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Determined to show the Grand Alliance that France was still resolute, LouisXIV prepared to launch a double surprise in Alsace and northern Italy. On the latter front Marshal Vendôme defeated the Imperial army at Calcinato on 19 April, pushing the Imperialists back in confusion (French forces were now in a position to prepare for the long-anticipated siege of Turin). In Alsace, Marshal Villars took Baden by surprise and captured Haguenau, driving him back across the Rhine in some disorder, thus creating a threat on Landau. With these reverses, the Dutch refused to contemplate Marlborough's ambitious march to Italy or any plan that denuded their borders of the Duke and their army. In the interest of coalition harmony, Marlborough prepared to campaign in the Low Countries. On the move.
Following the successes in Italy and along the Rhine, LouisXIV was now hopeful of similar results in Flanders. Far from standing on the defensive thereforeand unbeknown to MarlboroughLouisXIV was persistently goading his marshal into action. "[Villeroi] began to imagine," wrote St Simon, "that the King doubted his courage, and resolved to stake all at once in an effort to vindicate himself." Accordingly, on 18 May, Villeroi set off from Leuven at the head of 70 battalions, 132 squadrons and 62 cannoncomprising an overall force of some 60,000 troopsand crossed the river Dyle to seek battle with the enemy. Spurred on by his growing confidence in his ability to out-general his opponent, and by Versailles’ determination to avenge Blenheim, Villeroi and his generals anticipated success. Neither opponent expected the clash at the exact moment or place where it occurred. The French moved first to Tienen, (as if to threaten Zoutleeuw, abandoned by the French in October 1705), before turning southwards, heading for Jodoignethis line of march took Villeroi's army towards the narrow aperture of dry ground between the rivers Mehaigne and Petite Gette close to the small villages of Ramillies and Taviers; but neither commander quite appreciated how far his opponent had travelled. Villeroi still believed (on 22 May) the Allies were a full day's march away when in fact they had camped near Corswaren waiting for the Danish squadrons to catch up; for his part, Marlborough deemed Villeroi still at Jodoigne when in reality he was now approaching the plateau of Mont St. André with the intention of pitching camp near Ramillies (see map at right). However, the Prussian infantry was not there. Marlborough wrote to Lord Raby, the English resident at Berlin: "If it should please God to give us victory over the enemy, the Allies will be little obliged to the King [Frederick] for the success."
The following day, at 01:00, Marlborough dispatched Cadogan, his Quartermaster-General, with an advanced guard to reconnoitre the same dry ground that Villeroi's army was now heading toward, country that was well known to the Duke from previous campaigns. Two hours later the Duke followed with the main body: 74 battalions, 123 squadrons, 90 pieces of artillery and 20 mortars, totalling 62,000 troops. About 08:00, after Cadogan had just passed Merdorp, his force made brief contact with a party of French hussars gathering forage on the edge of the plateau of Jandrenouille. After a brief exchange of shots the French retired and Cadogan's dragoons pressed forward. With a short lift in the mist, Cadogan soon discovered the smartly ordered lines of Villeroi's advance guard some off; a galloper hastened back to warn Marlborough. Two hours later the Duke, accompanied by the Dutch field commander Field Marshal Overkirk, Quartermaster-General Daniël van Dopff, and the Allied staff, rode up to Cadogan where on the horizon to the westward he could discern the massed ranks of the French army deploying for battle along the front. Marlborough later told Bishop Burnet: "The French army looked the best of any he had ever seen."
Battle. Battlefield. The battlefield of Ramillies is very similar to that of Blenheim, for here too there is an immense area of arable land unimpeded by woods or hedges. Villeroi's right rested on the villages of Franquenée and Taviers, with the river Mehaigne protecting his flank. A large open plain, about wide, lay between Taviers and Ramillies, but unlike Blenheim, there was no stream to hinder the cavalry. His centre was secured by Ramillies itself, lying on a slight eminence which gave distant views to the north and east. The French left flank was protected by broken country, and by a stream, the Petite Gheete, which runs deep between steep and slippery slopes. On the French side of the stream the ground rises to Offus, the village which, together with Autre-Eglise farther north, anchored Villeroi's left flank. To the west of the Petite Gheete rises the plateau of Mont St. André; a second plain, the plateau of Jandrenouilleupon which the Anglo-Dutch army amassedrises to the east. Initial dispositions. At 11:00 the Duke ordered the army to take standard battle formation. On the far right, towards Foulz, the British battalions and squadrons took up their posts in a double line near the Jeuche stream. The centre was formed by the mass of Dutch, German, Protestant Swiss and Scottish infantryperhaps 30,000 menfacing Offus and Ramillies. Also facing Ramillies Marlborough placed a powerful battery of thirty 24-pounders, dragged into position by a team of oxen; further batteries were positioned overlooking the Petite Gheete. On their left, on the broad plain between Taviers and Ramilliesand where Marlborough thought the decisive encounter must take placeOverkirk drew the 69 squadrons of the Dutch and Danish horse, supported by 19 battalions of Dutch infantry and two artillery pieces.
Meanwhile, Villeroi deployed his forces. In Taviers on his right, he placed two battalions of the Greder Suisse Régiment, with a smaller force forward in Franquenée; the whole position was protected by the boggy ground of the river Mehaigne, thus preventing an Allied flanking movement. In the open country between Taviers and Ramillies, he placed 82 squadrons under General de Guiscard supported by several interleaved brigades of French, Swiss and Bavarian infantry. Along the Ramillies–Offus–Autre Eglise ridge-line, Villeroi positioned Walloon and Bavarian infantry, supported by the Elector of Bavaria's 50 squadrons of Bavarian and Walloon cavalry placed behind on the plateau of Mont St. André. Ramillies, Offus and Autre-Eglise were all packed with troops and put in a state of defence, with alleys barricaded and walls loop-holed for muskets. Villeroi also positioned powerful batteries near Ramillies. These guns (some of which were of the three barrelled kind first seen at Elixheim the previous year) enjoyed good arcs of fire, able to fully cover the approaches of the plateau of Jandrenouille over which the Allied infantry would have to pass.
Marlborough, however, noticed several important weaknesses in the French dispositions. Tactically, it was imperative for Villeroi to occupy Taviers on his right and Autre-Eglise on his left, but by adopting this posture he had been forced to over-extend his forces. Moreover, this dispositionconcave in relation to the Allied armygave Marlborough the opportunity to form a more compact line, drawn up in a shorter front between the 'horns' of the French crescent; when the Allied blow came it would be more concentrated and carry more weight. Additionally, the Duke's disposition facilitated the transfer of troops across his front far more easily than his foe, a tactical advantage that would grow in importance as the events of the afternoon unfolded. Although Villeroi had the option of enveloping the flanks of the Allied army as they deployed on the plateau of Jandrenouillethreatening to encircle their armythe Duke correctly gauged that the characteristically cautious French commander was intent on a defensive battle along the ridge-line.
Taviers. At 13:00 the batteries went into action; a little later two Allied columns set out from the extremities of their line and attacked the flanks of the Franco-Bavarian army. To the south, 4 Dutch battalions, under the command of Colonel Wertmüller, came forward with their two field guns to seize the hamlet of Franquenée. The small Swiss garrison in the village, shaken by the sudden onslaught and unsupported by the battalions to their rear, were soon compelled back towards the village of Taviers. Taviers was of particular importance to the Franco-Bavarian position: it protected the otherwise unsupported flank of General de Guiscard's cavalry on the open plain, while at the same time, it allowed the French infantry to pose a threat to the flanks of the Dutch and Danish squadrons as they came forward into position. But hardly had the retreating Swiss rejoined their comrades in that village when the Dutch Guards renewed their attack. The fighting amongst the alleys and cottages soon deteriorated into a fierce bayonet and clubbing "mêlée", but the superiority in Dutch firepower soon told. The accomplished French officer, Colonel de la Colonie, standing on the plain nearby remembered: "This village was the opening of the engagement, and the fighting there was almost as murderous as the rest of the battle put together." By about 15:00 the Swiss had been pushed out of the village into the marshes beyond.
Villeroi's right flank fell into chaos and was now open and vulnerable. Alerted to the situation de Guiscard ordered an immediate attack with 14 squadrons of French dragoons currently stationed in the rear. Two other battalions of the Greder Suisse Régiment were also sent, but the attack was poorly co-ordinated and consequently went in piecemeal. The Anglo-Dutch commanders now sent dismounted Dutch dragoons into Taviers, which, together with the Guards and their field guns, poured concentrated musketry- and canister-fire into the advancing French troops. Colonel d’Aubigni, leading his regiment, fell mortally wounded. As the French ranks wavered, the leading squadrons of Württemberg's Danish horsenow unhampered by enemy fire from either villagewere also sent into the attack and fell upon the exposed flank of the Franco-Swiss infantry and dragoons. De la Colonie, with his Grenadiers Rouge regiment, together with the Cologne Guards who were brigaded with them, was now ordered forward from his post south of Ramillies to support the faltering counter-attack on the village. But on his arrival, all was chaos: "Scarcely had my troops got over when the dragoons and Swiss who had preceded us, came tumbling down upon my battalions in full flight... My own fellows turned about and fled along with them." De La Colonie managed to rally some of his grenadiers, together with the remnants of the French dragoons and Greder Suisse battalions, but it was an entirely peripheral operation, offering only fragile support for Villeroi's right flank.
Offus and Autre-Eglise. While the attack on Taviers went on the Earl of Orkney launched his first line of English across the Petite Gheete in a determined attack against the barricaded villages of Offus and Autre-Eglise on the Allied right. Villeroi, posting himself near Offus, watched anxiously the redcoats' advance, mindful of the counsel he had received on 6 May from LouisXIV: "Have particular care to that part of the line which will endure the first shock of the English troops." Heeding this advice the French commander began to transfer battalions from his centre to reinforce the left, drawing more foot from the already weakened right to replace them. As the English battalions descended the gentle slope of the Petite Gheete valley, struggling through the boggy stream, they were met by Major General de la Guiche's disciplined Walloon infantry sent forward from around Offus. After concentrated volleys, exacting heavy casualties on the redcoats, the Walloons reformed back to the ridgeline in good order. The English took some time to reform their ranks on the dry ground beyond the stream and press on up the slope towards the cottages and barricades on the ridge. The vigour of the English assault, however, was such that they threatened to break through the line of the villages and out onto the open plateau of Mont St André beyond. This was potentially dangerous for the Allied infantry who would then be at the mercy of the Elector's Bavarian and Walloon squadrons patiently waiting on the plateau for the order to move.
Although Henry Lumley's English cavalry had managed to cross the marshy ground around the Petite Gheete, it was soon evident to Marlborough that sufficient cavalry support would not be practicable and that the battle could not be won on the Allied right. The Duke, therefore, called off the attack against Offus and Autre-Eglise. To make sure that Orkney obeyed his order to withdraw, Marlborough sent his Quartermaster-General in person with the command. Despite Orkney's protestations, Cadogan insisted on compliance and, reluctantly, Orkney gave the word for his troops to fall back to their original positions on the edge of the plateau of Jandrenouille. It is still not clear how far Orkney's advance was planned only as a feint; according to historian David Chandler it is probably more accurate to surmise that Marlborough launched Orkney in a serious probe with a view to sounding out the possibilities of the sector. Nevertheless, the attack had served its purpose. Villeroi had given his personal attention to that wing and strengthened it with large bodies of horse and foot that ought to have been taking part in the decisive struggle south of Ramillies.
Ramillies. Meanwhile, the Dutch assault on Ramillies was gaining pace. Marlborough's younger brother, General of Infantry Charles Churchill, ordered four brigades of foot to attack the village. The assault consisted of 12 battalions of Dutch infantry commanded by Major Generals Scholten and Sparre; two brigades of Saxons under Count Schulenburg; a Scottish brigade in Dutch service led by the 2nd Duke of Argyle; and a small brigade of Protestant Swiss. The 20 French and Bavarian battalions in Ramillies, supported by the Irish who had left Ireland in the Flight of the Wild Geese to join Clare's Dragoons who fought as infantry and captured a colour from the British 3rd Regiment of Foot and a small brigade of Cologne and Bavarian Guards under the Marquis de Maffei, put up a determined defence, initially driving back the attackers with severe losses as commemorated in the song "Clare's Dragoons". Seeing that Scholten and Sparre were faltering, Marlborough now ordered Orkney's second-line British and Danish battalions (who had not been used in the assault on Offus and Autre-Eglise) to move south towards Ramillies. Shielded as they were from observation by a slight fold in the land, their commander, Brigadier-General Van Pallandt, ordered the regimental colours to be left in place on the edge of the plateau to convince their opponents they were still in their initial position. Therefore, unbeknown to the French who remained oblivious to the Allies' real strength and intentions on the opposite side of the Petite Gheete, Marlborough was throwing his full weight against Ramillies and the open plain to the south. Villeroi meanwhile, was still moving more reserves of infantry in the opposite direction towards his left flank; crucially, it would be some time before the French commander noticed the subtle change in emphasis of the Allied dispositions.
Around 15:30 Overkirk advanced his massed squadrons on the open plain in support of the infantry attack on Ramillies. 48 Dutch squadrons, supported on their left by 21 Danish squadrons, led by Count Tilly and Lieutenants Generals Hompesch, d'Auvergne, Ostfriesland and Dopffsteadily advanced towards the enemy (taking care not to prematurely tire the horses), before breaking into a trot to gain the impetus for their charge. The Marquis de Feuquières writing after the battle described the scene: "They advanced in four lines... As they approached they advanced their second and fourth lines into the intervals of their first and third lines; so that when they made their advance upon us, they formed only one front, without any intermediate spaces." This made it nearly impossible for the French cavalry to perform flanking manoeuvres. The initial clash favoured the Dutch and Danish squadrons. The disparity of numbersexacerbated by Villeroi stripping their ranks of infantry to reinforce his left flankenabled Overkirk's cavalry to throw the first line of French horse back in some disorder towards their second-line squadrons. This line also came under severe pressure and, in turn, was forced back to their third-line of cavalry and the few battalions still remaining on the plain. But these French horsemen were amongst the best in LouisXIV's armythe "Maison du Roi", supported by four elite squadrons of Bavarian Cuirassiers. Ably led by de Guiscard, the French cavalry rallied, thrusting back the Allied squadrons in successful local counterattacks. On Overkirk's right flank, close to Ramillies, ten of his squadrons suddenly broke ranks and were scattered, riding headlong to the rear to recover their order, leaving the left flank of the Allied assault on Ramillies dangerously exposed. Notwithstanding the lack of infantry support, de Guiscard threw his cavalry forward in an attempt to split the Allied army in two.
A crisis threatened the centre, but from his vantage point Marlborough was at once aware of the situation. The Allied commander now summoned the cavalry on the right wing to reinforce his centre, leaving only the English squadrons in support of Orkney. Thanks to a combination of battle-smoke and favourable terrain, his redeployment went unnoticed by Villeroi who made no attempt to transfer any of his own 50 unused squadrons. While he waited for the fresh reinforcements to arrive, Marlborough flung himself into the "mêlée", rallying some of the Dutch cavalry who were in confusion. But his personal involvement nearly led to his undoing. A number of French horsemen, recognising the Duke, came surging towards his party. Marlborough's horse tumbled and the Duke was thrown"Milord Marlborough was rid over," wrote Orkney some time later. It was a critical moment of the battle. "Major-General Murray," recalled one eyewitness: "...seeing him fall, marched up in all haste with two Swiss battalions to save him and stop the enemy who were hewing all down in their way." Samuel Constant de Rebecque helped Marlborough back on his feet, while Marlborough's newly appointed aide-de-camp, Richard Molesworth, galloped to the rescue, mounted the Duke on his horse and made good their escape, before Murray's disciplined ranks threw back the pursuing French troopers.
After a brief pause, Marlborough's equerry, Colonel Bringfield (or Bingfield), led up another of the Duke's spare horses; but while assisting him onto his mount, the unfortunate Bringfield was hit by an errant cannonball that sheared off his head. One account has it that the cannonball flew between the Captain-General's legs before hitting the unfortunate colonel, whose torso fell at Marlborough's feeta moment subsequently depicted in a lurid set of contemporary playing cards. Nevertheless, the danger passed and Overkirk and Tilly restored order among the confused squadrons and ordered them to attack again, enabling the Duke to attend to the positioning of the cavalry reinforcements feeding down from his right flanka change of which Villeroi remained blissfully unaware. Breakthrough. The time was about 16:30, and the two armies were in close contact across the whole front, from the skirmishing in the marshes in the south, through the vast cavalry battle on the open plain; to the fierce struggle for Ramillies at the centre, and to the north, where, around the cottages of Offus and Autre-Eglise, Orkney and de la Guiche faced each other across the Petite Gheete ready to renew hostilities.
The arrival of the transferring squadrons now began to tip the balance in favour of the Allies. Tired, and suffering a growing list of casualties, the numerical inferiority of Guiscard's squadrons battling on the plain at last began to tell. After earlier failing to hold or retake Franquenée and Taviers, Guiscard's right flank had become dangerously exposed and a fatal gap had opened on the right of their line. Taking advantage of this breach, Württemberg's Danish cavalry now swept forward, wheeling to penetrate the flank of the Maison du Roi whose attention was almost entirely fixed on holding back the Dutch. Sweeping forwards, virtually without resistance, the 21 Danish squadrons reformed behind the French around the area of the Tomb of Ottomond, facing north across the plateau of Mont St André towards the exposed flank of Villeroi's army. The final Allied reinforcements for the cavalry contest to the south were at last in position; Marlborough's superiority on the left could no longer be denied, and his fast-moving plan took hold of the battlefield. Now, far too late, Villeroi tried to redeploy his 50 unused squadrons, but a desperate attempt to form line facing south, stretching from Offus to Mont St André, floundered amongst the baggage and tents of the French camp carelessly left there after the initial deployment. The Allied commander ordered his cavalry forward against the now heavily outnumbered French and Bavarian horsemen. De Guiscard's right flank, without proper infantry support, could no longer resist the onslaught and, turning their horses northwards, they broke and fled in complete disorder. Even the squadrons currently being scrambled together by Villeroi behind Ramillies could not withstand the onslaught. "We had not got forty yards on our retreat," remembered Captain Peter Drake, an Irishman serving with the French"when the words "sauve qui peut" went through the great part, if not the whole army, and put all to confusion"
In Ramillies the Allied infantry, now reinforced by the English troops brought down from the north, at last broke through. The Régiment de Picardie stood their ground but were caught between Colonel Borthwick's Scots-Dutch regiment and the English reinforcements. Borthwick was killed, as was Charles O’Brien, the Irish Viscount Clare in French service, fighting at the head of his regiment. The Marquis de Maffei attempted one last stand with his Bavarian and Cologne Guards, but it proved in vain. Noticing a rush of horsemen fast approaching from the south, he later recalled: "...I went towards the nearest of these squadrons to instruct their officer, but instead of being listened to [I] was immediately surrounded and called upon to ask for quarter." Pursuit. The roads leading north and west were choked with fugitives. Orkney now sent his English troops back across the Petite Gheete stream to once again storm Offus where de la Guiche's infantry had begun to drift away in the confusion. To the right of the infantry Lord John Hay's 'Scots Greys' also picked their way across the stream and charged the Régiment du Roi within Autre-Eglise. "Our dragoons," wrote John Deane, "pushing into the village... made terrible slaughter of the enemy." The Bavarian Horse Grenadiers and the Electoral Guards withdrew and formed a shield about Villeroi and the Elector but were scattered by Lumley's cavalry. Stuck in the mass of fugitives fleeing the battlefield, the French and Bavarian commanders narrowly escaped capture by General Cornelius Wood who, unaware of their identity, had to content himself with the seizure of two Bavarian Lieutenant-Generals. Far to the south, the remnants of de la Colonie's brigade headed in the opposite direction towards the French held fortress of Namur.
The retreat became a rout. Individual Allied commanders drove their troops forward in pursuit, allowing their beaten enemy no chance to recover. Soon the Allied infantry could no longer keep up, but their cavalry were off the leash, heading through the gathering night for the crossings on the river Dyle. At last, however, Marlborough called a halt to the pursuit shortly after midnight near Meldert, from the field. "It was indeed a truly shocking sight to see the miserable remains of this mighty army," wrote Captain Drake, "...reduced to a handful." Aftermath. What was left of Villeroi's army was now broken in spirit; the imbalance of the casualty figures amply demonstrates the extent of the disaster for LouisXIV's army: ("see below"). In addition, hundreds of French soldiers were fugitives, many of whom would never remuster to the colours. Villeroi also lost 52 artillery pieces and his entire engineer pontoon train. In the words of Marshal Villars, the French defeat at Ramillies was "the most shameful, humiliating and disastrous of routs".
Town after town now succumbed to the Allies. Leuven fell on 25 May 1706; three days later, the Allies entered Brussels, the capital of the Spanish Netherlands. Marlborough realised the great opportunity created by the early victory of Ramillies: "We now have the whole summer before us," wrote the Duke from Brussels to Robert Harley: "...and with the blessing of God I shall make the best use of it." Malines, Lierre, Ghent, Alost, Damme, Oudenaarde, Bruges, and on 6 June Antwerp, all subsequently fell to Marlborough's victorious army and, like Brussels, proclaimed the Austrian candidate for the Spanish throne, the Archduke Charles, as their sovereign. Villeroi was helpless to arrest the process of collapse. When LouisXIV learnt of the disaster he recalled Marshal Vendôme from northern Italy to take command in Flanders; but it would be weeks before the command changed hands. As news spread of the Allies' triumph, the Prussians, Hessians and Hanoverian contingents, long delayed by their respective rulers, eagerly joined the pursuit of the broken French and Bavarian forces. "This," wrote Marlborough wearily, "I take to be owing to our late success." Meanwhile, Overkirk took the port of Ostend on 4 July thus opening a direct route to the English Channel for communication and supply, but the Allies were making scant progress against Dendermonde whose governor, the Marquis de Valée, was stubbornly resisting. Only later when Cadogan and Churchill went to take charge did the town's defences begin to fail.
Vendôme formally took over command in Flanders on 4 August; Villeroi would never again receive a major command: "I cannot foresee a happy day in my life save only that of my death." LouisXIV was more forgiving to his old friend: "At our age, Marshal, we must no longer expect good fortune." In the meantime, Marlborough invested the elaborate fortress of Menin which, after a costly siege, capitulated on 22 August. Dendermonde finally succumbed on 6 September followed by Aththe last conquest of 1706on 2 October. By the time Marlborough had closed down the Ramillies campaign he had denied the French most of the Spanish Netherlands west of the Meuse and north of the Sambreit was an unsurpassed operational triumph for the English Duke but once again it was not decisive as these gains did not defeat France.
Meanwhile, on the Upper Rhine, Villars had been forced onto the defensive as battalion after battalion had been sent north to bolster collapsing French forces in Flanders; there was now no possibility of his undertaking the re-capture of Landau. Further good news for the Allies arrived from northern Italy where, on 7 September, Prince Eugene had routed a French army before the Piedmontese capital, Turin, driving the Franco-Spanish forces from northern Italy. Only from Spain did LouisXIV receive any good news where Das Minas and Galway had been forced to retreat from Madrid towards Valencia, allowing PhilipV to re-enter his capital on 4 October. All in all though, the situation had changed considerably and LouisXIV began to look for ways to end what was fast becoming a ruinous war for France. For Queen Anne also, the Ramillies campaign had one overriding significance: "Now we have God be thanked so hopeful a prospect of peace." Instead of continuing the momentum of victory, however, cracks in Allied unity would enable LouisXIV to reverse some of the major setbacks suffered at Turin and Ramillies.
Casualties. The total number of French casualties cannot be calculated precisely, so complete was the collapse of the Franco-Bavarian army that day. David G. Chandler's "Marlborough as Military Commander" and "A Guide to the Battlefields of Europe" are consistent with regards to French casualty figures, i.e. 12,000 dead and wounded plus some 7,000 taken prisoner. James Falkner, in "Ramillies 1706: Year of Miracles", also notes 12,000 dead and wounded and "up to 10,000" taken prisoner. In "Notes on the history of military medicine", Garrison puts French casualties at 13,000, including 2,000 killed, 3,000 wounded and 6,000 missing. In "The Collins Encyclopaedia of Military History", Dupuy puts Villeroi's dead and wounded at 8,000, with a further 7,000 captured. Neil Litten, using French archives, suggests 7,000 killed and wounded and 6,000 captured, with a further 2,000 choosing to desert. John Millner's memoirs"Compendious Journal" (1733)is more specific, recording 12,087 of Villeroi's army were killed or wounded, with another 9,729 taken prisoner. In "Marlborough", however, Correlli Barnett puts the total casualty figure as high as 30,000–15,000 dead and wounded with an additional 15,000 taken captive. Trevelyan estimates Villeroi's casualties at 13,000 but adds "his losses by desertion may have doubled that number". La Colonie omits a casualty figure in his "Chronicles of an old Campaigner" but Saint-Simon in his "Memoirs" states 4,000 killed adding "many others were wounded and many important persons were taken prisoner". Voltaire, however, in "Histoire du siècle du LouisXIV" records "the French lost there twenty thousand men". Gaston Bodart states 2,000 killed or wounded, 6,000 captured and 7,000 scattered for a total of 13,000 casualties. Périni writes that both sides lost 2 to 3,000 killed or wounded (the Dutch losing precisely 716 killed and 1,712 wounded), and that 5,600 French were captured.
Brian Kernighan Brian Wilson Kernighan (; born January 30, 1942) is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language ("The C Programming Language") with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan affirmed that he had no part in the design of the C language ("it's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work"). Kernighan authored many Unix programs, including ditroff. He is coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The "K" of K&R C and of AWK both stand for "Kernighan". In collaboration with Shen Lin he devised well-known heuristics for two NP-complete optimization problems: graph partitioning and the travelling salesman problem. In a display of authorial equity, the former is usually called the Kernighan–Lin algorithm, while the latter is known as the Lin–Kernighan heuristic. Kernighan has been a professor of computer science at Princeton University since 2000 and is the director of undergraduate studies in the department of computer science. In 2015, he co-authored the book "The Go Programming Language.
Early life and education. Kernighan was born in Toronto. He attended the University of Toronto between 1960 and 1964, earning his bachelor's degree in engineering physics. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1969, completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Some graph partitioning problems related to program segmentation" under the supervision of Peter G. Weiner. Career and research. Kernighan has held a professorship in the department of computer science at Princeton since 2000. Each fall he teaches a course called "Computers in Our World", which introduces the fundamentals of computing to non-majors. Kernighan was the software editor for Prentice Hall International. His "Software Tools" series spread the essence of "C/Unix thinking" with makeovers for BASIC, FORTRAN, and Pascal, and most notably his "Ratfor" (rational FORTRAN) was put in the public domain. He has said that if stranded on an island with only one programming language it would have to be C. Kernighan coined the term "Unix" and helped popularize Thompson's Unix philosophy. Kernighan is also known for coining the expression "What You See Is All You Get" (WYSIAYG), which is a sarcastic variant of the original "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG). Kernighan's term is used to indicate that WYSIWYG systems might throw away information in a document that could be useful in other contexts.
In 1972, Kernighan described memory management in strings using "hello" and "world", in the B programming language, which became the iconic example we know today. Kernighan's original 1978 implementation of was sold at The Algorithm Auction, the world's first auction of computer algorithms. In 1996, Kernighan taught CS50 which is the Harvard University introductory course in computer science. Kernighan was an influence on David J. Malan who subsequently taught the course and scaled it up to run at multiple universities and in multiple digital formats. Kernighan was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2002 for contributions to software and to programming languages. He was also elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. In 2022, Kernighan stated that he was actively working on improvements to the AWK programming language, which he took part in creating in 1977.
BCPL BCPL ("Basic Combined Programming Language") is a procedural, imperative, and structured programming language. Originally intended for writing compilers for other languages, BCPL is no longer in common use. However, its influence is still felt because a stripped down and syntactically changed version of BCPL, called B, was the language on which the C programming language was based. BCPL introduced several features of many modern programming languages, including using curly braces to delimit code blocks. BCPL was first implemented by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1967. Design. BCPL was designed so that small and simple compilers could be written for it; reputedly some compilers could be run in 16 kilobytes. Furthermore, the original compiler, itself written in BCPL, was easily portable. BCPL was thus a popular choice for bootstrapping a system. A major reason for the compiler's portability lay in its structure. It was split into two parts: the front end parsed the source and generated O-code, an intermediate language. The back end took the O-code and translated it into the machine code for the target machine. Only of the compiler's code needed to be rewritten to support a new machine, a task that usually took between 2 and 5 person-months. This approach became common practice later (e.g. Pascal, Java).
The language is unusual in having only one data type: a word, a fixed number of bits, usually chosen to align with the same platform architecture's machine word and of adequate capacity to represent any valid storage address. For many machines of the time, this data type was a 16-bit word. This choice later proved to be a significant problem when BCPL was used on machines in which the smallest addressable item was not a word but a byte or on machines with larger word sizes such as 32-bit or 64-bit. The interpretation of any value was determined by the operators used to process the values. (For example, codice_1 added two values together, treating them as integers; codice_2 indirected through a value, effectively treating it as a pointer.) In order for this to work, the implementation provided no type checking. The mismatch between BCPL's word orientation and byte-oriented hardware was addressed in several ways. One was by providing standard library routines for packing and unpacking words into byte strings. Later, two language features were added: the bit-field selection operator and the infix byte indirection operator (denoted by codice_3).
BCPL handles bindings spanning separate compilation units in a unique way. There are no user-declarable global variables; instead, there is a global vector, similar to "blank common" in Fortran. All data shared between different compilation units comprises scalars and pointers to vectors stored in a pre-arranged place in the global vector. Thus, the header files (files included during compilation using the "GET" directive) become the primary means of synchronizing global data between compilation units, containing "GLOBAL" directives that present lists of symbolic names, each paired with a number that associates the name with the corresponding numerically addressed word in the global vector. As well as variables, the global vector contains bindings for external procedures. This makes dynamic loading of compilation units very simple to achieve. Instead of relying on the link loader of the underlying implementation, effectively, BCPL gives the programmer control of the linking process. The global vector also made it very simple to replace or augment standard library routines. A program could save the pointer from the global vector to the original routine and replace it with a pointer to an alternative version. The alternative might call the original as part of its processing. This could be used as a quick "ad hoc" debugging aid.
BCPL was the first brace programming language and the braces survived the syntactical changes and have become a common means of denoting program source code statements. In practice, on limited keyboards of the day, source programs often used the sequences codice_4 and codice_5 or codice_6 and codice_7 in place of the symbols codice_8 and codice_9. The single-line codice_10 comments of BCPL, which were not adopted by C, reappeared in C++ and later in C99. The book "BCPL: The language and its compiler" describes the philosophy of BCPL as follows: History. BCPL was first implemented by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1967. BCPL was a response to difficulties with its predecessor, Cambridge Programming Language, later renamed Combined Programming Language (CPL), which was designed during the early 1960s. Richards created BCPL by "removing those features of the full language which make compilation difficult". The first compiler implementation, for the IBM 7094 under Compatible Time-Sharing System, was written while Richards was visiting Project MAC at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the spring of 1967. The language was first described in a paper presented to the 1969 Spring Joint Computer Conference.
BCPL has been rumored to have originally stood for "Bootstrap Cambridge Programming Language", but CPL was never created since development stopped at BCPL, and the acronym was later reinterpreted for the BCPL book. BCPL is the language in which the original "Hello, World!" program was written. The first MUD was also written in BCPL ("MUD1"). Several operating systems were written partially or wholly in BCPL (for example, TRIPOS and the earliest versions of AmigaDOS). BCPL was also the initial language used in the Xerox PARC Alto project. Among other projects, the Bravo document preparation system was written in BCPL. An early compiler, bootstrapped in 1969, by starting with a paper tape of the O-code of Richards's Atlas 2 compiler, targeted the ICT 1900 series. The two machines had different word-lengths (48 vs 24 bits), different character encodings, and different packed string representations—and the successful bootstrapping increased confidence in the practicality of the method. By late 1970, implementations existed for the Honeywell 635 and Honeywell 645, IBM 360, PDP-10, TX-2, CDC 6400, UNIVAC 1108, PDP-9, KDF 9 and Atlas 2. In 1974 a dialect of BCPL was implemented at BBN without using the intermediate O-code. The initial implementation was a cross-compiler hosted on BBN's TENEX PDP-10s, and directly targeted the PDP-11s used in BBN's implementation of the second generation IMPs used in the ARPANET.
There was also a version produced for the BBC Micro in the mid-1980s, by Richards Computer Products, a company started by John Richards, the brother of Martin Richards. The BBC Domesday Project made use of the language. Versions of BCPL for the Amstrad CPC and Amstrad PCW computers were also released in 1986 by UK software house Arnor Ltd. MacBCPL was released for the Apple Macintosh in 1985 by Topexpress Ltd, of Kensington, England. Both the design and philosophy of BCPL strongly influenced B, which in turn influenced C. Programmers at the time debated whether an eventual successor to C would be called "D", the next letter in the alphabet, or "P", the next letter in the parent language name. The language most accepted as being C's successor is C++ (with codice_11 being C's increment operator), although meanwhile, a D programming language also exists. In 1979, implementations of BCPL existed for at least 25 architectures; the language gradually fell out of favour as C became popular on non-Unix systems. Martin Richards maintains a modern version of BCPL on his website, last updated in 2023. This can be set up to run on various systems including Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. The latest distribution includes graphics and sound libraries, and there is a comprehensive manual. He continues to program in it, including for his research on musical automated score following.
A common informal MIME type for BCPL is . Examples. Hello world. Richards and Whitby-Strevens provide an example of the "Hello, World!" program for BCPL using a standard system header, 'LIBHDR': Further examples. If these programs are run using Richards' current version of Cintsys (December 2018), LIBHDR, START and WRITEF must be changed to lower case to avoid errors. Print factorials: Count solutions to the N queens problem:
Battleship A battleship is a large, heavily armored warship with a main battery consisting of large guns, designed to serve as capital ships. From their advent in the late 1880s, battleships were among the largest and most formidable weapon systems ever built, until they were surpassed by aircraft carriers beginning in the 1940s. The modern battleship traces its origin to the sailing ship of the line, which was developed into the steam ship of the line and soon thereafter the ironclad warship. After a period of extensive experimentation in the 1870s and 1880s, ironclad design was largely standardized by the British , which are usually referred to as the first "pre-dreadnought battleships". These ships carried an armament that usually included four large guns and several medium-caliber guns that were to be used against enemy battleships, and numerous small guns for self defense. Naval powers around the world built dozens of pre-dreadnoughts in the 1890s and early 1900s, though they saw relatively little combat; only two major wars were fought during the period that included pre-dreadnought battles: the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. The following year, the British launched the revolutionary all-big-gun battleship . This ship discarded the medium-caliber guns in exchange for a uniform armament of ten large guns. All other major navies quickly began (or had already started) "dreadnoughts" of their own, leading to a major naval arms race. During World War I, only one major fleet engagement took place: the Battle of Jutland in 1916, but neither side was able to achieve a decisive result.
In the Interwar period, the major naval powers concluded a series of agreements beginning with the Washington Naval Treaty that imposed limits on battleship building to stop a renewed arms race. During this period, relatively few battleships were built, but advances in technology led to the maturation of the fast battleship concept, and several of these ships were built in the 1930s. The treaty system eventually broke down after Japan refused to sign the Second London Naval Treaty in 1936. Although the rise of the aircraft carrier during World War II largely relegated battleships to secondary duties, they still saw significant action during that conflict. Notable engagements include the battles of Cape Spartivento and Cape Matapan in 1940 and 1941, respectively; the sortie by the German battleship in 1941; the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942; and the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944. After World War II, most battleships were placed in reserve, broken up, or used as target ships, and few saw significant active service during the Cold War. The four American s were reactivated during the Korean War in the early 1950s and again in the 1980s as part of the 600-ship Navy.
Even at the height of their dominance of naval combat, some strategists questioned the usefulness of battleships. Beginning in the mid-1880s, the (Young School) argued that construction of expensive capital ships should stop in favor of cheap cruisers and torpedo boats. Despite a period of popularity for the , the idea fell out of favor and the battleship remained the arbiter of naval combat until World War II. Even afterward, they remained potent symbols of a country's might and they retained significant psychological and diplomatic effects. A number of battleships—predominantly American—remain as museum ships. Background. Ships of the line. A ship of the line was a large, unarmored wooden sailing ship which mounted a battery of up to 120 smoothbore guns and carronades, which came to prominence with the adoption of line of battle tactics in the early 17th century. From 1794, the alternative term 'line of battle ship' was contracted to 'battle ship' or 'battleship'. The sheer number of guns fired broadside meant a ship of the line could wreck any wooden enemy, holing her hull, knocking down masts, wrecking her rigging, and killing her crew. They also imparted a psychological effect on the crews of smaller vessels. Ships of the line were also fairly resilient to the guns of the day; for example, the British Royal Navy lost no first-rate (the largest type of ship of the line) to enemy action during the entire 18th century. Over time, ships of the line gradually became larger and carried more guns, but otherwise remained quite similar. Development of the first-rates was particularly conservative, as these ships represented a major investment. By the early 1800s, the traditional "seventy-four" (so-named because it carried 74 guns) was no longer considered to be a proper ship of the line, having been supplanted by 84- and 120-gun ships.
The first major change to the ship of the line concept was the introduction of steam power as an auxiliary propulsion system. Steam power was gradually introduced to the navy in the first half of the 19th century, initially for small craft and later for frigates. Early vessels used paddle wheels for propulsion, but by the 1840s, the first screw propeller equipped vessels began to appear. The value of these smaller steam-powered warships demonstrated their worth, when vessels like the British "Nemesis" proved to be critical to the Anglo-French success in the First Opium War in the 1840s. The French Navy introduced steam to the line of battle with the 90-gun in 1850—the first true steam battleship. "Napoléon", which was designed by Henri Dupuy de Lôme, was armed as a conventional ship-of-the-line, but her steam engines could give her a speed of , regardless of the wind. This was a potentially decisive advantage in a naval engagement. The introduction of steam accelerated the growth in size of battleships. France and the United Kingdom were the only countries to develop fleets of wooden, steam-screw battleships although several other navies operated small numbers of screw battleships, including Russia (9), the Ottoman Empire (3), Sweden (2), Naples (1), Denmark (1) and Austria (1).
Concurrent with the development of steam power, another major technological step heralded the end of the traditional ship of the line: guns capable of firing explosive shells. Pioneering work was done by the French artillery officer Henri-Joseph Paixhans beginning in 1809. The American artillerist George Bomford followed not far behind, designing the first shell-firing Columbiad in 1812. The British and Russians began to follow suit in the 1830s, though early smoothbore guns could not fire shells as far as solid shot, which hampered widespread adoption in any fleet. By the early 1840s, the French Paixhans gun and American Dahlgren gun had begun to be adopted by their respective navies. In the Crimean War of 1853–1855, six Russian ships of the line and two frigates of the Black Sea Fleet destroyed seven Turkish frigates and three corvettes with explosive shells at the Battle of Sinop in 1853. The battle was widely seen as vindication of the shell gun. Nevertheless, wooden-hulled ships stood up comparatively well to shells, as shown in the 1866 Battle of Lissa, where the modern Austrian steam ship of the line ranged across a confused battlefield, rammed an Italian ironclad and took 80 hits from Italian ironclads, many of which were shells, but including at least one shot at point-blank range. Despite losing her bowsprit and her foremast, and being set on fire, she was ready for action again the very next day.
Ironclads. As amply demonstrated at the Battle of Sinope, and again during the Anglo-French blockade of Sevastopol from 1854–1855, wooden ships had become vulnerable to shell-firing guns. This prompted the French emperor Napoleon III to order the first ironclad warships: the s. Three of these ships led the Anglo-French attack on the Russian fortress on the Kinburn Peninsula in the Battle of Kinburn in 1855, where they bore the brunt of Russian artillery fire, but were not seriously damaged. The success of these ships prompted the French and British to order several similar vessels. In March 1858, the French took development of the ironclad to its next logical step: a proper, ocean-going armored warship. This vessel, another design by Dupuy de Lome, was , and after her launching in 1859, Napoleon III ordered another five similar ships, which sparked a naval arms race with Britain. The first French ironclads had the profile of a ship of the line, cut to one deck due to weight considerations. Although made of wood and reliant on sail for most journeys, "Gloire" and her contemporaries were fitted with screw propellers, and their wooden hulls were protected by a layer of thick iron armor. Britain responded promptly with , a similar but much larger ironclad with an iron hull. By the time "Warrior" was completed in 1861, another nine ironclads were under construction in British shipyards, some of which were conversions of screw ships of the line that were already being built.
During the Unification of Italy in 1860, the Kingdom of Sardinia entered the ironclad building race by ordering the s from French shipyards; their long-term rival across the Adriatic Sea, the Austrian Empire, quickly responded later that year with the two s. Spain and Russia ordered ironclads in 1861, as did the United States and rebel Confederate States of America after the start of the American Civil War. Construction of these large and expensive warships remained controversial until March 1862, when news of the Battle of Hampton Roads, fought between the Union and the Confederate , firmly settled debate in favor of even larger construction programs. From the 1860s to 1880s, navies experimented with the positioning of guns, in turrets, central-batteries, or barbettes; ironclads of the period also prominently used the ram as a principal weapon. As steam technology developed, masts were gradually removed from battleship designs. The British Chief Constructor, Edward Reed, produced the s in 1869. These were mastless turret ships, which adopted twin-screw propulsion and an arrangement of two pairs of guns, one fore and one aft of the superstructre, that prefigured the advent of the pre-dreadnought battleship some two decades later. By the mid-1870s steel was used as a construction material alongside iron and wood. The French Navy's , laid down in 1873 and launched in 1876, was a combination central battery and barbette ship, which became the first capital ship in the world to use steel as the principal building material.
The rapid pace of technological developments, particularly in terms of gun capabilities and thickness of armor to combat them, quickly rendered ships obsolescent. In the continuous attempt by gun manufacturers to keep ahead of developments in armor plate, larger and larger guns were fitted to many of the later ironclads. Some of these, such as the British , carried guns as large as in diameter, while the Italian s were armed with colossal guns. The French experimented with very large guns in the 1870s, but after significant trouble with these guns (and the development of slower-burning gunpowder), they led the way toward smaller-caliber guns with longer barrels, which had higher muzzle velocity and thus greater penetration than the larger guns. "Jeune École". In the 1880s, opposition to fleets of large, expensive ironclads arose around the world, but most notably in France, where a group of naval officers led by Admiral Théophile Aube formed the (Young School). The theory, which held as one of its core tenets that small, cheap torpedo boats could easily defeat ironclads, was based on combat experience during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. The doctrine also posited that modern steel-hulled cruisers could defeat a more powerful navy by attacking the country's merchant shipping, rather than engage in a direct battle. The concept proved to be highly influential for several years, shaping the construction programs of France, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, among others throughout the world.
Development of the modern battleship. Pre-dreadnought battleships. In 1889, the British government passed the Naval Defence Act 1889, which embarked on a major naval construction program aimed at establishing the so-called two-power standard, whereby the Royal Navy would be stronger than the next two largest navies combined. The plan saw the construction of the eight s, which have been regarded as the first class of battleship that would retrospectively be referred to as "pre-dreadnought battleships". These large battleships incorporated a number of major improvements over earlier vessels like the "Devastation"s, including a high freeboard for true ocean-going capability, more extensive armor protection, heavier secondary battery guns, and greater speed. The ships were armed with four guns in two twin mounts, fore and aft, which established the pattern for subsequent battleships. After building a trio of smaller second class battleships intended for the colonial empire, Britain followed with the nine-strong s in 1893–1895, which improved on the basic "Royal Sovereign" design. These ships adopted the gun, which would become the standard for all subsequent British pre-dreadnoughts.
Foreign navies quickly began pre-dreadnoughts of their own; France began in 1889 and Germany laid down four s in 1890. The United States Navy laid down three s in 1891, the same year work began on the Russian battleship . Japan ordered the two s from British yards, to an improved "Royal Sovereign" design, in 1894. The Austro-Hungarian Navy eventually ordered its own pre-dreadnoughts, beginning with the in 1899. All of these ships carried guns of between , save the Austro-Hungarian vessels, which, being significantly smaller than the rest, only carried guns. Most pre-dreadnoughts followed the same general pattern, which typically saw a ship armed with four large guns, usually 12-inch weapons, along with a secondary of medium-caliber guns (usually guns early in the period), which were also intended for combat at close range with other battleships. They also generally carried a light armament for defense against torpedo boats and other light craft. Some ships varied from this general pattern, such as the American "Indiana"s, which carried a heavier secondary battery of guns, and the German "Brandenburg"s, which had six 11-inch guns for instead of the usual four heavy guns. Many of the early French pre-dreadnoughts, such as , carried a mixed heavy armament of two 12-inch and two guns.
Pre-dreadnoughts continued the technical innovations of the ironclad throughout the 1890s and early 1900s. Compound armor gave way to much stronger Harvey armor developed in the United States in 1890, which was in turn superseded by the German Krupp armor in 1894. As armor became stronger, it could be reduced in thickness considerably, which saved weight that could be allocated to other aspects of the ship design, and generally permitted larger and more capable battleships. At the same time, the advent of smokeless powder continued the trend begun in the French navy of comparatively smaller guns firing at higher velocities. Early on in the pre-dreadnought era, most navies standardized on the 12-inch gun; only Germany remained the significant outlier, relying on 11-inch and even 9.4-inch guns for its pre-dreadnoughts. Similarly, later in the pre-dreadnought era, the secondary batteries grew in caliber, usually to guns. Some final classes, such as the British with a secondary battery of guns, or the French that had 9.4-inch secondaries, have been subsequently referred to as "semi-dreadnoughts", reflecting their transitional step between classic pre-dreadnought designs and the all-big-gun battleships that would soon appear.
In the last years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th, the escalation in the building of battleships became an arms race between Britain and Germany. The German naval laws of 1890 and 1898 authorized a fleet of 38 battleships, a vital threat to the balance of naval power. Britain answered with further shipbuilding, but by the end of the pre-dreadnought era, British supremacy at sea had markedly weakened. In 1883, the United Kingdom had 38 ironclad battleships, twice as many as France and almost as many as the rest of the world put together. In 1897, Britain's lead was far smaller due to competition from France, Germany, and Russia, as well as the development of pre-dreadnought fleets in Italy, the United States and Japan. The Ottoman Empire, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Chile, and Brazil all had second-rate fleets led by armored cruisers, coastal defence ships or monitors. Early combat experiences. Pre-dreadnought battleships received their first test in combat in the Spanish-American War in 1898 at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba. An American squadron that included four pre-dreadnoughts had blockaded a Spanish squadron of four armored cruisers in Santiago de Cuba until 3 July, when the Spanish ships attempted to break through and escape. All four cruisers were destroyed in the ensuing engagement, as were a pair of Spanish destroyers, and American ships received little damage in return. The battle seemed to indicate that the mixed batteries of pre-dreadnought battleships were very effective, as the medium-caliber guns had inflicted most of the damage (which reinforced the observations of the Battle of Manila Bay, where only cruisers armed with medium guns had been present). It also led navies around the world to begin working on better solutions for rangefinding in the hope of improving gunnery at longer ranges.
Conflicting colonial ambitions in Korea and Manchuria led Russia and Japan to the next major use of pre-dreadnoughts in combat. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, squadrons of battleships engaged in a number of battles, including the Battle of the Yellow Sea and the Battle of Tsushima. Naval mines also proved to be a deadly threat to battleships on both sides, sinking the Russian in March 1904 and the Japanese battleships and on the same day in May. The action in the Yellow Sea began during a Russian attempt to break out of Port Arthur, which the Japanese under Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō had blockaded. The Russians outmaneuvered the Japanese and briefly escaped, but the latter's superior speed allowed them to catch up. A 12-inch shell struck the Russian flagship, killing the squadron commander and causing the Russian ships to fall into disarray and retreat back to Port Arthur. With night falling, the Japanese broke off and reimposed the blockade. At Tsushima, Togo outmaneuvered the Russian Second Pacific Squadron that had been sent to reinforce the Pacific Fleet, and the Japanese battleships quickly inflicted fatal damage with long-range fire from their 12-inch guns.
In both actions during the Russo-Japanese War, the fleets engaged at longer range (as far as at the Yellow Sea), where only their 12-inch guns were effective. Only in the final stages of the battle at Tsushima, by which time the Russian fleet had been severely damaged and most of its modern battleships sunk or disabled, did the Japanese fleet close to effective range of their secondary guns, fighting as close as . The actions, particularly the decisive engagement at Tsushima, demonstrated that the lessons taken from the Spanish-American War were incorrect, and that the large-caliber gun should be the only offensive weapon carried by battleships. Dreadnought battleships. In the early 1900s, some naval theorists had begun to argue for future battleships to discard the heavy secondary batteries and instead carry only big guns. The first prominent example was Vittorio Cuniberti, the chief engineer of the Italian (Royal Navy); he published an article in 1903 titled "An Ideal Battleship for the British Navy" in "Jane's Fighting Ships". By the time that British Admiral Sir John ("Jackie") Fisher became the First Sea Lord in late 1904, he had already become convinced that a similar concept—that of a fast capital ship carrying the largest quick-firing guns available (which at that time were weapons)—was the path forward. The Japanese Navy was the first to actually order any of these new ships, beginning with the two s in 1904, though due to shortages of 12-inch guns, they were completed with a mix of 12- and guns. By early 1905, Fisher had converted to the 12-inch gun for his proposed new capital ships, and in March that year, the German Navy had decided to build an all-big-gun battleship for the planned . The American was authorized in 1905, but work did not begin until December 1906.
Though several navies had begun design work on all-big-gun battleships, the first to be completed was the British , which had been ordered by Fisher. He actually preferred a very large armored cruiser equipped with an all-big-gun armament, which would come to be known as the battlecruiser, and he only included "Dreadnought" in his 1905 construction program to appease naval officers who favored continued battleship building. Fisher believed that Britain's security against the French and Russian threats would be better guaranteed by squadrons of fast battlecruisers, three of which were laid down in 1906. Regardless of Fisher's intentions, the rapidly changing strategic calculus invalidated his plans and ensured that when the 1906–1907 program was being debated, Germany would be Britain's primary rival, the Royal Navy chose to build three more dreadnoughts instead of further battlecruisers. Reactions from the other naval powers was immediate; very few pre-dreadnoughts were built afterward, and in the first seven years of the ensuing arms race, all of the major naval powers either had their own dreadnoughts in service or nearing completion. Of these competitions, the Anglo-German race was the most significant, though others took place, such as the South American contest. Even naval powers of the second and third rank, such as Spain; Brazil, Chile, and Argentina in South America; and Greece and the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean had begun dreadnought programs, either domestically or ordering abroad.
"Dreadnought" carried ten 12-inch guns, all in twin turrets: one was forward, two further aft, all on the centerline, and the remaining pair were wing turrets with more restricted arcs of fire. She disposed of the medium-caliber secondary battery and carried only guns for anti-torpedo boat work. A variety of experimental arrangements followed, including the "hexagonal" layout adopted by the German "Nassau"s (which had four of their six twin turrets on the "wings"), or the Italian and Russian s that mounted their guns all on the centerline, but with restricted arcs of fire for half of the guns. The "South Carolina"s dispensed with "Dreadnought"s wing turrets, adopting instead a superfiring arrangement of eight guns in four twin turrets, which gave them the same broadside as "Dreadnought", despite having two fewer guns. Technological development continued over the decade that followed "Dreadnought"s launch. Already by 1910, the British had begun the first of the so-called "super-dreadnoughts" that carried significantly more powerful guns, all on the centerline. The United States followed suit in 1911, though increasing the caliber of their guns to . France adopted a gun for its s, laid down in 1912. That year, Japan laid down the first of its s, also armed with a 14-inch main battery. The Germans waited until 1913, but skipped directly to guns. By this time, Britain had led the way to the 15-inch gun with the begun in late 1912. But more importantly than the increase of caliber, these were the first completely oil-fired battleships these were the first fast battleships. At around the same time, the United States introduced the next major innovation in battleship design: the all or nothing armor system in the laid down in 1912. The heaviest possible armor was used to protect the ship's propulsion machinery and ammunition magazines, but intermediate protection was stripped away from non-essential areas, since this mid-weight armor only served to detonate armor-piercing shells.
World War I. By the start of World War I in July 1914, the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet outnumbered the German High Seas Fleet by 21 to 13 in numbers of dreadnought battleships and 4 to 3 in battlecruisers. And over the course of the war, Britain would add another 14 dreadnoughts, while Germany completed another 6. German strategy presumed that Britain would launch an immediate offensive into the southern North Sea, but the British preferred to establish a distant blockade, which very quickly stopped German maritime trade. Both sides were aware that, because of the greater number of British dreadnoughts, a full fleet engagement would be likely to result in a British victory. The German strategy was therefore to try to provoke an engagement on their terms: either to induce a part of the Grand Fleet to enter battle alone, or to fight a pitched battle near the German coastline, where friendly minefields, torpedo-boats and submarines could be used to even the odds. The British fleet commander, Admiral John Jellicoe, refused to be drawn into unfavorable conditions and enforced the blockade at the English Channel and between Scotland and Norway.
In the Baltic Sea, Germany found itself in the reverse situation, in an even more lopsided fashion versus its Russian opponent. The Russian Baltic Fleet had only four dreadnoughts at the start of the war, so they adopted a purely defensive approach to guard the capital at Petrograd and the northern flank of the Russian army units fighting on the Eastern Front. In the Mediterranean Sea, Italy initially remained neutral, despite being a member of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, leaving the latter to face the French Navy and British Mediterranean Fleet alone. After ensuring the French army units in French North Africa were safely convoyed to France, the French fleet sailed to the Adriatic Sea to blockade the Austro-Hungarian fleet, which refused to leave their fortified bases. The French, like the other major European naval commanders, had failed to consider that their opponents would not concede to engaging in battle on terms unfavorable to them. The Adriatic quickly turned into another stalemate as the threat of Austro-Hungarian mines and submarines prevented a more aggressive employment of the French fleet.
The Germans embarked on a number of sweeps into the North Sea and raids on British coastal towns to draw out part of the Grand Fleet, which would be isolated and destroyed. These included the raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, where the Germans nearly caught an isolated British battle squadron, but turned away, thinking that it was the entire Grand Fleet. This strategy ultimately led to the Battle of Jutland on 31 May – 1 June 1916, the largest clash of battleship fleets. The first stage of the battle was fought largely by the two sides' battlecruiser squadrons, though the British were supported by four of the "Queen Elizabeth"-class battleships. After both battleship fleets engaged, the British crossed the Germans' "T" twice, but the latter managed to extricate themselves from the action as darkness fell. Early on 1 June, the High Seas Fleet had reached port. In the course of the fighting, three British battlecruisers were destroyed, as was one German battlecruiser and the old pre-dreadnought . Numerous cruisers and destroyers were lost on both sides as well.
The Germans made two further offensive operations in the months after Jutland. The first, which led to the inconclusive action of 19 August, saw one German battleship torpedoed by a British submarine and two British cruisers sunk by German U-boats. This incident convinced the British that the risks posed by submarines were too great to send the Grand Fleet into the southern North Sea, barring exceptional circumstances like a German invasion of Britain. In the second German operation, which took place on 18–19 October, a German cruiser was damaged by a submarine and the Grand Fleet remained in port. By this time, the Germans were similarly convinced of the futility of their attempts to isolate part of the British fleet, and discontinued such raids. They instead turned to unrestricted submarine warfare, which resulted in their battleships being reduced to a supporting force that guarded the U-boat bases. In the Baltic, the Germans made two attempts to capture the islands in the Gulf of Riga. The first came in August 1915, and in the ensuing Battle of the Gulf of Riga, a pair of German dreadnoughts engaged in an artillery duel at long range with the Russian pre-dreadnought guarding the minefields that protected the gulf. The Germans were drove off the Russian ship, cleared the minefield, but by the time they entered the gulf, submarines had reportedly arrived. Unwilling to risk the battleships in the shallow, confined waters of the gulf, the Germans retreated. The second attempt—Operation Albion—took place in October 1917. During the Battle of Moon Sound, another pair of German dreadnoughts damaged "Slava" so badly that she had to be scuttled, and the Germans completed their amphibious assault on the islands.
The modern units of the French and British fleets in the Mediterranean spent much of the war guarding the entrance to the Adriatic, first based at Malta and later moving to Corfu. They saw very little action through the war. In May 1915, Italy entered the war on the side of the Triple Entente, declaring war on their former allies; the Austro-Hungarians, who were prepared for the betrayal, sailed with the bulk of their fleet to raid the Italian coast on the first hours of the war on 24 May; the battleships were sent to bombard Ancona, but there were no heavy Italian or French units close enough to intervene. For their part, the Italians were content to reinforce the blockading force guarding the Adriatic, as they, too, were unwilling to risk their capital ships in the mine and submarine infested waters of the Austrian Littoral. Instead, light forces carried out most of the operations. Meanwhile, several French and British pre-dreadnoughts were sent to attack the Ottoman defenses guarding the Dardanelles. In the ensuing naval operations from February to March 1915, several battleships were sunk or damaged by mines and torpedoes. When the fleets failed to break through the defenses, the British and French decided to land at Gallipoli to try to take the fortifications by land; the remaining battleships were thereafter used to provide naval gunfire support. This, too, ultimately failed and by January 1916, the British and French withdrew their troops.
Russian battleships saw more action in the Black Sea against their Ottoman opponents. The Ottomans had the battlecruiser "Yavuz Sultan Selim (formerly the German "Goeben"), which the Russians attempted to destroy in a series of short engagements, including the Battle of Cape Sarych in November 1914, the Action of 10 May 1915, and the Action of 8 January 1916, though they were unsuccessful in all three attempts, primarily because the faster "Yavuz Sultan Selim" could easily escape from the more numerous but slow Russian pre-dreadnoughts. By 1916, the Russians had completed a pair of dreadnoughts in the Black Sea, which severely curtailed Ottoman freedom of maneuver. In the course of the war, older pre-dreadnoughts proved to be highly vulnerable to underwater damage, whether by naval mine or ship-launched or submarine-delivered torpedoes. was sunk by a German U-boat in the English Channel in 1915. At the Dardanelles, was sunk by a German U-boat, was sunk by the Ottoman destroyer . The British and and the French were all sunk by mines. and were both sunk by mines in the Mediterranean in 1916 and 1917, respectively. was similarly mined and sunk off the British coast in 1916, and was sunk by a U-boat in the final days of the war. The French were sunk by U-boats in 1916, and was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat in 1917 At Jutland, the only battleship lost was the old pre-dreadnought "Pommern", which was torpedoed by a destroyer.
In contrast, dreadnoughts proved to be much more resilient to underwater attack. was damaged by a torpedo at Jutland, but nevertheless returned to port. The German was torpedoed at the action of 19 August 1916, and and were torpedoed by the same submarine in November 1917; all three survived. was mined during Operation Albion and remained in action against Russian artillery batteries for some time thereafter. Dreadnoughts lost to underwater attack were rare. was sunk by a mine in October 1914, the Austro-Hungarian was sunk by Italian MAS boats in June 1918, and five months later, Italian frogmen sank using a powerful limpet mine. Inter-war period. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the most modern units of the German fleet was interned at Scapa Flow, where in June 1919, their crews scuttled the fleet to avoid it being handed over to the Allies. The remaining dreadnoughts still in German ports were therefore seized as compensation for the scuttled ships. The postwar of Weimar Germany was limited to a contingent of eight old pre-dreadnoughts (of which two would be kept in reserve) under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles; new battleships were subject to severe restrictions on size and armament. The surviving battleships of Austria-Hungary, the other defeated Central Power, were soon distributed among the Allies, to be broken up.
While the other major naval powers remained free to build new battleships, most of them were financially crippled after the war. The prospect of a renewed naval arms race between the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan, appealed to few politicians in the three countries, and so they concluded the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922, which also included Italy and France. The treaty limited the number and size of battleships, and imposed a ten-year building holiday, along with other provisions. The treaty also imposed a ratio of 5:5:3 on total displacement of battleships for the US, UK, and Japan, respectively, and it severed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The only exceptions to the building holiday were for the two British s, which were permitted to give Britain parity with the latest American and Japanese battleships, which were all armed with guns. The Washington treaty was followed by a series of other naval treaties, including the First London Naval Treaty (1930) and the Second London Naval Treaty (1936), which both set additional limits on major warships. The treaty limitations meant that fewer new battleships were launched in 1919–1939 than in 1905–1914. The treaties also inhibited development by imposing upper limits on the weights of ships. Designs like the projected British , the first American , and the Japanese —all of which continued the trend to larger ships with bigger guns and thicker armor—never got off the drawing board. Those designs which were commissioned during this period were referred to as treaty battleships. The collapse of the treaty system began during the negotiations for the Second London Treaty, where Japan demanded parity with Britain and the US, which the latter two flatly rejected. Japan withdrew from the treaty system in 1936, though the agreements remained in effect until January 1937.
Rise of air power. As early as 1914, the British Admiral Percy Scott predicted that battleships would soon be made irrelevant by aircraft. Between 1916 and 1918, US Admiral William Fullam published a series of papers stating that aircraft would become an independent strike arm of the fleet, and argued that the s then under construction should be converted to aircraft carriers than scrapped. By the end of World War I, aircraft had successfully adopted the torpedo as a weapon. In 1921 the Italian general and air theorist Giulio Douhet completed a hugely influential treatise on strategic bombing titled "The Command of the Air", which foresaw the dominance of air power over conventional military and naval forces. In 1921, US General Billy Mitchell used the ex-German dreadnought in a series of bombing tests conducted by the Navy and Army. The test involved a series of attacks on the stationary, unmanned ships using low-level, land-based bombers dropping bombs that ranged from . "Ostfriesland" was sunk by the heaviest bombs, though Mitchell broke the rules of the tests and the subsequent report concluded that had the ship been crewed, underway, and firing back at the aircraft, damage control teams aboard "Ostfriesland" could have managed any damage inflicted. Mitchell and his supporters nevertheless embarked on a public campaign that falsely claimed that "Ostfriesland" was a super-battleship, and the quick sinking proved that battleships were obsolete. Mitchell would eventually be subjected to a court martial, convicted, and discharged from the Army over his insubordinate tactics.
Naval aviation traces its origin back to the first decade of the 20th century, though early efforts were based on using aircraft to scout for the fleet and help direct gunfire at long range. A number of experimental aircraft carriers were employed during World War I, primarily by the Royal Navy, all converted from merchant vessels or existing warships. The US Navy completed its first carrier, , in 1922. But aircraft carriers in the 1920s faced a number of challenges to be overcome: aircraft of the day were short-ranged, which meant the carrier had to be very close to the enemy to be able to launch and then recover a strike, which exposed the carriers to attack. In addition, the available planes had insufficient power to carry meaningful bomb loads. Early naval aviators nevertheless pioneered effective tactics like dive bombing during this period. Fast battleships and the end of the treaty system.
The French and Italian navies were exempted from the 10-year building holiday, owing to the comparative obsolescence of their battleships; they were permitted to build worth of battleships. But the weak economies of both countries led both to defer new construction until Germany began building the of heavily armed cruiser at the end of the 1920s. This prompted the French to build the of small, fast battleships armed with guns, which led to a short arms race in Europe in the mid-1930s. The Italians responded with the significantly larger and more powerful , armed with 15-inch guns. The French, in turn, began the s to counter the "Littorio"s. By this time, Nazi Germany had signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in 1935, which removed the restrictions imposed by Versailles and pegged German naval strength to 35% of British tonnage. This permitted the construction of two s, which were also a response to the "Dunkerque"s. The advent of the "Richelieu"s prompted the Germans to build the two s late in the decade. The Germans thereafter embarked on the ambitious Plan Z naval construction program, which included a total of eight battleships, of which the "Bismarck"s would be the first two.
Against the backdrop of European rearmament in the mid-1930s, Britain began planning its first battleship class in a decade: the . These were armed with 14-inch guns intended to comply with the terms of the Second London Naval Conference, and they were laid down in 1937. The United States began their at the same time, and though they were intended to be armed with 14-inch guns, Japan's refusal to agree to the Second London Treaty led the US to invoke a clause of the treaty that allowed an increase to 16-inch guns. In 1939, these were followed by the four s, and in 1940 by the first of four s. For its part, Japan had decided to embark on a program of four very large s, armed with guns, as early as 1934, though work did not begin on the first ship until late 1937. World War II. European theater. The German pre-dreadnought fired the first shots of World War II by initiating the bombardment of the Polish garrison at Westerplatte in the early hours on 1 August 1939. The German "Scharnhorst"-class battleships caught the British carrier off the coast of Norway and sank her during the Norwegian campaign. Following the collapse of France in June 1940 and subsequent surrender, the British embarked on a campaign to neutralize or destroy British battleships that might be seized to reinforce the German fleet, including the attack on Mers-el-Kébir and the Battle of Dakar in July and September, respectively. In the former action, the British sank a pair of older "Bretagne"-class battleships and the fast battleship , though the latter was refloated and repaired. At Dakar, the French battleship and other forces fended off the British task force, which resulted in the torpedoing of the battleship , which was severely damaged.
Italy entered the war in June 1940, shortly before the French defeat. In November, the British launched a nighttime airstrike on the naval base at Taranto; in the Battle of Taranto, Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers disabled three Italian battleships, though they were subsequently repaired. Over the next year, Italian and British battleships engaged in a number of inconclusive actions as they contested the supply lines to North Africa. These included the Battle of Cape Spartivento in November 1940 and the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941. At Matapan, the battleship was badly damaged by a Swordfish, though the ship returned to port. The British battleships , , and nevertheless caught a group of three heavy cruisers that evening and destroyed them in a furious, close-range night action. Convoy battles continued through 1941 and into 1942, with actions such as First and Second Sirte. By 1943, Italian operations were sharply reduced due to a shortage of fuel, and after the Allied invasion of Italy, the country surrendered, allowing most of its fleet to be interned at Malta. While on the way, the battleship was sunk by a German Fritz X guided glide bomb.
In the meantime, in January 1941, the Germans began to send their few battleships on commerce raiding operations in the Atlantic, starting with the two "Scharnhorst"-class ships in Operation Berlin, which was not particularly successful. followed with Operation Rheinübung in May, which resulted in two actions, the Battle of the Denmark Strait and the sinking of "Bismarck". During the operation, "Bismarck" was crippled by Swordfish torpedo bombers, which allowed a pair of British battleships to catch and destroy her. By 1942, the last operational German battleships— and —were sent to occupied Norway to serve as a fleet in being to tie down British naval resources and to attack supply convoys to the Soviet Union. The battleship eventually sank "Scharnhorst" at the Battle of North Cape in December 1943, and "Tirpitz" was destroyed by British heavy bombers in 1944. Pacific theater. On 7 December 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. Over the course of two waves of dive-, level- and torpedo bombers, the Japanese sank or destroyed five battleships and inflicted serious damage to the facilities there. Three days later, land-based Japanese aircraft operating out of French Indochina, then occupied by Japan, caught and sank the British battleship and the battlecruiser off the coast of British Malaya. Though the Taranto and Pearl Harbor strikes were significant steps toward aircraft replacing the battleship as the primary naval striking arm, the sinking of "Prince of Wales" and "Repulse" marked the first time aircraft had sunk capital ships that were maneuvering and returning fire.
Employment of battleships during the Pacific War was limited by a number of factors. Japanese strategic doctrine, the , envisioned a decisive clash of battleships at the end of the war, and so kept most of their battleships in home waters, and only the four "Kongō"s were routinely detached to escort the aircraft carriers of the . For their part, the US kept its surviving pre-war battleships out of action primarily because they were too slow to keep up with the carriers. Later in the war, they were employed as coastal bombardment vessels. Nevertheless, American and Japanese battleships saw significant action during the Guadalcanal campaign in 1942, most notably at the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in November. There, an American squadron centered on the battleships and intercepted and sank the battleship , though "South Dakota" received significant damage in return. As more and more of the American fast battleships entered service from 1942, onward, they were frequently used as escorts for the fast carrier task force that was the US Navy's primary striking arm in its campaign across the central Pacific.
During the Philippines campaign, battleships played a central role during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. The action was one of the largest naval battles in history, which took place over several days and as three Japanese fleets attacked the Allied invasion fleet. The Japanese battleship , part of Center Force, was sunk by American carrier aircraft during the Battle of Sibuyan Sea on 24 October. During the Battle of Surigao Strait the following night, several US battleships that had been repaired from the attack on Pearl Harbor defeated the Japanese Southern Force that included a pair of battleships. Center Force attacked again on 25 October and in the Battle off Samar, but was driven off by destroyers and aircraft from several escort carriers. During the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945, Japan sent "Yamato" as a final suicide mission to attack the landing beaches and attempt to stop the invasion of the island. American aircraft scored between nine and thirteen torpedo hits and six bomb hits on the ship and sank her. was sunk by US aircraft off Kure, Japan, in July. Only survived the war. The war ended with the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship in September 1945.
Cold War: end of the battleship era. After World War II, several navies retained their existing battleships, but most were either placed in their reserve fleets or scrapped outright. Of their surviving pre-war battleships, most of the American vessels were either scrapped or sunk as target ships by 1948, though the most modern vessels, those of the and es, survived until the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of the earlier vessels, , was preserved as a museum ship. The four "King George V"-class ships were all broken up by 1957, Only two battleships—the British and the French —were completed after the war. "Vanguard" did not long outlast the "King George V"s, being scrapped herself in 1960. "Jean Bart" (and her sister "Richelieu") remained in the French fleet's inventory until the early 1960s, when they were discarded. Three of the six American "North Carolina"- and "South Dakota"-class ships were similarly scrapped in the early 1960s, but the other three—, , and —were retained as museum ships. With the reduced naval budgets of the immediate postwar period, the US Navy chose to concentrate its resources on its carrier force. Besides the rise of aircraft carriers as the preeminent naval striking force, the advent of nuclear weapons influenced the decision to abandon large battleship fleets. In 1946, "Nagato", which was seized by the US, and four American battleships were used during the Operation Crossroads nuclear weapons tests, though three of the American ships survived the two blasts and were later sunk with conventional weapons.
Of the remaining, smaller battleships fleets, Italy retained its two s, of 1913 vintage, until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when they were scrapped. One other battleship, was taken by the Soviets as reparations and renamed "Novorossiysk"; she was sunk by a mine in the Black Sea on 29 October 1955. The two surviving "Littorio"-class ships were taken by the US and UK as war reparations and scrapped in the late 1940s. The Soviets still had a pair of World War I-era battleships— and —, but they, too, were scrapped in the late 1950s. The three large South American navies still had a handful of pre-World War I dreadnoughts in service after the war. Brazil eventually discarded its two s in the early 1950s; "Argentina" sold its two s in 1956; the last ship in the region, the Chilean , followed them to the breakers' yard in 1959. The four "Iowa"-class battleships were the only vessels of the type to see significant combat after World War II. All four ships were reactivated for gunfire support duties during the Korean War in the early 1950s, and was also deployed during the Vietnam War in 1968–1969 for the same task. All four ships were modernized in the early 1980s with Tomahawk cruise missiles, Harpoon anti-ship missiles, and Phalanx CIWS systems, along with the latest radar systems. They were recommissioned as part of the 600-ship Navy program under President Ronald Reagan. "New Jersey" next saw action in 1982, bombarding Syrian artillery during the Lebanese Civil War. "Missouri" and took part in Operation Desert Storm against Iraqi forces in 1991, bombarding enemy positions along the coast. The ships proved to be expensive to operate, and they required thousands of men to keep in service, so "Iowa" and "New Jersey" were already back in reserve by that time, and "Missouri" and "Wisconsin" were also decommissioned by the end of 1991. All four were struck from the Naval Vessel Register in 1995.
When the last "Iowa"-class ship was finally stricken from the Naval Vessel Registry, no battleships remained in service or in reserve with any navy worldwide. A number are preserved as museum ships, either afloat or in drydock. The U.S. has eight battleships on display: "Massachusetts", "North Carolina", "Alabama", "Iowa", "New Jersey", "Missouri", "Wisconsin", and "Texas". "Missouri" and "New Jersey" are museums at Pearl Harbor and Camden, New Jersey, respectively. "Iowa" is on display as an educational attraction at the Los Angeles Waterfront in San Pedro, California. "Wisconsin" now serves as a museum ship in Norfolk, Virginia. "Massachusetts", which has the distinction of never having lost a man during service, is on display at the Battleship Cove naval museum in Fall River, Massachusetts. "Texas", the first battleship turned into a museum, is normally on display at the San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site, near Houston, but as of 2021 is closed for repairs. "North Carolina" is on display in Wilmington, North Carolina. "Alabama" is on display in Mobile, Alabama. The USS Arizona Memorial was erected over the wreck of , which was sunk during the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, to commemorate those killed in the raid. Memorials were also placed to mark the wreck of , also sunk during the attack. The only other 20th-century battleship on display is the Japanese pre-dreadnought , preserved since 1923.
Strategy and doctrine. Doctrine. For much of their existence, battleships were the embodiment of sea power. The American naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan argued in his seminal 1890 work, "The Influence of Sea Power upon History", a strong navy was vital to the success of a nation, and control of the seas was a prerequisite for the projection of force. Conversely, countries with weak navies would inevitably decline. Mahan argued that the cruiser warfare advocated by the "Jeune Ecole" could never be decisive, and that only fleets of battleships could control sea lanes and enforce blockades of an enemy's coast. The book proved to be widely influential across the world's navies; it was translated into German in 1896, where it was used to support the German naval expansion program championed by Alfred von Tirpitz. A Japanese-language translation also appeared in 1896, and it soon became required reading at the Japanese naval academy. By the end of the decade, Russian, French, Italian, and Spanish versions were produced.
A competing doctrine, that of the "fleet in being" dates at least as far back as the 17th century Royal Navy; its commander, Lord Torrington, argued that his fleet, though significantly outnumbered by the French navy of the day, posed enough of a risk as to dissuade a French attempt to invade England. The "fleet in being" in part acts as a deterrent against attack. The concept underpinned Tirpitz's so-called "risk theory" that was the basis of his program to build a German battle fleet. Even if the Royal Navy maintained a numerical superiority, the risk that the German fleet would inflict grievous damage even in the case of a British victory would militate against any such battle taking place, and Germany would be free to pursue its global ambitions. Tactics. By the 1890s, naval tacticians had developed a number of formations in which to employ battleships. The most prominent were referred to as "line ahead" and "line abreast". The former, the standard tactic during the age of sail, arrayed ships in a single-file line, which emphasized broadside fire. The latter placed ships side-by-side, which was suited to close-range melees where ramming and torpedoes could be effectively employed; after Tegetthoff's success at Lissa in 1866 used a modified line abreast formation, the tactic enjoyed a period of popularity for several years. By the 1880s, line-ahead tactics had returned to prominence. Royal Navy officers devised the tactic referred to as "crossing the T" of an enemy fleet, whereby one fleet steaming in line-ahead formation crossed in front of another line of battleships. This maneuver would allow one's own battleships to concentrate entire broadsides on the leading enemy ship, while one's opponent could only reply with their forward guns. Many navies adopted the tactic soon thereafter.
As the threat of underwater attack, including mines and torpedoes, developed after the 1860s, capital ships could no longer maintain close blockades of enemy ports. This required smaller, faster scouts to observe hostile ports so that an enemy fleet could be brought to battle. Modern cruisers began to be built in the 1880s for this purpose. Almost immediately after the invention of the airplane, navies recognized its potential as a reconnaissance unit for the fleet's battleships. The Austro-Hungarian Navy, then following the "Jeune École" doctrine of the 1870s and 1880s, devised the tactic of placing torpedo boats alongside battleships; these would hide behind the larger ships until gun-smoke obscured visibility enough for them to dart out and fire their torpedoes. While this tactic was made less effective by the development of smokeless propellant, the threat from more capable torpedo craft (later including submarines) remained. By the 1890s, the Royal Navy had developed the first destroyers, which were initially designed to intercept and drive off any attacking torpedo boats. The other major naval powers quickly followed suit with similar vessels of their own.
Psychological and diplomatic impact. The presence of battleships had a great psychological and diplomatic impact. Similar to possessing nuclear weapons in the second half of the 20th century, the ownership of battleships marked a country as a regional or global power, and the ability to build them domestically signified that a country could claim to be a great power. Even during the Cold War, the psychological impact of a battleship was significant. In 1946, USS "Missouri" was dispatched to deliver the remains of the ambassador from Turkey, and her presence in Turkish and Greek waters staved off a possible Soviet thrust into the Balkan region. In September 1983, when Druze militia in Lebanon's Shouf Mountains fired upon U.S. Marine peacekeepers, the arrival of USS "New Jersey" stopped the firing. Gunfire from "New Jersey" later killed militia leaders. Cost-effectiveness.
Bifröst In Norse mythology, Bifröst (modern icelandic: Bifröst ; from Old Norse: /ˈbiv.rɔst/), also called Bilröst and often anglicized as Bifrost, is a burning rainbow bridge that reaches between Midgard (Earth) and Asgard, the realm of the gods. The bridge is attested as "Bilröst" in the "Poetic Edda", compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources; as "Bifröst" in the "Prose Edda", written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson; and in the poetry of skalds. Both the "Poetic Edda" and the "Prose Edda" alternately refer to the bridge as Ásbrú (Old Norse "Æsir's bridge"). According to the "Prose Edda", the bridge ends in heaven at Himinbjörg, the residence of the god Heimdall, who guards it from the jötnar. The bridge's destruction during Ragnarök by the forces of Muspell is foretold. Scholars have proposed that the bridge may have originally represented the Milky Way and have noted parallels between the bridge and another bridge in Norse mythology, Gjallarbrú. Etymology. Scholar Andy Orchard suggests that "Bifröst" may mean "shimmering path." He notes that the first element of "Bilröst"—"bil" (meaning "a moment")—"suggests the fleeting nature of the rainbow," which he connects to the first element of "Bifröst"—the Old Norse verb "bifa" (meaning "to shimmer" or "to shake")—noting that the element evokes notions of the "lustrous sheen" of the bridge. Austrian Germanist Rudolf Simek says that "Bifröst" either means "the swaying road to heaven" (also citing "bifa") or, if "Bilröst" is the original form of the two (which Simek says is likely), "the fleetingly glimpsed rainbow" (possibly connected to "bil", perhaps meaning "moment, weak point").
Attestations. Two poems in the "Poetic Edda" and two books in the "Prose Edda" provide information about the bridge: "Poetic Edda". In the "Poetic Edda", the bridge is mentioned in the poems "Grímnismál" and "Fáfnismál", where it is referred to as "Bilröst". In one of two stanzas in the poem "Grímnismál" that mentions the bridge, Grímnir (the god Odin in disguise) provides the young Agnarr with cosmological knowledge, including that Bilröst is the best of bridges. Later in "Grímnismál", Grímnir notes that Asbrú "burns all with flames" and that, every day, the god Thor wades through the waters of Körmt and Örmt and the two Kerlaugar: In "Fáfnismál", the dying wyrm Fafnir tells the hero Sigurd that, during the events of Ragnarök, bearing spears, gods will meet at Óskópnir. From there, the gods will cross Bilröst, which will break apart as they cross over it, causing their horses to dredge through an immense river. "Prose Edda". The bridge is mentioned in the "Prose Edda" books "Gylfaginning" and "Skáldskaparmál", where it is referred to as "Bifröst". In chapter 13 of "Gylfaginning", Gangleri (King Gylfi in disguise) asks the enthroned figure of High what way exists between heaven and earth. Laughing, High replies that the question isn't an intelligent one, and goes on to explain that the gods built a bridge from heaven and earth. He incredulously asks Gangleri if he has not heard the story before. High says that Gangleri must have seen it, and notes that Gangleri may call it a rainbow. High says that the bridge consists of three colors, has great strength, "and is built with art and skill to a greater extent than other constructions."
High notes that, although the bridge is strong, it will break when "Muspell's lads" attempt to cross it, and their horses will have to make do with swimming over "great rivers." Gangleri says that it doesn't seem that the gods "built the bridge in good faith if it is liable to break, considering that they can do as they please." High responds that the gods do not deserve blame for the breaking of the bridge, for "there is nothing in this world that will be secure when Muspell's sons attack." In chapter 15 of "Gylfaginning", Just-As-High says that Bifröst is also called "Asbrú", and that every day the gods ride their horses across it (with the exception of Thor, who instead wades through the boiling waters of the rivers Körmt and Örmt) to reach Urðarbrunnr, a holy well where the gods have their court. As a reference, Just-As-High quotes the second of the two stanzas in "Grímnismál" that mention the bridge (see above). Gangleri asks if fire burns over Bifröst. High says that the red in the bridge is burning fire, and, without it, the frost jotnar and mountain jotnar would "go up into heaven" if anyone who wanted could cross Bifröst. High adds that, in heaven, "there are many beautiful places" and that "everywhere there has divine protection around it."
In chapter 17, High tells Gangleri that the location of Himinbjörg "stands at the edge of heaven where Bifrost reaches heaven." While describing the god Heimdallr in chapter 27, High says that Heimdallr lives in Himinbjörg by Bifröst, and guards the bridge from mountain jotnar while sitting at the edge of heaven. In chapter 34, High quotes the first of the two "Grímnismál" stanzas that mention the bridge. In chapter 51, High foretells the events of Ragnarök. High says that, during Ragnarök, the sky will split open, and from the split will ride forth the "sons of Muspell". When the "sons of Muspell" ride over Bifröst it will break, "as was said above." In the "Prose Edda" book "Skáldskaparmál", the bridge receives a single mention. In chapter 16, a work by the 10th century skald Úlfr Uggason is provided, where Bifröst is referred to as "the powers' way." Theories. In his translation of the "Poetic Edda", Henry Adams Bellows comments that the "Grímnismál" stanza mentioning Thor and the bridge stanza may mean that "Thor has to go on foot in the last days of the destruction, when the bridge is burning. Another interpretation, however, is that when Thor leaves the heavens (i.e., when a thunder-storm is over) the rainbow-bridge becomes hot in the sun."
John Lindow points to a parallel between Bifröst, which he notes is "a bridge between earth and heaven, or earth and the world of the gods", and the bridge Gjallarbrú, "a bridge between earth and the underworld, or earth and the world of the dead." Several scholars have proposed that Bifröst may represent the Milky Way. Adaptations. In the final scene of Richard Wagner's 1869 opera "Das Rheingold", the god Froh summons a rainbow bridge, over which the gods cross to enter Valhalla. In J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, the "level bridge" of "The Fall of Númenor", an early version of the "Akallabeth", recalls Bifröst. It departs from the earth at a tangent, allowing immortal Elves but not mortal Men to travel the Old Straight Road to the lost earthly paradise of Valinor after the world has been remade. Bifröst appears in comic books associated with the Marvel Comics character Thor and in subsequent adaptations of those comic books. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe film "Thor", Jane Foster describes the Bifröst as an Einstein–Rosen bridge, which functions as a means of transportation across space in a short period of time.
Battlecruiser The battlecruiser (also written as battle cruiser or battle-cruiser) was a type of capital ship of the first half of the 20th century. These were similar in displacement, armament and cost to battleships, but differed in form and balance of attributes. Battlecruisers typically had thinner armour (to a varying degree) and a somewhat lighter main gun battery than contemporary battleships, installed on a longer hull with much higher engine power in order to attain greater speeds. The first battlecruisers were designed in the United Kingdom, as a development of the armoured cruiser, at the same time as the dreadnought succeeded the pre-dreadnought battleship. The goal of the design was to outrun any ship with similar armament, and chase down any ship with lesser armament; they were intended to hunt down slower, older armoured cruisers and destroy them with heavy gunfire while avoiding combat with the more powerful but slower battleships. However, as more and more battlecruisers were built, they were increasingly used alongside the better-protected battleships.
Battlecruisers served in the navies of the United Kingdom, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, Australia and Japan during World War I, most notably at the Battle of the Falkland Islands and in the several raids and skirmishes in the North Sea which culminated in a pitched fleet battle, the Battle of Jutland. British battlecruisers in particular suffered heavy losses at Jutland, where poor fire safety and ammunition handling practices left them vulnerable to catastrophic magazine explosions following hits to their main turrets from large-calibre shells. This dismal showing led to a persistent general belief that battlecruisers were too thinly armoured to function successfully. By the end of the war, capital ship design had developed, with battleships becoming faster and battlecruisers becoming more heavily armoured, blurring the distinction between a battlecruiser and a fast battleship. The Washington Naval Treaty, which limited capital ship construction from 1922 onwards, treated battleships and battlecruisers identically, and the new generation of battlecruisers planned by the United States, Great Britain and Japan were scrapped or converted into aircraft carriers under the terms of the treaty.
Improvements in armour design and propulsion created the 1930s "fast battleship" with the speed of a battlecruiser and armour of a battleship, making the battlecruiser in the traditional sense effectively an obsolete concept. Thus from the 1930s on, only the Royal Navy continued to use "battlecruiser" as a classification for the World War I–era capital ships that remained in the fleet; while Japan's battlecruisers remained in service, they had been significantly reconstructed and were re-rated as full-fledged fast battleships. Some new vessels built during that decade, the German s and s and the French s are all sometimes referred to as battlecruisers, although the owning navies referred to them as "battleships" (), "armoured ships" () and "battleships" () respectively. Battlecruisers were put into action again during World War II, and only one survived to the end, . There was also renewed interest in large "cruiser-killer" type warships whose design was scaled-up from a heavy cruiser rather than a lighter/faster battleship derivative, but few were ever begun and only two members of the were commissioned in time to see war service. Construction of large cruisers as well as fast battleships were curtailed in favor of more-needed aircraft carriers, convoy escorts, and cargo ships.
During (and after) the Cold War, the Soviet of large guided missile cruisers have been the only ships termed "battlecruisers"; the class is also the only example of a nuclear-powered battlecruiser. As of 2024, Russia operates two units: the "Pyotr Velikiy" has remained in active service since its 1998 commissioning, while the "Admiral Nakhimov" has been inactive (in storage or refitting) since 1999. Background. The battlecruiser was developed by the Royal Navy in the first years of the 20th century as an evolution of the armoured cruiser. The first armoured cruisers had been built in the 1870s, as an attempt to give armour protection to ships fulfilling the typical cruiser roles of patrol, trade protection and power projection. However, the results were rarely satisfactory, as the weight of armour required for any meaningful protection usually meant that the ship became almost as slow as a battleship. As a result, navies preferred to build protected cruisers with an armoured deck protecting their engines, or simply no armour at all.
In the 1890s, new Krupp steel armour meant that it was now possible to give a cruiser side armour which would protect it against the quick-firing guns of enemy battleships and cruisers alike. In 1896–97 France and Russia, who were regarded as likely allies in the event of war, started to build large, fast armoured cruisers taking advantage of this. In the event of a war between Britain and France or Russia, or both, these cruisers threatened to cause serious difficulties for the British Empire's worldwide trade. Britain, which had concluded in 1892 that it needed twice as many cruisers as any potential enemy to adequately protect its empire's sea lanes, responded to the perceived threat by laying down its own large armoured cruisers. Between 1899 and 1905, it completed or laid down seven classes of this type, a total of 35 ships. This building program, in turn, prompted the French and Russians to increase their own construction. The Imperial German Navy began to build large armoured cruisers for use on their overseas stations, laying down eight between 1897 and 1906. In the period 1889–1896, the Royal Navy spent £7.3 million on new large cruisers. From 1897 to 1904, it spent £26.9 million. Many armoured cruisers of the new kind were just as large and expensive as the equivalent battleship.
The increasing size and power of the armoured cruiser led to suggestions in British naval circles that cruisers should displace battleships entirely. The battleship's main advantage was its 12-inch heavy guns, and heavier armour designed to protect from shells of similar size. However, for a few years after 1900 it seemed that those advantages were of little practical value. The torpedo now had a range of 2,000 yards, and it seemed unlikely that a battleship would engage within torpedo range. However, at ranges of more than 2,000 yards it became increasingly unlikely that the heavy guns of a battleship would score any hits, as the heavy guns relied on primitive aiming techniques. The secondary batteries of 6-inch quick-firing guns, firing more plentiful shells, were more likely to hit the enemy. As naval expert Fred T. Jane wrote in June 1902,Is there anything outside of 2,000 yards that the big gun in its hundreds of tons of medieval castle can affect, that its weight in 6-inch guns without the castle could not affect equally well? And inside 2,000, what, in these days of gyros, is there that the torpedo cannot effect with far more certainty?
In 1904, Admiral John "Jacky" Fisher became First Sea Lord, the senior officer of the Royal Navy. He had for some time thought about the development of a new fast armoured ship. He was very fond of the "second-class battleship" , a faster, more lightly armoured battleship. As early as 1901, there is confusion in Fisher's writing about whether he saw the battleship or the cruiser as the model for future developments. This did not stop him from commissioning designs from naval architect W. H. Gard for an armoured cruiser with the heaviest possible armament for use with the fleet. The design Gard submitted was for a ship between , capable of , armed with four 9.2-inch and twelve guns in twin gun turrets and protected with six inches of armour along her belt and 9.2-inch turrets, on her 7.5-inch turrets, 10 inches on her conning tower and up to on her decks. However, mainstream British naval thinking between 1902 and 1904 was clearly in favour of heavily armoured battleships, rather than the fast ships that Fisher favoured.
The Battle of Tsushima proved the effectiveness of heavy guns over intermediate ones and the need for a uniform main caliber on a ship for fire control. Even before this, the Royal Navy had begun to consider a shift away from the mixed-calibre armament of the 1890s pre-dreadnought to an "all-big-gun" design, and preliminary designs circulated for battleships with all 12-inch or all 10-inch guns and armoured cruisers with all 9.2-inch guns. In late 1904, not long after the Royal Navy had decided to use 12-inch guns for its next generation of battleships because of their superior performance at long range, Fisher began to argue that big-gun cruisers could replace battleships altogether. The continuing improvement of the torpedo meant that submarines and destroyers would be able to destroy battleships; this in Fisher's view heralded the end of the battleship or at least compromised the validity of heavy armour protection. Nevertheless, armoured cruisers would remain vital for commerce protection. Fisher's views were very controversial within the Royal Navy, and even given his position as First Sea Lord, he was not in a position to insist on his own approach. Thus he assembled a "Committee on Designs", consisting of a mixture of civilian and naval experts, to determine the approach to both battleship and armoured cruiser construction in the future. While the stated purpose of the committee was to investigate and report on future requirements of ships, Fisher and his associates had already made key decisions. The terms of reference for the committee were for a battleship capable of with 12-inch guns and no intermediate calibres, capable of docking in existing drydocks; and a cruiser capable of , also with 12-inch guns and no intermediate armament, armoured like , the most recent armoured cruiser, and also capable of using existing docks.
First battlecruisers. Under the Selborne plan of 1903, the Royal Navy intended to start three new battleships and four armoured cruisers each year. However, in late 1904 it became clear that the 1905–1906 programme would have to be considerably smaller, because of lower than expected tax revenue and the need to buy out two Chilean battleships under construction in British yards, lest they be purchased by the Russians for use against the Japanese, Britain's ally. These economic realities meant that the 1905–1906 programme consisted only of one battleship, but three armoured cruisers. The battleship became the revolutionary battleship , and the cruisers became the three ships of the . Fisher later claimed, however, that he had argued during the committee for the cancellation of the remaining battleship. The construction of the new class was begun in 1906 and completed in 1908, delayed perhaps to allow their designers to learn from any problems with "Dreadnought". The ships fulfilled the design requirement quite closely. On a displacement similar to "Dreadnought", the "Invincible"s were longer to accommodate additional boilers and more powerful turbines to propel them at . Moreover, the new ships could maintain this speed for days, whereas pre-dreadnought battleships could not generally do so for more than an hour. Armed with eight 12-inch Mk X guns, compared to ten on "Dreadnought", they had of armour protecting the hull and the gun turrets. ("Dreadnought"s armour, by comparison, was at its thickest.) The class had a very marked increase in speed, displacement and firepower compared to the most recent armoured cruisers but no more armour.
While the "Invincible"s were to fill the same role as the armoured cruisers they succeeded, they were expected to do so more effectively. Specifically their roles were: Confusion about how to refer to these new battleship-size armoured cruisers set in almost immediately. Even in late 1905, before work was begun on the "Invincible"s, a Royal Navy memorandum refers to "large armoured ships" meaning both battleships and large cruisers. In October 1906, the Admiralty began to classify all post-Dreadnought battleships and armoured cruisers as "capital ships", while Fisher used the term "dreadnought" to refer either to his new battleships or the battleships and armoured cruisers together. At the same time, the "Invincible" class themselves were referred to as "cruiser-battleships", "dreadnought cruisers"; the term "battlecruiser" was first used by Fisher in 1908. Finally, on 24 November 1911, Admiralty Weekly Order No. 351 laid down that "All cruisers of the "Invincible" and later types are for the future to be described and classified as "battle cruisers" to distinguish them from the armoured cruisers of earlier date."
Along with questions over the new ships' nomenclature came uncertainty about their actual role due to their lack of protection. If they were primarily to act as scouts for the battle fleet and hunter-killers of enemy cruisers and commerce raiders, then the seven inches of belt armour with which they had been equipped would be adequate. If, on the other hand, they were expected to reinforce a battle line of dreadnoughts with their own heavy guns, they were too thin-skinned to be safe from an enemy's heavy guns. The "Invincible"s were essentially extremely large, heavily armed, fast armoured cruisers. However, the viability of the armoured cruiser was already in doubt. A cruiser that could have worked with the Fleet might have been a more viable option for taking over that role. Because of the "Invincible"s size and armament, naval authorities considered them capital ships almost from their inception—an assumption that might have been inevitable. Complicating matters further was that many naval authorities, including Lord Fisher, had made overoptimistic assessments from the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 about the armoured cruiser's ability to survive in a battle line against enemy capital ships due to their superior speed. These assumptions had been made without taking into account the Russian Baltic Fleet's inefficiency and tactical ineptitude. By the time the term "battlecruiser" had been given to the "Invincible"s, the idea of their parity with battleships had been fixed in many people's minds.
Not everyone was so convinced. "Brasseys Naval Annual", for instance, stated that with vessels as large and expensive as the "Invincible"s, an admiral "will be certain to put them in the line of battle where their comparatively light protection will be a disadvantage and their high speed of no value." Those in favor of the battlecruiser countered with two points—first, since all capital ships were vulnerable to new weapons such as the torpedo, armour had lost some of its validity; and second, because of its greater speed, the battlecruiser could control the range at which it engaged an enemy. Battlecruisers in the dreadnought arms race. Between the launching of the "Invincible"s to just after the outbreak of the First World War, the battlecruiser played a junior role in the developing dreadnought arms race, as it was never wholeheartedly adopted as the key weapon in British imperial defence, as Fisher had presumably desired. The biggest factor for this lack of acceptance was the marked change in Britain's strategic circumstances between their conception and the commissioning of the first ships.
The biggest factor for this lack of acceptance was the marked change in Britain's strategic circumstances between their conception and the commissioning of the first ships. The prospective enemy for Britain had shifted from a Franco-Russian alliance with many armoured cruisers to a resurgent and increasingly belligerent Germany. Diplomatically, Britain had entered the Entente cordiale in 1904 and the Anglo-Russian Entente. Neither France nor Russia posed a particular naval threat; the Russian navy had largely been sunk or captured in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, while the French were in no hurry to adopt the new dreadnought-type design. Britain also boasted very cordial relations with two of the significant new naval powers: Japan (bolstered by the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, signed in 1902 and renewed in 1905), and the US. These changed strategic circumstances, and the great success of the "Dreadnought" ensured that she rather than the "Invincible" became the new model capital ship. Nevertheless, battlecruiser construction played a part in the renewed naval arms race sparked by the "Dreadnought".
For their first few years of service, the "Invincible"s entirely fulfilled Fisher's vision of being able to sink any ship fast enough to catch them, and run from any ship capable of sinking them. An "Invincible" would also, in many circumstances, be able to take on an enemy pre-dreadnought battleship. Naval circles concurred that the armoured cruiser in its current form had come to the logical end of its development and the "Invincible"s were so far ahead of any enemy armoured cruiser in firepower and speed that it proved difficult to justify building more or bigger cruisers. This lead was extended by the surprise both "Dreadnought" and "Invincible" produced by having been built in secret; this prompted most other navies to delay their building programmes and radically revise their designs. This was particularly true for cruisers, because the details of the "Invincible" class were kept secret for longer; this meant that the last German armoured cruiser, , was armed with only guns, and was no match for the new battlecruisers.
The Royal Navy's early superiority in capital ships led to the rejection of a 1905–1906 design that would, essentially, have fused the battlecruiser and battleship concepts into what would eventually become the fast battleship. The 'X4' design combined the full armour and armament of "Dreadnought" with the 25-knot speed of "Invincible". The additional cost could not be justified given the existing British lead and the new Liberal government's need for economy; the slower and cheaper , a relatively close copy of "Dreadnought", was adopted instead. The X4 concept would eventually be fulfilled in the and later by other navies. The next British battlecruisers were the three , slightly improved "Invincible"s built to fundamentally the same specification, partly due to political pressure to limit costs and partly due to the secrecy surrounding German battlecruiser construction, particularly about the heavy armour of . This class came to be widely seen as a mistake and the next generation of British battlecruisers were markedly more powerful. By 1909–1910 a sense of national crisis about rivalry with Germany outweighed cost-cutting, and a naval panic resulted in the approval of a total of eight capital ships in 1909–1910. Fisher pressed for all eight to be battlecruisers, but was unable to have his way; he had to settle for six battleships and two battlecruisers of the . The "Lion"s carried eight 13.5-inch guns, the now-standard caliber of the British "super-dreadnought" battleships. Speed increased to and armour protection, while not as good as in German designs, was better than in previous British battlecruisers, with armour belt and barbettes. The two "Lion"s were followed by the very similar .
By 1911 Germany had built battlecruisers of her own, and the superiority of the British ships could no longer be assured. Moreover, the German Navy did not share Fisher's view of the battlecruiser. In contrast to the British focus on increasing speed and firepower, Germany progressively improved the armour and staying power of their ships to better the British battlecruisers. "Von der Tann", begun in 1908 and completed in 1910, carried eight 11.1-inch guns, but with 11.1-inch (283 mm) armour she was far better protected than the "Invincible"s. The two s were quite similar but carried ten 11.1-inch guns of an improved design. , designed in 1909 and finished in 1913, was a modified "Moltke"; speed increased by one knot to , while her armour had a maximum thickness of 12 inches, equivalent to the s of a few years earlier. "Seydlitz" was Germany's last battlecruiser completed before World War I.
The next British battlecruiser, , was intended initially as the fourth ship in the "Lion" class, but was substantially redesigned. She retained the eight 13.5-inch guns of her predecessors, but they were positioned like those of "Kongō" for better fields of fire. She was faster (making on sea trials), and carried a heavier secondary armament. "Tiger" was also more heavily armoured on the whole; while the maximum thickness of armour was the same at nine inches, the height of the main armour belt was increased. Not all the desired improvements for this ship were approved, however. Her designer, Sir Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt, had wanted small-bore water-tube boilers and geared turbines to give her a speed of , but he received no support from the authorities and the engine makers refused his request. 1912 saw work begin on three more German battlecruisers of the , the first German battlecruisers to mount 12-inch guns. These ships, like "Tiger" and the "Kongō"s, had their guns arranged in superfiring turrets for greater efficiency. Their armour and speed was similar to the previous "Seydlitz" class. In 1913, the Russian Empire also began the construction of the four-ship , which were designed for service in the Baltic Sea. These ships were designed to carry twelve 14-inch guns, with armour up to 12 inches thick, and a speed of . The heavy armour and relatively slow speed of these ships made them more similar to German designs than to British ships; construction of the "Borodino"s was halted by the First World War and all were scrapped after the end of the Russian Civil War.
World War I. Construction. For most of the combatants, capital ship construction was very limited during the war. Germany finished the "Derfflinger" class and began work on the . The "Mackensen"s were a development of the "Derfflinger" class, with 13.8-inch guns and a broadly similar armour scheme, designed for . In Britain, Jackie Fisher returned to the office of First Sea Lord in October 1914. His enthusiasm for big, fast ships was unabated, and he set designers to producing a design for a battlecruiser with 15-inch guns. Because Fisher expected the next German battlecruiser to steam at 28 knots, he required the new British design to be capable of 32 knots. He planned to reorder two s, which had been approved but not yet laid down, to a new design. Fisher finally received approval for this project on 28 December 1914 and they became the . With six 15-inch guns but only 6-inch armour they were a further step forward from "Tiger" in firepower and speed, but returned to the level of protection of the first British battlecruisers.
At the same time, Fisher resorted to subterfuge to obtain another three fast, lightly armoured ships that could use several spare gun turrets left over from battleship construction. These ships were essentially light battlecruisers, and Fisher occasionally referred to them as such, but officially they were classified as "large light cruisers". This unusual designation was required because construction of new capital ships had been placed on hold, while there were no limits on light cruiser construction. They became and her sisters and , and there was a bizarre imbalance between their main guns of 15 inches (or in "Furious") and their armour, which at thickness was on the scale of a light cruiser. The design was generally regarded as a failure (nicknamed in the Fleet "Outrageous", "Uproarious" and "Spurious"), though the later conversion of the ships to aircraft carriers was very successful. Fisher also speculated about a new mammoth, but lightly built battlecruiser, that would carry guns, which he termed ; this never got beyond the concept stage.
It is often held that the "Renown" and "Courageous" classes were designed for Fisher's plan to land troops (possibly Russian) on the German Baltic coast. Specifically, they were designed with a reduced draught, which might be important in the shallow Baltic. This is not clear-cut evidence that the ships were designed for the Baltic: it was considered that earlier ships had too much draught and not enough freeboard under operational conditions. Roberts argues that the focus on the Baltic was probably unimportant at the time the ships were designed, but was inflated later, after the disastrous Dardanelles Campaign. The final British battlecruiser design of the war was the , which was born from a requirement for an improved version of the "Queen Elizabeth" battleship. The project began at the end of 1915, after Fisher's final departure from the Admiralty. While initially envisaged as a battleship, senior sea officers felt that Britain had enough battleships, but that new battlecruisers might be required to combat German ships being built (the British overestimated German progress on the "Mackensen" class as well as their likely capabilities). A battlecruiser design with eight 15-inch guns, 8 inches of armour and capable of 32 knots was decided on. The experience of battlecruisers at the Battle of Jutland meant that the design was radically revised and transformed again into a fast battleship with armour up to 12 inches thick, but still capable of . The first ship in the class, , was built according to this design to counter the possible completion of any of the Mackensen-class ship. The plans for her three sisters, on which little work had been done, were revised once more later in 1916 and in 1917 to improve protection.
The Admiral class would have been the only British ships capable of taking on the German "Mackensen" class; nevertheless, German shipbuilding was drastically slowed by the war, and while two "Mackensen"s were launched, none were ever completed. The Germans also worked briefly on a further three ships, of the , which were modified versions of the "Mackensen"s with 15-inch guns. Work on the three additional Admirals was suspended in March 1917 to enable more escorts and merchant ships to be built to deal with the new threat from U-boats to trade. They were finally cancelled in February 1919. Battlecruisers in action. The first combat involving battlecruisers during World War I was the Battle of Heligoland Bight in August 1914. A force of British light cruisers and destroyers entered the Heligoland Bight (the part of the North Sea closest to Hamburg) to attack German destroyer patrols. When they met opposition from light cruisers, Vice Admiral David Beatty took his squadron of five battlecruisers into the Bight and turned the tide of the battle, ultimately sinking three German light cruisers and killing their commander, Rear Admiral Leberecht Maass.
The German battlecruiser perhaps made the most impact early in the war. Stationed in the Mediterranean, she and the escorting light cruiser evaded British and French ships on the outbreak of war, and steamed to Constantinople (Istanbul) with two British battlecruisers in hot pursuit. The two German ships were handed over to the Ottoman Navy, and this was instrumental in bringing the Ottoman Empire into the war as one of the Central Powers. "Goeben" herself, renamed "Yavuz Sultan Selim", fought engagements against the Imperial Russian Navy in the Black Sea before being knocked out of the action for the remainder of the war after the Battle of Imbros against British forces in the Aegean Sea in January 1918. The original battlecruiser concept proved successful in December 1914 at the Battle of the Falkland Islands. The British battlecruisers and did precisely the job for which they were intended when they chased down and annihilated the German East Asia Squadron, centered on the armoured cruisers and , along with three light cruisers, commanded by Admiral Maximilian Graf Von Spee, in the South Atlantic Ocean. Prior to the battle, the Australian battlecruiser had unsuccessfully searched for the German ships in the Pacific.
During the Battle of Dogger Bank in 1915, the aftermost barbette of the German flagship "Seydlitz" was struck by a British 13.5-inch shell from HMS "Lion". The shell did not penetrate the barbette, but it dislodged a piece of the barbette armour that allowed the flame from the shell's detonation to enter the barbette. The propellant charges being hoisted upwards were ignited, and the fireball flashed up into the turret and down into the magazine, setting fire to charges removed from their brass cartridge cases. The gun crew tried to escape into the next turret, which allowed the flash to spread into that turret as well, killing the crews of both turrets. "Seydlitz" was saved from near-certain destruction only by emergency flooding of her after magazines, which had been effected by Wilhelm Heidkamp. This near-disaster was due to the way that ammunition handling was arranged and was common to both German and British battleships and battlecruisers, but the lighter protection on the latter made them more vulnerable to the turret or barbette being penetrated. The Germans learned from investigating the damaged "Seydlitz" and instituted measures to ensure that ammunition handling minimised any possible exposure to flash.
Apart from the cordite handling, the battle was mostly inconclusive, though both the British flagship "Lion" and "Seydlitz" were severely damaged. "Lion" lost speed, causing her to fall behind the rest of the battleline, and Beatty was unable to effectively command his ships for the remainder of the engagement. A British signalling error allowed the German battlecruisers to withdraw, as most of Beatty's squadron mistakenly concentrated on the crippled armoured cruiser "Blücher", sinking her with great loss of life. The British blamed their failure to win a decisive victory on their poor gunnery and attempted to increase their rate of fire by stockpiling unprotected cordite charges in their ammunition hoists and barbettes. At the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, both British and German battlecruisers were employed as fleet units. The British battlecruisers became engaged with both their German counterparts, the battlecruisers, and then German battleships before the arrival of the battleships of the British Grand Fleet. The result was a disaster for the Royal Navy's battlecruiser squadrons: "Invincible", "Queen Mary", and exploded with the loss of all but a handful of their crews. The exact reason why the ships' magazines detonated is not known, but the abundance of exposed cordite charges stored in their turrets, ammunition hoists and working chambers in the quest to increase their rate of fire undoubtedly contributed to their loss. Beatty's flagship "Lion" herself was almost lost in a similar manner, save for the heroic actions of Major Francis Harvey.
The better-armoured German battlecruisers fared better, in part due to the poor performance of British fuzes (the British shells tended to explode or break up on impact with the German armour). —the only German battlecruiser lost at Jutland—had only 128 killed, for instance, despite receiving more than thirty hits. The other German battlecruisers, , "Von der Tann", "Seydlitz", and , were all heavily damaged and required extensive repairs after the battle, "Seydlitz" barely making it home, for they had been the focus of British fire for much of the battle. Interwar period. In the years immediately after World War I, Britain, Japan and the US all began design work on a new generation of ever more powerful battleships and battlecruisers. The new burst of shipbuilding that each nation's navy desired was politically controversial and potentially economically crippling. This nascent arms race was prevented by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, where the major naval powers agreed to limits on capital ship numbers. The German navy was not represented at the talks; under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was not allowed any modern capital ships at all.