1906 was a pivotal year in the development of battleships, but the trend also affected lighter ships. It was the year that HMS Dreadnought entered service with the Royal Navy. Almost overnight, this ship put previous battleships into obsolescence and as a result, those battleships from an earlier design are called 'pre-Dreadnought' ships. What made HMS Dreadnought so special was that it was a 'big gun' battleship. All of its main guns were 12 inch naval rifles. Prior to this, battleships carried a variety of main weapons of differing sizes, the thought being that different sizes would be used against different ships with the big guns being saved for the battleships.

Dreadnought was the brain child of two men; Admiral Sir John Fischer, the First Sea Lord and Sir Philip Watts, the Director of Naval Construction. Now the British were not the first to come up with the idea, but thanks to their collusion, they were able to get the Dreadnought built in record time, making them the first. Following ships took over twice as long to build. In the US, similar battleships, the USS South Carolina and USS Michigan were being planned and constructed, but these ships took years longer to complete, giving the Dreadnought the honor of being first. Similar ships were planned by the Italians and the Japanese were also leaning in that direction.

Aside from being a big gun ship, the Dreadnought was still somewhat tied to earlier ship designs as not all their big guns were along the centerline. Like the Germans and others, this ship and her sisters used what were known as 'wing guns'. These guns were outboard of the centerline of the ship and could only fire a broadside on one side of the ship. That meant that in order to have eight guns in a broadside, the ships had to have ten guns as two would always be blocked by the ship's superstructure. Attempts were made to correct this by developing openings through which the other guns could fire, but this resulted in damage to the surrounding superstructure so was rarely if ever used in combat.

The cure to this was, of course, to superimpose a turret over the other as one sees in later ships, but the British had not figured out how to do this properly so in order to rush the ship into service, went with the older design.

The Dreadnought was a single ship class and was used to test the various changes in ship design such as dual fuel power plants that could handle either coal or fuel oil. Naturally, with such a ship, it was imperative that more be built as quickly as possible in fear that other powers would outstrip the British with equal or better ships. For sure the Germans were quick to emulate the design of the Dreadnought with their own ships. Thus several classes of similar ships, each with some improvements to previous classes were built. These included the Bellerophon class, the St.Vincent class, the HMS Neptune, the Colossus class and another one off, the HMS Agincourt. This later ship was built for the Turkish navy and had two more gun turrets than the 'standard'. However, with the start of the war, the ship was held back to see how Turkey would enter the war and once she sided with Germany, the ship was confiscated and entered into the Royal Navy.

All of these ships save Dreadnought, participated in the only major naval engagement of WWI at Jutland with none of them being sunk and only one taking superficial damage. All of the British ships sunk at Jutland were battlecruisers or smaller vessels. All of these ships were modified during the war with most of them being sold and broken up within four years of the end of the war. The British rarely keep old warships, even for museums and none of these survived.

In this book, Angus Konstam takes a look at what led up to the building program before the war as well as a description of each of the various classes of ship. Full specs on each class are provided as well as their wartime use and any modifications done. There is also a section on the weapons used and a most interesting one on gunnery of the time.

This is superbly illustrated with a selection of period photos of these ships as well as the equally excellent art work or illustrator Paul Wright, who has ably illustrated several naval books. This includes a series of full color profiles. It is everything that makes the New Vanguard series one of my favorite from Osprey and a book I can easily recommend to you.

June 2013

For more on the complete line of Osprey books, visit www.ospreypublishing.com. In the US, it is Osprey Direct at 44-02 23rd St, Suite 219, Long Island City, NY 11101., where you can get a catalogue of available books.

If you would like your product reviewed fairly and quickly, please contact me or see other details in the Note to Contributors.