HMS Anson (79): The Battleship That Never Fired Her Guns in Anger

A Battleship Renamed Before She Sailed

HMS Anson was one of the King George V-class battleships, built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson on the Tyne, her keel laid on 20 July 1937. She was originally intended to be named HMS Jellicoe, after the admiral who had commanded the Grand Fleet at Jutland, but was renamed Anson before her launch on 24 February 1940.

The man she was named after had one of the more extraordinary careers in the Navy's history. George Anson sailed from Portsmouth in September 1740 with six ships and roughly 1,900 men, under orders to round Cape Horn and make a nuisance of himself among the Spanish possessions in the Pacific. He came home in June 1744 with one ship. Scurvy, storms and shipwreck had killed more than thirteen hundred of his people. What turned the voyage from catastrophe into legend was a single morning: on 20 June 1743 his flagship Centurion caught the annual Manila galleon, the Nuestra Señora de Covadonga, off the Philippines, and took a treasure eventually valued at something like four hundred thousand pounds, of which Anson personally kept upwards of eighty thousand.

The money made him famous and the experience made him useful. As First Lord of the Admiralty across two spells between 1751 and 1762 he rebuilt the institution from the inside: a new set of Articles of War, the first standard uniform for naval officers in 1748, the Royal Marines put on a permanent footing under Admiralty rather than Army control, a rational system for rating ships, annual inspections of the dockyards, a reserve of laid-up hulls that could be brought forward in a crisis, and a building programme aimed squarely at the next war with France. The fleet that won the Seven Years War was substantially his work. It is a good name to put on a battleship, and rather better suited to a ship whose contribution was organisation and presence than anyone can have intended.

The name she lost is interesting too. Two ships of the class were to have been Jellicoe and Beatty, after the two admirals who had commanded at Jutland, and both names were dropped in favour of eighteenth-century ones, Anson and Howe. Jellicoe and Beatty had spent the 1920s and 1930s at the centre of a long, bitter and very public argument about who had done what at Jutland and which of them had lost the chance of a second Trafalgar, and their partisans were still at it when these ships were ordered. Putting either name on a new battleship would have been taking a side. Two dead admirals from the age of sail were, on reflection, a great deal safer.

She was not commissioned until 22 June 1942, her completion delayed by the addition of fire-control radar and other defensive systems that the rapidly evolving war made increasingly necessary.

She was a formidable ship on paper: over 42,000 tons, armed with ten 14-inch guns across three turrets, plus a substantial secondary and anti-aircraft armament, one of the most powerful battleships Britain would send to sea during the entire war.

The number to notice in that paragraph is fourteen. Every other modern battleship of the Second World War carried a heavier main gun, and there is a reason for it that reflects rather well on Britain and did the Royal Navy no good at all. The Second London Naval Treaty of 1936 set fourteen inches as the maximum calibre for a battleship, and Britain, having signed it, laid the class down to that limit. The treaty carried an escalator clause allowing a return to sixteen inches from April 1937 if Japan or Italy declined to ratify, which they duly did. By then the King George V class were already building. Anson went to war with the lightest main battery of any modern battleship afloat because her country had kept its word and nobody else had.

The gun arrangement has its own story. The design began with twelve 14-inch guns in three quadruple turrets, which on a treaty displacement of 35,000 tons could not be reconciled with the armour the constructors wanted, and the weight of a superimposed quadruple turret raised real questions about the ship's stability. The answer was to cut B turret down to a twin and spend the saving on protection. That is why Anson has the odd arrangement of four guns forward, two above them and four aft, and it is why the King George Vs were among the best armoured battleships of the war on a comparatively modest hull. It was probably the right trade. The class's quadruple mountings also earned a poor reputation for jamming under fire, which both King George V and Prince of Wales discovered against Bismarck, so there is an argument that Anson never firing hers in anger spared her a particular kind of embarrassment.

Guarding the Arctic Convoys

Anson spent much of 1942 and 1943 providing distant cover for the brutal Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union, escorting no fewer than nine Russian convoys by December 1943, including QP 14, JW 51B, JW 52 and RA 52, part of the constant, exhausting effort to protect Allied shipping from German surface raiders and U-boats in some of the most hostile waters in the world.

A Hand in Planning, If Not Firing

Through 1943 and into 1944, Anson took part in a string of significant operations without ever quite getting into a direct gun battle herself.

She played a diversionary role during preparations for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, in July 1943, covered American carrier air strikes during Operation Leader that October, stood by for potential Norwegian strikes during Operation Bayleaf in February 1944, and served as flagship for Operation Tungsten on 3 April 1944, the major carrier strike against the German battleship Tirpitz sheltering in a Norwegian fjord.

In every case, her role was one of cover, planning, and presence rather than direct combat.

Tungsten is the one that makes the point. The target was a battleship, Tirpitz, sitting in Kaafjord. The flagship of the covering force was a battleship, Anson, sitting over the horizon. Between them were forty Barracudas flying off carriers, and it was the aeroplanes that did the damage while the two capital ships never came within a hundred miles of one another. The raid itself is described in the articles on HMS Pursuer (D73) and HMS Victorious (R38). Anson's job was to be there in case the Germans came out, and they did not, which is the whole of what a battleship was for by 1944 and the reason her guns stayed cold.

To the Pacific, and a Front-Row Seat at Victory

Anson was decommissioned for refit in June 1944 and returned to service in March 1945, sailing out to join the British Pacific Fleet just as the war against Japan was reaching its final stages.

She accepted the Japanese surrender at Hong Kong in August 1945 and was present in Tokyo Bay for the official surrender ceremony aboard USS Missouri, standing witness to the formal end of the Second World War from about as good a vantage point as any ship in the fleet could ask for.

The Hong Kong episode is worth pinning down, because the dates are further apart than the summary suggests. Rear-Admiral Cecil Harcourt gathered a force of some two dozen ships at Subic Bay in the Philippines and took them into Victoria Harbour on 30 August 1945. The formal instrument of surrender was not signed until 16 September, at Government House, by Harcourt for the Allies and by Major General Umekichi Okada and Vice Admiral Ruitaro Fujita for Japan. In the fortnight between, a British rear-admiral was running a colony that had been in Japanese hands since Christmas Day 1941, with the camps still being opened and the food situation desperate. Anson was there for all of it, and her guns stayed quiet through that as well.

And yet, for all of this, from Arctic convoys to Sicily to Tirpitz to the Japanese surrender, HMS Anson stands out as the only one of the five King George V-class battleships never to fire her main armament in anger.

Her sister King George V bombarded the Japanese mainland at Hamamatsu as late as July 1945, and an earlier sister, Duke of York, had sunk the German battleship Scharnhorst at the Battle of North Cape back in December 1943; Anson herself never got the chance.

It is a remarkable statistic for a ship built around ten enormous 14-inch guns, a career defined entirely by presence, deterrence and support rather than a single decisive shot.

A Quiet Retirement

Anson returned to British waters on 29 July 1946 and took part in Exercise Verity in July 1949 before being placed in reserve that November. She was towed to Gare Loch in 1951 and finally sold for scrap on 17 December 1957 to Shipbreaking Industries at Faslane.

Exercise Verity deserves rather more than its name, because it was the first of its kind. In the summer of 1949 the navies of Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium put more than a hundred warships to sea together under a single commander, Admiral Sir Rhoderick McGrigor, the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet. Everything from a battleship and several aircraft carriers down to motor torpedo boats took part. The British, French and Dutch ships gathered in Mounts Bay off Penzance on 30 June for official calls and harbour drills, sailed on 4 July for the Bay of Biscay, and worked through naval bombardment, convoy escort, air strikes, submarine attack and torpedo boat attack, while the Belgians joined a separate minesweeping exercise in the Channel.

This was the Western Union, the defence arrangement four of those countries had signed at Brussels the previous year, and it was learning to fight as one navy. The North Atlantic Treaty had been signed in Washington in April, three months earlier, and NATO as an actual organisation did not yet exist. Verity is where the habit started: common signals, common formations, ships of four navies manoeuvring on the same orders. Every combined NATO exercise since is descended from it.

Anson was the battleship in it. That was her last operational employment: not a shot fired at an enemy in her whole career, and her final job at sea was to stand in the middle of the first fleet the western alliance ever put together and let three other navies practise working with her.

Even in death she left a small physical legacy: timbers salvaged from the ship were repurposed as commemorative souvenirs, a modest afterlife for a battleship whose greatest achievement may simply have been being present, powerfully and reliably, exactly when and where she was needed, without ever needing to prove it with her guns.

She did not go alone, either. The class was laid up in the Gareloch from 1950 and sat there for seven years, and when the decision finally came it took the lot at once. King George V went onto the disposal list on 30 April 1957, was sold to Arnott Young, towed away on 8 January 1958 and reached Dalmuir twelve days later, her hull going on to Troon to be finished off that December. Duke of York and Howe were broken up in the same two yards the same year. Anson went to Shipbreaking Industries at Faslane. Britain built five of these ships; one was sunk by Japanese aircraft off Malaya in December 1941, and the other four were all cut up inside about twelve months, less than twenty years after the first of them was launched.