Naval tactics in the Age of Steam

The mine, torpedo, submarine and aircraft posed new threats, each of which had to be countered, leading to tactical developments such as anti-submarine warfare and the use of dazzle camouflage.

Many thought that the use of the ram would again become common and the sinking of Re d'Italia by the Austrian Erzherzog Ferdinand Max at the Battle of Lissa in 1866 seemed to give force to this supposition.

In a mêlée, or pell-mell battle (as at Lissa), opportunities would occur for the use of the ram, but the torpedo and the mine soon made it very dangerous for one fleet to rush at another.

[1] The new weapon scored its first success in the 1891 Chilean Civil War, when the old Congressional battleship "Blanco Encalada" was sunk at anchor by the Balmacedist torpedo gunboat "Almirante Lynch" in the Battle of Caldera Bay.

A school arose, having its most convinced partisans in France, which argued that, as a small vessel could destroy a great battleship with a single torpedo, the first would drive the second off the sea.

In the war between Russia and Japan the torpedo was at first used with success, but the injury it produced fell below expectations, even when allowance is made for the fact that the Russian squadron at Port Arthur had the means of repair close at hand.

On April 12, 1904, the Russian flagship Petropavlovsk ran into the minefield off Port Arthur and was sunk, while the battleship Pobieda was badly damaged.

The Japanese renewed the attempt on a great scale and with utmost intrepidity, at Port Arthur; but though a steamship can move with a speed and precision impossible to a sailing ship, and can therefore be sunk more surely at a chosen spot, the experiment failed.

[1] As the 19th century came to a close, the familiar modern battleship began to emerge; a steel-armoured ship, entirely dependent on steam and carrying a relatively small number of large guns mounted in turrets, typically arranged along the centreline of the main deck.

This sudden levelling of the field led to a naval arms race as Britain and Germany and, to a lesser extent, other powers like the United States, France, Russia, Japan, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina and Chile all rushed to build or acquire Dreadnoughts.

It was still as necessary as ever that all the guns should be so placed as to be capable of being brought to bear, and it was still a condition imposed by the physical necessities of the case that this freedom could only be obtained when ships followed one another in a line.

Steaming with the enemy off to the side enabled a ship to fire salvoes with both the forward and rear turrets, maximizing the chances for a hit.

The most common configuration of warship with gun turrets on its longitudinal axis severely limits gunfire directly ahead (forward) or abaft (backward).

This was reflected in the standard naval tactic of crossing the T. Dazzle camouflage was intended to make it difficult to estimate a ship's speed and heading and thus prevent submarines from effectively firing torpedoes.

Towards the end of the war, the British began to develop the first aircraft carriers by adding flying off and then landing decks to the large light cruiser Furious.

Although this treaty was extremely explicit in its governance of battleship and cruiser tonnage, it was lax in the area of carriers, a fact which all of the participants failed to take advantage of.

The growing tensions of the 1930s and the rise of aggressive nationalist governments in Japan, Italy and Germany restarted the building programs, with even larger ships than before; Yamato, the largest battleship ever, displaced 72,000 tons, and mounted 18.1-inch guns.

By luck as much as planning, the Americans and Japanese both developed large carriers that were capable of handling up to 90 aircraft, based on the hulls of battlecruisers due to be scrapped under the Washington Treaty.

Instead, German naval strategy relied on commerce raiding using capital ships, armed merchant cruisers, submarines and aircraft.

The Allies immediately introduced a convoy system for the protection of trade that gradually extended out from the British Isles, eventually reaching as far as Panama, Bombay and Singapore.

Later in the war however, anti-submarine warfare was perfected to a large degree by the Allies, meaning that much more specialized ships and equipment were deployed in convoys with the express purpose of detecting and destroying German (and later Japanese) submarines.

The employment of land-based and carrier-based aircraft during the Second World War showed that command of the seas rested in great part on control of the air above it.

Look outs high up on the bridges of the escort ships found it all but impossible to spot the low shape of the U-boat with the tiny silhouette of the boat's conning tower against the darkness of the water.

The escort vessels, which were too few in number and often lacking in endurance, had no answer to the lone submarine attacking on the surface at night as their ASDIC detection apparatus only worked against underwater targets.

The change in British tactics included the introduction of permanent escort groups to improve the co-ordination and effectiveness of ships and men in battle.

The Germans also made use of long-range patrol aircraft to find convoys for the U-boat packs to attack, though this tactic rarely succeeded.

The sinking of the British Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya on 10 December 1941 by Japanese aircraft marked the beginning of the end of the era of the battleship.

By the end of the Pacific War, the tactical role of battleships and cruisers had been reduced to providing anti-aircraft fire to protect the vulnerable carriers and bombarding shore positions.

Through a series of raids on Japanese-held islands, the American gradually grew more confident in their handling of aircraft carriers, learning that the right place for the task force commander was aboard a carrier, not one of the escorting cruisers, and developing tactics like having a single fighter direction officer for task forces operating in company.

The four great carrier battles of 1942 – Coral Sea, Midway, Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz – were all fought by aircraft without the ships on either side actually coming in sight of one another.