Fisher turned his immediate attention to modernizing the Royal Navy. The older ships on his "scrap" list were scheduled for demolition. Now he needed something to replace them. Fisher created a committee with himself as chair to implement the building of a new sort of fleet centered on the battleship. Two questions were at issue in the design of the new ship, in fact of the whole fleet -- speed and armament. Some tacticians saw speed as valuable only to a weaker fleet, one that must run from danger. British Naval tradition had placed speed secondary to stout hulls and overwhelming firepower; battles were fought broadside to broadside with opposing lines moving along at a snail's pace. But Fisher saw speed as an essential component of modern ships -- "only then can we choose our distance for fighting." The other question was armament -- and to Fisher that followed from the first -- "if we can choose our distance for fighting, then we choose our armament for fighting!" The Admiral argued that big guns were the most important component of the new vessels. On both issues his committee had its demurrers who were not quite convinced. Then the Russo-Japanese war gave Fisher to prove his hypotheses with no cost to the Royal Navy. The Battle of Tsushima in 1905 was a Russian disaster. Out of the smoke and flotsam of the shattered Russian fleet two lessons were drawn. First, speed was crucial. Admiral Togo's fast moving battleships determined the nature of the arena and the fight, cornering their Russian opponent before the latter could counter. The other fact, less readily seen, was the overriding importance of big, long range guns. Smaller guns and torpedo boats had played a role, to be sure, but they came onstage only for the finale, delivering the death blow to ships already mortally wounded. The issue had been decided in the first hour when the big guns of Togo's battleships hit their targets from 7000 yards. The lesser guns of 10 and 8 inches turned out to be excess baggage on these pre-dreadnoughts. In his review of Tsushima, Fisher declared that the principal lesson of the battle was that all existing battleships and their design were now obsolete. The committee agreed and in 1904, approved the design for a ship that consigned all existing types of battleships into obsolescence. The new battleship -- HMS Dreadnought -- unified in a single hull all the advances that the different technologies of propulsion, protection and armament made available. A Dream Made Steel The Dreadnought was equipped with rotary turbines -- a vast improvement over the old reciprocating engines which were intrinsically inferior to the turbine as a source of power. At the same time because of the long stroke of their upright position, reciprocating engine powered ships required a wasteful diffusion of armor around their engine spaces for protection against shellfire. The engine design gave her a flank speed of 21 knots making her as fast as a contemporary cruiser's speed. In terms of armament, the Dreadnought was the first ship launched which was equipped with all big guns. Though Fisher is generally credited with the idea, he did not originate it. Uniform armament -- i.e. all the guns on a ship being of the same caliber, was an idea whose time had come. As advances in gunnery has made it possible to fire from greater distances and as shipping became increasingly cluttered with guns of various sizes, naval opinion had been generally drifting in the direction of uniform armament. In addition to bringing heaviest firepower to bear, uniform armament would greatly simplify the problem of range finding, that is ascertaining the distance to the target. Historically, range finding and targeting had been a haphazard affair (and would continue until Percy Scott devised the electrically powered director firing in 1912). Officially it was known as "spotting" and "bracketing", unofficially it was known as "go as you please." At the onset of combat a gunnery officer, posted in the conning tower, would order the guns to fire a series of salvos and spot the splashes through a telescope to see where they landed. Then he would shout corrections to the turrets through a voice tube. When the splashes "bracketed" the target, that half were landing short of and half beyond it, the correct range found. The difficulties increased as the range to target decreased. Then the smaller caliber guns, which had been idle, came into play. Now the difficulties of spotting were compounded. The gunnery officer had to discern the small gun splashes through the geysers thrown up by the heavy guns. Even when he could determine which was which and where they were falling, his task had only begun. The 6, 9, and 12 inch guns each had different trajectories and all required different elevations to hit the same target. The spotting officer had to add to the chaos of battle by shouting into his voice pipe not just one set of orders, but as many as there were gun sizes aboard. The first known blueprint for a ship able to carry a large number of big guns came from a naval architect with the attached to a minor navy. Vittorio Cuniberti, as architect of the Italian navy, had already given that minor fleet the first electrically powered gun platforms, and ammunition hoists. In 1902 he presented a plan for a 17,000 ton battleship armed with a dozen 12" guns and 12 inch armor to protect them. When Italy turned the idea down, Cuniberti approached Fred T Jane, publisher of the annual Fighting Ships. When the drawings appeared the next year, along with an explanatory article entitled "An Ideal Battleship for the British Fleet," there was mixed reaction. Naval conservatives reacted to Cuniberti's plan with attitudes that ranged from skepticism to indignation. However the plan was warmly received in the United States, where Theodore Roosevelt loudly promoted the new design, and in Japan where two keels for the new design were laid down in 1904. Fisher, intrigued by its possibilities, embraced it enthusiastically. The Dreadnought had ten 12" guns (two had been dropped from the Cuniberti design to hold down tonnage). One pair of guns was mounted in the bow; two more pairs forward of amidships, one on port and one pair on starboard; and another pair abaft of amidships on centerline so that both could fire simultaneously on either broadside or astern. Hence six guns be fired ahead or astern, and eight could be fired simultaneously on one broadside or the other. As the best of the pre-dreadnought battleships, with their four 12" guns could fire only two ahead and astern and four on the broadside, the Dreadnought had the firepower of three earlier battleships firing ahead or two firing broadside. The great increase of gun power for forward shooting particularly pleased the aggressive Fisher, who envisioned any enemy would be flying from British pursuit, and therefore found end on fighting more exciting than broadside action. Fisher also introduced innovations into the construction of the Dreadnought. His first innovation was the introduction of standard hull parts. Previous warships had been built with individually crafted one of a kind hull plates that were not interchangeable. Dreadnought was designed so that most of her hull plates were interchangeable, hence one load of steel plates was as good as another. The result was dramatic, whereas as the last pre-dreadnought, King Edward VII had taken 16 months from keel-laying to launching, the Dreadnought's 527 foot hull was launched 18 weeks. Fisher also displayed his ability to run risks and support his own brainchild. Since it normally took two to two and one-half years to make a twelve inch gun, Fisher shortened the process by expropriating guns intended for ships of proven design. It was a risk -- if Dreadnought had turned out to be a failure, Royal Navy construction would be delayed for years. As a result of his innovations and imaginative larceny, the Dreadnought was built in a year and a day -- compared to the three years it normally required to build a battleship. The construction speed is even more miraculous when it is borne in mind that no one had ever built a dreadnought before. Dreadnought's performance on sea trials in 1906 exceeded all expectations -- in fact it was sensational. The new battleship averaged 17.5 knots on a 7000 mile roundabout trip from England to the Caribbean and back. A great deal of concern had been expressed about the recoil of her guns. When the time came to fire all eight guns on broadside, "there was a muffled roar below decks and a bit of kick to the ship." The "bit of a kick" was the discharge of 21,250 pounds of ordnance from the "muffled roar" of eight guns firing at once. Every naval observer in the world suddenly realized that Dreadnought was a revolution. They also noticed that the world's fleets had just been turned into floating scrap steel. The Cruiser With the Dreadnought safely on the quays, Fisher turned to the question of escorts for his super-battleship. Five days before the Dreadnought was launched in February 1906, the British dockyard at Clydebank laid down the first of a trio of Fisher's new class of armored cruisers, the Invincible (to be followed by her sister ships the Indomitable, and the Inflexible). Like the Dreadnought, the new cruisers were designed with Fisher's desire for speed and hitting power in mind. US Navy Cruiser. Its role was based in part on Fisher's ideas. Initially the new cruisers were conceived as scouting vessels that would serve the modern battleship in the same way as the frigate had served Nelson -- operating as the eyes and ears of the fleet. In addition their role would be to sweep away the protective screen an enemy battle fleet, bringing on a Trafalgar-style encounter of capital units with a minimum of preliminaries. Similar in size to the Dreadnought with a displacement of 17,250 tons and 567 feet in length, the new cruiser incorporated a number of innovations. Among these were telescopic funnels that could be retracted on a moment's notice so as not to be visible to enemy ships beyond the horizon. Because she was designed to reconnoiter and elude the ship had turbine engines provided 41,000 horsepower twice that of the Dreadnought and gave the ship a maximum speed of 27 knots. Another innovation were her eight 12" guns. They were distributed with two at the bow, two at the stern and four amidships. The amidships guns were situated a pair on port and one on starboard, but one was located a few feet aft of the other so that if one became disabled the other turret could fire on either broadside. In other words the new cruisers had armament 1.5 times that of any existing warship, except the Dreadnought. The cruiser's manifold strengths suggested numerous uses. The ship was hardly off the drawing board before, in addition to scouting duties, she was proposed for intercepting commerce raiders, for finishing off crippled battleships, even for opening fleet action by encircling the enemy. Meanwhile her name had shifted from armored cruiser to dreadnought cruiser to battle cruiser -- underscoring the fuzziness of her purpose. Though the ships seemed to have attributes that made them the ideal fighting ships -- the power to run and the power to stand and fight, those enamored with the design overlooked the basic frailty of the cruiser. The ships did have great speed. But only at the expense of armor. The cruisers had a minimal belt of armor that was six inches at the waist (compared to Dreadnought's 11 inches) and even that diminished to a precarious 4 inches on the bow. Furthermore there was not any armor at all aft of the afterturret and none at all on the decks. In an era when ships would only be equipped with armor- piercing shells and targeted ships were exposed to plunging fire, the cruiser could not withstand combat. But Royal Navy tacticians became fixated by her big guns. It was too tempting to put the cruiser's heavy guns in the line where they didn't belong. Even Fisher did not appear certain of their nature -- although he viewed them as scouting vessels he also maintained that "an armored cruiser of the first class is a swift battleship in disguise" and he felt that "no one can craw the line where the armored cruiser becomes a battleship any more than when a kitten becomes a cat." It was to be a fatal error in judgment as Admiral David K. Beatty would find when the process moved form the theoretical to the practical. Destroyers One of Fisher's overriding concerns was the need to protect both the dreadnoughts and cruisers against torpedo attack -- a menace that Germany was known to be perfecting. This was to be the job of the third member of the modernized feet -- the destroyer. US Navy Destroyers The destroyer was essentially two boats in one --- a vessel designed to destroy an enemy's torpedo boats and a carrier of torpedo's herself. The Royal Navy had had such ships for about a decade. The typical pre-Fisher one carried a 12 pound gun and five quick firing 6 pounders that could knock out an enemy torpedo boat at close range. In addition they had two tubes for launching torpedoes at enemy battleships and cruisers. But these early destroyers were small, only 335-550 tons, and averaged only about 25-30 knots. Furthermore the ships, with a capacity for only 80-130 tons of coal, limiting most of them to coastal areas. To replace them, Fisher demanded destroyers seaworthy enough to accompany the dreadnoughts wherever the large ships went. By 1905, his second year in office, British shipyards were furiously working to turn out six of the new destroyers. The modernized ships would average about 900 tons. Furthermore they burned oil not coal which made fueling them quicker and cleaner and gave them a sped of 36 knots. It also eliminated the telltale smoke clouds that had announced the presence of the older coal-burning ships. The ships were armed with a pair of 18 inch torpedo tubes, and two four inch guns that fired 25 pound shells. By 1914 Britain would have 125 of the new useful ships in service -- nearly a sevenfold increase over the 1905 flotilla Submarines With dreadnoughts, cruisers and destroyers under way there only remained the submarine to fill out the fill out the ideal fleet that Fisher envisioned. Unfortunately the submarine had few fans among the British. Admiral A K Wilson, normally a strong Fisher supporter spoke for most of his naval associates when he described the submarine as "underhand, unfair and damned un- English." Fisher prevailed in getting some built, but they were not what he wanted. By 1914 the Royal Navy had 74, but the number belies their reality. No more than a handful could go out to sea. Even then their underwater range was limited to 100 miles and they could do little more than guard British harbors. More Jacky Fisher Jacky Fisher: Introduction Jacky Fisher: "Like a Young Elephant" Jacky Fisher: Dreadnought Jacky Fisher: German Reaction Jacky Fisher: Epilogue Back to Cry Havoc #14 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1996 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com