The Ships of Brawling Battleships Steel: Great Britain Battle Cruiser Indefatigable

Laid down on February 23, 1909, launched on October 28 1, 1909 and commissioned on February 24, 1911, Indefatigable carried a main armament of eight 12 inch main guns mounted two per turret, with one forward, one aft and one wing turret per side that could fire fore and aft and to both sides. The class was similar to the earlier Invincible class but improved some of the technical shortcomings of the earlier ships. Indefatigable was the name ship of a three-ship class that included the class name ship built for Great Britain and the Australia and the New Zealand, built for those Dominion members. They were turbine powered with coal-fired boilers. British battle cruisers were built to carry all-big-guns but sacrificed armor protection for speed and were supposed to replace the earlier armored cruisers of the pre-dreadnought era. The big guns-thin armor concept proved to be a catastrophic failure whenever these imposing but poorly-protected ships sailed into the range of large caliber enemy guns. Indefatigable is an old name in the Royal Navy and the best-known earlier namesake was a small 64-gun wooden ship of the line of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Built in 1784 and modified into a razee frigate of 44 guns in 1795 to match the large new French frigates of the French Revolutionary period, she had an eventful career. Under the swashbuckling Captain Edward Pellew, she engaged in a number of notable actions, including a celebrated battle with a 74-gun French ship of the line fought at night during the height of a hurricane. The ship was also the site of some of the early adventures of a certain young fictional officer named Horatio Hornblower. Based in the Mediterranean on the outbreak of World War One, the Indefatigable was involved in the unsuccessful chase of the German battle cruiser Goeben and took part in the blockade of the Dardanelles, including the bombardment of the Turkish forts. After transfer home, she was with the Battle Cruiser Squadron at the Battle of Jutland, took heavy hits from the German battle cruiser Von der Tann and exploded and sank, leaving only four survivors out of 1021 crewmen.

See more British battle cruisers: Lion, Repulse, Courageous