Dreadnought Quotes

“The torpedo won Jutland. It nearly won the war for the Germans. But in the end it defeated them by drawing in the United States on the Allied side.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“The Dreadnought battleship itself was one victor. By its survival (not one was lost) it had appeared to justify both its mighty artillery and the diabolical ingenuity that had been expended on its defences. The other victor was the Dreadnought’s first enemy, the torpedo, which governed commanders’ judgments, by its threat or its reality caused squadron engagements to be broken off, and whole fleets to flinch away in fear.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“The British suffered worse casualties than in any previous naval battle, and more than twice as many as the Germans. But the material losses were not so heavy as at first appeared. Because of the very rapid development of the Dreadnought-type ship, the Invincible and Indefatigable were already outdated. The Queen Mary was a more modern battle cruiser, but she was much less valuable to the British than was the brand-new Lützow to the Germans.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Weakly protected battle cruisers should never have indulged in a sustained gunnery duel, especially when there were four vastly more powerful fast battleships available in the same scouting force. Armoured cruisers should never have been there at all. Destroyers obscured the enemy.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Many interpretations can be made of the events of May 31, 1916. All sorts of claims were made at the time, and many more since. The facts on the material are clear. These were some of the most important. There was something wrong with British shells, and the battle cruisers were not thoroughly enough protected, especially against the flash of cordite to the magazines. British armour plate was as good as German, but on most of the ships it was not thick enough. The buoyancy and damage control of the German ships was much better than the British. High speed was useful, but not at the expense of protection. The bigger the gun, as most people expected, the better the result.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“When dawn broke over the North Sea on May 31st, fifty-eight Dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers were steaming north or east toward the greatest naval collision of arms between surface ships of modern times. Thirty-seven were British, twenty-one were German.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“The British Admiralty knew that something was afoot on the morning of May 30th before Hipper and Scheer sailed, for the Germans were as free as ever with their wireless. Beatty and Jellicoe were therefore warned in the afternoon of likely activity.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Thus in the early summer of 1916, caution was not going to be thrown to the winds. Inferior forces from both sides were to be “lured” into “traps.” The big gun might be fired, if it survived the torpedoes, but only when the odds were overwhelming.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“an inconclusive result suited everyone. Both sides could, and did, claim victory. There was a measure of disappointment, but very little loss of prestige. A few thousand lives were lost, a few ships lost, new confidence in the big gun was established with its mass firing, the status quo was re-established, and the Germans returned to the Jade and the British to Scapa Flow to sit out the rest of the war.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“If Jellicoe had suffered overwhelming defeat, nothing could have saved the Allies. As Churchill confirmed, he was “the one man who could have lost the war in an afternoon.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Behind every calculation, every decision, every signal, every turn of the helm, was the deeply held conviction that the disaster of defeat must always be greater than the rewards of victory. The belief that governed all the tactical moves at this one confused melee was that the individual Dreadnought, the squadron, the fleet must be preserved, even at the cost of victory over the foe.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Taking advantage of the distance of enemy Dreadnought bases, hit-and-run shelling raids against British east-coast towns had been authorized. They caused dismay and outrage, and strong countermeasures were demanded. These would have been more difficult to accomplish if the Germans had not been so free with their use of wireless, and the Russian Navy had not discovered the German code in a sunk German cruiser, and passed it over to the British Admiralty. It proved useful for years, and in part accounted for the greatly superior British intelligence.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Britain’s second batch of three battle cruisers (still called armoured cruisers) was laid down from February, 1909, to June, 1910. They were as disappointing and conservative as the Colossus and Orion classes of battleship, and can be regarded as the worst ships built for the Royal Navy during the Fisher era.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“as the money and shipbuilding facilities were limited in Britain as well as in Germany, each battle cruiser represented the loss of a battleship. Indeed, they were soon costing more and absorbing more labour and materials than their contemporary Dreadnoughts.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Armoured cruiser operations with a fleet of Dreadnoughts (though Jellicoe misguidedly thought otherwise and lost three at Jutland) were now ruled out owing to their near equality in speed. The battle cruisers could have filled these fleet duties if they had not possessed an armament that was bound to tempt a commander in chief to place them in line for the sake of their big guns, risking a hit on their vulnerable vital areas.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“if a cruiser was to be given the armament of a battleship, the qualities of aggression which he so warmly extolled in a naval leader must result in their engaging in a line of battle with their own kind. In fact, the 12-inch gun which, with their high speed, was their raison d’être proved also their undoing. The battle cruiser was like a heavyweight boxer with an eggshell skull; alone in the ring the master of any challenger until the arrival of another heavyweight with equal agility and punch. While her speed was greater than that of any equally powerful foe, it was not an adequate substitute for protection.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Under the pressure of opinion of this weight, applied without let-up during the crucial years of the Fisher-Tirpitz battleship race, it is understandable that arithmetic won the day in Britain, and sight was sometimes lost of the less exciting factors that contributed vitally to a battle fleet’s efficiency and fighting power.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“At the end of 1912, then, the United States Navy had in commission six First Generation Dreadnoughts. In all of them, the wing turret was eschewed in favour of centre-line disposition; the turbine had arrived; armour plate and internal subdivision were equal to all but the German Dreadnoughts; the average speed was rather below those of its rivals, the gunpower rather above; in size, the latest pair exceeded that of any other capital ship in the world except the latest British battle cruiser.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Sims revolutionized American gunnery in the early years of the century, was Mahan’s leading contestant in the Dreadnought controversy, and commanded the United States Naval Forces in European waters in the First World War. Sims’s reasoned, sagacious, and totally crushing attack on the Mahan school decided American battleship construction policy in the vital years leading to 1912. Sims made America a major maritime power.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Britannia was prepared to derate the whole of her battle fleet and start afresh with new superbattleships but also that she had the wealth and means to do so while her rivals were still recovering from the shock of Dreadnought’s appearance.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“the Dreadnought’s predecessors of the King Edward VII class with a standard displacement of 16,350 tons could steam at 18.5 knots with 18,000 h.p. from their reciprocating engines; Dreadnought, of 17,900 tons, steamed 21.6 knots on her trials from 23,000 h.p.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Fisher was volatile, egocentric, overbearing, belligerent, and bellicose. He was also passionately patriotic, brilliantly intelligent, and possessed of prophetic powers that were almost uncanny in their accuracy. Even his contemporary enemies, of whom there were many, had to acknowledge that he had been responsible for almost every important innovation incorporated in the battle fleet in 1914;”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Lieutenant Commander William Sowden Sims brought about a complete revolution in United States naval gunnery, and from the outset was a powerful advocate of the all-big-gun battleship, with its advantage of uniform shell splash for long-range salvo spotting.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“The vagaries of chance, the pressures of conservative and radical opinion, the ebb and flow of the tides of militancy, the actuality of war, and above all the influence of one provocative and domineering personality, all played their part in the design and building of the first all-big-gun battleship, and in the revolution in naval philosophy and the massive arms race this brought about. These factors also combined to decide that the first of these vessels to be commissioned should be British, a nation that, it could be argued (and was, hotly), had most to lose and least to gain by the building of a superbattleship.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“Ever since the Renaissance, the Italian engineering mind has always had a special capacity for viewing a project with a fresh and practical artistry. The Italian talent for stripping down to bare essentials the elements of compromise, which is the heart of all creative design, has never been surpassed; and it was desperately needed to break clear from the archaic form of warship architecture that had lingered on for a quarter of a century.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“We are not concerned with the morality of the Dreadnought. Her purpose was always ugly and wicked, and she was, like any weapon of violence, a symptom of man’s baser characteristics.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“at the commencement of the battle-cruiser action the German Von der Tann had fought an unimpeded ship-to-ship duel with the British Indefatigable. In fourteen minutes’ firing with her eleven-inch guns the Von der Tann had sunk the Indefatigable without receiving a single hit from the Indefatigable’s twelve-inch.”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“a considerable portion of the appalling loss of British life was due to the destruction of the old armoured cruisers which had no business at Jutland”
― Richard Hough, Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship