Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship by Richard Hough

Author:Richard Hough [Hough, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2019-04-10T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5 - Greater-Than-Ever Guns

In the last months of 1912 a new class of battleship was laid down in the United States at Quincy, Massachusetts, and Camden, New Jersey, which was to have a most profound and lasting influence on capital-ship design all over the world. The ships were the Oklahoma and Nevada, America’s first Second Generation Dreadnoughts. They can be considered as the genesis of a family of ten more American battleships, and the family tree of every “Third Generation” capital ship can be traced back to them.

Since the earliest days of the ironclad in the 1860’s, a number of theoretical wars had raged between various principles of design and degrees of compromise, between the value of the offensive and defensive, between various forms of propulsion (sail had fought bitterly to the end), between different types of gun. In very few cases was a conclusion reached, because there were very few battles. Deductions had to be drawn from the most tenuous evidence, on manoeuvres, and even from accidents. For example, the ram was dropped only when it became disastrously evident that it was a greater threat to friends in peace than it was likely to be to enemies in war. Even from the few battles fought, the lessons were confused, contradictory, and mostly erroneous. The misguided belief about the deadly “hail of fire” has already been mentioned. Another so-called lesson from the Russo-Japanese War was that, after all, the torpedo was no real threat. But during the first fifty years of life of the armoured ship of the line, the most violent theoretical hostilities of all had raged between the gun and armour. In the 1870’s and 1880’s especially, increases in the strength and resistance of armour plate, in the power of the high-explosive shell, and variations in the importance attached to speed, protection, and hitting power, all brought about fundamental changes in the shape and fighting capacity of the battleship, and in the degree of emphasis designers gave to guns and armour. At one stage in the guns versus armour contest the caliber of the primary weapons rose to 15-inch and 16-inch, and finally to 17.7-inch, a caliber to be exceeded later only by British and Japanese ordnance. To meet the threat of these giant shells, the weight and thickness of armour plate rose accordingly. The power of resistance of armour plate was also constantly increased. On some ships in the 1870’s, the weight of armour began to account for a third of the total displacement, and the thickness went up to over 20 inches. Everything was sacrificed to a few big guns in impenetrable citadels; in others the armour was spread out here and there over the most vital parts in order that greater speed, and the ability to evade other battleships, could be obtained. These two grotesque and frightful extremes in men-of-war were very early prototypes of the Dreadnought battleship and battle cruiser of forty years later.

Battleships of the 1870’s mounting the heaviest possible guns behind the thickest possible armour plate over vital areas were referred to as “all-or-nothing” ships.

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