Dreadnought

Dreadnought (pronounced dred-nawt)

(1) A type of battleship armed with heavy-caliber guns in turrets: so called from the British battleship HMS Dreadnought (1906); A name used by the Royal Navy for many ships and submarines.

(2) A garment made of thick woolen cloth that can defend against storm and cold.

(3) A thick cloth with a long pile.

(4) Slang a heavyweight boxer, sometime extended to the largest or heaviest in a given field.

(5) A person who fears nothing; something that assures against fear.

1800-1810: The construct is dread + nought.  Dread is from the Middle English dreden, from Old English drǣdan (to fear, dread), aphetic form of ondrǣdan (to fear, dread), from and- +‎ rǣdan (from which English picked up read); corresponding to an aphesis of the earlier adread.  The Old Saxon was antdrādan & andrādan (to fear, dread), the Old High German was intrātan (to fear) and the Middle High German entrāten (to fear, dread, frighten).  Nought is from the Middle English nought & noght, (noȝt), from the Old English nōwiht & nāwiht (the construct being nay +‎ a +‎ wight), which in turn came from ne-ā-wiht, a phrase used as an emphatic "no", in the sense of "not a thing".  In the transition to Modern English, the word reduced gradually to nought, nawt and finally not; a doublet of naught.  The alternative spelling (though never used by the Admiralty) is Dreadnaught.

The dreadnoughts

HMS Dreadnought, 1906.

Launched in 1906, HMS Dreadnought is often said to have revolutionized naval power, the design so significant it proved the final evolution of what had, by the late nineteenth century, evolved into the battleship.  Subsequent vessels would be larger, faster, increasingly electronic and more heavily armed but the concept remained the same.  HMS Dreadnought rendered instantly obsolete every other battleship in the world (including the rest of the Royal Navy) and all other battleships then afloat were immediately re-classified as pre-dreadnoughts. 

HMS Dreadnought.

Her main design features were speed, armor, steam turbine propulsion and, especially, firepower almost exclusively of weapons of the largest caliber.  In the decades after her launch, British, German, American, Japanese and other navies would build larger and heavier dreadnoughts until, during world war two, their utility was finally seen to been eclipsed by both aircraft carriers and submarines.  The last dreadnought, HMS Vanguard, launched in 1946, was scrapped in 1958 but the US Navy maintained, on either the active or reserve lists, at least one of the four battleships it retained from WW2 until 2004 when the last was decommissioned.

HMS Dreadnought, 1908.

That it was the Royal Navy which first launched a dreadnought doesn’t mean the British Admiralty was alone in pursuing the concept.  Naval strategists in several nations had noted the course of battle between the Russian and Japanese fleets in 1905 and concluded the immediate future of naval warfare lay in the maximum possible deployment of big guns, able to launch attacks from the longest possible range, subsidiary smaller caliber weapons seen even as a disadvantage in battle.  That the Royal Navy was the first with such a ship afloat was a testament to the efficiency of British designers and shipbuilders, not the uniqueness of its plans.

Much read in palaces, chancelleries and admiralties around the word was a book released in 1890 called The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 by US naval officer and theorist Captain Alfred Mahan (1840-1914).  Published in what, in retrospect, was a historical sweet-spot (technologically and politically) for the views it espoused, it brought Mahan great fame and exerted an extraordinary influence on diplomacy, military planning and the politics of the era.  The book was not alone the cause of the naval arms-race in the decade before the First World War but was at least a sharp nudge, push or shove depending on one’s view.  Curiously though, although a work primarily about naval strategy, while many of the maritime powers seemed convinced by Mahan’s arguments about the importance of naval sea power in geopolitics, not all admiralties adopted the strategic template.  What all agreed however was they needed more ships.

The nineteenth century of Pax Britannica ("British Peace", echoing the Pax Romana of the Roman Empire), describes the century of relative great-power stability between the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) and the outbreak of war in 1914 encompasses the idea of British Empire as the global hegemon, a role possible only because the Royal Navy enjoyed an unchallenged ability to patrol and protect the key maritime trade routes.  The effective control of these transport corridors not only guaranteed the security of the British Empire but it meant also the British effectively controlled maritime access to much of Asia, the Americas, Oceania the south Pacific, although, one factor in the success was it was that London ran things essentially in accordance with US foreign policy, assisting Washington in enforcing the Monroe Doctrine which upheld the US preponderance of interest in the Americas.  It can be argued the roots of the so-called "special relationship" took hold here.

The British Empire, in terms of the impression created by a map of the world on which its colonies and dependencies were colored usually in some shade of red, was deceptive, the remit of the local administrators sometimes extending little beyond the costal enclaves, even the transport links between towns not always entirely secure.  Never did the Empire posses the military resources to defend such vast, remote and disparate territories but it was the control of the sea, uniquely in history, which allowed the British for centuries to maintain what was, with no disparagement intended, a confidence trick.  The reason the empire could be maintained was not because of control of big colonies, it was all the little islands dotted around the oceans which enabled the navy to operate outposts which housed the ports and coaling stations from which ships could make repairs or provision with fuel, food and water.  All those little dots on the map were the "keys to the world".  Mahan’s book had drawn its influential conclusions from his study of the role of sea power during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; what the British did was take advantage of the circumstances of the nineteenth century and deploy their sea power globally, in competition when necessary, in cooperation when possible and in conflict when required.  The practical expression of all this was British naval policy: that the Royal Navy must be of sufficient strength simultaneously to prevail in war against the combined strength of the next two biggest navies, either in separate theatres or as a massed fleet.

By the early twentieth century, economic and geopolitical forces combined to render the policy impossible to maintain, Britain no longer able to operate in “splendid isolation” (another somewhat misleading phrase of the era), needing alliances to spread the load of imperial defense.  It wasn’t just the rapid growth of the German fleet which had changed the balance of power but that alone was enough for the British and the French to reach an accommodation which is remembered as the Entente Cordiale (Cordial Agreement) of 1904 which may or may not have been an alliance but was enough of one for the admiralties in Paris and London cooperatively to organize the allocations of their fleets.  It certainly illustrated Lord Palmerston's (1784–1865) doctrine that the country had neither eternal allies nor perpetual enemies but only permanent interests for despite the centuries of enmity between Britain and France, the self-interest of both dictated the need to align against the German threat.

Royal Navy battlecruiser HMS New Zealand, 1911.

It was in this atmosphere the great naval arms race took place, plans for which were laid before the Wright brothers had flown a hundred–odd feet, barely off the ground, torpedoes were in their infancy and submarines were little threat more than a few miles from the coast.  The measure of a fleet was its battleships and their big guns and whichever side could put to sea the most firepower was winning the race.  It intrigued the navalists, strategists and theorists who knew from history that such a race, if left to run, could end only in war, the great, decisive set-piece battle of which would be the clash of massed fleets of battleships on the high seas, trading shell-fire at a range of twenty miles (32 km), before closing for the kill as the battle climaxed.  Dreadnought was one strand of the theorists’ imagination but there were others.  There was a school of thought which favored an emphasis on radio communications and a greater attention to the possibilities offered by the torpedo and, most influentially, what seems now the curious notion of a complimentary range of faster capital ships, essentially battleships with the big guns but little armor, the loss of protection off-set by the few knots in speed gained; these ships were called battlecruisers.  The argument was they could fight at such range nothing but a battleship would be a threat and those the battlecruiser could outrun because of their greater speed.  It seemed, to many, a good idea at the time.

Super Dreadnought: HMS Iron_Duke, Port Said, 1921.

But it was the Dreadnoughts which captured the imagination and defined the era.  Impressive though she was, HMS Dreadnought was not long unique as navies around the world launched the own and, as happens in arms races, the original was quickly out-classed and the next generation of ships, bigger and more heavily gunned still, came to be known as super dreadnoughts.  War did come but the grand battle on the high seas which the navalists had, for a quarter century been planning, never happened.  There were smaller clashes of squadrons but the imperative of the Royal Navy was more practical and traditionally British: avoid defeat.  As Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty (minister for the navy), emphasized to the First Sea Lord (the navy’s senior admiral), against a continental empire like Germany, while the Royal Navy couldn’t in a year win the war, because Britain’s empire was maritime, they could lose it in one afternoon.  Accordingly, the Royal Navy made no sustained attempts to induce a massed battle, focusing instead on a blockade, keeping the German fleet confined to its ports.  It was the German admirals who attempted to force the British to a set-piece battle, venturing into the North Sea in May 1916 with a fleet of nearly a hundred, including sixteen dreadnoughts and five battlecruisers.  Against this, the British assembled a hundred and fifty odd with twenty-eight dreadnoughts and nine battlecruisers.  The action came to be known as the Battle of Jutland.

German battlecruiser SMS Goeben, 1914.

On paper, although the result described as inconclusive, it was a tactical success for the Germans but strategically, the British achieved their goal.  The dreadnoughts barely engaged, most of the action confined to the battlecruisers and, unlike the smaller Battle of Tsushima (May 1905) in the Far East, fought by pre-dreadnoughts a decade earlier between the Japanese and Russian fleets, there was no winner in the traditional sense of naval warfare.  The German's tactical success in retrospect was something of a Dunkirk moment but the strategic implications were profound.  British losses were heavier but their numeric advantage was such they could absorb the loss and had the financial and industrial capacity to restore the fleet’s strength.  Damage to the German fleet was less but they lacked the time or capacity to build their navy to the point it could be used as a strategic weapon and it remained confined to its ports.  Both sides learned well the inherent limitations of the battlecruiser.

WWI era German U-Boot (Unterseeboot (under-sea-boat)), anglicized as U-Boat.

After Jutland, the German admirals concluded that to venture again against the British Home Fleet would either be an inconclusive waste or lead to the inevitable, decisive defeat.  They accordingly prevailed on the politicians and eventually gained approval to use the only genuinely effective weapon in their hands, the submarine.  It was the consequences of unrestricted submarine warfare which would bring the United States into the war in 1917 as a belligerent and without that intervention, the war would certainly have followed a different course and reached perhaps a different conclusion.

Although HMS Dreadnought lent her name to an era and remains one of the most significant warships built, she's remembered for the geopolitical reverberations around her launching rather than any achievement at sea, missing even the anti-climatic Battle of Jutland because of a scheduled re-fit.  Indeed, her only achievement of note in combat was the ramming and sinking of German U-Boat SM U-29 on 18 March 1915 although that remains a unique footnote in naval history, being the only time a battleship deliberately sank an enemy submarine.  Dreadnought was decommissioned in 1920 and scrapped the next year.  Later, under the terms of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty which sought to prevent another naval arms race, most of the surviving dreadnoughts were scrapped or scuttled but many of the super-dreadnoughts remained in the fleets, some not scrapped until after World War II.  The name has a strong resonance in the halls of the Admiralty (now the Navy Command in the Ministry of Defense) and has been chosen for the class of vessels to replace the existing Vanguard class ballistic missile submarines.  Now under construction, the first of the Dreadnought class boats is expected to enter service early in the 2030s.