HMS Rodney

Rodney was the second of two Nelson-class ships, in essence a 23-knot battleship version of the G3 battlecruiser cancelled for breaching the Washington Naval Treaty. To carry 16-inch guns matching the American Colorados and Japanese Nagatos inside 35,000 tons, everything else had to give. Her nine 16-inch guns sat in three triple turrets, all forward of the superstructure, with twelve 6-inch guns in twin turrets aft. Her belt was 14 inches of Krupp cemented armour between the barbettes, inclined 18 degrees outward at its upper edge to deflect plunging fire, and her turret faces were 16 inches thick.

She was laid down as yard number 904 at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead on 28 December 1922 and launched on 17 December 1925 by Princess Mary, after three attempts at cracking the bottle. She cost £7,617,799 and was commissioned on 7 December 1927 under Captain Henry Kitson. The fleet gave the sisters a run of nicknames: Rodnol and Nelsol after the oil tankers whose amidships superstructure they resembled, the Queen's Mansions, the ugly sisters, and the Cherry Tree class, for having been cut down by the Washington Treaty.

The weight saving left a legacy. The Director of Naval Construction had told her designer that everything was to be cut to a minimum, and David K. Brown later judged that the structure was not quite strong enough. Rodney's lighter machinery gave chronic trouble, her endurance fell away through the 1930s, and she leaked from panting all through the war, needing repairs in 1940, 1941 and 1944; one storm's leaking overwhelmed a 50-ton pump. By 1943 officials had concluded she needed a full modernisation. She never got one.

She joined the 2nd Battle Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet in March 1928 and stayed with it, as Home Fleet from 1932, until 1941. In July 1929 she was sent at full speed to Milford Haven after two submarines collided, arriving too late for any survivors of H47. Her captains read as a roll of the coming war: Andrew Cunningham from December 1929, John Tovey from 1932, William Whitworth, Edward Syfret. In September 1931 her crew took part in the Invergordon Mutiny, refusing orders to sea until the Admiralty softened the pay cuts.

She twice stood in as fleet flagship when Nelson was in dockyard hands, and was Royal Guardship at Cowes Week in 1928 and 1935. Between exercises she went to Portrush, which named a street after her, and to Iceland for the thousandth year of the Althing. In October 1938 a second octuple pom-pom went on the quarterdeck and a prototype Type 79Y early-warning radar was installed at her masthead, making her the first battleship in the Royal Navy to carry one.

On 22 May 1941 she sailed with four destroyers escorting the liner MV Britannic for Halifax, bound afterwards for Boston and a long-delayed refit, carrying boiler tubes, three pom-pom mounts, 521 military passengers and Bank of England gold. When Bismarck sank Hood on 24 May she was ordered into the pursuit. After Suffolk lost radar contact at 04:01 on 25 May, Captain Frederick Dalrymple-Hamilton consulted his officers and an American naval attaché, judged the German ship was making for Brest, and steered east. He disregarded an order from Tovey to head north west, knowing his ship too slow to matter if that guess were right.

Bismarck passed him just under the horizon, about 25 nautical miles off. A Catalina found her at 10:35 on 26 May, and Ark Royal's Swordfish jammed her steering that evening. Rodney fell in behind King George V and at dawn on 27 May sighted her at 08:44, opening fire three minutes later at 23,400 yards, the first British ship to shoot. Her third salvo straddled; her fourth, at 09:02, hit twice, knocking out the forward superfiring turret, disabling the lower turret and wrecking the bridge. At 09:31 she blew the left barrel off the lower aft turret and set the turret alight.

She closed to point-blank range, firing full broadsides on a flat trajectory, and loosed torpedoes at 3,000 yards from 09:51; one may have struck, which the historian Ludovic Kennedy, watching from Tartar, called the only instance in history of one battleship torpedoing another. She fired 378 sixteen-inch and 706 six-inch shells before ceasing fire around 10:16. Her own guns had hurt her more than Bismarck did: deck plates around the turrets depressed by muzzle blast, structural members cracked, piping and water mains broken, rivets loosened and compartments flooded. One gun in A turret failed permanently and two in B were disabled.

After repairs at the Boston Navy Yard she joined Force H at Gibraltar in September 1941, escorted the Malta convoy of Operation Halberd, and took Vice-Admiral Somerville's flag when Nelson was torpedoed. Recalled home in case Tirpitz broke out, she spent a winter between Scapa Flow and Hvalfjord before returning south. In August 1942 she was close escort for Convoy WS 21S, the Malta run known as Operation Pedestal, with Vice-Admiral Bruce Fraser aboard to learn how carriers and convoys worked together.

Italian spies at Algeciras marked the convoy through the Strait on 10 August; U-73 sank the carrier Eagle the next afternoon, and attack followed attack. Rodney combed the tracks of torpedoes on 12 August, claimed an Italian bomber at 12:17, and twenty minutes later fired her 16-inch guns at approaching torpedo bombers hoping to bring some down with shell splashes, an experiment that in one officer's words frightened us, our escort and the Italians. At 18:42 Ju 87s of the Regia Aeronautica's 102nd Dive Bomber Group attacked; one armour-piercing bomb bounced off X turret's roof, wounding four Royal Marines at the Oerlikons.

In November she covered the Torch landings and supported the Centre Naval Task Force at Oran. The four 194-millimetre guns of Fort du Santon above Mers-el-Kebir were still firing at British ships, and Rodney put sixteen shells into the position before breaking off for a reported submarine, the French declining to reply. When the fort opened up the next morning and nearly hit her, she moved out and resumed with a land-based spotter. The guns had begun shelling advancing American troops; at their request she fired on despite their nearness, and the French capitulated soon afterwards.

She bombarded coast-defence guns near Reggio di Calabria with Nelson on 31 August 1943 before the crossing of the Strait of Messina, blowing up an ammunition dump. For Normandy she was initially in reserve, but on 6 June 1944 she put two armour-piercing 16-inch shells into coast-defence guns near Le Havre and was ordered forward to Sword Beach that night, accidentally ramming and sinking LCT 427 with all thirteen of her crew in the darkness off the Isle of Wight, then taking a nine-foot hole in her plating when another landing craft rammed her bow.

Off the beaches she engaged targets north of Caen, expending 99 sixteen-inch and 132 six-inch shells in a day, and from 9 June began firing into Caen itself, bringing down the spire of the Church of Saint-Pierre. She supported Operation Epsom from 26 June, including a sporadic thirty-hour shoot dropping the occasional shell 22 miles inland to keep a Panzer division off a bridge, then Operation Windsor at Carpiquet and Operation Charnwood against Caen. Some targets lay beyond her guns' range, so oil was pumped to one side to list the ship, raise the elevation and reach them. Off Normandy she fired 519 sixteen-inch and 454 six-inch shells.

On 12 August she was sent against Batterie Blücher on German-held Alderney, whose long-range artillery was disrupting operations off the Cotentin, and fired 75 sixteen-inch shells from behind the Cap de la Hague to escape return fire. Postwar analysis showed that of 40 shells falling within 200 metres of the battery's centre, only one gun was actually damaged, and it was back in service by November. In September she escorted Convoy JW 60 to Murmansk and its return, her last operational task. Worn out and never modernised, she went to reserve in late 1945 and was allocated to Thos. W. Ward on 26 March 1948 for scrapping at Inverkeithing.