18 January 2007

Special Weapons



Men have always had their weapons. It is in the DNA of the species. But periodically ones arrive that are remarkable for their force or effect. The sling, for example, which propels a rock at greater speed than the arm alone.

David had one, and Goliath could not adapt quick enough. Other peoples had their unique innovations. The Romans introduced the Phalanx, and drove all before them. The Great Khans exploited the mobility and speed of their war ponies. Some of these special capabilities endured as significant advantages for generations. Understanding the maxims of Sun Tsu remains a powerful force multiplier today, just as it was two millennia ago.

The age of the machine has accelerated the pace of innovation, and the scope of the destruction that the boys and their toys can inflict. The American Civil War might have been the watershed in the process, with the full industrial might of the North brought to bear on their countrymen in terms of innovation. Repeating rifles, metallic cartridges, hotter-than-air balloons and ungainly ships of iron appeared. Even the submarine put in a first operational performance.

With the startling exception of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, the Pax Britannica cooled the fires of the world, though technology marched apace. While the French generals argued for a return of élan and cannons of bronze against the Krupp Steel of their Prussian conquerors.

It is natural that the British should produce the Special Weapons that defined an age. It was the vision of Admiral Jackie Fisher, First Sea Lord, who was the driving-force behind the development of the Dreadnought, the metal Goliath that made all the world's navies obsolete.

I like the picture of the Admiral when he was just a Captain, commanding the Mediterranean Squadron. His face still has the mischievous joy of youth in it, not the vaguely simian aspect the press lampooned in his age. Jackie caused the most heavily-armed ship in history to constructed in the Portsmouth Dockyard in eleven months, concluding before the holidays in 1906.

HMS Dreadnought had ten 12-inch guns, three times the number previously mounted. The turrets were situated higher than user and enabled accurate long-distance fire. In addition to her 12-inch guns, she boasted twenty-four 3-inch guns and five underwater torpedo tubes. Along the waterline section, this most special weapon was clad in armor plate four inches thick.

Not only was she deadly, but Jackie's creation was swift. Over five hundred feet long and crewed by 800 officers and men, Dreadnaught was the first capital ship driven solely by steam turbines, and the four sets built by Parson in her belly could drive the warship to 21 knots, faster than any other on the world ocean.

At a stroke, everything the floated became obsolete, and everything that emulated her strength thereafter adopted her name as a type. The launch of Dreadnaught ignited an arms race between Britain and Germany. By 1914, The Royal Navy had nineteen of the monsters, with another baker's dozen on the building ways. Germany had thirteen, with seven more under construction.

It was a matter of prestige to have these special weapons in the arsenal. The US had eight, tied with the French, and little Japan had four.

With the war underway on the Continent and the prospect of combat between the fleets, the Royal Navy introduced the first super-Dreadnaught, the Queen Elizabeth. Her guns were the biggest, fifteen-inch tubes that could hurl a two-ton projectile twenty-one miles. She was shortly joined by four other ships of her class, all of which survived the war, and served on until the next, the epitome of power.

There was a reason for their longevity as Special Weapons. When the exhausted belligerents concluded the slaughter of the Great War, President Wilson strode onto the stage of the Versailles to advocate limits on the stupendous weapons. Although his dream of a world government died with his stroke, the movement to cease the race of destruction was well established.

His Republican successor, Warren Harding, called for a conference to be held in Washington in 1921. It was outside the framework of the League of Nations, which the Senate had not permitted the US to join. It was attended by nine nations with interests in the Pacific and East Asia, excluding the only the Bolsheviks of Russia. It was the first international conference dedicated to the concept of disarmament, and resulted in four major agreements to limit naval construction.

That is not precisely what Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes had in mind. The US Navy had an aggressive building plan in progress, having already laid down keels for five battleships and four battlecruisers. There was little public support for such ambition, though, and it was unlikely to be sustained.

Hughes wanted to prop open the door to China, and as an alternative to a ruinous race in the weapons of mass power, he intended to limit ship tonnage and restrict the fortification of the new Japanese island territories. But above all, he wanted to reduce tensions with Britain, which in response to the rising presence of America in the Western Pacific had established a special relationship with the Japanese.

In order to secure his goal, he enlisted the assistance of Herbert Yardley, the chief of the American Black Chamber, the cryptologic group sponsored by State and the Army to intercept and translate diplomatic communications. Japanese communications were thoroughly penetrated, and American negotiators were able to secure the minimum possible terms that the Japanese were privately prepared to accept.

The Naval Treaty of 1922 thus established limits that were exceedingly unpopular with the Japanese Navy. But as with most of the subsequent agreements, it established goals for the future, not the present, and the formulas it established significantly contributed to the rise of Japan as a maritime power. Taken with the territorial mandates for German territories in the Pacific, it provided a context for an expanded Asian empire.

The Japanese had patterned their naval establishment on the Royal Navy, imitating and appropriating the best-in-class model of the day. Just down the shore from Yokosuka Base is a concrete lagoon in which floats the Mikasa, Admiral Togo's Flagship at the victorious battle over the Czar's Fleet in the Tsushima Straits.

Today, it is a symbol of innovation and equality. Disarmed, it has also been a dancehall. Mikasa was constructed for the Imperial Japanese Navy by the Vickers Company of Great Britain in 1902. It was successful, it was the British model that the IJN continued to follow.

To preserve their primacy in the western Pacific, the Japanese decided their next class of ships would be both fast and heavily armed, surpassing the Queen Elizabeth.

Nagato was the lead hull of a two-ship class, the last pre-treaty battleships completed before the dust settled at Versailles. She was named after Nagato city, in the prefecture of Yamaguchi, west of Hiroshima.

Even before the Washington Naval Treaty limited new warship construction, the Imperial Japanese Navy realized that it would never be able to match the USN in numbers. The Japanese solution was to achieve ship-to-ship superiority. With the prospect of treaty limitations looming, the Japanese forged ahead on a program of innovation.

The result was Nagato, and her sister Mutsu, the Special Weapons of their day.  Commissioned on the eve of the treaty in 1920, Nagato was the first battleship in the world to carry 16" guns, of which she had eight in four twin turrets. None except the 18.1” rifles of the super-battleship Yamato would ever exceed them. At 42,000 tons, Nagato was one of the largest battleships in the world, and her 26-knot top speed was the fastest in the world.

Nagato was the diamond center of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the years between the wars, and she was the flagship of Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku during the attack on Pearl Harbor. From her elaborate pagoda superstructure, the Admiral heard the radio crackle with the words: “Tora! Tora! Tora!”

Other special weapons had risen in the time since Nagato went to sea. The discarded battleship hulls banned by the Washington Naval Treaty had been recycled for another purpose, which was to create floating airfields that bristled with swift aircraft rather than guns.

Admiral Yammamoto watched the aircraft launch from his own floating airfields alongside, secure on his perch high above the decks of Nagato, He was a deft thinker and innovative planner. He had been a Naval Attaché in Washington, and had an idea about the consequences of this attack on the American Fleet.

He was also a man of duty, and when ordered, he flawlessly executed his orders. But he knew something about the nature of the storm that would follow, though only a few men could dream of just what that might be.

You would have to ask the physicists about that.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com


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