HMS Canopus - a pre-dreadnought battleship
The design of naval ships changed dramatically at the start of the 20th century, making ships built at the end of the 19th century obsolete long before the outbreak of World War 1 in August 1914. This resulted in a race between Great Britain and Germany to build new warships and establish naval supremacy. By 1914, the British Royal Navy was still larger than the German fleet, but not sufficiently large to station capital ships outside the home waters of the North Sea. Protection of the British colonies and dominions therefore rested with squadrons of older cruisers.
The advances in ship design fell into three categories:
The 19th century design of battleships placed an assortment of gun sizes on the ship depending on what space was available. Most battleships therefore only carried 2 or 4 large calibre guns along with an assortment of secondary weaponry. This design was radically changed with the launching of HMS Dreadnought, which gave its name to the new design which became known as the dreadnought battleship. The dreadnought design replaced the mixed assortment of guns with a single calibre gun, initially 12 inch, but later ships carried 15 inch guns. Up to 12 of these guns were carried on each ship, providing significantly greater firepower than any previous battleship. Older battleship designs were subsequently referred to as "pre-dreadnought".
Early reciprocating steam engines were both large and slow. On a warship the engines and boilers took up a substantial part of the ship's available space, requiring a large armoured area to protect them. The introduction of smaller turbine engines capable of faster speeds greatly improved the operational speed of warships. By 1914 modern ships were capable of speeds in excess of 20 knots, around 50% faster than ships built a decade earlier.
During the first decade of the 20th century, naval guns and shells improved in both range and firepower. The 10 inch guns of a pre-dreadnought battleship had a shorter range and less destructive power than the smaller 8 or 9 inch guns of a modern cruiser.
The combination of these design improvements meant that at the outbreak of World War 1, the modern ships of the German East Asiatic Squadron were a match for the numerically larger British, French and Russian squadrons in the area. The only allied ships in the region capable of effectively challenging the German squadron were those of the newly formed Australian navy, whose modern ships consisted of the Battle Cruiser "Australia" and light cruisers "Melbourne" and "Sydney". To the north also lay the Japanese fleet of modern warships, however at the outbreak of war, there was no immediate sign of Japan entering into the conflict.