The British Battleship: 1906-1946

INTRODUCTION

BATTLESHIPS and battlecruisers, the subject of this book, were hardly the full sum of British naval power, but they were certainly its most expensive element. The battle fleet of which they formed the most impressive part was conceived as a shield behind which large numbers of lesser ships could exercise such vital naval roles as protecting British commerce – the life-blood of the Empire – and interdicting the enemy’s commerce. Similarly, the shield could support operations abroad: anyone trying to stop those operations had to get past the battle fleet. Anyone contemplating an invasion of the British Isles had to deal with a battle fleet capable of wiping out his invasion shipping. However, during the First World War U-boats easily avoided any contact with the British battle fleet when attacking British and other shipping. But even then the battle fleet was crucial. The best counter to the U-boats was convoy by relatively weak (hence affordable) ships. These escorts were viable because the British battle fleet cancelled the threat of heavy German ships which could wipe out escorts and convoys. This threat was demonstrated in 1917 and 1918 when German surface ships mounted successful convoy raids.

Battleships mattered because to a considerable extent it took a battleship to sink another battleship at sea (as opposed to in port or close offshore). That was what ‘capital ship’ meant. It was true even during much of the Second World War, which we think of as dominated by aircraft. Both German capital ships sunk at sea succumbed to British battleship fire: Bismarck in 1941 and Scharnhorst in 1943. The lesson of the sinking of two British capital ships off Malaya in December 1941 (HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse) was at least partly that it took massed aircraft to sink fast manoeuvring capital ships at sea. This situation began to change only with the advent of guided weapons, which sank the Italian battleship Roma at sea in September 1943, but at the time it took a large land-based aircraft to deploy them. Moreover, it was accepted through the war that a carrier caught by surprise could quickly be sunk by gunfire, as HMS Glorious was sunk by the German Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off Norway in 1940.¹

It should be no surprise that, at the end of the war, both the Royal Navy and the US Navy planned to keep modern battleships in commission alongside carriers, as necessary supporting units. Battleships rapidly faded from both navies because they were too expensive to maintain in commission and because it was soon evident that the surviving surface threat was limited at best.

Numbers of battleships always mattered, more so once the naval arms limitation treaties cut overall numbers in each navy. Before mid-1940, the Royal Navy counted on the French Navy to make up the numbers needed to balance the Italians in the Mediterranean. Once France surrendered in June 1940, there was a real fear that the Germans would seize the French battle fleet and tip the balance of seapower in European waters. Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to destroy the French fleet to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. At Mers-el-Kebir the British opened fire, sinking the French Bretagne with heavy loss of life. At Alexandria, they reached an agreement which left the French fleet there neutralised but intact. Here at Alexandria on 4 July 1940 HMS Ramillies trains her guns on the French ships which had until then been her allies. They were reactivated – as allies – in 1943. Churchill’s decision was and remains extremely controversial. French naval chief Admiral Darlan had assured him that the French would not surrender their fleet. Churchill could be forgiven for some scepticism; France had just surrendered despite a pledge not to make a separate peace with Germany (Churchill had said that, if the British Isles were invaded, he would continue the fight from the Empire beyond the seas, and the French fleet could have been the core of a similar continued fight). Once France surrendered, the French fleet seemed to be the best bargaining chip that country could offer Germany. In fact, when the Germans tried to seize the French fleet at Toulon in November 1942, the French scuttled their ships. (Henri le Masson via US Naval Institute)

Admiral Sir John Fisher

The beginning of the era covered by this book can be traced to the appointment of Admiral Sir John (‘Jacky’) Fisher as First Sea Lord in October 1904. He was intimately involved with many of the crucial technical developments of the latter part of the nineteenth century and he may also have been the most important British naval tactician of his time. Fisher’s fascination with the tactical potential of new technology often seems to have led him to imagine that its promise could be realised much earlier than turned out to be the case.

As a young officer in the Mediterranean, Fisher witnessed an early demonstration of the new Whitehead automobile (i.e., self-propelled) torpedo. He later claimed that he was instrumental in convincing the Royal Navy to form an evaluation committee (of which he was a member). In 1884 he participated in exercises intended to evaluate the fleet’s ability to deal with torpedo attack while blockading an enemy fleet. Fisher became commander of the Royal Navy gunnery school (HMS Excellent), which was in effect the fleet gunnery R&D establishment. Then he became Director of Naval Ordnance (DNO), presiding over the adoption of quick-firing (QF) medium-calibre guns. As Third Sea Lord (Controller), the officer responsible for Royal Navy materiel, including ships, he was responsible for adoption of the destroyer by the Royal Navy – in effect, the antidote to the torpedo craft he had studied less than a decade earlier. Both torpedoes and QF guns were important in the concept of the Dreadnought battleship with which this book opens.

The Washington Treaty ended massed battle fleets by dramatically cutting battleship numbers worldwide. Even had there been no treaty, drastic changes in capital-ship technology would have cut numbers by pruning obsolete ships. As it was, many ships which would have been discarded survived to fight in the Second World War. The post-1919 British battle fleet split into a Home Fleet and a Mediterranean Fleet, the latter the bulk of the War Fleet intended to go East to Singapore in a crisis. Here four Home Fleet battleships exercise in 1938. They belong to two distinct generations. HMS Revenge, in the foreground, was among the most modern pre-First World War ships, but by 1938 she was obsolescent. Without heavy deck armour, she could not fight at long range. For example, that year DNC analysed a fight between a ship of this type and the German Scharnhorst. Since the German shells could penetrate easily at range, the vulnerability of the British ship was a matter of what proportion of her deck was occupied by magazines. DNC credited her with a one-in-twenty chance of blowing up. Three years later, after Bismarck sank Hood, the verdict was even bleaker: any Royal Sovereign which encountered Bismarck’s sister Tirpitz would be blown up. Even the total reconstruction applied to three Queen Elizabeths was not enough to solve this problem. The two Nelsons in the background were part of the new generation, designed to fight at greater ranges. For them the verdict was reversed. Since Bismarck lacked effective protection against long-range (plunging) fire, a Nelson enjoyed a considerable advantage at about 20,000 yds range.

During 1884 Fisher was the naval officer who leaked information to the journalist W T Stead for his series ‘The Truth About the Navy’. This was part of a successful effort orchestrated by the senior Royal Navy operational officer, Admiral Phipps-Hornby (at the time C-in-C Portsmouth), to force Prime Minister Gladstone’s Liberal Government to modernise the fleet. Fisher learned about the political power of the press, which he later exploited.

After service as Controller, Fisher was given command of the North America and West Indies Station. This backwater may have been a holding appointment, as may also have been his membership of the British delegation to the 1899 Hague Peace Conference. Later that year Fisher was appointed commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, by far the largest and most important in the Royal Navy. He showed an impressive grasp of strategy and tactics and was later said to have been the first real naval tactical innovator in many decades. He conducted tactical experiments which convinced him that line-ahead formation was by far the best way to use a steam battle fleet, just as it had been best under sail. Line-ahead tactics were reflected in the design of HMS Dreadnought and her successors. At the time, many naval tacticians believed in very different tactics and formations.

Like other fleet commanders, Fisher felt short of ships to match the forces he faced, particularly if the French and Russian fleets managed to join together. The Admiralty could not spare reinforcements on the scale Fisher wanted, so he sought innovative solutions. Fisher’s solution was radical. The telegraph line between France and Russia passed through Malta, his fleet base. Both the French and the Russians used it to preclude German interception of their messages. Fisher realised that any junction between the French and Russian fleets would have to be arranged by coded telegraph messages. Given the relevant messages, he could predict the movements of the two fleets. He could intercept one of them at sea before it met the other. If he could rapidly destroy that fleet, he would never face an overwhelming combination. To this end Fisher convinced the British telegraph chief in Malta to provide him with the relevant messages. He created a decoding cell.

To hit one enemy fleet before the other joined it he needed strategic mobility, meaning high sustained speed. Fisher’s fleet was powered by reciprocating steam engines, which notoriously vibrated and thus had trouble sustaining high speed. Fisher devoted considerable attention to his engineers. He said that his proudest achievement as Mediterranean Fleet commander was that he had transformed a fleet barely capable of 12 knots (with breakdowns) into one which could sustain 15 knots (without breakdowns). The Board of Admiralty devoted considerable attention to the issue of fleet speed in 1901–2, perhaps coincidentally just after Fisher had come to emphasise speed. Fisher’s introduction of turbines in HMS Dreadnought and his later advocacy of oil fuel can be traced back to his Mediterranean experience.

Fisher’s fleet also had to destroy one enemy fleet quickly before it faced the other. In 1899 dramatic improvements in gun and mounting design were raising the rates of fire of heavier guns. Fisher naturally looked forward to what amounted to heavy QF guns. That in turn led directly to the idea of an all-big-gun capital ship. The dreadnought revolution was the combination of strategic speed (turbines) and all big guns.

Fisher’s Mediterranean experience convinced him that the status of engineering officers had to be raised and that executive officers had to become more aware of technical issues. Like all naval officers, he was well aware of the social gulf between the two communities. When he left the Mediterranean to become Second Sea Lord, responsible for personnel, he proposed a radical ‘naval scheme’ which First Lord Selborne supported. He would merge the executive (deck) and engineer officer corps, at the least providing new officer cadets with the rudiments of engineering education by creating a naval college (Osborne) they would attend before joining the fleet. This change, with its deep social implications, may have been the main cause of the enmity Fisher soon attracted.

When Fisher became First Sea Lord in October 1904 Britain was governed by the Conservative (‘Tory’) or Unionist Party, which broadly favoured naval spending, but was reluctant to raise taxes. By 1904 the naval budget had reached the limit of what the Treasury could spend. Admiral Fisher was appointed to reform the navy so as to maintain its effectiveness without breaking the spending limit. HMS Dreadnought and the accompanying Invincible class battlecruisers were the most visible part of a policy designed to achieve the desired level of naval defence on a more affordable basis. Fisher’s naval critics said that he had been chosen only for his radical cost-cutting despite its dangers.

Battleships mattered because they could defeat lesser ships. They were massed to defeat enemy battle fleets, but massing created major command and control and tactical problems. The greater the number of battleships, the more complex the situation. Before the First World War navies operating massed battle fleets found themselves compiling explicit doctrines so that individual ship and squadron commanders would know what to do once the confusion of battle descended. The Royal Navy adopted follow-the-leader or line-ahead tactics both to simplify command and control and to make it possible to concentrate fire on an enemy fleet. These tactics, developed in the Mediterranean Fleet under Admiral Fisher, in turn shaped British battleships. Here the Grand Fleet, the largest of all concentrated big-gun battle fleets, cruises in the North Sea during the war. Cruising formation was in columns, for manoeuvrability and to minimise the target presented by the fleet. The optimum way to deploy into the desired line-ahead battle formation was a major concern of the pre-war Royal Navy and Admiral Jellicoe’s deployment at Jutland – across the Germans’ ‘T’ – was considered particularly masterful. It in turn was shaped by a new development, tactical plotting, which provided Jellicoe with a crucial degree of situational awareness. The same technique later convinced him to turn away in the face of an overrated German torpedo threat. (Dr David Stevens, RAN Seapower Centre)

The rise of aircraft carriers raised the question of how they could or should be integrated into a battle fleet. Until late in the Second World War it could be argued that carrier-based aircraft were unlikely to sink modern battleships, because their torpedoes could not defeat modern underwater protection and because their bombs could not penetrate thick armoured decks. That left battleship guns as the surest way to deal with an enemy battleship – but many foreign battleships could outrun their Royal Navy counterparts. Moreover, the experience of the First World War was overwhelmingly that an enemy would try to escape, so that the first requirement was to slow him down. The motto of the Fleet Air Arm was therefore ‘Find, Fix and Strike’, which meant that its main roles were to find the enemy fleet and to slow it down sufficiently for the British battle fleet to catch up and finish the job – which is essentially what was done to the Bismarck. It followed that for the Royal Navy the most useful air weapon was the torpedo, which alone could slow down an escaping enemy. The rules in the Pacific were very different, because that was so largely a carrier vs. carrier war. Carriers offered a reach and flexibility beyond that of battleships. Also, the effects of weapons were reversed: a carrier could have torpedo protection as good as that of a battleship, but she was much more vulnerable to bombs. Here HMS Resolution leads HMS Formidable during the Second World War as part of the Eastern Fleet assembled to block a possible Japanese thrust into the Indian Ocean. She returned home in September 1943 and was reduced to reserve after a brief refit.

The key financial problem in 1904, as it had been for some years, was the relatively new one presented by armoured cruisers needed primarily to protect British trade. In 1904 the Royal Navy planned in wartime to keep cruisers in ‘focal areas’ around the world. Enemy cruisers hunting British merchant ships would be drawn into these areas, where they could be destroyed. A second cruiser role was to operate with the fleet, both as scouts and as a screen to beat off enemy scouts and thus deny an enemy commander information about the deployment of a British fleet. Scouts might also operate off a port in which the enemy fleet was blockaded. In either case they would face enemy armoured cruisers.

Armoured cruisers benefitted from radical improvements in armour during the 1890s. Large ones were conceived as fast second-class battleships. At the least, it took an armoured cruiser to deal with another armoured cruiser. Both maritime powers against which the Royal Navy measured itself in 1904, France and Russia, had armoured cruisers. Although there was considerable intelligence suggesting that these ships were not as effective as had been hoped, there was no question that the Royal Navy had to match their numbers. A French Navy Minister wrote of guerre industrielle, a systematic attack on British commerce using (and covered by) the new cruisers. Although he spoke of the impact of trade attack on British maritime insurance, the phrase he used suggests that what he really had in mind was a ruinous arms race, in which the British would bankrupt themselves by building large numbers of battleship-sized cruisers to match the French.

Armoured cruisers transformed the ‘Two-Power Standard’, which had first been announced in 1889 in the context of that year’s Naval Defence Act. Initially it meant simply that the Royal Navy should have at least as many battleships (the word ‘modern’ was sometimes inserted) as the next two naval powers, France and Russia – which also happened to be its likeliest enemies. With the rise of German naval construction, First Lord Selborne added a margin of safety, as the Germans might intervene in a war between Britain and her two other enemies.² In the autumn of 1904 he formalised the margin: 15 per cent in battleships and 2:1 in battleship-sized armoured cruisers, each of which cost about as much as a battleship. The 2:1 figure probably reflected the reality that the big cruisers had two alternative roles, commerce destruction and fleet scouting, which had to be carried out at the same time. Although the formal figure was new, the big armoured cruisers had already been breaking the Admiralty’s shipbuilding budget for some time.

Fisher’s solution was one part new technology and one part new strategy based on intelligence. The new technology offered an overwhelming combination of firepower and speed in the Invincible class, sufficient to crush any existing armoured cruiser, although without a change in how they were used, the new ships would merely have been a faster road to bankruptcy for the Royal Navy. Fisher saw that he could use an operational intelligence system to track raiding cruisers well enough for the Admiralty to vector fast British cruisers to run them down. That would take a lot fewer cruisers than the earlier focal-area concept. It required central direction, high speed and a powerful enough armament to snuff out any enemy cruiser: a battlecruiser. By 1908, Fisher was writing that the new battlecruisers had been given unusually tall masts specifically to improve long-range wireless reception, so that they could be directed by an Admiralty at the centre of an intelligence net.³

Fisher envisaged the Admiralty as the centre of a spider-web of information-gathering. It would have a far better idea of the movements of foreign fleets than any local fleet commander. The Admiralty – the First Sea Lord – should therefore have not only the existing administrative role, but an operational one. He should guide deployed fleets into position to engage enemy fleets. Given its reliance on intelligence, this concept was not publicised. It was, however, tried during manoeuvres and the new role of First Sea Lord was made clear to seagoing commanders. They were understandably unhappy with the loss of their prerogatives. That was particularly evident when Admiral Sir Charles Beresford came from the Mediterranean Fleet to command the Channel Fleet, which by 1908 was the more important of the two due to the strategic shift towards the German threat. Beresford argued that without the usual detailed war orders he could not train his fleet for war. Fisher told him that the Admiralty would provide him with guidance when it was needed. Beresford was defeated in the subsequent inquiry, but Fisher found himself retiring early (January 1910) specifically to ensure that his favoured candidate Admiral Sir A K Wilson would succeed him.

Fisher’s solution to the cruiser problem helped him solve a central personnel problem. On paper the Royal Navy had immense strength, but much of it was inactive reserve ships which would be recommissioned by reservists in an emergency. Unfortunately reservists were generally unfamiliar with the ships to which they would be assigned on a more or less random basis. The French, the most likely enemy, had a far more efficient reserve system. When Fisher returned to the Admiralty in 1904, he proposed a new Scheme (with the motto, ‘the Scheme, the whole Scheme and nothing but the Scheme’) to solve the manpower problem. The key was to scrap many of the ships on foreign stations. The personnel released in that way would become the nucleus crews always assigned to reserve ships. Reservists would be earmarked for the ships they would man on mobilisation and they would drill on board those ships. The fleet would be split into three, depending on their degree of readiness. The First Fleet would be fully manned at all times. The Second Fleet would be nearly ready, the Third Fleet less so, but all ships would be mobilised periodically for training.

Fisher generated extreme passions; officers were either supporters or enemies. Because he rammed his innovations through the navy, he rarely felt compelled to explain his logic. Some of Fisher’s decisions as First Sea Lord seem to have been designed specifically to attack particular enemies within the Royal Navy. Examples are the abolition of the Trade Division in the Admiralty and his refusal to countenance the creation of a formal Naval Staff for war planning. The fight over the idea of all-big-guns led Fisher to regard the adoption of 6in secondary guns as heresy. That is why the battlecruisers and ‘large light cruisers’ Fisher ordered during his second term as First Sea Lord (1914–15) had 4in secondaries, rather than the 6in guns of the previous battleships. The decision to adopt the 5.5in gun for HMS Furious may have been a face-saver.

It says much for Fisher’s competence and promise that he had survived that long. In October 1905 the Conservatives lost a snap election. The incoming Liberals had the opportunity to appoint a new Board of Admiralty. Fisher was nearing retirement age. He was promoted Admiral of the Fleet, for which rank there was no retirement age at all and thus was able to continue at least some of his policies beyond the end of the Conservative Government which had appointed him. This was despite the Liberals’ desire to cut naval spending further and their interest in negotiating arms limitation with the Germans.

Once out of office, Fisher tried to retain influence through protégés. For example, he tried to advise Winston Churchill, who became First Lord in October 1911. Fisher returned to the Admiralty in November 1914 but had to leave the following June. At this time he exerted unusual influence because the civilian Cabinet ministers had no military credibility. Thus he was able to force through his new capital ship projects by threatening to resign. He came to see Churchill as a menace and his final resignation (June 1915) seems to have been a failed attempt to use the same tactic.

National Strategy and Naval Policy

The Royal Navy was usually the largest single item in British pre-1914 budgets because Britain was a seaborne empire, dependent on the sea for survival. Naval policy was designed to defend the Empire against all comers. Before 1904 the most important potential enemies were France and Russia, joined in alliance. Germany was beginning a hostile naval build-up. In the autumn of 1904 the worst case envisaged by First Lord of the Admiralty Selborne was a war against France and Russia, with Germany jumping in to take advantage of British weakness. The only major naval power Selborne did not include as a possible enemy was the United States (which had been considered a potential enemy for most of the nineteenth century).

Britain had long avoided peacetime alliances, but by 1900 she was seeking allies. The new policy, which led to the alliance with Japan, is usually explained as a reaction to growing relative British weakness. The 2:1 cruiser standard tells a different story. The British needed to balance off the cruiser power of the Franco-Russian coalition. In 1898 the British Colonial Secretary offered the Germans an alliance, initially as a way of resolving colonial differences (Selborne later advocated a similar alliance as the only way to contain naval costs). Such an alliance would have placed the French in a more difficult position, probably forcing them to expand their army at the expense of their navy. The Germans rejected the offer; privately some of their statesmen said that the British would not even have made the offer had they realised the intensity of German anti-British sentiment (due in large part to incidents during the ongoing Boer War).

The alliance with Japan, signed in 1902, dramatically reduced any threat posed by Russian cruisers in the Far East. Even then Selborne felt compelled to maintain the 2:1 cruiser ratio. This ratio explains why the 1905–6 programme included three armoured cruisers (the Invincibles) but only one new battleship (Dreadnought). This cruiser figure had already been dramatically reduced due to the destruction of Russian ships during the Russo-Japanese War.

By 1904 the only likely cause of a war between Britain and her traditional enemy France was friction in the colonial world. War nearly broke out in 1898 at Fashoda in upper Egypt. The memory of Fashoda caused French governments to keep building a fleet to fight the British, but in 1904 the two governments reached an entente (agreement), initially on colonial issues. On this basis the British helped the French avoid war with Germany over Morocco in 1905. They sought to preserve the balance of power in Europe which British statesmen had always considered essential. This crisis came as the British came to accept that aggressive building programmes made Germany a more and more significant naval threat. British naval attaches reported that in order to sell his expensive fleet German naval chief Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz relied increasingly on anti-British propaganda.

In the late 1905 General Election the Liberals, led at that time by Henry Campbell-Bannerman, defeated the Tories. To them social reform trumped defence. In effect social reform would defend against potential internal threats. External threats were less significant and to some extent mutual economic ties would deter war by making it so obviously ruinous. Social reform demanded money which might otherwise have gone into the capital ship programme.

Entente with France made the Two-Power Standard obsolete. As the Germans built a modern fleet, the new Standard came to be a set superiority over the Germans not in the total number of capital total but in modern (dreadnought) battleships and battlecruisers. During 1908 the Liberal Government in power emphasised instead the total number of British battleships. In 1909, however, it was compelled to admit that the Germans were gaining rapidly in the only measure which now seemed to matter, dreadnoughts. It adopted a requirement to maintain a margin over the Germans in dreadnoughts (including battlecruisers, counted as dreadnoughts). Margins of both 50 and 60 per cent were used, the latter adopted publicly by First Lord Winston Churchill in 1912. The margins were justified by the likelihood that the Germans would choose their moment to fight, whereas the British would always have to be ready.

During the Moroccan crisis Admiral Fisher ordered exercises in the Baltic as a way of emphasising the deterrent power of the Royal Navy. At the same time he formed a war planning cell led by Captain (later Admiral) C A Ballard. The usual close blockade was no longer an option in the face of increasingly effective sea-going torpedo craft (destroyers). Without it the British could not prevent enemy warships from emerging to destroy their vital trade. Ballard saw the British Isles as a stopper in the throat of the North Sea. British cruiser forces north of Scotland and in the Channel could block German access to world trade. Surely the Germans were so dependent on foreign trade that they would feel compelled to come out to fight – and be destroyed (Tirpitz imagined that he could force the British to come to him and fight a losing battle near his base). The British battle fleet had to be based be far enough from Germany that it could not be destroyed at the outset by a surprise destroyer attack. In 1904 the Japanese had tried exactly such an attack against the Russian Pacific Fleet at its base at Port Arthur. The attack had not been particularly successful, but it might well point to the future – and Tirpitz was led a former torpedo craft commander. Hence the creation of a secret northern base: Scapa Flow.

HMS Warspite was surely the most famous of all British Second World War battleships. After reconstruction she joined the Mediterranean Fleet, but in October 1939 she was transferred to the Home Fleet. As part of that fleet, she fought successfully at Narvik. Once Italy entered the war in May 1940, she was transferred back to the Mediterranean to become fleet flagship. Off Calabria on 9 July she hit the Italian flagship Giulio Cesare at a record range of 26,400 yds, putting the Italian ship out of action for four months. On 28 March 1941 she led the British fleet at Matapan in a successful night battle, helping to sink two Italian heavy cruisers. In this action she demonstrated just how well the Royal Navy had learned to fight at night: five or perhaps six of the shells of her initial broadside were direct hits. Damaged by a bomb while covering the evacuation of Crete, she was repaired by the US Puget Sound Navy Yard. While en route there, she visited Pearl Harbor, where her crew was surprised by how little anti-aircraft armament the US battleships there had. Upon completion of the refit on 28 December 1941, she became flagship of the British Eastern Fleet, returning home via Durban and Freetown between March and May 1943. She then joined the Home Fleet (Force H) to cover the Salerno landings – where she was nearly sunk by a German guided bomb. Partially repaired, she supported the Normandy landings the following year, being mined en route back to the beaches. She returned to bombardment duty after emergency repairs. On 10 September she shelled enemy gun positions at a range of 32,000 yds using air spotting. Although ordered into Category C reserve, she was selected in October to support the seizure of Walcheren, supporting the landing there on 1 November 1944. Warspite is shown as part of the Eastern Fleet, off Madagascar, June 1942. The other two modernised Queen Elizabeths were earmarked for this fleet at the time, but they did not join until January 1944.

The British had to know when the Germans emerged and where they were going. Their final pre-war manoeuvres showed how difficult that could be, given North Sea mists. No one seems to have realised that the Germans also would have no idea of where the British were. Thus a policy of Grand Fleet ‘sweeps’ in the North Sea, designed to lure the Germans out, turns out to have been pointless (except to keep the Grand Fleet active) because the Germans had no idea at all that they were being conducted. The only reason the British were aware of German sorties (hence could meet them) was their use of signals intelligence. When the Germans finally solved the problem of poor radio security, it turned out that the alternative, a submarine patrol off German ports, was ineffective. When the British focus turned to the Far East after the First World War, they paid great attention both to submarine patrols off Japanese ports and to various forms of air reconnaissance. The British could not afford to shift their attention completely from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, since the Mediterranean was the sea route to India and the East. Since the Germans were allied to Austria-Hungary and to Italy, a war with Germany would involve the Mediterranean. Once the Austrians and the Italians began to build dreadnoughts of their own, in 1909, it was no longer clear that the British could maintain sufficient strength in both the North Sea and the Mediterranean. In 1912 the Royal Navy concluded an informal understanding with the French: in the event of war, the British would secure the French Channel coast and the French would be responsible for the Mediterranean. In August 1914 the main remaining units of the British Mediterranean Fleet were two battlecruisers, stationed there because the French had no comparable units. In effect they balanced the German Mediterranean Division of one battlecruiser (Goeben) and a light cruiser.

HMS Valiant is shown at the surrender of the Italian Fleet, September 1943. She had been assigned to the Home Fleet upon completion of her reconstruction and then transferred to Force H (a separate fleet despite its non-fleet designation) upon its formation on 28 June 1940. As such she took part in the attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir on 3 July 1940. She joined the Mediterranean Fleet in August 1940, fighting at Matapan and then at Crete. At Alexandria she (with HMS Queen Elizabeth) was severely damaged by Italian manned torpedoes. She was temporarily repaired at Alexandria (completed May 1942), then refitted at Durban (15 April 1942 to 7 July 1942). This amounted to modernisation: she received a full radar outfit (Type 273 in the lantern on the fore starfish, gunnery radars [Types 282, 284 and 285] and a new air-search set [Type 281 instead of the earlier Type 279]). She was also given ten Oerlikons as an interim close-range upgrade. During a further refit at Devonport (4 March to 28 April 1943) the quadruple 0.5in machine guns on the roofs of ‘B’ and ‘X’ turrets were replaced by pairs of twin power Oerlikons and two more twin power Oerlikons were fitted; she also received fifteen single Oerlikons, including two on the roofs of each of ‘A’ and ‘Y’ turrets, which can be seen in this photograph. Her catapult was removed. Two more octuple pom-poms may have been mounted at this time, abreast the funnel (they were certainly present later on). On completion of this refit, she was assigned to the bombardment force planned to support the Salerno landing. She returned home in October 1943 for a refit at Devonport (completed in December) prior to joining the Eastern Fleet originally having been proposed for that fleet in August 1941. After having supported several operations, she was badly damaged when the floating dock (AFD 28) she occupied in Trincomalee collapsed on 8 August 1944. She was sufficiently repaired to return home (arrived Devonport 1 February 1945). At that time plans for the post-war fleet included her. She was refitted between February 1945 and April 1946, becoming stokers’ training ship as part of HMS Imperieuse. Note that the two high-angle directors atop the bridge were at different heights, so the rangefinders, which overlapped, could clear each other.

When Fisher took office in 1904 his two main fleets were the Channel Fleet and the Mediterranean Fleet. That October fleet structure was reviewed. Despite the turn towards France, Fisher had to be able to face the possibility of hostilities with the French (or the Russians, via the Dardanelles). To gain agility, he created a third (swing) Atlantic Fleet based at Gibraltar, which could reinforce either of the two main fleets. Fisher’s new reserve fleet policy made it possible to create a ready reserve Home Fleet as a deterrent against the Germans. Its readiness would be higher than that of the other reserve formations and its cruisers would be more or less fully active.

As the German threat developed, the Home Fleet became the focus of the Royal Navy. In 1909 the Channel Fleet was merged into it, leaving the Atlantic Fleet as a link with the Mediterranean. In the First World War the Home Fleet became the Grand Fleet plus other formations (Admiral Jellicoe was styled C-in-C Home Fleets). After the war the strategic situation changed radically. Now the next two sea powers were the United States and Japan, both wartime allies. The British were well aware of wartime tension between a United States bent on exporting to both sides and a Britain bent on enforcing an increasingly harsh blockade of Germany and the other Central Powers. The huge US fleet under construction in 1917 had been authorised to promote ‘freedom of the seas’, which meant the end of British naval dominance. US naval superiority might be used to bully Britain in the event of a future war. However, virtually no one imagined war with the United States.⁴

However, during the war it had become evident that, although allied to Britain, the Japanese sought to eject all foreign powers – led by Britain – from the Far East. The British position there extended beyond the formal Empire to vital investments in China and elsewhere. The Royal Navy now saw the likeliest future war as defence against a Japanese attack on the Far Eastern Empire.⁵ The sheer distance the fleet would have to traverse to get to the Far East presented major problems. A supposed US threat was deployed in negotiations between the Admiralty and its Government because the Admiralty knew that British politicians desperate to cut spending would try to pare the Royal Navy down to the size of the Japanese navy – far below what would be needed in a distant war. The US Navy (also focussed on Japan) seems to have had much the same view of the supposed British threat.

Japan was a much more maritime enemy than pre-1914 Germany. Because she imported nearly everything she used, she was far more dependent on the sea than Germany, hence was far more vulnerable to a blockade. To make blockade possible, the British would have to destroy the Japanese battle fleet. The US Navy came to much the same conclusion in its own war plans focussed on Japan. The British chose to base their fleet at Singapore much as they had chosen Scapa Flow before 1914: it was far enough from Japan to seem immune to early attack. To make the strategy viable, Singapore had to be built up at enormous expense. No fleet could be based there in peacetime because it lacked infrastructure as well as satisfactory facilities for the fleet’s personnel and their families. The infrastructure problem precluded transfer of the three battlecruisers to the China Fleet in 1929. Much thought was devoted to the problems raised by the movement of the fleet to the East – and of how to prevent the Japanese from overrunning the Far East before it got there.

The naval situation changed in another way. During the First World War the Royal Navy enjoyed crushing numerical superiority over the Germans, the legacy of the pre-war 60 per cent standard. After 1921 the British accepted a 5:5:3 naval standard: parity with the United States and a 67 per cent advantage over Japan (in tonnage rather than numerical terms). The British could achieve a 60 per cent edge in the Far East only at the expense of any coverage in European waters. They needed other equalisers, which included a new ability to fight at night and the ability to mount co-ordinated mass destroyer torpedo attacks. Superior command and control (and situational awareness) could be exploited to co-ordinate submarines with the battle line. The British continued to be interested in battleship torpedoes well after other navies abandoned them.

In the 1920s the Royal Navy led the world, due both to the overhang of First World War efforts and to successive governments’ willingness to continue to fund research and shipbuilding. The British Government’s ‘Ten Year Rule’ (defence spending should be based on the assumption that there would be no major war for a decade) drastically cut investment in consumables such as ammunition, stores and even quartz for sonar (Asdic), but it did not much affect research or new construction (in many cases ships were fitted for rather than with new equipment).

British rearmament began when the Japanese demonstrated when occupying Shanghai in 1932 that they were determined to eject Western powers from the Far East. The committee formed to frame a British position at the next League of Nations Disarmament Conference became the Defence Requirements Committee, charged with identifying and eliminating defence deficiencies. First Sea Lord remarked that the tone of European diplomacy seemed more like that during the run-up to the First World War. Even before the rise of Hitler, German delegates to the League of Nations conference were demanding parity with the other powers – the end of the restrictions forced on Germany at Versailles and a precondition for future aggression. In 1934 Sir Robert Vansittart at the Foreign Office proposed a substitute for the Ten Year Rule: a five-year run-up to ‘The Year of Maximum Danger’, when the balance between growing hostile (German) power and reviving British power might be at its worst.

The Germans threatened the European balance of power and possibly Britain itself. The Japanese threatened an important part of the economic underpinning of the Empire, the loss of which might also destroy the United Kingdom. In 1934, for example, First Sea Lord argued that the German threat was still a matter of extrapolation, whereas the Japanese threat was immediate. The British Government of the 1930s armed while trying to stave off this dual threat by appeasing the Germans. When the British tried to accelerate capital ship construction, they found themselves badly constrained by the lack of armour-making and gun mounting capacity, which could be traced back to the Washington Treaty.

The crisis over the Italian attack on Abyssinia was sobering. British planners had assumed that any war would be preceded by a warning period of deteriorating relations, during which deficiencies could be made good. The Mediterranean crisis appeared to show that British membership of the League of Nations (under whose aegis resistance to Italy was organised) might lead to a sudden outbreak. It did not help that about the same time the Germans announced that they were no longer bound by the Versailles Treaty.

HMS Queen Elizabeth lies behind the boom defence at Alexandria, probably in 1941. That she had not yet been refitted in the United States is evident in her lack of a Type 273 surface-search radar. The guns atop ‘B’ turret are the quadruple 0.5in fitted when she was modernised, not Oerlikons. The significance of the frame atop ‘A’ turret is unknown. This anti-torpedo boom did not help when she and Valiant were attacked by Italian manned torpedoes on the night of 19 December 1941. She was temporarily repaired at Alexandria (December 1941–June 1942), leaving via Suez for a full repair in the United States (at Norfolk) on 27 June 1942. (US Naval Institute)

The capital ship programme, particularly new construction ordered as the international situation darkened, was affected by the existence of the Royal Air Force as an independent service with an institutional view that it could and should be built up to deter a rising Germany. Through the inter-war period, advocates of independent air power advertised it as a far less expensive alternative to a powerful fleet, particularly as a cheaper alternative to battleships. In 1936, when the British were about to lay down their first new battleships, this pressure went so far as to force the Government of the day to convene hearings before the Committee of Imperial Defence – which ultimately decided in favour of battleships. Of the two threats the British faced in the 1930s, that of Japan was primarily naval. That of Germany was seen much more in terms of a possible air attack, which might be deterred by British strategic airpower. Despite claims that airpower was cheap, massed heavy bombers were not. Once the Germans began building a new fleet, the British Government also had to reckon with a European naval war. The Mediterranean was no longer merely a good place to station their ‘swing’ fleet. It had to be defended as the essential trade route to the most economically vital part of the Empire, India and the East.

The newly-threatening strategic situation played out against a general belief that the First World War had demonstrated that any new war, particularly in Europe, was unthinkable. Those who shaped British inter-war policy had either experienced the hell of the previous war at first hand or were closely related to those who had, or both. The British (and American) publics and many Europeans considered the First World War a demonstration of just how horrible war had become. In this atmosphere, public opinion in the democracies not only accepted the virtues of arms control but resisted growing evidence in the 1930s that Germany and Japan were on the march and were arming as rapidly as they could. Governments found it difficult to reverse course even as the international situation shifted uncomfortably. That is evident in the way in which the 1936 London Naval Treaty evolved.

The Admiralty’s preferred solution to the strategic dilemma was to fight one war at a time. By about 1939 it envisaged holding off hostile European fleets, with the help of the French, while defeating the Japanese. The fleet could then swing back to Europe with crushing strength. Unfortunately it was the Japanese who held back while the Germans and the Italians wore down the Royal Navy up to 1941. Once Japan was ready to move, the only fleet the British could send East was the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse. Without air cover and with limited anti-aircraft capability, neither could survive. Already intensely interested in aircraft carriers, the Royal Navy found itself trying to build a carrier force quickly while immediate problems, such as the battle of the Atlantic, consumed its resources. Not surprisingly, new battleships became a minor priority.

When war broke out in 1939, the Home Fleet withdrew to Scapa Flow. It was as far from Germany as the fleet could easily go, hence safe from a knock-out attack – in this case probably from the air. Scapa was also considered safe from submarines, but that turned out not to be the case (blockships had not been positioned effectively), as demonstrated when HMS Royal Oak was torpedoed and sunk. Apparent safety from air attack had also been overstated: the training/experimental ship Iron Duke (an ex-battleship) was bombed and sunk. However, the scale of air attack on Scapa was never as serious as that further south. When Italy entered the war in 1940, the main pre-war Mediterranean base at Malta became largely untenable. The Mediterranean Fleet had already withdrawn to Alexandria (out of range, it was hoped, of Italian air attacks). An element moved west to Gibraltar as Force H, a ‘swing’ force which could reinforce either the Home Fleet or the Mediterranean Fleet. The battlecruisers had already been deployed in 1939 against German commerce raiders in the Atlantic, including the ‘pocket battleship’ Graf Spee. In 1940 Force H consisted of the battle-cruisers and the carrier Ark Royal. It contributed to the attacks on the Bismarck (supporting the Home Fleet), but it also escorted convoys to Malta (supporting the Mediterranean Fleet). The Home Fleet absorbed the new King George V class battleships, although some later fought in the Mediterranean.

The war in European waters left no surplus force to fight Japan. After HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse were sunk, the Royal Navy assembled an East Indies Fleet around Royal Sovereign class battleships as a barrier against Japanese expansion into the Indian Ocean and later (in enhanced form) to go on the offensive. As the war in European waters wound down, the Royal Navy created a new British Pacific Fleet to operate alongside the US Pacific Fleet. It fought off Okinawa and its experience helped shape the early post-war Royal Navy. It too included battleships – the remaining King George Vs – but its main strength lay in its carriers.

British big-gun capital ships saw far more action during the Second World War than during the First. The Home Fleet battleships were essential insurance against German battleships breaking out into the Atlantic or attacking convoys bound for Russia. In the Mediterranean, British battleships were essential cover against the powerful Italian battle fleet. Less capable battleships served as convoy escorts to deal with possible attacks by German surface raiders, which were quite active early in the war. These roles involved British battleships in far more ship-on-ship action than their US counterparts, but far less shore bombardment. The great surprise was that British battleships were never massed in a battle fleet of pre-war proportions.

The Admiralty

In this book I often indicate participants in discussions by their titles rather than by their names. That is deliberate; it is often said in government that ‘you stand where you sit’, meaning that you advocate for your department at least as much as for yourself. The same Winston Churchill pushed forcefully for cuts in the expensive naval programme before he advocated even more expensive programmes as First Lord of the Admiralty. Later he again pressed for severe cuts as First Lord of the Treasury.

Royal Navy policy was set by the Board of Admiralty, which consisted of a First Lord of the Admiralty (corresponding roughly to a US Secretary of the Navy), Sea Lords, a Civil Lord and a Secretary. The First Lord connected the Board to the Cabinet and to Parliament, publicly justifying Board policy, but also enforcing Cabinet decisions. He presented the annual Estimates to Parliament, for a financial year beginning 1 May (thus the 1911–12 Estimates referred to the period between 1 May 1911 and 30 April 1912). To some extent the First Lord always affected policy, but Winston Churchill (First Lord between October 1911 and June 1915) greatly exceeded all of his predecessors and successors in his involvement.

Churchill had no prior naval experience, but had been an active soldier and a war correspondent in South Africa. When offered a Cabinet position in 1910, he asked for the Admiralty, but was given the Home Office (internal security) instead. There is reason to believe that he was moved to the Admiralty more to take him out of the Home Office (due to his excessive activism against, for example, strikers) than to reform the Admiralty. Because the ruling Liberals considered war very unlikely, the Admiralty was probably considered a safer appointment. Churchill was also wanted there to convince Liberals in Parliament to keep paying for increasingly expensive warships. He was fascinated by technical details, but his writings show virtually no grasp of naval technology or tactics. His ideas for modifications to ships often seem wrong-headed. His famous account of the Queen Elizabeth design is badly muddled. His forte, which was far more important, was grand strategy, often with a view to larger political or morale issues.

Before 1904 the Sea Lords were termed Naval Lords, but Admiral Fisher revived the earlier Sea Lord term when he took office. First Sea Lord was first among equals. It may seem that between 1904 and 1909 Fisher set British naval policy, but decisions were always corporate. Fisher lost some of his battles. Second Sea Lord was First Sea Lord’s deputy and was particularly responsible for personnel. Third Sea Lord (sometimes termed Controller) was responsible for materiel, including weaponry. Typically he set out what was wanted in a new ship. Many Controllers later became First Sea Lords and as such sometimes revived initiatives they had started as Controllers. Although the title Controller (for Third Sea Lord) lapsed between 1912 and 1918, I have used it interchangeably with Third Sea Lord to emphasise Controller’s key role in warship design decisions. Later there were also, at various times, Fourth Sea Lord (logistics) and Fifth Sea Lord (fleet aircraft).

At least in theory, the Board formulated requirements and gave them informally to its technical advisor, the Director of Naval Construction (DNC), who was therefore sometimes styled Deputy Controller. Many requirements were understood informally, hence are not obvious from surviving documents. An activist DNC could convince the Board to build a new type of ship, as in the case of the first British armoured cruisers, were sold to the Board by Sir William White. The DNCs of the period covered by this book seem not to have had comparable impact.

Ships were designed by the construction department headed by the DNC. Machinery was the responsibility of Engineer-in-Chief (E-in-C) and ordnance the Director of Naval Ordnance (DNO). Their subordination to DNC seems to have been much more nominal than actual: there is no evidence that DNC or his department had much familiarity with either ordnance or with machinery.

DNC’s assistant supervised design teams, each headed by an experienced constructor. Constructors’ Notebooks give some examples. During the First World War the capital ship team leader was E L Attwood. By 1920 Attwood was DNC’s assistant. The team which designed the post-war battlecruiser was headed by S V Goodall. For the King George V class, Goodall was assistant to DNC A W Johns. The capital ship team was headed by H S Pengelly. Goodall was soon promoted to DNC. Unfortunately there are insufficient surviving pre-1914 Constructors’ Notebooks to indicate how design was organised under Philip Watts, who as DNC was responsible for the pre-war dreadnoughts.

The DNC organisation designed ships up to the point at which bids could be invited, which for the purposes of this book meant to the point of mature designs. E-in-C and DNO laid out specifications and evaluated designs (they also estimated weights and sizes so that DNC’s designers could produce preliminary designs).⁶ DNO was responsible for developing fire-control systems. During the inter-war period an Anti-Submarine directorate, concerned with Asdic (sonar) was created. Ultimately this DAS took over responsibility for torpedoes as well (as DTASW).

Queen Elizabeth at Trincomalee, 13 April 1944, as photographed from USS Saratoga. She had been heavily modified during a refit at Norfolk Navy Yard in the USA and then refitted again between August and September 1943. Note that unlike Valiant, at this time she did not have Oerlikons on her ‘A’ and ‘Y’ turrets. The latter refit further increased her light anti-aircraft battery (she added sixteen twin Oerlikons to the four already on the roofs of ‘B’ and ‘X’ turrets), her aircraft and catapult were landed and a radio direction-finder added on her quarterdeck (the small box is its office). The pom-pom directors on the after superstructure were moved to her hangar roof.

The Board was reorganised in October 1912. The office of Controller as such was eliminated (but Third Sea Lord retained his responsibility for ship and other major materiel characteristics). A new Second Civil Lord was appointed to supervise contracting and ship construction and a new Directorate of Naval Equipment (DNE), was created. DNE became responsible for ships’ bridge configurations and also for requirements for ship modernisation in the mid-1930s. During the inter-war period, as electrical machinery became more important, a separate Department of Electrical Engineering (DEE) was created. I have referred interchangeably to departments and to their chiefs. Shipyard work was the responsibility of Supervisor of Contract Work (SCW) and Director of Dockyards (D of D). Ship modifications were generally a Royal Dockyard responsibility, hence involved D of D.

Before 1912 there was no naval staff as such, but the Naval Intelligence Department (NID) performed many staff functions. A Royal Naval War College formed in 1902 conducted special studies to help set ship characteristics. Little of its record seems to have survived, but its 1902–3 studies were printed as NID documents. They helped determine the character of battleships designed at that time and as such they are relevant to the Dreadnought story. The nascent war college appears to have lost much of its impact with the death of its founder Captain May in 1904.

Winston Churchill was appointed First Lord specifically (in theory) to create a naval staff. He did so largely by rearranging NID, which already carried out many staff roles. The new War Staff does seem to have been the first to explicitly connect ship characteristics with war plans. In 1913 Churchill stated to the Cabinet that the Board had reconsidered ship types in 1911–12 (in connection with the decision to build the Queen Elizabeth class). It seems likeliest that he was referring to War Staff recommendations – few of which unfortunately have survived. It is not clear to what extent War Staff or other tactical changes were directly related to the Queen Elizabeths and to other changes in the capital ship programme.

During the war the War Staff was greatly expanded to handle the demands of worldwide operations. The Naval Staff and the Board were heavily reorganised in 1917. Lloyd George made the civilian Sir Eric Geddes Controller of Ship Construction. Geddes was already famous for his success in disentangling the railway system in France. He was brought to the Admiralty to accelerate naval and merchant shipbuilding, both badly strained. To some extent Geddes’ appointment was possible because the heavily-reorganised staff included naval officers specifically responsible for setting requirements for ships and weapons. After the war the office of Controller reverted to a naval officer (Third Sea Lord). The pre-1917 War Staff was primarily an operational organisation: the Directorate of Operations (DOD) survived the reorganisation.

Under the reorganisation, First Sea Lord was double-hatted as Chief of the Naval Staff. He was assisted by a Deputy Chief of Naval Staff (DCNS, not on the Board, later redesignated Vice Chief). DCNS supervised the Naval Staff and was directly responsible for war planning (Directorate of Plans [D of P]) and for Naval Intelligence Division (NID). In this book I often refer to the directors of staff divisions, e.g., DTSD for Director of Training and Staff Duties Division. In what follows, I indicate the directors’ designations after the names of the Divisions.⁷ The Plans directorate had little impact during the First World War, but became important after the war, for example in connection with arms control negotiations and in formulating the capital ship programme. On a more detailed level, D of P commented to a 1936 proposal to limit the endurance of the new King George V class battleships.

Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (ACNS) sat on the Board until 1931. He assisted Controller, supervising the Tactical Division and the Staff Duties Division (later the Division of Training and Staff Duties [DTSD]), which prepared and circulated draft Staff Requirements. Typically Controller asked for a draft Staff Requirement for circulation for comment among the Staff Divisions. Requirements were also sent to DNC so that a draft sketch design could be produced as a test of feasibility. In theory, writing a Staff Requirement was the first step in a design, although in practice sketch designs might be developed informally in advance of actual staff requirements.

Staff weapon divisions were intended to formulate requirements for weapons and for fire control (gunnery). The Division of Torpedoes and