The semi-dreadnought was a transitional type of battleship offered as an alternative to the all-big-gun dreadnoughts. Where first-generation dreadnoughts dropped the secondary guns and instead carried five or more pairs of 12" guns, the semi-dreadnought generally retained the classic four 12" guns in twin turrets at the ends, augmented with a very heavy secondary battery sited along the sides. For instance, the Lord Nelsons mounted ten 9.2" guns in turrets; the Dantons, twelve 9.4s; the Japanese Satsumas, twelve 10-inchers; and the Radetzkys, eight 9.4s. (Metric: 10" 254 mm; 9.4" 240 mm; 9.2" 234 mm; 12" 305 mm.) In addition, the Dantons and the Japanese ships were turbine powered, though no faster than 21 kts. It was argued that the lighter weight of broadside metal would be offset in battle by the faster firing rate of the smaller guns; but this was sophistry in the dreadnought age. The semi-dreadnought philosophy held when engaging a weaker opponent; but the captain of a dreadnought could choose the range that favored his 12" guns. And in these he outgunned any semi-dreadnought afloat, while carrying armor making him highly resistant to 8-10" shellfire.It should be noted that, in the excitement over dreadnoughts, the public was not too discriminating about the actual nature of a dreadnought. Any big, modern warship with lots of big guns was commonly called a dreadnought; for example, an exquisitely crafted series of colourized prints of the French Danton class calls each one of them a "dreadnought;" no doubt the French Admiralty was pulling out its hair and wishing they were, but it seemed to make little difference to the public. It is worth noting that dreadnoughts had their critics on both sides of the Channel, and indeed both sides of the Atlantic. It was felt that to mount so many big guns in one ship was to risk losing too much capability if that ship were sunk. Dreadnoughts were said to be too big. Some critics were highly influential: men like former DNC Sir William White and Adm. Lord Charles Beresford in Britain, and Chief Constructor Louis Émile Bertin in France, father of the Danton class. That they were on the losing end of the argument does not mean they were insincere or wrong-headed. As our essay shows, the rush to all-big-gun battleships put the financial systems and industrial capacities of all countries involved in the naval arms race under intense strain. This was quite predictable when every battleship laid down now required more than double the number of big guns and ammunition as in the pre-dreadnought world. Nevertheless, the semi-dreadnought only ameliorated the strain somewhat, since a semi-dreadnought was also significantly larger and carried many more guns than the pre-dreadnoughts of 1900 or 1902. Once the genie's bottle was uncapped, there was no way re-stopper it and return to a golden age of the past. As our eminent blogger and banker, Sir Neville Cruikshank, so elegantly puts it, "Once the genie's out of the bottle, it's down the rabbit hole, old boy." And there you have it!
Many pre-dreadnoughts fought in WWI, and most proved very strong ships. The Lord Nelson class particularly performed well against fire from Turkish forts during the Gallipoli campaign, sustaining the sort of multiple hits that could have disabled many of the pre-dreadnoughts in theatre. In fact, the Nelsons were more completely protected than the Dreadnought herself and her earliest successors in the British fleet.On the French side, Danton herself made the ultimate sacrifice, being torpedoed and sunk by U-64 off Sardinia, with the loss of 296 lives, March 19, 1917; while her sister ship Mirabeau was damaged in the Baltic while supporting the western intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1919, but survived another 9 years of service before going to the wreckers. On the other side of the Russian conflict and WWI were the Andrei Pervozvanny and her sister Pavel I. The name ship was involved in the Bolshevik revolt at Petrograd and later was bombed and damaged to avoid capture; patched up, she rejoined the Baltic fleet long enough to appear in the film Battleship Potemkin in 1925 (though this appears to be stock footage spliced into the narrative part of the film where needed). Her sister ship the Pavel was torpedoed by a British motor torpedo boat in one of the summer 1919 raids on Kronstadt. Her damage was never repaired. The ship lay abandoned for a decent interval and was eventually scrapped.
There were only 15 semi-dreadnoughts built, plus the four Japanese semi-dreadnought battlecruisers. Though a transitory concept, the semi-dreadnought idea produced ships that were large and powerful in their own right, that were measurably more destructive than the pre-dreadnoughts that preceded them. Though they proved an evolutionary dead end, still their genesis shows how keen was the competition, how high the stakes in the prewar arms race. Their layout, with main turrets on the ends and intermediate turrets lined up along the sides, prefigured that adopted by capital ships in WWII, though these usually included a superfiring turret at bow which was not in the semi-dreadnought vocabulary.
The genesis of the type was sometimes an adaptation to supply and demand, showing how profoundly the arms race taxed the productive capacity of the world's industrial plant: Japan could not get 12" guns fast enough to arm the ships she was building, and so had to be content with 10" guns instead in ships intended to be all big gun. The last semi-dreadnoughts, the later units of the Danton class, commissioned in 1911. Henceforth, the new capital ships in all major navies would be dreadnoughts exclusively. But the semi-dreadnoughts would claim their place in the histories of the Great War, and in the memory of modelers. When Kombrig, the foremost producer of resin model kits, announced its 1:350 line of deluxe models, the Russian firm chose the Danton as its first subject.
- The Sinking of the Danton - Lavishly Illustrated Account
- HMS Dreadnought: A Naval Revolution
- BBB's Encyclopedia of WWI Dreadnoughts
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