significantly harder to cripple, but once they *are* rendered combat ineffective, they’ve usually been so badly damaged that they’ll often already be sinking. And with the armament spread across so many separate, isolated compartments, it’s significantly more difficult for the crew to tell whether they’re actually winning or losing. In the heat of combat, focused entirely on working their specific part of the ship, they might not even notice if their ship takes catastrophic damage, or not realize the damage is as bad as it actually is. So not only is it significantly more dangerous to let an enemy surrender before their ship is actually sinking, the crew of the ship might not even realize that they’re in a position where they should surrender.
If the enemy ships flag is still flying it is taken as a sign that the ship is not going to surrender, this is why at the battle of Coronel the Monmouth was finished off by the German cruisers, she would not drop her flag even though she was too badly damaged to fight anymore.
It is my understanding Blucher used a longer barreled, higher velocity 8.2" gun with greater power and longer range than the old 8.2" on Scharnhorst. This gun was not outranged by the British 12", and fired faster. It had better penetration than the old 8.2". Given how well Blucher absorbed punishment at Dogger bank.... I find myself wondering if Blucher, with proper fuel and able to work up to proper speed, would have done much better in a one on one fight with an Invincible class than is commonly believed. I recall one source mentioning the Germans developed a new heavier shell for the 8.2" gun in WW I that had even better performance, though Blucher was not equipped with it during her service life. But she might have been , had she not been lost. This perhaps would've equalized things even more. Blucher, though with smaller guns, but more guns in broadside and a higher rate of fire, would seem to present a more serious opponent than often credited with to the lighter armored contemporary Invincible class battlecruisers, though obviously not the larger ships with 13.5" guns. Something I have often thought about......
Outdated or not; to my eyes, Blücher was a very elegant ship and had pleasing lines, especially the double-curved bow owing both to clipper bow and ram bow is beautiful to behold.
The WWII reincarnated version of the Blucher was sunk by the Norwegians. In a somewhat lurid coincidence loss of life was also calculated at up to 800 crew.
@@parsecboy4954 Blucher is a former pit village near Newcastle upon Tyne, it was named after the Prussian General, the coal hewed would probably have been used to make the steel used by the Armstrong yards in their warship and armament construction. I don't think the coal was high quality 'Admiralty' coal preferred for warship propulsion.
@@parsecboy4954 yes of course, it was a ridiculous statement and I supposed amusing. It is indicative of Blucher's fame that he had an English pit and village named after him, as well as a German ship.
Great video, more or less. I'm a tank guy, however we are taught a bit about naval ? navel ? warfare. The effects of speed and range on maneuver, gunnery, etc. so I find your statistics fascinating.
Something which has always puzzled me is what are the " booms " or whatever they are that are present on so many pre WW2 heavy ships on the hull close to the waterline, these appear on vessels all the way back to the pre dreadnoughts. i have seen one photo with these things extended to horizontal position, but have no clue what they may be. My assumption is they are early anti torpedo defence but if so i assume they are hanging netting underwater. The photo at 3:50 ish shows them clearly, just in case there is any doubt as to what i am referring to. Also naturally thank you for your excellent video's.
All the funny joshing in the comments about the pronunciation video aside, I appreciate a serious effort. The ü vowel in "Blücher" is not a part of British nor American English and as such not easy to get right until people realize they have heard it a thousand times from the Scottish and it's their way of pronouncing the 'oo' sound. Also it's normal for the odd mispronunciation to still slip through even when making the serious effort that befits an intellectual. So I'm not here to drag you about saying "Nassoh" and "Ruhn" once again ;-) after hearing basically every WoWs streamer and youtuber say it that way countless times, when it's actually "Nassow" and "Rohn". (In all the rare German words with double-o, it's always just to make the vowel longer, as in 'Boot', not change it into a different vowel.) That does however make a good transition into pointing out that German pronunciation is actually fairly easy to get right because unlike English, there are hardly any spelling shenanigans. Once you've learned how "the letters sound", you're set to get it right almost every time. Even Jeremy Clarkson can pull it off. (That is meant to be motivating.) (The 'ch' can be pronounced in two main ways in German but it's not a matter of choice; in 'Blücher', it's not the "Dach" laut but the same way as the h in the English 'hue'. That is one of the few instances of spelling shenannigans.)
"Blooker" is a fair pronunciation if you are not German. The "ch" is hard and the umlaut converts a 'u' to a sound that can best be conveyed in English as 'oo'.
@@ShizukuSeiji Additionally ... the term Blooker - was a nick name for the M-79, 40 mm. Grenade Launcher used by the Americans during the Vietnam war. The sound the weapon made when firing was approximated as "BLOOK!" There were other nick similar names also approximating the sound of the weapon firing. .
Q&A What effect did the Treaty of Versailles have on Central Powers naval design. I heard somewhere that Scharnhorst had smaller guns than intended because by the 1930s Germany had lost the expertise and manufacturing industry to build big guns. What were the other effects. I apologise if you have answered this before. Keep up the good work.
Drach’s already mentioned this somewhere else, but one of the other effects of Versailles (as far as warships in the German Navy were concerned) was a loss of expertise in how modern warships should be designed. Going into WWII, a lot of Germany’s warships suffered from some questionable design choices (continued use of the outdated “turtleback” armor scheme on the Scharnhorst and Bismarck classes, unreliable high-pressure steam power plants on the Admiral Hipper class, lack of armor sufficient to protect against anything more powerful than a destroyer in the Königsberg and Nürnberg classes, etc), and the Kriegsmarine suffered for it. The Bismarck class are probably the best example of this. Bismarck and Tirpitz were both very powerful warships, but their designs were grossly inefficient and had a number of critical flaws (such as only having a single rudder, which doomed Bismarck, and having the cables for the fire control system placed *outside* of the armored citadel, which badly hindered her ability to fight back after taking only a few hits). The Bayern class of WWI vintage had a similar main armament to Bismarck, and even a similar secondary battery (although Bayern’s secondaries were in casemates instead of turrets), with roughly similar armor protection. The only serious advantages Bismarck had over Bayern were being significantly faster (30 knots vs 21 knots) and having somewhat better torpedo protection. What makes this even more disappointing is that Bismarck was *far* more expensive to build, and was 10-15,000 tons heavier than Bayern. Without the “brain drain” caused by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression, Germany could almost certainly have made a class of ships that could do everything the Bismarck class could do, but much more efficiently designed, significantly lighter, and much less expensive.
@@willrogers3793 yeah that's more or less what I heard. I just thought it would be cool if we had a dedicated video explaining it. I read somewhere that the loss of effectiveness in German ship design was so bad that the WWI German navy was superior over all despite decades of improvements in naval technology. So even though on the surface the Treaty of Versailles may seem to have been a failure, being unable to stop Germany from fighting another war. It did hamper her war fighting capabilities quite drastically. Particularly her navy.
Ieuan Hunt All of that is entirely true, but it also didn’t help that Germany’s high command couldn’t think of anything for the surface fleet to do other than “raid convoys” or “go die pointlessly”. When I look at what the Kriegsmarine was told to do, and what they were given to do it, against enemies ridiculously more powerful and with a frankly disgusting advantage in resources, I get the distinct impression that technology wasn’t the only area the Kriegsmarine had fallen behind in. I’m pretty sure the German high command had also forgotten what a modern navy actually entails, to say nothing of how to effectively use it.
There might have been other effects of the Blucher had not taken the brunt of the punishment. If the Seydlitz had been one of the ships sunk in addition, the near disaster of the hit to the turret may well have been lost with her and German battlecruisers (or perhaps even dreadnoughts) may well have still been at risk of a similar incident
I certainly would like to see some good internal plans for blucher. Giving away 4000 tons to Von der Tann it would seem to me a more balanced design. If the German navy had built her as a mixed-fueled ship and did something quick about the Nassau type main battery layout the kaiser would have had an armour cruiser that the British navy could almost not catch or sink if they could.
Blücher should have been attached to the German battleship fleet. She would have been very useful as a command ship for light cruisers and torpedo boat flotillas.
Sorry if you've covered this before (you probably have) but why did designs go with wing turrets instead of centerline turrets or straight up superfiring turrets right from the get go? The wing turrets seem grossly inefficient
A mixture of sighting hoods on turrets being vulnerable to blast and the old triple expansion engines took up more space which meant there wasn't the space on the centreline for the barrettes and magazines.
I actually understand it more on the German and Japanese ships that had no auperfiring turrets, than on Dreadnought which had a superfiring rear turret, but wing turrets at the front. I presume that means the critical engineering problems had been resolved, and the ship didn't have triple expansion engines. So why didn't they go all the way?
SMS Blucher strikes from the grave and takes with it three of the most priced crusiers of the Royal Navy You know what they say Revenge is best served cold(literally if you notice where the battle of jutland took place)
There were a lot of discussions about this. The Blücher was too advanced to be reconstructed, but it was either considered abandoning her and go for 2 von der Tanns, but the additional costs prevented this or sell the Blücher to the Ottoman empire opposing the Georgis Averoff purchase of Greece. The latter would fund another battle cruiser, so theerror could be made good. But the Blücher contained too much secret technology of recent development, so that it was thought that selling Blücher would transfer knowledge to the British Navy worth more than one battle cruiser as the Ottoman fleet was practically under British control.
Correctly, the selling idea was created after the Blücher was completed. The Otoman Empire wanted the unfinished Moltke but German navy was thinking about selling the Blücher instead. So the thoughts directly after learning about the battle cruiser armament were abandoning the construction process quite late.
My understanding is that the British leaked information about the Invincible design but announced they would be armed with the same guns as the Minotaur - 9.2" - but going down the Dreadnought route of all big guns plus turbine engines. As Germany had not yet perfected turbine engine technology the Blucher was supposedly a response to an up-gunned, extra fast Minotaur. I also think @Drachinifel that 25 knots is too high a speed for Blucher. 24 knots seems a more likely maximum speed. The 1SG withdrew initially at Dogger Bank at only 20 knots, BTW, so that the squadron could stay together, so that gunnery was less affected by severe vibration and smoke and so the 2SG and accompanying destroyers could manoeuvre ahead of them as necessary. Kolberg in the 2SG remember could only achieve 23 knots.
@@ShizukuSeiji 25 knots was her maximum theoretical speed, with light load, great crew, not shooting and perfect fuel. I can find you materials about what her speed was when in battle, but I think it wouldn't be more than 21 knots at best. Otherwise she wouldn't be able to shoot with some degree of accuracy. I'll grab some books on it and reply here in couple of hours.
I did not see an answer in the live stream episode but this seems like a good spot with the SMS Blucher being related. In his book Castles of Steel R K Massie states that he believes that SMS ship built just before WW I were generally better designed and better built than their RN counter parts. I believe he meant in addition to magazines not exploding when looked at sideways. What is your view of this assessment
Considering the SMS Blücher's (neigh) fate and that of the KM Blücher as well (being sunk by torpedoes from 1914), Germany shouldn't name any more ships Blücher. (Neigh)
Yes, in Shout at the Devil they blow it up. But if my memory serves me right, that novel by Wilbur Smith was based on the story of SMS Konigsberg, which Drach has a video on.
Honestly, thinking about this kind of ship, the germans could've been onto something. Battleships were, at the time, too costly to send to far-flung areas of the European empires. Battlecruisers, seem to have a better chance to be sent across the empire, but even then, navies seemed VERY hesitant to do so. A dreadnought Armoured Cruiser could've been a viable way to get a relatively well-armed, fast, and most importantly, reasonably independent ship to far-flung areas of the empires, such as pacific holdings, to force more native threats, such as the Japanese to need to commit at least a battlecruiser, which might not have been an option at the time, or to overpower the protected cruisers and gunboats of the other respective European powers pacific holdings. Essentially, this could've been a more cost-effective way of filling the Battlecruiser's mission profile, in locations where navies could not afford to send a full battlecruiser but needed a firepower advantage.
Not to be confused for a different Blucher that got blasted by obsolete Krupp-made coastal guns and torps made by Austro-Hungary-a country that didn't even exist anymore.
This ship also suffered from slow resupply of stores when in port. All horses in the dock area had to be removed, lest they be spooked any time the ship was mentioned by name.
If the name is supposed to be pronounced the German way, the sound isn't quite the same. In German, the 'ch' digraph is pronounced as [x] after back vowels (like 'a') and as [ç] after front vowels (like 'ü').
Drach, just something for future videos: When one cannot access the Umlaut in words such as Blücher it is proper to write it as ae/ue/oe. There are valid reasons for going against this rule, if you do this on purpose, but I did want to share with you the official rule, in case you weren't aware of it.
The design stuff isn’t right - the Germans weren’t fooled by erroneous reports of the Invincibles’ armament, this is an old myth. See Dodson’s The Kaiser’s Battlefleet. Yes, I know, I need to rewrite the Wiki article. I’m busy :P
@Nguyen Johnathan Read Dodson's book - the design work on Blucher began before the Invincibles, so they can hardly have influenced the German ship. And there are no references to the Invincibles in German documents produced after the British ships were laid down.
@@parsecboy4954 The Germans were well aware during Bluchers design period that Britain was laying down a new class of armoured cruiser. To assume that navies spent millions on ships that would take a couple of years to get afloat without knowing (or trying to find out) what a possible future enemy was planning is plain untrue. Just because official papers may nor reference the Invincible design does not mean the Germans were unaware of it.
What you say is completely nonsensical - you might as well say the sky is blue, as if that had any relevance. Yes, the Germans were aware that the British were building more armored cruisers - what exactly is your point? The alternative would have been that the Brits simply decided to scrap their navy and empire. The point is, the Germans didn’t know the characteristics of the new British armored cruisers, and did not have them specifically in mind when designing Blucher. Their internal documents make no reference to the imagined hypotheses you so frequently hear about the subject (i.e., that they expected the Brits to build a dreadnought armored cruiser with a uniform battery of 9.2s), which is EXACTLY what would have turned up in their records. And bear in mind that concerns over the King Edwards played very heavily in the design of the Nassaus, which IS attested in their associated design docs. So what we’re left with is your idle speculation and ignorance of what Dodson actually says. Thank you next.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Pinned post for Q&A :)
Thanks for all the fine videos info and insight.
Lately I've been wondering based solely on the status imagining all still floating, and upgrades ending with the completion of the H.M.S. Vanguard could the Vanguard be called the best battleship ever made?
whats the deal with masts on ships? Did they carry sails just in case their engine get damaged? Besides signalling flags whats the point?
@@abialo2010 In a pre-radar age the masts were there to keep a lookout from. And during battle, to observe the fall of shot around the enemy ships and correct your aim accordingly.
@@jamesharmer9293 good info. thanks!
So, Blucher definitely wasn't a battlecruiser, and if she wasn't really an armored cruiser, either, what exactly was she?
"They made a scaled-down version of the Nassau-class battleships, right down to the stability issues."
Golden line there.
Warships chased off by a Zeppelin attack. Not words you hear often...
WWI was an interesting time in mankinds history of always finding new and exciting ways to kill eachother.
ConradsStudio At the time, Zeppelins were quite feared, as no effective means of fighting them, such as gun elevation and a Zeppelins relative speed, were readily to hand.
Unless it was Led Zeppelin. Great band but not much chop against a warship.
I suppose, if it seems that the enemy wants to interfere when you are trying to save their survivors, the threshold for giving up is very low.
@@Falconer1523 yeah seriously. Prior to the invention of the interrupter gear, allowing for forward firing machine guns, aerial warfare bore a rather alarming resemblance to something out of a Mad Max movie.
Very interesting - my grandfather was on board the British Ship, 'Undaunted" during the battle of the dogger bank. His ship did rescue survivors of the sinking of the Blucher. I have two (2) seamans 'tallys' ( i.d. discs) retrieved from two of the survivors after the battle. I also have the safety pin taken from a shell prior to firing, and that shell actually hit the Blucher. (or so the hand written note says.) I have notified the German Embassy in Canberra, Australia, but they were unable to locate any living relatives in reference to the numbered 'tallys'. Very sad for someones forebears.
The Blücher is my favorite ship. I have two 1250 scale models of it.
I have a soft spot for the Blücher as well. Ever since I read "Castles of Steel" by Robert K. Massie.
and it died twice I believe? In both World Wars... XD
This ship is one of my favorite 1/700 scale models I've built since 2015. With the photo-etch kit it comes with and the after market brass 8 inch barrels, it's a very beautiful looking model. Brass gun barrels are always better than the plastic or resin barrels models almost always come with.
"Metal is better than plastic" is a disgustingly obvious truism that the rest of the world needs to rediscover really goddamn fast.
I read the ship was supposed to have turbines, but as they weren't available, they went with triple expansion engines instead. This meant no room for magazines for the forward wing turrets. Instead, there was a conveyor system under the armored deck from the rear magazines. Lion, I think, dropped a 13.5" shell right onto that conveyor and set off 40 charges and started a raging fire. Also cut off the main communication trunk, so that was a critical hit.
Dogger Bank is notable for having the following two friendly fire situations in a short while:
1. Russian ships attack fishers and each other.
2. German Zeppelin attacks destroyers rescuing friendly sailors.
Very excellent and well presented documentary! A true naval comedy of errors, from her launch (to fight inexistent British counterparts) to her sinking (passing as a much larger battle cruiser).
You are my favorite historical UA-camr. Keep up the good work. All of your videos are great but some are truly magnificent.
The Imperial German Navy had some amazing designed beautiful shipa. Thanks for giving us such insight into the navies of the world.
Considering you complete made my 35:40 minute video on the Blücher look like a child's play in this simple 8 minute video you did really well.
Kind of proto-heavy cruiser in a way, even if that wasn't the intention at all.
Actually the heavy cruisers grew out of the long line of british light cruisers that were developed in parallel with the battlecruisers. Armoured cruisers were made obsolete.
The Germans continued to build light cruisers which kept the British in the game. The final british light cruisers of that period were the Hawkins class mounting 7.5 inch guns. Hawkins became the template for the washington treaty heavy cruisers and was copied in the japanese furutaka class.
Hindsight being 20-20, Blucher would have been of more use in the Baltic. She would have made a very interesting counter to Rurik.
What a lunacy to send a ship unfit for the battle line into this battle
The response from the German admiralty to HMS Invincible must have been something along the lines of: "whoops"
More like "Ach!"
@@hektor6766 Probably more along the lines of "Scheiße!"
Considering that Blucher was something of a red-headed stepchild, she definitely deserves membership in the “Iron Dogs” club. If for no other reason than being one of the earliest examples of the German style of surface combatants; i.e. “Taking an absurdly heavy pounding from vastly superior forces before *finally* deciding to sink.”
Also, shout-out to the crew of that zeppelin for going above and beyond in their efforts to prove that military airships aren’t just an epic fail on land, but at sea as well. “Team-killing fucktards” indeed.
The Zeppelins provided the High Seas Fleet with a huge amount of useful recon information. They also made mistakes just like everyone has done throughout military history. Don't criticise something you haven't understood the history of.
I agree thay had there uses
IJN Mogami: *Casually looks the other way*
When you see the picture of her with many crewmen on deck the comparative size makes the ship look huge !
I read the name and heard whinnying horses.
(Young Frankenstein reference)
"Nevertheless, she kept fighting."
I'd say you missed an opportunity for a quote more than 100 years newer than the Blucher.
Blucher! (Horses whinny in the background...)
Waiting for all the Frau Blucher jokes
Did someone say Frau Blucher?
*NEEEIIIIGH*
Shhhh you're scaring the horses
LMAO.
He vas my BOYFRIEND!
It seems that, compared to the age of sail or the ironclad era, it was difficult to establish when an enemy was neutralised and you could move on, and it also seems that commanders where either reluctant to surrender, or were unable to communicate their surrender to the enemy. Sinkings like Blucher's just seem vicious, on the surface, with the disabled ship being hammered because an isolated gun crew inside a single turret which has lost communication with the rest of the ship doesn't realise that honour has been satisfied, and that it's time to stop.
Hearing Drach narrate the last stand of the Bismarck was very chilling to hear, for just that reason. Hundreds of sailors trying to abandon ship, yet the British keep firing because the ship is a massive inferno and no one can actually surrender the ship in any way.
I think part of it has to do with the changing characteristics of the warships themselves. A wooden “ship of the line” is actually pretty difficult to sink if you’re only using solid shot and black powder muzzle-loaders. Unless you intentionally focus fire at the waterline, manage to start a fire too big for the crew to put out, or set off the ship’s magazine, chances are it’ll actually be easier to render a wooden ship of the line “combat ineffective” than to sink it. Additionally, a ship of that time period will start to lose the ability to fight back very quickly once the crew starts taking heavy losses. The more casualties, the fewer guns can be fired because there just aren’t the men left to actually fire them. And if the ship’s masts or rudder are damaged, it will become far more difficult to bring its guns to bear on the enemy. Add to that the fact that a ship with a badly reduced crew, damaged masts or rudder has much less chance of surviving any storms that might appear, and it makes sense that crews would be less stubborn about surrendering once their ship could no longer fight effectively. And considering how long and expensive a process building new warships was, many navies would rather *capture* an enemy warship than sink it.
In more modern conflicts, several things changed: armored warships made entirely of steel are significantly harder to cripple, but once they *are* rendered combat ineffective, they’ve usually been so badly damaged that they’ll often already be sinking. And with the armament spread across so many separate, isolated compartments, it’s significantly more difficult for the crew to tell whether they’re actually winning or losing. In the heat of combat, focused entirely on working their specific part of the ship, they might not even notice if their ship takes catastrophic damage, or not realize the damage is as bad as it actually is. So not only is it significantly more dangerous to let an enemy surrender before their ship is actually sinking, the crew of the ship might not even realize that they’re in a position where they should surrender.
@DR Dan Which happened 26 years after the events discussed in this video.
If the enemy ships flag is still flying it is taken as a sign that the ship is not going to surrender, this is why at the battle of Coronel the Monmouth was finished off by the German cruisers, she would not drop her flag even though she was too badly damaged to fight anymore.
@DR Dan THAT particular event is in the future: 1941. THIS action is in 1915.
It is my understanding Blucher used a longer barreled, higher velocity 8.2" gun with greater power and longer range than the old 8.2" on Scharnhorst. This gun was not outranged by the British 12", and fired faster.
It had better penetration than the old 8.2".
Given how well Blucher absorbed punishment at Dogger bank....
I find myself wondering if Blucher, with proper fuel and able to work up to proper speed, would have done much better in a one on one fight with an Invincible class than is commonly believed.
I recall one source mentioning the Germans developed a new heavier shell for the 8.2" gun in WW I that had even better performance, though Blucher was not equipped with it during her service life. But she might have been , had she not been lost. This perhaps would've equalized things even more.
Blucher, though with smaller guns, but more guns in broadside and a higher rate of fire, would seem to present a more serious opponent than often credited with to the lighter armored contemporary Invincible class battlecruisers, though obviously not the larger ships with 13.5" guns.
Something I have often thought about......
Outdated or not; to my eyes, Blücher was a very elegant ship and had pleasing lines, especially the double-curved bow owing both to clipper bow and ram bow is beautiful to behold.
“Oh, all right Drach, I’ll like it again”
Frau Boucher !!
The WWII reincarnated version of the Blucher was sunk by the Norwegians. In a somewhat lurid coincidence loss of life was also calculated at up to 800 crew.
Good Job. Mein Lieblingsschiff. Grüße aus dem Schwarzwald 😉😉😉
Quite a long time I was waiting for a video on the SMS Blücher. Thank's a lot :)
Blucher, named after a village in Northeast England. One of my favorites.
Not quite, as old Gebhard would tell you
@@parsecboy4954 Blucher is a former pit village near Newcastle upon Tyne, it was named after the Prussian General, the coal hewed would probably have been used to make the steel used by the Armstrong yards in their warship and armament construction. I don't think the coal was high quality 'Admiralty' coal preferred for warship propulsion.
I can't say anything to the quality of their coal, but you said the ship was named for the town, which is not the case.
@@parsecboy4954 yes of course, it was a ridiculous statement and I supposed amusing. It is indicative of Blucher's fame that he had an English pit and village named after him, as well as a German ship.
Ah, I should have guessed - the internet is not a good transmitter of humor
Excellent upload, The human voice is much better than the robot voice thank you.
Bravery on both sides.
Great video, more or less.
I'm a tank guy, however we are taught a bit about naval ? navel ? warfare. The effects of speed and range on maneuver, gunnery, etc. so I find your statistics fascinating.
I can’t help myself; every time I hear the word “Blücher” I think I can hear a horse neighing in the background.
Wonderful footage.
beautiful ship
They were courageous . Fighting till the end
The definition of "I don't hear no bell"
Love oyur channel and videos, glad the TTS even get a rework from you, also: Selling Umlaute for future german ships, just copy & paste the "ü" ;)
Young Frankenstein, anyone?
One of the best channels around for warships!
You might want to consider a follow-up video or a revised video addressing any attempts to dive the wreck.
Loved the video. Would enjoy a video that covers the history of armored cruisers.
Something which has always puzzled me is what are the " booms " or whatever they are that are present on so many pre WW2 heavy ships on the hull close to the waterline, these appear on vessels all the way back to the pre dreadnoughts. i have seen one photo with these things extended to horizontal position, but have no clue what they may be. My assumption is they are early anti torpedo defence but if so i assume they are hanging netting underwater. The photo at 3:50 ish shows them clearly, just in case there is any doubt as to what i am referring to. Also naturally thank you for your excellent video's.
Anti submarine nets
All the funny joshing in the comments about the pronunciation video aside, I appreciate a serious effort. The ü vowel in "Blücher" is not a part of British nor American English and as such not easy to get right until people realize they have heard it a thousand times from the Scottish and it's their way of pronouncing the 'oo' sound.
Also it's normal for the odd mispronunciation to still slip through even when making the serious effort that befits an intellectual. So I'm not here to drag you about saying "Nassoh" and "Ruhn" once again ;-) after hearing basically every WoWs streamer and youtuber say it that way countless times, when it's actually "Nassow" and "Rohn". (In all the rare German words with double-o, it's always just to make the vowel longer, as in 'Boot', not change it into a different vowel.)
That does however make a good transition into pointing out that German pronunciation is actually fairly easy to get right because unlike English, there are hardly any spelling shenanigans. Once you've learned how "the letters sound", you're set to get it right almost every time. Even Jeremy Clarkson can pull it off. (That is meant to be motivating.)
(The 'ch' can be pronounced in two main ways in German but it's not a matter of choice; in 'Blücher', it's not the "Dach" laut but the same way as the h in the English 'hue'. That is one of the few instances of spelling shenannigans.)
"Blooker" is a fair pronunciation if you are not German. The "ch" is hard and the umlaut converts a 'u' to a sound that can best be conveyed in English as 'oo'.
The small intellectual side of me understands all this to some degree, the rest of me is very confused...
@@ShizukuSeiji Additionally ... the term Blooker - was a nick name for the M-79, 40 mm. Grenade Launcher used by the Americans during the Vietnam war. The sound the weapon made when firing was approximated as "BLOOK!" There were other nick similar names also approximating the sound of the weapon firing.
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Q&A What effect did the Treaty of Versailles have on Central Powers naval design. I heard somewhere that Scharnhorst had smaller guns than intended because by the 1930s Germany had lost the expertise and manufacturing industry to build big guns. What were the other effects.
I apologise if you have answered this before. Keep up the good work.
Drach does mention that.
@@kieranh2005 could you give me a link?
Drach’s already mentioned this somewhere else, but one of the other effects of Versailles (as far as warships in the German Navy were concerned) was a loss of expertise in how modern warships should be designed. Going into WWII, a lot of Germany’s warships suffered from some questionable design choices (continued use of the outdated “turtleback” armor scheme on the Scharnhorst and Bismarck classes, unreliable high-pressure steam power plants on the Admiral Hipper class, lack of armor sufficient to protect against anything more powerful than a destroyer in the Königsberg and Nürnberg classes, etc), and the Kriegsmarine suffered for it.
The Bismarck class are probably the best example of this. Bismarck and Tirpitz were both very powerful warships, but their designs were grossly inefficient and had a number of critical flaws (such as only having a single rudder, which doomed Bismarck, and having the cables for the fire control system placed *outside* of the armored citadel, which badly hindered her ability to fight back after taking only a few hits). The Bayern class of WWI vintage had a similar main armament to Bismarck, and even a similar secondary battery (although Bayern’s secondaries were in casemates instead of turrets), with roughly similar armor protection. The only serious advantages Bismarck had over Bayern were being significantly faster (30 knots vs 21 knots) and having somewhat better torpedo protection. What makes this even more disappointing is that Bismarck was *far* more expensive to build, and was 10-15,000 tons heavier than Bayern. Without the “brain drain” caused by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression, Germany could almost certainly have made a class of ships that could do everything the Bismarck class could do, but much more efficiently designed, significantly lighter, and much less expensive.
@@willrogers3793 yeah that's more or less what I heard. I just thought it would be cool if we had a dedicated video explaining it.
I read somewhere that the loss of effectiveness in German ship design was so bad that the WWI German navy was superior over all despite decades of improvements in naval technology. So even though on the surface the Treaty of Versailles may seem to have been a failure, being unable to stop Germany from fighting another war. It did hamper her war fighting capabilities quite drastically. Particularly her navy.
Ieuan Hunt All of that is entirely true, but it also didn’t help that Germany’s high command couldn’t think of anything for the surface fleet to do other than “raid convoys” or “go die pointlessly”. When I look at what the Kriegsmarine was told to do, and what they were given to do it, against enemies ridiculously more powerful and with a frankly disgusting advantage in resources, I get the distinct impression that technology wasn’t the only area the Kriegsmarine had fallen behind in. I’m pretty sure the German high command had also forgotten what a modern navy actually entails, to say nothing of how to effectively use it.
Beatty at it aagain !
"Human voice".
*Yeah nice try Skynet*
Er.. it is a human voice, apart from the (very obvious) end bit.
whoosh
Just about once a minute, the word "oops" pops up in my head.
The SMS Blucher must of Jinx the KMS Blucher
Ye ships bearing the name Blucher seem to be quite unlucky
You want irony? The guns that shot the KMS Blucher were WW1 German built naval guns.
@@Grimmwoldds and then it was torpedoes that delivered the final blow...
I'm never going to serve on board a German ship named Blücher.
@@Feiora Austrian torpedoes.
There might have been other effects of the Blucher had not taken the brunt of the punishment. If the Seydlitz had been one of the ships sunk in addition, the near disaster of the hit to the turret may well have been lost with her and German battlecruisers (or perhaps even dreadnoughts) may well have still been at risk of a similar incident
Does anyone else hear a horse whinnying?
Every...time...=D
of course
I really wish Drach had added that to the video.
Paul the chickens are making such a Racket that I can not hear the Horse . Thank you for letting me know , I will look outside .
I was looking for this comment.
Imagine a running fight in the Baltic between Rurik and Blucher.
Blucher - Neiiigh
Between this and Bismark, Germany seems to have a habit of preventing their own sailors from being rescued.
The name actually is "Blücher", after the Field Marshall of 1815 (Waterloo).
It can be written "Bluecher", if the correct letter "ü" isn't available.
Well she got revenge by letting her comrades live to fight another day. Even though it was not intended
I certainly would like to see some good internal plans for blucher. Giving away 4000 tons to Von der Tann it would seem to me a more balanced design. If the German navy had built her as a mixed-fueled ship and did something quick about the Nassau type main battery layout the kaiser would have had an armour cruiser that the British navy could almost not catch or sink if they could.
The German battle cruisers didn't need to be fast, they just had to be faster than the Blucher.
Can you do a video on the Blucher that tried to capture the Norwegian royal family in 1940?
She, too, was an unlucky ship, falling victim to shore fired torpedoes...
40 year old ones at that
Please could you review SMSMunchen of battle of Jutland. Thanks
Blücher should have been attached to the German battleship fleet. She would have been very useful as a command ship for light cruisers and torpedo boat flotillas.
Sorry if you've covered this before (you probably have) but why did designs go with wing turrets instead of centerline turrets or straight up superfiring turrets right from the get go? The wing turrets seem grossly inefficient
If I remember right, in the beginning the engineers thought that superfiring turrets could damage the lower turret with the blast from shooting it.
A mixture of sighting hoods on turrets being vulnerable to blast and the old triple expansion engines took up more space which meant there wasn't the space on the centreline for the barrettes and magazines.
I actually understand it more on the German and Japanese ships that had no auperfiring turrets, than on Dreadnought which had a superfiring rear turret, but wing turrets at the front. I presume that means the critical engineering problems had been resolved, and the ship didn't have triple expansion engines. So why didn't they go all the way?
@@bificommander stick with what you know is my guess.
D5 you say?
it would be cool to hear about early British submarines...
SMS Blucher strikes from the grave and takes with it three of the most priced crusiers of the Royal Navy
You know what they say
Revenge is best served cold(literally if you notice where the battle of jutland took place)
Frau Blucher...young Frankenstein
Almost sounds like you have a liking for what could've become of Blücher.
agggh I'm addicted to your channel. Stop please stop the great videos and wry comments. Thanks but since I'm addicted now please keep it up.
What was the advice in Piece of Cake about Tail End Charlie?
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🐴 neigh!
2:05 Drach, a hint regarding "Roon": the pronunciation is not "Ruhn", it´s "Rohn" :)
Its actually 'Roon', with the double 'o' pronounced as in 'book'.
Were the Germans really forced to build Blucher after learning of the truth about the "dreadnought armored cruiser" design?
There were a lot of discussions about this. The Blücher was too advanced to be reconstructed, but it was either considered abandoning her and go for 2 von der Tanns, but the additional costs prevented this or sell the Blücher to the Ottoman empire opposing the Georgis Averoff purchase of Greece. The latter would fund another battle cruiser, so theerror could be made good. But the Blücher contained too much secret technology of recent development, so that it was thought that selling Blücher would transfer knowledge to the British Navy worth more than one battle cruiser as the Ottoman fleet was practically under British control.
Correctly, the selling idea was created after the Blücher was completed. The Otoman Empire wanted the unfinished Moltke but German navy was thinking about selling the Blücher instead. So the thoughts directly after learning about the battle cruiser armament were abandoning the construction process quite late.
Well they already had all the bits for it, might as well put em together and see if it works.
My understanding is that the British leaked information about the Invincible design but announced they would be armed with the same guns as the Minotaur - 9.2" - but going down the Dreadnought route of all big guns plus turbine engines. As Germany had not yet perfected turbine engine technology the Blucher was supposedly a response to an up-gunned, extra fast Minotaur.
I also think @Drachinifel that 25 knots is too high a speed for Blucher. 24 knots seems a more likely maximum speed. The 1SG withdrew initially at Dogger Bank at only 20 knots, BTW, so that the squadron could stay together, so that gunnery was less affected by severe vibration and smoke and so the 2SG and accompanying destroyers could manoeuvre ahead of them as necessary. Kolberg in the 2SG remember could only achieve 23 knots.
@@ShizukuSeiji 25 knots was her maximum theoretical speed, with light load, great crew, not shooting and perfect fuel. I can find you materials about what her speed was when in battle, but I think it wouldn't be more than 21 knots at best. Otherwise she wouldn't be able to shoot with some degree of accuracy. I'll grab some books on it and reply here in couple of hours.
Why do i hear horses?
Anybody else click on this assuming it was the ship that now sits at the bottom of Oslofjord?
I did not see an answer in the live stream episode but this seems like a good spot with the SMS Blucher being related. In his book Castles of Steel R K Massie states that he believes that SMS ship built just before WW I were generally better designed and better built than their RN counter parts. I believe he meant in addition to magazines not exploding when looked at sideways. What is your view of this assessment
Большой крейсер (нем. Große Kreuzer) ВМФ Германской империи "Синехуев".
Considering the SMS Blücher's (neigh) fate and that of the KM Blücher as well (being sunk by torpedoes from 1914), Germany shouldn't name any more ships Blücher. (Neigh)
Wait. Didn't Roger Moore and Lee Marvin blow this one up back in 1976?
Yes, in Shout at the Devil they blow it up. But if my memory serves me right, that novel by Wilbur Smith was based on the story of SMS Konigsberg, which Drach has a video on.
Honestly, thinking about this kind of ship, the germans could've been onto something. Battleships were, at the time, too costly to send to far-flung areas of the European empires. Battlecruisers, seem to have a better chance to be sent across the empire, but even then, navies seemed VERY hesitant to do so. A dreadnought Armoured Cruiser could've been a viable way to get a relatively well-armed, fast, and most importantly, reasonably independent ship to far-flung areas of the empires, such as pacific holdings, to force more native threats, such as the Japanese to need to commit at least a battlecruiser, which might not have been an option at the time, or to overpower the protected cruisers and gunboats of the other respective European powers pacific holdings. Essentially, this could've been a more cost-effective way of filling the Battlecruiser's mission profile, in locations where navies could not afford to send a full battlecruiser but needed a firepower advantage.
Not to be confused for a different Blucher that got blasted by obsolete Krupp-made coastal guns and torps made by Austro-Hungary-a country that didn't even exist anymore.
Roon!
Was the SMS Blucher a armoured cruiser or a battlecruiser?
Early heavy cruiser
This ship also suffered from slow resupply of stores when in port. All horses in the dock area had to be removed, lest they be spooked any time the ship was mentioned by name.
Wasn't there a German ship named Blucher that was sunk by torpedoes fired from a Norwegian fort, early in WWII?
To answer my own question, yes there was. I have a suggestion for the Germans, stop naming ships "Blucher."
@@jimkilcoyne7904 Perhaps when the RN stops having warships named "Queen Eliizabeth".
Also I'm from Scarborough.
I am almost in attempt to say my German neighbor i build a bike jet helicopter :-D I and he we love mechanical engineering.
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I speak the London aswell
"Drop your panties, Sir William, I cannot wait till lunchtime."
I suspect the current Bundesmarine isn’t too keen to name any of their current warships Blucher.
Maybe offtopic, but I always wondered: is the "ch" in Drachinifel pronounced same as the "ch" in Blücher?
Similar, yes
Yes, say it as a 'k'.
If the name is supposed to be pronounced the German way, the sound isn't quite the same. In German, the 'ch' digraph is pronounced as [x] after back vowels (like 'a') and as [ç] after front vowels (like 'ü').
Bit of a sound problem on this video, kind of sounds like horses neighing in the background every so often.
The woeful state of British signalling seriously needed sorting out.
Still did not get past Oskars borg
Wasn't this another Seymour error?
His first of two biggies, yes.
OK now the other Bleucher...the one that needs all the Norwegian narcisists like me :)
So, Germans lost one Blucher in each World War. Not particularly lucky name. Do they have Blucher in Bundesmarine now?
Drach, just something for future videos: When one cannot access the Umlaut in words such as Blücher it is proper to write it as ae/ue/oe. There are valid reasons for going against this rule, if you do this on purpose, but I did want to share with you the official rule, in case you weren't aware of it.
The design stuff isn’t right - the Germans weren’t fooled by erroneous reports of the Invincibles’ armament, this is an old myth. See Dodson’s The Kaiser’s Battlefleet.
Yes, I know, I need to rewrite the Wiki article. I’m busy :P
@Nguyen Johnathan Read Dodson's book - the design work on Blucher began before the Invincibles, so they can hardly have influenced the German ship. And there are no references to the Invincibles in German documents produced after the British ships were laid down.
@@parsecboy4954 The Germans were well aware during Bluchers design period that Britain was laying down a new class of armoured cruiser. To assume that navies spent millions on ships that would take a couple of years to get afloat without knowing (or trying to find out) what a possible future enemy was planning is plain untrue. Just because official papers may nor reference the Invincible design does not mean the Germans were unaware of it.
What you say is completely nonsensical - you might as well say the sky is blue, as if that had any relevance. Yes, the Germans were aware that the British were building more armored cruisers - what exactly is your point? The alternative would have been that the Brits simply decided to scrap their navy and empire.
The point is, the Germans didn’t know the characteristics of the new British armored cruisers, and did not have them specifically in mind when designing Blucher. Their internal documents make no reference to the imagined hypotheses you so frequently hear about the subject (i.e., that they expected the Brits to build a dreadnought armored cruiser with a uniform battery of 9.2s), which is EXACTLY what would have turned up in their records. And bear in mind that concerns over the King Edwards played very heavily in the design of the Nassaus, which IS attested in their associated design docs.
So what we’re left with is your idle speculation and ignorance of what Dodson actually says. Thank you next.
I'm from Hartlepool and have seen the list of civilians killed in the bombardment, some only toddlers. I shed no tears for SMS Blucher.
What if the Washington Naval Treaty and the London Naval Treaties failed.
Thought I were going to listen to the demise of the Blucher leading the assault on Oslo in WW2, but great surprise led to great story.
If you have to have in answer to stupidity and how the cure is please tell everybody . (Warships won't help)