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She was the ship that changed naval thinking inthe early 20th century and the ship that sparked a frantic world-wide arms race, when she was launched in 1906; she was big, she was fast, she was powerful - she was HMS Dreadnought and she was built in Portsmouth Dockyard at a pace that shocked the world. Dreadnought was the result of ideas propounded by Admiral Sir John "Jackie" Fisher, when he became First Sea Lord in 1904 - a battleship that concentrated almost all of her hitting power into her main armament, with what secondary armament she carried intended only for use in the unlikely event of close-quarters action. As a result, she carried ten 12 inch breech loading guns, mounted in turrets originally manufactured for the Lord Nelson class battleships that immediately preceded her, and which her commissioning rendered obsolete, along with every other battleship then in existence. |
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The "all big gun" concept was suddenly all the rage, although of course the new classes of battleship - they were called Dreadnought types, after the original - carried not only lighter guns, but also torpedoes, but the sight of a few of these big beasties pointing at you would not have been one for sailors of the time to relish! Laid down in October 1905, Dreadnought |
was launched on 10 February 1906 and completed and amazingly commissioned on 2 December 1906 - the speed of her construction, almost as much as her appearance, sent a shudder through the maritime world. She displaced 18,420 tons, was 527 feet long and 82 feet at her widest - in other words she was big ... bigger than anything else afloat. |
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Jackie Fisher (left) had started something with Dreadnought - French, German, American, Italian and Russian shipyards were immediately involved in the biggest arms race ever known, but Britain continued to forge ahead. It wasn't long, however, before even the Dreadnought class of |
battleship was outmoded - 12-inch guns gave way to 13-inch, then 14-inch and eventually 15-inch, hulls were longer, wider and better armoured and so the Super-Dreadnought was born! After that, it was "battlecruisers", lighter armoured than battleships, but still with massive guns and several knots faster. |
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The theory behind the evolution of the battlecruiser was severely tested at the Battle of Jutland, in 1916, although British losses were later attributed to poor ammunition handling and safety techniques. Meantime, however, battleships had continued to evolve and grow apace, so that at the outbreak of war in 1914, the majority of capital ships on either side boasted at least 14-inch and probably 15-inch guns, as did HMS Warspite, seen here on the left, who, along with several similar ships of her age, survived into the second world |
war, albeit with various improvements and modifications. Radar, electronic range finding equipment and spotter aircraft catapulted off runways strapped to main gun turrets - there seemed to be no end to what could be achieved by the battleship. And then came the British air raid on the Italian harbour of Taranto and the Japanese raid on pearl Harbour and the aircraft carrier was set to make the battleship a thing of the past ... |
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