The Ferdinands therefore, had no centralised main battery fire control, and were – a few light machine guns apart, bereft of air defences.
It was positively… negligent.
The ships’ deficiencies were further exacerbated because given the low freeboard of the Ferdinands, a gun director sitting in a turret at deck level could not even see his target until it was virtually close enough to throw a rock at! For example, coming across an enemy with the capabilities of one of the Ferdinands, Breitenfeld would simply stand off at a range of about seven or eight thousand metres and pummel its foe into submission, assured that the men directing his enemy’s big guns would never even see its tormentor. Moreover, the Ferdinands’ protective systems were so inadequate that, at that range, Breitenfeld’s 8-inch shells would penetrate all bar the thin strake of waterline belt armour. Obviously, a chance hit by one of the battleship’s three-hundred-and-eighty-five-kilogram shells might wreak havoc; this though, would be very much an unlucky accident and as such, for battle planning purposes could be disregarded until such time as it, highly unlikely as it was, occurred.
The antiquity of the Ferdinands and the antique design philosophy they embodied had yet another deleterious consequence – well, one of almost too many to catalogue, truth be known – in that although the last two ships completed had been equipped with turbines, albeit cranky, Valencia Naval Dockyard models, the Ferdinand and two of the other surviving ships of the class still had their original triple-expansion reciprocating engines. This, allied to the vessels’ coal-fired boilers meant that the machinery sets of the Ferdinands, producing approximately one-seventh of the shaft horsepower of the Breitenfeld and Lutzen’s, actually weighed about one hundred and thirty tons more.
The Ferdinands, specified to steam at 21.5 knots, had only ever managed 20.5 when brand new, and nowadays, struggled to maintain a speed of around 17 knots; and to do this they had to burn prodigious quantities of coal, reducing their operating range at this, maximum speed, to less than fifteen hundred miles. Breitenfeld and Lutzen by comparison could steam half way around the globe at 17 knots and at a pinch maintain revolutions sufficient for around 24 or 25 knots for several days, with a sustainable flank speed in excess of 30.5 knots even with their bottoms fouled by nearly a year in the tropics.
Nonetheless, the Ferdinands enjoyed one low-technology advantage. Without any modern systems to run, monitor and maintain, like for example ELDAR, or communications kit that worked and could talk to anybody in the World, complex high-pressure steam and hydraulic equipment constantly in need of care and attention, galleys that served men more than just gruel, hard tack and salted meat, any need for deck crews and machinery to operate float aircraft, and the two hundred plus men who were required to operate and in action, ensure that ammunition was continuously fed to the clusters of upper deck anti-aircraft guns of von Reuter’s big ships, the Ferdinands could be crewed by around eight hundred – the majority relatively unskilled – men, whereas, Breitenfeld’s peace time complement was one thousand three hundred and twelve men, a figure intended to be swollen to nearly sixteen hundred officer and men in wartime.
Maddeningly, it was Breitenfeld and Lutzen’s very modernity and complexity which had meant they had had to fight the Achilles with one hand tied behind their proverbial backs, since the majority of the Nuevo Granada men on board were so unfamiliar with their systems that they were virtually useless other than as stretcher bearers and spare muscle for damage control teams. Even in those capacities the alien attitudes and dismal lack of esprit de corps among the Spaniards had seriously degraded both ships’ combat efficiency.
Nobody in Berlin seemed to understand that the Spanish way of war, especially out here in the colonies, was not the same as that of the Kaiserliche Marine. Or of the Royal Navy. It might be that the land and air forces of Nuevo Granada, steeled from previous conflicts with the New Englanders were intrinsically better able to adjust to the mental and technological challenges of battle in the modern age. However, from what he had seen to date, von Reuter had little confidence that the Cubans or the Dominicans were anywhere near as far down the road as their Mexican allies.
In fact, the cynic in him viewed the Triple Alliance’s decision to start the war in the Cuban-Dominican sector of operations as highly significant. The men in Mexico City were not about to put their hand into the fire until their ‘allies’ had demonstrated their fealty to the cause, irrespective of whether this actually distracted the British as much as they hoped it might ahead of their own offensive in the American south west.
Far below von Reuter’s lofty vantage point the first main battery reloads were coming aboard, loaded three at a time on a Krupp manufactured steel pallet. The armoured hatches to the lifts down to the shell rooms deep below the waterline were open.
Von Reuter watched awhile before lifting his gaze anew to the flagship of the Vera Cruz Squadron.
He had been demoted to Commander, Cruisers.
That, in itself, was another breach of the terms of the transfer of his ships to the Armada de Nuevo Granada: he was supposed to remain in squadron command until such time as his ships were sixty percent officered and crewed by Mexicans…
The El Rey Ferdinand II was still wearing her peacetime livery, her hull painted brilliantly white from her ram prow to her rounded stern. Despite constant prompting from Kaiserliche Marine advisors in Havana the ship still retained her original armament, and no deck or superstructure-mounted light anti-aircraft guns. Apparently, the thinking – if it could be called that – in the Navy Ministry of the Catholic Crown Colony of Cuba was that to ‘adorn the upper decks and the tops of any of the four turrets with machine gun nests and ugly cannon pits’ would utterly ruin the ‘broadside aspects’ of their battleships.
Unaccountably, both the Cubans and the Dominicans were inordinately proud of their ancient Ferdinands. Notwithstanding von Reuter was not the only German officer to point out, tartly, that a five-hundred-pound bomb would do an awful lot more to remodel the ‘broadside aspects’ of the ships than a few anti-aircraft cannons!
His protests were to no avail.
His allies believed that the Ferdinands’ job was to engage other ‘ships of the line’, not to swat down ‘passing enemy aircraft’; that was what their escorting cruisers and destroyers were for.
According to Gravina, two of El Rey Ferdinand II’s sister ships, the Reina Eugenie and the Alphonse XII, both under Dominican colours were assigned to the Northern Strike Force, while the Cuban-crewed Ferdinand and the Felipe II – named for the greatest of all the Hapsburg monarchs of the old empire, when it was at its absolute apogee of power and prestige, the globe’s sole superpower – were assigned to the Southern Strike Force, charged with the conquest of Jamaica, the lesser Antilles and each and every island, Windward and Leeward all the way down the eastern chain of British Imperial fiefdoms to Trinidad and Tobago. If that was not a gargantuan, implausible mission, that of the Northern Force was even more daunting.
This remained the case despite die Schlacht der Windward Passage having mauled von Reuter’s ships so badly that the Breitenfeld, Lutzen and Karlsruhe’s participation in a suicidal attempt to seize Bermuda had been, for the moment postponed. Instead, the Vera Cruz Squadron, reinforced by El Rey Ferdinand II and Felipe II, two Cuban cruisers and several smaller vessels was now assigned to the ‘Southern’ mission.