Telling Cruisers and Battleships Apart

Starting when I was a boy and for decades thereafter I had trouble telling American cruisers from battleships. Specifically, cruisers and battleships of the World War 2 era from, say, 1935 to 1950. Before the 1930s cruiser and battleship appearances were fairly distinctly different.

I was not the only one who confused the two types. Aerial reconnaissance observers fairly often identified enemy cruisers as being battleships. An example is the early Japanese sighting reports of an American task force during the battle of Midway in June of 1942.

Consider the two photos at the top of this post. Which ship is the cruiser and which is the battleship?

The upper image is of BB-60 USS Alabama, a battleship, and the lower image is of heavy cruiser CA-74 USS Columbus.

Here are ways to distinguish the two types of warship:

Gallery

Top: CB-1 USS Alaska, bottom: BB-63 USS Missouri, docked at Norfolk, Virginia - 1944
The USS Alaska was a very large cruiser not typical of those in the rest of the US fleet (only two Alaska Class ships were built). Regardless, the image is instructive. Cruiser lengths were in the same range as contemporary battleships, sometimes a little shorter, sometimes even longer.

However, cruisers were narrower to allow higher speeds. The fineness ratio (waterline length to beam) of cruisers approached and sometimes equaled ten, whereas that of Great War era battleships was about six, and World War 2 "fast battleships" ranged from about 6.5 to around eight. More specifically, the final US dreadnaught class of the early 1920s (Colorados) had a fineness ratio of about 6.4, whereas the Missouri's was 8.2 and the Alaska's was 8.9.

I include this photo because it's the only aerial one I know of showing a cruiser and a battleship close together. So generally speaking, cruisers are proportionally narrower than battleships.

BB-56 USS Washington

CA-71 USS Quincy
The Washington was one of the first US fast battleships, having a fineness ratio of 6.7, whereas the heavy cruiser Quincy's ratio was 9.5. These high-angle photos made the difference obvious, but seen from a low angle, as in the top images, the ships look similar because their superstructures are similar. Another difference is in the size of the main battery guns. Heavy cruisers has 8-inch guns and World War 2 US battleship classes had 16-inch guns.

CA-68 USS Baltimore

CL-48 USS Honolulu
For sake of completeness, we should consider appearance differences between heavy and light US cruisers. Baltimore's fineness ratio is 9.5 and that of the light cruiser Honolulu is 9.8, Baltimore being about ten percent longer. Setting aside displacements, light cruiser main armament was six-inch guns in greater numbers than heavy cruiser eight-inchers. So Honolulu has three main turrets forward of the bridge compared to Baltimore's two. This is distinctly different from battleship practice (aside from the Royal Navy's HMS Nelson and HMS Rodney that also had three turrets forward), making it easier to distinguish the Honolulu from a battleship. Later light cruiser classes had a different turret arrangement, but the comparatively delicate gun barrels are a strong difference from a battleship's armament.

Before the 1930s it was much easier to distinguish cruisers from battleships. Two examples from around 1920 are compared below.

BB-38 USS Pennsylvania

CL-5 USS Milwaukee
Cruiser Milwaukee has small turrets with small guns positioned close to the bow and stern, with a long stretch in the mid area having little but four smokestacks.  Battleship Pennsylvania's topside elements are more compactly arranged.  The reason for this difference is that the cruiser was designed for high speed and therefore required a much larger machinery area whose boilers and engines developed 90,000 horsepower compared to Pennsylvania's 35,000.  The post-1935 battleships and cruisers mentioned in the first part of this post had about the same horsepower from more advanced, more compact machinery systems, which largely explains their similar appearance.

Ludwig Dill: Conservative Secessionist

Wilhelm Franz Karl Ludwig Dill (1848-1940), who called himself Ludwig Dill, was a founding member of the Munich Secession artists group. A brief Wikipedia entry on Dill is here.

In 1894 he became second president of the group after Bruno Piglhein's death. He was appointed professor at the Karlsruhe fine arts academy in 1899, so resigned and was replaced by Fritz von Uhde.

Although Dill was supportive of modernist tendencies in painting, his own works were fairly conservative. His mature style tended to simplification through use of broad brushwork as well as somewhat decorative composition. His favored subjects were trees and boating scenes from the Venice Lagoon, especially towards its southern end and the town of Chioggia.

Gallery

Fischer in Venedig - 1880
"Fishermen in Venice" show Dill's earlier traditional style.

Ein bewaldete Flusslandschaft - 1883
The title doesn't translate easily into English, but refers to a landscape featuring woods and water.  Modernist influence is clearly found here.

Trees

Der Morgen
"Morning" and the painting above it are characteristic of Dill's tree paintings, though Der Morgen seems more of a sketch than his usual tree art.

View of a town
No tile or date for this, but it shows that he didn't exclusively paint trees and boats. However, he tended to avoid painting people other than small, incidental figures in his boat paintings.

Segelboote in Kanal - ca. 1890
"Sailboats in a Canal" is in a style different from the paintings below that also are said to be from around 1890, so I wonder when it was made.

Ankunft des Fischerbootes - ca. 1890
"Arrival of the Fishboats" and the following painting are done in a decorative, broad-brush style that yields a modernist feeling without much distortion of the subject matter.

Fischer in Pellestrina - ca. 1890
Pellestrina is a barrier island to the Venice Lagoon.

Booten im Hafen - ca. 1900
"Boats in Harbor" apparently was painted later than the images above and incorporates a slight shift towards Expressionism and away from Dill's faintly Romantic earlier views.

Norman Wilkinson: Sea, Sky and Other Stuff

Norman Wilkinson (1878-1971) was a master poster artist (I wrote about that aspect of his career here). He also carved out noteworthy careers in other fields of art, especially painting marine and naval scenes. His Wikipedia entry is here and another link sketching his work is here.

Below are examples mostly of his marine and naval paintings. Unless he was commissioned to feature a particular ship, his sea paintings featured a lot of water and sky, whereas ships, land and other objects usually occupied small amounts of art canvas real estate. That seems sensible, given the visual vastness of oceans and seas -- something Wilkinson was intimately familiar with, having served in the Royal Navy.

Gallery

Scene with ships
This exhibits a poster style, but I don't know if it was actually used for a poster.

Yachts off the Needles, Isle of Wight
A contrasting, more painterly style.

The 'Revenge' Leaving Plymouth to Meet the Armada - 1912
This is an illustration.

Hawker Harts of 601 Squadron - c. 1936
The sky is vast and the Harts are small.

The Pilot
Nowadays, pilot boats are usually a lot bigger and fancier than this.

Dublin and Holyhead - 1905
This is a poster illustration for the London and North Western Railway. I include it here because the style is closer to his marine paintings than the style he usually used for posters.

HMS 'Lion' Battlecruiser
This has a poster-like style.  Lion was Admiral Beatty's flagship at Dogger Bank and Jutland.  I'm guessing that this painting shows Lion on the way to her 1924 scrapping.

Fitting Out RMS 'Queen Mary' at Clydebank - 1936

HM Troopship 'Queen Mary' at Anchor in the Second World War
Thanks to her high speed, the Queen Mary was in little danger of being torpedoed by a German submarine.  Her companion Queen Elizabeth went straight to troopship duties before ever carrying commercial passengers.

Action off the River Plate, 13 December 1939, Pursuit of the 'Graf Spee'
The commerce-raider Graff Spee was a heavily armed large cruiser (and not really a "pocket battleship," as she was called at the time).  She was finally hunted down by three British cruisers and damaged to the point where her captain had her scuttled.

Japan Signs Her Own Death Warrant, Attack on Pearl Harbour, 7 December 1941

Coronation Review, 15 June 1953
I'm sorry to say that the next coronation review probably won't be as impressive as this one was.

William Aylward, Illustrator of Nautical Scenes

William James Aylward (1875-1956) came from a Great Lakes shipping family, was a student of Howard Pyle, and usually illustrated stories with nautical themes.

Biographical information about Aylward is skimpy. Two sources are here and here. The Kelly Collection site deals with him here.

Having been accepted by Pyle as a student signifies Aylward's potential as an illustrator, which was fulfilled in most cases. I do include one poorly-done example below from late in his career.

Some of the titles of the illustrations shown below are truncated. Those lacking capital letters are conjectural titles.

Gallery

Coming to America

Contrasts - 1905

future airships? - McClure's Magazine - 1905

storm scene - Harper's - 1909

Surrender of the Guerriere - Harper's - March, 1912

Perry Transferes His Flag - 1913

Mystic, Connecticut - 1916

battleship - c. 1943
This looks like a North Carolina class battleship, though a number of things seems "off" to me. For instance, the ship is too foreshortened for the viewing angle. The North Carolina and Washington had long bows, so it's possible that Aylward used some artistic license to better fit the ship into a compositional scheme. In any case, the top of the hull is too low at the front (there's much more of an upwards curve on the actual ships) and the main turrets are more distant from the prow than is shown here. The foremast structure and, indeed, all the superstructure elements shown are seemingly too high and definitely too large compared to the main turrets. The problem here is that the perspective is a mess. The anti-aircraft guns mounted high on the superstructure appeared late in the war on the North Carolina, but by that time the foremast was much more cluttered than pictured here in its 1941state. I really have no idea why an artist as experienced as Aylward would let all this happen.

SS America Bringing Troops Home - c. 1945

Marine Museum and Marin-Marie Too

Paris seems packed full of museums. A tourist who has visited the town a few times is advised (by me) to devote several hours a day to being simply a flâneur, one who strolls the rues and boulevards instead of rushing from museum to famous site to yet another museum. Even so, it can be worthwhile to drop below Paris' layer of world-class museums from time to time. If you happen to be interested in history, naval history or simply ships, a nice place to visit is the Musée National de la Marine, located a few steps from where one views the Eiffel Tower from the Trocadéro area. Its Wikipedia entry is here and its website is here.

A visitor will find decorative bits from old sailing ships, an early diver's suit, paintings dealing with seafaring and naval warfare, plus many, many models of ships. Below are some photos of ship models along with some paintings. These subjects were behind protective screens, so I wasn't able to avoid some reflections appearing.

Gallery

The models are of French vessels only, as best I could tell.

At the top are models of some of France's last battleships, the Dunkerque and the Jean Bart.

A variety of naval types.

Pre-Great War battleships.

A few displays dealt with old shipyards and ship construction.

Among the artists featured was Marin-Marie, who I wrote about here. The images below are from two paintings dealing with arctic exploration ship Pourquoi-Pas (the "Why Not?"). I have a soft spot for nice brushwork, and Marin-Marie certainly accomplished that in these paintings made during World War 2, long after the Pourquoi-Pas was destroyed in a storm with only one man surviving.

"Le Pourqui-Pas dans le Soresby Sund en 1925" (detail) - 1943

"Le Pourqui-Pas à Jan Mayen en 1926" (detail) - 1943

United States Cruisers 1900-1950

From the early 1900s into the 1950s, combat vessel types were largely understandable to the part of general public that paid at least a little attention to naval matters. As technology changed, new classes appeared, but types prominent during that period included torpedo boats, submarines, destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships and aircraft carriers. Nowadays, matters are less clear, but that is a subject for another post on (probably) another blog.

The most controversial class was the battlecruiser, initially a fast, heavily armed but less well armored kind of battleship. British battlecruiser losses during the Battle of Jutland in 1916 cast doubt on the battlecruiser concept. And by the late 1930s, a new generation of battleships appeared that were fast as well as strongly armed and armored, thus eliminating the justification for the battlecruiser class.

Cruisers were not controversial, but problematical. And what was problematical was how to conceptualize suitable designs to fit a variety of potential roles within the constraint of naval construction budgets and constraints imposed during the inter-war period when naval limitation treaties were in effect. For example, cruisers were useful for "showing the flag" and maintaining a degree of peace and order in dangerous parts of the world; this was a major role for Royal Navy cruisers stationed far from the United Kingdom. Cruisers could be useful as commerce raiders, something that appealed to the German navy. Cruisers could be useful for sweeping commerce raiders from the sea. Cruisers were useful as long-range scouts for a battleship fleet. Cruisers were useful for screening battleship fleets and carrier task forces from attacks by enemy cruisers and torpedo-armed destroyers. They were useful for providing anti-aircraft protection for fleets and task forces.

The trouble was, one kind of cruiser did not equally satisfy all those tasks. Those naval treaties eventually codified two kinds of cruisers, light and heavy, the difference being in their armament. Light cruisers were limited to 6-inch (about 15 cm) guns that usually were fast-firing, smothering their target with shellfire. Heavy cruisers could have 8-inch (about 20 cm) guns that would be effective against similarly armed opponents, but had a comparatively slow rate of fire that made them less effective for close-range, rapidly moving combat. How many of each kind of cruiser should a navy build?

The American navy was at a disadvantage compared to other navies due to treaty weight restrictions. This was because US cruisers had to be able to operate at Pacific Ocean distances and potential opponents' cruisers could be shorter-range. Given the treaty limit of 10,000 tons displacement, American cruisers had to sacrifice some combination of armor, speed (related to power plant weight) or armament in order to make room (and weight) for attaining those long cruising ranges.

Until World War 2 when the aircraft carrier emerged as the most important kind of warship, battleships were the decisive element of naval power. Cruisers were always secondary, given their support roles noted above.

Yet to the general public, it could be hard to tell cruisers apart from battleships when casually viewing them. That was in part because they tended to look similar to each other and different from destroyers, aircraft carriers and such. Another factor is that cruisers tend to be long -- as long or longer than battleships, even. Although they were long, they were narrower than battleships because they had to have a high fineness ratio (length divided by width) to attain high speeds. And so they weighed considerably less than battleships of similar length, having less armor and smaller, lighter guns as well as the less width.

Cruiser Alaska (top) and Battleship Missouri (below)
The photo above, taken in 1944, offers a comparison between America's largest class of battleship and its largest class of cruiser. The Alaska's overall length, 808 feet (246 m), is more than 9/10ths of the Missouri's 887 feet. And that 808 feet was greater than the length of the two other World War 2 classes of American battleships, the North Carolinas (729 feet) and the South Dakotas (680 feet) or of the last pre-treaty battleships such as the Arizona and California whose length was 600 feet.

Below are photos of American cruisers of the period 1900-1950. The ship number prefix CA means the ship is a heavy cruiser and a CL prefix designates a light cruiser. The Alaska is a CB, a special designation for cruisers with near-battleship characteristics (but does not mean "battlecruiser").

Gallery

USS San Diego (CA 6)
The San Diego was originally named USS California but had to be re-named when the battleship California was ordered. Length was 505 feet (154 m). This was only 22 less than the length of the revolutionary battleship HMS Dreadnought that was laid down in 1905, three years after work began on the San Diego/California.

USS Omaha (CL 4)
Cruisers of this type appeared in the 1920s and did not look much like contemporary battleships. Note the spacing of the four smokestacks and that the main guns are well towards the bow and stern. Awkward looking, I'd say. Length was 556 feet.

USS Houston (CA 30)
The Houston was sunk early in World War 2 as part of a multinational force under Dutch command attempting to defend the East Indies from the Japanese assault. A nice looking ship of 600 feet total length (same as first-line battleships when it was commissioned in 1930).

USS Philadelphia (CL 41)
The Philadelphia was a Brooklyn class light cruiser commissioned in 1937. Its overall length was 608 feet, about the same as that of the heavy cruiser Houston. Armament was 15 6-inch guns. Three three-gun turrets are seen towards the bow. Note the the third turret is at the same level as the first, or forward turret. That meant that its guns could not be fired except in broadside.

USS Cleveland (CL 55)
The Cleveland was about the same length as the Philadelphia, but it had only 12 6-inch guns as main armament, the broadside-only turret having been eliminated.

USS Baltimore (CA 68)
The heavy cruiser Baltimore was 673 feet long and looks superficially similar to the battleships North Carolina and Washington.

USS Des Moines (CA 134)
The Des Moines was laid down in May 1945 but not commissioned until 1948. Its length was 716 feet, putting it in the general length range of the the North Carolina and South Dakota battleship classes.

USS Alaska (CB 1)
A more representational view of the Alaska.  Something was going on with the forward turret when this was taken.  It held three 12-inch guns, but only two are visible and one is raised higher than the other.