Pocket battleships

Cruisers were considered by the Naval Staff to be the major threat to British trade, and also the means by which a guerre de course could be conducted against Japan. The Germans sprang a surprise in the early 1930s when they began to replace their pre-dreadnoughts with so-called pocket battleships. These armoured ships were nominally within the... 

January 1934 by Hankey and Fisher about the pocket battleships, Chatfield replied that the French (who had laid down the first of two battle-cruisers in 1932) could look after them. He added that Britain s three battle-cruisers could do so too, but ultimately the Royal Navy might not possess any ships of that type as the design of their replacements would depend upon what the Japanese replaced their battlecruisers with. No attempt was made to build larger cruisers to cope with the pocket battleships. Indeed, the Admiralty proposed at the second London naval conference to reduce the maximum size of cruisers, from the 10,000 tons allowed under the Washington treaty to 8,000 tons, to make it possible to build at less cost the number believed to be required to protect British trade. ... 

Armoured ships, popularly known as pocket battleships, each with a tonnage of about one-third of the maximum for a capital ship under the Washington Treaty. 

Ships of the Kraft diirch Freiide sail to if o, Spain on 16 Mav 1939, led by the pocket battleship Admiral GrafSpee, to embark the Luftwaffe Condor Lej ion. From left to rifiht the Robert Ley, Wilhelm Gustloff and Der Deutsche. (Heinz Schbn)... 

Listing and on fire, the auxiliary cruiser Rnwnlpindi is seen under attack from a German capital ship in this painting by Norman Wilkinson. Her attacker, on the horizon to the ri> ht, is mistakenly portrayed as the pocket battleship... 

A year later, on 5 November 1940, when the Jervis Bay was sunk while defending convoy HX 84, her courageous action pennitted the convoy to disperse and ensured that losses were minimal. The convoy was a thousand miles east of Newfoundland when it was attacked by the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer. Apart from the AMC Jervis Bay,... 

To put this into context, in the Battle of the River Plate, the first major sea battle of the Second World War and very widely published, the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spec fought a bloody battle with three Allied cruisers, the Achilles, Ajax and Exeter over three days in December 1939. The total casualties in this engagement, German and British were 109. Indeed for the first three months of the Second World War, more civihans were killed in the UK through black-out accidents than service personnel died on active service. 

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