The "Maximum Battleships", also known as the "Tillman Battleships", were a series of World War I-era design studies for extremely large battleships, prepared in late 1916 and early 1917 upon the order of Senator "Pitchfork" Benjamin Tillman by the Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R) of the United States Navy. They helped influence design work on the  and first South Dakota classes of battleships. The plans prepared for the senator were preserved by C&R in the first of its "Spring Styles" books, where it kept various warship designs conceptualized between 1911 and 1925.

Context
During the years leading up to World War I, some members of the U.S. Congress were growing frustrated with what they perceived to be chronic overspending by the U.S. Navy on battleships.

The only limits on the potential size of an American battleship were the dimensions of the locks of the Panama Canal. The locks measure roughly , and so the "maximum battleships" were . The Panamax draft limit during the designing of these battleships was , however the Department of the Navy required that all designs be limited to only  in draft.

Designs

Tillman's first request for designs of so-called "maximum battleship" in 1912–1913 led to several estimates for battleships unconstrained by cost. Created by the US Navy Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R), these ships would displace up to  and carry 14 inch guns. Although C&R was "appalled," in the words of naval historian Norman Friedman, by the extravagance of these designs, they admitted that far larger warships could transit the Panama Canal's locks, which, due to the US's geography, were often held to be the final limiting factor on the size of a US warship. Such larger designs would be often and seriously proposed within only a few years.

In 1916, Tillman repeated his request, and C&R produced another series of design studies. C&R drew up four blueprints, all ships having varying characteristics despite being built on the same hull:

Comparisons to other US Navy Battleships
The Tillman designs all included five casemate guns mounted aft, two on each side and one at the tip of the stern. Similar "stern chasers" had been previously mounted in Nevada, but were omitted from the . These casemates were a return to an older design idea; American battleship designers had abandoned hull-mounted casemates after the . They had transpired to be too "wet" – heavy seas rendered them unusable—and they had been removed from all earlier classes.

Fate of the designed battleships
The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 limited naval armaments, causing the cancellation of the South Dakotas and halting all consideration of the "maximum battleships."

See also
 
 Gavrilov's battleship project - Russian project proposed by head of , ,  ( Reval 1914, 265/34,4/9,15 m, 16x406/45, 24x152/55, 30 knots)

References

Bibliography 
 Friedman, Norman. Battleship Design and Development, 1905–1945. New York: Mayflower Books, 1978. . OCLC .

External links
 An extensive article about the Tillman battleships, including a look at possible designs for "Tillman battlecruisers.". Retrieved 5 May 2012
 Tillman battleships entry at Global Security
 Design for 80,000-ton battleship prepared by C&R for Senator Tillman, dated 29 December 1916, from U.S. Naval Historical Center. Retrieved 5 May 2012.
 "Construction of battleships", includes the 1912 resolution
 The Shipscribe article on the Bureau of Ships' "Spring Styles" Book # 1 (1911-1925).  This specific webpage publicly preserves, among other things, the "maximum battleship" designs as digital photographs from the first "Spring Styles" US Navy catalog, and describes how they were presented therein.  Quoting Shipscribe's About page: "The "Spring Styles" drawings were added on 26 April 2015... following the deletion of the Online Library of Selected Images from the web site of the Naval History and Heritage Command."

World War I battleships of the United States
Battleships
Battleships of the United States Navy
Benjamin Tillman