The British Battleship. Norman Friedman
dated 25 September 1903.19 DNC’s deputy J H Narbeth thought DNC might want to offer the 12in ship and he prepared slips of paper to be stuck into the Legend indicating the 12in gun alternative. Narbeth’s sketch shows engines aft, magazines between the waist turrets and boilers forward of them, abaft the bow turret. A sketch of the deck arrangement of this ship was included in the Cover for HMS Dreadnought. The 12in ship offered a 6800lb broadside and 5100lbs end-on. The sixteen 10in ship offered 5000lbs on the broadside or 3000lbs end-on. The existing design with ten 9.2in offered a 5650lb broadside and 3220lbs end-on. All of these alternatives dwarfed a King Edward VII: 4660lbs on the broadside, 2660lbs end-on.
The design was still in flux. A 14 October 1903 Legend, perhaps the first to bear the name Lord Nelson, showed eight 9.2in guns (displacement was 15,600 tons). DNC presented a G series of designs in November 1903: G was the August 1903 design (twelve 9.2in), G1 a modified version (19 October), G2 a somewhat lengthened version, G3 a shorter version. G4 and G5 were cut to ten 9.2in guns. Controller asked for more deck armour. The new rendable projectiles being adopted abroad could carry their bursters through side armour with as much, if not greater, penetration as armour-piercing projectiles (Controller cited a 6in capped shell which penetrated 10in KC armour without being damaged). Thicker deck armour was needed to deal with the splinters such inboard explosions would produce.20 In December 1903 the Naval Lords unanimously supported the G5 design, but they wanted beam limited to not more than 79ft 6in. Based on extensive work by the Boiler Committee, they were prepared to accept a powerplant using only water-tube boilers (Yarrow boilers had already been tested and Babcock & Wilcox was also likely to be satisfactory).
Early in February 1904 DNC offered a further alternative (G6) whose form was improved by lengthening it 20ft, making it certain to attain the desired 18-knot speed without extra power. This ship could conceivably mount two 9.2in in each of the amidships turrets, giving her a total of twelve such guns. DNC still considered the all-10in gun ship worth considering. He offered an updated version called E1. He also offered a further design (H) mounting sixteen 10in guns. There was no mention of the all-12in design.
At a 10 February 1904 meeting the Naval Lords considered three alternative designs: G5, E1 (twelve 10in) and H. They were uninterested in the larger G6. E1 was discussed and investigated at length using fighting diagrams. The 10in gun would not penetrate the belt or turret armour of the latest French battleships at 3000 yds, whereas in theory the 12in had 3in to spare. It was unanimously agreed that the ship should have 12in guns, as noted in a 17 February 1904 Minute. The Naval Lords unanimously chose G-5 (ten 9.2in guns), with speed set at 18 knots and displacement set at 16,500 tons including a 200-ton Board Margin. Two such ships were included in the 1904–5 programme as the Lord Nelson class – the last British pre-dreadnoughts.
It is not clear to what extent, if any, Admiral Fisher was responsible for the uniform-calibre alternatives DNC offered. He was almost certainly aware of what Narberth and Watts were offering in 1902–3 because he was Second Naval Lord between June 1902 and August 1903. However, the Cover, which includes the 10in and 12in uniform-battery ships, the types Fisher later advocated, includes no correspondence with Admiral Fisher or any acolyte. Descriptions of Fisher’s time as Second Naval Lord emphasise his work on personnel issues.21
Agamemnon, June 1908. (A D Baker III)
ADMIRAL FISHER AND A NEW BATTLESHIP
ADMIRAL Sir John Fisher was so closely associated with the advent of both the Dreadnought and the associated Invincible class battle-cruisers that they are often seen as the full content of the naval revolution he ignited as First Sea Lord, but they were actually integral parts of a much larger shift in British naval policy and strategy. However, for other navies these ships were the revolution. At a stroke they made all previous capital ships and armoured cruisers obsolescent, compelling navies either to invest heavily or to lose any pretensions to major power status. That had important implications for the developing Imperial German Navy, which thus gained an opportunity to match effective British battleship strength even though it could not come anywhere near the total number of British battleships.
This new reality made HMS Dreadnought extremely controversial. In effect large numbers of ships which were still entirely serviceable were suddenly reduced to obsolescence. The enormous numerical advantage enjoyed by the Royal Navy seemed to have collapsed, future British naval supremacy depending on how rapidly the country could build dreadnoughts. In the United States, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, the most respected naval strategist in the world, argued for the earlier type of battleship.
The new capital ships had two distinguishing features. One was the all-big-gun main battery, the heaviest guns replacing the heavy intermediate guns of semi-dreadnoughts like the King Edward VIIs and the Lord Nelsons. When other navies built all-big-gun ships, they were described as dreadnoughts. The second vital feature of the new British ships, which may have been even more significant in Fisher’s mind, was turbine power. It gave them the ability to cruise indefinitely at high speed. The previous reciprocating engines tended to break down if forced to sustain high power. Sustained steaming at high speed was vital to realise Fisher’s vision of wide-area intelligence-supported reactive deployment. Other navies, which had not adopted Fisher’s revolutionary strategic ideas, presumably put a much lower value on strategic mobility.
The account of the Lord Nelson design in the previous chapter shows that the possibility of an all-big-gun ship was being taken seriously in the Royal Navy as early as October 1902 and that it was reviewed by the Sea Lords in February 1904. It was the natural extension of the semi-dreadnought idea, which was that hand-loaded fast-firing guns were not enough to smash through the lightweight armour introduced during the previous decade. Once single-man hand-loading had been abandoned, there was a premium on faster power-loading of more powerful weapons. That began with 7.5in guns (a shell held by two men) and soon led to faster-firing 9.2in guns and then 12in guns.
By 1900, when the King Edward VII design was being developed, Admiral Fisher, who had approved the 9.2in gun as Controller, was commanding the Mediterranean Fleet. In his previous role as Commander North America Station, Fisher’s flagship had been the fast second-class battleship Renown. In exercises he found that she could mop up cruisers; in a seaway, the rated speeds of the cruisers could not be attained, but the larger battleship retained more of her own speed. Fisher also became impressed with the performance of the 10in guns aboard HMS Renown. He apparently became convinced that 10in guns could fire rapidly enough that they could effectively replace a ship’s secondary battery, yet could fire a heavy enough shell to function as a main battery. Fisher’s experience seems to have pushed him towards the idea that the battleship and the large armoured cruiser were becoming a single type of ship – a view which seems to have been shared by several leading navies. The attempt to build an all-10in gun ship in 1903 was quashed because the Board of Admiralty doubted that 10in shells could penetrate the thickest armour of the latest French battleships. Fisher seems not to have taken this objection seriously, since he advocated all-10in battleships in the initial version of his Naval Necessities manifesto.
Dreadnought after target practice before King Edward VII, 5 August 1907, with the targets hauled in amidships. By this time the upper deck 12pdrs were gone and she had a pair of such guns atop each turret. She also had her foremast searchlight and her two 9ft rangefinders. In 1909 she was fitted with a cylindrical range indicator atop her foretop; it was later relocated to the fore side of the foretop, before being removed in 1912.