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 remarkably impressive speed of 26.48 knots on trials, well above her designed 25.

The type she belonged to was one man's idea, and it is worth understanding it properly because the misunderstanding of it killed several thousand people. Admiral Sir John Fisher argued that the armoured cruiser should be replaced by something carrying battleship guns on a cruiser's hull: fast enough to run down any cruiser afloat, hitting hard enough to destroy it before it could reply, and fast enough to decline an engagement with anything stronger. The protection was speed. That is a coherent doctrine so long as everybody remembers the second half of it. The Invincibles were the first three, and Inflexible was one of them: eight 12-inch guns, twenty-six knots, and side armour of six inches where a contemporary battleship had eleven or twelve. Used as Fisher intended, they were devastating, and the Falklands is the proof. Used as a fast wing of the battle fleet, in line, exchanging fire with German ships built to take it, they were death traps, and Jutland is that proof. The Royal Navy did both things with the same ships inside eighteen months.

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. On 4 August, alongside HMS Indefatigable and under Admiral Sir Archibald Berkeley Milne, she actually caught up with the two German ships as they withdrew from bombarding the French Algerian port of Philippeville, only for Britain and Germany not yet being formally at war to force Milne to simply shadow rather than engage. Both sides were nursing boiler troubles of their own, and Goeben and Breslau slipped away to recoal at Messina before the net could properly close, a diplomatic and strategic setback that would go on to have significant consequences for the war in the eastern Mediterranean.

It is hard to overstate what the escape of those two ships led to, and the phrase significant consequences is doing a great deal of work. Goeben and Breslau reached Constantinople, were nominally transferred to the Ottoman navy with their German crews still aboard wearing fezzes, and in October 1914 went into the Black Sea and shelled Russian ports, which pushed a wavering Ottoman government into the war on the German side. Britain had already made that easier by seizing two Ottoman battleships building in British yards, described in the article on HMS Erin (1911). With Turkey in the war the straits closed, which cut Russia off from her allies for the rest of the conflict and starved her of the munitions she could not make herself; and the attempt to force them open produced the Dardanelles campaign and Gallipoli, which Inflexible herself would be mined in six months later. The Royal Navy was not gentle about the failure afterwards. Rear Admiral Troubridge, who had declined to engage Goeben with four armoured cruisers, was court-martialled and acquitted but never given a sea command again; Admiral Milne was exonerated and quietly never employed at sea again either.

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.

Coronel deserves rather more than a subordinate clause, because it was the Royal Navy's first defeat in a fleet action for over a hundred years and it was almost entirely avoidable. Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock had been sent to find von Spee's East Asia Squadron with a scratch force: two elderly armoured cruisers, a light cruiser and an armed merchantman, with a slow pre-dreadnought battleship trailing hundreds of miles behind. Spee had two modern armoured cruisers with crack gunnery crews, holders of the Kaiser's own gunnery prize, and three light cruisers. They met off the Chilean coast on the evening of 1 November 1914 with the British silhouetted against the sunset and the Germans invisible against the dark shore. Good Hope and Monmouth were sunk with every man aboard them, nine hundred and six hundred and seventy-eight respectively, Cradock among them. Two British shells hit Scharnhorst and both were duds. Four hit Gneisenau. Three German sailors were wounded. That is the whole butcher's bill on the German side, and the Admiralty, which had sent Cradock out inadequately supported and with ambiguous orders, reacted by detaching two battlecruisers from the Grand Fleet within days.

The British force very nearly missed its moment entirely. Having reached Port Stanley on 7 December, Inflexible was still coaling from the collier Trelawney at eight o'clock the following morning when lookouts on Sapper Hill reported two German warships approaching from the south. Sturdee's own foresight saved the day: his ships had been kept at two hours' notice for steam throughout, and by 8.45am the collier had cast off and Inflexible was clear to open fire the moment the range allowed.

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 truly comprehensive victory that restored British naval prestige in the South Atlantic almost overnight.

The Falklands was the exact reverse of Coronel and it was not a subtle piece of work. Sturdee had Invincible and Inflexible, each with eight 12-inch guns and five knots of speed in hand over anything Spee had; once the Germans turned to run there was no possible outcome except the one that happened. It took most of the day, largely because both battlecruisers shot badly, blinded by their own funnel smoke at long range and firing at extreme distances to stay outside the German 8.2-inch guns. Inflexible alone fired 661 twelve-inch shells. Scharnhorst went down with Spee and every man aboard, refusing to strike; Gneisenau followed after a two-hour pounding, her crew standing to their guns until the ammunition ran out. Two of Spee's sons were serving in the squadron and both were killed, one in Gneisenau and one in Nurnberg. Nurnberg and Leipzig were run down by the cruisers. Only Dresden got away, and she was hunted for three months and finally cornered by Glasgow and Kent at the island of Mas a Fuera on 14 March 1915, where her captain scuttled her. Something over two thousand Germans died in the two engagements. Spee had told a Chilean audience three weeks earlier that he was homeless and could only plough the seas until his ammunition ran out or a better ship caught him.

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 severe blow.

The 18th of March 1915 is one of the pivotal days of the twentieth century and it turned on twenty mines. The plan was to force the Narrows with battleships alone, sixteen of them British and French, and by mid-afternoon it appeared to be working: the Turkish forts were being pounded and running short of ammunition. Then the French Bouvet, turning away, hit a mine and capsized in about two minutes, taking 639 of her 710 men with her. Inflexible was mined an hour or so later, Irresistible shortly after, and Ocean, going in to take Irresistible in tow, was mined as well; her story is in the article on HMS Ocean (1898). The cause was a small Turkish minelayer called Nusret, which ten days earlier had crept down and laid a line of twenty mines in Erenkoy Bay, running parallel to the shore instead of across the strait, in exactly the stretch of water the Allied ships had been using to turn in. The sweepers had never looked there. Admiral de Robeck, having lost three battleships and had three more crippled in an afternoon, refused to try again until soldiers had taken the high ground overlooking the Narrows, and that decision produced the landings of 25 April, the eight months at Gallipoli and something over half a million casualties on both sides. Twenty mines, laid by one small ship, changed the shape of the war.

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 dangerous in a direct gunnery duel.

What happened to Invincible at Jutland is worth setting out precisely, because Inflexible was two cables away and could have gone the same way. Rear Admiral Horace Hood took the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron into the action at close range and shot extremely well, hitting Lutzow repeatedly. Then the mist shifted, Invincible was silhouetted, and German shells hit Q turret amidships. The flash went down the trunk into the magazine. She blew up, broke in half and sank in about ninety seconds, and of 1,032 men aboard six survived; Hood was not among them. Three British battlecruisers were destroyed the same way that afternoon, and the cause was not simply thin armour. It was the handling of cordite: the ships had been stripping out the anti-flash arrangements between turret and magazine and stacking charges in the handling rooms to speed up their rate of fire, a practice encouraged by an obsession with gunnery scores, so that a single hit in a turret could put fire straight into several tons of propellant. The Germans had learned that lesson in 1914 when Seydlitz nearly blew up at Dogger Bank, and had fixed it. Beatty's remark about there being something wrong with our bloody ships is the most quoted line of the battle; what was wrong with them was partly in the drill book.

The End

HMS Inflexible saw more limited action for the remainder of the war as German naval activity became increasingly restricted, though she was involved in one of the Royal Navy's most tragic accidents of the entire conflict. During a night exercise in the Firth of Forth on 31 January 1918, Operation EC1, a chain of collisions between K-class submarines and the fleet's own cruisers, later grimly nicknamed the Battle of May Island, left two submarines sunk, four more damaged and 105 men dead. At 19:43, twenty-five minutes after an earlier collision had already left the submarine HMS K22 crippled and helplessly signalling for help in the darkness, HMS Inflexible ploughed into her, bending the first 30 feet of her own bow at right angles and wrecking her fuel tanks in the process. She was present at Scapa Flow for the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet that November all the same.

Set out end to end, her war is an extraordinary run of consequence for a ship almost nobody remembers. She shadowed the two German ships whose escape brought Turkey into the war. She helped destroy the German squadron that had humiliated the Royal Navy at Coronel, in the last big-gun action fought at sea entirely out of sight of land, and the one occasion on which Fisher's battlecruiser did exactly what he designed it to do. She was mined on the afternoon that made Gallipoli inevitable. She stood in the line at Jutland and watched her own sister disintegrate in a minute and a half. She rammed a British submarine in the dark in the Firth of Forth. And she was at Scapa Flow in November 1918 to watch the German fleet come in and surrender. She was sold for scrap in 1921, aged thirteen, obsolete before she was worn out, which was the fate of every battlecruiser that survived.

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.