5 of the Most Idiotic Warships Ever Made

When done right, a warship, be it a dinky destroyer or a beastly battleship, is a truly terrifying thing, as it brims with the latest, greatest, and most deadly technology, and is crewed by hundreds, if not thousands of masterfully trained men and women, each of whom are masters of their individual maritime crafts, and who come together to make a fearsome sum far greater than their individual parts.

And yet, despite all of that, ‘great’ warships have a problem… you all find them boring! We’ve seen the analytics; we know what you are all about – you cheeky scamps!

Well, we here on Sideprojects aim to please, so for the next 20 or so minutes, let’s boot the notion of quality far off over the horizon and pay it no heed, and instead focus our minds firmly on the terrible, the incompetent, and the bewildering; the truly God-awful stuff that never should have graced, or should we say disgraced, the waves.

This is five idiotic warships… let’s begin.

1. Vasa

Although known for its peace-loving ways nowadays, back in the 17th century Sweden was a VERY different beast; a muscular unit of a nation that liked nothing more than flexing its guns, both literally and figuratively, and waging expansionist wars of conquest against its neighbours… as was the European way at the time.

Enter Gustavus Adolphus, the then wearer of Sweden’s shiny hat. The year was 1628, and he was then engaged in one such war of expansion, specifically the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648. The war was going quite well for him all things considered, and to keep that momentum going he was on a ship building bonanza; eager to make sure that Sweden emerges from the war not only victorious, but as the undisputed master of the Baltic Sea for many years to come.

The pièce de résistance of this effort was the Vasa, an enormous 64-gun warship that was to be the flagship not just of Adolphus’ navy, but of Sweden itself; a no expense spared testimony to the might of Swedish civilisation as beautiful as she was deadly.

Truly she was a thing to behold, and no doubt Adolphus couldn’t help but feel a sense of smug satisfaction as her mighty hull crashed into the waves for the first time. You can’t blame him really, because he had invested 5% of his entire nation’s GDP into her construction.

Said smugness would have been fleeting however, because not even twenty minutes later, the top of Vasa’s masts slipped beneath the waves as the drink claimed her for its own.

So, what the hell happened?

In a nutshell, it was all about the ballast, or rather a lack thereof. Ballast stabilizes a ship, ensuring that it has a low centre of gravity and can remain upright and steady at sea, and Vasa’s ballast was insufficient for her size and the weight of her armaments. This critical miscalculation made her dangerously top-heavy, with way too much weight placed high above the waterline. This made her terrifying array of 64 guns little but multi-ton pendulums as she swayed from side to side in the Baltic waves.

This was bad enough within the sheltered confines of Stockholm Harbour, with surviving testimony describing her as wallowing from side to side so severely that her crew would almost certainly be breaking out the precautionary brown underpants.

But for whatever reason, the captain ordered full sails ahead, and when they broke out of the harbour, the full might of the Baltic’s winds hit her, and it was game over; her pendulous guns sent her into an extreme list from which she could not right, and she fell over onto her side. From there she began filling with water, and soon enough sank beneath the waves – barely more than a kilometre away from her home port.

But while her lack of ballast was the straw that broke the camel’s back, there is a larger story. For example, there was a lack of oversight and clear guidelines from the king during her construction, who was more concerned with her firepower and imposing appearance than her seaworthiness. The shipbuilders, under immense pressure to meet the king’s demands, kept quiet, fully aware of the disaster they were nailing together.

Additionally, there were significant changes to her specifications during construction, including a last-minute decision to add a second gundeck, which only exacerbated the existing stability problems, and further compromised her design.

The aftermath of the sinking led to an inquest by the Swedish Council of the State. Much finger pointing ensued, as everyone involved with the Vasa debacle tried to make sure the blame landed at someone else’s feet, and ultimately, no canings, either literal nor proverbial, were handed out – Adolphus was well aware it was his fault, and well aware that everyone thought that, and so saw little to be gained from trying to pin the blame on a scapegoat.

Incredibly, that isn’t where the Vasa’s story ends however, because she was hauled up from the seabed in 1961 after it was found that thanks to the peculiar specifics of where she sank, she was still in near as damn it perfect condition. She was then housed in a purpose built ‘Vasa Museum’ in Stockholm, where she remains to this day. We FIRMLY recommend a visit if you happen to be in the area – few ships from this period survive PERIOD, so the fact that one survives in near perfect condition is genuinely crazy.

2. Novgorod

When a boffin has a brainwave, it means one of two things. Either A), sliced bread has just been invented, and the world’s other boffins are about to slap their head in unison before shouting “Damn, why didn’t we think of that!” Or B), there was a VERY good reason no one else was doing it, and our hypothetical boffin is about to have fate smear egg thickly over his face, and generally leave him looking a bit of a nob.

For Rear-Admiral Andrei Alexandrovich Popov of the Imperial Russian Navy, it was B), because back in the black and white days of the late 19th century, he took a look at the THOUSANDS of years of ship-design orthodoxy that preceded him which dictated that ships should be vaguely rectangular shaped from the top down, and proceeded to say: “Sod that for a game of soldiers, what if they were circular.”

Yes, you heard us right, CIRCULAR ships.

From those musings spawned the Novgorod in 1874. She was an ironclad river monitor, a river monitor being a classification of ship which boasts neither speed nor armour, but REALLY big guns relative to its size, and river, well, would it shock you to discover that that refers to where she was meant to operate? In this case specifically ‘river’ refers to the Dnieper–Bug Estuary, a vital waterway in modern day Ukraine, where Novgorod and her sister ship the Vice Admiral Popov were planned to be stationed, so that they could duly obliterate any pesky foreigners who threatened the Tsar’s waterways.

Like every terrible idea however, there was method in the madness, and for Popov he believed that shortening a ship’s hull while broadening its beam would reduce the area of the ship which needed armouring and greatly enhance mobility thanks to the weight saved. The circular hull was just the logical end point of this idea; there is no less short nor broad a shape can be before it starts to take on the form of a rectangle once again – or so his thinking went anyway.

Initially, the Russian Navy was so impressed that it wanted an entire fleet of these circular ironclads. Once constructed however, it quickly became apparent that those lofty ambitions were to go unrealised, as fate didn’t so much throw just a bit of egg into Popov’s face, as it did pin him down and smear a whole coop’s worth right on in there.

That great manoeuvrability that Popov yearned for so desperately. Well, it was non-existent, and we mean that quite literally. The ship’s circular design and flat bottom resulted in a vessel that was not far off impossible to steer and control, especially in strong currents – she was basically a skimming stone with some whopping great cannons bolted on. So bad was this, that she could take 45 MINUTES to do a full 360° turn in the water.

But wait, there’s more! Her flat bottom also meant she was dangerously unstable and prone to rolling, which left her confined to port during all but the calmest of water, and our personal favourite fact about her: her cannons could send her spinning uncontrollably – imagine a teacup ride propelled by 82lbs of gunpowder and you have the idea.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, that planned fleet of circular ironclads soon had the plug pulled on it, and the idea was written off as a bugger up from which the Imperial Russian Navy would like to quickly move on.

Popov however, eager to scrape SOME of egg off his face, did later revisit the idea for the imperial yacht Livadia, but she was, to put it simply, a ‘normal’ ship that had her hull balloon out into an oval shape at the waterline – a FAR cry from Popov’s original vision. But it did at least, you know, work and all that, so good for you Popov!

3. Hoche

If there’s one thing France excels at, it’s architecture. A statement which becomes self-evident when one gazes upon the Arc de Triomphe, the Palace of Versailles, and Notre-Dame Cathedral; all truly magnificent structures to behold.

This isn’t ALWAYS a good thing, however. If it’s a beautiful yet cliched proposal spot you want, say no more, keep that beautiful architecture coming. But if you are trying to make a top-of-the-line warship, old school architectural cues probably shouldn’t really be high up on your list of must haves.

And that brings us to the Hoche, because she WAS designed with such features in mind, and as a result featured multi-pane glass windows and doors more befitting of the Basilica of Saint-Denis than the Port of Brest – smart shout that, big windows in something designed to be shot at… WHAT COULD GO WRONG.

It gets worse too, because while her bizarre windows are certainly the easiest thing to point and laugh at, the low hanging fruit that they are acts as a scapegoat for a much broader picture… one in which the Hoche was simply a heap of junk from top to bottom.

Another glaring issue was her stability, which was heavily compromised by an overly heavy and tall superstructure. This had been intended to give her plenty of space for additional facilities and crew accommodations, so was certainly a commendable idea, but in reality, all it served to do was make her VERY top-heavy… much like the Vasa.

Oh, and just to make the stability even worse, they then plonked two VERY thick and therefore heavy military masts on top of all of that.

But wait, there’s more, because they also gave her a fearsome complement of guns, specifically, two 340mms, two 274mms, and 18 138mms, all of the Modèle 1881 type, which weighed 52, 28, and eight tons respectively BEFORE they were put into a turret. This would have been happy days in a better designed ship, but in the already unstable Hoche, it was just too much, and as a result of all of this, she was about as stable as a baby deer having its first go at ice skating.

And it’s a shame really, because Hoche could have been a belting ship, as she actually had quite a lot of highly innovative and top of the line features. For example, she was the first French capital ship to use armoured turrets and compound armour, alloyed armour that offers much greater protection than just pure steel, and she also had that mighty armament we just discussed – and yet, it all meant naught in the face of her highly compromised core design.

At least it didn’t end in disaster, because the French Navy immediately recognised the hot steaming turd they had on their hands when Hoche first hit the water in 1886, and almost immediately took some steps to fix her, such as giving her some lighter guns, chopping away some of her upper superstructure, and swapping in some lighter masts. This didn’t suddenly make her a wonder ship mind, and she was still deeply flawed as a fighting warship, but at least she didn’t drag all of her sailors down to the bottom of the ocean… so that’s something at least.

4. HMS Captain

Our next idiotic warship, HMS Captain from 1870 is a ship that is difficult to categorise, as she was a child of the transitional period between sail and steam power. As a result of this, the form of then modern warships was still being figured out, and thus Captain escapes an easy ‘type’ we can point to her as being. She was reasonably big for her time, displacing just under 8,000 tons, which, to put it in perspective, is just over 1,000 tons lighter than HMS Warrior and double the displacement of CSS Virginia – both of which are more famous ships of the same period we can use as a reference.

And like both Warrior and Virginia, she too was both steam powered and ironclad in her design. Her firepower came from a pure muzzle-loading arrangement of four RML 12-Inchers, and two RML 7-Inchers. These would have made for quite the formidable armament even if they were just pointing out of the side ‘age of sail’ style, but she had a little trick up her sleeve – her 12-Inchers were mounted in armoured turrets buried in the middle of her hull, which gave them unparalleled versatility for the time.

This was part of a wider cutting edge design trend of the time of so called ‘turret ships,’ which were exactly what they sound like, although note, due to the WIDE variation in turret type, shape, and the sort of ship they were mounted to, this moniker doesn’t tell you much about the ship beside the fact it had at least ‘a’ turret, and thus it isn’t typically used to describe a ship ‘type,’ but rather a feature.

But we digress; if Captain had all of this good stuff going for her on paper, being a big, well-armed, and armoured girl, where did it all start to go belly up?

Well, in what is becoming something of a trend in this video, she was FAR too top heavy. Really, she was a victim of her own success in many ways – she had all of these whiz-bang new features… that were SO cutting edge that they were implemented terribly, as the designers of the day simply hadn’t had the opportunity to think them through thoroughly.

For example, while she may have been steam powered, steam propulsion was still new and scary in those days. Ship designers the world over recognised the merits make no mistake, and were well aware that being able to sail independently of the wind at speeds hitherto thought impossible was a BIG deal, but they were reluctant to depend upon it, because what if it broke? You’d be stranded at sea with no way of making it back home and no way of communicating your situation, and so, it was reasoned, some sails should still be chucked on just as an emergency backup.

And that is what led to Captain’s bizarre looking design with the turrets buried in the centre of the ship. The designers couldn’t think of a way of getting both her turrets AND her masts onto the same deck… and so they just put a deck over the turrets. This was just far too much weight up high; between the weight of her turrets, the weight of her masts, and the weight of her armour, it was a recipe for disaster.

Oh, and that’s not all, the ‘turrets in the middle’ set up also led to her having a dangerously low freeboard, the distance between the waterline and the deck, of six and a half feet… and there’s A LOT of waves taller than that out on the waves of the deep blue sea.

All of these defects came home to roost in September 1870, barely five months after her commissioning. She was hit by a storm off the coast of Spain, one that threw 50-foot-tall waves in her direction, and because of her low freeboard, A LOT of this water settled on her deck, then, when she entered a list while crossing a wave, all of that weight sloshed to the side, and made sure she didn’t recover, and she was below the waves in mere minutes. Out of a crew of over 500, only 18 survived.

5. Tomozuru

For our final idiotic warship, let’s take a look at the Japanese torpedo boat Tomozuru. She was a modest little thing, displacing a little over 800 tons fully laden, and more or less dead on 600 tons normally.

Her small size was quite intentional however, because as a torpedo boat her whole schtick was being small and nippy while packing a mighty right hook that could leave much larger ships trembling before her. To this end, she could top out at 30 knots, carried a 127mm Type 3 Naval gun as normally seen on destroyers, which was later upgraded to three 120mm Type 11s, and packed a complement of eight Type 95 torpedoes, each of which packed a 550kg warhead, and was the fastest of ANY torpedo in common use at the time.

So then, just how did Tomozuru earn her place on this list most contemptable, because she sounds like a bit of a unit doesn’t she? Well, the problem, in a nutshell, was that her teeth were TOO sharp – much like a bro-lifter who always finds an excuse to skip leg day, and as a result finds themselves sporting a fetching pair of chicken legs, Tomozuru’s strength came at the expense of her stability.

You see, she was a child of the Washington Naval Treaty, which was signed by the US, the UK, Japan, France, and Italy in 1922. The treaty aimed at preventing a naval arms race by limiting the size and armament of warships, as the construction of big muscular warships before WWI was seen as a major contributing factor to both the outbreak of hostilities and the destructiveness of the conflict when it did break out… it also proved CRIPPLINGLY expensive to boot.

We’ll spare you the specific legalese, lest this video get JUST A BIT dull, but just know that this treaty, and the various limits it and its later revisions imposed saw Japan want to get the maximum bang for its buck out of its warships, quite literally, and it began to cram ever bigger guns onto hulls which they never would never have been paired up with before the treaty. From this logic, the Tomozuru was born in 1934, with the teeth of a destroyer, but the hull of a torpedo boat.

There is a small problem with that kind of ship building formula however, one that was missed by Japanese planners as they hyper-fixated on firepower relative to tonnage… that being that there was a damned good reason why in the before times guns were fixed to the hulls they were… and ignoring that wisdom made ships ‘rather’ top heavy.

So, knowing that, guess what happened when Tomozuru was put into the water?

Yep, she capsized.

She was unstable from the offset, and before her sea trials were even complete, she was noted to wallow from side to side in a manner akin to a drunkard after their 10th can of Special Brew. The Japanese Admiralty cared not however, as it is easy to gloss over glaring problems and say ‘be reet’ when it isn’t you who is personally serving on the ship in question.

But alas, time is the great vindicator and humiliator, and so all was proved to not in fact ‘be reet’ on the 12th of March 1934, not even a month after her completion. She was on nighttime exercises with the 12th Torpedo Flotilla, and as a storm rolled in, her lights disappeared from view and all radio communications stopped… she had capsized! It took 10 hours to find her, and a further 17 hours to drag her back into port, by which point over 100 of her crew perished.

She was then refitted with the new guns we mentioned earlier to make her less top heavy, and pushed back into service, where she then managed to stay out of the drink until March 1945, when American bombs sent her to the bottom of the sea.

Key Takeaways

• The Vasa sank shortly after launch due to insufficient ballast, making it dangerously top-heavy.
• The Novgorod’s circular design made it nearly impossible to steer and prone to rolling.
• The Hoche’s stability was compromised by a heavy superstructure and large guns, making it unstable.
• The HMS Captain’s design flaws, including excessive top weight and low freeboard, led to its sinking in a storm.
• The Tomozuru capsized due to its top-heavy design, resulting in over 100 crew members perishing.

Sources

• Original Side Projects video: 5 of the Most Idiotic Warships Ever Made

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