HMS Inflexible (1907): She Avenged Coronel, Then Watched Her Sister Die at Jutland

Built on the Clyde

HMS Inflexible was built by John Brown and Company on the Clyde, authorised under the 1905 naval expansion programme, laid down on 5 February 1906, launched on 26 June 1907 and commissioned on 20 October 1908, an Invincible-class battlecruiser displacing 17,290 long tons at load and armed with eight 12-inch guns in four twin turrets, driven by 31 Yarrow boilers producing 41,000 shaft horsepower for a genuinely impressive speed of 26.48 knots on trials, well above her designed 25.

Failing to Catch the Goeben

HMS Inflexible served as flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet when war broke out in August 1914, and took part in the frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to intercept the German warships SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau before they escaped to Ottoman Turkey, a diplomatic and strategic setback that would go on to have significant consequences for the war in the eastern Mediterranean.

Avenging Coronel

HMS Inflexible's finest hour came at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914, serving under Vice Admiral Doveton Sturdee as part of a British force sent to avenge the disastrous defeat at Coronel, where a German squadron had sunk two British cruisers with all hands. HMS Inflexible and her sister ship HMS Invincible ran down and sank the German armoured cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and SMS Gneisenau, firing 661 twelve-inch shells during the engagement while suffering minimal casualties of her own, a genuinely comprehensive victory that restored British naval prestige in the South Atlantic almost overnight.

Mined at Gallipoli

HMS Inflexible bombarded Turkish fortifications during the Dardanelles campaign in February and March 1915, and on 18 March, during an intense day of operations, was struck by a heavy shell of unknown size below the waterline. Far more seriously, she then struck a mine, probably around 100 kilograms in size, which blew a large hole in her starboard bow and drowned 39 of her crew, a genuinely severe blow. She was beached at Bozcaada for emergency temporary repairs before making her way onward to Malta and Gibraltar for more thorough work.

Watching Her Sister Die at Jutland

HMS Inflexible was reassigned to the Grand Fleet's 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron and fought at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, engaging German battlecruisers under Rear Admiral Horace Hood and damaging SMS Lutzow during the action. She also witnessed one of the battle's most shocking single moments: her own sister ship, HMS Invincible, was struck and destroyed in barely 90 seconds by German shellfire, a devastating demonstration of exactly the same design vulnerability, thin armour traded for speed, that had made the entire battlecruiser concept so genuinely dangerous in a direct gunnery duel.

The End

HMS Inflexible saw more limited action for the remainder of the war as German naval activity became increasingly restricted, and collided with the submarine HMS K22 in February 1918, before being present at Scapa Flow for the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet that November. She was paid off to the Reserve Fleet in January 1919 and decommissioned on 31 March 1920; a possible sale to Chile that same year fell through, and she was ultimately sold for scrap on 1 December 1921, broken up in Germany the following year, closing out the career of a battlecruiser whose war had taken in both one of the Royal Navy's most complete victories and one of its most sobering lessons in naval design.