CZ:Featured article/Current
Battleship
The USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii which spans over the wreckage of the battleship.
The USS Massachusetts (BB-59) or "Big Mamie," on display as a museum ship in Battleship Cove, Fall River, Massachusetts.
The battleship, though now essentially obsolete as a naval weapon, is a naval vessel intended to engage the most powerful warships of an opposing navy. Evolved from the ship of the line, their main armament consisted of multiple heavy cannon mounted in movable turrets. The ships boasted extensive armor and as such were designed to survive severe punishment inflicted upon them by other capital ships.
The word "battleship" was coined around 1794 and is a contraction of the phrase "line-of-battle ship," the dominant wooden warship during the Age of Sail.[1] The term came into formal use in the late 1880s to describe a specific type of ironclad warship (now referred to by historians as pre-Dreadnought battleships).[2] In 1906, the commissioning of HMS Dreadnought heralded a revolution in capital ship design. Subsequent battleship designs were therefore referred to as "dreadnoughts." A general criterion from thereon in was that the armor of a true battleship must be sufficiently thick to withstand a hit by its own most powerful gun, within certain constraints. Battlecruisers, while having near-battleship-sized guns, did not meet this standard of protection, and instead were intended to be fast enough to outrun the more heavily armed and armored battleship.[3]
From 1905 to the early 1940s, battleships defined the strength of a first-class navy. The idea of a strong "fleet in being", backed by a major industrial infrastructure, was key to the thinking of the naval strategist per Alfred Thayer Mahan, writing in his 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1763 (1890). The essence of Mahan from a naval viewpoint is that a great navy is a mark and prerequisite of national greatness. In a 1912 letter to the New York Times, he counseled against relying on international relations for peace, and pointed out that other major nations were all building battleships.[4] Asymmetrical threats to battleships began, in the early 20th century, with torpedoes from fast attack craft and mines. These underwater threats could strike in more vulnerable spots than could heavy guns. Aircraft, however, became an even more decisive threat by World War II.
| notes |
|---|
|