TODAY the Royal Navy is a shadow of its former self, with only around 62 active and commissioned ships, compared with more than 1,400 in 1939. Could a revival of British seapower be one answer to our defence, especially if the US under Donald Trump seeks to withdraw from military involvement in Europe?
Historian Robert Tombs believes so. Writing in the Telegraph, he says: ‘Naval power can support European security and deter aggressors. A navy is expensive, but in a dangerous world it is indispensable to Britain’s prosperity and safety: The Russians are, and the Chinese soon will be, sailing round our coasts . . .
‘Now we need submarines, planes, drones and operational aircraft carriers and their escorts. We need a serious defensive and offensive cyber capacity – the modern equivalent of Palmerston’s gunboats. This would require fundamental political changes, including redirecting public spending and indefinitely postponing Net Zero. Whether the Government does this will tell us whether it is just play-acting.’
With Sir Keir ‘Captain Mainwaring’ Starmer effectively putting our much-depleted military on a war footing over Ukraine, it’s an interesting question, but don’t hold your breath. It’s also instructive to recall that 120 years ago, Britain – as well as having the world’s largest navy – was at the leading edge of technological innovation, thanks to a remarkable new battleship, Dreadnought.
In March 1905, plans were revealed to Parliament by the Admiralty for building the vessel that would revolutionise sea power, reinforce Britannia’s mastery of the waves and trigger a naval arms race. Its name meant ‘fear nothing’.
The £1,785,000 ship, primarily the brainchild of the First Sea Lord, Admiral John ‘Jackie’ Fisher, was laid down at the Royal Dockyard in Portsmouth in October 1905. After an impressively swift construction process, her hull was launched by King Edward VII on February 10, 1906 and the following December she went into service. From that moment on, every other battleship in the world, including those in the British fleet, became obsolete. Dreadnought outgunned and outran them all.
What made her so formidable was that she was the first ‘all big gun’ battleship. Rather than featuring an array of different-sized weaponry, as was usual, she had just ten 12in main guns and 27 guns of 3in calibre. In a sea battle, the only way of judging if your shots were close to hitting an enemy ship was to observe the splashes your shells made. But with an assortment of your guns firing at once, it was difficult to identify which shot was from which gun. Dreadnought, by being restricted to 12in guns for long distance combat and 3in guns for closer engagement, simplified range assessment.
The 18,000-ton battleship’s other main advantage was being powered by steam turbines rather than reciprocating engines. Turbines were lighter and more efficient and the coal which fired her boilers was sprayed with oil to boost the combustion rate. It gave her a top speed of 21 knots (24.1 mph), which outpaced every other contemporary battleship. So epoch-making was the ship that it gave its name to a whole new class and concept of fighting vessel, the dreadnought. Previous battleships were now dubbed pre-dreadnought.
The Royal Navy was boosted by this mighty addition to its armoury, and the British public, who took an extraordinary pride in the Senior Service, were delighted. Meanwhile, other major maritime nations looked on in envy, frustration and trepidation. The concept of the ‘all big gun’ battleship was well known in theory, but Britain had got there first. With their fleets effectively redundant, there was only one thing our rivals could do – build their own dreadnoughts.
In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm was especially stung by the arrival of this menacing British leviathan and saw his dream of challenging the Royal Navy’s seaborne supremacy slipping away. And so began the maritime arms race which would reach its apotheosis with the start of the Great War.
When in 1908 Germany announced a massive naval construction programme, the Admiralty proposed building at least six more dreadnoughts. But ministers in the Liberal government – including Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George – baulked at the £38million cost. They were met by a tidal wave of protest, apparently supported by the King, calling instead for eight dreadnoughts under the jingoistic slogan: ‘We want eight and we won’t wait!’ The government gave way and agreed to start four dreadnoughts the following year and four more after that.
Yet even as the original Dreadnought set sail, she in turn was being made obsolete by these later additions to the fleet, some of which became a newer class of battleship dubbed the super-dreadnought. They were bigger, better armoured and had more powerful guns than their namesake, with their turbines fuelled by oil instead of coal.
But once the Great War was over, so too was the age of the battleship – although it would take another world conflict to confirm the death sentence and bring the realisation that the aircraft carrier was now queen of the seas. The stark truth was that despite their stupendous firepower, battleships had become too vulnerable to air and underwater attack, a weakness that was ruthlessly exposed during the Second World War.
In May 1941, Swordfish torpedo bombers launched from British carriers crippled the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic, and she was sunk soon after. On December 7, 1941, a Japanese air attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor sank five battleships. Three days later, Britain’s newest battleship, Prince of Wales, was sunk by Japanese torpedo aircraft along with the battle cruiser Repulse in the South China Sea off Malaya. Winston Churchill later recalled that when he heard of that disaster: ‘In all the war I never received a more direct shock.’ Eleven days after that, two British battleships were badly damaged at their moorings in Alexandria, Egypt, by Italian frogmen manning ‘human torpedo’ midget submarines. The final nail in the coffin of the battleship came in April 1945, when the biggest ever built, Japan’s 70,000-ton Yamato, was sunk by American carrier-based aircraft as it headed on a suicide mission towards Okinawa.
It is perhaps ironic that for all her prowess, the original Dreadnought never fired her much-vaunted big guns to any great effect. Her only close encounter with the enemy was ramming and sinking a German submarine off the Orkneys in March 1915. She missed the Battle of Jutland in 1916 because she was in dock for a refit. In 1919, Dreadnought was placed in reserve and in 1921 was sold for scrap for around £36,000.
The last battleship constructed for the Royal Navy – and the last to be built and completed anywhere – was the Vanguard. Laid down in 1941, the 45,500-tonner represented the zenith of battleship development. She was capable of 35 knots (40mph) and armed with eight 15in guns, plus an array of around 90 smaller anti-aircraft guns, all remotely powered and controlled. With a range of 9,500 miles, she had cutting edge radio systems and was air conditioned – and even had bunks instead of hammocks for the crew. But she never saw battle, going into service in October 1945, six weeks after the end of the war. Vanguard cost £11,500,000 and was sold for scrap in 1959 for £560,000.
