This woodblock print of the 1894 Battle of the Yalu is one of a series by Kobayashi Kiyuchika, a Japanese artist who documented the Sino-Japanese conflict with great brío. As shots burst around a Japanese warship, crews share a clear view of Adm. Ting's fleet, riddled and burning, just across the waves. This daylight scene well captures the "fog of war:" the gritty cloud of gunsmoke that envelopes ships engaged in a protracted fight in light air.
The Victorian era of ironclad warships was a parodoxical time, of rapid technological advance but also a prolonged era of peace. In the 1860s the first ironclads were successfully tested in battle, and proved nearly impervious to the weapons of the time. To destroy ironclad ships, admirals turned to ramming since their shellfire no longer inflicted sufficient harm.From then until the Battle of the Yalu in 1894, there were no large fleet actions. Europe remained at peace. America forgot that it had a navy. There were a few actions fought: off Chile, in Egypt (at right, the 1882 bombardment of Alexandria by the British fleet), and in support of imperial adventures in China; the battle data was eagerly digested and discussed in the admiralties and armories of Old Europe.
During this time of fertile engineering advances, many schemes were advanced for the best form of battleship, leading to the baroque variety of bizarre warships presented elsewhere in this site. Friendly competition and sustained warship-building prevailed on all sides. But directions were all based on guesswork, calculations, and tests at the weapons proving grounds: there was no battle in nearly 30 years between ironclad fleets to prove, for instance, that the ram was a useless anachronism. A full century stretched between Nelson's victory at Trafalgar and the Japanese sweep at Tsushima, with no fleet action on that grand scale, even as the technological revolution transformed ships and society.Viewed in hindsight, the skirmishes and mix-em-ups of the late 1800s were suggestive of future directions and illuminating of contemporary fads and failures. Here we present a complete list of naval actions in the era, up to and including the First World War. Astute readers will note that of these fights, only Lissa, Tsushima, and Jutland assume the proportions of all-out fleet actions, and of those three, only Jutland pitted the most advanced navies of the day against each other. Moreover, the main fleets engaged for little more than an hour at Jutland, proving once again that battleships were all but invulnerable to gunfire, just as at Hampton Roads more than half a century before. The fear of new surprise weapons against which battleships had no effective defense -- submarines and torpedoes -- led Adm. Jellicoe to turn his fleet away and disengage at a critical moment, allowing his foe to escape into the smog of battle.
In the First World War large numbers of pre-dreadnought vessels were involved, often in hazardous or suicidal missions. As a rule these clashes illustrated the inferiority of the pre-dreadnought when engaged in combat with dreadnought warships. However, it is well to remember that mines and torpedoes took out more ships of either description than gunfire. The great dreadnoughts that endured such an ordeal by fire at Jutland, often were disabled to a single well-placed mine or torpedo; the torpedo nets invariably supplied in the period proved useless against simple counter measures. This vulnerability remained as true in WWII as WWI, despite the extravagant efforts made at antisubmarine defense ("torpedo blisters" and the like) between the wars.
The Japanese flagship Mikasa under fire in the opening phase of the Battle of Tsushima. The lead ship in the Japanese column, Mikasa proved highly resistant to damage despite several hits. Victorious in battle, Mikasa succumbed to an internal explosion while at base only months later, and had to be completely rebuilt. Her casualties from the magazine explosion were ten times what she had suffered in battle.
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