50 Events You Really Need to Know by Robin Cross

Author:Robin Cross [Cross, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

However, the sheer weight of these turrets meant that warships armed with them rode very close to the waterline and were thus confined to inshore operations. Moreover, the victory of a technically inferior Austrian fleet over a technically superior Italian fleet in the Battle of Lissa (1866) drove designers down the dead end of fitting warships with armored rams. Nevertheless, in the latter half of the 19th century, any navy with pretensions to modernity deployed iron ships that were driven by steam, mounted with shell-firing guns, and protected over their engine rooms, magazines and gun batteries by plates of metal armor.

By the turn of the century, the dizzying pace of change in the technology of naval warfare prompted Admiral Fisher, appointed Britain’s First Sea Lord in 1904, to establish a committee to design an “all-big-gun” battleship. Urgency was added to his deliberations by the Japanese victory over the Russians in the naval battle of Tsushima in May 1905, a dramatic demonstration of the power of modern naval gunnery.

Dreadnought In 1905, Admiral Fisher inaugurated a new program of battleship construction that would consign all other existing types to obsolescence. The aim was to concentrate in a single hull the many advances in propulsion, protection and armament now available—among them rotary turbine engines, armor protection, range-finding optics, fire control systems and detonation-retarding fuses.

“The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we have finally compromised on eight.”

Winston Churchill, home secretary 1909

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