After reading Norman Friedman's excellent book 'British cruisers' and his book on the Royal Navy, 'Nelson to Vanguard' I'm sure that it mentioned somewhere that 1inch of armour was enough to stop a 8inch shell
below a certain distance (can't remember exactly at the moment), even I thought that was a bit of an exaggeration but the Counties were designed to go up against other 8inch heavy cruisers so her 4inch armour must have been enough to stop anything smaller or of the same size (or sometimes bigger, Cumberland suffered a direct hit by a 9.4inch shell at Dakar which only caused a ruptured steam pipe).
After watching BBC 2's Time Watch documentary about the Battle of the River Plate a few months ago I was very annoyed that they got so much of their info wrong, not even a mention of the Cumberland and very little credit given to the Exeter
.
Just annoys me so much that the BBC shows these documentaries without properly checking all the facts first, or only showing one side of the story. Langsdorff was an honorable gentleman, sailor and had immense respect for the Royal Navy cruisers he was up against and its a shame that the full story was not told.
Okay, rant over, breathe in...
Nick B