Gunnery Department
IN WHICH we trace the evolution of naval guns and mountings from 1860 to WWI, with particular reference to battleship weapons. For forensic evidence of how warships armed with these guns performed in the heat of action, refer to Notable Battles of the Ironclad Age.
Above: Admiral Canevaro poses with his staff under the 17.7" barrels of the Italia. Launched in 1881, she was still among the biggest ironclads afloat in 1897.
The Cost of the Naval Arms Race
The naval arms race had bubbled merrily along through the closing years of the 19th century, when Britain kept well ahead of its nearest rivals by spending some £5M annually, funding 50 pre-dreadnought battleships at a total cost of £54M. Through the mid-Nineties, Britain's main rival was France; but with the 1898 Navy Law, Germany undertook to construct a formidable rival to the Royal Navy. While having a modern navy was a matter of prestige and technological accomplishment for Germany, the Royal Navy navy was looked on as indispensable to survival in Britain. The island nation imported two-thirds of its foodstuffs and many of its raw materials. With its wealth based on empire and trade, Britain felt well justified in maintaining a predominant fleet. Therefore, her navy's supremacy was both a principle of national policy and an article of faith.
By building the Dreadnought in 1906, Britain threw down the gauntlet, signaling that she would pay any price to maintain her rule of the waves. This battleship of unmatched power was meant to persuade other nations they could never win a naval competition with Britain. But it had one unintended effect: it threw away Britain's wide numerical advantage in pre-dreadnought ships and, in effect, wiped the slate clean for competitors in the new classification. Far from discouraging would-be rivals, after some initial consternation, the challenge awakened appetites the world over: Suddenly everyone wanted dreadnoughts. Italy and Austria-Hungary engaged in a dreadnought arms race of their own. The Rusians spent freely to recoup the position they had lost with their defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, laying down a quartet of "Baltic dreadnoughts" for the north, and another quartet for Black Sea service. The U.S. and Japan turned out dreadnoughts as fast as their rolling mills could pound out the armor plate and their yards could rivet it together. The failing Ottoman Empire took up a subscription among its subjects and came up with enough piastres to purchase two dreadnoughts of the latest design. Even poorer countries like Brazil and Argentina willingly emptied their treasuries to build just one or two, while all the major powers soon fielded at least one dreadnought battle squadron. Space weaponry advocates take note.
But the chief competition was between Great Britain and Germany. Once ignited, the dreadnought arms race nervously ramped up and down through several cycles before burning itself out in an orgy of spending between 1914 and 1918. Above, the foreseeable outcome made material: a 15-inch naval gun being slung aboard HMS Barham as she nears completion in 1914. This outcome was engendered in the German challenge of 1898 and the British counterstroke, the Dreadnought of 1906. The Queen Elizabeth class of which the Barham was a member, and the German Baden class of 15" gunned ships, marked a huge technological leap over previous warships. Indeed, the five QEs and the five dead-similar "R class" ships that followed the next year, formed the core of Britain's floating might well into the Second World War. These were indeed tough ships: during the Battle of Jutland, HMS Warspite lost her steering and steamed in involuntary circles, taking 29 large-calibre hits before control was restored. Though slowed to a 16-knot maximum by the gaping holes in her sides, the ship survived the battle with remarkably light casualties (14 killed and 32 wounded), made port under her own power, and emerged from the yard ready to fight again before summer's end. Less well armored warships did not all share her happy fate in that battle. The results made an open-and-shut case for fuller protection; particularly when, with the greater efficiency of oil fuel pioneered in the Queen Elizabeths, it did not result in the sacrifice of speed. Designed for 25 knots, the Queen Elizabeths were nearly as fast as battlecruisers, some 4 knots faster than the 1906 Dreadnought. But battlecruisers were also leapfrogging ahead in speed: HMS Hood of 1920 could make 32 knots when new.
But all the technological overkill of the Queen Elizabeths came at a stiff price. There was a great investment in fleet oilers, storage tanks, all the pumps and plumbing necessary to handle oil in bulk. Then there was the foreign entanglement: Britain had no oil, extractable by 1900-era techniques. Seeking to guarantee supply, the British government bought control of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (present-day BP) and took a plunge into neocolonial control over what is today Iran -- beginning a sorry story of manipulation and mistrust, whose end remains as yet unwritten (see Note). Then there was the additional necessity of protecting the tanker lifeline to and from the Gulf.
Above all, there was the daunting expense of running the whole complex operation. During the peak years of the naval arms race, just before the First World War, Britain spent lavishly on her Royal Navy: between the advent of the Dreadnought and the 1909-10 fiscal year 3 years later, she built 11 dreadnoughts for a total cost of £20M. New battleship construction authorized in 1909-10 consumed £26.4M (eight dreadnoughts at £3.3M apiece). Although this was an exceptionally high year, spending had seldom fallen below £5M a year in any year since 1889, totaling some £54M for pre-dreadnought battleship construction between 1889 and 1908. Fifty-some armored cruisers built in the period brought the tab up to £104M. The British taxpayer was forfeiting a lot of butter to pay for those big guns.
But pre-dreadnought construction was only a warmup for the main event: the orgy of spending that underpinned the big-power dreadnought contest. Between the record year 1909-10 and the 1912-13 program that included the Queen Elizabeths, eight more dreadnoughts slid down the ways at an aggregate cost of £28.4M. Naval estimates (budget requests) ballooned: from £31.25M in 1907-08 to £40.4M in 1910-11 and on to a bloated £45.1M in 1912-13. When Churchill pushed through production of the 15-inch gun and the construction of the visionary Queen Elizabeths, he was decried for grandiose and wasteful spending; but the four Queen Elizabeths were voted through at a cool £4M apiece, and the five "R class" battleships at a comparable cost the following year; a fifth QE class battleship was funded by the colony of Malaya.
From the Liberals' accession to power -- with a pledge to cut military spending -- to the outbreak of war (1908-1914), the British taxpayer was assessed over £229 millions for new capital-ship construction, or an average of £38.2 millions per year.
Over time, the arms race had developed a will of its own; but the Liberals and their allies did make sincere and sustained efforts to curb arms spending from the time they took office. Indeed, Minister of War Richard Haldane had combined significant economies with modernizing reform in managing the British Army. Winston Churchill was brought into the Admiralty in 1911 as a comparable "new broom" for the Royal Navy: to cut wasteful spending, to develop a naval war staff, and to coordinate naval strategy with the Army's war planners.
Something of a mirror image of British budgetary disputes was happening in Germany -- or at least, a fun-house mirror image. In the pre-dreadnought era, when Britain built 50 battleships at a cost of some £53M, Germany began her naval challenge with expenditure of £243M, building 24 battleships between 1891 and 1906, with 15 armored cruisers for an additional £11.1M. (Between 1890 and 1906 Britain authorized 56 armored cruisers at an approximate cost of £50M.) With the coming of the dreadnought revolution, German naval spending increased precipitously from 290M gold marks (GM) in 1907 to 347M in 1908 -- equivalent to £14.1M and £16.9M, respectively; the pound then being valued at US $4.85. Because of the peculiar structure of the Kaiserliche Marine -- overseen only by a Navy Cabinet headed by Grand Adm. Alfred Tirpitz, reporting directly to the Kaiser --, there were no enforceable limits on naval spending. The result was a series of stratospheric increases.
By 1906, Tirpitz had the bit firmly clamped in his teeth. It was realized that there were not sufficient funds to crew the magnificent new fleet. Tirpitz approached the Reichstag in a well-orchestrated campaign for a supplementary budet request, or novella. The 1908 novella was a whopper, containing funds for 38 cruisers, 144 destroyers, 60 submarines, and crews for all the above. At the same time the pace of building accelerated to four dreadnoughts a year, and the goal grew to 16 battleships and five battlecruisers by 1914, 38 battleships and 20 battlecruisers by 1920; the first target was achieved as scheduled, in the fateful year 1914.
The 1908 request amounted to 24% of the entire national budget, the sort of increase that could only be justified by a national emergency. Tirpitz' burly body and imposing presence were belied by a high, shrill voice that tended to squeak when he got excited. The Grossadmiral's squeaks echoed through conference rooms and legislative committee meetings as he jawboned his supplement through the Reichstag, forked beard shaking dogmatically at the awed deputies. But unbalanced naval spending was causing a huge deficit: a worrisome 500M GM in 1908 that doubled to 1 billion GM by 1914. The question of where to find the money was the source of controversy in the government. The State Treasury Secretary resigned over this impasse and the deficit was funded entirely by massive borrowing; Tirpitz had craftily included the country's leading bankers in his pro-navy coalition. Both the German State Treasury and the British Admiralty had real cause for concern. New elections were called, and a more pliant Reichstag was elected in 1908, approving the loans to fund the supplement and accelerate the naval race.
As noted above, the jump in German spending precipitated a parallel crisis in Britain, the "Naval Scare" of 1909, when activists chanted, "We want eight [dreadnoughts] and we won't wait." By this time, naval spending in both countries was veering out of control, having acquired a madcap momentum of its own. For a detailed breakdown of German naval spending from 1893 to 1916, click here. Soon even the gargantuan increases of 1908 were not enough. In 1912 Tirpitz approached the Reichstag with an even more bloated novella, justifying it by the stepped-up pace of building in Britain.
This budget request was the cause of a government crisis, engendering as it did a billion-mark budget deficit by 1914. Chancellor von Bülow attempted to plug the gap with stiff new taxes, but a coalition of right- and left-wing deputies at the Reichstag nixed the measure. This time Tirpitz overplayed his hand, demanding three additional capital ships and 15,000 additional men, for a total of 49 battleships, 28 battlecruisers, and 100,000 men by 1920. The mark of the maniac was on these demands; Germany had no need of such an enormous fleet and her industry could not readily produce it, while the manpower projected wuld draww needed personnel away from Army and industry. The Army was jealous of the big increases already voted for the fleet, and demanded a 136M GM increase of its own (£6.6M), which was soon granted. Von Bülow and Finance Minister von Sydow resigned over the necessity to fund nearly the entire armaments appropriations by borrowing.
A new government was formed with conservative lawyer Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg (right) as Chancellor. Tall and phlegmatic, long a favorite of the Kaiser, Bethmann-Hollweg brought with him no foreign policy experience whatever. Following the 1912 elections, the Reichstag was stacked with Socialist deputies who were not inclined to run up the deficit further for armaments. Instead of assenting to Tirpitz' novella, they slowed the rate of increase in naval spending right on the brink of war. The new Chancellor resolved the budget impasse by pledging to incorporate Army expenditures as a fixed proportion of future budgets. Thus, he was able to steer the moneys pruned from the Navy's request to Germany's land armies; after all, the experts were unanimously declaring the imminence of a general European war. Viscerally disliked at home, Bethmann looked to a short, victorious war to enhance his popularity. Germany's shift in military emphasis came at the same time that Britain was ratcheting up its own naval spending to assure its advantage over Germany. In all, Britain spent £130M on dreadnought construction from 1906 to 1914, building 36 battleships and 9 battlecruisers. In that same period, Germany spent the equivalent of £57M on 19 dreadnought battleships and seven battlecruisers, the cost of a capital ship being nearly one-third more in Germany than Britain. Of course, in terms of cost, building a warship was only the beginning of the financial commitment. Some £150,000 a year was required just to maintain a dreadnought, exclusive of fuel and ammunition. And a moderate-sized dreadnought might require 22 tons of coal per hour to operate. Higher speeds or bigger ships devoured even more coal.
During the Great War and shortly afterward, Britain completed a further six capital ships, while Germany refrained from any new construction (although three newly-completed dreadnoughts were delivered in 1916-17). Instead, Germany concentrated on achieving victory on the Western Front, while focusing its naval effort of submarine warfare.
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  There were a number of efforts to moderate an arms race that was clearly getting out of control. German intransigence and arrogance bloodied a generation of British politicians who tried to make overtures to Berlin. An important drag on German envoys' freedom of maneuver was the Kaiser. Though he had close family ties with the British royals -- he was, after all, the grandson of Queen Victoria -- the Kaiser had had a vexed relationship with Britain. "Willie"'s urge to one-up his British cousins imparted an intimidating swagger to Germany's style and actions over 3 decades; at its worst, prefiguring Hitler at his most arrogant. To Germany's All Highest, personal control over the Navy he had built up from scratch remained a cherished prerogative. The Kaiser insisted on regarding any advice on running naval matters as a personal affront. The German government was shackled to Wilhelm's intransigence, since the Reichstag had no constitutional control over the navy; as noted above, the service was, in effect, a personal project of the Kaiser and Grand-Admiral Tiripitz. The Reichstag merely approved the funds to sustain a titanic rivalry -- a titanic Teutonic rivalry, in fact -- and government/industrial interests expertly tilted German public opinion toward hawkish expenditure. Across the sea, through 1913 Churchill remained one of the chief "economizers" in the Liberal cabinet. Along with Prime Minister Asquith and Chancellor David Lloyd George, Churchill initially championed cutting the military budget to pay for new social programs: the Socialists and elements of the Whig Party claimed that half the annual naval budget, applied to social programs, would cure most of Britain's social ills. (Photos by gracious permission of www.workhouses.org.uk)
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At the outset of his term as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911-12, Churchill made a sincere attempt to come to terms with the Germans and build a bridge of trust to them. In 1912 Richard Viscount Haldane was despatched to Berlin to negotiate a relaxation in tensions and a restraint on the ruinous naval arms race; his was an exploratory mission. The Germans were proposing to accelerate from building from two dreadnoughts a year to three every other year: 3-2-3-2-3-2, seeking to arrive at a 35-dreadnought fleet by 1918 -- 28 battleships and seven battlecruisers, a goal which was later inflated even further, as noted above. At first the Kaiser's envoys agreed to a cautious reduction in the "tempo" or pace of building in return for a reciprocal slowing on the British side. Unfortunately even this modest opening was torpedoed by two events beyond Haldane's control. First, Churchill made a derogatory reference to the German navy as a "luxury fleet" in parliament, while Haldane was still in Germany. This observation was meant for domestic consumption, grounded in Britons' deep belief in the necessity of British naval superiority, However, the colorful phrase was widely reported. Unhappily, it was taken as an insult in Germany, whose new navy was an object of considerable national pride; moreover, Tirpitz and his agents made sure the expression was widely circulated, with the most inflammatory possible interpretation. Pamphlets and speeches whippped up popular indignation across Germany. Then after Haldane returned to London, other elements of the German Naval Law not discussed in his talks came out: accelerated destroyer and U-boat construction, and a huge buildup in personnel. These concerns came up soon enough during questions in parliament, potentially embarrassing Asquith's Liberal administration. The apparent German bad faith made any concessions politically impossible for the British government. The Liberals could not afford to appear "weak on German expansionism." Not to be outdone, Britain undertook to lay down two keels for every extra dreadnought Germany lay down under Tirpitz' accelerated building schedule.
View down the bore of a 9.4" Krupp gun on the Austro-Hungarian warship Kaiser Karl VI.
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Last-Ditch Efforts Fail:
A Continent Sucked Into the Vortex of War
Nothing daunted, Churchill continued to dangle a slowing of the arms race even as Whitehall prepared the alternative: the most monstrous budget yet, of £45 million, covering the Queen Elizabeths, oil fuel terminals, and fleet basing facilities for an expected North Sea confrontation.
As the rivalry with Germany sharpened after 1909, costs continued to skyrocket. To build a ground of mutual confidence betwen the two countries, Churchill proposed a mutual "naval holiday" in building. In a March 18, 1912 address to the Commons, the First Lord formally renounced the "Two-Power Standard", a long-time British doctrine under which Britain maintained sufficient naval power to fight the two next largest navies simultaneously, and prevail. (This formula dated, appropriately enough, to the Spencer Programme and the inception of the battleship race in 1889.) Instead Britain would build to maintain an 8:5 ratio of superiority against Germany. The proposed building holiday would save £7M equivalent for the German people and at least £12M sterling in Britain without altering either country's relative position in the big-ship race. Churchill's proposals were ridiculed in England, but the Germans agreed to informal talks. After a cautious opening, these negotiations came to nought, largely due to a German lack of openness. On the Wilhelmstrasse, a machiavellian Foreign Ministry calculated that by holding out longer, Germany could exact a stiffer price for settling the rivalry with Britain.
And so the moment was lost. Asquith, Foreign Secretary Lord Grey, and Churchill were leery of German intentions and angered by German deviousness as negotiations swiftly reached an impasse. Germany's envoys were not kept in Berlin's confidence and were not empowered to agree to anything independently. Germany remained obdurate in refusing to permit inspection of its shipyards by British naval attachés in return for reciprocal courtesy at the royal dockyards. And behind the scenes Tirpitz, obsessed with ever-greater numbers of battleships, frantically smothered the mounting flames of dialogue with the British. Spurred by fear of each other's intentions, the arms race spurted onwards with renewed vigor. All caution was thrown to the winds, for in the absence of mutual trust, the completest possible readiness for war seemed the only prudent policy. Churchill bent to the national consensus with a will, and record budgets sailed through Parliament. The willfulness in Berlin mirrored that in London. The atmosphere of mutual mistrust thickened, lending a sense of inevitability to the drift to war. This air of hopelessness and pessimism in the run-up to August 1914 is described in the memoirs of virtually all the leading figures on both sides: a sense of horrified paralysis.
A destroyer tows a target to gunnery practice.
In some ways the Royal Navy was ill-prepared for the war that came; but it was certainly well found in ships, and for this Churchill deserved a share of the credit. The results of the 1911-1914 acceleration of building were not apparent immediately. With ships withdrawn for refit and the loss of the Audacious to a mine, Britain had a razor-thin two-ship margin of superiority in operational dreadnoughts at the end of 1914 through winter 1915. Thereafter, the margin increased by leaps and bounds. The ratio remained 5:3 in favor of Britain even after the losses at the Battle of Jutland were tallied, and improved with the delivery of new construction, while the battle readiness of the German fleet decreased its potency in the last two years of the War.
Across the North Sea, in 1912-1914 the German fleet was well on its way to Tirpitz's goal of two battleships for every three in the British fleet: Seventeen dreadnoughts and six battlecruisers were operational at the commencement of hostilities, three more joining in 1916-17. Moreover, the German ships were more robustly constructed than the British, with labyrinthine watertight subdivision and conservative armor protection. But the German Navy's mission had always been somewhat blurred, resulting in a nebulous strategy. For the Kaiser's personal hand in naval operations turned out unexpectedly timid and indecisive once the war was on.
By late 1916, Germany's two 15-inch gunned super-dreadnoughts were operational; but by that time, Britain had already commissioned ten 15-inch ships. It is clear who had won the arms race. It is equally certain that the British public had paid a burdensome price: £129 millions by war's end just for the construction of 50 dreadnoughts, versus 26 for Germany, costing some £57 millions. Given the several bombardments of British ports undertaken with near impunity by Adm. Hipper's battlecruisers, and the many air raids made by zeppelins during the war, it seemed questionable how much "security" the public reaped in return for that huge investment (see Note, below). Between the bombardments, the U-boats, the inconclusive Battle of Jutland, and the Beatty-Jellicoe feud that convulsed the service between the wars, the Royal Navy lost much of the lustre it had enjoyed before the War.
And in Germany, the navy was thoroughly discredited. It is by the U-boat that Germany's navy in WWI is remembered, not the battle fleet; by the mine and torpedo, not the big gun. And the big winner in the Great War was neither Britain nor Germany; it was really the United States.
Battleship guns being turned at Bethlehem Steel, Pennsylvania, in 1909.
NOTE: In an unforeseen way, however, the investment in armaments and infrastructure paid off; for it was cheap oil from Iran that fueled Britain's prosperity in the Twenties and Thirties -- a prosperity achieved in spite of burdensome debt payments to the financiers who had underwritten the Empire's tremendous war effort. It would take another cycle of world war-fueled-by-cheap-Anglo-Persian-Oil before the people of Iran would demand a fair share of that prosperity -- and find their democratic revolt snuffed by the CIA-orchestrated coup d'êtat of 1953. This in turn set up the cycle of repression under the Shah and resentment of U.S. meddling, which ended so disastrously for America. The marathon hostage crisis of 1979-81 kicked off Iranian-American relations and set the tone for what has followed, with the U.S. painting Iran as a "rogue state." Both Bush and Ahmedinejad made domestic political capital playing off each other after Bush promoted Iran from Rogue State to Axis of Evil member in 2002. One looks for a cooler tone of discourse when sanity returns to the White House early in 2009. The practice of painting entire nations or peoples as 'evil' would appear to have a boomerang effect on the accuser.
Proudly featured on the reverse of a Shah-era 100-rial note, an engraving of the Abadan Oil Refinery, first opened in 1912 by the Burmah Oil/Anglo-Persian Oil consortium. By 1941 and until wrecked by Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-86), it was the world's largest petroleum facility and the chief source of the Pahlavi family's immense wealth. Their régime's influence derived from its close collaboration with powerful western interests, its identification with Iran's elite, and fear of its police tactics. Though the current régime has derived much of its power from standing in opposition to the so-called "Great Satan," it still defines Iran largely by its relationship to the West. Some would say this is being put forth by way of a diversion, turning attention away from thuggish policies and lack of social progress at home.
In a little-known scandal, the U.S. set itself up for a massive loss of confidence in its own currency by selling the Shah's government a complete mint including the self-same gravure presses used to print U.S. currency, along with a 20-year supply of the special security paper used for U.S. paper money. The mint had hardly come online in Tehran when the Shah was overthrown in 1979. Once in power, the Ayatollah's government lost no time in debasing the U.S. currency while bankrolling its own campaign of subversion by flooding Europe and the Middle East with expertly forged U.S. $100 banknotes. Small wonder that the Carter and Reagan administrations kept this fiasco a closely-held secret within the United States; However, it is quite widely known in the rest of the world.
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