DREADNOUGHTS At the start of the 1900s Great Britain had the most powerful navy on Earth Warships protected British colonies all over the world from Canada and Africa to India and Australia Trade from these colonies was important to the British economy In the 1800s naval warfare had changed During the American Civil War both the Union and Confederate navies built ships with iron plating and steam engines The Union’s USS Monitor even had a turret on top That allowed its cannon to fire in one direction while the ship moved in another In the last half of the 1800s the world’s navies upgraded their ships By 1900 modern steel-hulled vessels had replaced wooden ships with sails The first clash between two fleets with modern ships was the Battle of Tsushima Straight It was fought in 1905 in the Sea of Japan during the Russo-Japanese War The Japanese navy dealt the Russians a humiliating defeat destroying or capturing most of enemy’s fleet The Japanese ships had a major advantage they were faster and had more powerful guns Great Britain learned from the Japanese victory that modern battleships must be fast and have powerful long-range guns If Great Britain were to keep control of the seas and protect its empire it had to upgrade its ships In February 1906 Great Britain’s Royal Navy launched the HMS Dreadnought It was a new design of battleship that made other warships on the seas obsolete HMS dreadnought had the all-big-gun design
Great Britain’s HMS dreadnought launched in 1906 The huge battleship with massive guns made all other ships obsolete
The Royal Navy’s HMS Dreadnought was a monster-sized battleship It could reach speeds of 21 knots 24 mph 39 kph making it the fastest battleship in the world It had armor plating 11 inches 28 cm thick It was armed with ten 12-inch 30-cm guns These huge weapons could shoot projectiles one foot 3 m in diameter By 1914 Great Britain built an additional 24 Dreadnought-class ships The Dreadnought was such a unique and deadly battleship that other countries began building similar ships All these vessels were called dreadnoughts even those built by other nations A Dreadnought-class ship fires its massive guns
By the turn of the twentieth century Germany began a plan to build a great navy It wanted to challenge Great Britain for control of the seas because it wanted an empire of colonies for itself The British built even more Dreadnought-class battleships to counter the German threat Within a few years super-dreadnoughts were built that included 13 5-inch 34-cm guns They could fight an enemy ship more than 11 miles 18 km away Super-dreadnoughts also had many smaller guns for attacking an enemy’s small ships at close ranges All the major powers rushed to build their own Dreadnought-class battleships This naval arms race was extremely expensive It also added to the tension that eventually led to the start of World War I
