Chapter 264: The Fall of Destiny |
This naval battle had only devolved into its current state through a perfect storm of coincidence.
If Operation Catapult had gone smoothly, and Robeck's fleet hadn't been battered from behind by massive coastal defense guns during their hasty retreat from the Port of Taranto—destroying nearly all the rear firepower of his capital ships—Robeck would never have needed to fear the Spee Fleet flanking him.
Furthermore, if Robeck's fleet hadn't suffered such a drastic drop in speed, opening a gap of over ten knots between them, Admiral Spee wouldn't have had such an easy time pulling off that flanking maneuver in the first place.
All these factors compounded. Both sides maneuvered endlessly to force the most advantageous combat conditions, ultimately grinding the battle down into its current, drawn-out state.
Later on, when this great naval battle was inscribed into military history, it reportedly left a profound and lasting impact on battleship design philosophies worldwide. From then on, no naval architect ever dared to propose an "all-forward main battery" design.
As a result, in this universe where Lelouch resided, the historical designs of the Nelson and the Richelieu would never appear. Their names might be used again in the future, but the ships themselves would look nothing like their counterparts on Earth.
The moment a designer dared suggest such a layout, critics would immediately hurl the painful lessons of the Battle of Taranto in their faces. "You still want an all-forward battery? Look at how the Barham died! It didn't even have an all-forward design; its rear guns were simply blown apart, and after a torpedo strike slowed it down, it was flanked and destroyed!"
Admiral Robeck continued to circle and skirmish with Spee, and before anyone realized it, evening was fast approaching.
Calculating the timeline, the two fleets had first spotted each other right at dawn. At the time, they were still forty nautical miles apart. With a speed difference of thirteen knots, it had taken until 9:30 AM for them to finally close into combat range.
Then came the protracted maneuvering and probing between their battlecruisers. Unwilling to fight a fair artillery duel, Count Spee had repeatedly executed sweeping turns to disengage, only to re-enter the fray from a different angle. After several such hit-and-run passes, the clock had ticked over to three or four in the afternoon.
Naturally, during those three hours of afternoon skirmishing, the opposing capital ships had remained at a considerable distance. The Brit Nation's main battleship guns had failed to achieve any meaningful results, but the Demanian Navy had still managed to score some secondary victories.
This discrepancy stemmed from their entirely different tactical approaches.
From 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM, during the initial phase of the skirmish, Admiral Robeck employed classic naval tactics. He deployed his protected cruisers and destroyers on the flanks of his capital ships to form a close-range defensive screen.
Since the distance between the opposing capital ships remained steadily above fifteen kilometers—sometimes even stretching past twenty—both sides were safely out of range of each other's 150mm secondary batteries. Only their heavy 280mm, 343mm, or 380mm main guns could exchange fire.
In principle, Robeck's decision to form a screening line with his light vessels was perfectly sound. After all, the 150mm secondary guns on the Demanian battlecruisers couldn't shoot far enough to threaten the screening vessels huddled near the Brit capital ships.
However, Admiral Spee refused to play by the book.
Spee hadn't ordered his own screening ships forward, completely denying the enemy capital ships any chance to shell them. Thanks to his superior speed, the dwindling numbers of enemy screening vessels, and the fact that the enemy had already exhausted their torpedoes, Spee had no fear of facing a torpedo charge without a defensive screen. Even if the enemy suddenly shifted formations, his speedy battlecruisers could easily adjust in time.
While maneuvering to manage the distance, there were moments when the opposing capital ships were simply too far apart to trade blows effectively. Yet, because the Brit screening vessels were deployed several kilometers ahead of their main fleet, Spee found an alternative. By turning his battlecruisers' main guns onto the inner screening protected cruisers of the Brit fleet, he could achieve a noticeably higher hit rate.
For instance, when the capital ships were twenty kilometers apart, hitting each other was incredibly difficult. But the inner Brit screening ships might only be seventeen kilometers away from the Demanian capital ships. By employing a massive overkill strategy—turning their 280mm guns to fire on protected cruisers seventeen kilometers away—the Demanian ships could often land "free" damage. Even though the absolute hit rate was still quite low and it wasted a tremendous amount of shells, the tactic worked.
Over the first two hours, Spee used this exact trick to freely destroy two of Robeck's older protected cruisers and one destroyer without taking a scratch in return. This further decimated Robeck's fleet, leaving him with only a single protected cruiser and just seven combat-capable destroyers (two others were heavily crippled and out of the fight, though they hadn't sunk).
While the absolute number of losses wasn't staggering, taking a completely one-sided beating without any means to retaliate was devastating to morale. Robeck was eventually forced to change his tactics, mirroring Spee by completely abandoning his inner screening line.
From that point onward, the waters between Robeck and Spee's capital ships were entirely clear of any small vessels. It was purely a capital-on-capital duel as the two fleets continued to circle.
What Robeck didn't know, however, was that this forced shift in formation would prove fatal. Though it didn't cause any immediate adverse effects, the hidden danger slowly festered over the next two hours until he finally paid the price.
It was now past 5:00 PM, and the sky was finally beginning to dim.
The reinforcement fleets for both sides were still a long way off. Because they had started from so far away, neither the Osman fleet nor the Francian forces could be expected to arrive before midnight, or even the early hours of the following morning.
However, a few submarines sent by Italy from Sicily on a probing and retaliatory mission, along with a handful of submarines the Demanians had diverted from elsewhere in the Mediterranean, had managed to reach the battlefield right before nightfall.
The submarines of this era were woefully slow. Even while navigating on the surface, their top speeds only reached between fifteen to eighteen knots. Submerged and relying purely on electric propulsion, they could muster eight knots at best.
If Spee hadn't forced Robeck into a continuous circling maneuver to prevent being flanked, these submarines might never have caught up to participate in today's naval battle. But Robeck's overly cautious delaying tactics had ultimately made this convergence possible.
In truth, as early as 3:00 PM, five Demanian submarines deployed in the Mediterranean—U19, U20, U21, U22, and U24 (U23 having been sunk in an earlier engagement; throughout the war, Demania had deployed roughly forty submarines in the Mediterranean region)—had arrived at the battlefield one after another, rushing in at high speed on the surface.
These submarines were normally stationed in Osman ports and had all participated in the Dardanelles campaign the previous year. Among them, U21 was a highly decorated vessel, having previously torpedoed and sunk an enemy armored cruiser at the Dardanelles. As an aside, in the Earth universe, this very U21 had an even more legendary record: using the low visibility of heavy fog as cover in the Dardanelles, it had sunk two of the Brit Nation's Pre-dreadnoughts in quick succession. Every single man aboard, from Captain Otto Hess on down, had been awarded the Iron Cross First Class by the Emperor.
However, in Lelouch's universe, the Gallipoli campaign had been delayed from winter to early summer. Because of the change in seasons, there had been no heavy fog over the Dardanelles to provide cover, and U21's "glorious destiny" had been stolen by allied forces.
Yet, what they lost there, they made up for here; these submarines had finally managed to join the Malta naval battle.
The only issue was that the Brit Nation had previously spread their protected cruisers and destroyers along the outer perimeter in a patrol screen. This made it utterly impossible for the submarines to get close. They were forced to dive from far away and attempt to creep closer at a sluggish eight knots.
When the enemy fleet maintained a surface speed of fifteen knots while submerged submarines could only chase at eight, a bad angle meant they would never catch up. Experienced captains had to anticipate the enemy's general heading and submerge far ahead of them to lie in wait.
Admiral Robeck's fleet was making incredibly evasive maneuvers, but their overarching direction was still clear: they were desperately trying to flee back to Malta.
Working off this anticipation, the five Demanian submarines successfully slipped past the screening vessels, surfaced again to pick up speed, and consecutively cut into the waters west-southwest of the enemy fleet—the exact path leading toward Malta.
Then, around 4:30 PM, a massive tactical shift swung in the submarine unit's favor. The British Army's Admiral Robeck, utterly exasperated by Spee's tactic of scoring "free hits" with his 280mm main guns on the inner screening cruisers, finally abandoned the inner defensive screen altogether.
Prior to this, it had been incredibly difficult for a submarine to approach the capital ships from the inside track. A defensive screen of destroyers and protected cruisers had been stationed three to four kilometers ahead of them.
But because Admiral Robeck couldn't stomach the losses and proactively withdrew the screening line on the side facing the enemy battlecruisers, he practically handed the submarine unit a golden opportunity to push in and secure an optimal firing position.
The five Demanian submarines hastily scattered to find their respective firing solutions and wait for an opening. Sometime past 5:00 PM, as the light faded, Captain Hess of the U21 finally seized a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—
At that moment, the enemy ship Barham was less than four kilometers away and closing. Hess had initially assumed the battleship would pass horizontally across his bow at a distance of roughly three kilometers, and he had been debating whether to find the right moment to surface and loose his torpedoes.
However, twenty kilometers out, the Demanian battlecruisers Moltke and Goeben were also circling the Barham, aggressively attempting to flank its rear.
To prevent itself from being outflanked, the Barham was forced into an inward-cutting turn.
In other words, the Barham was about to carve an inward-cutting, sweeping arc that would bring it right onto the U21's doorstep.
This was the absolute dream trajectory for a submarine firing torpedoes! A submarine's ultimate fantasy was an enemy vessel tracing an inward curve right across its bow—it practically guaranteed the target would swallow the entire fan-shaped spread of torpedoes.
Of course, this was also a testament to the U21 and Captain Otto Hess's superb technical skill and predictive acumen. They had perfectly anticipated the flow of battle, slipping right between the Barham and the Moltke to lie in wait for this exact inward curve.
"Adjust the hull's heading immediately! Aim the bow to bearing 240! Prepare all four forward torpedo tubes for launch!"
Major Hess swiftly ran the calculations, oriented the submarine into its optimal firing posture, and continued creeping forward at minimum speed.
Finally, the Barham swung through its inward turn a mere 1,600 yards directly ahead of his bow.
"All forward torpedo tubes, fire!"
At Captain Hess's command, four muffled thuds reverberated through the hull as all four forward tubes discharged their torpedoes along perfectly calculated lead trajectories.
Roughly forty seconds later, panicked cries from the spotters finally rang out across the Barham's main bridge: "Torpedoes! Torpedoes to starboard! Torpedoes approaching from the starboard rear quarter!"
This reaction time was even more sluggish than Captain Hess had anticipated—they were late by at least ten seconds.
What Captain Hess didn't know was that the Barham's rear bridge had been entirely blown away by the Port of Taranto's 305mm 17-caliber coastal defense guns during the earlier exchange. Consequently, the torpedoes approaching from the rear quarter couldn't be spotted by the aft watch. They had to travel several hundred yards closer before the spotters on the forward main bridge could finally see them.
This robbed the Barham of more than ten precious seconds of evasive maneuvering time. With so many catastrophic disadvantages compounding all at once, even the gods couldn't have saved the ship now.
"Hard a-port!" a desperate, shrieking command tore through the conning tower.
But the battleship had already dropped to fifteen knots, its propulsion heavily damaged. It had already taken a prior torpedo hit and absorbed flooding, and the endless hours of circling had further deteriorated its maneuverability. It simply didn't have the agility to execute an evasive maneuver at this stage.
"Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!"
Four earth-shattering explosions erupted in rapid succession. All four of the forward tube torpedoes slammed dead-on into the starboard hull. Over a dozen watertight compartments along the right side were torn open simultaneously. Massive, gaping holes were blasted through the battleship's starboard underbelly, allowing torrential volumes of seawater to violently flood the hull. Within a matter of minutes, the ship had taken on more than 5,000 tons of water.
The Barham listed heavily to the right at a speed visible to the naked eye, its starboard tilt rapidly exceeding thirty degrees.
Having absorbed a cumulative total of five torpedoes—four of them practically simultaneously—it was entirely beyond salvation. Even taking into account that the explosive payloads and destructive force of 1916-era torpedoes were vastly inferior to those of 1940: a 450mm (18-inch) torpedo from this era carried an explosive yield of roughly 250 kilograms of TNT, whereas the later 21-inch and 24-inch variants packed payloads of 320 kilograms and 400 kilograms, respectively.
In terms of pure payload, the 1,250 kilograms of explosives across five 1916 torpedoes delivered a destructive force comparable to three 1940-era torpedoes carrying 1,200 kilograms.
"Commander! The enemy flagship is listing violently! Multiple water columns were just observed rising alongside its hull! It must have taken torpedo hits!"
On the bridge of the Goeben, Admiral Spee swiftly received the report. He immediately raised his binoculars for a closer look and, sure enough, confirmed that the Barham was in the throes of sinking.
"Quickly! Have someone grab the longest-focal-length camera on board and see if we can capture their sinking on film!"
Even a proper and dignified aristocrat like Admiral Spee couldn't resist the urge to document the historic moment. He had his men bring out their finest Zeiss telephoto lens, treating the spectacle as if he were shooting a motion picture.
The two vessels were eighteen kilometers apart, so the details were practically impossible to make out, and the ambient lighting was dreadfully dim.
However, two minutes later, as the Barham's list approached a catastrophic ninety degrees, seawater began pouring down the funnels directly into the boilers. An apocalyptic steam explosion detonated instantly, blowing the massive hull into sheer fragments.
The Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Robeck, had already abandoned the ship and boarded a lifeboat. But before he had even rowed a hundred meters away, the titanic blast caught him, hurling him right up into the sky.
The highest echelon of command within the Mediterranean Fleet had now been completely wiped out for the second time in this global war. This practically guaranteed that rebuilding the fleet's command structure moving forward would be excruciatingly difficult. Even if they managed to piece it back together, its combat effectiveness would be drastically diminished, as an immense wealth of accumulated experience and institutional knowledge had just been permanently severed.
Setting everything else aside, Admiral Robeck's immediate staff had included a specialized radio detection and interception squad. They, too, were entirely eradicated alongside the flagship.
Among their ranks was a thirty-five-year-old radio officer named James Somerville, who had long served as a radio technology expert for the Mediterranean Fleet.
Had this gentleman survived, he would have played a pivotal organizational role in cracking Demanian radio ciphers during the next major war. In the Earth universe, he was the founding father of the Brit Nation's naval radar program.
With this man and his entire team blown to bits, the Brit Nation in this universe would inevitably stumble down a much longer, darker path when it came to deciphering Demanian naval codes. They also wouldn't conceptualize or develop radar technology anywhere near as quickly.
The fiery death of the future Admiral Somerville was a loss that far outstripped the sinking of a single Barham battleship.
Such was the devastating cost of losing a fleet's flagship; it was often the precise vessel where a military's most highly specialized technical officers were stationed.
"No!"
Aboard the battlecruiser Tiger, Rear Admiral Osmond Brock, tasked with supporting Admiral Robeck, cried out in horror.
Watching the fleet's flagship get ambushed by a despicable submarine and instantly annihilated by a barrage of torpedoes left Rear Admiral Brock absolutely dumbfounded. The sudden and catastrophic downturn was completely paralyzing.
With their only flagship—the sole vessel wielding super-heavy armor and 15-inch cannons—now resting at the bottom of the sea, the Brit Nation's Mediterranean Fleet was instantly plunged into an overwhelming disadvantage.
Had the Barham managed to survive, the enemy's 280mm guns would have never been able to truly sink it! The naval Battle of Dunkirk the previous year had explicitly proven this point. During that conflict, the HMS Warspite had shrugged off dozens of enemy 280mm shells; it had been heavily damaged, but it absolutely refused to sink.
It was only after taking on too much water that it developed a severe list, exposing the vulnerable hull beneath its armored belt. Only then were the Demanians able to close the distance and relentlessly bombard that weak point with 305mm guns until the HMS Warspite finally went down.
To think that such an incredibly mighty dreadnought had been stolen away by a tiny, insidious submarine!
The Demanian battlecruisers and Italy's coastal defense guns had put in so much groundwork, yet in the end, they had merely played a supporting role. They had broken the Barham's legs, gouged out its eyes, and deafened its ears—reducing the dreadnought into a crippled, blind iron lump, only for a submarine to deliver the final execution.
However, before Brock could even properly mourn the Barham, another wave of danger came crashing down on them.
The moment U21 unleashed its forward torpedoes, the other four Demanian submarines knew their presence had been entirely compromised. The enemy was now fully alert. They no longer had the luxury of patiently waiting for optimal firing positions; they had to launch everything they had right now, straight at their pre-selected targets.
Because their timing had been ruined, the vast majority of these torpedoes were loosed from distances greater than 2,000 meters. The U19 and U22 had it the worst, forced to blindly launch their payloads from over 3,000 meters away.
Furthermore, after firing all four bow tubes, each submarine had to execute a rapid turn to hurriedly acquire secondary targets for their two aft torpedoes.
Over ten minutes later, following a frantic storm of acceleration, evasive turning, and utterly chaotic dodging maneuvers, the dust finally settled.
The combined twelve torpedoes launched by U19 and U22 completely missed their marks. Fired from over three kilometers away, the staggering distance had simply afforded the enemy far too much time to safely evade.
The U18 and U24 fared slightly better. Although they lacked the pristine firing angle of the U21, they had both managed to close within 2,000 meters of their marks. The issue was that their targets weren't as agonizingly sluggish as the Barham, and their aft bridges remained fully intact, allowing for early warning and evasive action. As a result, their hit rates were inevitably far lower than the U21's.
In the end, two of the four forward torpedoes launched by the U18 slammed into the Russell, which had already been heavily damaged during the gunnery exchange at Taranto. The blast decisively sent the Pre-dreadnought—whose superstructure had already been severely mangled—plunging to the bottom of the sea.
Unable to find any other viable targets, the U18 pivoted and fed its two aft torpedoes into the very same Russell, which had completely lost all propulsion following the initial strikes, delivering a merciless coup de grâce to hasten its sinking.
Having absorbed a staggering total of four torpedoes, the Russell similarly capsized within minutes, affording its crew virtually no time to abandon ship.
As for the U24, its four forward torpedoes managed to snag the British Army's last surviving old protected cruiser. Naturally, such an antiquated vessel couldn't withstand the devastating bombardment of a torpedo strike, and it was violently torn apart on the spot.
Its two aft-fired torpedoes, however, went entirely wide, yielding zero results.
When the carnage subsided, the five Demanian submarines had collectively managed to sink one dreadnought battleship (the Barham), one Pre-dreadnought (the Russell), and one protected cruiser.
The Brit Nation's Mediterranean Fleet was now reduced to a mere fraction of its combat strength: one battlecruiser, one battleship, one Pre-dreadnought, two armored cruisers, and seven destroyers, totaling just twelve vessels.
With the enemy fleet whittled down to such a pitiful state, Admiral Spee—having finally waited out the perfect opening—was entirely done playing nice. He immediately ordered his entire fleet to advance at maximum speed and engage the enemy in a close-quarters artillery duel.
Nightfall would drastically plunge hit rates for both sides, necessitating engagement at a much closer distance.
While daytime engagements allowed them to comfortably bombard one another from fifteen kilometers away, night combat required closing the gap to between five and ten kilometers.
Spee wanted to inflict a brutal, punishing wave of damage right before the sky went completely pitch black! It was late June in the Mediterranean; from the initial dimming of the sky to total darkness, they had roughly two hours. The sun would dip below the horizon shortly after 6:00 PM, but the night wouldn't achieve absolute blackness until 8:00 PM.
After all, they were rapidly approaching the longest day of the year; the summer solstice was the day after tomorrow.
Across the waters, the Brit Nation's Mediterranean Fleet fell into catastrophic command chaos upon witnessing Spee's vicious charge. Despite Rear Admiral Osmond Brock's arrival as reinforcement from the homeland, there were still other commanding officers stationed within the Mediterranean Fleet who outranked him.
Within the Brit Nation's Navy at the time, the Mediterranean Fleet was widely considered secondary in both strategic importance and pressure compared to the homeland's Grand Fleet. Thus, the Mediterranean was heavily populated with outdated, legacy vessels, essentially transforming it into a dumping ground for aging, high-ranking, and deeply tenured admirals who had zero career prospects and were coasting toward retirement.
Many officers with bloated ranks, deficient competence, and completely obsolete tactical knowledge were simply exiled to the Mediterranean Fleet to live out their final days in uniform.
It was comparable to the "Six Ministries of Nanjing" during the Ming Dynasty of the East—nominally holding the exact same prestige and rank as the primary ministries, but in reality, serving as a glorified retirement home for old men stepping back from the front lines of politics.
In the Royal Navy's homeland Grand Fleet, the officer commanding a cutting-edge battlecruiser squadron might only be a Rear Admiral. Down in the Mediterranean, however, one might find a Vice Admiral commanding a mere handful of obsolete Pre-dreadnoughts.
Now that Commander-in-Chief Robeck had been killed in action, a fatal question hung in the air: in this critical hour, should the fleet obey the second-line Vice Admirals, or the frontline Rear Admiral?
Facing the enemy's aggressive advance, should they stand their ground and fight to the bitter end? Or should they allow their most valuable asset, the battlecruiser Tiger, to flee alone, sacrificing every other friendly vessel to the enemy's guns?
It was an agonizing choice. From a purely rational perspective, with the battle having devolved to this point, they simply weren't going to survive long enough for the Francian reinforcements to arrive. Continuing to fight guaranteed a total wipeout.
The battlecruiser Tiger could still make twenty-five knots. Even though that was three and a half knots slower than the Goeben's twenty-eight and a half, if the rest of the fleet stayed behind to die and stall the pursuit, the Tiger could undoubtedly escape.
As for the rest of the ships, already hobbling along at fifteen knots, they were dead in the water. They absolutely couldn't run.
But to order a cutting-edge battlecruiser to flee alone while leaving the entire fleet to be slaughtered—did that align with the proud traditions of the Royal Navy?
Besides, they still had one battlecruiser and one dreadnought left. Even though both were damaged, who was to say they absolutely couldn't triumph over two relatively intact enemy battlecruisers?
They clearly still had a fighting chance. Who could possibly stomach the resolve to just surrender and abandon their comrades at a time like this?
The sheer agony of this indecision immediately spiraled into widespread chaos.
Initially, Rear Admiral Osmond Brock wanted to assume total command and order the entire fleet to scatter and flee independently. It was the standard protocol for transport fleets ambushed by commerce raiders: scatter to the winds, forcing the enemy to choose their targets. Whichever ship the enemy locked onto was a guaranteed casualty, but the others would use the time bought by their comrade's death to secure their own escape.
Rear Admiral Brock actually issued exactly that order. He dispatched a telegram demanding that every vessel break off and retreat independently, while simultaneously ordering the Tiger to accelerate and put distance between itself and the battle.
However, the very moment Brock began to withdraw, the Deputy Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, Vice Admiral Arbuthnot—operating from the battleship Bellerophon—declared that he had assumed command in the wake of Admiral Robeck's martyrdom. In direct contradiction to Brock, Arbuthnot commanded the entire fleet to maintain their battle line and engage the enemy.
Sending, receiving, encoding, and decoding radio transmissions all required precious time—a few minutes at the very least. Thanks to these unavoidable delays in communication, their most powerful vessel, the Tiger, had already broken formation and sped away for over ten minutes. Reversing course and returning to the battle line wasted another ten.
This chaotic, back-and-forth maneuvering cost the Tiger over half an hour of detachment from the main formation. That staggering window of time handed the Demanians the perfect opportunity to focus their fire entirely on the British Army's lumbering, slower ships.
How could Spee possibly let such a golden opportunity slip by? Having spent half the day hesitantly circling and probing the enemy, Spee now transformed into a decisive, ravenous wolf. Pressing forward at absolute maximum speed, he intended to viciously exploit this critical time gap and obliterate the British Army's slower vessels.
Brock's Tiger broke formation at 6:37 PM. By 6:50 PM, before the sky had even fully darkened, Spee had already violently closed the distance between himself and the Brit Nation's sluggish fleet to well under fifteen kilometers. The two sides began frantically trading artillery shells, and the Demanian battlecruisers were continuing to close the gap at a blistering rate of two kilometers every five minutes.
At 6:54 PM and 6:56 PM, as the combat distance shrank to 13,200 meters and 12,800 meters respectively, both the Moltke and the Goeben successively found their marks.
The Moltke hammered a 280mm shell into the Bellerophon, while the Goeben scored a direct hit on the Pre-dreadnought HMS Africa trailing right behind it.
The five or six minutes that followed were a sheer masterclass in Demanian gunnery efficiency. The Moltke landed two more shells on the Bellerophon, whereas the Bellerophon only managed a single retaliatory hit on the Moltke.
Due to the drastically shortened distance, the trajectories of both fleets' shells were brutally flat, slamming directly into each other's vertical main armored belts. Because of this, the notorious weakness of a battlecruiser's thin horizontal deck armor simply ceased to matter.
Since there was no plunging fire from high-arcing trajectories, neither side was hitting the other's deck anyway.
Both sides battered each other's main armor plating and successfully scored penetrations. However, the Bellerophon was severely hindered by the prior damage to its superstructure and its consequently crippled fire-control systems, placing it at a devastating disadvantage in terms of hit rate.
On the other flank, the Goeben's duel with the Pre-dreadnought HMS Africa held even less suspense. The HMS Africa was rapidly riddled with seven or eight 280mm shells, leaving it completely in tatters. The two 305mm shells it managed to land on the Goeben in retaliation couldn't even dent its vertical main armor—
This was because the HMS Africa belonged to the King Edward VII-class, whose primary armaments were 40-caliber 305mm guns. The painfully short barrel length meant the shells had dreadfully low muzzle velocity and kinetic energy. When facing off against modern dreadnoughts and battlecruisers from beyond ten kilometers, they simply lacked the power to penetrate.
By the time Rear Admiral Brock finally rushed the Tiger back into the fray, both of the friendly warships had sustained substantial damage. The HMS Africa, in particular, had been beaten so viciously that it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it was completely crippled, having lost more than half of its firepower.
