The Ships of Brawling Battleships Steel: Introduction
Knowledgeable observers, with few dissenters, agreed that the British Royal Navy was the largest and also the best navy in the world as the Nineteenth Century ended. The world’s admirals, still adjusting to iron ships, were confronted with a host of new naval technologies. It was clear that turbine engines, ships mounting only one major caliber of big guns, new gunnery control methods and new optical instruments that multiplied effective combat ranges would all revolutionize naval warfare. The British Royal Navy, inspired by the theories of Lord Sir John Fisher (1841–1920), who was First Sea Lord for the periods from 1904–1910 and 1914–1915, took the latest technologies and initiated a new type of ship that incorporated all the latest equipment and theories. A ship that could fight at longer ranges would reduce the threat posed by the newly-perfected torpedo and mine, which had caused serious losses during the just-concluded Russo-Japanese War. For this purpose, H. M. S. Dreadnought , commissioned at the end of 1906 as the first turbine-powered all-big-gun capital ship, was rushed into construction and built in record time and secrecy. She immediately made all earlier battleships obsolete with her ability to use speed to keep her distance and her awesome battery of large guns to concentrate lethal firepower at long range. This new battleship design, which could be regarded as an innovative though logical advance, was immediately followed by another, and far more controversial, of Lord Fisher’s visions, the “dreadnought” battle cruiser. British battle cruisers were big and carried big guns, like battleships, but they had far less armor than battleships and their higher speed was intended to be their protection.
Since most of the now-obsolete “pre-dreadnought” battleships belonged to Great Britain, it was apparent to all parties that, if they could build the new “dreadnoughts” fast enough, they could challenge Britain for control of the high seas. Germany, under Admiral Alfred P. F. von Tirpitz (1849–1930) had already started an accelerated naval building program in the late 1890s. This realization launched an expensive naval arms race, as first one and then another nation started building the new dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers, a trend that extended to the United States and Japan and even to the richer nations of South America.
By the outbreak of World War One in August 1914, most knowledgeable observers would still agree that the British Royal Navy was number one in the world. By an extraordinary effort, they had paced in the world in capital ship construction, and, especially after confiscating a number of dreadnoughts being built for foreign powers in British yards during 1914; Great Britain had far more of the new ships than any other nation. They also had a glorious and aggressive naval tradition that no other nation could match. Yet, the British Royal Navy lost some of its advantages after 1906. In the rush to build the new ships, Britain possessed more of the earlier and less efficient dreadnoughts than any other nation. Most pointedly, ship-for-ship, the German designs were superior in protection and staying power until the Queen Elizabeth class appeared. British and German design techniques were equivalent but Germany had some advantages. One was that their concepts for building better protected battle cruisers were much sounder than those of Great Britain. Another advantage for the German designers was their improved port facilities. Their expansion of the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and their new docks that could handle ships with a beam of up to 102 feet (and two docks that could handle even much wider vessels) served them well, while the British, to save money, used existing docks that restricted beams to 90 feet (United States battleships were restricted to a maximum beam of about 108 feet due to the width of the Panama Canal, which only became a problem with their later and much larger World War II battleship designs). This extra beam allowed superior compartmentalization for German ships and made them less vulnerable to mines and torpedoes. Deficient shell quality (the British had a higher percentage of duds) offset the German disadvantages of smaller main guns and torpedo quality problems became apparent only in after action reports. There was always the nightmare possibility that a rash of losses to mines and torpedoes or a disastrous small action could remove enough capital ships to upset the balance.
As it turned out, the British Grand Fleet was able to blockade and starve out Germany from a distance across the North Sea. When the German and British fleets finally met at the climactic Battle of Jutland, both fleets had almost all their available capital ships present and the much larger British fleet managed to twice outmaneuver and “cross the T” of the German battleline, while the Germans blew up three of the vulnerable British battle cruisers for the loss of only one of their own. The Germans declined to repeat the experiment of a full-scale battle and the British won the war of the dreadnoughts almost by default.
After World War I ended, it appeared as if a new naval arms race was about to heat up, this time centering on Great Britain, the United States and Japan, all of which were initiating or planning new building programs. The United States wanted a fleet that was “Second to None,” especially with regards to the potential threat of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Japanese wanted the power to face the United States Pacific Fleet and carry out their expansionist strategy. Budgetary constraints had already forced Great Britain to retreat from its prewar desire to have as large a fleet as the next two largest fleets combined to a policy of a “One Power Standard” to match the other largest fleet, in this case the United States Navy. This expensive arms race, which none of the powers really wanted, was ended by a series of naval treaties, starting with the Washington Conference and Treaty of 1921–1922 that limited battleship numbers, tonnage and new construction. The treaty coincided with the lapsing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which, at the request of Australia and New Zealand, was not renewed.
With these treaties, most of the dreadnoughts of World War One passed from the scene almost as quickly as they had appeared. The capital ships of the German fleet had been destroyed when they were interned and then scuttled by their own crews at Scapa Flow, the Austro-Hungarian Empire disappeared along with its navy and the new communist successors to the Russian Empire were not much interested in their navy. The number of French and Italian dreadnoughts had never been large and their numbers remained small. The British, Japanese and American navies all trimmed down their fleets by scrapping their oldest and least useful capital ships, by converting other ships to aircraft carriers and by disposing of new and incomplete hulls before spending any more money on them. Great Britain scrapped 30 ships, most of them their oldest battleships and battle cruisers with 12 inch and 13.5 inch guns, the United States deleted 19 hulls, most of them new vessels in various stages of construction and the Japanese discarded only four incomplete hulls plus demilitarizing the obsolete Settsu .
This article is intended to provide players of Lost Battalion Games’ BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS card game some idea about the histories of the 64 dreadnought cards found in the game. It is in no way intended to be a definitive or exhaustive naval history and many ships of the World War One era were left out simply because they are not in the game. Years ago this would have been a magazine article on the background to the game but today it is in the form of an online article as progress marches on. The data found in this article came from a number of sometimes conflicting sources, different nations used different measuring techniques and, in most cases, the figures are rounded off. The belt armor figure is generally given for the thickest part and, roughly, gives an idea of a ship’s overall armor protection. The other figures give an idea of how one ship’s size, firepower and speed compared to other ships. The torpedoes carried by most of these ships have been left out for the simple reason that no dreadnought ever torpedoed another ship during World War One—I also did not mention the equally ineffective pistols and swords carried on board. Secondary armament, intended to ward off enemy destroyers, changed so often and so much that it is equally ignored in these sketches.
See other early Battleships: Nassau, South Carolina, Courbet
Or, you can visit any of our dreadnaughts directly:
Agincourt, Andrea Doria, Arizona, Arkansas, Australia, Baden, Bayern, Bellerophon, Bretagne, Canada
Centurion, Courageous, Courbet, Dante Alighieri,Delaware, Derfflinger, Dreadnought, Erin, Espana
Friedrich der Grosse, Fuso, Gangut,Grosser Kurfurst, Hercules, Imperator Alesksandr III
Imperatriza Ekaterina, Indefatigable, Invincible, Iron Duke, Ise, Jean Bart, Kaiser, Kawachi, Kongo
Leonardo da Vinci, Lion, Lorraine, Lutzow, Markgraf, Mississippi, Moltke, Moreno, Nassau
Neptune, New Zealand, Orion, Ostfriesland, Prinz Eugen, Queen Mary
Repulse, Rheinland, Royal Oak, Sao Paulo, Seydlitz, South Carolina, Texas, Tiger
Utah, Vanguard, Viribus Unitis, Van der Tann, Westfalen, Yavuz Sultan Selim
