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HMS Dreadnought

Laid Down: 1905

Launched: 1906

Completed: December, 1906

Displacement: 18,200 tons

Main Armament: ten 12” guns (five twin turrets)

Secondary Armament: twenty-seven 3” guns (single mounts)

Speed: 21 knots

Treaty: Pre-Washington Naval Treaty

Major Engagements: Sinking of U-29

Fate: Scrapped, 1923

State of the art battleship armament in the late nineteenth century involved a mix of large and small caliber weapons. Naval architects believed that most engagements would take place within the range of the smaller guns, and that a variety of guns would combine penetrating power with volume. Indeed, some argued that large armored ships with small weapons (armored cruisers, which were roughly the same size as battleships) could defeat battleships by saturating them with fire.

HMS Dreadnought

However, developments in optics and improvements in gun accuracy at the beginning of the twentieth century began to tilt the balance toward heavier guns. The increased accuracy meant that ships could engage and expect hits at previously unimagined ranges. Moreover, the high rate of fire of smaller guns was mitigated by the fact that it was difficult to acquire the range by gun splashes when there were so many splashes around the target. Indeed, the presence of smaller weapons made it more difficult to get hits with larger guns. In 1904, the Japanese and the Americans began thinking about “all big gun” ships, which would carry a larger main armament at the expense of the secondary weapons. Satsuma, laid down in 1905, was designed to carry twelve 12” guns, but ended up carrying four 12” and twelve 10” because of a shortage of 12” barrels. The Americans didn’t lay down South Carolina (which would carry eight 12” guns in four twin turrets) until December 1906, about the time that HMS Dreadnought entered service.

In October 1905 John “Jackie” Fisher became First Sea Lord. Fisher was, in organizational terms, a committed revolutionary. He retired many of the older ships and set others to reduced commission. His vision of the Royal Navy centered on a new kind of ship, the battlecruiser, that would have the speed and armament to either destroy or run away from any potential foe. This would answer the threat posed by German merchant cruisers (or French armored cruisers), while also providing for a powerful offensive capability. The Admiralty agreed to pursue the battlecruiser project, but also called for significant attention to the line of battle. Fisher compromised on a new design for a battleship, to be called Dreadnought. The Royal Navy has used the name Dreadnought (meaning “fear nothing”) throughout its history (a Dreadnought served with Nelson at Trafalgar), with the 1906 version being the sixth to carry the moniker. The name was later applied to the Royal Navy’s first nuclear attack submarine.

Admiral Sir John Fisher, December 28, 1915. Bain News Service.

Dreadnought, like Satsuma and South Carolina, would carry a single main armament of large guns, rather than the mixed armament of previous ships. But Fisher wanted more than big guns. What distinguished Dreadnought from South Carolina or Satsuma was the decision to use turbines instead of reciprocating engines, resulting in a higher speed, faster cruising, and less vibration. It was this contribution that helped make Dreadnought a revolutionary design. Neither the Americans nor the Japanese had envisioned their new ships as part of a fundamental break with the past. USS South Carolina was built onto the hull of a Connecticut class pre-dreadnought with what amounted to a re-arranged armament. She could have (and eventually did) operated at the head of a squadron of pre-dreadnoughts without difficulty or embarrassment.

Dreadnought, on the other hand, rendered the previous battleships of the world obsolete at a stroke. Carrying a large number of heavy, long range guns and having a higher speed than any contemporary meant that she could destroy extant battleships at range. Later battleships would have to be modeled upon Dreadnought; thus, she gave her name to a type of warship.

Dreadnought and Victory at Portsmouth. Henry J. Morgan, 1907.

The British didn’t believe that superfiring turrets would work (and, in their defense, superfiring experiments in American battleships had yielded poor results), so arranged the turrets one fore, two aft, and one on each wing. This gave Dreadnought an eight gun broadside and six gun head on fire in either direction. Dreadnought was armored on roughly the same scale as the Lord Nelson class pre-dreadnoughts.

Dreadnought became Fisher’s political cause. Fisher began stockpiling material for Dreadnought before finalizing the design, and delayed all other construction to accelerate her completion (Lord Nelson and Agamemnon were so delayed by this concentration that they didn’t commission until 1908). Laid down in October 1905 (five months after Satsuma), she was launched in February 1906. HMS Dreadnought was commissioned in December 1906 (accounts vary as to whether on the third, sixth, or eleventh of the month).

Dreadnought represented what theorists of design refer to as an “architectural innovation.” Her planners took a set of pre-existing technologies and re-arranged them into something transformative, without necessarily exploring new innovation in any one of these categories. As such, it was not difficult for other countries to adopt the same architecture. Her construction forced the navies of the world to reappraise their own battleship designs, with the result that Dreadnought remained the most powerful ship in the world for only a brief period of time. By 1910, even Brazil (through British contracts) owned more powerful battleships than Dreadnought. But however quickly other ships might have eclipsed Dreadnought, she so clearly outclassed everything that had come before that the preceding ships were considered obsolescent and virtually useless for front-line service.

Her actual war career was less consequential. Dreadnought served as flagship of the Home Fleet until 1912, eventually taking a secondary role as newer and larger battleships entered service. Still, she remained a squadron flagship while she stayed with the Grand Fleet.

On March 18, 1915, the German submarine U-29 slipped into Pentland Firth (in the Orkneys) to attack the Grand Fleet at exercise. The U-boat inadvertently surfaced after firing her torpedoes, and the nearby Dreadnought rammed her at speed, sinking the German submarine. Dreadnought is the only battleship to ever sink a submarine. Ironically, the number of dreadnoughts sunk by submarine in World War I is smaller than the number of submarines sunk by Dreadnought.

Dreadnought missed Jutland while in refit, and served for a while as flagship of a squadron of pre-dreadnoughts stationed on the Thames, intended to deter German battlecruisers from bombarding English coastal towns. Although she returned to the Grand Fleet in March 1918, she was placed in reserve when the war ended, and scrapped in 1923. She survived First Baron John Fisher (who had taken “Fear god and dread nought” on his family’s coat of arms) by three years.

Author’s Note

It’s interesting to consider what modern battleships would have been called if another ship had preceded Dreadnought. I doubt, for example, that the navies of the world would have come to call their ships “South Carolinas.” Satsuma has a decent ring to it, but the Japan is probably too remote for the name to catch on. Dreadnought was followed on the slips by HMS Bellerophon and HMS Temeraire, neither of which, I suspect, would have become popular.

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HMS Dreadnought. Jane’s Fighting Ships, 1906-07.

The notion that a warship could go from being the world class to obsolete in a decade (perhaps less, given how quickly new ships outclassed Dreadnought) is almost entirely alien to modern sensibilities. Between 1905 and 1915, this essentially happened twice in a ten year period. HMS Queen Elizabeth was probably as far ahead of Dreadnought in terms of raw power as Dreadnought was ahead of the latest pre-dreadnoughts, although in the case of the former the innovation was more incremental (fast incremental) than disruptive. This degree of innovation was outmatched by everything except the fighter aircraft design industry during the twentieth century. Remarkably, however, many of the ships built just a decade after Dreadnought remained in service until the mid-1940s.

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