I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (17 page)

Sound military reasoning, I’m sure you’ll agree. But there was another advantage to such a huge and powerful ship. Prestige. Let the world know you have a ‘battleship’ and suddenly you are a force to be reckoned with.

Japan was the first nation to start building such a thing but, inevitably, it was the British who got theirs into the water first. It was constructed in just 100 days, it was christened by King Edward VII and it would give its name to every battleship that ever there was.

It was called HMS
Dreadnought
.

This 17,900-ton monster was protected with armour eleven inches thick and bristled with ten 12-inch guns. That she could move at all was astonishing. That she could do 21 knots was phenomenal. But she could because she was the first large warship ever to be fitted with a steam turbine – a new device that extracted the energy of dry, superheated steam as mechanical movement.

At the time Britannia ruled the waves. Everyone had known that for two hundred years. But
Dreadnought
was something else.
Dreadnought
turned the Royal Navy from a formidable fighting force that could have taken on the navies of France and Russia, at the same time, into something that could have taken on the world.

Unfortunately, for Britain at least, other countries had also adopted Cuniberti’s ideas. They included Japan, America, Brazil, New Zealand, Argentina, Russia, Turkey, Chile, France and, most worrying of all, Germany.

Germany had made it plain that its battle fleet would be so strong that ‘even the adversary with the greatest sea power’ – that would be us – ‘would be loath to take it on’.

Germany had a big advantage too. Its fleet only needed to prowl around in the Baltic and the North Sea, so the ship designers didn’t need to worry about storage for food and fuel, or crew comfort – they’d only be at sea for short periods. British battleships, on the other hand, had to cover an area extending from Hong Kong and Australasia through every ocean on earth. That meant our crews would be away for months so we had to ‘waste’ space on larders and beds. This
made the Royal Navy ships unbelievably expensive.
Dreadnought
had cost £2 million. Ten years later its sisters were costing £3 million and the only way was up.

Such was the value of our dreadnoughts that Navy commanders had to think up new tactics for using them. In the past they had attacked and killed, and then attacked again. But such was the firepower of the enemy’s new battleships, and such was the cost of ours, that they had to start thinking about defence.

And not just defence from other battleships either. One puny little mine or one nasty little torpedo could sink these enormous gun platforms if it got past the armour.

There was a psychological issue too. If the Navy had lost a dreadnought, the effect on morale back at home would have been catastrophic. You could have told the British Tommy that his wife was ugly or that he had a small willy and he wouldn’t have minded. But sink one of his battleships and he’d crumple, a broken and disconsolate man.

The result was simple. In the new Navy, with its new big ships, attack became a dirty word. Defence was everything.

So, when the First World War erupted, our
ships hung around their home base. And the Germans? Well, they didn’t much want to risk their dreadnoughts either so they too stayed close to home. For the first couple of war years all that happened in the North Sea were brief, high-speed forays by minelayers.

And then came Jutland, in which the cheaper, less well-armed and armoured battlecruisers from both navies beat the hell out of each other. As the smoke blew away, the giant dreadnoughts were in range and the scene was set for the world’s first battleship battle. It didn’t happen though because the German commander decided a victory would have been good but not
that
important in the scheme of things, whereas a defeat would have been utterly catastrophic. So, he ordered his fleet to turn for home. And run.

His opposite number from the Royal Navy could have given chase. We had more, better, faster ships but he was fearful the Germans might have laid mines in their wake. So he too turned away. The result was astonishing. In the entire course of the First World War not a single battleship was sunk by another battleship.

After hostilities were ended the German fleet was scuppered and a treaty drawn up to limit
the size of battleships in the future. This lasted for, ooh, about twenty minutes. Then everyone started gearing up for Round 2.

By now there were several variations on a theme. Some battleships were coming along with almost no armour at all to make them fast. Some had a protective shell only where it mattered. Others were iron clad from prow to stern. There was much debate on what type of guns should be fitted too and, more importantly, where they should go. The British decided at one point that they wouldn’t have any at the back ‘because we do not run away’, but actually there was a sound reason for this.

If you have guns fore and aft, you need to turn the ship sideways so they can all be brought to bear on a target. And a ship that’s sideways on to the enemy is a juicy target. If all its guns are at the front, the ship is much harder to hit.

Sounds sensible. And it was, but the British Navy did have one disadvantage over all the others. We had tradition. There was a sense in the Senior Service that ‘we do it this way because we always have’. Rate of fire was considered more important, for instance, than accuracy. Because rate of fire is what had won the day at Trafalgar.

Still, as the Second World War kicked off we were still a force to be reckoned with on the high seas. Unfortunately, the Germans had pretty much caught up again. And so, at 5 a.m. on 24 May 1941, began one of the most famous and disastrous naval battles of all time.

The battleship KMS
Bismarck
had been dispatched to the North Atlantic by German High Command to destroy as many merchant ships as possible. As was the way with battleships, the captain had been ordered to avoid at all costs any British warships. They really didn’t want their pride and joy damaged.

But the British couldn’t allow such a killing machine to roam around the Atlantic at will, disrupting the vital supply lines from America. And since the only way to stop a battleship was with another, we had to bite the bullet so to speak.

The
Bismarck
was located and shadowed by four cruisers, none of which could do much to stop it. So they kept their distance until our big guns rolled up. The big guns in question were the battleship HMS
Prince of Wales
and the battle-cruiser HMS
Hood
.

Hood
fired first from its two forward turrets but stupidly it was aiming at the
Bismarck’s
escort ship.
The
Prince of Wales
got the right target but missed. The German escort ship fired back, hitting the
Hood
but not badly. Then the British fired again, and again and again. A good rate of fire, but lousy accuracy. All of the shots missed.

And then it was the
Bismarck’s
turn. Its first salvo also missed, and it must have seemed at this point that the outcome would be decided on which ships were the toughest and which navy had the most accurate guns. One thing was for sure: this was to be a long day.

But it wasn’t. On just its fifth salvo the
Bismarck
hit the
Hood
, which blew up, split in two and within three minutes had sunk. All but three of its 1,419 crew were killed.

Then the
Bismarck
turned its fearsome armoury on the
Prince of Wales
, which was hit and damaged. It turned away from the fight.

For the first time a battleship had proved its worth in a battle. But in doing so it had also exposed its biggest weakness… It could never, in a thousand years, be allowed to get away with it.

Back at home Churchill knew what effect the destruction of the
Hood
would have on morale. Yes, the loss of life had been horrific, but the loss of the ship was somehow worse. The
Hood
had
been a battlecruiser rather than a battleship, but it was the pride of the fleet nevertheless because it was still a dreadnought. Even the Germans on board
Bismarck
had been scared of it.

So the Royal Navy was ordered to find the
Bismarck
and extract some payback. The damaged
Prince of Wales
tracked the mighty German while the most extraordinary hunting party was assembled. The battlecruiser
Renown
, the aircraft carrier
Ark Royal
and the cruiser
Sheffield
were dispatched from Gibraltar. The battleship
Ramillies
was released from convoy-escort duties and the
Rodney
, with its forward-facing guns, was sent from its station just off Ireland.

Then you had the original search party, which was also ordered to seek and destroy. The battleship
King George V
, the fleet carrier
Victorious
and the battlecruiser
Repulse
.

All that… to get one ship.

The first attack from a torpedo-carrying Sword-fish biplane failed to dent the enormous battleship and the second was even more useless, since it was launched in error against the British ship
Sheffield
. But the third struck home and the
Bismarck’s
rudder was damaged.

Helplessly steaming in circles, the poor old
thing could only wait for the pack to descend, and descend they did, like a pack of wolves.

Early on the morning of 27 May the
King George V
and the
Rodney
opened fire, and in 90 minutes turned the enemy into an inferno. But still she wouldn’t sink. So torpedoes were launched from the heavy cruiser
Dorsetshire
, which had been called in as well the previous day, to finish her off. The pride of the German Navy sank at 10.36 a.m. just off Ireland.

She was killed but I don’t think this could be called a defeat. I mean, she had killed first, taking out one of the most-loved ships in the Royal Navy, and then she had tied up a simply enormous amount of the British fleet for days.

When it came to wasting the enemy’s time though,
Bismarck’s
sister ship, the
Tirpitz
, was even more successful.

Fourteen times the Royal Air Force launched massive bombing raids to destroy her while she was still being built. But none was successful and on 25 February 1941 she was commissioned into service.

Just three months later the
Bismarck
was sunk and the Germans had to think hard about the role of their new big boy. They decided when she
became operational in January 1942 that they really couldn’t afford to lose her. So she was sent to Norway, where she spent most of the war hiding in a fjord.

Sounds pathetic, but there was method in their madness. They knew the British and the Russians couldn’t afford to just ignore the hulking presence. They knew the Allies would stop at nothing to get her, and that this would tie up a simply vast amount of resources. Resources that otherwise might be used in the Atlantic or the Mediterranean.

This was the joy of a battleship. It was more of a prize than Hitler himself.

The plan worked like a dream. Just two weeks after she first arrived in Norway, seven Stirlings and nine Halifaxes were sent in on bombing raids. Poor weather caused the attack to be aborted. The weather also caused another, much larger raid to be halted two months later. But in April the skies were clear enough for 30 Halifaxes and 11 Lancasters to get through. The ship escaped unharmed. And it wasn’t scratched the next night either when 32 British planes attacked.

The attacks then stopped so the
Tirpitz
nosed out of the fjord and went in search of convoys.
Almost immediately a Russian submarine pounced and slammed a torpedo into her side with such force that the crew on board said they never felt a thing. Happily, she failed to find any merchant ships to destroy but this foray did at least remind the British she was still around.

In October we were back with a plan to use human torpedoes. But this went awry in the North Sea so we tried again with midget submarines, using six big subs to tow them over there. They did manage to lay mines under her keel and two went off with devastating force. A normal ship would have succumbed to the blasts but
Tirpitz
was not normal. Yes, her hull was damaged and, yes, there was severe damage to her rudders and turbines. But she remained afloat.

While she was being repaired the Russians mounted an air raid, which was unsuccessful, and then it was our turn to get serious. On 3 April 1944 41 Barracudas swooped out of the sky and this time, finally, an air raid worked. Fifteen bombs hit home. Incredibly, though,
Tirpitz
survived this and the next three air raids and just three months later put to sea.

For two months we threw just about everything at the damn thing until eventually, in October, a
Lancaster found the bow with a bomb and
Tirpitz
was brought to her knees. With her top speed down to just ten knots she headed for the protection of Norway where, on 12 November 1944, 31 Lancasters using Tallboy bombs blew her to pieces.

She listed to port and rolled over so quickly that nearly 1,000 men were drowned.

And then just three years after the war finished she was bought by a salvage company for a mere 100,000 Norwegian Kroner and broken up for scrap. A sad end for a ship that sank nothing but possibly tied up more resources than any single weapon in the history of warfare.

I’d like to say
Tirpitz
was the greatest of all the battleships. But I think the best has to be the biggest. The
Yamato
.

Tirpitz
had weighed 41,000 tons and was considered to be vast.
Yamato
weighed 68,000 tons and that’s just hyperbolic.

She was a tough old bird too with armour plating eight inches thick in weak places and a full 22 inches thick where it mattered. In fact her armour alone weighed more than the total weight of the world’s second-biggest battleship. This was her
raison d’être
. To startle and shock and terrify.
We had a ship called the
Invincible
. They had a ship that really was.