Toward the battleship
- Related Topics:
- submarine
- landing craft
- cruiser
- aircraft carrier
- warship
The later 19th century continued to be a time of great flux in warship design. European nations tried numerous arrangements of guns and armour, such as centreline turrets, a central armoured citadel with large guns on turntables at each corner, lightly armoured big guns topside in barbettes (open-top breastworks), torpedoes in even the largest vessels, and substitution of high speed for armour.
For a time even the ancient ram was revived. When the Austrians won the Battle of Lissa from the Italians in 1866 by ramming, its value for the future seemed confirmed. Hence for years most large ships carried rams, which proved to be more dangerous to friend than foe when ships were sunk in peacetime collisions.
This period also saw a fundamental advance in underwater weaponry with the invention of the locomotive torpedo. After being presented with the idea by an Austrian naval captain in 1864, a British engineer named Robert Whitehead produced a projectile that was driven by compressed air and was designed to strike a ship’s unprotected hull below the waterline. The Whitehead torpedo, as it was quickly adapted by the European navies, was about 16 inches (41 cm) in diameter and had a range of about 1,000 yards (914 metres) at approximately seven knots.
Engines for all the types of warships steadily improved as stronger metals made possible higher steam pressures and weight reduction. In the 1870s a third cylinder was added onto the two-stage compound steam engine to make the triple expansion engine, and in the 1890s a fourth cylinder was added. These improvements on the traditional reciprocating steam engine provided a marked increase in speed that was surpassed only by the radical innovation of the steam turbine at the end of the century.
Ships
A trend toward the centreline-turret, big-gun battleship finally became clear. In it were combined the seagoing hull, armour, and habitability of the Virginia, Gloire, and Warrior with the revolving turret and big guns of the Monitor.
HMS Monarch, 8,300 tons, mounting four 12-inch (30-cm) guns in two turrets, and commissioned in 1869, was perhaps the first true seagoing turret warship. HMS Devastation, 9,330 tons, four 12-inch (30-cm) guns in two turrets, and massively armoured, was completed four years later without sail and was a next step toward the ultimate 20th-century battleship, a ship with an armoured citadel around the propulsion plant, powder magazines, and handling rooms. Rising out of it, protecting big guns and crews, were barbettes and turrets. The main battery shrank to a few powerful guns, but these took the place of many in broadside because of their great size and ability to fire through a wide arc of bearings.
The change was vividly illustrated by the “new navy” the United States began building in the 1880s, consisting not of improved monitors but of powerful seagoing capital ships with mixed-calibre main batteries. Displacing 11,700 tons, these vessels had 18-inch (46-cm) belt armour and a speed of 15 knots and mounted four 13-inch (33-cm) guns in two turrets. They also mounted eight eight-inch guns in four turrets, smaller guns for defense against torpedo boats, and six torpedo tubes. The plan was, as in other navies, to employ the heavy guns against an enemy ship’s armour-protected machinery and magazines while the faster-firing eight-inch guns attacked its relatively unprotected superstructure.
The armoured cruiser was developed in this period as a large, fast vessel armed with intermediate-calibre guns and protected by armoured deck and medium-weight belt armour. Designed for commerce protection and raiding, as well as to cooperate with the battle line in fleet action, it was considered powerful enough and sufficiently protected to fight any ship capable of catching it and able to outrun battleships. Some even held it should become the principal warship.
Less heavily armoured was the protected cruiser, the engines and magazines of which were shielded by an armoured deck, but which lacked an armour belt. Unprotected cruisers had little or no armour, carried fairly light guns, and were designed primarily for scouting, patrolling, and raiding.
Carrying the new self-propelled torpedo, the torpedo boat had great potential, particularly under conditions of low visibility. Small, unseaworthy, and useful only in restricted waters with the then-short-range, slow torpedoes, the new boats did not immediately live up to expectations; nevertheless, as craft and torpedo improved, they were soon regarded as a major menace.
Armour
Early hull armour had been of wrought iron backed by wood. To increase resistance against ever more powerful rifled guns, compound armour of steel backed with iron was devised to combine steel’s surface hardness with iron’s resiliency. The firm Schneider & Cie in France invented an oil-tempering process to produce a homogeneous steel plate that had good resiliency and greater resistance than compound armour. The later addition of nickel further improved its resistance.
Steel-armour-piercing shells came into use in the late 1880s, again threatening the armoured ship. Accordingly, an American engineer, Hayward Augustus Harvey, perfected a face-hardening process, applying carbon to the face of the steel plate at very high temperatures for an extended period and tempering. Harvey nickel-steel armour superseded earlier types. Then, in 1894, the Krupp firm of Germany devised hot-gas tempering, based on Harvey’s process, which in turn became standard with world navies. Later, the addition of chromium to nickel steel was found to be a further improvement.
Armament
The impact of developments in guns and powder exceeded even that of warship design in their effect upon navies. In the two decades after the American Civil War the main difficulties with breech mechanisms were resolved. Better guns, along with breech-loading, made possible both longer ranges and higher rates of fire.
New powders were equally important. About 1880 brown or cocoa powder appeared, employing incompletely charred wood. It burned slower than black powder and hence furnished a sustained burning that was effective ballistically but did not create excessive pressures within the gun barrel. To take advantage of this for longer-range firing, gun-barrel lengths jumped to 30–35 times bore diameter.
Several nations began to achieve success with smokeless powder of nitrated cellulose and usually some nitroglycerin. With greater striking power available, armour-piercing projectiles became more formidable. These were originally solid shot designed simply to punch through armour plate. In the 1890s, better steel and fuses made it possible to add an explosive charge. The resulting semi-armour-piercing shells became highly destructive, and in time all of the armour-piercing projectiles carried explosive charges.
In 1881 the British Admiralty advertised for an anti-torpedo-boat gun to fire cased ammunition at a rate of 12 shots per minute. Benjamin Berkeley Hotchkiss, an American ordnance engineer with a factory in Paris, produced a series of one-, three-, and six-pounder rapid-fire guns that vastly increased the rate of fire for small guns.
Ernest McNeill Eller Robert L. Scheina John C. Reilly John F. GuilmartinThe age of big gun and torpedo
From the late 19th century through World War I, the greatest driving force in warship development was the rivalry between the big gun and the torpedo. Improvements in these weapons had immense influence on the design and use of surface warships, from the huge dreadnought battleships to the small torpedo boat.
Armament
Guns
By 1900 a major change had occurred in the handling of the very heavy main guns, those of 11 to 13.5 inches calibre that fired shells weighing up to 1,300 pounds. In the 1890s such weapons often fired no faster than once every five minutes, compared to the five to 10 rounds per minute fired by a six-inch gun. As power control became easier and more precise, the big guns became more effective. By 1900 it was possible for a 12-inch gun to fire one or two aimed shots per minute.
Meanwhile, the standard of heavy-gun marksmanship began to improve. Although rifled guns had grown bigger and muzzle velocity had increased throughout the late 19th century, there had been no corresponding improvement in fire control. For this reason, effective battle ranges had not extended much beyond 3,000 to 4,000 yards. Then it was discovered that a ship’s roll and pitch could be systematically compensated for, so that each shot could be fired at the same angle to the sea and reach almost exactly the same range. Greater accuracy could be achieved by firing groups of shells, or salvos, bunched around the estimated range. The pattern of splashes raised by a salvo would then make corrections possible. By the end of World War I, fire control had improved enough that guns firing 15,000 to 20,000 yards could attain a hit rate of 5 percent. This meant that a ship firing 10 heavy guns at the rate of once or twice per minute could expect a hit after two or three minutes.
Increased range was valuable for two reasons. First, a ship that could hit at ranges beyond the capabilities of its enemies could stand off and destroy them at leisure. Second, improved gun range increased protection against the new, longer-range torpedoes.
Torpedoes
Modifications and adaptations of the original Whitehead design quickly made the torpedo a formidable weapon. Directional control was greatly improved in the 1890s by the use of a gyroscope to control the steering rudders. Another significant improvement was the use of heat engines for propulsion. British firms, introducing both heat engines and contrarotating propellers, advanced to the high-performance, steam-driven Mark IV torpedo of 1917. Concurrently with this development, an American firm, E.W. Bliss Company, successfully used a turbine to drive a modified Whitehead design. (This Bliss-Leavitt torpedo remained in extensive use until World War II.) By 1914, torpedoes were usually 18 or 21 inches in diameter and could reach almost 4,000 yards at 45 knots or 10,000 yards at close to 30 knots.
Armour
The torpedo threat forced ship designers to provide battleships with underwater protection. Schemes to place coal bunkers near the outside of the ship proved impractical, but research during World War I showed that the basic idea of keeping the underwater explosion at a distance from the interior of the ship was correct. In the Royal Navy, existing ships were fitted with external bulges or “blisters” to keep the explosion farther outboard, and new ships were built with specially designed layers of compartments designed to absorb the shock of explosion.
During the war it also became apparent that the longer firing ranges meant that more shells would fall onto a ship’s deck than on its side armour. Because these ranges were experienced at the Battle of Jutland, ships designed afterward with stronger deck armour were called post-Jutland.
Propulsion
Steam turbines
While weapons were the main driving force in warship development, changes in propulsion were also important. In 1890, propulsion was exclusively by reciprocating (i.e., piston) steam engines, which were limited in power and tended to vibrate. To escape these limits, warship designers adopted steam turbines, which ran more smoothly and had no inherent limits. Turbines were applied to destroyers from about 1900 and to battleships from 1906.
The main drawback of turbine propulsion was that really efficient turbines ran too fast to drive efficient propellers. The solution was to reduce turbine speeds to acceptable propeller speeds through gearing. By 1918, single-reduction gearing was commonplace. Late in the interwar period, the U.S. Navy adopted double-reduction gearing, which permitted even higher turbine speeds without requiring propellers to run any faster.
Fuel
Fuel also became a major issue. Coal was relatively inexpensive and easily available; however, it did not burn cleanly and was difficult to transfer from ship to ship at sea. Oil, on the other hand, burned cleanly, and it could be transferred easily at sea. Also, it had a higher thermal content than coal, so that the same weight or volume of oil could drive a ship much farther. The United States shifted to oil fuel in new ships in about 1910 and converted its remaining coal-burning warships after World War I. Beginning with the Queen Elizabeth class of battleships in 1915–16, Britain switched to oil. The other navies followed suit after the war.
Internal combustion
In contrast to the steam engine, a gasoline or diesel engine often needed no tending at all, could be very compact, and could start and stop quite easily. Such engines made it possible to build small, fast coastal minesweepers, subchasers, and motor torpedo boats. Internal combustion was thought to be especially suitable to subchasers, which would have to stop their engines while listening for a submarine and then start them up suddenly when something was heard.
