One British ship in 1906 made every battleship afloat obsolete
In 1906 Britain launched HMS Dreadnought, armed with ten big guns of one size and none of the usual medium weapons. Overnight every earlier battleship looked outdated, and navies worldwide scrambled to build their own dreadnoughts, sparking a costly arms race. Yet the only major fleet clash of the First World War, at Jutland, settled nothing.
The battleship's ancestor was the wooden ship of the line, carrying up to 120 smoothbore guns and fighting in long lines that fired broadsides. From 1794 the phrase line of battle ship was shortened to battleship. These vessels were remarkably tough; Britain lost none of its largest first-rates to enemy action throughout the 18th century. Steam came first to small craft, and in 1850 France launched the 90-gun Napoleon, the first true steam battleship, able to make 12 knots whatever the wind.
Armour followed. France's Gloire, launched in 1859, was an ocean-going wooden warship clad in iron plates, and Napoleon III's order for five more triggered a race with Britain that spread to Italy, Austria, Spain, Russia and both sides of the American Civil War. After much experimentation, Britain's Royal Sovereign class of the late 1880s set the pattern for pre-dreadnoughts: four large guns, several medium ones and many small guns for defence.
Not everyone was convinced. From the mid-1880s, a French school of thought known as the Jeune Ecole argued for cheap cruisers and torpedo boats instead of costly giants. It fell out of favour, and battleships stayed the arbiters of naval war until the 1940s. Between the world wars, the Washington Naval Treaty and later agreements limited construction, until Japan's refusal to sign a new treaty in 1936 unravelled the system.
In the Second World War aircraft carriers took over as the decisive ships, though battleships still fought at Cape Matapan, Guadalcanal and Leyte Gulf, and the German Bismarck made its famous sortie in 1941. Afterwards most were scrapped, mothballed or used as targets. The four American Iowa-class ships returned for the Korean War and again in the 1980s, and several battleships, mainly American, survive as museums.
Source: Battleship
