too, I benefited enormously from discussions with the late David Topliss, who was then chief of the Brass Foundry, and who was working on a study of the British warship export market; from discussions with Chris Carlson; with Chris Wright, editor of Warship International; with A D Baker III (who has always been far more than an illustrator); with Alan Raven; with Dr Tom Hone; with Dr Nicholas Lambert; and with Prof Jon Tetsuro Sumida. I am also grateful for insights offered by Bill Jurens and by Miles McLaughlin. John Roberts kindly read the manuscript and provided some valuable comments. The reproductions of the as-fitted drawings in this book will show readers just how much Mr. Baker adds when he draws a ship. That involves not merely interpreting these often ambiguous drawings, but incorporating considerable other information, much of it derived from extremely careful examination of surviving photographs, many of them muddy at best. The results include insights I have tried to include in some captions. For assistance with photographs I am grateful to Chuck Haberlein, Curator Emeritus of the photo collection of the US Navy History and Heritage Command; to Janis Jorgensen of the Naval Institute Photo Collection; to Bill Taylor; to Rick E Davis; to Clare Sharpe and Paul O’Reilly of the Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt Naval and Military Museum; to Dr. David Stevens and John Prettyman of the RAN Seapower Centre; to the State Library of Victoria; and to Chris Wright of Warship International.
I am grateful to all who helped, and who incidentally helped me, avoid some mistakes. Any errors which remain are of course by own responsibility.
My wife Rhea, who so innocently encouraged me to visit David Lyon in 1973, thus is indirectly responsible for much I have published since then. Without her sacrifice of what must have seemed an endless stay in the Nelson Room, I would never have realised what existed, and what should have been done using that wonderful trove of information. Rhea was glad for both of us to spend a great deal of our vacation with the four naval people I met at and after the visit to Greenwich, and all of us became great friends, often seeing each other on later visits to the United Kingdom. She has been my greatest support ever since. That has been much more than passive; it has, for example, included discussions of the historical (political) end of the story, based partly on her own experience as a student of history (David Lyon used to say that only ‘trained historians’ had any business writing history: Rhea is, but I am not – and neither are most of those who have been concerned with the history of naval technology).
BATTLESHIPS and battlecruisers, the subject of this book, were hardly the full sum of British naval power, but they were certainly its most expensive element. The battle fleet of which they formed the most impressive part was conceived as a shield behind which large numbers of lesser ships could exercise such vital naval roles as protecting British commerce – the life-blood of the Empire – and interdicting the enemy’s commerce. Similarly, the shield could support operations abroad: anyone trying to stop those operations had to get past the battle fleet. Anyone contemplating an invasion of the British Isles had to deal with a battle fleet capable of wiping out his invasion shipping. However, during the First World War U-boats easily avoided any contact with the British battle fleet when attacking British and other shipping. But even then the battle fleet was crucial. The best counter to the U-boats was convoy by relatively weak (hence affordable) ships. These escorts were viable because the British battle fleet cancelled the threat of heavy German ships which could wipe out escorts and convoys. This threat was demonstrated in 1917 and 1918 when German surface ships mounted successful convoy raids.
Battleships mattered because to a considerable extent it took a battleship to sink another battleship at sea (as opposed to in port or close offshore). That was what ‘capital ship’ meant. It was true even during much of the Second World War, which we think of as dominated by aircraft. Both German capital ships sunk at sea succumbed to British battleship fire: Bismarck in 1941 and Scharnhorst in 1943. The lesson of the sinking of two British capital ships off Malaya in December 1941 (HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse) was at least partly that it took massed aircraft to sink fast manoeuvring capital ships at sea. This situation began to change only with the advent of guided weapons, which sank the Italian battleship Roma at sea in September 1943, but at the time it took a large land-based aircraft to deploy them. Moreover, it was accepted through the war that a carrier caught by surprise could quickly be sunk by gunfire, as HMS Glorious was sunk by the German Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off Norway in 1940.1
It should be no surprise that, at the end of the war, both the Royal Navy and the US Navy planned to keep modern battleships in commission alongside carriers, as necessary supporting units. Battleships rapidly faded from both navies because they were too expensive to maintain in commission and because it was soon evident that the surviving surface threat was limited at best.
Numbers of battleships always mattered, more so once the naval arms limitation treaties cut overall numbers in each navy. Before mid-1940, the Royal Navy counted on the French Navy to make up the numbers needed to balance the Italians in the Mediterranean. Once France surrendered in June 1940, there was a real fear that the Germans would seize the French battle fleet and tip the balance of seapower in European waters. Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to destroy the French fleet to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. At Mers-el-Kebir the British opened fire, sinking the French Bretagne with heavy loss of life. At Alexandria, they reached an agreement which left the French fleet there neutralised but intact. Here at Alexandria on 4 July 1940 HMS Ramillies trains her guns on the French ships which had until then been her allies. They were reactivated – as allies – in 1943. Churchill’s decision was and remains extremely controversial. French naval chief Admiral Darlan had assured him that the French would not surrender their fleet. Churchill could be forgiven for some scepticism; France had just surrendered despite a pledge not to make a separate peace with Germany (Churchill had said that, if the British Isles were invaded, he would continue the fight from the Empire beyond the seas, and the French fleet could have been the core of a similar continued fight). Once France surrendered, the French fleet seemed to be the best bargaining chip that country could offer Germany. In fact, when the Germans tried to seize the French fleet at Toulon in November 1942, the French scuttled their ships. (Henri le Masson via US Naval Institute)
Admiral Sir John Fisher
The beginning of the era covered by this book can be traced to the appointment of Admiral Sir John (‘Jacky’) Fisher as First Sea Lord in October 1904. He was intimately involved with many of the crucial technical developments of the latter part of the nineteenth century and he may also have been the most important British naval tactician of his time. Fisher’s fascination with the tactical potential of new technology often seems to have led him to imagine that its promise could be realised much earlier than turned out to be the case.
As a young officer in the Mediterranean, Fisher witnessed an early demonstration of the new Whitehead automobile (i.e., self-propelled) torpedo. He later claimed that he was instrumental in convincing the Royal Navy to form an evaluation committee (of which he was a member). In 1884 he participated in exercises intended to evaluate the fleet’s ability to deal with torpedo attack while blockading an enemy fleet. Fisher became commander of the Royal Navy gunnery school (HMS Excellent), which was in effect the fleet gunnery R&D establishment. Then he became Director of Naval Ordnance (DNO), presiding over the adoption of quick-firing (QF) medium-calibre guns. As Third Sea Lord (Controller), the officer responsible for Royal Navy materiel, including ships, he was responsible for adoption of the destroyer by the Royal Navy – in effect, the antidote to the torpedo craft he had studied less than a decade earlier. Both torpedoes and QF guns were important in the concept of the Dreadnought battleship with which this book opens.
