"I thoroughly believe in developing and building an adequate number of submarines," wrote President Theodore Roosevelt.* "I believe in building torpedo-boat destroyers; there must be a few fast scouts, and, of course, various auxiliary vessels of different kinds. But the strength of the navy rests primarily upon its battleships, and in building these battleships it is imperatively necessary, from the standpoint alike of efficiency and economy, that they should be the very best of their kind." These words were written at the height of the Dreadnought controversy in America, the heat and extent of which was exceeded only in Britain.
* Letter to the Chairman of the Naval Committee of the House of Representatives dated January 11, 1907.

There is a curious similarity between the theoretical arguments on the battleship that occurred in Britain and the United States between 1906 and 1909. In both countries the terms of the debates were conditioned by an awareness of dangers and new responsibilities, and the precariousness of isolation. The importance of naval strength in a world of threatened, and shrinking, frontiers was becoming increasingly recognized; and only the most daring and radical thinkers were at this time forecasting the end of the battleship as the first instrument of naval power.

The controversial aspects of the battleship were its size, cost, speed, protection, and above all its armament. At this distance of time, it seems curious that this highly specialized field of architecture should have been debated so widely, popularly, and hotly. Great numbers of people who could scarcely distinguish a battleship from an armored cruiser took up one side or the other in the great Dreadnought debate. An even more striking and curious point is that both in Britain and America the argument was about a fait accompli. In Britain, under Fisher's impetus, the first all-big-gun ship was on her trials before the real implications of her characteristics were properly understood and before the forces of opposition were mobilized. Everyone knew that there could be no turning back: there she was, in all her magnificence and terrible beauty, at a cost of almost $9,000.000, an increase of 20 percent over the last pre-Dreadnoughts. In America, the South Carolina and Michigan, although delayed for nearly two years after they were authorized by Congress, were on the stocks before the first blow fell.

The attack was opened by the distinguished naval historian Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a tall, scholarly, peppery former officer in the United States Navy. His background was Irish, his education private until he went to Columbia University and then to the Naval Academy. He was little known in his own country, and quite unrecognizcd in Britain, before 1886. In that year he delivered a painstakingly prepared series of lectures at the War College at Newport. They formed the basis for one of the most influential books of naval history, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783· This was followed six years later by The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793--1812. The second confirmed the authority and breadth of vision of the first, and in Britain especially he acquired the distinction of recognition as the most profound naval thinker of his day. On contemporary naval problems, however, he was to prove surprisingly retrogressive. While he was campaigning for a higher status for the American Navy, his theories on strategy and ship design were a good deal less sound. There were few people who could quarrel with his analysis of Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar; his conclusions on Togo and Tsushima were a good deal more controversial.

Shortly after the Dreadnought had been completed, Mahan delivered a lecture on the lessons to be learned from that battle. This amounted to a massive broadside against the Dreadnought principle. Because the Russians suffered great casualties and damage to their upper works from Togo's 6-inch and 8-inch shells, and because Rozhestvensky's survivors described in graphic terms the terror and bewilderment of "the rain of fire," Mahan drew the conclusion that the smaller calibers had played a vital part in the battle, and would be an important influence in future naval battles. This was false on several counts. First, Mahan disregarded the decisive effect of long-range 12-inch fire at the Battle of Tsushima; and, second, he failed to take into account the special circumstances at the battle where the outmaneuvered, outpaced, and thoroughly demoralized Russian fleet had been engaged at the later stages at the closest range by a confident and disdainful enemy. Tsushima was an annihilation, not a combat between foes of comparable power and skill, and the range was closed not by mutual consent but for the kill. For this reason, Mahan deplored the Dreadnought-inspired tendency to discard the second battery. "It has long been my opinion that [it] is really entitled to the name primary, because its effect is exerted mainly on the personnel, rather than the material of a vessel."

Alas for Mahan, during the "long" period he had held this opinion, the world's navies had suffered a revolution in ordnance and gunnery. The modern 12-inch shell could fire, and hit and sink, at more than ten miles; and with the rapid improvement in power and range of the torpedo, battleships were mutually happier to remain as far from each other as possible. Science was on the march forward; Mahan and his many disciples on both sides of the Atlantic were busily engaged in walking backward in blinkers.

On almost every count, Mahan's theories were in direct contradiction to Cuniberti's. "Speed at its best is a less valuable factor in a battleship than fighting power," ran Mahan's thesis. "To obtain increase of speed by increasing the size, whether the proportion of gun power be maintained or not-though especially if not-is also a mistake...." At a time when Fisher was already advocating oil-firing to replace coal, and telescopic funnels, Mahan was preaching: "The loss of a modern funnel will be like the loss of a formerday lower mast..... The funnels are open to serious injury by guns of that secondary battery....." Mahan wanted no increase in the size of battleships, when history had already shown that this was inevitable, and was later to show that in the eighty-five-year life of the armored steam ship of the line only international compromise reached by fear of cost, size, and numbers could halt its growth from less than 10,000 tons to nearly 70,000 tons. He wanted no sacrifice of protection or gunfire for speed, even at the expense of size. He wanted a larger number of medium-sized and less costly battleships. In these views he had many renowned and wise supporters, for special qualities-not often possessed by historians-were needed to appreciate that the pace of technology was so rapidly increasing.

The opinions of the powerful Mahan school could not be disregarded, and Roosevelt recognized the need for satisfying the American electorate before construction on the South Carolina and Michigan was further advanced and before their successors were laid down. He therefore demanded a full report, and appointed Lieutenant Commander William Sowden Sims to draw it up. Sims was the one great figure thrown up by the American Navy during its vital years of development, and represented in that service many of the qualities of both Jellicoe, the thinker, stategist, the leader in war, and of Percy Scott, the gunnery specialist and innovator, in the Royal Navy. Sims revolutionized American gunnery in the early years of the century, was Mahan's leading contestant in the Dreadnought controversy, and later commanded the United States Naval Forces in European waters in the First World War. Sims's reasoned, sagacious, and totally crushing attack on the Mahan school decided American battleship construction policy in the vital years leading to 1912. Sims made America a major maritime power.

In his report to Roosevelt, Sims was obliged to go back again to the lessons of Tsushima. Mahan had contended that few hits were made at the longest ranges at Tsushima because the distance between the lines was constantly changing and that, by this reasoning, battle fleets would in future close in so that the greatest concentration of fire from all calibers could damage the enemy structurally as well as piercing funnels, destroying the upper works, and killing the exposed members of the crew. Sims refuted Mahan's conclusions, and insisted that the initiative and choice of range were with the Japanese throughout, underlining again the paramount importance of speed, which can only be obtained by an increase in displacement; and that the main reason why Togo closed Rozhestvensky's fleet was that at above 5,000 yards his gunlayers were finding it impossible to follow the flight of their 12-inch shells visually and the splashes on which they had to rely to adjust their aim were confused by the splashes of the more frequent smaller shells exploding in the water. He also claimed a point that had not previously been considered: that the distortion to the Japanese range finders caused by the rising heated powder gas from the numerous smaller guns frequently upset the shooting of the big guns.

Sims dealt next with Mahan's belief that large all-big-gun ships were a "growing wanton evil" that caused "the wilful premature antiquating of good vessels." Sims wrote: "It seems to me that the mere fact of there a common demand for such vessels is conclusive evidence that there be a common cause that is believed to justify the demand." This "command demand" was based on sound technical and tactical considerations:

Not only would the effective broadside weight of shell be greater with the ten larger ships, continued Sims's thesis; they would also provide a greater concentration of fire owing to the shorter length of their line. Thus, the total weight of their gunpower could be brought to bear on half the line of smaller, more numerous ships, utterly overwhelming them; while the larger vessels would themselves be within the range of fire of only half the smaller vessels. Sims made numerous further, and all deadly, strikes against Mahan's arguments. He cited simplification of fire control, economy (those twenty smaller battleships would actually cost 120 to 130 millions) in initial outlay and maintenance, as well as in the total personnel: it would require fewer men to serve the Dreadnought's ten heavy guns than the battleship Missouri's, BB-11, twenty mixed 12-inch and 6-inch.

The summing up was annihilating:

The President accepted these arguments as overwhelming; and they cast aside all technical doubts-except among the most diehard reactionaries-in the Department of the Navy. Political doubts endured for much longer, however, and appropriations for the Navy were debated warmly, if only because the one unquestioned feature of the Dreadnought-type battleship was its higher cost. In the discussion on the 1908 program, for example, Representative James A. Tawney, of Minnesota, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, claimed that the Dreadnought policy "implies a total disregard of necessity or expense and requires that, like children competing for the most expensive and glittering toys, we must compete with the nations of the world in the construction of the largest and most expensive battleships in order to satisfy our national pride and vanity." John S. Williams, of Mississippi, deploring the laying down of the Michigan, considered that it should at least be given a more resounding name to match up to its claimed omnipotence. The motion he put forward ran, "That whereas the battleship sea monster we are imitating has been named the Dreadnought-an archaic name-this man o'war is hereby named the Skeered o' Nothin' as an expression of our true American spirit: provided further, that it is hereby made the duty of the first captain who shall command her to challenge in the nation's name the so-called Dreadnought to a duel a l'outrance, to take place upon the sea somewhere in sight of Long Island, and that upon the occasion of the combat the President and his Cabinet ..... shall be entertained on the quarter deck as guests of the ship and the nation." (John S. Williams's argument, in spite of his facetious tone, had some validity. The French in the eighteenth century had understood the importance of minatory nomenclature; in the twentieth century only the British seemed able to break away from states and cities and accord to battleships suitable names like Swiftsure and Indomitable, Colossus, Thunderer, and Indefatigable.)

Construction of the South Carolina and Michigan was proceeded with apace, however, and when the latter was completed in August, 1909, as the first non-British Dreadnought, and several months ahead of the German Nassau, her qualities were at once recognized. On a displacement of only 16,000 tons, 2,000 tons less than the Dreadnought, she offered with her twin turrets all on the center line an equal broadside and end-on fire. This economical disposition, by means of superimposed turrets, was at first viewed with some doubt in Europe and America. The blast effects of the upper guns on the gun crews in the lower turrets was considered by most authorities to make this arrangement impractical. In the Indiana class, BB-01, completed in I895-1896, the blast from the high-wing 8-inch turrets was said to make the working of the lower 13-inch guns impossible, and the freak double 13-inch and 8-inch turrets of the Kearsarge and Kentucky had been notorious failures. But in the Michigan, "by virtue of the improved sighting ports and the closely-fitting port shields employed, and other arrangements, it will be possible, in an emergency, to fire any of these 12-inch guns in any position of training without serious interference with the work of the other gun crews," reported the Scientific American; with the added comment: "If this should prove to be the case, our Navy Department will be the subject of congratulation on having produced, in proportion to their displacement, by far the most powerful fighting ships built or building in the world today."

This favorable comment was confirmed by one of the most prominent: naval students of the day, Commander William Hovgaard of the Massachusetts School of Naval Architecture, whose influential essays were a feature: of many issues of Fighting Ships during this period. In 1910 he wrote of the American superimposition arrangement, which was to be imitated by naval constructors everywhere:

Hovgaard also approved of the lattice, or cage, mast, another American innovation, which served its purpose (of insulating the fire control from the shock of heavy gunfire and the vibration of stressed machinery) until one was destroyed in a storm. Hovgaard described it as "ingenious," "ideal in point of construction," and "probably very resistive to gunfire." When the Michigan and South Carolina had been on the stocks for only a year, the United States Navy laid down two further First Generation Dreadnoughts, to be named Delaware and North Dakota. The size of these battleships, at 20,000 tons, represented the biggest leap in displacement since the recent renaissance of the American Navy. This was mainly accounted for by the additional overall length demanded by a further pair of 12-inch guns disposed aft, and provided a broadside 25 percent heavier than that of any existing battleship; and by the increase in the weight of armor, and of machinery to provide the same speed as in the earlier ships. In the North Dakota turbines were resorted to for the first time, and with complete success.

Mahan's fears were being realized in full. The Utah and Florida, with many features in common with the North Dakotas and launched in 1909 and 1910, showed an increase in displacement of less than 2,000 tons. But the Arkansas and Wyoming, both completed in 1912, made another notable increase in size and armament. A new mark of 12-inch gun was introduced in these ships, the 50-caliber, with considerably higher muzzle velocity and penetrating power than the earlier 45-caliber. Moreover, there were now no fewer than twelve guns all on the center line. This number was never reached by any capital ship designed and completed for the Royal Navy, and never exceeded by the Germans. The Arkansas's firepower set new standards at a time when the development in ordnance, size, protection, and displacement among the world's capital ships had reached a frenzied pace.

At the end of I912, then, the United States Navy had in commission six First Generation Dreadnoughts. In all of them, the wing turret was eschewed in favor of center-line disposition; the turbine had arrived; armor plate and internal subdivision were equal to all but the German Dreadnoughts; the average speed was rather below those of its rivals, the gunpower rather above; in size, the latest pair exceeded that of any other capital ship in the world except the latest British battle cruiser. There was nothing graceful or balanced in their appearance, but with the concentration of their lattice masts, control platforms, derricks and funnels into a small area rather forward of amidships, and the domination of the rest of the ship by the three raised and three lower turrets, they gave a sense of purposefulness and fitness to their role of destruction.

SOURCE:

Richard Hough
A History of the Modern Battleship Dreadnought
Bonanza Books
New York, NY  

Last Updated 20 January 2000