Maximum battleship
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The "Maximum battleships," also known as the "Tillman battleships," were a series of World War I-era design studies for extremely large battleships, prepared in late 1916 and early 1917 upon the order of Senator "Pitchfork" Benjamin Tillman<ref name="congress1916">Template:Cite book</ref> by the Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R) of the United States Navy.<ref name="Zimm1975">Template:Cite journal</ref> They helped influence design work on the Template:Sclass and first South Dakota classes of battleships. The plans prepared for the senator were preserved by C&R in the first of its "Spring Styles" books, where it kept various warship designs conceptualized between 1911 and 1925. “Maximum battleships” referred to the largest-possible battleships the U.S. Navy could afford to construct and field while still being able to utilize the Panama Canal.
ContextEdit
During the years leading up to World War I, some members of the U.S. Congress were growing frustrated with what they perceived to be chronic overspending by the U.S. Navy on battleships.<ref name="congress1914">Template:Cite book</ref>
The only limits on the potential size of an American battleship were the dimensions of the locks of the Panama Canal. The locks measure roughly Template:Convert, and so the "maximum battleships" were Template:Convert. The Panamax draft limit during the designing of these battleships was Template:Convert, however the Department of the Navy required that all designs be limited to only Template:Convert in draft.<ref name="Zimm1975" />
DesignsEdit
Tillman's first request for designs of so-called "maximum battleship" in 1912–1913 led to several estimates for battleships unconstrained by cost. Created by the US Navy Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R), these ships would displace up to Template:Convert and carry 14 inch guns. Although C&R was "appalled," in the words of naval historian Norman Friedman, by the extravagance of these designs, they admitted that far larger warships could transit the Panama Canal's locks, which, due to the US's geography, were often held to be the final limiting factor on the size of a US warship. Such larger designs would be often and seriously proposed within only a few years.<ref>Friedman, US Battleships, 148–149.</ref>
In 1916, Tillman repeated his request, and C&R produced another series of design studies. C&R drew up four blueprints, all ships having varying characteristics despite being built on the same hull: Template:Bulleted list
Edit
The Tillman designs all included five casemate guns mounted aft, two on each side and one at the tip of the stern. Similar "stern chasers" had been previously mounted in Nevada, but were omitted from the Template:Sclass. These casemates were a return to an older design idea; American battleship designers had abandoned hull-mounted casemates after the Template:Sclass. They had transpired to be too "wet" – heavy seas rendered them unusableTemplate:Sndand they had been removed from all earlier classes.
Fate of the designed battleshipsEdit
The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 limited naval armaments, causing the cancellation of the South Dakotas and halting all consideration of the "maximum battleships."
See alsoEdit
- Template:HMS
- USN 1934 "Maximum Battleship" study.
ReferencesEdit
BibliographyEdit
- Friedman, Norman. Battleship Design and Development, 1905–1945. New York: Mayflower Books, 1978. Template:ISBN. Template:OCLC.
External linksEdit
- An extensive article about the Tillman battleships, including a look at possible designs for "Tillman battlecruisers.". Retrieved 5 May 2012
- Tillman battleships entry at Global Security
- Design for 80,000-ton battleship prepared by C&R for Senator Tillman, dated 29 December 1916, from U.S. Naval Historical Center. Retrieved 5 May 2012.
- "Construction of battleships", includes the 1912 resolution
- The Shipscribe article on the Bureau of Ships' "Spring Styles" Book # 1 (1911–1925). This specific webpage publicly preserves, among other things, the "maximum battleship" designs as digital photographs from the first "Spring Styles" US Navy catalog, and describes how they were presented therein. Quoting Shipscribe's About page: "The "Spring Styles" drawings were added on 26 April 2015... following the deletion of the Online Library of Selected Images from the web site of the Naval History and Heritage Command."