The only time the battlecruiser New Zealand, paid for by a loyal dominion, saw action. Bet there were some twitching assholes on board that day as they saw their sister battlecruisers Indefatigable and Queen Mary blown sky high in the first hour of combat
yeah, cause Beatty was a fcuking idiot who beleived in rate of fire over, say, blast doors that prevent shell flash from igniting your own magazine
would have been blown up himself (on Lion) if his marine major/gunnery chief hadn't ordered his magazine flooded after a turret hit (postumously awarded a VC for that)
Why single out Beatty? All the crews did the same thing, stacking the gunpowder sacks in vulnerable areas so they could be got up to the guns more quickly instead of leaving them in the magazine.
The New Zealand was a lucky ship though. Didn't it make it through the war (including two other scraps with German battlecruisers as well as Jutland) with not a single crewman lost in combat?
Re the anti-flash measures - the Germans damn near lost a ship in similar circumstances themselves - but that was at the Dogger Bank a year or so before Jutland which gave them warning. We'd almost have been better off losing, or nearly losing a ship then...
Yes! Ironically annoying as when I was casting about for a masters thesis topic I thought I'd have a look at doing a history of the New Zealand in WW1, only to find, happily for the crew, that it could hardly have been more uninteresting.
From what I gather things got pretty exciting, on more than one occasion, but none of the crew died doing it - not the case with HMS Malaya which sustained something like a hundred casualties at Jutland. Interestingly the Malaya, backed by the wealth of a colony that was one of the world's biggest producers of rubber at the time, was a fast battleship costing nearly 40% more than HMS New Zealand.
There are lots of really interesting aspects to Jutland - many elements of pre-war and post-war naval thinking and popular consciousness.
The only time the battlecruiser New Zealand, paid for by a loyal dominion, saw action. Bet there were some twitching assholes on board that day as they saw their sister battlecruisers Indefatigable and Queen Mary blown sky high in the first hour of combat
yeah, cause Beatty was a fcuking idiot who beleived in rate of fire over, say, blast doors that prevent shell flash from igniting your own magazine
would have been blown up himself (on Lion) if his marine major/gunnery chief hadn't ordered his magazine flooded after a turret hit (postumously awarded a VC for that)
Why single out Beatty? All the crews did the same thing, stacking the gunpowder sacks in vulnerable areas so they could be got up to the guns more quickly instead of leaving them in the magazine.
the battlecruiser squadron under Beaty did that
the rest of the Grand fleet under Jellicoe didn't
The New Zealand was a lucky ship though. Didn't it make it through the war (including two other scraps with German battlecruisers as well as Jutland) with not a single crewman lost in combat?
Re the anti-flash measures - the Germans damn near lost a ship in similar circumstances themselves - but that was at the Dogger Bank a year or so before Jutland which gave them warning. We'd almost have been better off losing, or nearly losing a ship then...
Yes! Ironically annoying as when I was casting about for a masters thesis topic I thought I'd have a look at doing a history of the New Zealand in WW1, only to find, happily for the crew, that it could hardly have been more uninteresting.
From what I gather things got pretty exciting, on more than one occasion, but none of the crew died doing it - not the case with HMS Malaya which sustained something like a hundred casualties at Jutland. Interestingly the Malaya, backed by the wealth of a colony that was one of the world's biggest producers of rubber at the time, was a fast battleship costing nearly 40% more than HMS New Zealand.
There are lots of really interesting aspects to Jutland - many elements of pre-war and post-war naval thinking and popular consciousness.
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