HMS Duke of York (17): She Carried Churchill, Then Sank the Scharnhorst

Built at Clydebank

HMS Duke of York was built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, her keel laid on 5 May 1937, launched on 28 February 1940, and commissioned on 4 November 1941, a King George V-class battleship displacing 42,076 long tons at full load and measuring 745 feet in length, one of the most powerful warships in the entire Royal Navy at the time of her completion.

Carrying Churchill to America

HMS Duke of York's very first significant mission came in mid-December 1941, barely a month after commissioning, when she transported Prime Minister Winston Churchill across the Atlantic for a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, arriving at Annapolis, Maryland, on 22 December 1941, only weeks after America's entry into the war following Pearl Harbor. She carried out a shakedown cruise to Bermuda that January before returning to Scapa Flow on 17 January 1942, with Churchill himself travelling home by air, a genuinely significant early role for so new a ship to play in Anglo-American wartime diplomacy.

Arctic Convoys and the Mediterranean

HMS Duke of York escorted Arctic convoys to Russia between March and September 1942, serving as flagship of the Heavy Covering Force for the ill-fated Convoy PQ-17, one of the most costly convoy disasters of the entire war. Following her transfer to Gibraltar in October 1942, she supported Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, and took part in diversionary operations ahead of the invasion of Sicily. In October 1943, she covered Operation Leader, a raid against German shipping off Norway.

The Battle of North Cape

HMS Duke of York's defining moment came on 26 December 1943 at the Battle of North Cape, when she engaged the German battleship Scharnhorst during a critical Arctic convoy escort operation. Contact was established at 16:32 at a range of 29,700 yards, and HMS Duke of York opened fire at 16:50 from 12,000 yards, eventually closing to as near as 10,400 yards. Over the course of a battle that lasted ten and a half hours, HMS Duke of York struck Scharnhorst with ten 14-inch shells, one devastating hit silencing her main turrets entirely, while German fire scored only two hits in return, a 28.3-centimetre shell that passed clean through her main mast without detonating, and a 15-centimetre shell that pierced her foremast strut. Fifty-two broadsides from HMS Duke of York damaged Scharnhorst sufficiently to allow accompanying destroyers to finish her off with torpedoes, and the German battleship sank at 19:45 that evening, taking over 1,700 of her crew down with her, one of the most significant single naval victories won by the Royal Navy during the entire war.

The Pacific and Japan's Surrender

HMS Duke of York sailed to join the British Pacific Fleet on 25 April 1945, though electrical problems suffered at Malta delayed her arrival in Sydney until 29 July. In early August, she joined Task Force 37, taking part in air raids against Japan between 9 and 15 August, in the war's final and most intense weeks. Following Japan's surrender, HMS Duke of York took part in the formal surrender ceremonies in Tokyo Bay, and sailed on to Hong Kong to accept the surrender of the Japanese garrison there, before serving as flagship of the British Pacific Fleet until June 1946, a genuinely fitting conclusion for a ship that had begun her war carrying the Prime Minister to meet an ally and ended it accepting the surrender of an enemy.

The End of Service

HMS Duke of York remained active as Home Fleet flagship until April 1949, was laid up in November 1951, and received formal scrapping orders on 18 May 1957, broken up by Shipbreaking Industries Ltd at Faslane. Her ship's bell was salvaged and donated to the Duke of York School, now Lenana School, in Nairobi, Kenya, a lasting physical link to a ship whose career had carried her across an extraordinarily wide sweep of the Second World War's most significant moments.