The Battleship Book. Robert M. Farley
turrets, where the second turret on each side of the ship was elevated above the first. This allowed all of the guns to fire in a broadside in either direction. The Royal Navy and others believed that the blast from the lower gun would throw off the aim of the upper, but tests on the American ships were very successful. This arrangement was maintained in the rest of the US battleship fleet, and eventually spread to the rest of the world’s navies.
Unfortunately, because of her small size Michigan lacked the machinery to make more than 18 knots. Dreadnought, on the other hand, could make 21 knots. The next class of American battleships (and all that followed them) could also make 21 knots, which had the effect of rendering South Carolina and Michigan obsolete shortly after their completion. Unable to keep up with the main US battle squadron, Michigan generally operated with squadrons of pre-dreadnoughts.
USS Michigan underway, 1918. Enrique Muller, War Department photo.
Michigan and South Carolina were also notable for being the first US battleships constructed with cage masts. Earlier US ships had been built with more conventional masts, although by 1910 most had been refitted with cage masts. Cage masts distinguished American ships from those of any other navy in the world. They were extremely fire resistant (shells simply passed through them), but tended to restrict angles of fire for anti-aircraft guns, although this was not an important consideration in 1908. Every battleship up until West Virginia (completed in 1922) carried cage masts. The experience of Michigan also, indirectly, helped lead to the end of the cage mast era. In 1918, gale force winds bent the forward mast of Michigan all the way down to the deck, killing six men and injuring twice as many. US battleships modernized during the interwar period lost their cage masts, although four of the ships at Pearl Harbor (California, Tennessee, Maryland, and West Virginia) still had theirs on the day of the attack. Two ships (Maryland and Colorado) would retain their cage masts all the way until their disposal dates in 1959.
In any case, Michigan never saw combat outside of the action off Vera Cruz in 1914, when Woodrow Wilson unleashed most of the firepower of the US Navy against a small Mexican city. In World War I, Michigan conducted convoy escort and training ops. Michigan was taken out of service shortly after World War I, and was scrapped under the requirements of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty.
Author’s Note
Michigan was a nice, well-designed little battleship, more of a coda to the pre-dreadnought era than an introduction to the new form. US battleship architects habitually underrated speed relative to armor and armament. While other states had begun to develop fast pre-dreadnoughts, the United States built slow dreadnoughts. The US built no battlecruisers, and kept tight parameters for the speed of the “standard type” battleships.
But oh, the glory of cage masts. Unlike superfiring turrets, these were a design dead end. But nevertheless, the era of cage masts was wonderful from an aesthetic point of view. The masts set US dreadnoughts visually apart from all of their foreign contemporaries, lending a sense of uniqueness and authenticity to the American battlefleet. It’s too bad they collapsed in strong winds, were bad for anti-aircraft fire, and had a variety of other fatal problems.
USS Michigan in 1912. National Archive and Records Administration.
Related Entries:
Contemporary of… HMS Dreadnought
Preceded… USS Utah
Inspired… SMS Viribus Unitis
SMS Ostfriesland
Laid Down: 1908
Launched: 1909
Completed: August, 1911
Displacement: 22,400 tons
Main Armament: twelve 12” guns, six twin turrets
Secondary Armament: fourteen 6” guns (single mounts)
Speed: 21 knots
Major Actions: Battle of Jutland
Treaty: Pre-Washington Naval Treaty
Fate: Sunk as target by US Army aircraft, July 21, 1921
SMS Ostfriesland was the second ship of the Helgoland class, the second group of German dreadnoughts. Germany had been taken aback by the appearance of HMS Dreadnought and HMS Invincible. The Kiel Canal, which provided for quick, safe transit between the Baltic and the North Sea, could not accommodate vessels of Dreadnought’s girth. The Germans dawdled a bit before finally deciding to enlarge the canal, and in 1907 laid down their first modern battleships. The construction of HMS Dreadnought turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because while the Germans trailed badly in naval strength in 1906, Dreadnought reset the race; everybody went back to zero, and the Germans were well-positioned to make a game of it.
Ostfriesland in American service
German warship naming practice of the time used states and regions for battleships. Accordingly, Ostfriesland was named after East Frisia, a region along Germany’s North Sea coast. Like her predecessors in the Nassau class, Ostfriesland’s main armament was arranged in hexagon fashion, with turrets fore and aft and four wing turrets. This meant that Ostfriesland only had a broadside of eight 12” guns, the same as the much smaller USS Michigan. The Brazilian São Paulo and the Argentinian Rivadavia each had ten-gun broadsides, and the Hungarian Szent Istvan and Italian Dante Alighieri each managed a twelve-gun broadside on a smaller displacement than the German ship. However, like all German ships, Ostfriesland was very well armored, and capable of sustaining a great deal of damage.
Ostfriesland’s career mirrored that of the rest of the High Seas Fleet. It was thought at the time that encounters at sea were particularly susceptible to what became known as the Lanchester Equations, in which numerical advantage has exponential, rather than additive, effect. A naval battle, unlike a land battle, suffers from relatively few natural impediments. Thus, it was thought that any encounter would quickly become a match of competing battle lines. In such a match, the side with more heavy guns would cause damage above ratio to the other fleet. A small numerical advantage would mean a large victory; if sixteen ships met thirteen, the ships would not simply cancel each other out, and the smaller side would be devastated at a relatively light cost to the larger. Because the High Seas Fleet could never match the Grand Fleet in numbers, its admirals were loath to sortie.
The only major clash between the dreadnoughts of the two fleets came at the end of May, 1916, at the Battle of Jutland. Ostfriesland played a relatively small part in the battle, taking no damage but probably scoring a hit on HMS Warspite. On the way back to port, Ostfriesland hit a mine, but did not suffer crippling damage. The High Seas Fleet made only a couple more minor sorties, and mutinied when ordered on a near-suicide mission in late 1918.
A fairly old ship, Ostfriesland escaped internment at Scapa Flow at the end of the war. The surviving German fleet was parceled out among the great powers, with Ostfriesland going to the United States. A forty-two-year-old US Army aviator, Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell, had been arguing since the end of the war that aircraft could destroy surface naval units. In July of 1921, US military authorities allowed him to put this to the test. Along with a number of other naval units, including the pre-dreadnoughts Alabama and Iowa, Ostfriesland was attacked by successive waves of US Army Air Force bombers.
Ostfriesland sinking
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