Lead Ship by Lead Ship: Warship Classes from the Kongo to the Queen Elizabeth

The path opens in 1913 with the Kongo class, four Imperial Japanese Navy battlecruisers armed with eight 14-inch guns, the lead ship built by Vickers in Britain and the last Japanese capital ship ever built abroad. All four were rebuilt between the wars into fast battleships and all four were lost in the Second World War.

The Deutschland class, commissioned from 1933, was nicknamed the pocket battleship because six 28cm guns sat on a hull far lighter than a true battleship, using welding and diesel propulsion to keep within postwar tonnage limits. Admiral Graf Spee was scuttled off Montevideo after the Battle of the River Plate in December 1939.

Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, commissioned in 1938 and 1939, were the first new German capital ships since the First World War, carrying nine 28cm guns and reaching about 31 knots. Together they sank the carrier HMS Glorious in June 1940, and Scharnhorst was sunk at the Battle of North Cape in December 1943.

Larger still was the Bismarck class, whose lead ship was commissioned in August 1940. At over 41,000 tons standard with eight 38 centimeter guns, these were the largest battleships Germany ever built. Bismarck herself sank HMS Hood during the May 1941 Atlantic sortie and was sunk on 27 May 1941, after a career of barely eight months.

The British answer was the King George V class, five ships with ten 14-inch guns in an unusual mix of quadruple and twin turrets. Ships of the class took part in the action against Bismarck, and HMS Duke of York sank Scharnhorst at North Cape, while HMS Prince of Wales was lost to Japanese aircraft off Malaya in December 1941.

Not every important class was large. The American Fletcher class put 175 destroyers into service, the most numerous destroyer class the United States Navy ever built, each with five 5-inch guns and ten torpedo tubes, and the class is credited with sinking 29 Japanese submarines.

The Forrestal class, led by USS Forrestal commissioned on 1 October 1955, was the first class of true supercarrier, displacing 81,000 long tons at full load and introducing the angled flight deck that became standard on later American carriers. The last of the four was decommissioned in 1998.

The Soviet Kirov class, commissioned from 1980, is nuclear powered and so large that it is described in the West as a battlecruiser, second in size among modern warships only to large aircraft carriers. High running costs left only Pyotr Velikiy in regular Russian service for most of the early twenty-first century.

The Ticonderoga class, with USS Ticonderoga commissioned in 1983, was built around the Aegis Combat System to defend carrier strike groups against air and missile attack. Later ships added the Mark 41 vertical launching system, and twenty-seven were built.

Beneath the surface, the Soviet Akula class, whose lead boat was commissioned in 1984, used a double hull and sound-dampening mounts to cut noise sharply. Western analysts often cite it as the point where Soviet submarine quieting first became competitive with American designs.

The Russian Borei class replaced Soviet-era ballistic missile submarines, with the lead boat Yury Dolgorukiy commissioned in December 2012. Each boat carries sixteen RSM-56 Bulava missiles, and the planned total is fourteen boats.

The Zumwalt class, with USS Zumwalt commissioned in 2016, used a wave-piercing tumblehome hull and integrated electric propulsion. Its 155mm Advanced Gun System lacked an affordable guided shell, and the class was cut to just three ships.

The trail ends with the Queen Elizabeth class, HMS Queen Elizabeth commissioned in December 2017 and HMS Prince of Wales in December 2019, the largest warships the Royal Navy has operated. Two small islands and a ski-jump ramp for F-35B jets set it apart from carriers built around one large island and catapults.