H.M.S. Dreadnought (1906)
Dreadnought, built at the Royal Portsmouth Dock Yard in a year and a day, was the apotheosis of the all-big-gun ship, a type of battleship widely discussed in naval circles during the previous decade but never yet committed to. Italian architect Vittorio Cuniberti had broached the discussion with a public proposal in 1903, published as "An Ideal Battleship for the British Fleet" -- knowing that only the British had both the ego and the loot to realize such a ship. Dreadnought was the especial pet project of the First Sea Lord, Adm. Jackie Fisher. To shorten the build time for his super-ship, Fisher commandeered the eight 12" guns ordered for the Lord Nelson and her sister the Agamemnon for use in Dreadnought, making it possible to produce her in a build-time which remains impressive today, and made a particular bragging point for the Royal Navy and the "advocates of a forward naval policy." This emphasis rubbed French noses in their dismal build times, typically 6-8 years. In 1906 no other naval power could approach the Portsmouth DY's turnaround. But to be fair, British yards of the day typically took 2-3 years to build a pre-dreadnought -- comparable to yards in the U.S. and Russia. When the Dreadnought debuted in 1906, she caused a sensation: so many innovations were encompassed in one vessel as to constitute an overnight naval revolution. This revolution mandated that practically every capital ship that followed adopted, adapted, incorporated, or elaborated upon the principles of Dreadnought's design.
At 18,500 tons standard (21,000 tons deep-laden), the Dreadnought was nearly 20% larger than any previous battleship. Measuring 527 feet long and 82 feet in beam, drawing 31 feet, Dreadnought placed much of the increased size in a long bow and fine entry. This broke through and rode over the waves, keeping the guns far dryer than in the 400-foot pre-Dreadnought battleships. Dreadnought carried ten 12" guns in five twin turrets, plus 27 12-pdrs as anti-TB armament. Many of the 12-pdrs initially were mounted on the turret roofs but eventually were removed because of blast interference from the main battery. There were also submerged torpedo tubes. Broadside weight of metal was 21,250 lbs. Aside from the number of big guns practical in one ship (outgunning any existing battleship by 2:1), Dreadnought's most revolutionary development was her propulsion system: 4 Parsons steam turbine engines shafted to quad screw. This power plant gave her a speed of 21 kts, 3 kts faster than her contemporaries, and with far greater reliability, particularly at sustained high speeds. Her armor was slightly less comprehensive than the contemporary Nelsons, with 11" Krupp cemented (KC) belt on the hull, 11" on the turrets, and 3" on the armored deck.
Riding high without her guns and machinery installed, Dreadnought dwarfs everything afloat after her launch at Portsmouth, an event of national importance. She was christened by the King.
Just after commissioning in late 1906, Dreadnought went on a transatlantic shakedown cruise to test out the ship's new systems, particularly the engines. In most respects (especially engineering), the ship surpassed expectations, steaming 7,000nm round trip from Gibraltar to Trinidad at an average speed of 17.5 kts without the turbines missing a beat. This justified Fisher's gamble on the new technology. Henceforth all the Royal Navy's capital ships and destroyers would have the best: Parsons turbine engines. But it was not as though the technology was untested: smaller turbines had already seen extensive use in Royal Navy destroyers; it was merely the massive scale of the application that was revolutionary. Not coincidentally, at precisely the same time that Dreadnought was building, the Cunard Line had selected even more powerful turbines to propel its two record-breaking transatlantic liners Lusitania and Mauretania. As in the Dreadnought, these ships' turbine power plants were an unqualified success, propelling 31,000 tons of steel and mahogany at 27.5 kts. In fact, the Mauretania made a record crossing which stood until 1928, when she was deposed by the German Bremen.
When Dreadnought returned to Portsmouth after her transatlantic cruise, crew, builders, and backers were jubilant. There seemed to be but one defect in the design: the foremast had been placed just abaft #1 funnel, making it too hot to climb in many circumstances; too, funnel smoke and heat waves frequently obscured the lookouts' view from the top. Spotting duty on the ship was not highly regarded. Otherwise, Dreadnought was a sweeping technological success.
The ship's plan shows the layout fashionable in European navies, with main armament partly carried in beam or wing turrets. Compare this concept with the superfiring turret layout pioneered by the American Navy at the same time. The French, in their first generation of dreadnoughts completed early in WWI, combined superfiring turrets fore and aft with beam turrets amidships. The beam turrets were omitted in the next class of French dreadnoughts, and the guns up-sized to 13.4".
Each of Dreadnought's five turrets required a crew of 35 to operate. Working at peak efficiency, they could shoot 12 salvos in 10 minutes. Each 850-lb projectile would be hurled up to 20 miles away. Beneath each turret was a precision engineered maze of machinery 4 decks deep, tightly packed with state-of-the-art gear for training the turret, elevating the guns, and sending shells and powder up to the gunhouse. But this was only the business end of the ship's brain for directing its fire:the gentlemen of the slide rule working the Dreyer Fire Control Table in the Combat Communications Center, deep below the bridge; the gentlemen of the split-field optics manning the rangefinders before the bridge; and the gentlemen of the telescope manning Director Firing Control in the spotting top. True, the Dreyer Table and the Vickers Director Firing System were only on the drawing boards when Dreadnought debuted. But her advent -- and the rush to build fleets of dreadnoughts afterwards -- fostered these advancements in naval science. They came simultaneously with quantum leaps in design, gunnery, and manufacturing. A joint vision of designers and engineers took shape, for it had now became urgently necessary for fire control engineering to tune these expensive weapons systems into efficient mobile batteries. At the same time, much of the element of chivalry and chance which had governed naval warfare heretofore was annulled. From now on guesswork would be eliminated. Warships would become ever more efficient killing machines.
Dreadnought's only moment of combat came not with her imposing guns, but with her sharply convex bow. While on patrol in the Firth of Forth, near Scapa Flow, on March 18, 1915, she spied a periscope, turned sharply and rammed the sub. Dreadnought's forefoot sliced neatly through the U-29's pressure hull, sinking the sub immediately. If Dreadnought did not achieve further battle glory, she at least avoided becoming a U-boat victim herself.
In fact, despite the pride-boosting knowledge that Dreadnought had initiated the entire era in battleship development and the very great prosperity of Britain's armaments manufacturers (now that every battleship had to have 3 times as many guns as before) -- despite that knowledge, Dreadnought was already becoming obsolescent by the time war came, only 8 years after her thunderclap debut. After the opening phase of the War, she was not deployed with the battle fleet. When coastal towns were bombarded by the German battlecruiser squadron several times in 1915, Dreadnought was despatched to guard London. She became flagship of a squadron otherwise composed of the 8 King Edward VII class pre-dreadnoughts, her famous name lending comfort to the civilian population at a time when the Royal Navy's prestige was somewhat tarnished in the popular estimation.
Viewed in perspective, the building of Dreadnought was an audacious step for Britain; a step up to "forward naval policies." While bringing the Dreadnought into being was a great technical and PR tour-de-force, it also undermined Britain's advantage, for it rendered her large existing fleet as obsolete the next country's. It was Britain that had invested most heavily in pre-dreadnought naval dominance, building some 50 battleships and all the facilities to support them between 1890 and 1905. Britain thus had the most to lose; and indeed would lose most of her technical lead over Germany in the next 10 years.
In the end, Dreadnought's significance lies less in her wartime exploits and more in the example she set. As a pioneer of new frontiers, she gave her name to an entire era of naval history, an entire class of ships, an entire arms race. For the coming of the dreadnoughts unleashed the most fevered and ruinous phase of the naval arms race. The rush to build more, ever more deadly battleships led some naval professionals to view the easygoing days of the Nineties with nostalgia. If the naval arms race had been on the slow boil for some decades, the Dreadnought turned up the heat. All the world's major navies responded. By 1916 Britain had built a fleet of 28 dreadnoughts and 9 dreadnought battlecruisers, while Germany boasted 16 dreadnoughts and 5 dreadnought battlecruisers. Britain's Asian partner, Japan, had built two 12-gun dreadnoughts and Britain had built her a battlecruiser, the Kongo, which set trends in Britain itself. By 1916 Japan had laid down 5 improved versions of the 14" gunned Kongo in her own yards, and would complete 2 more by 1919 for a total of 8. The United States had completed 10 dreadnoughts and was rapidly constructing more. Soon even Argentina, Chile and Brazil must have their dreadnoughts -- no matter if it required emptying the treasury and raising further subscriptions to build them; national prestige was at stake. British and American yards were ony too glad to comply with foreign demand: after all, the exigencies of the arms race had enforced a £9M deficit in Britain by 1914 (For a more detailed look at the costs of the dreadnought arms race in Britain and Germany, click here). Britain's great shipyards produced a trio of dreadnoughts for Brazil and Chile, while the Fore River Shipyard at Quincy, MA, U.S.A. turned out a workmanlike pair for Argentina, complete with USN-style cage masts. So great was world demand between 1910-1914 that there was a shortage of the primary weapon -- the 12"/45 gun, forcing lengthy waits upon Japan and many other foreign customers drooling over dreadnoughts from the sidelines.
Turkey, determined to avenge its humiliating naval reverses in the 1908 and 1912-13 Balkan Wars, was one of Britain's best customers, with 2 huge dreadnoughts completing just as war enveloped Europe. The Turkish crews were already in England, training on the vessels before formally taking them over and bringing them back to Turkey. But Britain delayed the hand-over. Citing wartime emergency, 1st Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill swooped in when war was declared, commandeering 3 complete or nearly complete dreadnoughts building in British yards. The ships concerned were the Chilean dreadnought Almirante Latorre and both Turkish ships: the Sultan Osman I and Reshadieh, which were to serve with the Grand Fleet as HMS Erin, with ten 13.5" guns, and HMS Agincourt, the longest battleship of WWI, mounting fourteen 12" guns. As the Turks had substantially paid for these ships -- a matter of patriotic pride in Turkey, where the money had been raised by public subscription -- their seizure inflamed anti-British feelings in Turkey. This made it easier for the Turks to side with the Central Powers in 1914, particularly when the Germans threw in a new battlecruiser (together with a supporting cruiser and seasoned crews) as a sweetener. A footnote: the Latorre served in the Grand Fleet as HMS Canada, reverting to Chilean ownership at a bargain rate after the War. She remained the Chilean flagship until 1952.
Meantime in the Mediterranean, the Italians, French, and Austro-Hungarians all entered their bids in the dreadnought competition. Italy completed 6 formidable dreadnoughts before the War's start; France had one operational dreadnought by August 1914 but 3 more ready for trials and three 13.5" superdreadnoughts abuilding, completed by 1916; Austria-Hungary had 4 sister ships under construction mounting twelve 12" guns apiece mounted in two pairs of superfiring triple turrets -- the Viribus Unitis class. The gunnery design of these 4 ships may have been cutting-edge for 1914, but some of them were poorly jobbed and plagued by delays and technical failures in production: political expediency had dictated farming out the construction to different yards in different provinces, some of which had no previous experience of capital ship construction. Bottled up in port by a severe fuel shortage, the Austrian dreadnoughts hardly took to the open seas as intended, but instead were sunk while breaking out (Szent Istvan) or sabotaged while sitting in port. Russia too made a vigorous if belated bid with its frightening-looking but thinly protected Baltic dreadnoughts and the tragic Imperatritsa Mariya class on the Black Sea. Both classes mounted four triple 12" turrets on the centerline, but without taking advantage of a superfiring imposition. Ironically, because they were considered expendable, these countries' pre-dreadnought battleships saw more action in WWI than most of the Mediterranean or Russian dreadnoughts. This was not entirely true of British and German dreadnoughts, however.
The banners waved gaily in the sunshine as the armies of Europe marched to war that August long ago. But the consequences were dreadful. By far the greatest, most heavily armed armies in history remained deadlocked along an 1,100-mile front for almost 4 years on the west; more millions perished along a similar though less active front through Russia. The slaughter on the Western Front was unprecedented. Some two years after Verdun and the Somme, the cost of victory to the Allies was exorbitant, but the consequences of defeat proved far worse for Germany. But the war was a catastrophe for victor and vanquished alike. By the end of WWI military adventurism had beggared Europe and squandered a whole generation of her youth on the battlefield. Some 10 million promising young men became stinking corpses in the trenches and no-man's-lands of the 2 vast battlefronts; hundreds of thousands more in the many "side shows" such as Gallipoli, Greece, and the Mideast. Hundreds of drowned sailors washed up on shore after the great naval battles of WWI, especially along the coast of Jutland (Jylland) in Denmark after the titanic naval clash that bears its name. But fate cheated the naval strategists who had emptied their treasuries to build the dreadnought fleets (and the pre-dreadnought fleets before them).
Despite all the strategizing before war broke out, both England and Germany adopted a very conservative naval strategy once war was a reality. Both sides aimed at conserving their huge battle fleets in the face of mine and submarine threats. Significantly, the foremost advocates of "a forward naval policy," Fisher in England and Tirpitz in Germany, were both muscled out of the way in 1916. In the war, the navies played a supporting role only -- though a fleet in being was a potent intangible on many levels. For the sailors of the dreadnought fleets, the British upheld a reasonable standard of living through the end of the war, but by early 1917 the German sailors found their grub to consist mainly of cabbage. As in Russia, discontent simmered aboard the idle ships. High Seas Fleet activists were among the principal revolutionaries who toppled Kaiser Wilhelm in November 1918, forcing an end to the war. Along with the Kaiser went all the chief dynasties of Central and Eastern Europe. Royal houses lost their power as surely and suddenly as the families of the fallen at Verdun lost their loved ones. To some, the triumphant survival of 80% of the battleship fleet may have seemed a hollow victory when set against the horrific sacrifices made in the trenches. In the aftermath of war, dreadnought and pre-dreanought alike went to the wrecker's yard as countries repudiated militarism.
In truth the magnificent battleship fleets had themselves been outflanked in WWI by deadly new developments: submarines, "aeroplanes," sophisticated mine-layers. The shimmering promise of an easy win through mounting more big guns was discredited. Yet the mystique of the big ship survived and flourished right through WWII, though few advances over 1918 technology came about until 1939-40 (radar). Battleships were never again constructed in such large numbers as in 1906-1920, however. Fewer and better became the motto of navies between the wars. Before the Washington Treaty went into effect in 1923, first-rate battleships had attained a length of 700 to 860 feet and 40-50,000 tons -- specs which would have been inconceivable in 1906 when the naval arms race ginned up in earnest. By 1942, however, the battleship was already becoming regarded as obsolete, displaced by the mobile projection of air power via aircraft carriers. To be sure, battleships remained important weapons in the arsenals of the contending navies, but in a supporting role. They now served as floating AA batteries to protect the flattops, or as mobile bombardment batteries to "soften up" enemy positions for amphibious landings. In WWII there were few battleship-on-battleship duels: USS Washington vs. IJN Kirishima in 1942 off Guadalcanal; and of course the actions to stop the Bismarck's breakout to the North Atlantic in 1941 -- actions in which fleet aircraft and a Catalina flying boat played a key role, setting up the German marauder for interception by the overwhelming strength of the British battleship fleet.
The aircraft carrier battle group began its reign as the supreme naval weapon after Pearl Harbor -- a reign that continues to this day with advanced weaponry that was only dreamed of in the Forties. Just to maintain one of these battle groups costs $1B US per year; currently there are 2 such battle groups deployed by the U.S. to the Persian Gulf solely to intimidate Iran. To what end remains to be seen . . . the Iranians have extended an olive branch of sorts (April 2007); will Bush listen? The record of conciliation to date is not encouraging on either side. Stay tuned for late-breaking developments!
