Battleships: The War at Sea

CHAPTER 1

PRE-DREADNOUGHT ERA

A battleship can be described as a large armoured warship with a main armament consisting of large calibre guns. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries battleships were the most powerful warships on the world’s oceans. A fleet of these powerful vessels was regarded vital for any seafaring nation that wanted to gain or maintain command of its territorial waters and on the high seas. How did the battleship come into being?

Line-of-battle ship

The word battleship or battle ship was coined during the 1790s and is a contraction of the phrase line-of-battle ship, which was the most powerful wooden warship during the Age of Sail. Today, the world-famous HMS Victory, Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, is the last surviving ship of its kind in the world and a national treasure for Great Britain. Line-of-battle ships (also known as ships of the line) were large, unarmoured wooden sailing ships with a battery of up to 120 smoothbore guns of various types. They were built from the 17th through to the mid-19th century to see action in a naval tactic labelled as the line of battle, in which two columns (lines) of opposing warships would manoeuvre to bring the greatest weight of their broadside firepower to bear against the enemy. Since these clashes were most frequently decided in favour of those who had the larger ships with the more powerful armament (and certainly the wind on their side), each navy tried to construct the heaviest ships with the strongest firepower of their era, thus leading to repeated naval arms races. Apart from growing in size, they changed little.

Ironclads

However, after Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar the era of proud wooden sailing ships slowly came to an end. The introduction of steam power in the late 1840s enabled ships to be less dependent on the wind in battle and during manoeuvring. This led to the construction of screw-driven ships of the line and the fitting out of a number of existing sailing ships with this new propulsion system. However, the career of these unarmoured wooden vessels with sails and propellers was short-lived due to the introduction of explosive and incendiary shells which posed a major threat to wooden ships and due to the construction of the French Gloire, launched in 1859, the world’s first ocean-going ironclad warship.

However, Gloire was built with a wooden hull, and rendered obsolete when the Royal Navy reacted and launched HMS Warrior in 1860 and its sister ship HMS Black Prince the following year, the world’s first completely iron-hulled ironclad warships. Now the naval race was on for the best protected and most heavily armed ironclad – the ancestor of the 20th-century-battleship. Nelson’s successors now had to find a way to keep the lead and maintain the dominance which the Royal Navy had been enjoying and defending since Trafalgar. In March 1863, a 22-year-old gunnery lieutenant named John Jackie Fisher was appointed to Warrior. Fisher would become the Royal Navy’s First Sea Lord in 1904, being responsible for the construction of Dreadnought, the world’s first commissioned all-big-gun battleship. The energetic and reform-minded Fisher is, like Nelson, considered one of the most significant figures in British naval history.

The superior armoured British HMS Warrior followed the French Gloire by just 14 months, and both nations began building new ironclads and converting existing screw ships of the line to armoured warships. Warrior has survived to this today, and can be visited alongside HMS Victory in Portsmouth. (U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command / NH 71191)

Battle between USS Monitor and

CSS Virginia

At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, the American Civil War was fought on land, at sea, and on rivers. On March 9, 1862, Hampton Roads off the coast of Virginia became the backdrop for the first clash between ironclad warships – the Union’s USS Monitor and the Confederacy’s CSS Virginia. While the first carried a revolving gun turret, the latter was a casemate ironclad using the raised and cut down original lower hull and engines of the scuttled former steam frigate USS Merrimack. After fighting for several hours, mostly at close range, neither could overcome the other as the armour of both ships proved adequate. Therefore, the Battle of Hampton Roads ended with a draw.

This significant engagement led to the construction and deployment of additional ironclads during the Civil War. One of these, USS Cairo, has been preserved at the Vicksburg National Military Park, Mississippi, where visitors can get an idea of the design of early river ironclads. The battle received worldwide attention, and had sustainable effects on the world’s navies – it not only confirmed the need for ironclad ships but also proved the advantages of rotating gun turrets enabling the ship to fire in all directions without having to turn the ship around immediately after passing the enemy. The rotating gun turret became the standard in warships of all types until the end of the 19th century. Therefore, the term ship of the line eventually fell into disuse due to evolving new naval tactics. Navies also began building ships with a ram as an additional weapon resembling ancient Greek and Roman designs. The ram would be driven into the hull of an enemy ship in order to puncture it and thus sink, or at least disable, the ship. With steam propulsion becoming more efficient and reliable, masts gradually disappeared from new warship designs. The mid-1870s saw the introduction of steel as a solid and durable construction material alongside iron and wood. The French Redoutable, launched in 1876, was a central battery and barbette warship becoming the world’s first battleship using steel as the principal building material.

The Battle of Hampton Roads between USS Monitor and the Confederacy’s CSS Virginia in 1862. Prior to this clash, Virginia had sunk several wooden Union ships proving the superiority of ironclad warships over conventional unarmoured wooden vessels. (U.S. Library of Congress / LC-USZ62-15167)

From ironclads to pre-dreadnought battleships

Eventually, the ironclad warship evolved into the pre-dreadnought battleship. When the first ironclads, the French Gloire and the British Warrior, were commissioned in the early 1860s, they looked much like conventional sailing warships featuring broadside batteries and three masts. Just a few years later, in 1871, the Royal Navy launched Devastation, a turreted ironclad showing a stronger resemblance to a pre-dreadnought battleship than previous and contemporary turretless ironclads. Devastation was built without masts and armed with four heavy guns in two turrets fore and aft. It was the world’s first ocean-worthy breastwork monitor (the term monitor was derived from USS Monitor), designed to attack enemy harbours and coasts. However, with its very low freeboard, Devastation could not operate as a fighting platform on the high seas as the decks would be swept by water and spray, interfering with the working of the artillery. However, navies worldwide, like the French which had launched Redoutable in 1876, continued to construct masted, turretless battleships because these vessels had sufficient freeboard and were seaworthy enough to fight on the high seas. To Horatio Nelson, the masted Redoutable built by his old French foe certainly must have looked much more familiar than Devastation constructed by his British successors. However, the Royal Navy as the dominating global sea power, determined to keep its lead in the design of modern warships, did not exclusively rely on monitors such as Devastation, and designed a type of warship that blurred the distinction between a coast-assault battleship and a cruising battleship capable of operating on the high seas. Commissioned in the late 1880s, the six ships of the Admiral-class reflected the latest developments in ironclad design. Their protection consisted of iron-and-steel compound armour rather than wrought iron, and they boasted breech-loading guns of between 12-inch and 16¼-inch (30.5 cm and 41.3 cm) calibre in rotating turrets. These heavily armed ships continued the trend of ironclads towards enormously powerful floating artillery platforms. They were succeeded by the eight larger and faster ships of the Royal Sovereign-class (1889) which were uniformly armed with 13.5-inch (34.3 cm) guns. Their higher freeboard made them unequivocally capable of the battleship role on the high seas. The nine ships of the Majestic-class (1895) eventually represented a mature pre-dreadnought battleship design, serving as a model for future British and foreign battleships for years to come. They were constructed entirely of steel and armed with 12-inch (30.5 cm) main guns having a range of 10,000 yards (9,100 m), which, due to advances in casting and propellant, were more powerful and lighter than previous larger gun calibres.

Pre-dreadnoughts battleships were armed with different gun calibres used for various roles in ship-to-ship engagements. With a few exceptions, the main armament usually consisted of four heavy guns, mounted in two centre-line turrets fore and aft. Although these slow-firing weapons initially suffered from a limited accuracy, they were able to penetrate the thick armour plating protecting the enemy ships’ engines, magazines, and main guns. Although the most commonly used calibre for the main artillery in British, French, American, Japanese, and Russian pre-dreadnoughts was 12-inch (30.5 cm), some ships such as the German Brandenburg-class (11-in; 27.9 cm) carried a smaller armament in order to attain a higher rate of fire.

The secondary battery consisted of smaller guns, usually 6-inch (15.2 cm), although additional calibres ranging from 4 to 9.4 inches (10 to 24 cm) were in use as well. Most of these weapons employed a number of innovations to increase the rate of fire making them quick firing guns. They were to be used against smaller vessels such as cruisers, destroyers, and torpedo boats. Another role of the secondary battery was to damage the less armoured and protected parts of enemy battleships. Although their shells could not penetrate the main armour belt, they could hit lightly armoured areas like the bridge, or start fires on board. They were mounted in various places, including turrets, fixed armoured casemates in the side of the hull, or in unarmoured positions on deck. Some pre-dreadnoughts were armed with an intermediate battery, typically consisting of 8-inch (20.3 cm) to 10-inch (25.4 cm) calibre guns. These light-weight weapons served as a means of adding more firepower to an already well-armed battleship. They were usually to be used against enemy battleships or at long range targets. Pioneered by the U.S. Navy, the fleets of Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and Russia followed suit. The launch of Dreadnought in 1906 almost without exception halted further construction of intermediate-battery ships and rendered the existing ones obsolete.

The armament of pre-dreadnought battleships was completed by a tertiary battery consisting of light, rapid-fire guns ranging from 3-inch (7.6 cm) calibre down to machine guns. They provided short-range protection against torpedo boats, or were to be used to strafe the decks and superstructure of enemy warships. Numerous ships carried torpedoes which usually had a diameter of 18 inches (45.7 cm) and a range of several thousand yards. They could be fired from fixed tubes located either above or below the waterline.

The American pre-dreadnought USS Kearsarge, launched in 1898, carried a powerful main armament of four 13-inch guns and an intermediate battery of four 8-inch guns. The latter soon became obsolete. (U.S. Library of Congress / LC-D4-20475)

At that time, John Jackie Fisher had risen through the ranks and been promoted to Vice-Admiral in 1896. Since his days aboard Warrior three decades earlier, he had witnessed and supported the Royal Navy’s transformation from a fleet of steam-powered sailing ships to heavily armoured steel-built pre-dreadnoughts. As an innovator, strategist and developer he had helped to improve the speed of operations (e.g. shortening the construction time of warships) as well as the range, accuracy, and rate of fire of naval guns. Moreover, Fisher was an early proponent of the use of the torpedo and torpedo boat destroyers for the defence against torpedo boat or submarine attacks.

Armour and protection

Pre-dreadnoughts carried a considerable weight of steel armour for protection against enemy gunfire. Instead of giving the ship uniform armour protection and making them too heavy, the armour plating was concentrated over critical areas including the gun turrets. The central hull section housing the engines and boilers was protected by the main armour belt called the central citadel. With a thickness of up to 18 inches (45.7 cm) or more, it ran from just below the waterline to a certain height above it. The main armament and the ammunition and magazines were protected by projections of thick armour from the main belt. The main armour belt tapered to a lesser thickness along the side of the hull towards the bow and stern; and tapered up from the central citadel towards the ship’s superstructure. The deck was lightly armoured with 2 to 4 inches (5.08 to 10.16 cm) of steel. Until the late 1880s, pre-dreadnought battleships had an armour protection consisting of iron and steel compound armour, which was soon made obsolete by the more effective American-made case-hardened Harvey steel armour. In 1895, the superior German Krupp armour replaced Harvey steel in Europe, and only the United States continued using Harvey steel into the 20th century. With the improved quality of armour plating, new ships could be built with thinner armour providing the same protection and saving weight.

Propulsion system

Prior to the construction of the turbine-driven HMS Dreadnought almost all of its predecessors were powered by reciprocating steam engines enabling a top speed of up to 18 knots (21 mph; 33 km/h). While the pre-dreadnoughts of the 1880s used simple compound engines, the following years saw the introduction of more efficient triple or even quadruple expansion steam engines. The adoption of increasingly higher pressure steam from the boilers resulted in an improvement in engine performance. The introduction of water-tube boilers allowed higher-pressure steam to be produced with less fuel consumption and less risk of explosion.

Pre-dreadnought fleet action

When the pre-dreadnought battleship was the strongest type of warship in any fleet during the late 19th century, it was accompanied by older ironclads and numerous other ships. The latter included