HMS Ajax (1912): A Dreadnought That Fired Just One Salvo at Jutland

One of the Navy's New Dreadnoughts

HMS Ajax was the third of the four King George V-class battleships, the Royal Navy's next generation of dreadnoughts, built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering at Greenock. She was laid down on 27 February 1911, launched just over a year later on 21 March 1912, and completed in May 1913 at a cost of nearly £1.9 million, entering active service on 31 October that year armed with ten 13.5-inch guns across five twin turrets, a formidable amount of firepower for her time.

In June 1914, only weeks before the war that would define her career, Ajax and her three sister ships took part in the Kiel Week celebrations in Germany, a slightly surreal piece of naval diplomacy that saw British and German dreadnoughts exchanging courtesy visits only months before they would be trying to sink each other.

A War of Waiting

Ajax joined the Grand Fleet under Admiral Jellicoe on the outbreak of war in August 1914, and spent much of the following years doing what most Grand Fleet dreadnoughts did: patrolling the North Sea, standing ready, and waiting for the German High Seas Fleet to give battle. That moment arrived at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, where Ajax fought as the second ship from the head of the British battle line under Captain George Baird. For all the buildup, her actual contribution to the battle was almost comically brief: she fired a single salvo of six shells at German battlecruisers before losing a clear target in the chaos of the fleet action, a modest tally for the largest battleship clash of the war.

She also took part in the inconclusive Action of 19 August 1916, one of several failed attempts by the Grand Fleet to bring the German fleet to a decisive battle, along with the routine, unglamorous North Sea patrol work that filled most of a dreadnought's war whether or not the enemy ever obliged.

A Postwar Change of Scenery

After the war, Ajax was posted to the Mediterranean Fleet, where she served from 1919 to 1924, a period that took in support for operations connected to the Russian Civil War and the tense Chanak Crisis of 1922, when Britain and Turkey came uncomfortably close to renewed conflict over the Dardanelles.

Scrapped by Treaty

Ajax's career, like so many dreadnoughts of her generation, was ultimately ended not by an enemy but by arms control. She was placed in reserve in April 1924 and decommissioned in October 1926, as the Washington Naval Treaty's strict tonnage limits forced the Royal Navy to thin out its battleship fleet. She was sold to the Alloa Shipbreaking Company on 10 December 1926 and scrapped at Rosyth, a quiet administrative end for a ship built for a battle that, when it finally came, barely gave her the chance to fire her guns.