The ship that gave its name to an era
HMS Dreadnought was launched at Portsmouth in February 1906 and completed later the same year. Her construction was rapid by the standards of the time, and the speed was part of the message. She introduced no single new invention, but she combined several ideas in a way that made earlier battleships look out of date.
The first was her armament. Earlier battleships carried a mixed set of weapons: a few heavy guns, a larger number of medium-sized guns, and many smaller ones. Dreadnought carried a main battery of ten 12-inch guns and relatively few secondary weapons. The reasoning was that, at the longer ranges now expected in battle, only the heaviest guns could be relied upon to hit and damage an enemy, and that a uniform main battery made it easier to observe the fall of shells and correct the aim. The second was propulsion. She used steam turbines instead of reciprocating engines, which allowed higher sustained speed. Her top speed was in the region of 21 knots, faster than most existing battleships.
Where the idea came from
The thinking behind the design was not confined to Britain. Naval officers and constructors in several countries had been considering all-big-gun ships for some time. The Italian naval architect Vittorio Cuniberti published a proposal for such a ship in 1903. Japan and the United States were building vessels with unusually heavy secondary armament in the same period, and the Tsushima naval battle of 1905 convinced many observers of the importance of heavy gunfire at long range, although what exactly it proved is still debated.
In Britain, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Fisher, was a vigorous champion of the new type, and a committee examined the design in 1904 and 1905. Fisher believed in speed and in concentrating resources in modern ships. The result was that Britain, with its large industrial base and shipyards, reached a finished ship first.
Why it changed everything
Because Dreadnought was clearly more capable than any earlier battleship, every battleship already built was suddenly in the second rank. These older vessels, now known as pre-dreadnoughts, remained useful but no longer defined a fleet’s strength. This offered Britain a short lead but also an uncomfortable fact: by starting a new class, it had reset the competition, and rivals did not need to catch up with a century of British building. They only needed to build dreadnoughts of their own.
Germany was the most important rival. Its Naval Laws, beginning in 1898 and expanded in 1900, set out a programme of fleet expansion, and the new ship type gave it an opportunity. Germany’s first dreadnought-type battleships, the Nassau class, were laid down in 1907. Britain responded with additional ships of its own, and public pressure in Britain for building more led to a famous slogan around 1909, “We want eight and we won’t wait”. The pace of building was driven as much by public opinion and political rivalry as by naval need.
The arms race spreads
Other powers joined. The United States laid down its own all-big-gun ships, beginning with the South Carolina class, followed by others with larger and larger guns. Japan, France, Italy, Austria-Hungary and Russia all built dreadnoughts, and some smaller states, including Brazil, Argentina and Chile, ordered them from foreign yards. Later classes of so-called super-dreadnoughts used heavier guns, around 13.5 inches or 15 inches in the British case, and larger hulls. Costs rose steeply with each class, and navies took a growing share of national budgets.
Britain also built battlecruisers, ships with dreadnought-sized guns and high speed but lighter armour. The first, HMS Invincible, was completed in 1908. They were meant for scouting and for hunting enemy cruisers, but they were sometimes used in the battle line, with grave consequences, as the Jutland fleet action of 1916 showed.
The test of war
When war began in 1914, the great battle fleets of Britain and Germany had been built at enormous expense. Yet the long-awaited decisive encounter did not occur in the way many expected. The only large clash between the main fleets was at Jutland, which ended without the destruction of either. The German fleet largely stayed in port afterwards, and the British blockade continued to constrain Germany. Submarines and mines, meanwhile, proved effective against capital ships, and the early submarines of the pre-war period became a much more serious weapon than most admirals had assumed.
Dreadnoughts survived the war, and arms-limitation efforts such as the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 set limits on their numbers. The type continued into the Second World War, though by then the aircraft carrier had begun to displace it. The dreadnought era is often seen as a classic example of an arms race: each state’s decisions were reasonable from its own viewpoint, but the combined result was a heavy burden on all of them. Whether it contributed directly to the outbreak of war in 1914 is something historians continue to argue about.