Dreamboat

Next to steam (which old wind jamming navy men welcomed like a mouse in the morning oatmeal) the biggest thing that has happened to fighting-ship design is the airplane. Before the epochal crippling of the Bismarck by aerial torpedo, and the crashing success of unsupported aircraft in sinking the Prince of Wales and Repulse, designers of battlewagons and smaller craft had given only half an eye to defense against the new weapon on the seas. Those demonstrations ended all arguments, basically altered ship design.

Today the U.S. Navy, busy on the biggest shipbuilding program in the world's history is at work on ships--battleships, cruisers and carriers--whose design has been radically changed since the keels were laid. How they have been changed is a military secret, for the Jap and the German to learn at their own expense.

But the changes forced by the airplanes on all the basic attributes of fighting ships--firepower, mobility and protection--have been so marked that some of them will be apparent even to landlubbers. In the days after 1942 no design changes will be too fantastic to be dismissed without sober consideration.

For such dreams there is a wealth of background material. When naval strength was computed in terms of wooden ships and iron men, an unidentified artist in the Mexican war of 1846-47 pictured the battleship of 1952. It was a cathedral-like fortress armed and armored to the crow's nest. His pagodaed vision had a strange prescience in its slanting surfaces, its radical protection for the crew.

On the practical side, a famed forerunner of modern design was the ironclad Maine (6,682 tons), ugly and awkward but formidably armed for her day (four 10-and six 6-inchers), but no match for the mine that took her in Havana harbor. U.S.S. North Dakota was another step to today, with 20,000-ton displacement, ten 12-inchers, fourteen 5-inchers.

But the North Dakota, scrapped before the march of naval progress, was a Mississippi scow compared with the U.S.S. Washington, one of the newest battlewagons, with her heavy armor protection for crews above decks (against shell and bomb splinters), her massive armament (topped by nine 16-inchers), her imposing hull and turret armor, her sleek, low-lying speed lines.

The Washington, with anti-aircraft guns less defiladed by stacks and superstructure than any of her forebears, has a mighty slug in her guns, plenty of speed to dodge while the battle is on. Her successors will go farther still. But none will go so far as the dreamboat design put out by Industrial Stylist George W. Walker of Detroit. He went all the way, streamlined his ship like an airplane, put his main battery in mushroom turrets, massed bridge and stack into a bulletlike island alongside a launching deck for aircraft. It was another vision. But no man could reasonably say that the battleship of 1955 might not have more than a passing resemblance to the dreamboat Walker.

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