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Originally Posted by DeepSix
Oooh, so it was the heat that touched off the fires, then.:hmm: That makes sense.... Tell me more!  |
I'll quote from Page 667 of
Castles of Steel:
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Not all - or even most - of the blame for British losses at Jutland should be placed on thinner armor. There is no evidence that Indefatigable, Queen Mary, and Invincible blew up because German 11-inch or 12-inch shells penetrated their armored hulls and burst inside their magazines. Rather, the almost certain cause of these cataclysmic explosions was that the turret systems of British battle cruisers lacked adequate flashtight arrangements and that, in each of these ships, a shell bursting inside the upper turret had ignited powder waiting to be loaded into the guns, sending a bolt of flame flashing unimpeded down the sixty-foot hoist into the powder magazines. Assuming this to be true, blame lay not with the design of the British ships but with the deliberate decision by captains and gunnery officers to discard the flashproof scuttles originally built into the British dreadnoughts. The Royal Navy made a cult of gunnery. To win peacetime gunnery competitions, gun crews were encouraged to fire as rapidly as possible. Quick loading and firing required a constant supply of ammunition at the breech of the gun, and thus a continuous flow of powder bags moving out of the magazines and up the hoists to the guns. Safety became secondary; gunnery officers began leaving magazine doors and scuttles open to facilitate movement; eventually, in some ships, these cumbersome barriers were removed. But for this weakness none of the three battle cruisers might have been lost.
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On the other hand, the battlecruiser
Seydlitz at the battle of Dogger Bank took a hit in her aftermost turret, which caused powder in the turret to ignite, which started a catastrophic fire that killed everyone in the two after turrets. The ship survived after the powder magazines were flooded, and after that accident, the Germans started putting anti-flash scuttles on all their ships.