HMS Achilles (1905): The Lucky One in a Cursed Class

One of the Best Cruisers Britain Ever Built

HMS Achilles belonged to a small, select class of ships that had a genuine claim to being the best of their kind. The naval historian Oscar Parkes rated the four Warrior-class armoured cruisers, Warrior, Achilles, Cochrane and Natal, as the best cruisers the Royal Navy ever built, an evolution of the earlier Duke of Edinburgh design with better armament layout and improved stability. Achilles herself backed up the reputation in style, winning the Royal Navy's gunnery competition in 1907, the sort of accolade that suggested a ship, and her crew, thoroughly knew what they were doing.

She was built by Armstrong Whitworth at Elswick, laid down on 22 February 1904, launched on 17 June 1905, and finally completed on 22 April 1907 at a cost of a little over £1.19 million, a substantial sum for the time. On paper she was formidable: over 13,500 tons, more than 500 feet long, capable of 23 knots, and armed with six 9.2-inch guns and four 7.5-inch guns, backed by a swarm of smaller quick-firing weapons and torpedo tubes.

A Quiet, Respectable Pre-War Career

Achilles spent her early service doing exactly what a well-regarded cruiser was meant to do: showing the flag and holding her place in the fleet. She joined the 5th Cruiser Squadron in 1907, moved to the 2nd Cruiser Squadron in 1909, and paid a visit to Russia in 1908, the sort of dignified, unhurried peacetime routine that would look almost quaint from the vantage point of 1916. When war broke out in August 1914, she was sent north to help reinforce the Shetland Islands, a suitably understated posting for a ship about to have a rather charmed run through the war that followed.

The Ship That Kept Missing Disaster

This is where Achilles' story becomes genuinely interesting, not for what she did, but for what she managed to avoid. Her sister ships suffered two of the more painful losses of the Warrior class's war. HMS Warrior was hammered by more than fifteen heavy German shells at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916 and capsized while under tow back to port. HMS Natal never even got the chance to fight: she was destroyed in December 1915 by an internal explosion, almost certainly caused by unstable ammunition, killing somewhere between 390 and 421 people while at anchor in home waters, a peacetime-style tragedy dressed in wartime colours.

Achilles missed both of these catastrophes entirely. At Jutland, arguably the single defining fleet action of the entire war, she was simply not there, having the singular good fortune to be in refit at the exact moment her sister was being torn apart by the German High Seas Fleet. It is hard to overstate how significant that piece of timing was: had her refit schedule fallen only slightly differently, Achilles might easily have shared Warrior's fate rather than reading about it afterwards.

Her Own Small Piece of Action

None of this is to say Achilles spent the war doing nothing. She took part in Grand Fleet sorties in August and October 1916, the sort of tense, inconclusive fleet movements that filled much of the war's middle years without producing another Jutland. Her one genuine moment of glory came on 16 March 1917, when she sank the German auxiliary cruiser Leopard north of the Shetland Islands, a clean, useful kill against a converted merchant raider rather than a fellow warship, and about as satisfying an outcome as naval war ever offers.

In August 1917 she was sent across the Atlantic to the North America and West Indies Station, swapping the cold, tense waters of the North Sea for convoy escort duty, before returning for a lengthy refit that ran from February to December 1918, seeing her through to the war's very end without ever having to test her luck again.

A Gentle Retirement

With the war over and a fleet full of increasingly obsolete armoured cruisers, Achilles was quietly repurposed as a stoker training ship at Chatham, teaching a new generation of engine room crews rather than facing another German battle line. She was finally sold for scrap on 9 May 1921, closing out a career that, for a ship built to the very highest standard the Edwardian Royal Navy could manage, was defined less by combat than by extraordinarily good timing. Her sisters paid, in blood, for the risks that came with being one of the best cruisers in the fleet. Achilles, through nothing more than the accident of a refit schedule, simply did not.