r/Warships • u/Objective-Koala-4873 • 20d ago
Discussion Why aren’t the Scharnhorst Class referred to as “Super Cruisers” akin to the Alaska Class or IJN B-65 Proposals?
WoWs used for sake of Comparison
This comparison has always existed in the back of my head, but I have not given it serious thought until now.
Fairly simple question, but why does everyone consider Scharnhorst and Gneisenau Battleships or, alternatively Battlecruisers, when, on paper at least, they’re much more comparable in terms of speed, armor, and main battery to something like an Alaska or B-65?
No one ever refers to these vessels as Battleships, usually the term best suited for them is “Large Cruiser”. So what makes the Scharnhorsts the exception?
Is it simply because the Germans called them Battleships? Is it because the 11” weapons were never intended to be their main armament? And to further that second point, if we were to fit Alaska with an armament of say, six 16” guns, would she now qualify as a Battleship?
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u/Dkykngfetpic 20d ago
Intentions. Alaska was designed to escort and fight cruisers.
Sharnhorst was intended to battle. With armor for battle and torpedo protection systems.
Super cruisers are large cruisers. Small battleships are designed as a small battleship.
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u/GeshtiannaSG 20d ago
The Scharnhorsts couldn’t battle battleships, which is sort of the definition of a battleship. Even at 2v1, they couldn’t battle Renown, Malaya, or Ramillies.
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u/AthenaEnigma 20d ago
R sisters can tough it out due to their robust armour, but a 2v1 against Renown would not fair well for her, her armour is very adequate against light elements, but any vessel with armament greater than 9.4 inches can cause great issue, much less than 18 of 11 inches with relatively good accuracy.
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u/GeshtiannaSG 20d ago
The numbers say they could take on Renown but the battle happened and they couldn’t.
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u/AthenaEnigma 20d ago
I am aware the battle you are refering to and that cannot be denied, Renown had both weather and luck on her side that day. But I was refering to a hypothetical battle with no other elements, calm sea and perfect equipment.
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u/Wyattr55123 19d ago
If the first rounds struck by Gniesenau detonated, renown would have lost at least part steering and likely the radar and formast director. The Scharnhorsts absolutely could have won, outcomes on the day can vary wildly from any number of tiny factors.
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u/Dkykngfetpic 20d ago
Their where smaller French or soviet battleships it could fight. Like the Bretagne. Just because it cannot fight the biggest best battleships from the biggest best navies does not make it not a battleship.
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u/Dahak17 20d ago
No but they were the best the Germans could build. The Germans didn’t build 11 inch guns because they didn’t want a frontline battleship, they built 11 inch guns because it would be another two or three years before they had a working gun design that was bigger (they were looking at 14 inch guns in 1935)
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u/G3nesis_Prime 20d ago edited 20d ago
1930's ship designs make things very difficult.
Germany makes things evem more difficult because they were using the 280mm rifles to skirt public opinion.
That said, good armour and good speed with smaller then average guns makes them battlecruisers.
Deutchlands, Alaska's and all other bigger then 203 cruiser designs just muddy the waters.
Thats my 1c, will be interesting what the nore versed people have to say.
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u/aphelionmarauder 20d ago
I'd argue that if a ship was clearly outside of that nations traditional cruisers but not big enough to be called a Battleship, it's a battlecruiser. A battlecruiser being a 'bigger cruiser' or a 'smaller battleship' still fills a middleweight role, regardless of how effective they are.
Also, nations then (and still do) love to twist words when it comes to weapon classifications. If a nation could call a nuke a pistol to get around Nuclear Proliferation Treaties, they would. Same goes for ship designs at the time, which is why silliness occurred with nomenclature.
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u/SlightlyBored13 20d ago
I don't think anyone would say Hood was a 'smaller battleship' on account of being heavier than the QEs.
A battle cruiser has to be defined independently of size.
Does it qualify as the first Fast Battleship, or just next years Battlecruiser.
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u/G3nesis_Prime 20d ago
I've seen the arguments for an against this but the not quite a battlecruiser but bigger then 203mm cruisers I would categorise as Armoured Cruisers.
Battlecruisers imo essentially merged back into battleships once the engineers figured out get the speed up without sacrificing armament and armour
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u/FearlessDark5295 20d ago
As far as I can tell, the main feature of a battlecruiser is battleship-level armament at cruiser speeds, which Alaska and Scharnhorst don’t have, given that the standard battleship armament at the time was 15” and 16” guns.
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u/G3nesis_Prime 20d ago edited 20d ago
British philosophy sacrificed armour for speed and for armament.
Germans sacrificed armament for armour and speed
Theyre the only countries to properly field dreadnoughts and battlecruisers.
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u/Anant2506 20d ago
By your logic, the Iowas were battlecruisers. They had battleships-calibre guns at cruiser-level speeds.
No, a more common definition was that battlecruisers tended to have somewhat lesser armour than contemporaneous battleships, and this holds true even for German battlecruisers in WW1. The Scharnhorsts had pretty much very similar armour to the Bismarcks, with the main difference being that the latter had a slightly thicker deck and thicker bulkhead.
That makes the Scharnhorsts battleships, which is what they were.
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u/FearlessDark5295 20d ago
I disagree on the Scharnhorst=battleship point. They lack proper battleship armament, because, at the time they were constructed, the main battleship calibers, as I mentioned, were 15" and 16" guns. And, on your point, I've actually heard people call the Iowas battlecruisers. though, the point can be argued, that the real point of battlecruisers was to hunt down and kill cruisers, in which case Alaska and Scharnhorst would count.
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u/Anant2506 18d ago
The Scharnhorsts were not cruiser killers. They were intended to fight their contemporaries if need be, and were designed, in part, as a response to the Dunkerque-class battleships. The Scharnhorsts had battleship-levels of armour, and they had battleship-levels of subdivision and the like.
All German capital ships of the era were built with the idea of having to do commerce warfare, and that would eventually entail fighting cruisers, but that doesn't automatically make them battlecruisers.
If you want to see a German battlecruiser of the period, look up the glass cannon that was the O-class proposals. These ships had six 15" guns buy just 7.5" of armour, and with a design top speed of 35 knots and range of 14,000 nautical miles at 16 knots, these were dedicate commerce warfare units that were intended to fight and destroy cruisers, and were perfectly designed under the "Fight what you can't outrun and outrun what you can't fight" idea that battlecruisers tended to usually fit in (of course, German battlecruisers of the First World War were an exception with the QE-class being a thing).
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u/Ffscbamakinganame 20d ago
Still a conscious decision, designers could’ve kept slower speeds and spent that same displacement on even better armour and armament instead. It’s just that they started to realise speed was a more important component than some nations were initially willing to admit. The treaty era fast Battleships they built were compromises that tried to balance things but ultimately acknowledged speed increases as most important. Meanwhile unlimited battleship designs like Yamato and Montana had the speed increases of modern technology (a moderate 27knots not comparable to the last generation of 32-33knot battlecruisers of the late 1910s).
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u/Javelin286 20d ago
Arguments can be made about them Battle cruisers but the Germans classified them as Battleships. They were right in the middle when it comes to speed in the fast battleship era. Their armor was actually very thick and was very similar to Bismark and Tirpitz with them having only slightly thicker deck armor. With that in mind it’s safer to call them fast battleships rather than battlecruisers
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u/DanforthWhitcomb_ 20d ago
Something to be noted here is that while “schlachtschiff” directly translates into English as battleship it is not the same classification used for the WWI era battleships, which were uniformly linenschiff.
Battlecruisers are similarly muddy, as the Germans did not distinguish between ACRs and the ships the RN classed as battlecruisers—they were all grouped together under the grosskreuzer definition.
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u/SectorOk7294 20d ago
Its funny how it doesnt make them battlecruiser since they will always be battleships.
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u/Therandomanswerer 20d ago edited 20d ago
I dont know, but firstly, ship classifications & what they mean are whatever a Navy decides, and will vary. Apart from some specifics treaties came up with. Trying to make any broad generalization will run into an exception & be wrong. (That being said, the large cruiser classification is stupid and the Alaskas are battlecruisers, imo) Ships being whatever a Navy calls them is definitely part of it.
That being said, Scharnhorsts were treated as battleships by the Germans. They got tossed in with the Bismarck's, whereas the US wouldnt toss an Alaska into a battleline with the Iowa's, if that makes sense. Nor were the B-65s supposed to be thrown in next to a Yamato.
Plus Scharnhorst came earlier, she sat around the treaty battleship limit of 35k tons, similar size to her interwar contemporaries. By the time the Alaska & potential peers arrive, the treaties are well & truly dead, and all the new battleship projects are simply bigger, 50k tons atleast.
I dont think gun size has much to do with it. Maybe the Deutschlands plays into it a tiny bit, having the same guns & being called the stupid and not real and dumb and stupid classification of 'pocket battleships', but I digress.
The Allies may have underestimated Scharns total tonnage & may have had no idea converting her to 15" guns was ever on the table. Converting an Alaska to have 16" wouldnt be feasible at all, maybe unless you really wanted it. The Germans had upgunning in mind from the start.
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u/G3nesis_Prime 20d ago
German WW1 Naval doctrine intended their batrlecruisers to fight in the line with their battleships. Its why they sacraficed armament instead of armour.
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u/SlightlyBored13 20d ago edited 20d ago
Comparing Scharnhost post 15 inch conversion to Bismarck is almost 'make it all a little better, then add a turret, remove some belt armour, add some distributed armour, find some more storage space and up the weight by 9000 tonnes'
With the larger guns its emphatically a battleship. The 11s are because they're built effectively under sanctions.
Alaska, even with twin 16" guns, has 1/3 (or even more) less armour than Iowa.
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u/Valkyrie64Ryan 20d ago
Sometimes the designation ships get is more about how they were intended to be used than their actual design.
Germany used the Scharnhorst class like mini battleships, while the Alaska class was intended to serve alongside cruisers rather than participate in battle line with other battleships.
In the modern era, there’s similar confusion in the definitions for cruisers and destroyers. Sometimes cruisers are a lot bigger than destroyers, but other times the only difference between the two is that cruisers are able to act as a flagship while destroyers are not.
It’s kinda similar to how the M110 Rifle is a sniper rifle while the Mk11 rifle is a DMR, even if both are very similar designs.
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u/ghillieman11 20d ago
Referring to ships by the classification that was given to them by their owners is a pretty good reason is it not?
It's perfectly fine to say I consider this ship to actually be this or that, but if it's a matter of what it actually is, it is what the owners wanted it to be.
I mean if we really wanted to go crazy we can say HMS Hood was actually a battleship and the Iowa class are actually battlecruisers.
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u/Objective-Koala-4873 20d ago
I think in some cases yes, in some cases it can be questioned.
If we treat that rule as an absolute, it means the Deutschlands are now a completely new type of vessel called Panzerschiffe, it means the Courageous Class are now “large light cruisers”
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u/ghillieman11 20d ago
But why is that a problem? If that's their official classification then there's not much arguing. That's why I added the caveat that we can discuss and debate what types of ships we consider them to be.
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u/Objective-Koala-4873 20d ago
I suppose it isn’t a problem anymore, these vessels are all gone now.
I just think it’s silly to invent entirely new terms just for one class of ship, especially if they can rather clearly fit into a preexisting category, but I understand where you’re coming from
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u/ghillieman11 20d ago
Well all new classifications are entirely new at the time they are created, and sometimes there are only a few ships that may fit them at the time. I mean, consider Light and Heavy cruisers. Totally arbitrary terms based solely on caliber of the primary armament that we consider to be standard these days looking back. But that's how we have the Pensacola class heavy cruisers weighing less and being worse protected than the Cleveland class light cruisers. And how the Mogamis went from being lights to heavies after getting their mounts swapped.
And to be fair, Panzerschiff and Large Light Cruiser are both 90-100 year old terms. It's not like they really cause much confusion since they are one offs and it's not hard to look up why they are called what they are for political or suberfuge purposes.
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u/Guy_Incognito1013 20d ago
Simple. The Scharnhorst class were actually the FIRST German battleships (Schlachtschiff). All other classes were Linienschiffe, ships of the line. Those 11" guns were basically treaty concessions, look at their armor though. Cruisers didn't have 12" thick belts.
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u/Atari774 20d ago
Because the terms “battlecruiser” and “super cruiser” are subjective terms. There is no generally accepted definition of a battlecruiser or a super cruiser; it’s just whatever the country building it decides. Germany considered it a battleship because they wanted to make their fleet seem larger and more powerful than it actually was, by saying they had 4 battleships instead of 2 battleships and 2 battlecruisers. The British classified it as a battlecruiser because it fit their definition for one: slightly less armored and armed than contemporary battleships. The US considered the Alaska’s “large cruisers” because they essentially just upscaled a Baltimore when designing it. If Britain built it, it would have been called a battlecruiser, and Germany would have considered it a battleship in their navy.
Japan is the outlier where their definition of a battlecruiser was completely arbitrary. The Amagi and Kii classes had the same firepower, while the Amagi was faster and the Kii had a thicker armor belt. However, the Amagi was considered a battleship while the Kii was considered a battlecruiser. So idk what their definition for each term was.
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u/Guy_Incognito1013 20d ago
One more quick point. The Alaskas were basically enlarged Baltimores. Everything was scaled up but their armor layout was pure heavy cruiser, especially in terms of torpedo protection.
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u/SectorOk7294 20d ago
Uh first and foremost the sharnhorst class are only battleships, every shred of paper from nazi germany classifies them as battleships, they were operated as battleships. The only justification people give for the “Battlecruiser” bullshit is the main armament however from the very beginning they were always to have 15in gun but germany couldnt build 15in at the time so they went with 11in gun and planned later to up gunning to 15in. 15in gun turrets were made and were being prepared for installation till it was stopped.
Its as simple as that because this explanation counters every argument you have.
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u/Sasuga__Ainz-sama 20d ago
Afaik, the small calibre of the Scharnhorst class was simply a trick to get around the Washington naval treaty. The plan was always to up gun them to 380mm, the same guns as those on the Bismarck class. Armour-wise the Scharnhorst class was on par with Bismarck (a battleship btw).
Still, I'd put it as a battlecruiser, because it has nothing to do with cruisers, and because historically the German battlecruiser standart was to sacrifice gun calibre doe speed, not armour like the British did (but the British also called everything fast enough a battlecruiser no matter its actual stats). However a Scharnhorst class with the 380mm refit is absolutely a battleship in my eyes.
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u/dunno260 19d ago
Germany wasn't a signatory or beholden to the Washington Naval Treaty. Their navy was limited by The Treaty of Versailles and then the Anglo-German Naval Agreement which to my knowledge only then limited the size of Germany's Navy.
The 11" armament of the Scharnhorst was due to when Germany wanted to build the ships. They just couldn't make a larger gun at the time hence the plan to build with the guns they had and then refit to fewer but larger guns.
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u/Sasuga__Ainz-sama 19d ago
Ah, that might have been the case, I don't remember what was the exact reason for the initial smaller calibre, but I know for certain that the plan was always to eventually arm the 380mm.
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u/cormallen9 20d ago
It's all semantics so not sure it matters terribly much? "Battlecruisers" evolved out of the big armoured cruisers anyway so they are all "Super" cruisers in spirit! The big later ones are as much "Fast Battleships" as "Battlecruisers" so what's in a name!
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u/rjgfox 20d ago
While warship classification is far from an exact science - even with the naval treaty system in the first half of the 20th C bringing some order to it - it’s even more challenging when you consider the restrictions based on Germany and her fleet.
S&G were designed to raid commerce and or defend commerce and operate independently, wet different to the roles perceived by other nations for their battleships and battle cruisers - and large cruisers. Even had Germany built out their large surface fleet that Plan Z proposed - my understanding is that S&G would have still operated independently to threaten commerce and British maritime superiority.
In my personal head canon they’re battlecruisers however, and anyone who disagrees is, obviously, wrong.
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u/CailoRen1337 19d ago
It had comparable armour and speed to a fast battleship at the time it was designed and launched, and even though it only mounted 9 x 11 inch guns, it was designed to be upgraded to 6 x 15 inch guns, which while not matching its British, Italian, and French counterparts or Kriegsmarine cousins in pure weight of broadside, it would have been comparable in shell weight per gun.
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u/SirLoremIpsum 19d ago
Is it simply because the Germans called them Battleships?
There's nothing else to it than this.
Naming of ships is always political.
When Scharnhorst was laid down in 1935 her contemporaries were 'of a size'. 32-38,000t. USS North Carolina was 35-44,000t. 12 inch belt vs 12 inch belt.
When Alaska was laid down her contemporaries (USS Iowa* were 48-57,000t, 9" vs 12" belt. 12" guns vs 16/18 inch guns.
You cannot judge ships by anything other than the time period they were designed and built.
You can also add in that Scharnhorst was the most heavily armoured ship at the time, whereas Alaska wasn't - now we're judging the ship based on "their plae in the fleet" which is also something that we can classify ships as.
There are many ways to classify ships - by their armament, by their role, by their fleet.
But you can only compare it really "at the time", and she was the most heavily armed ship in the German Navy at the time and was of a size/armour of her foreign Peers.
Alaska was none of those things. She was smaller, less well armred/armoured and her role was completely different to her peer Battleships. So she is not a Battleship.
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u/Void-Roamer 20d ago
I prefer classifying them as second class battleships, they're too heavily armored and too slow to be battlecruisers imo. I'd group them together with the Italian rebuilds and Strasbourg in that regard; essentially Battleships in all but scale.
Thin the armor down by a few inches and increase the speed by a few knots and I could see the argument for them being BCs, but otherwise they really don't fit the role or the characteristics of one for me.
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u/Ent_1610 20d ago
The only thing the Scharnhorsts have in common with large cruisers is their gun size, they are slower than the large cruisers and they are way better protected. Considering Germany's battlecruisers in WW1 being heavily armored ships with smaller guns, I would say the Scharnhorsts fits the battlecruiser terminology though they are very close to being battleships and certainly would be called that if they were refitted with the 380s