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For the late Horst Feistel, who loved battleships and what he called their zero-speed relatives, land fortifications.
1. TECHNOLOGY
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Newly completed in June 1909, HMS Bellerophon shows a typical early British dreadnought bridge arrangement. The windowed level is the charthouse and signal bridge, its wings used to conn the ship in port. It housed the helm used in peacetime. On it were mechanical semaphores (one is visible to the left of the charthouse) used for daylight signalling. On either side of the charthouse were 36in searchlights – for night illumination of torpedo craft, not for signalling. Atop the charthouse was the compass platform, from which the ship was normally conned, the officers there ordering changes of course by voice tube. The tripod foremast carries an additional electrically-controlled searchlight, also for night torpedo defence. Within a short time masthead searchlights were being abandoned as ineffective. The girders supporting the charthouse rest on the ship’s armoured conning tower, from which she was supposed to be controlled in battle. It was often argued that the conning tower was so cramped and the view from it so restricted, that it was virtually useless.
The new analogue technique was far more automated than the system in which the Dreyer Table had been embedded. That, much more than the technicalities of the new computer, may have been its greatest virtue. It required far less training and it got onto a target much more quickly. As one of the five test ships equipped with Pollen’s computer, HMS Queen Mary reportedly made the best shooting among the battlecruisers at Jutland. Since the battlecruisers’ problem seems to have been very few opportunities to practise, her superiority may reflect the difference between the heavily human element in a Dreyer Table system and the far more automated approach represented by Pollen’s computer.
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