Battle at Sea by John Keegan

Author:John Keegan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446496114
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

The smaller ships

At Trafalgar ships too small to ‘stand in the line of battle’ – frigates, brigs and cutters – had taken no part, except as repeating signal stations or emergency command vessels. At Jutland ships smaller than dreadnoughts had been in the thick of action, as was intended and expected. Torpedo-boats, destroyers and cruisers, light and heavy, had fought each other but had also fought battleships and battlecruisers – the cruisers inappropriately, for they were merely inferior versions of the capital ships, but destroyers and torpedo-boats as a function of their design. Torpedo-boats had been conceived, immediately after Whitehead’s invention of the first efficient self-propelling torpedo in the 1870s, as a cheap though perhaps expendable means of bringing large and costly ironclads under attack. Their development had inspired an alternative theory of naval strategy, which argued that torpedo-boat fleets put weak naval powers potentially on an equal footing with strong (its supporters formed the so-called Jeune École). That theory was mistaken; its realisation would depend on the perfection of the submarine, a development not to be completed until the appearance of the nuclear-propelled submarine in our own time. However, the torpedo, the torpedo-boat and even the early and primitive submersible imposed important restrictions on ironclads’ freedom of action and required significant alterations to their design and tactical employment. One was the incorporation of underwater barriers in the ship’s hull, culminating in the torpedo ‘bulge’, a feature long since abandoned by naval architects but subsequently adopted and refined, in the form of ‘spaced armour’, by tank designers. A second was the multiplication of secondary armaments. HMS Dreadnought had had almost none. Fisher revelled in its ‘all-big-gun’ design and its speed was considered to give it sufficient protection against torpedo attack.

A doubling of the range and tripling of the speed of torpedoes between 1906 and 1914 called the ‘all-big-gun’ philosophy into doubt. Doubt was enhanced by consonant improvements in the speed, endurance and sea-keeping qualities of torpedo-boats, which by 1914 were capable of keeping company with capital ships in fleet operations in all but the worst weather. As a result, room had had to be found in battleships and battlecruisers for large numbers of anti-torpedo-boat guns, of up to 6-inch calibre, with consequent complications to the layout of their armoured belts and magazine protection. As we have seen, many of the casualties suffered in capital ships at Jutland were caused by fire in the secondary armament, where arrangements for the safe handling of cordite propellant were necessarily less elaborate than in the supply systems of the big-gun turrets.

Torpedo-boats and destroyers – the latter originally the enemies of the former, but by 1916 simply their equivalent in a larger version – remained potent threats to capital ships, despite the multiplication of secondary armaments designed to destroy them. However, for all their speed – British destroyers easily exceeded 30 knots in the sort of easy sea conditions prevailing at Jutland – torpedo-craft were acutely vulnerable to shellfire, even to the shells fired by each other’s 4-inch guns.

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