Early 20th Century and World War I Photographs

After the turn of the century, the modern battleship took its final form. As the naval arms race escalated, imperial nations produced large fleets that symbolized a nation’s might and ability to enact its foreign policies. Needless to say, these fleets required a huge amount of a country’s wealth to maintain. A prime example of the growing arms race was the HMS Dreadnought, commissioned in 1906. This British battleship was equipped with 10 large guns as opposed to the usual 4 on preceding battleships. This emphasis on bigger, long range guns was a response to the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, where a Japanese fleet defeated a Russian fleet due in large part to its use of guns and rangefinders that could fire up to 15,000 yards. Naval warfare became dominated by battleships with success dependent upon a fleet’s ability to hit the correct coordinates too distant to see with the unaided eye. After the HMS Dreadnought, every other ship was effectively obsolete with the launch of this ship. By World War 1, the major navies boasted large fleets of “dreadnought” type ships. The First World War continued the development of the battleship; however, aircraft emerged as a serious threat to the battleship. Aircraft carriers were born out of the lessons of World War 1. The decades after World War I eventually led to this new type of ship eclipsing the battleship as the most powerful type of ship afloat. World War I left the major powers (apart from the United States) with severely crippled economies, and as a result ship construction was not what it was pre- World War I.