HMS Warspite

The Queen Elizabeth class was designed as a fast squadron to work against the leading ships of an enemy battle line, which demanded maximum offensive power and several knots more speed than any other battleship afloat. Warspite ran 643 feet 9 inches overall with a 90 foot 7 inch beam and a deep draught of 33 feet, displacing 32,590 long tons normally and 33,260 at deep load. Two sets of Parsons turbines drove four shafts on steam from twenty-four Yarrow boilers, rated at 75,000 shaft horsepower for 25 knots, with 5,000 miles of range at twelve. She was manned by 1,025 officers and ratings in 1915.

Her main armament was eight breech-loading 15-inch Mk I guns in four twin turrets, superfiring in pairs fore and aft and lettered A, B, X and Y. Twelve of her fourteen 6-inch Mk XII guns sat in casemates along the broadside, the last two on the forecastle deck behind shields. Krupp cemented armour thirteen inches thick covered the waterline over her vitals, with 11 to 13 inches on the turrets, 7 to 10 on the barbettes and 13 on the conning tower. Two fire-control directors carried fifteen-foot rangefinders, one hooded above the conning tower and one in the spotting top.

She was laid down at Devonport Royal Dockyard on 21 October 1912, launched on 26 November 1913 and completed in April 1915 under Captain Edward Phillpotts. Oil firing and the untried 15-inch gun were both real risks in the middle of an arms race, taken by Winston Churchill as First Lord and by Jackie Fisher, who had pushed the design. Churchill was present at her gunnery trials and came away impressed by the accuracy and power of the new guns. She was the sixth Royal Navy ship of the name, which probably descends from 'speight', an archaic word for woodpecker.

Her first year was accident-prone. Late in 1915 her escorting destroyers led her down the small-ships channel and she grounded in the River Forth, taking two months of repair at Rosyth and Jarrow. In early December, during an exercise, she collided with her sister Barham and did considerable damage to her own bow, which sent her from Scapa Flow to Devonport; she rejoined the fleet on Christmas Eve 1915, by then part of the new 5th Battle Squadron formed for the class.

On 31 May 1916 the squadron, temporarily attached to Beatty's battlecruisers, was left trailing them by a signalling error and took heavy fire from the High Seas Fleet. Warspite scored her first hit on the battlecruiser Von der Tann, then damaged Markgraf. As the squadron turned to join the Grand Fleet a shell struck the port-wing engine room and jammed her steering. Captain Phillpotts chose to hold on rather than stop, so she circled twice under concentrated fire — and in doing so drew shells off the crippled armoured cruiser Warrior, whose survivors were convinced the manoeuvre was deliberate.

She was hit fifteen times, with fourteen killed and sixteen wounded; among the wounded was warrant officer Walter Yeo, one of the first men in the world to be given facial reconstruction by plastic surgery. Her rangefinders and transmitting station were knocked out and only 'A' turret could fire, in local control, its twelve salvos all falling short; Sub Lieutenant Herbert Packer was promoted for commanding it. Sent back to Rosyth, she was missed by three torpedoes from a U-boat and tried to ram another on the surface. Repairs took two months, but the steering trouble stayed with her for the rest of her career.

The rest of the war was quieter and clumsier: another collision with Valiant after a night-shooting exercise, a collision with a destroyer in June 1917, and four months under repair in 1918 after a boiler room caught fire. On 21 November 1918, under Captain Hubert Lynes, she went out to escort the German High Seas Fleet into internment at Scapa Flow.

Between the wars she alternated Atlantic Fleet service with long spells as a Mediterranean flagship, and attended the Royal Fleet Review at Spithead before George V in 1924. A partial modernisation finished in 1926 trunked her two funnels into one, added torpedo bulges, replaced the 3-inch anti-aircraft guns with 4-inch and removed half her torpedo tubes. Trouble followed her anyway: in 1927, under Captain James Somerville, she struck an uncharted rock in the Aegean, and in March 1933 a Romanian passenger ship rammed her in fog off Portugal.

From March 1934 to March 1937 Portsmouth rebuilt her for £2,363,000, and handed the Admiralty what amounted to a new warship. Twenty-four Yarrow boilers were replaced by Admiralty three-drum boilers in six separate boiler rooms, with geared Parsons turbines in four new engine rooms and gearing rooms. The plant gave 80,000 shaft horsepower and cut consumption from 41 tons of oil an hour to 27 at almost 24 knots. The 1,500 tons saved on lighter machinery went straight back into protection and armament.

Eleven hundred long tons of armour were added, thickening cover forward of A turret and over the boiler rooms and raising deck protection to five inches over the magazines and three and a half over the machinery. Her 15-inch turrets were altered to elevate ten degrees further, adding 9,000 yards to reach 32,300 yards. Eight 4-inch high-angle guns in twin mountings and two octuple 2-pounder pom-poms went in, the tripod mast came out, and an armoured citadel bridge and a hangar for four aircraft were built up in its place, served by two cranes.

Trials exposed propulsion and steering faults that were a direct legacy of Jutland, delaying her departure, wrecking the crew's leave and pushing aggrieved sailors into the national papers, to Admiral Dudley Pound's fury. She finally entered Grand Harbour at Malta on 14 January 1938 and spent the year exercising in the Aegean, Adriatic and Mediterranean. In June 1939 Andrew Cunningham relieved Pound and took her to Istanbul for talks with the Turkish government. When war came the Mediterranean stayed quiet and she was recalled home after the loss of Royal Oak.

On 13 April 1940 Vice-Admiral William Whitworth hoisted his flag in Warspite and took nine destroyers into Ofotfjord, where eight German destroyers were trapped near Narvik after the first battle there. Her Fairey Swordfish floatplane sank U-64 with 250 lb bombs, the first aircraft to sink a U-boat in the war, and its spotting reports were arguably worth more to the action than her guns. She destroyed the crippled Z13 Erich Koellner with broadsides and hit Z17 Diether von Roeder and Z12 Erich Giese; every German destroyer present was sunk or scuttled.

At Calabria on 9 July 1940 Cunningham's cruisers were outranged by heavier Italian ships, so he took Warspite ahead to support them. She hit the battleship Giulio Cesare at about 26,000 yards, one of the longest-range gunnery hits ever made from a moving ship on a moving target. The shell went through the Italian's rear funnel and detonated inside it, opening a hole nearly twenty feet across; smoke drawn down into the boiler rooms drove four boilers off-line because the men could not breathe, and cut her to 18 knots. The Italian fleet turned away behind a smoke screen.

Warned by Bletchley Park in March 1941, Cunningham sailed on the twenty-seventh with his flag in Warspite. Air attacks slowed the battleship Vittorio Veneto and crippled the cruiser Pola; radar found Pola in the dark, then two of her sisters. Warspite, Valiant and Barham closed on unsuspecting ships and destroyed the heavy cruisers Fiume and Zara and two destroyers at point-blank range under searchlights. Matapan had a paralysing effect on the Regia Marina. A month later she bombarded Tripoli, an operation Cunningham thought futile and said so to Churchill.

Off Crete on 22 May 1941, serving as a floating anti-aircraft battery, she took a 500 lb bomb that wrecked her starboard 4-inch and 6-inch batteries, ripped open her side and killed 38 men. Alexandria could not repair her, so she went by Suez, Ceylon, Manila, Pearl Harbor and Esquimalt to the Bremerton Naval Shipyard, arriving on 11 August, and was still there when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Recommissioned on 28 December 1941 with new radar and replacement 15-inch guns, she joined the Eastern Fleet at Trincomalee in March 1942 as Somerville's flagship, and came home in May 1943 having steamed some 160,000 miles since the war began.

Back with Force H for the invasion of Sicily, she shelled Catania on 17 July 1943 and ran for Malta at high speed the next night through repeated air attacks, drawing the signal from Cunningham that named her: "Operation well carried out. There is no question when the old lady lifts her skirts she can run." In September she covered the crossing of the Straits of Messina, bombarded the Italian batteries near Reggio, and twice led surrendered Italian warships into internment at Malta — first Vittorio Veneto and Italia, then, on 12 September, her old opponent from Calabria, Giulio Cesare.

Detached to Salerno, she shelled an ammunition dump and German positions around Altavilla Silentina on 15 September, buying time for Allied reinforcements to reach the American forces near Battipaglia. The following afternoon Fw 190 fighter-bombers attacked, then three Do 217s of KG 100 released Fritz X radio-controlled bombs from high altitude. One hit near the funnel, cut down through her decks and left a twenty-foot hole in the bottom of her hull; a near miss opened her torpedo bulges. Nine men were killed. Towed by US Navy tugs, she broke every line and drifted sideways through the Straits of Messina before reaching Malta on 19 September.

Rosyth patched her rather than repaired her: the 6-inch guns came out and the casemates were plated over, a concrete caisson closed the bomb hole, and one boiler room and 'X' turret were written off. At 0500 on 6 June 1944 she was the first ship to open fire on D-Day, shelling the Villerville battery from 26,000 yards for the British 3rd Division landing on Sword Beach. She worked off Utah and Gold, wore her guns out, and hit a mine off Harwich on 13 June. She bombarded Brest, then Le Havre, then Walcheren Island on 1 November 1944, the last time she fired. Her fifteen battle honours are the most ever awarded to an individual Royal Navy ship.

Proposals to keep her as a museum ship were rejected and scrapping approved in July 1946. Under tow from Portsmouth to Faslane on 19 April 1947 she met a storm: the tug Bustler's hawser parted, Metinda III slipped her tow, a dropped anchor failed to hold in Mount's Bay, and she drove onto Mount Mopus Ledge and then hard aground at Prussia Cove, her skeleton crew of seven taken off by the Penlee lifeboat. Salvage failed in 1950. She was worked round to Marazion beach and broken up in situ from 1951, gone from view by the summer of 1955. Her ship's wheel, given by George VI to King Haakon VII, is in Narvik City Hall.