Tennessee Class Cruiser - Reevaluation

Reevaluation

Even before HMS Invincible was built, questions arose in US Navy circles about the overall effectiveness of armored cruisers such as the Tennessees and what kind of ship might be built to replace them. The 1903 annual summer conference report, which included a staff memorandum on all-big capital ships, also mentioned a new type of fast armored cruiser that would be armed and armored much like a battleship. The following year, the summer conference considered tactics for a ship armed with four 12-inch guns, twenty-two 3-inch guns, four submerged torpedo tubes and armored like a battleship. Ships such as these were essentially Tennessee-class vessels in which the 6-inch battery had been traded for heavier main guns and protection and figured in Naval War College studies for several years. The 1906 summer conference report on a US building program advocated strongly the construction of such ships. The justification for them was two-fold: first, their use in scouting and as a fast wing in a fleet action; and second, their much greater ability over the Tennessees to stand up to 12-inch gunfire.

The appearance of the British Invincible-class battlecruisers in 1908 and the larger, faster ships of her class that followed reduced the viability of the Tennnessee class as fighting units drastically. While some Navy circles considered the Pennsylvania and Tennessee classes the only ones "dignified enough to bear the name of armored cruiser," it was also generally agreed after the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914 that a battlecruiser "could destroy either a or a at extreme range without receiving enough punishment to note in the ship's log." They were outranged by the Invincibles' 12-inch (305 mm) Mk X guns, outweighed in amount of long-range metal thrown per broadside (5,100 pounds (2,300 kg) for six 850-pound (390 kg) 12-inch shells as opposed to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) for four 10-inch shells) and outpaced in speed (26 knots versus 22). Moreover, the turbine engines on the Invincibles could maintain 26 knots for days, if needed. Reciprocating engines such as the triple-expansion units on the Tennessees were not made for such continued punishment; pre-dreadnought battleships could not generally maintain flank speed for more than an hour.

The college tested its proposed armored cruiser against the Invincibles and other ships like them. By 1908, it had come out in favor of battlecruisers. The Secretary of the Navy requested designs from C&R for battlecruiser equivalents of the Wyoming-class ships then being considered. The Navy General Board retained these sketches but did not recommend construction. With the laying down by Japan of its Kongō-class battlecruisers in 191l, C&R was asked to return its attention to like projects, which led to its series of Lexington designs.