HMS Canada: The Chilean Battleship Britain Borrowed to Fight at Jutland

Built for Chile, Taken by Britain

HMS Canada began life as the Chilean battleship Almirante Latorre, built by Armstrong Whitworth at Elswick on the Tyne, ordered on 2 November 1911 and her keel laid that same month, launched on 27 November 1913 in an elaborate ceremony presided over by Chile's own ambassador.

The name she was launched under is worth stopping on, because the Royal Navy had already met the ship that made it. Juan José Latorre was the Chilean officer who, on 8 October 1879 at the Battle of Angamos, took the ironclad Almirante Cochrane into a running fight with the Peruvian monitor Huáscar and ran her down; the Peruvian rear-admiral aboard her, Miguel Grau, was killed by a shell through the conning tower, and the capture settled the naval half of the War of the Pacific in a single morning. Chile has kept the Huáscar ever since. She is still afloat at Talcahuano as a museum ship, which makes her one of the oldest surviving ironclads anywhere in the world, and rather older than most of the countries arguing about her.

Two years before Angamos the Royal Navy had gone after the very same vessel and come off distinctly second best. In 1877 the Huáscar had been seized by Peruvian rebels under Nicolás de Piérola and had taken to stopping British merchant ships along the coast, so on 29 May Rear-Admiral de Horsey took the frigate HMS Shah and the corvette HMS Amethyst after her off Pacocha. Shah fired 237 rounds and Amethyst 190. They hit her about sixty times. Not one round got through, because neither ship was carrying armour-piercing shell, and a wooden-era broadside against a Birkenhead-built ironclad turns out to be mostly noise.

So Shah tried something nobody had ever tried. She launched a Whitehead torpedo at the Huáscar, the first self-propelled torpedo ever fired at an enemy by anyone, anywhere. It ran at nine knots. The Huáscar was making at least ten, in the same direction, and simply drew away from it. She escaped into the dark and surrendered to her own government two days later, and the Admiralty went home having learned two lessons in an afternoon: that unarmoured cruisers cannot hurt an ironclad, and that a torpedo slower than its target is an expensive way of making a splash. All of which is why, when the Tyne launched a battleship named for the man who finished the job the Royal Navy had started and fumbled, and Britain then bought her, there was a certain circularity about it that nobody at Elswick appears to have mentioned out loud.

With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, however, Britain formally purchased the still-unfinished battleship from Chile on 9 September that year, a negotiated acquisition rather than the outright seizure Britain applied to some other foreign warships building in British yards, reflecting just how important it was to keep Chile, a crucial supplier of the sodium nitrate essential to munitions production, firmly in the camp of friendly neutrals rather than risk alienating her.

The contrast is worth spelling out, because the ships Britain did simply take had consequences that are still argued about. On 1 August 1914, three days before Britain was even at war, the Admiralty requisitioned the two battleships building in British yards for the Ottoman Empire. One was Reshadieh, which became HMS Erin. The other was Sultan Osman I, which had begun life as the Brazilian Rio de Janeiro and entered the Royal Navy as HMS Agincourt, the ship with more turrets than any battleship ever built. Both were paid for. Neither was handed over.

The Ottoman ships had been funded in part by public subscription, with schoolchildren and villagers contributing to what was presented as a national effort, and the Turkish crews were already in Britain waiting to take them home. Within weeks the German battlecruiser Goeben and the cruiser Breslau had arrived at Constantinople and been transferred, at least on paper, into Ottoman colours, and by the autumn the Ottoman Empire was in the war on Germany's side. Historians have argued ever since about how much the seizures actually decided, and the honest answer is probably less than the popular version suggests. But it explains perfectly why the Admiralty took a good deal more care with Chile, negotiated a purchase, and paid for it.

A Super-Dreadnought Renamed

Completed and fitting out that summer, the ship was commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMS Canada on 15 August 1915, a super-dreadnought battleship displacing 28,000 tons and armed with five twin 14-inch gun turrets, a calibre unique among British battleships of the day, alongside sixteen 6-inch guns, torpedo tubes and anti-aircraft armament, a notably powerful and modern warship that gave the Royal Navy a valuable, if diplomatically unusual, addition to the Grand Fleet at a critical moment in the war.

That word unique is doing a great deal more work than it looks. British battleships of the period were built around 13.5-inch guns and then around 15-inch guns, and the entire logistical apparatus of the Grand Fleet, the shell factories, the ammunition ships, the magazines at Scapa Flow, was arranged to feed those two calibres and no others. Canada's 14-inch guns were an Armstrong export design worked up to a Chilean requirement, and not one other ship in the fleet used them. Her shells fitted nothing else and nothing else's shells fitted her, so every round she would ever fire had to be made, moved and stored specially, for one ship, in a war that was consuming ammunition faster than anybody had planned for.

The Admiralty put up with all that for a simple reason: ten heavy guns is ten heavy guns. Only Agincourt, with her celebrated fourteen, carried more, and Agincourt was another orphan taken off another foreign customer in the same panic. A fleet that expected to meet the Germans in a line of battle at any hour was not going to leave a modern super-dreadnought sitting on the Tyne over a question of shell diameter. It is a useful reminder that the Grand Fleet of 1916, so often described as a single vast homogeneous instrument, contained several ships that had been built to other people's specifications and simply pressed into the line as they were.

Her sailing north was delayed until October: she finally left Rosyth for Scapa Flow at four o'clock on the afternoon of the 14th, screened by destroyers, paused off Tor Ness for gun trials the next morning, and reached Scapa that afternoon, a fortnight-and-a-half after commissioning that has sometimes been mistaken, understandably, for her actual commissioning date.

Canada had a sister ship, Almirante Cochrane, laid down at the same Tyneside yard and still unfinished when Britain requisitioned her too, in 1918, though for a rather stranger purpose: rather than a second battleship, she was converted into an aircraft carrier and commissioned as HMS Eagle. Chile later made an offer to buy her back and convert her into a battleship after all, but the cost of reversing the conversion proved too steep, and Eagle remained in Royal Navy service until she was torpedoed and sunk escorting a Malta convoy in 1942.

Firing Her Guns at Jutland

HMS Canada saw action at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June 1916, the largest naval battle of the First World War, serving with the 4th Battle Squadron under the command of Captain William C. M. Nicholson.

Canada opened fire at 6.38pm on 31 May, engaging a German ship already obscured by smoke and the splash of other ships' shells, so indistinct that neither salvo was seen to fall. At 7.20pm she took on a target her own captain's official report described only as a battleship or battle-cruiser, "very indistinct, probably 'Kaiser' class," at the uncomfortably short range of 13,000 yards, and for a few minutes may have found herself trading fire with something considerably grander still: the same report notes she was fired on in return by a Kaiser-class ship, or possibly the German battlecruiser Derfflinger, whose shots fell well short.

Her clearest success came at 7.30pm, when three salvoes of 14-inch shells were fired at a German destroyer attacking from abaft the starboard beam; the third salvo appeared to hit, and the destroyer vanished into smoke, believed sunk. By 7.35 Canada had ceased firing for good. In total she expended 42 rounds of 14-inch and 109 rounds of 6-inch ammunition during the engagement, and, as Nicholson reported afterwards, was not struck during the entire action and had no casualties to report, a remarkable outcome to close out her only major battle.

Returned to Her Original Owner

With the war won and Chile's wartime importance as a nitrate supplier no longer the pressing concern it had been, Chile repurchased the ship in April 1920, and she was formally handed back on 27 November 1920, resuming her original identity as the Chilean battleship Almirante Latorre.

Chile did not simply take her back and forget about Britain, either. In 1929 the Admiralty sent Devonport dockyard officials all the way to Valparaiso to inspect Almirante Latorre and tender for the contract to modernise her, a tender British MPs were still asking about in the House of Commons that February. She sailed for Plymouth herself that May, spent the better part of two years there having her bridge rebuilt, her fire control modernised, new anti-torpedo bulges fitted and her old turbines replaced, and finally sailed home to Valparaiso in March 1931.

Her homecoming did not stay peaceful for long. That September, in protest at government pay cuts during the Depression, Almirante Latorre's own crew mutinied at the port of Coquimbo and took their officers prisoner; the revolt spread to almost the entire Chilean fleet within days before internal disagreements caused it to collapse. The old battleship went on to serve as a wartime patrol vessel through the Second World War, was eventually laid up during the 1950s, and was finally sold for scrap to a Japanese yard in 1959, some of her recovered fittings reportedly helping to restore Japan's own preserved battleship, Mikasa.

Two things belong to that last stretch that rarely get told. The first is that she was wanted again, twice. Washington discovered in 1939 that the Soviet Union had at one point tried to buy her, and after Pearl Harbor the United States Navy made an approach of its own. An American offer to a neutral South American government for a battleship laid down before the First World War is as good a measure as any of how thin things looked in the winter of 1941. Chile declined, kept her flagship and went on using her for patrol work she was magnificently over-qualified for.

The second is that nothing warlike ever finished her. She came through Jutland without a scratch and without a casualty, through a fleet mutiny, through being bombed by her own air force when about twenty Chilean aircraft flew against the mutinous ships in September 1931, and through the whole of the Second World War. What ended her was an engine room fire in 1951, from which she never properly recovered. She was laid up for the rest of the decade and then towed to Japan, where a ship built on the Tyne for Chile, borrowed by Britain and blooded in the North Sea, was taken apart to keep a Japanese battleship standing.

Her time as HMS Canada, spanning barely five years, stands as one of the more unusual episodes of naval diplomacy from the First World War, a foreign nation's flagship-in-waiting borrowed by Britain for the duration of the conflict, blooded at one of history's greatest naval battles, and then handed back essentially unscathed to the country that had originally paid for her.