Both cruisers had expended prodigious quantities of ordnance in the fight with the Achilles, half-emptying their magazines. Having commenced the battle with respectively: Breitenfeld, one hundred and seven rounds per barrel, and Lutzen, one hundred and four per barrel, stored in their magazines, both ships had fired off over four hundred armour piercing and around a hundred and twenty ‘common’ or high explosive shells, expending in the process some forty-seven percent of their cordite ‘propellent’ stores. The Cubans had offered to replenish a small part of the latter but neither von Reuter nor his officers trusted the chemical composition, or the safety of the ‘local product’. Accurate gunnery depended on the performance of the ‘charge’, so any variability in the mix was critical and besides, von Reuter’s captains did not need to be worrying about unstable, sub-standard cordite spontaneously blowing up beneath their feet every time they loaded propellent charges onto their gun room hoists!
Re-ammunitioning from lighters in an open anchorage was a maddeningly slow business. Lutzen had thus far taken on board around a hundred-and-fifty reloads, Breitenfeld only a couple of dozen. Granted, nobody had anticipated that the two big cruisers would have been so badly mauled or suffered so many casualties that they would have to return to Guantanamo Bay to lick their wounds but even so, everything seemed to happen at an excruciatingly slow pace in Cuba.
In the near distance the Cuban hybrid battlecruiser El Rey Ferdinand II, which had anchored in the main channel overnight, was being nudged and dragged to the northern side of the bay.
Von Reuter scoffed ruefully.
What kind of idiots thought it was a good idea mooring a big ship in the middle of the main channel where an enemy air raid might sink it at any time?
Unbelievable…
Thankfully, His Excellency Federico Gravina y Vera Cruz, Minister of Las Amada de Nuevo Granada, and High Admiral of the Fleets of the Triple Alliance, had decided that a man of his elevated talents and affairs, ought to be flying his flag on a ‘battleship’, not a mere cruiser and had transferred his flag to the El Rey Ferdinand II yesterday afternoon.
Gravina’s blood-red pennant now flew from the main mast of the old, truncated, fifty-year-old failed capital ship experiment, one of five transferred – a sixth, manned by a skeleton ‘transfer crew’ and in a poor state of repair after years rusting in the Reserve, had sunk in a storm in mid-Atlantic, which said everything one needed to know about the sea-keeping capabilities of the class – some said ‘handed off’, to the Cuban and Dominican Navies in the 1940s by Madrid.
The ‘Ferdinands’ were mightily odd ships.
Failed experiments, or misbegotten mongrels depending upon how charitable one wanted to be.
The Armada Española had ordered the ships back in the 1920s, more as a gesture to convince itself it was still actually the navy of a first-rate power, than as part of any strategic grand design. The problem had been that not only could the then Spanish Government not afford to buy the projected twelve vessels it ‘thought’ it required, neither could it afford to buy thirty thousand-ton behemoths capable of trading broadsides with the British or German capital ship of the day.
So, the Royal Treasury and the Armada Española had come to a compromise of the sort that satisfied nobody. But… It did result, eventually, in the six ‘small battleships’ of the El Rey Ferdinand II class coming into commission between 1926 and 1937. Whether the ships were worth their combined price tag of nearly a hundred million silver pesetas was a thing never spoken of in polite, Madrid society, or at all in the many Spanish cities which still lacked modern hospitals or half-way adequate sanitation in that era. In any event, only one of the vessels had ever been in commission in Armada Española service at any one time, the others moored, rusting at Cartagena or Ferrol in semi-permanent de-activated reserve, a fate the five surviving ships had soon experienced anew after their ‘gifting’ to the two West Indian colonies between 1943 and 1948.
At around sixteen thousand tons fully loaded, and just one hundred and forty metres in length, the Ferdinands were the best part of two-and-a-half thousand tons lighter and sixty-five metres shorter in the hull than either the Breitenfeld and Lutzen, notwithstanding the cruisers were of lesser beam, twenty-one as against twenty-four metres give or take a few centimetres. Fully loaded, the Ferdinands sat a metre-and-a-half deeper in the water.
So much for dimensions and tonnage.
The Ferdinands were only marginally more heavily armoured, and then only along the waterline, than the modern German heavy cruisers which actually had significantly thicker main deck protection, and a generally far superior underwater layout in terms of the weight and depth of protection, and the placement and gaps between armoured bulkheads. Additionally, the Ferdinands were notoriously bad sea boats. Although they were designed to have comparable stability to larger foreign ‘ships of the line’, they had a relatively low metacentric height – just 1.5 metres when fully loaded – and slightly less than four-and-a-half metres of freeboard amidships in that condition. This meant the class was ‘wet’ in almost any sea state, and if there was any damage beneath the waterline it was only a – very short – matter of time before the ship listed heavily, or capsized.
Basically, far too many bad compromises had been made with the Ferdinands in order to arrive at a design capable of mounting four twin 12-inch rifles, in the Ferdinand II, Whitworth Mark III 50-calibre patent barrels, in the others, mostly to save money, Ferrol Naval Arsenal licenced ‘lower bursting tolerance’ Whitworth Mark VI 48-calibre guns. One main turret was mounted forward, another aft, with two amidships turrets, offset to port and starboard ahead and behind the ship’s single funnel.
A secondary armament of twenty 4-inch casemate mounted, and therefore, low-elevation guns had been provided for close range but not anti-aircraft defence. This latter was not an unreasonable design choice since back in the 1920s nobody in their wildest imaginings had foreseen that capital ships would ever be threatened from the air. In those days the only airborne machines which flew were helium filled airships and they rarely ventured far out to sea…
The Ferdinand II still had her original tripod masts with a rudimentary gun director box on the fore mast above a minimalist bridge superstructure, originally open to the elements but partially enclosed in subsequent refits.
The multiplicity of the Ferdinands’ shortcoming had been recognised even before their keels kissed the water. The basic problem was that the raft of compromises inherent in carrying so many big guns on such a small hull, meant that the addition of any topweight had a critical effect on general stability. Whereas, the Royal Navy and the Kaiserliche Marine had dealt with this issue in their first-generation – twenty-five to thirty thousand ton – modern battleships by stripping out the useless casemate mounted secondary armament and using the weight saved to install ELDAR aerials as high as possible, to improve bridge superstructures to accommodate the latest command and control technologies and clustered smaller, quick firing dual-purpose weaponry above the weather deck level, the Armada Española, with no other option, had accepted the constraint of local fire control – that is, each main battery turret had its own optical equipment and was directed by its commander – and to abrogate any responsibility for providing the ships with any meaningful anti-aircraft capability to escorting vessels.