style="font-size:15px;"> HMS Invincible, 1907.
HMS Invincible returned to Great Britain, but missed the Battle of Dogger Bank. In May 1916, Invincible was flagship of the Third Battlecruiser Squadron, temporarily operating with the Grand Fleet out of Scapa Flow rather than with the rest of the battlecruiser squadrons. Her commander was Read Admiral Horace Hood, part of a family with a long history in the Royal Navy. Invincible did not arrive at Jutland early enough to participate in the “Run to the South.” Hood led the Third Battlecruiser Squadron into the fight ahead of the Grand Fleet, joining his ships to Beatty’s surviving battlecruisers. Invincible began to hammer SMS Lutzow, the flagship of Admiral Hipper’s German battlecruiser squadron, with uncanny accuracy.
HMS Inflexible
Unfortunately, the Germans noticed Invincible’s excellent gunnery, which distinguished her from the rest of Beatty’s battlecruisers. Lutzow and Derfflinger poured fire onto Invincible, and a salvo from Lutzow hit the British ship on its middle turret. Invincible was not designed to take heavy fire from battleships, but the admirals of neither the Grand Fleet nor the High Seas Fleet could resist pressing their battlecruisers into front line combat. Invincible exploded and sank, taking all but six of her crew of 1,021 with her, including Admiral Hood. That was twice the number of survivors of the battlecruiser Hood, destroyed almost twenty-five years later. A much larger number of sailors probably survived the initial explosion, but it was not the policy of the Royal Navy to pick up survivors during battle. Invincible came to rest in two pieces, with her stern protruding just above the water. As the rest of the Grand Fleet passed by, the name Invincible was clearly visible on the stern of the wreck.
HMS Invincible in poor condition, Battle of Jutland, May 31, 1916.
Author’s Note
In the years after Jutland, examination of the details of the losses of the three battlecruisers indicated that weapons storage and handling played a major role in the fatal explosions. Still, the eggshell thin armor on the early ships (such as Invincible) surely contributed to their loss. The passage of time would serve to vindicate Fisher’s interest in the battlecruiser type, however, as faster ships consistently played a more active role in naval warfare (in both world wars), than their slower, more well-armored cousins.
HMS Invincible.
The United Kingdom has insisted on retaining the name Invincible for its capital ships, despite the embarrassing loss of the battlecruiser at Jutland. The most recent Invincible, a light carrier, served honorably in the Falklands War, just as her namesake had served seventy years earlier.
Related Entries:
Contemporary of… HMS Dreadnought
Inspired… SMS Goeben,
Sunk by… SMS Lutzow
São Paulo
Laid Down: 1907
Launched: 1909
Completed: July, 1910
Displacement: 19,000 tons
Main Armament: twelve 12” guns (six twin turrets)
Secondary Armament: twenty-two 4.7” guns (casemates, individual mounts)
Speed: 21.5 knots
Major Actions: Revolt of the Lash
Treaty: Pre-Washington Naval Treaty
Fate: Sank while en route to scrapping, 1951
The commissioning of Dreadnought set the navies of the world to zero, or close enough. Dreadnought represented no great technical revolution. Rather, she combined a set of available technologies in a single platform, resulting in a ship that was simply larger, faster, and more heavily armed than any predecessor. The capacity to build a dreadnought type battleship was easily within the capabilities of any nation that could construct and maintain pre-dreadnoughts. Accordingly, the French, Russian, US, and German navies immediately began construction on their own dreadnoughts. Those countries without the capacity to build large armored ships simply bought them from others, most often from Great Britain. This group included Brazil, which ordered three battleships from British yards in the years before the First World War. Minas Gerais and São Paulo were delivered to Brazil in 1910, but the third ship, to be named Rio De Janiero, had another path.
Minas Gerais and São Paulo were very similar to Dreadnought in appearance and design, although they were slightly larger and carried twelve 12” guns, rather than the ten of Dreadnought. When presented to Brazil, the two ships were probably the most powerful in the world. They were certainly superior in speed and armament to the latest class of US battleships (the South Carolinas), although the US Navy commissioned four dreadnoughts in 1910 and two each in 1911 and 1912. The purchase of these ships spurred a minor naval race between Brazil and its Southern Cone neighbors, as Argentina ordered two ships from the United States in 1910, and Chile one from the UK in 1912 (although the Chilean battleship, Almirante Latorre, served in the Royal Navy as HMS Canada for four years before delivery).
São Paulo uring sea trials, 1910. Brazilian Navy photo.
Other than HMS Canada, none of these ships ever saw combat. For the Southern Cone navies (as well as for some others) battleships served no meaningful military purpose. Any war between the three states would be decided on land. The possession of a pair of dreadnoughts, even if the ships were state-of-the-art, would not long dissuade a major naval power from intervention; as noted above, the US possessed eight such ships by 1912, would commission another eight by 1918, another five by 1923. At the Battle of Jutland, the Grand Fleet deployed thirty-seven dreadnoughts and the High Seas Fleet twenty-one. São Paulo and her kin were symbols, meant to indicate to foreign and domestic audiences that Brazil was a modern, powerful player on the world stage. In 1910, with Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power on History being read by one and all, being modern meant possessing a dreadnought.
São Paulo. Brazilian Navy photo.
Mere possession did not convey the resources for maintaining a dreadnought, however. In 1910, Brazil fell into a devastating economic recession. This put immense pressure on the armed forces, which had to reduce personnel, pay, and procurement. This led to an increase in lashing, a punishment then regarded as standard in the Brazilian Navy. In the Navy, lashing fell most heavily on black sailors, many of them recent descendants of slaves. In November 1910, a particularly brutal incident of lashing led to a revolt, which began upon São Paulo’s sister ship, Minas Gerais. The revolt, concentrated among black enlisted personnel, quickly spread to São Paulo and several other ships. The sailors threatened to turn the guns of the two great battleships upon Rio de Janeiro, which was unprepared for bombardment. The
