History UsefulNotes / HistoryOfNavalWarfare

The line between ironclad and battleship is not clear, but arguably the first battleships were the turreted, sail-less ironclads of the 1870s - HMS ''Devasation'' commissioned in 1871, the all-steel French ''Redoubtable'' of 1878, and the Italian ''Caio Duilio'' of 1880. By the 1890s most capital ships were of a similar type -- coal-powered triple-expansion engines, heavy steel armour, with a main armament of around 4x 12 inch guns (usually two each in turrets before and after the superstructure), an intermediate armament of around 10x 5-to-8 inch guns (in turrets or broadside casemates), and a secondary armament of 10-30 3-to-5 inch guns (turrets or casemates). The main armament was powerful but slow-firing, meant to punch through heavy armour with ease; the secondary armament was quick-firing but weak, meant to wreck the lightly armoured parts of the target with a torrent of explosive shells as well as destroy lighter vessels; the intermediate guns split the difference. In all cases, the entire armament was expected to work together attacking a single target at a relatively short range -- although the bigger guns could shoot further, the fire control of the period was too primitive to allow for accurate long-range shots. Likewise, the line between cruisers and battleships was blurry, since the battleship was initially no more than a more powerful type of cruiser. As technology slowed enough for standard ship roles to start developing, it became typical for the cruiser to become a fast, long-range ship with around 8 to 12 guns in the 5-to-10 inch range. The idea is that a major navy would do most of its commerce raiding and GunboatDiplomacy with a fleet of cruisers, and keep the battleships for fleet actions against the battleship fleets of other navies -- similar to the roles of frigates and ships-of-the-line during the Age of Sail.

Ten years of dreadnought battleship development were finally put to the test of massed combat during the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, the British Grand Fleet confronted the German High Seas Fleet off the coast of Denmark. The battle itself was inconclusive: the British lost more ships and men but more of the German ships were damaged. However, the British Grand Fleet was larger and could afford to take losses whereas the German High Seas Fleet could not; the Grand Fleet was ready for battle the next day and the High Seas Fleet wasn't. Here the battlecruiser concept died rather spectacularly with the loss of HMS ''Queen Mary'', HMS ''Indefatigable'', and HMS ''Invincible'' in catastrophic explosions; Admiral Beattie's own flagship HMS ''Lion'' only avoided sharing their fate by the narrowest of margins due to a HeroicSacrifice by a turret officer, prompting Beattie's acerbic quote above. On the German side SMS ''Lutzow'' was scuttled after the battle, too severely damaged to make port and SMS ''Seydlitz'' only barely managed to limp home with less than one foot of freeboard minus all of her turrets. All but Lutzow were sunk by other battle cruisers and no battle cruiser on either side returned undamaged. None of the more heavily armored Dreadnoughts were sunk. Though some battlecruisers survived until UsefulNotes/WW2 few were built during the interwar period. During [=WW2=] battlecruisers fought battleships on 3 occasions:[[note]]Denmark Strait, 24 May 1941; Second Guadalcanal, 14-15 November 1943; and North Cape, 26 December 1943.[[/note]] each time, a battlecruiser was sunk. Jutland also saw the introduction of a new kind of fast battleship or super-dreadnought in the ''Queen Elizabeth'' class, which attempted to address the battlecruisers' shortcomings by combining relatively high speed with even bigger guns and commensurate protection.

And now we come to the part when it begins to matter, because for Lake in particular that someone was Wilhelm II, the Kaiser (Emperor) of Germany (Lake's main competitor Holland, on the other hand, had his main success with the Germany's main [[TheRival rivals]] — United Kingdom and ImperialRussia). [[ImperialGermany Germany]], being unified only around the 1870s, was a bit late to the colonial cake. Being late, it had yet to build up its naval muscle. The Germans took up the development of their ''Hochseeflotte'' and, through creating it and pursuing a ham-fisted policy of colonial expansion to match everyone else's, help drive a neutral country (the insular United Kingdom) into the arms of its enemy (France). A country which was renowned for its naval capabilities, to boot. Between this and the failure to maintain cordial relations with Russia, which France also drew into her orbit as an ally, Germany had surrounded herself with strong enemies and just one weak friend (Austria-Hungary).

Numerous armored gunboats appeared during the US Civil War, mostly designed with broadside batteries. USS ''Monitor'' introduced the rotating armored gun turret, allowing the gunboat to engage targets from any angle (the arrangement was so peculiar at the time that observers initially called the turret a "cheesebox" because that's what it looked like), it was also iron-hulled (less than two years after the ''Warrior'') and entirely reliant on its steam engines--a rarity at that time. In 1862, the first battle between ironclads took place, with the ''Monitor'' engaging CSS ''Virginia'' after the ''Virginia'' had engaged a Union blockade and damaged or destroyed several ships. The two ships fought to a draw, neither significantly damaging the other. With this proof that a single ironclad could wipe out an entire unarmored fleet and that nothing could stop it but another ironclad, Great Britain and France decided that ironclads were no longer simply a supplement to their mostly unarmored fleet - ironclads were now the only type of warship worth building. Construction of unarmored line-of-battleships ended almost immediately.

The new British Type 45 destroyers are another attempt at dealing with this problem. The official stats claim it has the smallest radar profile of any modern surface warship and an air-defence system capable of destroying multiple objects the size of cricket balls traveling at Mach 3. This argument also begs the question of who exactly is going to be firing all those anti-ship missiles; with the end of the USSR, the potential for a massive missile attack on a carrier group has gone way down. Russia, despite a recent naval buildup combining several new missile-heavy designs and a generally more aggressive attitude currently has neither the resources, the intention, or the warm water ports[[note]]Not that it ever bothered Russians much, most of their ships having the ice reinforcements, their main problem is rather the lack of foreign basesand most of their major ports located in inner seas with easily blocked exits.[[/note]] to enter into another major naval arms race. So for now the states of the world seem content (or at least resigned) to the allow the U.S. Navy to continue to dominate the world's oceans just as they have since WWII, a situation that seems unlikely to change as long as the U.S. Navy outguns all of the world's other navies put together.

Despite the ambiguous and much debated results of Jutland WWI triggered a new round of battleship construction as each state sought to acquire "super-dreadnoughts" featuring near-battlecruiser speed with even heavier armor and bigger guns. The high costs of this naval arms race grew to be such a concern that the world's first major international arms reduction treaties (The 1922 Washington and 1930 London Naval Conferences) were aimed at limiting battleship size and reducing their numbers. (Ironically, Japanese anger at the way they were treated at these conferences actually helped set the stage for UsefulNotes/WW2). As these treaties were eventually abandoned during the run-up to WWII, battleships became ridiculously large and powerful -- the largest battleship ever created, the Japanese ''Yamato'' had [[MoreDakka nine 18" guns]], and the fastest, the U.S. ''Iowa'' class, could sail at 33 knots.[[note]]Arguably, ''both'' the ''Yamato''-class superbattleships and the ''Iowa''-class fast battleships were terrific wastes of resources, as these jewels of the IJN and USN battle fleet never had opportunity to meet a worthy target during the Pacific Campaign. The important difference being the USA could ''afford'' to build these ships without making the slightest dent in its production of more critical aircraft carriers; indeed, by this point in the war the US had economically dominated the IJN to such a degree the USN was running out of things to buy and already had more ships under construction than they had sailors to man. Also, the ''Iowa''s did prove to be quite useful in a fire-support role supporting American troops fighting within 20 miles of shore--which happened strangely often in the latter half of the 20th century--and their speed came in handy keeping up with the nuclear-powered ships that popped up in the same period.[[/note]]

To some degree, development of the ironclad came from the French Navy attempting to use technology to offset the numerical superiority of [[FriendlyEnemy the English Navy]]. The French built the (unarmored) 90-gun steam-powered line-of-battle ship ''Napoleon'' in 1850, and several French-designed ironclad floating batteries were fielded in the Crimean War. Putting the two together, the French commissioned ''Gloire'' in 1859, an oceangoing 36-gun ironclad that would easily lay waste to the unarmored British navy. The British countered with HMS ''Warrior'' in 1860, the first iron-hulled warship.

Ten years of dreadnought battleship development were finally put to the test of massed combat during the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, the British Grand Fleet confronted the German High Seas Fleet off the coast of Denmark. The battle itself was inconclusive: the British lost more ships and men but more of the German ships were damaged. However, the British Grand Fleet was larger and could afford to take losses whereas the German High Seas Fleet could not; the Grand fleet was ready for battle the next day and the High Seas fleet wasn't. Here the battlecruiser concept died rather spectacularly with the loss of HMS ''Queen Mary'', HMS ''Indefatigable'', and HMS ''Invincible'' in catastrophic explosions; Admiral Beattie's own flagship HMS ''Lion'' only avoided sharing their fate by the narrowest of margins due to a HeroicSacrifice by a turret officer, prompting Beattie's acerbic quote above. On the German side SMS ''Lutzow'' was scuttled after the battle, too severely damaged to make port and SMS ''Seydlitz'' only barely managed to limp home with less than one foot of freeboard minus all of her turrets. All but Lutzow were sunk by other battle cruisers and no battle cruiser on either side returned undamaged. None of the more heavily armored Dreadnoughts were sunk. Though some battlecruisers survived until UsefulNotes/WW2 few were built during the interwar period. During [=WW2=] battlecruisers fought battleships on 3 occasions:[[note]]Denmark Strait,24 May 1941; Second Guadalcanal,14-15 November 1943; and North Cape,26 December 1943.[[/note]] each time the battlecruiser was sunk. Jutland also saw the introduction of a new kind of fast battleship or super-dreadnought in the ''Queen Elizabeth'' class, which attempted to address the battlecruisers' shortcomings by combining relatively high speed with even bigger guns and commensurate protection.

After Jutland the British fleet remained in control of the North Sea and maintained their NavalBlockade of Germany. The Germans never challenged the British navy again,. After a ([[UnreliableNarrator heavily biased, with egregious methodological and computational errors]]) German Navy study claimed that 'unrestricted' (indiscriminate) anti-commerce submarine warfare could cripple the Entente's war effort the Reichstag went along with the recommendations of the Navy and OHL (Army High Command, headed by Hindenburg and Ludendorf) and voted in favour of it in early 1917. This ultimately and predictably, not least by Chancellor Bethman Hollweg, backfired when it drew the United States decisively into the war against them ([[RightHandVersusLeftHand when combined with the blundering of the independently-acting diplomatic service]], [[WhatAnIdiot which tried to persuade Mexico to attack the USA]]). Frustration with their inactivity led the men of the High Seas fleet to mutiny in 1918, hastening the collapse of the German war effort. The German fleet eventually scuttled itself at the British fleet anchorage in Scapa Flow on June 21, 1919: 52 ships were scuttled in all, including 10 battleships and 5 battlecruisers.

The torpedo, originally meant as a short-range weapon for battleships and cruisers, was quickly realized as a very mobile weapon that could be carried by vehicles that couldn't possibly carry a heavy gun. Countries that couldn't afford battleships quickly adapted the torpedo to smaller craft such as torpedo boats and (eventually) submarines -- very inexpensive vessels that could easily sneak up on an unsuspecting battleship and sink it. This in turn lead the big navies to develop "Torpedo Boat Destroyers" (later shortened to the familiar "destroyer"); fast, maneuverable ships able to keep up with torpedo boats and carrying enough guns to readily overpower them before they could do any damage. Thus, shortly before UsefulNotes/WorldWarOne, the TypesOfNavalShips had been well-developed -- the battleship, the cruiser, the destroyer, the submarine, and the torpedo boat.

The old methods had their last hurrah in UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo as well, largely because there were still conditions (night battles and arctic seas) where aircraft were ineffective, especially early in the war. There were nine battleship-on-battleship engagements in UsefulNotes/WW2, all but one happening by 1943. [[note]] The first three years of the war were effectively "battleship years" because the US and Japan were not engaged yet and intra- and inter-service rivalry within the Royal Navy and with the RAF had left Britain's Fleet Air Arm with a small number of overage or undersized carriers and a motley collection of aircraft running the gamut from obsolescent through lame to pathetic, a situation it took three years to correct. The unfortunate decision to assign all aircraft and aircrew to the RAF between the wars also meant there were no aviators and hence little aviation savvy amongst the Royal Navy's senior leadership.[[/note]]. There were also many surface engagements among cruisers and destroyers in the Mediterranean, Pacific, and Indian oceans without battleships present. And battleships did continue to prove useful since they made good antiaircraft and shore bombardment platforms. Later they were even placed in front of the carriers to protect them from aircraft attack since they could [[SuperToughness take more damage]] and were [[WeHaveReserves more expendable]] in the aviation era and proved highly effective in this role since late war advances in radar and anti-aircraft gunnery gave them the means to protect themselves if they were provided with sufficient air cover.

However, the German navy noted, the situation might not be as grim as it appeared. Germany was dependent on foreign trade, but so was France. Britain was even more so. While trade ships could be protected from surface ships by the Entente's navy, they would still be vulnerable to submarine attack. Even from the submarines of the day, which were still little more then temporarily submersible (one hoped) torpedo boats. A bit of trivia: one of the most successful submarine captains of UsefulNotes/WorldWarOne was an Austro-Hungrian officer named [[Theatre/TheSoundOfMusic Georg Von Trapp]].

The Germans and the Americans had some success with with radio-guided bombs and missiles during UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo and both sides had also fielded successful acoustic homing torpedoes. The American air-launched Mark 24 "Fido" acoustic torpedo sank or damaged 27% of the submarines it was dropped on. The Germans even managed to sink an Italian battleship (after Italy switched sides and joined the Allies) using the "Fritz-X" air-to-surface missile. The Japanese managed to trump both the Germans and the Americans (and horrify the world) by damaging more than 300 ships using the ''human-guided'' missiles known as [[SuicideAttack Kamikaze]], sinking 47 ships and causing more than 15,000 casualties. But things really started to develop in the 1960s after the development of semiconductors resulted in quantum leaps in electronic control systems.

In 1982, two modern navies [[UsefulNotes/TheFalklandsWar went to war over some islands in the South Atlantic]]. Argentina demonstrated the effectiveness of sea-skimming cruise missiles using the (in)famous French-made Exocet. The British demonstrated the effectiveness of chaff as a decoy. Both demonstrations were particularly vivid in the case of the ''Atlantic Conveyor'' on 25 May, where the chaff from one vessel attracted two Exocets but led to the missiles acquiring the next target they could, a requisitioned merchant vessel. Two missiles designed to destroy a warship made short work of the ''Atlantic Conveyor'' which promptly sank, resulting in the loss of twelve men and a lot of helicopters. It also meant the British troops had to walk across the Falklands to capture Port Stanley. There was a sense of the old here too -- ''General Belgrano'', an Argentine gun cruiser of UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo vintage (previously the USS ''Phoenix'') was sunk using torpedoes of UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo design from a nuclear-powered submarine, an act that to this day constitutes the only confirmed kills by a nuclear powered sub in combat. ''Gotcha.''

The old methods had their last hurrah in UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo as well, largely because there were still conditions (night battles and arctic seas) where aircraft were ineffective, especially early in the war. There were nine battleship-on-battleship engagements in UsefulNotes/WW2, all but one happening by 1943. [[note]] The first three years of the war were effectively "battleship years" because the US and Japan were not engaged yet and intra- and inter-service rivalry within the Royal Navy and with the RAF had left Britain's Fleet Air Arm with a small number of overage or undersized carriers and a motley collection of aircraft running the gamut from lame to pathetic, a situation it took three years to correct. [[/note]]. There were also many surface engagements among cruisers and destroyers in the Mediterranean, Pacific, and Indian oceans without battleships present. And battleships did continue to prove useful since they made good antiaircraft and shore bombardment platforms. Later they were even placed in front of the carriers to protect them from aircraft attack since they could [[SuperToughness take more damage]] and were [[WeHaveReserves more expendable]] in the aviation era and proved highly effective in this role since late war advances in radar and anti-aircraft gunnery gave them the means to protect themselves if they were provided with sufficient air cover.

Sea battles took on a decided "hurry up and wait" character during the Age of Sail, as ships were restricted to maneuvering with the wind and speeds rarely exceeded eight or nine knots. Warships could literally take hours maneuvering into a position where they could profitably employ their broadsides (the British approach at Trafalgar took almost all day). The desultory nature of combat under sail often meant sailors could spend minutes or even hours waiting for a withering storm of fire that might decimate their ranks in seconds, only to spend minutes or hours waiting and preparing for it to happen again. Hence the expression "wooden ships and iron men."

The old methods had their last hurrah in UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo as well, largely because there were still conditions (night battles and arctic seas) where aircraft were ineffective, especially early in the war. There were nine battleship-on-battleship engagements in UsefulNotes/WW2, all but one happening by 1943. There were also many surface engagements among cruisers and destroyers in the Mediterranean, Pacific, and Indian oceans without battleships present. And battleships did continue to prove useful since they made good antiaircraft and shore bombardment platforms. Later they were even placed in front of the carriers to protect them from aircraft attack since they could [[SuperToughness take more damage]] and were [[WeHaveReserves more expendable]] in the aviation era and proved highly effective in this role since late war advances in radar and anti-aircraft gunnery gave them the means to protect themselves if they were provided with sufficient air cover.

* On 10 December 1941, HMS ''Prince of Wales'' and HMS ''Repulse'' (a brand-new battleship and an old battle cruiser, respectively) were engaged by aircraft off Malaya. Despite being out at sea, fully alert and defending themselves (but without friendly fighter cover) the ships were no match against a concerted aerial attack by Japanese land-based torpedo bombers. [[note]] Mitsubishi [=G3M=] and [=G4M=] as noted above. It's also worth noting that both the British and the Japanese placed unwarranted confidence in the capabilities of their relatively unsophisticated antiaircraft gun directors, which resulted in a nasty shock for the British when their AA fire proved ineffective off Malaya and another for the Japanese when a smaller but similar attack off Guadalcanal was massacred by the U.S. Navy's vastly more sophisticated computerised fire control systems.[[/note]]

* On 11-12 November 1940 a daring British nighttime carrier strike at Taranto severely damaged three of the newest battleships in the Italian fleet.
* On 26 May 1941 another British carrier strike (flown by inexperienced pilots in appalling weather conditions, with obsolete and under-armed torpedo bombers) managed to achieve a lucky torpedo hit that disabled the steering on the German battleship ''Bismarck'', preventing her from fleeing the pursuit of a British battleship force and leading directly to her sinking/scuttling.

* On 26 May 1941 another British carrier strike (flown by inexperienced pilots in appalling weather conditions) managed to achieve a lucky torpedo hit that disabled the steering on the German battleship ''Bismarck'', preventing her from fleeing the pursuit of a British battleship force and leading directly to her sinking/scuttling.

Naturally, it's an idea that has primarily appealed to underdogs. Which is why the first recorded instances of attempted submarine attacks were made by weak naval powers against much stronger ones. The first recorded attempted submarine attack took place in the American Revolutionary war, when David Bushnell's ''Turtle'' (essentially a wooden barrel powered by a hand cranked propellor) tried and failed to attach a mine to a British warship. The second, more successful attack occurred during the American Civil War when the somewhat more sophisticated (but still hand cranked) Confederate submarine ''Hunley'' managed to sink U.S.S. ''Housatonic'' with a "spar torpedo" (essentially a bomb on a stick) at the cost of the lives of her own crew. The Confederates also tried steam powered semi-submersibles called "Davids" that were virtually submarines (only a small part stuck up above the water) but without success.

However, two things were invented near the end of the 19th Century that made things look up (or down) for submarine enthusiasts: The first was the invention of the self propelled or "locomotive" torpedo, which gave submarines a weapon they could use from a range greater than 20 feet and without surfacing, and the second was the invention of the internal combustion engine and the electric motor, which together freed submarine crewmen from all of that laborious hand-crankery provided they were given sufficient time between dives to recharge their batteries on the surface. And once again it was a couple of Americans, Simon Lake and James Holland,[[note]]Holland was actually Irish by birth and emigrated to the U.S. in his 30s which along with his building his first submarine for the forerunners of the IRA means he is often considered an Irish inventor rather than an American inventor. On the other hand he indisputably did most of his work ''in'' America. Ironically, his first major sale was to the Royal Navy.[[/note]] who put these things together to create the first modern submarine, though since the U.S. was no longer a naval underdog Lake and Holland (who were competitors, not collaborators) had to go elsewhere to find someone who was truly interested in their machines.

During this time the idea of a hybrid warship that combined the speed of a cruiser with the fire power of a battleship was appealing to some admirals, particularly Britain's Jackie Fisher[[note]]Who was also one of the main minds behind ''Dreadnought''[[/note]], and resulted in the development of the ''battlecruiser''. [[FragileSpeedster By sacrificing armor protection]], it was believed these ships were able to outrun anything that could sink them and out-gun anything that could catch them, much like the heavy frigates of the age of sail. Unfortunately, no admiral has ever resisted the temptation to use the battlecruisers' big guns to pad his line of battle salvo weight, and this would be the death toll for the [[GlassCannon fragile battlecruisers]] that were never intended to face full-on battleships in line-on-line fight.

The dreadnought increased the range at which battles could be fought to approximately eleven miles or all the way out to the visible horizon.[[note]] The advent of radar in WWII extended these ranges even further. HMS ''Warspite'' achieved a hit on the Italian battleship''Giulio Cesare'' at 25,000-27,000 yards (15 miles) and USS ''Iowa'' straddled a Japanese destroyer with five out of ten salvos at 35,000-39,000 yards (20 miles).[[/note]] Dreadnought battleships and the counters developed against them created the TypesOfNavalShips that we use today. Tactics no longer resembled land warfare in the slightest, focusing instead on good scouting so you could discover the enemy first and place your own battleships in the most advantageous position.

Ten years of dreadnought-type battleship development were finally put to the test of massed combat during UsefulNotes/WW1. At the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, the British and German fleets finally engaged each other en masse off the coast of Denmark. The battle itself was inconclusive: the British lost more ships and men but more of the surviving German ships were severely damaged. However, the British Grand Fleet was larger and could afford to take losses whereas the German High Seas Fleet could not. Here the battlecruiser concept died rather spectacularly with the loss of HMS ''Queen Mary'', HMS ''Indefatigable'', and HMS ''Invincible'' in catastrophic explosions; Admiral Beattie's own flagship HMS ''Lion'' only avoided sharing their fate by the narrowest of margins due to a HeroicSacrifice by a turret officer, prompting Beattie's acerbic quote above. On the German side SMS ''Lutzow'' was scuttled after the battle, too severely damaged to make port and SMS ''Seydlitz'' only barely managed to limp home with less than one foot of freeboard minus all of her turrets. All but Lutzow were sunk by other battle cruisers and no battle cruiser on either side returned undamaged. None of the more heavily armored Dreadnoughts were sunk. Though some battlecruisers survived until UsefulNotes/WW2 few were built during the interwar period. During [=WW2=] battlecruisers fought battleships on 3 occasions:[[note]]Denmark Strait,24 May 1941; Second Guadalcanal,14-15 November 1943; and North Cape,26 December 1943.[[/note]] each time the battlecruiser was sunk. Jutland also saw the introduction of a new kind of fast battleship or super-dreadnought in the ''Queen Elizabeth'' class, which attempted to address the battlecruisers' shortcomings by combining relatively high speed with even bigger guns and commensurate protection.

Despite the ambiguous and much debated results of Jutland WWI triggered a new round of battleship construction as each state sought to acquire "super-dreadnoughts" featuring near-battlecruiser speed with even heavier armor and bigger guns. The high costs of this naval arms race grew to be such a concern that the world's first major international arms reduction treaties (The 1922 Washington and 1930 London Naval Conferences) were aimed at limiting battleship size and reducing their numbers. (Ironically, Japanese anger at the way they were treated at these conferences actually helped set the stage for UsefulNotes/WW2). As these treaties were eventually abandoned during the run-up to WWII, battleships became ridiculously large and powerful -- the largest battleship ever created, the Japanese ''Yamato'' had [[MoreDakka nine 18" guns]], and the fastest, the U.S. ''Iowa'' class, could sail at 33 knots.[[note]]Arguably, ''both'' the ''Yamato''-class superbattleships and the ''Iowa''-class fast battleships were terrific wastes of resources, as these jewels of the IJN and USN battle fleet never had opportunity to meet a worthy target during the Pacific Campaign. The important difference being the USA could ''afford'' to build these ships without making the slightest dent in its production of more critical aircraft carriers; indeed, by this point in the war the US had economically dominated the IJN to such a degree the USN was running out of things to buy. Also, the ''Iowa''s did prove to be quite useful in a fire-support role supporting American troops fighting within 20 miles of shore--which happened strangely often in the latter half of the 20th century--and their speed came in handy keeping up with the nuclear-powered ships that popped up in the same period.[[/note]]

And now we come to the part when it begins to matter, because for Lake in particular that someone was Wilhelm II, the Kaiser (Emperor) of Germany (Lake's main competitor Holland, on the other hand, had his main success with the Germany's main [[TheRival rivals]] — United Kingdom and ImperialRussia). [[ImperialGermany Germany]], being unified only around the 1870s, was a bit late to the colonial cake. Being late, it had yet to build up its naval muscle. The Germans took up the development of their ''Hochseeflotte'' and, through creating it and pursuing a ham-fisted policy of colonial expansion to match everyone else's, help drive a neutral country (the insular United Kingdom) into the arms of its enemy (France). A country which was renowned for its naval capabilities, to boot. Between this and the failure to maintain cordial relations with Russia, which France also drew into her orbit as an ally, Germany had surrrounded herself with strong enemies and just one weak friend (Austria-Hungary).

However, the German navy noted, the situation might not be as grim as it appeared. Germany was dependent on foreign trade, but so was France. Britain was even more so. While trade ships could be protected from surface ships by the Enente's navy, they would still be vulnerable to submarine attack. Even from the submarines of the day, which were still little more then temporarily submersible (one hoped) torpedo boats. A bit of trivia: one of the most successful submarine captains of UsefulNotes/WorldWarOne was an Austro-Hungrian officer named [[Theatre/TheSoundOfMusic Georg Von Trapp]].

The policy not only failed, but drew the United States into the conflict in mid-1917. This was not an immediate disaster, as the USA had very little capacity for weapons manufacture [[note]] For instance the USA produced just 400 of the 3000 artillery pieces its Expeditionary Force finished the war with, all of these being 'light' (small) ones to boot. France manufactured the rest. The other weapons systems are a similar story [[/note]]. However, it did give the Entente enough 'first-rate' manpower to execute another two years of high-casualty warfare which valued taking and holding as much ground as possible over preserving lives. Germany, France, and Britain had all run out in 1916 and switched to low-casualty warfare which valued preserving as many lives as possible over taking and holding ground. The USA's entry was a game-changer because now, the Entente could take the losses needed to force its way through Germany's defences again, and again, and again, until they could no longer form any more and their depleted forces broke completely. This is exactly what happened in summer 1918, with Austria-Hungary and Germany suing for peace in October-November 1918.

The submarine threat caused the Allied to adopt convoys[[note]]Convoys work primarily and counter-intuitively because an ocean is so huge and empty gathering the ships together actually makes individual ships harder to find as well as easier to defend. If a submarine did find a convoy it usually only had time to attack one or two ships before the convoy moved out of range. If the same number of ships were scattered over the ocean it would both increase the likelyhood of encountering a submarine and increase the amount of time the submarine had to attack each target. The German ''Rudeltactic'' (AKA Wolfpacks) was an attempt to address this.[[/note]] to protect their shipping and to seek out ways to detect and dispose of them, starting with [[UsefulNotes/NavalWeapons depth charges]] and hydrophones and proceeding through sonar to radar and radio direction finding -- as well as specific kinds ships to carry all of these things. Twenty years after the first World War Britain was still an island so the Germans tried the same naval strategy again -- this time with significantly more success, since they'd also developed their "wolfpack" tactics in the interim. The idea behind the wolfpack was fairly simple--any submarine locating a convoy would report it to base, which would in turn vector all available U-Boats to the vicinity. The Allies in turn responded to heavy losses with new technologies -- radar and aircraft, both land-based and flying from the specialized small "escort carriers" mentioned above, fancier means of delivering depth charges like "hedgehog" and "mousetrap" and eventually even acoustic homing torpedoes. The Germans, in turn, responded with defensive homing torpedoes of their own, radar warning receivers, anti-sonar and radar coatings, the ''Schnorkel'' which allowed subs to cruise submerged while recharging their batteries, and ultimately the Type XXI, a very advanced type of sub that carried a larger number of torpedoes and was actually fast enough to run away from the chasers, even while underwater.

The Germans and the Americans had some success with with radio-guided bombs and missiles during UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo and both sides had also fielded successful acoustic homing torpedoes. The American air-launched Mark 24 "Fido" acoustic torpedo sank or damaged 27% of the submarines it was dropped on. The Germans even managed to sink an Italian battleship (after Italy switched sides and joined the Allies) using the "Fritz-X" air-to-surface missile. The Japanese managed to trump both the Germans and the Americans (and horrify the world) by damaging more than 300 ships using the ''human-guided'' missiles known as [[SuicideAttack Kamikaze]], sinking 47 and causing more than 15,000 casualties. But things really started to develop in the 1960s after the development of semiconductors resulted in quantum leaps in electronic control systems.

In this new environment, the only real defense was not getting hit. Small, fast missile boats rapidly replaced larger vessels in the navies of smaller states because they were significantly cheaper to build, maintain, and man while their powerful missile batteries offered the same sort of David-vs-Goliath defence capabilities that torpedo boats had offered against battleships in the previous century. (They also have the advantage of being a lot more useful for most of the peacetime missions navies have, like fisheries patrol and search and rescue.) Countries with transoceanic commitments that required large ships couldn't take that route, however, and this inspired all sides to work on countermeasures like jammers, chaff, surface-to-air missiles that could shoot down anti-shipping missiles, culminating in the U.S. Aegis system, and on [[GatlingGood gatling gun]] based automated "close in weapons systems" for last ditch defense.

However, the German navy noted, the situation might not be as grim as it appeared. Germany was dependent on foreign trade, but so was France. Britain was even more so. While trade ships could be protected from surface ships by the Enente's navy, they would still be vulnerable to submarine attack. Even from the submarines of the day, which were still little more then temporarily submersible (one hoped) torpedo boats. A bit of trivia: one of the most successful submarine captains of UsefulNotes/WorldWarOne was an Austro-Hungrian officer named [[TheSoundOfMusic Georg Von Trapp]].

The old methods had their last hurrah in UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo as well, largely because there were still conditions (night battles and arctic seas) where aircraft were ineffective, especially early in the war. There were nine battleship-on-battleship engagements in UsefulNotes/WW2, all but one happening by 1943. There were also many surface engagements among cruisers and destroyers in the Mediterranean, Pacific, and Indian oceans without battleships present. And battleships did continue to prove useful since they made good antiaircraft and shore bombardment platforms. Later they were even placed in front of the carriers to protect them from aircraft attack since they could [[MightyGlacier take more damage]] and were [[WeHaveReserves more expendable]] in the aviation era and proved highly effective in this role since late war advances in radar and anti-aircraft gunnery gave them the means to protect themselves if they were provided with sufficient air cover.

Twelve years of dreadnought-type battleship development were finally put to the test of massed combat near the end of UsefulNotes/WW1. At the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1918, the British and German fleets finally engaged each other en masse off the coast of Denmark. The battle itself was inconclusive: the British lost more ships and men but more of the surviving German ships were severely damaged. However, the British Grand Fleet was larger and could afford to take losses whereas the German High Seas Fleet could not. Here the battlecruiser concept died rather spectacularly with the loss of HMS ''Queen Mary'', HMS ''Indefatigable'', and HMS ''Invincible'' in catastrophic explosions; Admiral Beattie's own flagship HMS ''Lion'' only avoided sharing their fate by the narrowest of margins due to a HeroicSacrifice by a turret officer, prompting Beattie's acerbic quote above. On the German side SMS ''Lutzow'' was scuttled after the battle, too severely damaged to make port and SMS ''Seydlitz'' only barely managed to limp home with less than one foot of freeboard minus all of her turrets. All but Lutzow were sunk by other battle cruisers and no battle cruiser on either side returned undamaged. None of the more heavily armored Dreadnoughts were sunk. Though some battlecruisers survived until UsefulNotes/WW2 few were built during the interwar period. During [=WW2=] battlecruisers fought battleships on 3 occasions:[[note]]Denmark Strait,24 May 1941; Second Guadalcanal,14-15 November 1943; and North Cape,26 December 1943.[[/note]] each time the battlecruiser was sunk. Jutland also saw the introduction of a new kind of fast battleship or super-dreadnought in the ''Queen Elizabeth'' class, which attempted to address the battlecruisers' shortcomings by combining relatively high speed with even bigger guns and commensurate protection.

The British, in a brilliant case of "AdaptationDistillation", decided to leapfrog everyone by combining ''all'' of these technological advances into one battleship. For speed, she eschewed triple-expansion steam engines for more powerful steam turbines. For protection, heavy armor around her machinery, magazines, and gun turrets, with minimal armor around non-critical spaces.[[note]]The "armored citadel" approach was already well-established, so while the quality, thickness, and layout of the armor were all excellent, they were no more remarkable than any other ship of that time.[[/note]] For firepower, no intermediate guns at all, only [[MoreDakka ten 12" guns]] in 5 independent turrets.[[note]]The secondary guns were kept; 27 12-pdr 18cwt (somewhat equivalent to 3" guns) were kept for close-range protection[[/quote]] They named her HMS ''[[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Dreadnought]]'' and she reduced the worldwide number of first-class capital ships to 1, as no one else had anything that could compete. But the British technological lead was only temporary, as Germany, the U.S., and Japan all had Dreadnought-style battleships on the drawing board before she was even launched (and in some cases before her keel was laid.)[[note]]Ironically, ''Dreadnought'' backfired by setting a new standard that threw away the Royal Navy's existing advantage in pre-dreadnought battleships, triggering a new building race where everyone started from scratch.[[/note]] Clearly the all big gun battleships' time had arrived and dreadnought construction became the first 20th century arms race.

As the weight of the steam engine, heavy guns, and armor only allowed for ships of a single gun deck, ironclads were almost all single-gun-deck ships and appropriately referred to as "armored frigates" from around the 1860s-1870s. As First- and second-rate multi-gun-deck ships-of-the-line were no match for these fifth- and sixth-rate warships, the Royal Navy's rating system became irrelevant. By the 1870s, the rating system was tossed out and these new warships were classified as "cruisers."

By the turn of the 20th Century, the Royal Navy had made two key observations: A faster ship can often force combat on its own terms, and the mixed-caliber gun batteries then in vogue impaired accuracy by making it difficult to spot the "fall of shot"--that is, figure out which splashes belonged to which guns and therefore which set of gunners needed to adjust their aim. And since a battleship's primary role is fighting other battleships, it made little sense to carry any but the heaviest guns and armor.

Word that the U.S. was working on an all-big gun battleship inspired the British, in a brilliant case of "AdaptationDistillation" to leapfrog everyone by combining ''all'' of the latest technological advances into one battleship with steam turbine engines, an all-steel hull, a 12" armor belt and [[MoreDakka ten 12" guns]] in 5 independent turrets. They named her HMS ''[[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Dreadnought]]'' and she reduced the worldwide number of first-class capital ships to 1, as no one else had anything that could compete. But the British technological lead was only temporary, as Germany, the U.S., and Japan all had Dreadnought-style battleships on the drawing board before she was even launched (and in some cases before her keel was laid.)[[note]]Ironically, ''Dreadnought'' backfired by setting a new standard that threw away the Royal Navy's existing advantage in pre-dreadnought battleships, triggering a new building race where everyone started from scratch.[[/note]] Clearly the all big gun battleships' time had arrived and dreadnought construction became the first 20th century arms race.

During this time the idea of a hybrid warship that combined the speed of a cruiser with the fire power of a battleship was appealing to some admirals, particularly Britain's Jackie Fisher[[note]]Who was also one of the main minds behind ''Dreadnought''[[/note]], and resulted in the development of the ''battlecruiser''. [[FragileSpeedster By sacrificing armor protection]], it was believed these ships were able to outrun anything that could sink them and out-gun anything that could catch them, much like the frigates of the age of sail. Their greater speed was considered sufficient to protect them from battleships, No one stopped to consider that a speed advantage could be easily negated by battle damage (or even one solid hit) as no one expected them to slug it out with battleships since they were intended to be used primarily for scouting and running down enemy commerce raiders. Unfortunately, no admiral has ever resisted the temptation to use the battlecruisers' big guns to pad his line of battle salvo weight, and this was the death toll for the fragile battlecruisers that were never intended to face full-on battleships in line-on-line fight.

The dreadnought increased the range at which battles could be fought to approximately eleven miles or all the way out to the visible horizon.[[note]] The advent of radar in WWII extended these ranges even further. HMS ''Warspite'' achieved a hit on the Italian battleship''Giulio Cesare'' at 25,000-27,000 yards (15 miles) and USS ''Iowa'' straddled a Japanese destroyer with five out of ten salvos at 35,000-39,000 yards (20 miles).[[/note]] Dreadnought battleships and the counters developed against them created the TypesOfNavalShips that we use today. Tactics no longer resembled land warfare in the slightest, focusing instead on good scouting so you could discover the enemy first and place your own battleships in the most advantageous position. Boarding no longer makes sense in this environment, as you'd be destroyed well before you could get close enough, so [[SemperFi Marines turned to storming beaches instead]]. The major war of the Battleship era was UsefulNotes/WW1 and the most notable battle was the Battle of Jutland. The Germans in that war did a fair bit of the "sink the enemy's merchant ships and starve them into submission using submarines" tactic that they would try again in UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo -- the British did the same with their surface navy with considerably more success.

Much of the pre-WWI thinking involved a big battle between the British and German fleets. Jutland was it, occurring on 31 May 1916 off the coast of Denmark. The battle itself was inconclusive: the British lost more ships and men but more of the surviving German ships were severely damaged. However, the British Grand Fleet was larger and could afford to take losses whereas the German High Seas Fleet could not. Here the battlecruiser concept died rather spectacularly with the loss of HMS ''Queen Mary'', HMS ''Indefatigable'', and HMS ''Invincible'' in catastrophic explosions; Admiral Beattie's own flagship HMS ''Lion'' only avoided sharing their fate by the narrowest of margins due to a HeroicSacrifice by a turret officer, prompting Beattie's acerbic quote above. On the German side SMS ''Lutzow'' was scuttled after the battle, too severely damaged to make port and SMS ''Seydlitz'' only barely managed to limp home with less than one foot of freeboard minus all of her turrets. All but Lutzow were sunk by other battle cruisers and no battle cruiser on either side returned undamaged. None of the more heavily armored Dreadnoughts were sunk. Though some battlecruisers survived until UsefulNotes/WW2 few were built during the interwar period. During [=WW2=] battlecruisers fought battleships on 3 occasions:[[note]]Denmark Strait,24 May 1941; Second Guadalcanal,14-15 November 1943; and North Cape,26 December 1943.[[/note]] each time the battlecruiser was sunk. Jutland also saw the introduction of a new kind of fast battleship or super-dreadnought in the ''Queen Elizabeth'' class, which attempted to address the battlecruisers' shortcomings by combining relatively high speed with even bigger guns and commensurate protection.

Word that the U.S. was working on an all-big gun battleship inspired the British, in a brilliant case of "AdaptationDistillation" to leapfrog everyone by combining ''all'' of the latest technological advances into one battleship with steam turbine engines, an all-steel hull, a 12" armor belt and [[MoreDakka ten 12" guns]] in 5 independent turrets. They named her HMS ''[[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Dreadnought]]'' and she reduced the worldwide number of first-class capital ships to 1, as no one else had anything that could compete. But The British technological lead was only temporary as Germany, the U.S., and Japan all had Dreadnought-style battleships on the drawing board before she was even launched (and in some cases before her keel was laid.)[[note]]Ironically, ''Dreadnought'' backfired by setting a new standard that threw away the Royal Navy's existing advantage in pre-dreadnought battleships, triggering a new building race where everyone started from scratch.[[/note]] Clearly the all big gun battleships' time had arrived and dreadnought construction became the first 20th century arms race.

The line between ironclad and battleship is not clear, but arguably the first battleships were the turreted, sail-less ironclads of the 1870s - HMS ''Devasation'' commissioned in 1871, the all-steel French ''Redoubtable'' of 1878, and the Italian ''Caio Duilio'' of 1880. By the 1890s most capital ships were of a similar type - coal-powered triple-expansion steel ships, heavily armored, with a main armament of around 4x 12 inch guns (usually two each in turrets before and after the superstructure) an intermediate armament of around 10x 5-to-8 inch guns (in turrets or broadside casemates) and a secondary armament of 10-30 3-to-5 inch guns (turrets or casemates). The main armament was powerful but slow-firing, meant to defeat the heaviest armour on the target; the secondary armament was quick-firing but weak, meant to wreck the lightly armoured parts of the target with a torrent of explosive shells; the intermediate guns split the difference. In all cases, the entire armament was expected to work together attacking a single target at a relatively short range - although the bigger guns could shoot further, the fire control of the period was too primitive to hit anything at long range with any reliability. Likewise, the line between cruisers and battleships was blurry, as initially the battleship was just an extremely powerful cruiser. As technology slowed enough for standard ship roles to start developing, it became typical for the cruiser to become a fast, long-range ship with around 8 to 12 guns in the 5-to-10 inch range. The idea is that a major navy would do most of its commerce raiding and GunboatDiplomacy with a fleet of cruisers, and keep the battleships for fleet actions against the battleship fleets of other navies - similar to the prior roles of frigates and ships-of-the-line.

This was around the time the United States - having been a frigate navy for its entire history - began to build itself into a significant naval power. In response to Brazil's launching of the battleship ''Riachuelo'' in 1883 (which by itself made Brazil the most powerful Navy in the Americas by a wide margin), the US Navy launched the battleship ''Texas'' and armored cruiser ''Maine''. In the Spanish-American War (1898), the new all-steel ships of the U.S. Navy [[FlawlessVictory sank two Spanish fleets and seized their Caribbean and Pacific colonies without losing any ships of their own.]] In the RussoJapaneseWar (1904-05) [[{{Foreshadowing}} (opened with a surprise torpedo attack against the Russian fleet in Dalian/'Port Arthur', Liaoning province)]] the [[KatanasOfTheRisingSun Imperial Japanese]] managed to sink [[RussiansWithRifles Imperial Russia's]] (smaller-than-Japan's) Pacific Fleet with land-based artillery and destroy Russia's (slightly-larger-than-Japan's) Baltic fleet, [[CurbStompBattle the latter in less than an hour]].

The torpedo, originally meant as a short-range weapon for battleships and cruisers, was quickly realized as a very mobile weapon that could be carried by vehicles that couldn't possibly carry a heavy gun. Countries that couldn't afford battleships quickly adapted the torpedo to smaller craft such as torpedo boats and (eventually) submarines - very inexpensive vessels that could easily sneak up on an unsuspecting battleship and sink it. This in turn lead the big navies to develop "Torpedo Boat Destroyers" (later shortened to the familiar "destroyer"); fast, maneuverable ships able to keep up with torpedo boats and carrying enough guns to readily overpower them before they could do any damage. Thus, shortly before UsefulNotes/WorldWarOne, the TypesOfNavalShips had been well-developed - the battleship, the cruiser, the destroyer, the submarine, and the torpedo boat.

The dreadnought increased the range at which battles could be fought to approximately eleven miles or all the way out to the visible horizon.[[note]] The advent of radar in WWII extended these ranges even further. HMS ''Warspite'' achieved a hit on the Italian battleship''Giulio Cesare'' at 25,000 - 27,000 yards (15 miles) and USS ''Iowa'' straddled a Japanese destroyer with five out of ten salvos at 35,000-39,000 yards (20 miles).[[/note]] Dreadnought battleships and the counters developed against them created the TypesOfNavalShips that we use today. Tactics no longer resembled land warfare in the slightest, focusing instead on good scouting so you could discover the enemy first and place your own battleships in the most advantageous position. Boarding no longer makes sense in this environment, as you'd be destroyed well before you could get close enough, so [[SemperFi Marines turned to storming beaches instead]]. The major war of the Battleship era was UsefulNotes/WW1 and the most notable battle was the Battle of Jutland. The Germans in that war did a fair bit of the "sink the enemy's merchant ships and starve them into submission using submarines" tactic that they would try again in UsefulNotes/WorldWarTwo -- the British did the same with their surface navy with considerably more success.

Parallels could be drawn to the torpedo and naval mine - cheap weapons capable of damaging or destroying a battleship, deliverable by inexpensive vehicles (torpedo boats, destroyers, submarines, or minelayers) which introduced new dynamics to naval warfare in the first decade of the 20th century, but failed to knock the battleship off its pedestal. Surely airpower would likewise be inconsequential so long as battleships mounted a couple anti-arcraft guns and applied appropriate defensive tactics.

The very idea of a ship has a single weak point: if it sinks, it's useless. Someone finally got to the conclusion "Gee, wouldn't it be funny if I swam over there and made a hole in that ship?". Not everyone, though, is a good swimmer, and not every good swimmer swims well enough. So someone came up with the idea that all this swimming under sea's surface can be done by a dedicated machine: ''sub''- (under) -''marine'' (sea); in a sense, it's a [[SubvertedTrope [=SUBversion=] of the concept of a ship]].

This caused problems with guidance, namely the fact that most radars can't go too far beyond the horizon- the ones that can wouldn't fit on a ship, leading to developments in target data-sharing, allowing an airplane, helicopter or submarine to send course corrections to the missiles in flight. The Soviets did some work on radar satellites to detect U.S. carrier groups from space (the stupendous energy needs of which also meant that they also had the lead in the satellite-based ''nuclear reactors''), the Americans worked on anti-satellite weapons, so the Soviets did the same.

Originally considered poor man's airpower for countries that couldn't build or afford carriers, missiles soon changed the face of naval warfare because they allowed a relatively small boat to pack a big punch. Like the submarine and airplane before them, missiles primarily appealed to a relatively weak naval power hoping to leapfrog a larger rival, in this case the Soviet Union. In the Six Day War of 1967, Soviet-built "Komar"-class missile boats in Egyptian service sank several Israeli vessels, including a destroyer, which was a wake-up call to everyone. Some were heedless though, and in the 1972 war the Indian Navy pretty much destroyed the Pakistani naval base in Karachi with two extremely successful raids using Soviet-built missile boats, sinking a number of Pakistani vessels and blowing up much of the port's land-based infrastructure while sustaining zero losses. These episodes proved without doubt that firepower had at last won the ancient struggle of gun vs armor.

Naval warfare sped up tremendously here -- in the case of HMS ''Sheffield'', the time from Exocet launch to impact was four minutes -- with ''Sheffield'' only getting five seconds warning as they disbelieved the alert until it was too late. In a confrontation between the U.S. and Iranian navies precipitated by the mining of USS ''Samuel B Roberts'' an Iranian patrol boat was sunk so quickly by two U.S. missiles that a third missile couldn't find enough left of it to hit. On the other hand, two Iraqi-launched Exocets failed to sink the frigate USS ''Stark'' due to a combination of sheer luck (HMS ''Sheffield'' lost her high-pressure fire main--a seawater system used to extinguish fires--due to the missile impact), stout construction, and outstanding damage control work on the part of the crew, proving that even in the missile age luck and seamanship still count for something.

While there have been no major naval conflicts in the 21st century, some [[http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/ armchair-generals]] have speculated that the standard carrier group still in use by the U.S. has been rendered obsolete in that they are basically large sitting ducks to the newer technologies above. The theory goes that a multi-billion dollar carrier can apparently easily be overwhelmed by [[MacrossMissileMassacre multiple low cost missiles approaching at Mach 2+ speeds from different directions]]. Actual non-armchair (lieutenant) general Paul K. Van Riper used a similar strategy to "sink" 16 American warships, including a carrier, during the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 2002 Millennium Challenge wargame]].

Navies are not blind to this idea, as it's been considered as a possible scenario since the late 1970s: The infamous "Backfire" raid scenario, consisting of supersonic Soviet bombers firing numerous missiles, haunted U.S. planning throughout the late cold war. The U.S. Aegis system installed on cruisers and destroyers was designed expressly to defeat this threat, and is capable of engaging dozens of small, fast moving targets simultaneously at any range from "beyond visual" to "knife fight". In fairness, there has not been a major missile engagement since the system was invented, so it is unknown how well it would work in a real fight.

The new British Type 45 destroyers are another attempt at dealing with this problem. The official stats claim it has the smallest radar profile of any modern surface warship and an air-defence system capable of destroying multiple objects the size of cricket balls traveling at Mach 3. This argument also begs the question of who exactly is going to be firing all those anti-ship missiles; with the end of the USSR, the potential for a massive missile attack on a carrier group has gone way down. Russia, despite a recent naval buildup combining several new missile-heavy designs and a generally more aggressive attitude currently has neither the resources, the intention, or the warm water points[[note]]Not that it ever bothered Russians much, most of their ships having the ice reinforcements, their main problem is rather the lack of foreign basing points and most of their major ports being on the inner seas with the easily blocked exits.[[/note]] to enter into another major naval arms race. So for now the states of the world seem content (or at least resigned) to the allow the U.S. Navy to continue to dominate the world's oceans just as they have since WWII, a situation that seems unlikely to change as long as the U.S. Navy outguns all of the world's other navies put together.

Armored warships continued to be constructed of a combination of iron and wood until the development of steel shipbuilding in the 1870s. Armor technology improved and guns because increasingly powerful. Marine steam power was sufficiently reliable, and (more importantly) coal fueling stations became sufficiently numerous, that sails largely disappeared, although masts were retained because they were useful for signalling, fire control, and so forth.

The Koreans were actually the first to armor ships with iron[[note]], maybe,it's [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_ship#Decking debated]][[/note]], using them to defeat a Japanese invasion in the late 16th century, but news of this success never reached the wider world, and the amount of armor that could be carried on any ship powered by sails or oars was limited; a truly successful seagoing armored ship requires steam power.

The Age of Sail lasted roughly into the early 1800s, until sometime between the end of the NapoleonicWars and the beginning of UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar. By this point, most naval powers had consolidated their strength into two basic types of ship, the powerful "ship of the line" which sailed directly from home port to a massive[[note]]and typically fast and decisive[[/note]] fleet battle, and the less powerful frigate, which could spend months or years at sea and generally fought other frigates in small squadrons (or even one-on-one battles) in sea lanes far from home.

The policy not only failed, but drew the United States into the conflict in mid-1917. This was not an immediate disaster, as the USA had very little capacity for weapons manufacture [[note]] For instance the USA produced just 400 of the 3000 artillery pieces its Expeditionary Force finished the war with, all of these being 'light' (small) ones to boot. France manufactured the rest. The other weapons systems are a similar story [[/note]]. However, it did give the Entente enough 'first-rate' manpower to execute another two years of high-casualty warfare which valued taking ground over preserving lives. Germany, France, and Britain had all run out in 1916 and switched to low-casualty warfare which valued preserving lives over hoding ground. The USA's entry was a game-changer because now, the Entente could take the losses necessary to force its way through Germany's defences again, and again, and again, until they broke completely. This is exactly what happened in summer 1918, with Austria-Hungary and Germany suing for peace in October-November 1918.

And now we come to the part when it begins to matter, because for Lake in particular that someone was Wilhelm II, the Kaiser (Emperor) of Germany (Lake's main competitor Holland, on the other hand, had his main success with the Germany's main [[TheRival rivals]] — United Kingdom and ImperialRussia). [[ImperialGermany Germany]], being unified only around the 1870s, was a bit late to the colonial cake. Being late, it had yet to build up its naval muscle. The Germans took up the development of their ''Hochseeflotte'' but then, their likely enemy, the insular United Kingdom, was rather known for its naval capabilities. However, the Germans thought, being located on an island means you are dependent upon supplies, which are brought by ships, and while these can be protected from surface ships by the Royal Navy they are still vulnerable to submarine attack. Even from the submarines of the day, which were still little more then temporarily submersible (one hoped) torpedo boats. A bit of trivia: one of the most successful submarine captains of UsefulNotes/WorldWarOne was an Austrian named [[TheSoundOfMusic Georg Von Trapp]].

And thus, the Germans embraced the submarine as a means of naval warfare, and thus the word ''U-Boat'' (''Unterseeboot'', "undersea boat" -- or "sub"-"marine") entered dictionaries, and all submarines are referred to as "boats" to this day. While the Germans initially tried to be gentlemanly by [[HonorBeforeReason surfacing to stop ships before torpedoing them]] it didn't take them long to realize that merely exposed their subs to British countermeasures and [[CombatPragmatist threw away their advantages]]. Besides, depriving Britain of sea trade required more than just torpedoing British merchant vessels, so the idea of unrestricted submarine warfare was born: Sink all ships you suspected of aiding your enemy, even if they belonged to neutral states, and let the chips fall where they may. In WWI the chips fell on the other side of the Atlantic, drawing the United States into the conflict in 1917. However, it was probably the prospect of facing the United State's potentially unlimited reserves of manpower rather than America's initial battlefield accomplishments that convinced Germany to sue for peace in November 1918.

After Jutland the British fleet remained in control of the North Sea and maintained their NavalBlockade of Germany. The Germans never challenged the British navy again and switched to unrestricted submarine warfare instead, a strategy which ultimately backfired when it helped draw the United States into the war against them. Frustration with their inactivity led the men of the High Seas fleet to mutiny in 1918, hastening the collapse of the German war effort. The German fleet eventually scuttled itself at the British fleet anchorage in Scapa Flow on June 21, 1919: 52 ships were scuttled in all, including 10 battleships and 5 battlecruisers.