page_title: List of battleships of Japan
section_title: Kawachi class
hierarchical_section_title: List of battleships of Japan / Dreadnought battleships / Kawachi class
caption_attribution_description: Picture of Japanese battleship Kawachi
context_page_description: Between the 1890s and 1940s, the Imperial Japanese Navy built a series of battleships as it expanded its fleet. Previously, the Empire of Japan had acquired a few ironclad warships from foreign builders, although it had adopted the Jeune Ecole naval doctrine which emphasized cheap torpedo boats and commerce raiding to offset expensive, heavily armored ships. To counter the Imperial Chinese Beiyang Fleet in the early 1890s, however, Japan ordered two Fuji-class battleships from Great Britain as Japan lacked the technology and capability to construct its own vessels. Combat experience in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 convinced the IJN that its doctrine was untenable, leading to a ten-year naval construction program that called for a total of six battleships and six armored cruisers. The two ships of the Shikishima class and the battleships Asahi and Mikasa were also purchased from Great Britain. Aware that they could not outbuild the Americans or British, the IJN decided that their ships would always be qualitatively superior to offset their quantitative inferiority.
context_section_description: The Kawachi class (Kanji: 河内型戦艦; Rōmaji: Kawachi-gata senkan), Kawachi and Settsu, were a pair of dreadnought battleships ordered in the Navy's Warship Supplement Program after the Russo-Japanese War. They were the IJN's first dreadnoughts and marked one of the first steps in achieving Japan's recently adopted Eight-Eight Fleet Program. The sisters were armed with four 50-caliber 12-inch and eight 45-caliber 12-inch main guns, arranged in the hexagonal layout used by the German dreadnoughts of the Nassau and Helgoland classes. They had originally been designed with a dozen 45-caliber guns, but after the IJN received word that the Royal Navy had adopted the more powerful and expensive 50-caliber guns, it upgraded the four centerline guns to the longer caliber as it could not afford to upgrade all of them.
  Settsu and Kawachi bombarded German fortifications at Tsingtao during the Battle of Tsingtao in 1914, but saw no other combat in World War I. Kawachi sank in 1918 after an explosion in her ammunition magazine with the loss of over 600 officers and crewmen. Settsu was disarmed in 1922 and converted into a target ship. She was heavily damaged in 1945 by American carrier aircraft and eventually beached to avoid sinking. The ship was subsequently scrapped in 1946–1947.
caption: Kawachi, about 1913
exif: {}