The logical outcome of these leading ideas is realized in the present battle-ships as follows: There are two turrets, protected by armor, the thickest that can be given them, considering the other weights the ship has to carry, and of the highest resisting quality that processes of manufacture can develop. Armor of similar character and weight protects the sides about the engines. In each turret are guns whose power corresponds to the armor which protects them. Their proper aim—not, of course, always reached—is the heavy armored part of the enemy, chiefly the engines, the motive power. When they strike outside of this target, as often must happen, there is excess of blow, and consequent waste. The turrets are separated, fore and aft, by a distance as great as possible, to minimize the danger of a single shot or any other local incident disabling both. The fact that the ends of ships, being comparatively sharp, are less waterborne and cannot support extreme weights, chiefly limits this severance of the turrets. Between the two, and occasionally before or abaft them, is distributed the broadside rapid fire of the ship, which in its development is in contradistinction to the compressed fire of the monitor. This fire is rapid because the guns are many and because individually they can fire fast. Thus, the turret gun, twelve or thirteen inch in bore, fires once in five minutes; the five-inch rapid-fire gun thrice in one minute. The rapid-fire battery aims outside of the heaviest armor. When it strikes that, unless it chance to enter a gun port, its effect is lost; but as much the greater part of the ship is penetrable by it, the chance of wasting power is less than in the case of the heavier guns. As most of a ship’s company are outside the protection of the heaviest armor, the rapid-fire gun aims, as did the British in the old line-of-battle ship, at the personnel of the enemy.
The reader will comprehend that in the application of these leading ideas there is considerable variety in detail. The two turrets may be looked upon at present as the least variable factor; and in disposing armor all practice agrees that the turrets and engines receive the greatest protection. But how to distribute the total available weight of armor gives rise to varieties of practice which find their reflection in similar variety in the sizes and numbers of the rapid-fire guns, to whose penetrative force there is a corresponding thickness of armor. For example, two battle-ships now building for the United States navy have four thirteen-inch guns in turrets, and in broadside fourteen five-inch, twenty six-pounder, and six one-pounder rapid-fire guns; between the two classes they have four eight-inch guns, also mounted in smaller turrets, superimposed on the main turrets. A ship since designed will have the same thirteen-inch gun fire, but in place of the eight-inch and five-inch will have fourteen six-inch rapid-fire guns. An expert officer, discussing these, says: “In the former the weight of fire per minute is two thousand and fifty pounds on the broadside and five hundred ahead or astern, while with the latter plan it is only one thousand seven hundred and fifty on the broadside and five hundred ahead and astern. But the main objection to the second plan is that the volume of effective fire is enormously diminished by the omission of eight-inch guns. The larger area covered with their armor is fairly safe from the six-inch gun at fighting ranges, whereas the eight-inch projectile at any range, and at even a considerable angle of incidence, will penetrate it.” In the judgment of the present writer the weight of this argument depends upon what is behind the armor the eight-inch only will penetrate. If battery and men, it is strong, if not decisive; if motive power only, not.
HISTORY’S TEACHING AND THE FUTURE
The object of this paper has been not to present an accumulation of details, but to elucidate the principles upon which the details rest. The latter, when correct, are but the application of principles to practice. Subject to the imperfections attendant on all human work, the writer is persuaded that the greatest errors in practice—and especially the lack of homogeneousness which characterizes the present battle-ships—arise chiefly from the failure to refer back to principles. Until war has given us the abundant experience which led our predecessors to the broadside seventy-four as the rule, with occasional exceptions, we must depend upon reasoning alone for the solution of our problems; and the reasoner keeps within the limits of safety only by constant reference to fundamental facts.
The one experience of war which ships really contemporary have had was in the battle of the Yalu. Its teachings lose some value from the fact that the well-drilled Japanese used their weapons to advantage, while the Chinese were ill trained; still, some fair inferences can be made. The Japanese had a great many rapid-fire guns, with few very heavy ones, and their vessels were not battle-ships properly so-called. The Chinese, besides other vessels, had two battle-ships with heavy armor and heavy guns. Victory remained with the Japanese. In the opinion of the writer two probable conclusions can be reached: That rapid-fire guns in due proportion to the entire battery will beat down a ship dependent mainly upon turret guns; that is, between two ships whose batteries are alike the issue of the contest will depend upon the one or the other gaining first a predominance of rapid fire. That done, the turret guns of the predominant ship will give the final blows to the engines and turrets of the other, whose own turret guns cannot be used with the necessary deliberation under the preponderant storm of projectiles now turned upon them. The other conclusion, even more certain than the first, is that rapid-fire guns alone, while they may determine an action, cannot make it decisive. Despite the well-established superiority of the Japanese rapid fire in that action, the Chinese battle-ships, though overborne, were not taken. Their heaviest armor being unpierced, the engines and turret guns remained effective, and they withdrew unmolested.
BATTLE-SHIPS THAT ARE TOO LARGE
The battle-ship constituted as described remains for the present the fighting ship upon which the issues of war will depend. The type is accepted by all the leading naval states, though with considerable variations in size. As regards the latter feature, the writer believes that the enormous tonnage recently given is excessive, and that the reasons which support it, too numerous and various to be enumerated at length, have the following fundamental fault: they look too much to the development of the individual ship and too little to the fact that the prime requisite of the battle-ship is facility for co-operating with other ships of its own type—facility in manœuvring together, facility in massing, facility also in subdividing when occasion demands. It may be remarked, too, that the increase of size has gone much more to increase of defensive power than of offensive—a result so contrary to the universal teachings of war as of itself to suggest pausing.
Does the present hold out any probabilities of important changes in the near future, of revolutionary changes? No. For twenty-five or thirty years now we have been expecting from the ram and from the torpedo results which would displace the gun from its supremacy of centuries. Those results, however, are not yet visible. No one disputes the tremendous effects of the ram and of the torpedo when successfully used; but I believe I am correct in saying that the great preponderance of professional opinion does not attribute to them a certainty, or an approach to certainty, impairing the predominance of the gun. This is not the conclusion of mere conservation in a profession naturally conservative. The fluctuations of professional opinion have been sufficiently marked and the matter sufficiently argued to dispose of that contention. Nor is this supremacy of the gun probably a transient matter, liable to pass away with improvements greater than those of the last quarter of a century. The advantage of the gun depends upon conditions probably permanent—upon its greater range, its greater accuracy, its greater rapidity. The individual effect of each shot may be less than that of a torpedo or of a ram thrust; but, as was said in comparing very heavy guns with rapid fire, the probability of many hits prevails over the possibilities of one great blow.
THE GUN AND THE TORPEDO
In none of these features is either of the other weapons likely to overtake the gun. The torpedo relies mainly upon stealth, the ram mainly upon a happy chance for effective use. Both stealth and chance have their place in war; stratagem and readiness, each in place, may contribute much. But the decisive issues of war depend upon the handling of masses with celerity and precision, according to certain general principles of recognized universality. Afloat, such massed force, to be wielded accurately and rapidly, must consist of units not too numerous because of their smallness—as torpedo craft would be—nor too unwieldy because of their size. We may not be able to determine yet, in advance of prolonged experience of war, just what the happy mean may be corresponding in principle to the old seventy-four, but we may be reasonably sure that it will be somewhere in the ranks of the present battle-ships; and that in the range, accuracy and rapidity of their gun-fire—especially when acting in fleets—will be found a protection which the small vessels that rely upon the torpedo or ram alone will not be able to overcome, though they may in rare instances elude.