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    Battleships: The First Big Guns
    Battleships: The First Big Guns
    Battleships: The First Big Guns
    Ebook211 pages1 hour

    Battleships: The First Big Guns

    By Philip Kaplan

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    About this ebook

    This new addition to the Images of War series takes as its focus the early Big Gun battleships that saw development and deployment during the First World War. Iconic ships such as HMS Warspite and Malaya feature amidst this pictorial history that is sure to appeal to fans of the series, and naval enthusiasts in particular. Vessels featured include the battleship Royal Sovereign, the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle, the cruiser HMS Gloucester, the Queen Elizabeth class battleship HMS Barham and the Italian battleships Littorio, Cesare, Duillo, Vittorio Veneto, Conte di Cavour and Doria, amongst many others. British and international battleships feature side by side in a publication that offers a truly representative selection of the kind of vessels in action at this time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 15, 2014
    ISBN9781473835085
    Battleships: The First Big Guns
    Author

    Philip Kaplan

    Author/historian/designer/photographer Philip Kaplan has written and co-authored forty-seven books on aviation, military and naval subjects. His previous books include: One Last Look, The Few, Little Friends, Round the Clock, Wolfpack, Convoy, Fighter Pilot, Bombers, Fly Navy, Run Silent, Chariots of Fire, Legend and, for Pen and Sword, Big Wings, Two-Man Air Force, Night and Day Bomber Offensive, Mustang The Inspiration, Rolling Thunder, Behind the Wire, Grey Wolves, Naval Air, and Sailor. He is married to the novelist Margaret Mayhew.

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    • 2/5
      This book is not particularly well-illustrated or well-written and does not live up to the "rare photographs from wartime archives" subtitle on the cover. It is a decent enough survey of the "battleship" from the first sailing ships armed with cannons to the modern battleship. There are many other books on battleships that are far superior to this one.

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    Battleships - Philip Kaplan

    acknowlegments.

    The First Battleships

    A battleship gunner’s mate writing a letter to a loved one.

    Battles have been fought at sea for thousands of years, but naval warfare entered a new era in the late fifteenth century, when cannon became the principal armament of warships. From this period until the second half of the nineteenth century, when steam supplanted sail in the world’s navies, naval tactics were dominated by the ‘line of battle’. This formation, consisting of a line of ships sailing, parallel with or at an angle to a similar line of opposing ships, enabled the rows of guns along the ship’s side to bring maximum firepower to bear on the enemy. A ship that was big and powerful enough to take its place in the line of battle was called a ‘ship of the line’ or a ‘battleship’.

    Ships of the line might vary significantly in size and armament—in Lord Nelson’s navy they might carry anything between seventy-four and 120 guns—but they were all signficantly superior to frigates, sloops, brigs and the other lesser craft; they were all what navies later came to call ‘capital ships.’

    Preserved in the historic Naval Dockyard at Portsmouth, England, are three examples of ‘capital ships’, one from the beginning of the age of ‘classical’ naval warfare, one from its zenith and the third from the point when steam began to eclipse sail. The Tudor Mary Rose, the oldest of these, was commissioned in 1509 by King Henry VIII, as the first real warship of the young Royal Navy. Named after the King’s favourite sister, Mary Rose was launched at Portsmouth in 1511 and became the flagship of the Royal Navy. She was 127 feet long at her waterline, with a beam of thirty-eight feet and a draught of fifteen feet. Her ultimate displacement, after being refitted, was 727 tons.

    Mary Rose was constructed of oak and elm and armed with muzzle-loading guns made of cast bronze and breech-loading guns of wrought-iron. In order to ensure that her guns were made to the highest standard of the day, the king imported the finest gun-founders from France. Her armament also included a large number of skilled bowmen whose task was to kill the crewmen of enemy vessels. She was normally manned by a crew of between 300 and 400.

    Unlike most fighting ships of the time, the Mary Rose was designed specifically as a warship. Mindful of her role as a defence against England’s potential enemies, which included France and Scotland, the king himself specified how she was to be equipped; the result was an innovative vessel which can legitimately be described as a prototypical battleship. Rather than having her guns mounted mainly on the ‘castles’ at either end of the hull like her predecessors, her designers pioneered the use of big guns down a row each side of the hull near the waterline, enabling her to fire broadside barrages at enemy vessels. In another break from tradition, her planking was positioned edge to edge, in a Carvel-type construction, rather than being overlapped. This technique made for a much more watertight hull.

    In 1512 the Mary Rose took part in her first battle. In September of the previous year the Pope and the King of Aragon had entered into an alliance against Louis XII of France. In January 1512, the English Parliament voted to ally the country with Spain and preparations were made for Mary Rose to sail as flagship of Admiral Sir Edward Howard. On 10 August that year she led twenty-five other warships in an attack on the French fleet at Brest, which Admiral Howard estimated at 222 ships. He immediately attacked the French flagship, the 790-ton Grande Louise. At the end of the two-day raid, Howard returned to Portsmouth in triumph, having captured thirty two French vessels and 800 seamen.

    Mary Rose campaigned effectively for the king through the subsequent years during which Henry devoted much money and effort to fortifying his coastal approaches against attack by the French. At Portsmouth an enormous chain boom extending to the Gosport shore, to seal off the harbour entrance was installed. In a two-month campaign against France in 1544, English forces captured the port of Boulogne, tightening their control over the Channel. By spring of 1545, however, Henry faced the prospect of a major French attack on Portsmouth, his principal naval base on the south coast, which was intended to destroy Henry’s warships and other vessels in their anchorage, and to sever English supply lines to Boulogne. On 18 July, the French fleet anchored in St Helen’s Roads near the Isle of Wight. As the commander-in-chief of his forces, the king waited at Portsmouth for the threatened French landings. His fortifications there included the Square and Round Towers which oversaw the deepwater channel, and the gun batteries of Southsea Castle. Treacherous shallows near the harbour posed an additional hazard to the enemy ships.

    The French had assembled a fleet of 225 ships with 30,000 men, while Henry faced them with just 100 ships and 12,000 men. He met with his naval commanders and then went ashore to watch his fleet sail out to meet the enemy. His ships turned south out of Portsmouth harbour, between Spit Sand and Horse Sands; but although there were some clashes between the two sides that day, little resulted from the early exchanges of cannon fire before night fell.

    The Mary Rose, pride of the English Fleet

    The following day the sea was calm and the French galleys advanced on the English warships, attempting to draw them out into open battle. Then suddenly the Mary Rose heeled over and sank. A French account claims that she was hit by French cannon. English accounts differ considerably, though they suggest that, while hoisting sail and preparing to get under way, Mary Rose suddenly heeled as she came about. Her gunports were open, with her cannon run out ready for action and as she heeled, seawater rushed over the gunport sills, destabilizing the vessel and causing her to capsize and quickly sink.

    The Mary Rose was the main casualty of what turned out to be little more than an inconclusive skirmish.

    Attempts to raise her failed, and it was only in 1982 that she was lifted from the seabed and taken to the dockyard where she had been built.

    In the two centuries that followed the sinking of the Mary Rose, Britain, along with France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, developed a large colonial empire, and a powerful naval fleet to oppose any threat to their freedom of the seas. Britain had the advantage numerically, but France and other nations were more advanced in the design and construction of warships that were larger, faster, and more stable. However, the superior quality of the British crews and officers who excelled in their training, gunnery skills, and discipline resulted in the dominance of the British fleet until the American War of Independence. In that conflict the French sided with the Americans against Britain, and Spain allied herself with France, posing a combined invasion threat which the British had to take most seriously. Within a decade of the end of the American war, that threat became more substantial as Napoleon Bonaparte began his adventures across Europe. In 1783, the British were defeated by the Americans and the Royal Navy was no longer the feared force it had been for nearly three hundred years.

    An English stone cannonball.

    The Duke of Wellington in 1855, flagship of the British Royal Navy’s Baltic Fleet.

    French Admiral Pierre Suffren.

    The most famous warship in British history is HMS Victory, the flagship of the Royal Navy fleet at Trafalgar. Crewed by 850 men, Victory was 226 feet long with a beam of fifty-two feet and a draught of twenty-one feet. She was built of oak, elm, fur, and pine and her hull was sheathed in copper. Her armament was 102 cast-iron cannon ranging from twelve to thirty-two-pounders, along with two sixty-eight-pounders. She spent the first years of the nineteenth century sailing at the head of the British fleet in the Meditarranean and Atlantic oceans for several years, trying to draw the French fleet into battle. Then, in October 1805, Admiral Villeneuve, in command of the French fleet, took his warships out of port at Toulon to join with the Spanish fleet at Cadiz. Napoleon had abandoned whatever plans he may have had for invading England, and his combined naval force was proceeding to Naples where they were to operate in support of troops against Italy.

    Heading into what would be one of the last great open-sea battles of the age of sail, in the early hours of 29 October, Nelson’s force awaited that of Villeneuve and the Spanish commander, Rear Admiral Charles-René Magon, in the Straits of Gibraltar at Cape Trafalgar. Contrary to strict Admiralty policy, Nelson chose to attack the French and Spanish warships using a new tactic he had devised. He would lead his ships in two separate parallel battle lines at a nearly 90 degree angle to the enemy line, causing their ships to scatter and providing his captains with the opportunity to engage their opponents in ship-to-ship actions. In fact, this approach put

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