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

Laid down on April 2, 1906, launched on April 13, 1907 and commissioned on March 20, 1908, Invincible carried a main armament of eight 12 inch main guns mounted two per turret; one centerline forward, one centerline aft and one wing turret per side that could fire fore and aft and, in limited arcs, to both sides. Invincible was the name ship of a three-ship battle cruiser class. They were powered by turbines with coal-fired boilers. For reasons of secrecy, the Invincibles were at first designated as "armored cruisers," as it was intended that battle cruisers should supplant those earlier pre-dreadnought vessels. When launched they did make all of the world’s armored cruisers obsolescent, including the 35 which were currently part of the British Royal Navy inventory. Invincible was a name that had been used for many Royal Navy capital ships over the centuries. Like the radical new battleship Dreadnought, the new battle cruisers were built to carry all-big-guns but, more controversally, sacrificed armor protection for speed. In theory, battle cruisers were to avoid combat in dangerous situations but this would have been anathema to the hard-driving British captains and the whole battle cruiser concept proved to be a failure whenever these large but poorly-protected ships sailed into the range of large caliber enemy guns. In short, they violated the age-old tenet that a ship’s first duty is to stay afloat. Technically, the Invincible class was also structurally weak and Royal Navy technicians spent most of their prewar years trying to remedy defects in their electrically-driven turret training and loading gear. On March 17, 1913, Invincible was involved in a collision with British submarine C-34. With the declaration of war, the ship was involved at Heligoland Bight on August 28, 1914 and then sent, with her sister ship, Inflexible, to the South Atlantic to search for the German cruisers of their East Asiatic Squadron under Graf Maximilian von Spee (1861–1914). This squadron had sunk the British armored cruisers Monmouth and Good Hope at the Battle of Coronel in November. On December 8, 1914, the battle cruisers headed an overwhelming British cruiser force at the Battle of the Falklands, where the German cruiser shells (the German squadron included armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and a number of light cruisers), despite 23 hits and near misses, proved incapable of seriously hurting Invincible and the Germans, long at sea, proved too slow to outrun the fast British battle cruisers and their big guns. This proved to be the perfect action for battle cruisers and an overwhelming, annihilating victory. Britannia rules the waves! Interestingly enough, her namesake, the ski-jump aircraft carrier (also called a "commando carrier" or a "through-deck cruiser"–don’t ask) Invincible was a key to victory in the Falkland Islands Campaign of 1982, almost 68 years later. Returning home, the Invincible later took heavy hits from the German battle cruiser Lutzow at the Battle of Jutland and blew up on May 31, 1916 with only five survivors out of a crew of 1,031.

See other battle cruisers: Indefatigable, Von de Tann, Queen Mary