Battleship

A battleship is a large, heavily armored warship with a main battery consisting of large guns, designed to serve as a capital ship. 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 Royal Sovereign class, 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 HMS Dreadnought. 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 Bismarck 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 Iowa-class battleships 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 Jeune École (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 Jeune École, 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.

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 Napoléon 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 12 knots (22 km/h; 14 mph), 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 SMS Kaiser 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 300-pound (140 kg) 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.