A new kind of battleship: HMS Dreadnought in Portsmouth Harbour, probably soon after having been completed. Note the 24in searchlights in her bridge wings and aft and the officers on the compass platform atop her charthouse. Her anti-torpedo battery was limited to 12pdrs, presumably because it was no longer considered likely that an attacking torpedo boat would come within 3pdr range. Initially she had four on her forecastle (not visible here) and one (rather than two) atop ‘A’ turret, but that did not last long. The 12pdrs on deck were sometimes said to be on ‘disappearing’ mounts: in fact they were dismountable, stowed in chocks on deck in daytime when the 12in guns might be fired. The derricks on the mainmast are for coaling (a third was added in 1915–16). Another is visible near the after funnel.
For a time Fisher rejected the idea that battleships and armoured cruisers would merge, but by 1902, he was shifting towards the view that merger was inevitable: fast battleships would supersede both slow battleships and fast armoured cruisers.1 That he seems to have realised that he could not immediately sell this vision to the Admiralty is evident in his call for separate types in Naval Necessities and also in the construction of both Dreadnought and Invincible.
Sustained speed came first. In December 1900 Fisher wrote to the First Lord that success in war required ‘the concentration of an overwhelming force upon a given spot in the shortest possible time and as the attacking power has the privilege of selection, the advantage is generally on that side’. Given code-breaking, Fisher could predict where his enemies would be, hence could employ a fast fleet to concentrate there.2 Elsewhere Fisher likened higher speed to the weather gauge of sailing-ship battle: the factor that enabled a fleet either to force action on its enemy or to withdraw if necessary.
In a 28 January 1901 letter, Fisher laid out the revolutionary principles he thought should be the basis of future warships: ‘oil fuel, turbine propulsion, equal gunfire all round [perhaps implying a battery of uniform calibre], greater speed than any existing vessels of their class, no masts, no funnels, etc’.3 Oil fuel and turbines added up to sustained rather than the usual burst speed (unlike coal-fired boilers, oil-fired ones did not have to be shut down periodically to clean grates of ash). Adoption of oil fuel impacted Fisher’s slightly later concern with chronic shortages of personnel. Coal-fired boilers required large numbers of stokers; the more powerful the ship, the more stokers. Adopting oil fuel would more than halve that number. In March 1902, as prospective Second Sea Lord (responsible for personnel), Fisher wrote to the Earl of Selborne (First Lord) recommending a shift to all-oil fired ships.4 At a stroke, the shift would settle half the navy’s manning problems. Manning was later a key element in Fisher’s reforms as First Sea Lord. For the moment, Fisher was content to argue for mixed coal and oil fuel.
Eliminating masts and funnels would have made it difficult for gunners on board an opposing ship to estimate the speed and course of Fisher’s ship – or, for that matter, to see anything of her when she was hull-down over the horizon. Fisher later wrote that during manoeuvres he had often been able to identify cruisers by their funnel configuration, even when they were hull-down.
By the time he left the Mediterranean Fisher was also determined to increase effective gun range to stay out of torpedo range – he and other officers considered hits by torpedoes launched by battleships potentially devastating. Thus in July 1902 he wrote Lord Selborne that the Royal Navy needed increased muzzle velocities for sufficient accuracy at 4000 yds or at least 3300 yds, because ships needed a sufficient range margin over torpedoes, which might reach out to 3000 yds in a stern chase (as had been proven over and over in the Mediterranean). ‘Don’t get inside 4000 yds of the enemy (even though we are suffering from want of accuracy . . .) because, as sure as you do, the torpedo will get in’. Fisher had already conducted experiments designed to increase hitting at longer ranges such as 4000 yds. Fast torpedo craft were another danger to any battle fleet. In August 1904 Fisher wrote that they had ‘outdated the battle fleet altogether and that there was no function that first class armoured cruisers cannot fulfil’. This statement did not appear in the version of Naval Necessities published in November as his manifesto as First Sea Lord.5
When he opened the deliberations of the Committee on Designs (which reviewed the Dreadnought and Invincible designs) in January 1905, Fisher argued that concentrating more of the most powerful guns in single ships would shorten the line of battle, the line-ahead formation he had developed when C-in-C Mediterranean. That would make the line itself more manoeuvrable and it would also concentrate British fire. The line-of-fire formation in turn made broadside fire much more important than end-on fire. Simplicity of fire control also figured in Fisher’s argument.
Fisher could cite both theory and recent experience. In theory, gun effectiveness depended on three factors: the probability of hitting, damage per hit and the rate of fire. The heavier the gun, the flatter its trajectory at a given range. A uniform battery made for better spotting, i.e., for better fire control. Damage per hit depended on the energy remaining to the shell and to the weight of its burster. All of these factors favoured heavier guns. Rate of fire favoured a lighter gun, but at long range guns had to wait to fire while the results of previous shots were spotted (so that aim could be corrected). Fire would therefore be slow and deliberate until the range had been found and kept, when all the guns could fire together. By that time a large number of the heaviest guns would have done far more damage.
Fisher’s protégé and advisor Captain Reginald Bacon seems to have made the argument that for effective spotting the main battery should be of a single calibre. The point of the designs was to increase battle range to 6000 yds or more to keep ships out of torpedo range of enemy battleships. The work on increased gun range begun under Fisher in the Mediterranean was done with the single-calibre secondary batteries of the battleships (the 12in main guns were not involved), so that by 1905 Royal Navy experience with spotting was in effect experience with single-calibre batteries.
Fisher cited the 10 August 1904 battle of the Yellow Sea between the Russian and Japanese fleets. To the British observer Captain Pakenham, even though the Russian 10in guns outranged Russian 12in, ‘the fire effect of every gun is so much less than that of the next larger one, that when 12in guns were firing, shots from 10in guns pass unnoticed, while, for all the respect they instil, 8in or 6in guns might just as well be peashooters and the 12pdr simply does not count’. It appeared that the battle had been decided entirely by the heavy guns. The Japanese flagship Mikasa took a 12in hit at about 13,000m range, which made a 3ft hole in her 7in armour. Had the sea not been so calm, it would have had serious consequences. A prominent (unnamed) Japanese official said that if he had to order new ships of the Nisshin type (armoured cruisers), he would endeavour to insist on 12in/50 guns. Fisher claimed that the Admiralty had secret information to the effect that both the Russians and the Japanese had decided that their future battleships should have uniform batteries of 12in guns and a speed of 20 knots.6
After serving as Second Sea Lord, Fisher was made C-in-C Portsmouth in 1903. He was told that he would soon become First Sea Lord, so he spent some of his time at Portsmouth thinking through his plans for new types of ships. It seems likely that he was in contact with DNC Watts. A copy of Narbeth’s September 1903 memo on alternative batteries of sixteen 10in and twelve 12in guns is Folio 1 in the Cover for the revolutionary British battleship Dreadnought. Certainly the idea of eliminating all but the heaviest guns was in the air in 1903–4 among other navies.7
Dreadnought is shown at the time of her sea trials, with two water tanks aft (abreast her mainmast) to measure the loss of feed water during trials. Note the single 12pdrs (rather than pairs of such guns) atop her centreline turrets. The large object just forward of her after funnel is her after conning tower. In 1907 two 9ft Barr & Stroud rangefinders were installed, one on the compass platform and one atop the after conning tower. (Photograph by Cribb of Southsea, bought by the US Office of Naval Intelligence)
Newly completed