Battle of the Falkland Islands

The Battle of the Falkland Islands was a naval engagement fought between elements of the Royal Navy and the Kaiserliche Marine on 8 December, 1914 near the Falkland Islands. It came a little over a month after the defeat of the South Atlantic Squadron at the Battle of Coronel and saw Graf von Spee's squadron effectively annihilated by a powerful British force under the command of Frederick Charles Doveton Sturdee especially assembled to avenge Coronel.

Myths

Dreyer Tables

Many record the low hit percentages of the British ships as being indicative of the weaknesses of the Dreyer Fire Control Table. It's unlikely that either battlecruiser was equipped with one at the time of the battle^{[Citation needed]}.

The most likely reasons for bad hit percentages were both attributable to the fact that the fight was a long range one on bearings well ahead:

• The Royal Navy (probably all navies in 1914) lacked a means of correcting for cross-tilt, which as their ships rolled would subject the salvoes to large and chaotic errors in deflection.
• A spry enemy more interested in escape than combat can, under these circumstances, zig-zag and offset his position far enough in deflection during the long time-of-flight of the shells that you must guess where he might be when they get there. Even the World War II American battleships New Jersey and Iowa, with their extremely sophisticated fire control systems failed to bring the fleeing destroyer Nowaki to bay in 1944 under roughly similar circumstances.

Coriolis Effect

An annoying urban legend persists that the Royal Navy's shooting at the Battle of the Falklands was poor due to their equipment applying corrections for Coriolis effect in the wrong direction, as the action was in the southern hemisphere rather than the northern. To the best of my knowledge, no aspect of Royal Navy equipment or process took Coriolis effect into consideration at this juncture, and this is not a terrible deficiency. For, even if the old story were true, if the action took place on a nearly constant bearing, and at a range that changed only slowly, even a blatant mistreatment of Coriolis effect would therefore have been a constant error, and one unlikely to be large compared to other factors affecting the proper deflection to use (such as the zig-zagging of a fleeing enemy). This fact implies that the remedy for such a miscue would have been a spotting correction for deflection which, once made, would counteract the error for the remainder of the action.

While I think it likely that later systems of firing incorporated Coriolis corrections nicely, a system lacking such treatment which is designed primarily to bring fire upon a maneuvering enemy is not a sad system by any means. Taken in context, Coriolis errors are a constant source of deflection error and quite modest in scale. The need to fire repeated salvoes which for many reasons will require spotting to put them onto the target implies that a failure to handle Coriolis effect, or even a failure to handle it correctly, does not imply an inability to hit the target.

See Also

• Wikipedia