Fifty years ago, Admiral Sir John Fisher revealed his new creation—the dreadnought battleship. The new ship, so much more powerful than any other, took the world by surprise, but soon all the big powers began their own versions of the dreadnought. Many small countries ordered construction of the huge ships without even considering whether they could pay for them, for not only was the dreadnought a unit of great power, but it was also a symbol of national stature.
The French development of the shell-gun and its application to naval warfare about 1840 made obsolete the oaken ships which for so long had served the purposes of war at sea. The Russian Navy was the first to exploit this new weapon. At Sinope in 1853 Admiral Nakhimov’s ships, equipped with shellguns, annihilated a Turkish squadron. In response. the French Navy quickly built three iron-plated gunboats, which served satisfactorily in Black Sea operations. But what was necessary for gunboats was even more necessary for ships of the line. Here again Imperial France took the lead, with the Gloire, a wooden vessel armored from end to end. Begun in 1857 and completed two years later, she was armed in the conventional manner, her guns lining an entire deck, port and starboard. England followed two years later with the Warrior.
The American Civil War confirmed the lesson of Sinope. The armament of the Southern ironclads was distributed on the old broadside system, which had been evolved under sail. But the North, taking full advantage of steam, produced the turreted monitor in which the armor could be concentrated over a comparatively small area. In addition the turret ship, through carrying so few guns, was able to mount bigger guns than ever before.
By 1900, after forty years of experiment, battleship design had settled down. The standard ship of the line, of about 15,000 tons, had a little bit of everything. She carried four 12-inch guns in two turrets, one forward and one aft. A considerable variety of lesser guns—8-inch, 6-inch, 3-inch, 1- pounders—lined the sides, either in casemates or turrets; frequently both systems prevailed on the same ship. Fixed torpedo tubes abounded below the waterline. Should all else fail, the bow was capped with a ram.
The point of that formidable array of short- range weapons, besides torpedo defense, was that naval gunnery was wretchedly bad at ranges of over a mile, even though an unfettered 12-inch gun could shoot ten times that distance. Furthermore, the experience of the ’90s had shown that the real execution was done by the lesser weapons. At Santiago in 1898 the Americans had scored but one major caliber hit, yet three big cruisers were destroyed by the fire of small guns. If anything, it was the heavy weapons whose value was in doubt.
In the years following Santiago, under the leadership of men such as William S. Sims and with the use of the new range-finding devices, the great potential of the big gun, hitherto unneeded and unused, was rapidly exploited. Target practices of all navies were showing hits by big guns at ranges never before thought possible. It soon appeared that battles might be decided before the opposing ships came into the range of their lesser guns. Thus was born the concept of the all-big- gun ship.
The idea, once examined, had many attractions. Fire control and ammunition supply would be enormously simplified. The fire of one battery would not interfere with that of another. A fight to the death at long range would mean that torpedoes might never come into play. Although the big guns fired more slowly than smaller weapons, they could do much more damage when they hit.
The dreadnought race, though originally only for numbers, quickly became one for bigger and better ships as well. Ten years after the advent of the Dreadnought, the type had nearly doubled in size and the end was not yet in sight.
When war came in 1914 the Dreadnought and her successors were recognized as the only battleships that counted. Already England had nineteen in service and thirteen building, Germany thirteen and six, and the United States ten and four. Almost every other maritime nation had at least one. In addition, there were over a score of battle cruisers, dreadnought versions of the armored cruiser, in the British, German, and Japanese services.
During World War I, instead of the expected all-out clashes between opposing dreadnought squadrons in the North Sea, there was only a single battleship action in the 51 months of war. This was at Jutland when by accident two huge, unwieldy fleets met in fog and mist. The 44 dreadnought battleships came through the day without the loss of a single one of their number; indeed, they were seldom in action and the admirals, perhaps overawed by the prestige and expense of their huge charges, were largely concerned with keeping them out of danger.
Nevertheless the British dreadnoughts, inactive though they were, did serve a purpose. The U-boats, deadliest peril faced by the Allies, were overcome by small, specialized vessels which, quite unable to defend themselves against the German surface forces, were dependent upon the shield of dreadnoughts. The German dreadnoughts in turn put the British to the enormous expense of providing and protecting that shield.
The dominance of the battleship depended entirely on the pre-eminence of the big gun. The great improvements in gunnery in the century before 1906 had produced the Dreadnought, but by then the big gun had reached almost the limit of its perfectibility. At the same time the torpedo and the mine were in comparatively primitive form. In World War I these two weapons were to sink many more ships, naval and merchant, than the big gun. This suggests that even in those days the dreadnought’s dominance might have been more psychological than real. In any event, not only were the torpedo and the mine coming along splendidly, but so was the aerial bomb.
These weapons had advantages over the big shell-gun of destructive power or range or simplicity and inexpensiveness. They could be transported to their targets by comparatively small vehicles characterized either by high speed or by stealth of approach. Under the circumstances the decline of the great gun was inevitable. The wonder is that the big-gun ships did so well in World War II, particularly in the first two years, when they performed their historic function with a dash and imagination reminiscent of Nelson’s time.
Most valuable, perhaps, was their effectiveness as gun-fire support ships for amphibious operations. The Dreadnought era, nonetheless, belongs properly to the first third of the twentieth century.