Battleships mattered because to a considerable extent it took a battleship to sink another battleship at sea (as opposed to in port or close offshore). That was what ‘capital ship’ meant. It was true even during much of the Second World War, which we think of as dominated by aircraft. Both German capital ships sunk at sea succumbed to British battleship fire: Bismarck in 1941 and Scharnhorst in 1943. The lesson of the sinking of two British capital ships off Malaya in December 1941 (HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse) was at least partly that it took massed aircraft to sink fast manoeuvring capital ships at sea. This situation began to change only with the advent of guided weapons, which sank the Italian battleship Roma at sea in September 1943, but at the time it took a large land-based aircraft to deploy them. Moreover, it was accepted through the war that a carrier caught by surprise could quickly be sunk by gunfire, as HMS Glorious was sunk by the German Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off Norway in 1940.1
It should be no surprise that, at the end of the war, both the Royal Navy and the US Navy planned to keep modern battleships in commission alongside carriers, as necessary supporting units. Battleships rapidly faded from both navies because they were too expensive to maintain in commission and because it was soon evident that the surviving surface threat was limited at best.
Numbers of battleships always mattered, more so once the naval arms limitation treaties cut overall numbers in each navy. Before mid-1940, the Royal Navy counted on the French Navy to make up the numbers needed to balance the Italians in the Mediterranean. Once France surrendered in June 1940, there was a real fear that the Germans would seize the French battle fleet and tip the balance of seapower in European waters. Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to destroy the French fleet to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. At Mers-el-Kebir the British opened fire, sinking the French Bretagne with heavy loss of life. At Alexandria, they reached an agreement which left the French fleet there neutralised but intact. Here at Alexandria on 4 July 1940 HMS Ramillies trains her guns on the French ships which had until then been her allies. They were reactivated – as allies – in 1943. Churchill’s decision was and remains extremely controversial. French naval chief Admiral Darlan had assured him that the French would not surrender their fleet. Churchill could be forgiven for some scepticism; France had just surrendered despite a pledge not to make a separate peace with Germany (Churchill had said that, if the British Isles were invaded, he would continue the fight from the Empire beyond the seas, and the French fleet could have been the core of a similar continued fight). Once France surrendered, the French fleet seemed to be the best bargaining chip that country could offer Germany. In fact, when the Germans tried to seize the French fleet at Toulon in November 1942, the French scuttled their ships. (Henri le Masson via US Naval Institute)
Admiral Sir John Fisher
The beginning of the era covered by this book can be traced to the appointment of Admiral Sir John (‘Jacky’) Fisher as First Sea Lord in October 1904. He was intimately involved with many of the crucial technical developments of the latter part of the nineteenth century and he may also have been the most important British naval tactician of his time. Fisher’s fascination with the tactical potential of new technology often seems to have led him to imagine that its promise could be realised much earlier than turned out to be the case.
As a young officer in the Mediterranean, Fisher witnessed an early demonstration of the new Whitehead automobile (i.e., self-propelled) torpedo. He later claimed that he was instrumental in convincing the Royal Navy to form an evaluation committee (of which he was a member). In 1884 he participated in exercises intended to evaluate the fleet’s ability to deal with torpedo attack while blockading an enemy fleet. Fisher became commander of the Royal Navy gunnery school (HMS Excellent), which was in effect the fleet gunnery R&D establishment. Then he became Director of Naval Ordnance (DNO), presiding over the adoption of quick-firing (QF) medium-calibre guns. As Third Sea Lord (Controller), the officer responsible for Royal Navy materiel, including ships, he was responsible for adoption of the destroyer by the Royal Navy – in effect, the antidote to the torpedo craft he had studied less than a decade earlier. Both torpedoes and QF guns were important in the concept of the Dreadnought battleship with which this book opens.
The Washington Treaty ended massed battle fleets by dramatically cutting battleship numbers worldwide. Even had there been no treaty, drastic changes in capital-ship technology would have cut numbers by pruning obsolete ships. As it was, many ships which would have been discarded survived to fight in the Second World War. The post-1919 British battle fleet split into a Home Fleet and a Mediterranean Fleet, the latter the bulk of the War Fleet intended to go East to Singapore in a crisis. Here four Home Fleet battleships exercise in 1938. They belong to two distinct generations. HMS Revenge, in the foreground, was among the most modern pre-First World War ships, but by 1938 she was obsolescent. Without heavy deck armour, she could not fight at long range. For example, that year DNC analysed a fight between a ship of this type and the German Scharnhorst. Since the German shells could penetrate easily at range, the vulnerability of the British ship was a matter of what proportion of her deck was occupied by magazines. DNC credited her with a one-in-twenty chance of blowing up. Three years later, after Bismarck sank Hood, the verdict was even bleaker: any Royal Sovereign which encountered Bismarck’s sister Tirpitz would be blown up. Even the total reconstruction applied to three Queen Elizabeths was not enough to solve this problem. The two Nelsons in the background were part of the new generation, designed to fight at greater ranges. For them the verdict was reversed. Since Bismarck lacked effective protection against long-range (plunging) fire, a Nelson enjoyed a considerable advantage at about 20,000 yds range.
During 1884 Fisher was the naval officer who leaked information to the journalist W T Stead for his series ‘The Truth About the Navy’. This was part of a successful effort orchestrated by the senior Royal Navy operational officer, Admiral Phipps-Hornby (at the time C-in-C Portsmouth), to force Prime Minister Gladstone’s Liberal Government to modernise the fleet. Fisher learned about the political power of the press, which he later exploited.
After service as Controller, Fisher was given command of the North America and West Indies Station. This backwater may have been a holding appointment, as may also have been his membership of the British delegation to the 1899 Hague Peace Conference. Later that year Fisher was appointed commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, by far the largest and most important in the Royal Navy. He showed an impressive grasp of strategy and tactics and was later said to have been the first real naval tactical innovator in many decades. He conducted tactical experiments which convinced him that line-ahead formation was by far the best way to use a steam battle fleet, just as it had been best under sail. Line-ahead tactics were reflected in the design of HMS Dreadnought and her successors. At the time, many naval tacticians believed in very different tactics and formations.
Like other fleet commanders, Fisher felt short of ships to match the forces he faced, particularly if the French and Russian fleets managed to join together. The Admiralty could not spare reinforcements on the scale Fisher wanted, so he sought innovative