Golden Journal No. 59
Ships of the Armada
Part One: Dreadnought Dreams
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2025

Golden Journal No. 59: Portugal’s Armada is all about the Portuguese Navy in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. Despite having the weakest economy in Western Europe, Portugal’s leaders (both kings and presidents) still dreamed of a powerful fleet to defend their decaying colonial empire and fend off absorption by Spain.

Let’s have a look at the ships they desired.

The Armstrong Battleship
Initial Portuguese interest in dreadnoughts of their own began in 1911, with informal contacts seeking information on price and capability. Alerted to the potential market, both Vickers and Armstrong approached the Portuguese Navy with potential ship designs. Conscious of their customer’s price sensitivity, each firm offered the Portuguese a small dreadnought, and a still-smaller ship more like an improved semi-dreadnought.

Vickers Design 504 (dated 6 March 1911) was a handsome vessel, a reduced version of the Iron Duke class super-dreadnoughts then in the design stage. Where Iron Duke carried ten 13.5-inch guns and a secondary battery of a dozen 6-inch guns, Design 504 had ten 12-inch guns and twenty 4.7-inch guns. She displaced 19,250 tons, had a length of 510 feet and could make 21 knots. An alternative, Design 505, had the same hull but instead carried eight 13.5-inch guns (deleting the amidships turret) and fourteen 6-inch guns. Both ships had two submerged torpedo tubes, and a maximum belt armor thickness of nine inches. The competing Armstrong Design 702 (dated 12 April 1911) was slightly larger (19,750 tons), a half-knot faster and had a quarter-inch more armor, but was otherwise nearly identical to Design 504; Armstrong does not appear to have offered a version with heavier guns.

While Design 702 would have been much less capable than Iron Duke, she compares very favorably with the Colossus class. Both ships of the Colossus class commissioned in the summer of 1911, and were slightly larger, with slightly less armor protection and an inferior turret arrangement than the Armstrong design. The Portuguese were more interested in buying a better ship than the Brazilian São Paulo; the Brazilian ship had a dozen heavy guns where the Portuguese ship had but ten, but Portugal was buying three dreadnoughts while Brazil had only two.

The Portuguese took their time, and finally in 1914 chose Design 702 and placed an order with the Coventry Syndicate, a consortium of five British shipbuilders led by the John Brown yard, which had built the battle cruisers Inflexible and Australia. No work had been done when the First World War broke out and the yard stopped taking foreign orders. The Portuguese order would have been for three battleships, plus a pair of light cruisers and destroyers as well.

All three battleships appear in Portugal’s Armada, bearing the names of the kingdom’s early heroes.

The American Dreadnought
In July 1921, Rear Admiral Charles Frederick Hughes brought an offer to the Portuguese to sell them the dreadnought Utah, then visiting Lisbon, and five pre-dreadnoughts of the Connecticut class; Hughes had brought three of them to Lisbon on a separate training cruise. The Washington Naval Limitations Conference would open in November, but at this point it was not even a concept. Without any treaty to stop construction, much more capable ships of the Colorado and South Dakota classes, ten ships armed with 16-inch guns, would soon be commissioning. Utah would be one of the older American dreadnoughts retained after the war, with ten 12-inch guns and a displacement less than half that of the mighty South Dakota class. As a sweetener for the sale to Portugal, she probably seemed expendable.

The timing was right, and not in the least coincidental. Dreadnought fever had returned to Portugal. São Paulo returned to Lisbon in November 1920 on a tour of Brazil’s European allies, and again in December to pick up the remains of Emperor Dom Pedro II (who had died in Lisbon in 1891) for re-burial in Brazil. She was once again a sensation, just as she had been on her 1907 visit. The Portuguese had to have a dreadnought in any deal; even fourteen years later the Portuguese still wanted a ship like São Paulo.

Utah almost fit the bill. Like the abortive 1914 battleship, she was slightly smaller than the Brazilian ship, but the deal would give Portugal six battleships and a flagship equivalent to São Paulo. But Portugal could not afford a battleship on her own finances, especially since the Americans appear to have insisted on a package deal for all six ships, and her ally Britain was unlikely to finance the purchase of American ships.

Utah and her crew, during their July 1921 visit to Lisbon.

A decade of naval development had left Utah behind, though the Portuguese don’t seem to have cared. She had been commissioned in August 1911, within weeks of both British Colossus-class ships, and had very similar size and capabilities to those ships and the Armstrong Design 702. She pre-dated American adoption of the all-or-nothing armor scheme, and would receive extensive modernization in the mid-1920’s, only to be deleted in 1930 under the terms of the London Naval Treaty and turned into a target ship. She was still in that role when Japanese planes sank her at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

The American Pre-Dreadnoughts
If Utah no longer represented front-line battleship design, the Connecticut-class ships offered along with her in a package deal were little more than floating scrap. The U.S. Navy would try to keep them anyway in the initial discussions of the Washington Naval Conference, which represents either a doomed negotiating gambit or some sort of delusion.

All six ships of the class undertook secondary duties during the Great War, as training ships and convoy escorts in the western half of the North Atlantic - they were kept well away from any potential confrontation with an enemy warship. Three of them visited Lisbon in the summer of 1921 on the annual Midshipmen’s Cruise; the other three had already been decommissioned. Vermont, then a hulk at Mare Island Navy Yard, had been idle for a full year when Hughes made the offer, thus the projected sale of five ships rather than all six.

As built, the ships carried four 12-inch guns in a pair of twin turrets, eight 8-inch guns in four turrets, placed in the “corner” positions, twelve 7-inch guns and twenty 3-inch guns. During the war the 7-inch and 3-inch guns were removed for use as artillery in the ground war in France (guns went to both Marine and Army batteries). They were painfully slow (18 knots) even when new, but did have reasonable armor protection though like most ships of their era they were fantastically vulnerable to mines and torpedoes.

Had the Portuguese somehow been bamboozled into buying them, they would have needed substantial work to become even mediocre fighting ships. All had been commissioned between 1906 and 1908, so in theory they retained some service life in 1921. We’ve projected a restored secondary battery, probably with the American 6-inch Mark 12 that armed the Omaha-class light cruisers, as the original 7-inch guns now occupied depots and coast defense batteries from Maine to Bora Bora (several of the Bora Bora guns are still there, long abandoned but watching over the crystal blue waters).

Portugal’s Armada comes with 23 die-cut and silky-smooth playing pieces (17 long ones and six square ones). We tell you all about the ships, the story of the Portuguese Navy, and then we have scenarios so you can play with them in Great War at Sea: Jutland 2e.

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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 a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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