HMS Dreadnought 1906
The first modern battleship had its inception with the launching of HMS Dreadnought by Great Britain in 1906. HMS Dreadnought, an 18,110-ton battleship built at Portsmouth Dockyard, England, represented one of the most notable design transformations of the armored warship era. She touched off the greatest naval arms race in history. In 1905, King Edward VII of England christened a new ship designed by British Admiral of the Fleet Sir John [Jackie] Fisher [later created Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, with the apposite motto Fear God and Dread Nought]. This ship was unquestionably the most powerful afloat, and few ships have captured the world's imagination like Dreadnought.
Her name, HMS Dreadnought, was derived from "Fear God and dread nought." Her name became synonymous with "battleship." Or rather, in some discussions the term "Dreadnought" was used to refer to any ship patterned on her "all-big-gun" layout, while the term "battleship" was reserved for ships with the earlier pattern of a mixed battery of large and medium caliber guns. The previous battleships were disparaged as "pre-dreadnoughts", but within a decade Dreadnought herself was obsolescent, and with time the term "battleship" came back into style.
HMS Dreadnaught represented a contest of wits between the two greatest naval intellects of the day: Sir John Fisher and Admiral von Tirpitz. For several years these men had been conducting a new kind of long-range duel, concretely expressed in new battleships, destroyers, cruisers, and other fighting craft. Tirpitz, in his rapid ship-building program, had caused great changes in British naval policy. He had forced Sir John Fisher to withdraw his big ships from the Mediterranean and Pacific, and concentrate them in the North Sea, thus making the British Empire dependent on France for its highway to India. German money was pouring into the navy, the ships were launching rapidly, and popular enthusiasm in Germany was increasing apace. What possible way to meet and to destroy for all time this growing German menace? A ship, designed several years before for the American navy, but never built, presented itself as the solution. This was a huge affair, displacing 18,000 tons-the biggest ships before 1905 displaced about 15,000-and distinguished by the fact that its armament consisted entirely of big guns. Such a ship could sail faster, shoot farther, and have infinitely greater destructive power than any other then afloat.
Germany had built the Kiel Canal for strategic purposes - as a commercial enterprise it was a failure - so that she could keep her fleet at will either in the Baltic or the North Sea. But the new Dreadnaught was too big to go through the Kiel Canal; so Germany either would not build them, or the strategic advantage of the Kiel Canal would be lost. Germany chose the later course. Dreadnaught apparently destroyed, at a stroke, the strong navy on conventional lines which Tirpitz had laboriously built up. But Tirpitz saw the situation in another light. It really furnished him the great opportunity he had been seeking. It is true that, as Sir John Fisher had foreseen, it made obsolete the whole German navy. But it made obsolete the whole British navy as well.
Such strong assertions of the disclassing of previous types were put forward, that it was only natural for possible rivals who were then far behind in the construction of those previous types to rush into the construction of the new type. Germany, in particular, took this course, and it became the fashion to concentrate attention on the numbers of British and German Dreadnoughts and Inmncibles and to estimate the relative forces of the British and German navies at selected dates, as if only ships of the new type counted and their predecessors were of very subordinate importance. Not a few high authorities, however, were of opinion that some vessels of preceding types were individually superior in fighting efficiency to the Dreadnought type, and for a given expenditure a larger number of such vessels can be produced.
HMS Dreadnought was the world's first modern all-big-gun, fast, heavily armored capital ship, and her launching made all the major ships in all other navies obsolete. The fact that Dreadnought had also made much of the rest of the British Navy obsolete should not be forgotten. Her "all-big-gun" main battery of ten twelve-inch guns, steam turbine powerplant and 21-knot maximum speed thoroughly eclipsed earlier types.
Her all big gun main armament was evolutionary, not revolutionary. Prior to Dreadnought, battleship secondary guns had been increasing in size with each new design. This made it very difficult to distinguish the splash of a big gun shell from that of secondary armament, a crucial factor in an era of visual range-finding.
The fundamental idea of the Dreadnought armament - the single-caliber big-gun - was simply a return to an idea represented in the Thunderer and Devastation, designed in 1869, repeated with improvements in a former Dreadnought, re-designed in 1872, and exemplified of the largest scale in the battleship Inflexible of 1873. The previous Dreadnought, a sea-going monitor, had a displacement of 10,800 tons, and was armed with four 12-inch muzzle-loading guns mounted in pairs in two turrets, all four guns being available on both broadsides, and having large arcs of training across the keel-line. The vessel was heavily armoured to the upper deck (10-1/2 feet above water) over a considerable portion of her length; the maximum thickness of armour was 14 inches. Her maximum speed was 14 knots, and she had a large coal supply. The heavy guns were carried about 14 feet above water, not quite half as high as the forecastle guns of the Dreadnought; and efficient fighting of the guns was difficult in a sea way. A few small guns were carried on the superstructure, and on it the boats were stowed. In armament, except for numbers of guns and their height above water, this Dreadnought was a distant prototype of her namesake designed thirty years later.
The most striking instances of the domination of armaments over warship design are to be found in the Dreadnought and her successors. In the Dreadnought there were ten 12-inch guns and twenty-seven 12-pounders. The 12-inch guns are mounted in pairs in five armoured positions. One pair is carried above a high forecastle which rises 28 feet above the normal water-line, the axes of the guns being about 6 feet higher. These guns are on the centre line of the deck and command large arcs of horizontal training on each side. Another pair is placed similarly on the centre line of the upper deck towards the after part, and commands a corresponding arc of training astern. A third pair is placed on the centre line of4 the upper deck at some distance before the after turret: these guns are available on either broadside, and command large arcs of training, but cannot fire directly astern because of the interference of the after turret. The remaining four 12-inch guns are mounted in two armoured stations, one on each side of the upper deck at some distance abaft the forward turret. Each pair can be fired directly ahead past the side of the high forecastle, and they command large arcs of training abaft the beam, but each pair is available only on one broadside. The eight guns on the upper deck are carried about 24 feet above the normal water-line. As the official description puts it: ' Eight 12-inch guns (80 per cent, of the main armament) can be fired on either broadside, and four (or possibly six) 12-inch guns can be fired simultaneously ahead or astern.' The latter statement assumes that the two pairs of 12-inch guns mounted at the sides of the forecastle can simultaneously be brought to bear on an enemy directly ahead or astern, which is unlikely to occur in practice.
The other impact of HMS Dreadnought was the propulsion system. Prior to Dreadnought, major combatants used the triple expansion reciprocating steam engine. It limited the maximum speed for a battleship to around 18 knots. The huge rods and pistons of the engine caused great vibration throughout the ship, which interfered with accurate targetting with the optical rangefinders then in use. The reciprocating machinery broke down frequently when run at top speed, and a high-speed run of any great eduration would result in the ship sitting for days making repairs.
HMS Dreadnought adopted the Parsons turbine, previously used only in small ships. The turbine's advantages were enormous. The top speed at 21 knots was 3 knots higher than previous first class battleships, maintenance time was reduced, and the lack of the vibration allowed for accurate rangefinding at greater ranges.
The swiftness of her construction was remarkable. The US Navy already had BB-26 South Carolina class approved in 1905, but they were not laid down until December 1906, hence, the failure to complete in a timely manner gave Dreadnought the honors. The first sketch was approved 15 January 1905, the keel was laid 02 October 1905, she was launched 10 February 1906 after only four months on the ways, and completed and sailed out of Portsmouth 03 October 1906. This large and novel ship was built in a year and a day. Dreadnought was commissioned for trials a year after her keel was laid and was completed in December 1906. Sir John Fisher, First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, rendered his navy and all others obsolete when he produced HMS Dreadnought in the course of a year. The design features of HMS Dreadnought were rapidly copied by other navies and by 1914 the modern gun heavily armoured battle ship dominated naval warfare.
The appearance in 1906 of the Dreadnought-type battleships forced a complete re-thinking of America's defense strategy. The change from the piston-style engines to the new turbine engines provided higher speed and longer cruising range. It was possible to envision a battleship which could cross the Atlantic Ocean non-stop. Previously, as in the Spanish American War of 1898, such an expedition would have been done in the face of great difficulties, with battleships approaching America's coast short of coal, always a much-dreaded misfortune. Steaming radius was a basic element of sea power -- how far can a warship go without feeling the necessity of putting into port? Around the year 1900, in most cases about two thousand miles. A ship, after spending a certain time at sea, would becomes more or less unseaworthy, and had to be refurbished. An English fleet, almost anywhere on the earth's surface, had a pile of coal within steaming radius.
A German Dreadnought would no longer need the advanced base and coaling station which it had previously needed to reach the Caribbean. The 3,000-mile wide Atlantic Ocean longer served as a natural barrier protecting America from European attack. Advances in shipbuilding technology had shortened the time needed to build such ships, thus the American time to respond was also shortened. The US could find itself losing a war before the country could transfer its economic power into military might.
In late 1912, the United States commissioned its most heavily-armed battleship, USS Wyoming (BB 32). Wyoming was 562 feet in overall length, with an extreme beam of 93 feet. She displaced 26,000 tons and carried 58 officers and more than 1,000 enlisted men. Her armor plate was a foot thick. Her main battery was a dozen 12-inch guns, backed by 21 5-inch guns and two 21-inch torpedo tubes.
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