Sailor Steve
03-13-06, 12:14 PM
Stupid, Stupid, Stupid!
I had planned on posting some of the information I've collected over the years, of the events leading up to the 100th anniversary of the First World War, which is not for another eight years, but a large part of it was due to the naval arms race which began in 1905, with the laying down of the first all big-gun battleship, HMS Dreadnought. I had already missed posting the anniversary of the laying down of the keel of the big ship, but the launching was coming up, and most naval buffs consider the launching to be the most important part of the development of a ship anyway. I knew the launching was in October 1906, so I started checking my sources again, only to find out that I had the date way off, thanks mostly to the stupid British practice of listing dates backward, day first instead of month first. Before anyone takes this too seriously, I'm sure any self-respecting Briton will be glad to tell me it's we Yanks who have it backwards, and he would be right. My mistake is my own and nobody else's.
The bottom line is this: HMS Dreadnought was launched on February 10, 1906; one hundred years and a little over a month ago. The signifigance is this: Being an island, Britain has always had to rely more on a navy than an army for protection, and in keeping with that need had maintained the lead in naval technology and construction since the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 1600s. During the heyday of the sailing warship during the 1700-1800s, Britain had kept the largest fleet of any nation, and was always the envy of every country which aspired to be a world power.
Since the ancient Phonicians ocean-going ships had been of two types: war and commercial. Warships were long and sleek, and carried a sail for long-distance travel but were rowed when going into combat. This of course required that the rowers be trained soldiers; the novelist's idea of Romans using slaves to row galleys was pure fantasy. Every man on a warship had to be there because he wanted to, or failure was inevitable. There were slaves on Roman ships, just as there were slaves in the Roman army. Any slave of Rome could buy his freedom and that of his family simply by serving for twenty years in the military. Commercial ships were short, round and tubby; they had to be to hold enough cargo to make a profit. They were almost always family-owned: the crew would be a father and his sons, or sons-in-law. For this reason they were easy prey for pirates, and travelled with a war-galley when they could.
These two main types of ships didn't change much until the coming of the gun in the 1400s. The ship-board cannon made mercantile shipping much safer; pirates usually hid out on islands, attacking in large groups in small boats. If a merchant ship was armed it was a deadly threat to the pirate, even if it only had a crew of eight or ten men. During this time the warship started to rely more on sails than oars, but even with cannon it was still common for the main fighting to be with soldiers. Guns would be used to sweep the decks, but the boarding action and hand-to-hand fight resolved the battle. It was the English development of the lighter, faster ship and the long nine-pound gun that held the Spanish Armada at bay in 1588, even though the Armada was far superior in numbers, both in ships and men. In 1652 and again in 1665 The Dutch and English went to war over trade rights, now in ships which were being designed to fight at longer ranges and only close when one or the other was dismasted and decrewed. Boarding was now put off until victory was fairly certain. In the "Day of fighting sail" of the 1700s it was common for ships to strike their colors and surrender; though there were still boarding actions they were few and far between.
The late 1700s saw the coming of the industrial revolution. Scottish inventor James Watt created the first steam engine and modern technology came into existence. One of the problems was the use of brass for boilers-pressure had to kept low, so for a boiler to provide enough power it had to be huge; steam power at first could only be used to run factories and mines. Then came the development of rolled iron plates, and boilers could now handle far higher pressures. In 1807 Robert Fulton, another Scotsman living in America made the first successful steamship, the Clermont, then made a fortune carrying cargoes up and down the Hudson River in New York State.
Steamships soon became the norm for commercial traffic, and it wasn't long before its use was looked to for warships. Fulton himself designed Demologos, a central-paddle steam warship with sides several feet thick, designed to lift the British blockade of New York in the war of 1812. Unfortunately for the Americans the ship wasn't finished until long after that war was over, and it spent its short life as a curiosity. One of the problems with a paddle warship was the susceptibility to damage to the paddle; another was that the paddle took up space where the guns should be. Also the side paddles were extrememly vulnerable to the constantly changing motion of the waves. The solution came from another engineer, this time a Swede by the name of John Ericsson, in the form of the screw propellor. This solved all three problems: it had no problems with wave variation, it was safely located underwater and out of the way of incoming fire and it left the entire side of the ship free for the mounting of guns.
In 1855, during the Crimean War, the British and French found a new use for rolled iron: armor. They created what they called "Floating Ironclad Batteries", barges with small maneuvering engines and sloping iron plates to protect guns and crews. In 1959 the French navy had the first ocean-going ironclad ship, La Gloire, and in 1860 the British created the first ship with an all-iron hull, Warrior. These ships were powered by steam and sail, a compromise that would dominate naval design for the next ten years.
In 1861 one of the first actions of the American Civil War was the capture by the Confereracy of the Union naval base at Gosport, just outside Norfold, Virginia. The retreating Federal forces scuttled and burned several ships, the most important being USS Merrimack, a 40-gun steam frigate. The ship was burned, but this caused it to sink quickly, saving the engine and boilers from fire damage. The Confederates raised the hull and started to turn it into an entirely new ship, an ironclad they renamed CSS Virginia. When word of this leaked to the North, work was begun on three ironclads designed to counter the new threat. The one which ended up being used for this purpose was designed by John Ericsson, now living in the United States. He called it USS Monitor, and it gave its name to all ships of the type which followed it. Monitor and Virginia met in battle at Hampton Roads, the bay outside Norfolk at the mouth of the James River, on March 9, 1862. The day before Virginia had attacked the wooden fleet blockading the area, and sank two frigates, USS Cumberland and USS Congress. While the first fight of the ironclads was technically a draw, Monitor did prevent Virginia from destroying a third Union ship, and the blockade remained in place.
Another development of the time was the big gun itself. In the sailing era ships mounted anywhere from 18 to 120 guns, rated by the weight of the shot they fired. 18-pound guns were considered large at first, but by the end of the Age Of Sail the ships were carrying 32-pounders, with backup carronades (short guns) of up to 64 pounds. By 1865 American monitors were carrying 15-inch guns, firing shot weighing up to 300 pounds. European manufacturers started developing even bigger guns to counter this threat, and soon were successfully making breech-loading guns, which could fire much faster.
During the 1870s the British experimented with large warships simply called "Turret Ships", the largest of these being HMS Victoria and Sans Pareil, which carried a pair of 16.25" guns firing an oblong shell weighing 1800 pounds. These ships were the exception, though, the usual big gun of the time being 13.5" diameter and firing a 1250-pound shell; still plenty big.
One of the problems of these ships was the low freeboard required to carry four guns weighing 67 tons each, and so ship designs got larger. The first class of ships to be officially called "Battleships" were the British Royal Sovereign class of 1892. These ships were larger than anything that had gone before, being 410 feet long overall and displacing 14,150 tons. They carried four 13.5" guns in two open barbettes, and twelve 6" guns arranged in batteries along the sides. The open barbette was required for the main guns in order to make them stable with a freeboard high enough for ocean-going duties. If they had had full turrets they would have been top-heavy, and would have had to have a low freeboard to keep them stable, which in turn would have made them more susceptible to wave action in bad weather. An eighth ship, HMS Hood, was built that way and suffered exactly those problems.
The problem was solved in 1896 with the Majestic class battleships. A new process was created for making big guns, which involved winding miles of wire around the inner lining of the gun, making it much stronger. Though it only fired an 850-pound shell, the new wire-wound 12" gun was actually more deadly than the old 13.5", and light enough for the new ships to carry in an enclosed and armored turret. Another development of the class was the use of Harvey process Nickel-steel armor, which was stronger that regualar steel and allowed thinner plates-9" versus the previouse 18", thus making the ship lighter.
The Canopus class of 1899 used the new German-designed Krupp Cemented armor, which was even stronger. They made a mistake in over-estimating its strength, however, and only used 6" plates. This was rectified in the following classes, 9" of Krupp Cemented becoming the norm.
A new problem began to develop at this time, in the form of a new technology: fire control. Previously each gun of a battery had its own gun-captain, a practice dating back to the earlies days of naval gunnery. The gun-captain would do his own aiming, by eyeball, and do his own gun-laying, which is setting up the gun to fire at the required range. Since each gun-captain had to distinguish the splash of his shells from those of all the others, firing was limited to point-blank range, for these guns about 1,000 yards. With the development of the split-image rangefinder ranges could now be accurately obtained out to about 10,000 yards. It would be impossible to supply each gun-captain with such a device, and even if it could be done the the gun-captain would have to single out his splashes from the nine others firing on a typical broadside. Needless to say, this would be impossible. Thus, the rangefinders were mounted high up in the masts, and the gun-captains had to be retrained to follow the orders of a new superior, the Fire-Control Officer. They soon discovered their new problem. 12-inch guns and six-inch shells have different flight characteristics, and even the FCO couldn't make the guns elevate to give the same flight paths; furthermore at the longer ranges he couldn't tell the 12" splashes from the 6", so even if the guns fired as a group mistakes were constantly made.
The last major group of British pre-Dreadnoughts, as they came to be known, were the King Edward VII class of 1905. These attempted to raise firepower by reducing the number of 6" guns from twelve to ten and adding four 9.2" guns in small turrets. While this did increase the firepower it also complicated the problem by adding a third caliber of shell splash to the mix. A further attempt was made with the laying down of Lord Nelson and Agammemnon in 1905, which did away with the 6" guns altogether in favor of ten 9.2" guns. These last two ships would be delayed in favor of Dreadnought, which made them post-Dreadnought pre-dreadnoughts. Of course this also applies to the ships of every other nation in the world, which were still being finished to the old designs.
HMS Dreadnought carried ten 12"/45 caliber guns in an odd arrangement: one 2-gun turret forward, two turrets across from each other just behind the bridge, one more turret amidships on the centerline and the last one on the centerline aft. This meant that she could only fire eight guns on a broadside, but it also meant that she could fire six guns straight forward, and since it was believed that any older ship who saw her coming woud try to run away, this was exactly the arrangement the designers wanted. Dreadnought was revolutionary in one more respect: she was the first large warship to carry the new steam turbine engines. These took up less space, were cleaner and easier to operate and gave more power, making Dreadnought the first battleship capable of 21 knots. Altogether she was truly something new, and led to an arms race which some historians credit with being a major cause of the Great War.
I hope to update this and keep current with new events in the future, and maybe even get the dates right sometimes.
I had planned on posting some of the information I've collected over the years, of the events leading up to the 100th anniversary of the First World War, which is not for another eight years, but a large part of it was due to the naval arms race which began in 1905, with the laying down of the first all big-gun battleship, HMS Dreadnought. I had already missed posting the anniversary of the laying down of the keel of the big ship, but the launching was coming up, and most naval buffs consider the launching to be the most important part of the development of a ship anyway. I knew the launching was in October 1906, so I started checking my sources again, only to find out that I had the date way off, thanks mostly to the stupid British practice of listing dates backward, day first instead of month first. Before anyone takes this too seriously, I'm sure any self-respecting Briton will be glad to tell me it's we Yanks who have it backwards, and he would be right. My mistake is my own and nobody else's.
The bottom line is this: HMS Dreadnought was launched on February 10, 1906; one hundred years and a little over a month ago. The signifigance is this: Being an island, Britain has always had to rely more on a navy than an army for protection, and in keeping with that need had maintained the lead in naval technology and construction since the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 1600s. During the heyday of the sailing warship during the 1700-1800s, Britain had kept the largest fleet of any nation, and was always the envy of every country which aspired to be a world power.
Since the ancient Phonicians ocean-going ships had been of two types: war and commercial. Warships were long and sleek, and carried a sail for long-distance travel but were rowed when going into combat. This of course required that the rowers be trained soldiers; the novelist's idea of Romans using slaves to row galleys was pure fantasy. Every man on a warship had to be there because he wanted to, or failure was inevitable. There were slaves on Roman ships, just as there were slaves in the Roman army. Any slave of Rome could buy his freedom and that of his family simply by serving for twenty years in the military. Commercial ships were short, round and tubby; they had to be to hold enough cargo to make a profit. They were almost always family-owned: the crew would be a father and his sons, or sons-in-law. For this reason they were easy prey for pirates, and travelled with a war-galley when they could.
These two main types of ships didn't change much until the coming of the gun in the 1400s. The ship-board cannon made mercantile shipping much safer; pirates usually hid out on islands, attacking in large groups in small boats. If a merchant ship was armed it was a deadly threat to the pirate, even if it only had a crew of eight or ten men. During this time the warship started to rely more on sails than oars, but even with cannon it was still common for the main fighting to be with soldiers. Guns would be used to sweep the decks, but the boarding action and hand-to-hand fight resolved the battle. It was the English development of the lighter, faster ship and the long nine-pound gun that held the Spanish Armada at bay in 1588, even though the Armada was far superior in numbers, both in ships and men. In 1652 and again in 1665 The Dutch and English went to war over trade rights, now in ships which were being designed to fight at longer ranges and only close when one or the other was dismasted and decrewed. Boarding was now put off until victory was fairly certain. In the "Day of fighting sail" of the 1700s it was common for ships to strike their colors and surrender; though there were still boarding actions they were few and far between.
The late 1700s saw the coming of the industrial revolution. Scottish inventor James Watt created the first steam engine and modern technology came into existence. One of the problems was the use of brass for boilers-pressure had to kept low, so for a boiler to provide enough power it had to be huge; steam power at first could only be used to run factories and mines. Then came the development of rolled iron plates, and boilers could now handle far higher pressures. In 1807 Robert Fulton, another Scotsman living in America made the first successful steamship, the Clermont, then made a fortune carrying cargoes up and down the Hudson River in New York State.
Steamships soon became the norm for commercial traffic, and it wasn't long before its use was looked to for warships. Fulton himself designed Demologos, a central-paddle steam warship with sides several feet thick, designed to lift the British blockade of New York in the war of 1812. Unfortunately for the Americans the ship wasn't finished until long after that war was over, and it spent its short life as a curiosity. One of the problems with a paddle warship was the susceptibility to damage to the paddle; another was that the paddle took up space where the guns should be. Also the side paddles were extrememly vulnerable to the constantly changing motion of the waves. The solution came from another engineer, this time a Swede by the name of John Ericsson, in the form of the screw propellor. This solved all three problems: it had no problems with wave variation, it was safely located underwater and out of the way of incoming fire and it left the entire side of the ship free for the mounting of guns.
In 1855, during the Crimean War, the British and French found a new use for rolled iron: armor. They created what they called "Floating Ironclad Batteries", barges with small maneuvering engines and sloping iron plates to protect guns and crews. In 1959 the French navy had the first ocean-going ironclad ship, La Gloire, and in 1860 the British created the first ship with an all-iron hull, Warrior. These ships were powered by steam and sail, a compromise that would dominate naval design for the next ten years.
In 1861 one of the first actions of the American Civil War was the capture by the Confereracy of the Union naval base at Gosport, just outside Norfold, Virginia. The retreating Federal forces scuttled and burned several ships, the most important being USS Merrimack, a 40-gun steam frigate. The ship was burned, but this caused it to sink quickly, saving the engine and boilers from fire damage. The Confederates raised the hull and started to turn it into an entirely new ship, an ironclad they renamed CSS Virginia. When word of this leaked to the North, work was begun on three ironclads designed to counter the new threat. The one which ended up being used for this purpose was designed by John Ericsson, now living in the United States. He called it USS Monitor, and it gave its name to all ships of the type which followed it. Monitor and Virginia met in battle at Hampton Roads, the bay outside Norfolk at the mouth of the James River, on March 9, 1862. The day before Virginia had attacked the wooden fleet blockading the area, and sank two frigates, USS Cumberland and USS Congress. While the first fight of the ironclads was technically a draw, Monitor did prevent Virginia from destroying a third Union ship, and the blockade remained in place.
Another development of the time was the big gun itself. In the sailing era ships mounted anywhere from 18 to 120 guns, rated by the weight of the shot they fired. 18-pound guns were considered large at first, but by the end of the Age Of Sail the ships were carrying 32-pounders, with backup carronades (short guns) of up to 64 pounds. By 1865 American monitors were carrying 15-inch guns, firing shot weighing up to 300 pounds. European manufacturers started developing even bigger guns to counter this threat, and soon were successfully making breech-loading guns, which could fire much faster.
During the 1870s the British experimented with large warships simply called "Turret Ships", the largest of these being HMS Victoria and Sans Pareil, which carried a pair of 16.25" guns firing an oblong shell weighing 1800 pounds. These ships were the exception, though, the usual big gun of the time being 13.5" diameter and firing a 1250-pound shell; still plenty big.
One of the problems of these ships was the low freeboard required to carry four guns weighing 67 tons each, and so ship designs got larger. The first class of ships to be officially called "Battleships" were the British Royal Sovereign class of 1892. These ships were larger than anything that had gone before, being 410 feet long overall and displacing 14,150 tons. They carried four 13.5" guns in two open barbettes, and twelve 6" guns arranged in batteries along the sides. The open barbette was required for the main guns in order to make them stable with a freeboard high enough for ocean-going duties. If they had had full turrets they would have been top-heavy, and would have had to have a low freeboard to keep them stable, which in turn would have made them more susceptible to wave action in bad weather. An eighth ship, HMS Hood, was built that way and suffered exactly those problems.
The problem was solved in 1896 with the Majestic class battleships. A new process was created for making big guns, which involved winding miles of wire around the inner lining of the gun, making it much stronger. Though it only fired an 850-pound shell, the new wire-wound 12" gun was actually more deadly than the old 13.5", and light enough for the new ships to carry in an enclosed and armored turret. Another development of the class was the use of Harvey process Nickel-steel armor, which was stronger that regualar steel and allowed thinner plates-9" versus the previouse 18", thus making the ship lighter.
The Canopus class of 1899 used the new German-designed Krupp Cemented armor, which was even stronger. They made a mistake in over-estimating its strength, however, and only used 6" plates. This was rectified in the following classes, 9" of Krupp Cemented becoming the norm.
A new problem began to develop at this time, in the form of a new technology: fire control. Previously each gun of a battery had its own gun-captain, a practice dating back to the earlies days of naval gunnery. The gun-captain would do his own aiming, by eyeball, and do his own gun-laying, which is setting up the gun to fire at the required range. Since each gun-captain had to distinguish the splash of his shells from those of all the others, firing was limited to point-blank range, for these guns about 1,000 yards. With the development of the split-image rangefinder ranges could now be accurately obtained out to about 10,000 yards. It would be impossible to supply each gun-captain with such a device, and even if it could be done the the gun-captain would have to single out his splashes from the nine others firing on a typical broadside. Needless to say, this would be impossible. Thus, the rangefinders were mounted high up in the masts, and the gun-captains had to be retrained to follow the orders of a new superior, the Fire-Control Officer. They soon discovered their new problem. 12-inch guns and six-inch shells have different flight characteristics, and even the FCO couldn't make the guns elevate to give the same flight paths; furthermore at the longer ranges he couldn't tell the 12" splashes from the 6", so even if the guns fired as a group mistakes were constantly made.
The last major group of British pre-Dreadnoughts, as they came to be known, were the King Edward VII class of 1905. These attempted to raise firepower by reducing the number of 6" guns from twelve to ten and adding four 9.2" guns in small turrets. While this did increase the firepower it also complicated the problem by adding a third caliber of shell splash to the mix. A further attempt was made with the laying down of Lord Nelson and Agammemnon in 1905, which did away with the 6" guns altogether in favor of ten 9.2" guns. These last two ships would be delayed in favor of Dreadnought, which made them post-Dreadnought pre-dreadnoughts. Of course this also applies to the ships of every other nation in the world, which were still being finished to the old designs.
HMS Dreadnought carried ten 12"/45 caliber guns in an odd arrangement: one 2-gun turret forward, two turrets across from each other just behind the bridge, one more turret amidships on the centerline and the last one on the centerline aft. This meant that she could only fire eight guns on a broadside, but it also meant that she could fire six guns straight forward, and since it was believed that any older ship who saw her coming woud try to run away, this was exactly the arrangement the designers wanted. Dreadnought was revolutionary in one more respect: she was the first large warship to carry the new steam turbine engines. These took up less space, were cleaner and easier to operate and gave more power, making Dreadnought the first battleship capable of 21 knots. Altogether she was truly something new, and led to an arms race which some historians credit with being a major cause of the Great War.
I hope to update this and keep current with new events in the future, and maybe even get the dates right sometimes.