The Rise of the Dreadnought

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HMS Dreadnought and Victory, by Henry MorganThe most famous warships in history tend to be known either for their wartime exploits or for their longevity and place of pride in their fleets. A few names that might come to mind would include the German Bismarck, which was pursued and sunk in a dramatic chase on the high seas by the Royal Navy; the HMS Victory, which served as Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar; the USS Constitution, in service today with the US Navy as the oldest commissioned warship still afloat; or perhaps the carriers that fought at Midway, like the Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown, or Japan’s Kaga and Akagi. It is ironic, then, that perhaps the most famous warship of all time, the HMS Dreadnought, had a service career that was both short and entirely light on kinetic action. Launched in 1906, the Dreadnought had an active lifespan of just thirteen years - barely that of a small dog - and by 1921, after two years in reserve, she was ingloriously sold for scrap. Today, virtually no artifacts of the ship survive, apart from a few small items like a decorated gun tampion (essentially a plug for the barrel of a gun) at Britain’s National Maritime Museum. In the brief years that she was on active duty, the Dreadnought fought no real battles and never fired at an enemy ship: her lone kill was the German submarine U-29, which was sunk off the coast of the Orkney Islands in 1915 when the Dreadnought ran her over. The Dreadnought had, by any measure, a short and quiet service career. But this has little bearing on the enormity of her significance in the history of nava…