Battleships

The American battleship was a diplomatic instrument before it was a weapon, and the photography reflects that. These ships were built partly to be seen.

The turning point was 1907, when Theodore Roosevelt sent sixteen battleships around the world. The Great White Fleet steamed forty-three thousand miles over fourteen months, visited twenty ports, and was photographed at every one of them. The hulls were painted white with buff superstructure specifically so they would look impressive in harbor. The point of the voyage was to demonstrate that the United States could put a fleet anywhere, and the photographs were how the demonstration reached the rest of the world.

The ships themselves changed radically within a decade. The pre-dreadnoughts of the 1890s carried a mix of gun sizes and looked, to a modern eye, cluttered. HMS Dreadnought in 1906 made every one of them obsolete overnight with a single-caliber main battery and turbine engines, and the American ships that followed are recognizably modern warships.

The cage masts are the peculiarly American detail. Latticework towers of thin steel tubes, adopted around 1908 on the theory that shell fire would pass through rather than topple them. They look like nothing else in any navy, they swayed alarmingly in a seaway, and one collapsed in heavy weather, which ended the experiment.

The naming convention is worth knowing when reading captions. American battleships were named for states, cruisers for cities, and destroyers for individuals. So the Oregon, the Maine and the Missouri are battleships by definition, and a ship named for a person in these photographs is a smaller vessel whatever it looks like.

The crew photographs are the more interesting half of the collection. Several hundred men lived in a steel hull with no air conditioning, and the pictures show them coaling ship — the filthiest job in the navy, done by hand, by everyone aboard including officers — doing laundry, boxing on deck, at mess, at divine service, and posed by division against the turrets.

Turret guns are the detail worth understanding in these pictures. A main battery gun of fourteen inches threw a shell weighing three quarters of a ton, and the turret that held two of them was a building-sized machine with a magazine, hoists and a crew of dozens working below the waterline. The photographs almost never show that, because it was below decks and dark.

Coaling deserves the attention it gets. A battleship burned enormous quantities of coal, and taking it aboard meant days of shoveling from a collier alongside, with coal dust in everything. The changeover to oil in the 1910s was the single biggest improvement in the life of a sailor in the history of the navy.

Fleet reviews were public events and drew enormous civilian crowds. A line of battleships anchored in the Hudson or in Hampton Roads with excursion boats moving between them was a spectacle people traveled to see, and the photographs were sold afterward as souvenirs.

For dating, the paint tells you. White hulls with buff upperworks are pre-1909. Grey comes in after, and stays. And a ship with cage masts is American and between roughly 1908 and the 1930s.

The Tent That Held Twelve Thousand People