Jutland:
Alternative Dreadnoughts, Part One
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
December 2020

Like many revolutions in technology, the introduction of the British battleship Dreadnought armed solely with big guns represented “evolution” just as much. Within the British Admiralty, discussion of a new type of battleship armed solely with big guns began well before Sir John Fisher took over as First Sea Lord and placed his manic energy behind the concept.

Following the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, warship designers began to question the standard battleship design followed by every major navy: a pair of heavy guns in each of two turrets, sited fore and aft, and a number of light guns for protection from torpedo boats, usually placed in an armored casemate amidships.

Spain built her naval power around a squadron of relatively fast armored cruisers, destroyed off Santiago de Cuba by the American fleet. A high rate of fire at close range made the difference for the Americans both off Santiago and in Manila Bay. Some designers drew from this the conclusion that a powerful medium-caliber battery capable of very rapid fire would overwhelm a ship with a smaller number of heavier guns. Each hit from the heavier guns might do more damage, but the sheer number of hits by smaller shells would more than balance this out.

Fisher had extensive experience within the Admiralty’s bureaucracy, as Director of Naval Ordnance, Controller and Second Sea Lord (charged with overseeing personnel matters). The Royal Navy, he believed, needed extensive changes to improve efficiency in terms of both financial costs and manpower. One way to achieve this would be to replace the traditional pre-dreadnought battleship with a more powerful vessel carrying only heavy guns, that could deliver several times the firepower from the same crew and maintenance expense.

Appointed First Sea Lord in the autumn of 1904, Sir John Fisher had a very direct mission brief from the First Lord, the Earl of Selborne. In the wake of the just-concluded Second Boer War, the Royal Navy’s budget had to be reduced. At the same time, Fisher was expected to make the fleet more ready to fight a modern, technological war. That dovetailed directly with his own long-held views.

Fisher immediately sent dozens of aged warships he termed “useless junk” to the scrap heap. As he had urged Selborne several years previously, a switch to oil fuel would slash the Royal Navy’s manpower requirements - no need for stokers to shovel coal - and ultimately provide both greater power and less cost. Likewise, ships armed solely with heavy guns would deliver more fighting power at less cost; they would have far fewer guns, reducing the number of men required to serve them in battle.

Bow turret of Lord Nelson’s sister Agamemnon.

The all-big-gun concept pre-dated Fisher’s arrival as First Sea Lord; the topic had arisen in October 1902 during the discussions for the new battleship design that became the semi-dreadnought Lord Nelson. In November 1902 the Director of Naval Construction, Sir Philip Watts, presented a design armed with a dozen 10-inch guns; in August of the next year he provided alternatives armed with sixteen 10-inch guns or a dozen 12-inch guns.

Lord Nelson as finally ordered was a compromise design, with four 12-inch guns and ten 9.2-inch guns, the latter in turrets arrayed along either side. She was a compact ship due to cost concerns; among other compromises, her main battery turrets were pulled closer to the central citadel in order to reduce the size of the armored area but greatly restricting their arcs of fire compared to the preceding King Edward VII class.

Lord Nelson typified a category later known as “semi-dreadnoughts,” warships packing huge numbers of 8-inch to 10-inch guns in amidships batteries, usually in turrets for faster and more accurate fire. Sir William White’s King Edward VII class, designed in 1902, replaced the dozen 6-inch guns of the previous classes with four 9.2-inch and ten 6-inch guns. The Austro-Hungarian Radetzky class carried four 12-inch guns and eight 9.4-inch guns, all in turrets. The American Virginia and Connecticut classes mounted eight 8-inch guns in turrets; the Russian Imperator Pavel I had fourteen of them in a mix of turrets and casemate mounts.

Fine lines, weak firepower: Cuniberti’s Regina Elena.

Italy’s Vittorio Cuniberti had different ideas. In 1899, the Royal Italian Navy charged him with designing a fast armored cruiser armed with a dozen 8-inch guns. Before those drafts had been completed, the navy changed the requirements to a fast battleship that could outrun any French or British battleship but would be more powerful than any of their armored cruisers. The Regina Elena class, very handsome ships, easily met the standards. They carried a pair of 12-inch guns, in single turrets fore and aft. Amidships they mounted three twin turrets on either side for 8-inch guns. At 12,500 tons, they could make 21 knots.

From his post at Malta as commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, Fisher apparently learned of the Italian requirement for battleships of greater speed. His new battleship now not only needed to carry greater firepower; it needed to be faster at well. With a top speed of 18 knots, the Royal Navy’s current “fleet speed,” Lord Nelson would not suffice.

Originally the Lord Nelson class would have numbered five units, but upon Fisher’s arrival he quickly secured the First Lord’s agreement to replace the latter three with ships built to a new design. The new First Sea Lord came equipped with some sketches prepared by his crony W.H. Gard, chief constructor of the Royal Dockyard in Malta. Fisher’s flagship in the Mediterranean, the second-class battleship Renown, had carried a main armament of four 10-inch guns, supplemented by ten 6-inch guns, and in exercises his ship’s faster rate of fire had overwhelmed the heavier but slower-firing 12-inch guns of other battleships.

Fisher had overseen development of the 9.2-inch gun that armed British armored cruisers and served as the secondary armament of the Lord Nelson and King Edward VII classes. It was a crapulent weapon, with its short range and poor accuracy not mitigated by its lightweight shell. The 10-inch, 32-caliber Mark IV breech-loading cannon that armed Fisher’s beloved Renown had been designed in 1879 as part of the first generation of Royal Navy breechloaders and by the turn of the century was completely outdated.

Renown’s after turret.

The Admiralty ordered a new 10-inch design, rejecting the Mark V 40-caliber gun developed by Elswick for use on ships built for foreign naves. This new naval rifle would have been 50 calibers long, and though the design was accepted in 1901 no prototype was ever built. It probably would have fired a round at least as large as that of the Elswick Mark V, 500 pounds compared to 380 pounds for the 9.2-inch Mark IX of Lord Nelson, with substantially greater range.

Fisher convened a Committee on Designs with both civilian and naval experts, the latter including Sir Reginald Bacon, who would become Dreadnought’s first commander, and future Grand Fleet commander Sir John Jellicoe, then the Director of Naval Ordnance. Fisher pressed hard for the Watts design with sixteen of the new-model 10-inch guns, but as information from the concurrent Russo-Japanese War filtered in a different picture emerged. Rather than begin overwhelmed by the rapid fire of smaller guns, battleships of both sides survived enormous numbers of medium-caliber hits, and at the longer ranges seen at the battles of Tsushima and the Yellow Sea, spotters had difficulty distinguishing the splashes of heavy- and medium-caliber shells. The answer here seemed to be a ship armed exclusively with heavy guns.

The First Sea Lord remained unconvinced. The new 10-inch gun held great promise, and the slow firing cycle of the 12-inch gun greatly worried him. Armstrong’s, producer of the new weapon, claimed a rate of fire three times that of existing 12-inch guns. Bacon and Jellicoe argued for the bigger guns, with Jellicoe in particular pressing the case for the new Vickers-made Mark X 12-inch gun that would arm Lord Nelson; its new mount allowed a rate of fire almost as great as Armstrong’s mythical 10-inch gun that did not yet exist, and better yet, it was ready for production.

Click here to order Jutland right now.

Sign up for our newsletter right here. Your info will never be sold or transferred; we'll just use it to update you on new games and new offers.

Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published countless books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold.

Want to keep Daily Content free of third-party ads? You can send us some love (and cash) through this link right here. You don’t have to, but Leopold would like it if you did.