Cruiser
A
cruiser (From
Dutch Kruiser, "something that crosses") is a large
warship capable of engaging multiple targets simultaneously. Historically they were generally considered the smallest ships capable of independent operations —
destroyers usually requiring outside support such as
tenders — but in modern parlance this difference has disappeared. In modern warfare the cruiser has virtually disappeared, supplanted in all roles by the destroyer.
The term "cruiser" was a mid
19th century invention. During the age of sail,
frigates were small, fast, long range, lightly armed (single gun-deck) ships used for scouting, carrying dispatches, and disrupting enemy trade. The majority of the fleet would be made up of much larger and slower
ships of the line, which were expected to deal with fleet combat that the frigates would avoid. The first
ironclads also had only a single gun-deck because of the weight of armor, even though they were bigger ships with bigger guns. They were nevertheless referred to as frigates although they were used as ships of the line. Thus the definition of a frigate changed, the smaller ships originally using this term were now referred to as "cruising ships", which was rapidly abbreviated to cruiser.
For many years cruisers filled a
sweet spot between very light craft such as the
torpedo boat, and the ships intended to take part in fleet combat, later generally referred to as
battleships. Cruisers were large enough to fend off attacks from smaller surface ships and self-sufficient enough to roam far from their home bases. Battleships were more powerful in combat, but so slow and (after the introduction of increased engine power), so fuel hungry that long-range operations were difficult. For much of 19th century and the first half of the
20th, the cruiser was a navy's long-range "force projection" weapon, while the larger ships stayed nearer to home. Their main role was to attack enemy
merchant vessels, so much so that this task came to be called
cruiser warfare. Cruisers were strongly optimized for high speed: the sleek, streamlined hull that best supported these speeds was long and narrow, finely and smoothly tapered at both bow and stern for minimal turbulence in their hydrodynamic flow, giving rise to the term "cruiser hull" to describe it (while battleships tended also to be very long, they were also very broad, in order to provide the most possible buoyancy and stability for their big guns).
The British
Royal Navy, with maritime responsibilities in almost all the major oceans of the world, was particularly fond of cruisers. A large cruiser fleet allowed the Royal Navy to patrol large swathes of ocean at a reasonable cost. When the cruisers spotted enemy threats, they would either shadow the threat and lead heavy capital units to it or attack it in large numbers. For example, the heavy cruisers
HMS Norfolk and
Suffolk shadowed the
German battleship Bismarck until British battleships and aircraft carriers could intercept and sink her. Against the German
pocket battleship (heavy cruiser)
Graf Spee one heavy and two light British cruisers were able to split the fire of her heavier guns and although damaged, trail her to port where she was subsequently scuttled rather than risk battle again.
Cruisers were also attached to the main battlefleet and used for
reconnaissance, sweeping ahead of the fleet looking for the enemy.
The evolution of the cruiser follows that of their larger cousins, generally growing in size and capability. The conversion from sail to steam resulted in the
armored cruiser, essentially a small and faster battleship. This occurred so rapidly during the late 19th century battleships only a few years old could be outperformed by cruisers of the next building run. The United States'
Great White Fleet was rendered obsolete in this fashion only a few years after it sailed. During this period it was not uncommon for fleets to contain the very latest of an older generation as well as the latest designs, which were generally much larger.
For this reason the terms
heavy cruiser and
light cruiser started to be used. After
World War I these terms were codified during the various naval arms limitation treaties. Light cruisers were defined to be armed with 6.1 in (155 mm) guns or smaller and heavy cruisers to be armed with larger calibers, 8 in (203 mm) being particularly common. 8 in was the largest gun permitted by the
Washington Naval Treaty on heavy cruisers of the major treaty signatory nations, and became the de facto international standard for heavy cruisers; only five cruisers would be eventually built with larger guns: three German "
pocket battleships" of the
Deutschland class and two
United States Navy World War II-era
Alaska-class "large cruisers".
From around
1880 until
1910 smaller ships with considerably less capability were built as
protected cruisers. Because they carried less armor, it was distributed as a shaped deck inside the vessel rather than covering the sides.
An even more limited type was the
auxiliary cruiser, a
merchant ship hastily armed with small guns on the outbreak of war. Auxiliary cruisers were used to fill gaps in their long-range lines or provide escort for other cargo ships, although they generally proved to be useless in this role because of their low speed, feeble firepower and lack of armor. In both world wars the Germans also used small merchant ships armed with cruiser guns to surprise Allied merchant ships who did not realise what they were. Some large liners were armed in the same way. In British service these were known as Armed Merchant Cruisers (AMC). The Germans and French used them in World War I as raiders because of their high speed (around 30 knots or 56 km/h), and they were used again as raiders in World War II by the Germans and Japanese. In both the First World War and in the early part of the Second, they were used as convoy escorts by the British.
Main article: Battlecruiser
One
rule of thumb for warship design was that they should be armored against their own armament: a warship should be able to withstand hits from its own guns. This was considered a "balanced" design. Just prior to
World War I, a significant deviation from this rule was tried. The intention was to create a ship which was both much faster than a battleship and with guns that were just as powerful, so that it could hunt down and destroy enemy cruisers.
This
battlecruiser role was achieved by building a vessel which had the size and firepower of a battleship but with reduced armour protection; the weight saving used to provide it with more powerful propulsion. (It should be noted that battlecruisers are still considerably more well protected than cruisers; indeed battlecruisers are much closer to battleships than cruisers.) The result was a ship with superior tactical initiative: it could engage and outgun any surface ship up to cruiser size, yet outrun anything that potentially outgunned it.
The concept was successful where battlecruisers were employed in their designed role, as at the
Battle of the Falkland Islands in
1914. However the ships proved disastrously vulnerable when they engaged enemy battlecruisers or battleships in a fleet action, as at
Jutland in
1916 where three British battlecruisers exploded as a result of German heavy gunfire. The
Royal Navy quickly scrapped most of theirs after the war, and upgraded the armor on the rest to the limited extent that was possible. The scrapping was however primary the result of limitations imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty on capital ships numbers and tonnage.
The weakness of the battle cruiser against a battleship was further demonstrated in the Second World War, during the hunt for the German battleship
Bismarck by the British fleet in
1940. The battlecruiser
HMS Hood, known as "The Mighty Hood", was the pride of the British fleet. Armed with eight 15-inch (380 mm) guns, she presented equal firepower to that of
Bismarck. However, her weak deck armour left her vulnerable and during the
battle of the Denmark Strait she did not strike the
Bismarck before plunging fire penetrated
Hood's armour and she exploded. The
Hood was split in two and sank rapidly after the spectacular explosion, and only 3 men of the crew of 1,419 survived.
The rise of air power during
World War II dramatically changed the nature of naval combat. Even the fastest cruisers could not outrun an airplane, which were increasingly able to attack at longer distances over the ocean. This change led to the end of independent operations by single ships or very small task groups, and for the second half of the 20th century naval operations were based around very large fleets able to fend off all but the largest air attacks. This has led most navies to change to fleets designed around ships dedicated to a single role,
anti-submarine or
anti-aircraft typically, and the large "generalist" ship has disappeared from most forces. The
United States Navy, the
Russian Navy, and the
Peruvian Navy (with the
Almirante Grau) are the only remaining navies which operate cruisers.
In the
Soviet Navy, cruisers formed the basis of their combat groups. In the immediate post-war era they built a fleet of large-gun ships, but replaced these fairly quickly with very large ships carrying huge numbers of
guided missiles and anti aircraft missiles. The most recent ships of this type, the four
Kirovs, were built in the
1970s and
1980s, and, with the exception of the two newest in the class,
RFS Pyotr Velikiy and
RFS Admiral Nakhimov, are no longer in service today. Russia also operates one
Kara-class and four
Slava-class cruisers, plus one Kuznetsov-class carrier which is officially designated as a cruiser.
The United States Navy has centered on the
aircraft carrier since WWII. The
Ticonderoga-class cruisers, built in the
1980s, were originally designed and designated as a class of
destroyer, intended to provide a very powerful air-defense in these
carrier-centered fleets. The ships were later "mis-named" largely as a
public relations move, in order to highlight the capability of the
Aegis combat system the ships were designed around. In the years since the launch of
USS Ticonderoga in
1981 the class has received a number of upgrades that have dramatically improved their capabilities for
anti-submarine and land attack (using the
Tomahawk missile). Like their Soviet counterparts, the modern
Ticonderogas can also be used as the basis for an entire battle group.
Main article: United States Navy 1975 ship reclassification
Prior to the introduction of the
Ticonderogas, the US Navy used odd naming conventions that left its fleet seemingly without many cruisers, although a number of their ships were cruisers in all but name. From the 1950s to the 1970s, US Navy "cruisers" were large vessels equipped with heavy offensive missiles (including the
Regulus nuclear cruise missile) for wide-ranging combat against land-based and sea-based targets. All save one —
USS Long Beach — were converted from World War II
Baltimore and
Cleveland class cruisers. "
Frigates" under this scheme were heavy destroyers almost as large as the cruisers and optimized for
anti-aircraft warfare, although they were capable anti-surface warfare combatants as well. In the late
1960s, the US government perceived a "cruiser gap" — at the time, the US Navy possessed six ships designated as "cruisers," compared to 19 for the Soviet Union, even though the USN possessed at the time 21 "frigates" with equal or superior capabilities to the Soviet cruisers — because of this, in 1975 the Navy performed a massive redesignation of its forces:
* CVA/CVAN were redesignated CV/CVN (although
USS Midway (CV-41) and
USS Coral Sea (CV-43) never embarked anti-submarine squadrons).
* DLG/DLGN (Frigate/Nuclear-powered Frigate) were redesignated CG/CGN (Guided Missile Cruiser/Nuclear-powered Guided Missile Cruiser).
*
Farragut-class guided missile frigates (DLG), being smaller and less capable than the others, were redesignated to DDGs (
USS Coontz was the first ship of this class to be re-numbered; because of this the class is sometimes called the
Coontz class);
* DE/DEG (Ocean Escort/Guided Missile Ocean Escort) were redesignated to FF/FFG (Guided Missile Frigates), bringing the US "Frigate" designation into line with the rest of the world.
Also, a series of Patrol Frigates of the
Oliver Hazard Perry class, originally designated PFG, were redesignated into the FFG line. The cruiser-destroyer-frigate realignment and the deletion of the Ocean Escort type brought the US Navy's ship designations into line with the rest of the world's, eliminating confusion with foreign navies.
*
Protected cruiser*
Armored cruiser*
Light cruiser*
Heavy cruiser*
Battlecruiser*
List of cruisers*
United States Navy 1975 ship reclassification
