It's July/, 1911 , and the Texas is just 301 months old as thousands of tons of carefully shaped steel take form at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company. Th ey built the Texas, in all her complexity, in under three years-a very considerable achievement for the young American industrial establishment, in what was still the horse-andbuggy era (note the two horses bringing supplies to build this incredible sea machine!).
mander to open fire as soon as possible, hoping to damage the enemy before the range closed. At the Battle of Santiago in 1898, five American battleships destroyed four much weaker Spanish cruisers by firing at ranges of over 5,000 yards, but with minimal accuracy. One source estimated only one hit was achieved for every 300 rounds fired. The US Navy took a very serious look at its gunnery training program but the problem was common to all navies and efforts to correct it went on parallel paths on both sides of the Atlantic. As the range opened up two things were soon realized: The only way to correct the fall of shell was for an observer high in the ship to sight the splashes of misses, and at a range of several thousand yards it was impossible to distinguish the splashes made by 12in shells from those of say an 8in or 9in shell and thus impossible to correct the aim of individual guns. And at the longer ranges the smaller guns would have little effect against a well armored ship. The logical conclusion was the concept of the all-big-gun ship. If a ship were given guns of a uniform calibre the fall of shell could be expected to achieve close grouping. If 8-10 guns were mounted they could be fired in two alternating salvoes, reducing the lag between firings to half the loading time, thus minimizing the rate of change (the distance the target could move before the next salvo arrived). Four or five shells landing together offered a fair chance of scoring a hit and with all 12in shells not many hits would be required. The idea occurred simultaneously in several places. In England Admiral Fisher was thinking about such a ship in 1900, and the Italian designer Cuniberti published an article in the 1903 Jane's Fighting Ships describing an ideal battleship armed with 12-12in guns. The first complete designs to be drawn up were begun in 1903 by the US Navy for the battleships Michigan and South Carolina. The design work was very thorough-the ships were not begun until 1905, and were not commissioned until 1908. The first to begin construction of an all-big-gun battleship were the Japanese, who laid the keels of their two Satsuma class ships some months ahead of the Michigans. Both nations' ships had a main battery of 8-12in guns. In 1904 Germany began design work on a ship to carry 12-12in guns but waited to see how British ships evolved before beginning to build theirs in 19ITT. Meanwhile in England , Fisher was now First Sea Lord. Spurred by knowledge of American plans and suspicions of German intentions he convened a committee in December 1904 to produce a design for the Royal Navy. The plans took shape in a few short months and the ship was begun in late 1905 and built in the record time of 14 months . Named Dreadnought, she was the first of the new kind when commissioned in January 19ITT. The truly unique aspect of the Dreadnought was not her design but the astonishing speed of her construction and the fact that three more of her kind were built in each of the two following years. This reflected British shipbuilding prowess coupled with Fisher's zeal but was even more the product of the political situation in which Britain saw her position threatened by the rise of the German fleet. The 19th century was a time of relative stability in Europe. Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars England had been the supreme naval power. Shipping was the lifeblood of the British Empire, to the extent that in the last quarter of the 19th century four out of five ships afloat flew the Red Duster.* The British Army was minuscule by European standards, and spread thinly over the Empire. British policy was to stay clear of European alliances and conflicts. At the same time the British were sufficiently wor-
Always,for any ship, a great moment: her people file aboard for commissioning ceremonies, March 12, 1914, as a late snow lies on the ground. 1he Salvation Army horse-drawn wagon provides hot coffee, a crew member, who was present at this scene recalled. He kept a scrapbook of her early years. I* do not know his name. "What it takes to man a.fighting machine": 1he crew, some 1,200 strong , our anonymous member noted, gathers in a traditional portrait, Captain Albert S. Grant, USN, standing square behind the life ring. Most ofthese men had served together on an earlier battleship sold off to the Greeks; they come to the ship as a cohesive unit, enabling her to step forward into her role as the world's strongest warship.
*1he British merchant shipping flag.-ED.
SEA HISTORY, SPRING 1984
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