Battleship washington wiki

The adoption of steam power was only one of a number of technological advances which revolutionized warship design in the 19th century. The ship of the line was overtaken by the ironclad : powered by steam, protected by metal armor, and armed with guns firing high-explosive shells. Guns which fired explosive or incendiary shells were a major threat to wooden ships, and these weapons quickly became widespread after the introduction of 8 inch shell guns as part of the standard armament of French and American line-of-battle ships in Nevertheless wooden-hulled ships stood up comparatively well to shells, as shown in the Battle of Lissa , where the modern Austrian steam two-decker SMS Kaiser ranged across a confused battlefield, rammed an Italian ironclad and took 80 hits from Italian ironclads, [20] many of which were shells, [21] but including at least one pound shot at point blank range.

Despite losing her bowsprit and her foremast, and being set on fire, she was ready for action again the very next day. The development of high-explosive shells made the use of iron armor plate on warships necessary.

In France launched Gloire , the first ocean-going ironclad warship. She had the profile of a ship of the line, cut to one deck due to weight considerations. Although made of wood and reliant on sail for most journeys, Gloire was fitted with a propeller, and her wooden hull was protected by a layer of thick iron armor. The superior armored frigate Warrior followed Gloire by only 14 months, and both nations embarked on a program of building new ironclads and converting existing screw ships of the line to armored frigates.

The French Redoutable , the first battleship to use steel as the main building material [25]. Navies experimented with the positioning of guns, in turrets like the USS Monitor , central-batteries or barbettes , or with the ram as the principal weapon.

As steam technology developed, masts were gradually removed from battleship designs. By the mids steel was used as a construction material alongside iron and wood.

The French Navy's Redoutable , laid down in and launched in , was a central battery and barbette warship which became the first battleship in the world to use steel as the principal building material. Photochrom print c. The term "battleship" was officially adopted by the Royal Navy in the re-classification of By the s, there was an increasing similarity between battleship designs, and the type that later became known as the 'pre-dreadnought battleship' emerged.

These were heavily armored ships, mounting a mixed battery of guns in turrets, and without sails. The slow-firing inch mm main guns were the principal weapons for battleship-to-battleship combat. The intermediate and secondary batteries had two roles. Against major ships, it was thought a 'hail of fire' from quick-firing secondary weapons could distract enemy gun crews by inflicting damage to the superstructure, and they would be more effective against smaller ships such as cruisers.

Smaller guns pounders and smaller were reserved for protecting the battleship against the threat of torpedo attack from destroyers and torpedo boats. The beginning of the pre-dreadnought era coincided with Britain reasserting her naval dominance. For many years previously, Britain had taken naval supremacy for granted. Expensive naval projects were criticised by political leaders of all inclinations. The principle that Britain's navy should be more powerful than the two next most powerful fleets combined was established.

This policy was designed to deter France and Russia from building more battleships, but both nations nevertheless expanded their fleets with more and better pre-dreadnoughts in the s. Diagram of HMS Agamemnon , a typical late pre-dreadnought battleship. In the last years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th, the escalation in the building of battleships became an arms race between Britain and Germany. The German naval laws of and authorised a fleet of 38 battleships, a vital threat to the balance of naval power.

In , the United Kingdom had 38 battleships, twice as many as France and almost as many as the rest of the world put together. By , Britain's lead was far smaller due to competition from France, Germany, and Russia, as well as the development of pre-dreadnought fleets in Italy, the United States and Japan.

Pre-dreadnoughts continued the technical innovations of the ironclad. Turrets, armor plate, and steam engines were all improved over the years, and torpedo tubes were introduced. A small number of designs, including the American Kearsarge and Virginia classes , experimented with all or part of the 8-inch intermediate battery superimposed over the inch primary.

Results were poor: recoil factors and blast effects resulted in the 8-inch battery being completely unusable, and the inability to train the primary and intermediate armaments on different targets led to significant tactical limitations. Even though such innovative designs saved weight a key reason for their inception , they proved too cumbersome in practice.

Combining an "all-big-gun" armament of ten inch mm guns with unprecedented speed from steam turbine engines and protection, she prompted navies worldwide to re-evaluate their battleship building programmes. While the Japanese had laid down an all-big-gun battleship, Satsuma in , [32] and the concept of an all-big-gun ship had been in circulation for several years, it had yet to be validated in combat.

Dreadnought sparked a new arms race , principally between Britain and Germany but reflected worldwide, as the new class of warships became a crucial element of national power. Technical development continued rapidly through the dreadnought era, with step changes in armament, armor and propulsion. Ten years after Dreadnought ' s commissioning, much more powerful ships, the super-dreadnoughts, were being built.

In the first years of the 20th century, several navies worldwide experimented with the idea of a new type of battleship with a uniform armament of very heavy guns.

Admiral Vittorio Cuniberti , the Italian Navy's chief naval architect, articulated the concept of an all-big-gun battleship in The Russo-Japanese War provided operational experience to validate the 'all-big-gun' concept. At the Yellow Sea and Tsushima , pre-dreadnoughts exchanged volleys at ranges of 7,—12, yd 7 to 11 km , beyond the range of the secondary batteries. It is often held that these engagements demonstrated the importance of the inch mm gun over its smaller counterparts, though some historians take the view that secondary batteries were just as important as the larger weapons.

In Japan, the two battleships of the Programme were the first to be laid down as all-big-gun designs, with eight inch guns. However, the design had armor which was considered too thin, demanding a substantial redesign. The design also retained traditional triple-expansion steam engines. A preliminary design for the Imperial Japanese Navy 's Satsuma was an "all-big-gun" design. As early as , Jackie Fisher had been convinced of the need for fast, powerful ships with an all-big-gun armament.

If Tsushima influenced his thinking, it was to persuade him of the need to standardise on inch mm guns. It was to prove this revolutionary technology that Dreadnought was designed in January , laid down in October and sped to completion by She carried ten inch guns, had an inch armor belt, and was the first large ship powered by turbines.

She mounted her guns in five turrets; three on the centerline one forward, two aft and two on the wings , giving her at her launch twice the broadside of any other warship. She retained a number of pound 3-inch, 76 mm quick-firing guns for use against destroyers and torpedo-boats.

Her armor was heavy enough for her to go head-to-head with any other ship in a gun battle, and conceivably win. HMS Dreadnought Dreadnought was to have been followed by three Invincible -class battlecruisers, their construction delayed to allow lessons from Dreadnought to be used in their design. While Fisher may have intended Dreadnought to be the last Royal Navy battleship, [3] the design was so successful he found little support for his plan to switch to a battlecruiser navy.

Although there were some problems with the ship the wing turrets had limited arcs of fire and strained the hull when firing a full broadside, and the top of the thickest armor belt lay below the waterline at full load , the Royal Navy promptly commissioned another six ships to a similar design in the Bellerophon and St. Vincent classes. An American design, South Carolina , authorized in and laid down in December , was another of the first dreadnoughts, but she and her sister, Michigan , were not launched until Both used triple-expansion engines and had a superior layout of the main battery, dispensing with Dreadnought ' s wing turrets.

They thus retained the same broadside, despite having two fewer guns. In , before the revolution in design brought about by HMS Dreadnought , the Royal Navy had 62 battleships in commission or building, a lead of 26 over France and 50 over Germany. The new class of ship prompted an arms race with major strategic consequences. Major naval powers raced to build their own dreadnoughts. Possession of modern battleships was not only vital to naval power, but also, as with nuclear weapons today, represented a nation's standing in the world.

The First World War was an anticlimax for the great dreadnought fleets. There was no decisive clash of modern battlefleets to compare with the Battle of Tsushima. The role of battleships was marginal to the great land struggle in France and Russia; and it was equally marginal to the First Battle of the Atlantic , the battle between German submarines and British merchant shipping. The German strategy was therefore to try to provoke an engagement on their terms: either to induce a part of the Grand Fleet to enter battle alone, or to fight a pitched battle near the German coastline, where friendly minefields, torpedo-boats and submarines could be used to even the odds.

The first two years of war saw conflict in the North Sea limited to skirmishes by battlecruisers at the Battle of Heligoland Bight and Battle of Dogger Bank and raids on the English coast. On May 31, , a further attempt to draw British ships into battle on German terms resulted in a clash of the battlefleets in the Battle of Jutland. This reinforced German determination never to engage in a fleet to fleet battle. In the other naval theatres there were no decisive pitched battles.

In the Black Sea, engagement between Russian and Turkish battleships was restricted to skirmishes. In the Baltic, action was largely limited to the raiding of convoys, and the laying of defensive minefields; the only significant clash of battleship squadrons there was the Battle of Moon Sound at which one Russian pre-dreadnought was lost.

The Adriatic was in a sense the mirror of the North Sea: the Austro-Hungarian dreadnought fleet remained bottled up by the British and French blockade. And in the Mediterranean, the most important use of battleships was in support of the amphibious assault on Gallipoli. The war illustrated the vulnerability of battleships to cheaper weapons. In September , the potential threat posed to capital ships by German U-boats was confirmed by successful attacks on British cruisers, including the sinking of three British armored cruisers by the German submarine SM U-9 in less than an hour.

Sea mines proved a threat the next month, when the recently commissioned British super-dreadnought Audacious struck a mine and sank. By the end of October, the British had changed their strategy and tactics in the North Sea to reduce the risk of U-boat attack. The German High Seas Fleet, for their part, were determined not to engage the British without the assistance of submarines; and since the submarines were needed more for raiding commercial traffic, the fleet stayed in port for the remainder of the war.

For many years, Germany simply had no battleships. The Armistice with Germany required that most of the High Seas Fleet be disarmed and interned in a neutral port; largely because no neutral port could be found, the ships remained in British custody in Scapa Flow , Scotland.

The Treaty of Versailles specified that the ships should be handed over to the British. Instead, most of them were scuttled by their German crews on 21 June just before the signature of the peace treaty.

The treaty also limited the German Navy, and prevented Germany from building or possessing any capital ships. Profile drawing of HMS Nelson commissioned The inter-war period saw the battleship subjected to strict international limitations to prevent a costly arms race breaking out.

While the victors were not limited by the Treaty of Versailles, many of the major naval powers were crippled after the war. Faced with the prospect of a naval arms race against the United Kingdom and Japan, which would in turn have led to a possible Pacific war, the United States was keen to conclude the Washington Naval Treaty of This treaty limited the number and size of battleships that each major nation could possess, and required Britain to accept parity with the U.

These treaties became effectively obsolete on 1 September at the beginning of World War II , but the ship classifications that had been agreed upon still apply. The treaties also inhibited development by putting maximum limits on the weights of ships. Designs like the projected British N3-class battleship, the first American South Dakota class , and the Japanese Kii class —all of which continued the trend to larger ships with bigger guns and thicker armor—never got off the drawing board.

Those designs which were commissioned during this period were referred to as treaty battleships. As early as , the British Admiral Percy Scott predicted that battleships would soon be made irrelevant by aircraft. In the s, General Billy Mitchell of the United States Army Air Corps , believing that air forces had rendered navies around the world obsolete, testified in front of Congress that "1, bombardment airplanes can be built and operated for about the price of one battleship" and that a squadron of these bombers could sink a battleship, making for more efficient use of government funds.

Navy, but Mitchell was nevertheless allowed to conduct a careful series of bombing tests alongside Navy and Marine bombers. Although Mitchell had required "war-time conditions", the ships sunk were obsolete, stationary, defenseless and had no damage control.

The sinking of Ostfriesland was accomplished by violating an agreement that would have allowed Navy engineers to examine the effects of various munitions: Mitchell's airmen disregarded the rules, and sank the ship within minutes in a coordinated attack. The stunt made headlines, and Mitchell declared, "No surface vessels can exist wherever air forces acting from land bases are able to attack them. Moffett used public relations against Mitchell to make headway toward expansion of the U.

Navy's nascent aircraft carrier program. Among the new features were an increased tower height and stability for the optical rangefinder equipment for gunnery control , more armor especially around turrets to protect against plunging fire and aerial bombing, and additional anti-aircraft weapons. Some British ships received a large block superstructure nicknamed the "Queen Anne's castle", such as in the Queen Elizabeth and Warspite , which would be used in the new conning towers of the King George V -class fast battleships.

External bulges were added to improve both buoyancy to counteract weight increase and provide underwater protection against mines and torpedoes. The Japanese rebuilt all of their battleships, plus their battlecruisers, with distinctive " pagoda " structures, though the Hiei received a more modern bridge tower that would influence the new Yamato -class battleships.

Bulges were fitted, including steel tube array to improve both underwater and vertical protection along waterline. The U. Radar, which was effective beyond visual contact and was effective in complete darkness or adverse weather conditions, was introduced to supplement optical fire control. Even when war threatened again in the late s, battleship construction did not regain the level of importance which it had held in the years before World War I.

The "building holiday" imposed by the naval treaties meant that the building capacity of dockyards worldwide was relatively reduced, and the strategic position had changed. In Nazi Germany , the ambitious Plan Z for naval rearmament was abandoned in favour of a strategy of submarine warfare supplemented by the use of battlecruisers and Bismarck -class battleships as commerce raiders. In Britain, the most pressing need was for air defenses and convoy escorts to safeguard the civilian population from bombing or starvation, and re-armament construction plans consisted of five ships of the King George V class.

It was in the Mediterranean that navies remained most committed to battleship warfare. France intended to build six battleships of the Dunkerque and Richelieu classes , and the Italians two Littorio -class ships. Neither navy built significant aircraft carriers.

Japan, also prioritising aircraft carriers, nevertheless began work on three mammoth Yamato -class ships although the third, Shinano , was later completed as a carrier and a planned fourth was cancelled. The crew aboard Jaime I murdered their officers, mutinied, and joined the Republican Navy. Thus each side had one battleship; however, the Republican Navy generally lacked experienced officers.

The Spanish battleships mainly restricted themselves to mutual blockades, convoy escort duties, and shore bombardment, rarely in direct fighting against other surface units. In May , Jaime I was damaged by Nationalist air attacks and a grounding incident. The ship was forced to go back to port to be repaired. There she was again hit by several aerial bombs.

It was then decided to tow the battleship to a more secure port, but during the transport she suffered an internal explosion that caused deaths and her total loss. While continuing to fire, the USS Washington was slowly sinking. At , as her bow dipped below the waves, her captain finally gave the order to abandon ship. The Washington took hours to sink, allowing many merchant ships to save crew members. However, without any heavy capital ships, the Tegetthoff and Nettelbeck managed to sink a total of 21 of the 36 ships in the convoy.

Overall, while it's estimated men survived the initial sinking, the subsequent loss of Merchant ships led to only men surviving the ordeal. Warships Wiki Explore. Wiki Content. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? USS Washington. The Washington was a modern North Carolina-class battleship armed with nine inch guns.

Using radar, the U. The South Dakota was damaged, but the Washington sank a destroyer and fatally hit the Kirishima , which was scuttled by her crew a few hours later. The Japanese did not seriously threaten Guadalcanal again. Since the Age of Sail, battleships had fought one another for dominance of the seas, but the use of aircraft in warfare quickly rendered such encounters anachronistic.

The naval actions in the Solomon Islands happened at night when aircraft were of little use.