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

Laid Down 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.

She began life under a different name. The ship laid down at Clydebank in May 1937 was to be HMS Anson, and she was renamed before she went down the ways; the name Anson was handed on to a later ship of the same class, which is why the Royal Navy ended the war with both. There is a more consequential oddity in her design, though, and it would matter a great deal on one particular night in the Arctic. The King George Vs carried 14-inch guns at a time when the Germans, Americans, Japanese, French and Italians were all building 15-inch and 16-inch ships. Britain had spent the 1930s trying to talk the world into a lower gun limit and then, having failed, went ahead and built to it anyway. To claw back some weight of shell from a smaller calibre, the designers fitted quadruple turrets, cramming four guns into a single mounting. It was an ingenious answer to a self-inflicted problem, and it never worked properly.

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.

Churchill's own party included his daughter Mary and the American ambassador Averell Harriman, and the voyage across a U-boat-infested Atlantic in December was tense enough without a deeply personal irony that struck the Prime Minister along the way: as Duke of York passed within 400 miles of the German airbase at Brest, he grew notably morose at the realisation that this was roughly the same distance his previous transatlantic battleship, HMS Prince of Wales, had been from the Japanese torpedo bombers that sank her off Malaya only days earlier, with heavy loss of life. Prince of Wales had been Duke of York's own sister ship.

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 notably significant early role for so new a ship to play in Anglo-American wartime diplomacy.

Calling it a meeting rather undersells the cargo she was carrying. That crossing delivered Churchill to the First Washington Conference, code-named ARCADIA, which ran from 22 December 1941 to 14 January 1942 and is arguably the most important few weeks of Anglo-American planning in the entire war. Three things came out of it. The Combined Chiefs of Staff were created, putting the British and American high commands into one permanent body that would approve every major Allied military decision for the rest of the war. The Germany first principle was confirmed, which meant that the country which had just been attacked by Japan agreed to devote its main effort to defeating Germany instead. And on New Year's Day 1942 Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Declaration by United Nations, twenty-six countries pledging to fight on together and, crucially, that none of them would make a separate peace. The name stuck to the organisation that came afterwards. A new battleship carried all of that across the Atlantic in December weather with U-boats about, and her passenger spent a good part of the voyage brooding about his last one.

Arctic Convoys and the Mediterranean

HMS Duke of York spent that summer as part of the Home Fleet's heavy covering force, providing distant protection alongside the American battleship USS Washington and the carrier HMS Victorious for Arctic Convoy PQ-17, which sailed from Iceland on 27 June 1942 with 33 merchant ships bound for Arkhangelsk. On 4 July, acting on intelligence that the German battleship Tirpitz was moving to intercept, the First Sea Lord ordered the covering force to withdraw and the convoy to scatter, a decision debated ever since: Tirpitz never actually left her Norwegian moorings, but the scattered merchantmen, no longer able to protect each other, were picked off individually by U-boats and aircraft, and 24 of the 33 ships were lost.

It is worth being clear about what a heavy covering force actually did, because Duke of York's uselessness that week was designed in from the start. The Admiralty would not send battleships east of Bear Island, where they would be inside range of German land-based bombers and beyond effective air cover of their own, so the covering force cruised well to the west of the convoy, hundreds of miles away, as a deterrent rather than an escort. It could threaten Tirpitz. It could not defend a merchant ship. And when the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, made his decision on 4 July, it went out as three signals in quick succession, each more urgent than the last: the cruiser force was to withdraw to the westward at high speed, then the convoy was to disperse, then the convoy was to scatter. To the escorts reading them in that order, they could only mean that a German battle squadron was over the horizon and closing. There was nothing over the horizon.

Duke of York herself never fired a shot in the whole affair and returned to Scapa Flow completely unscathed, a frustrating outcome for a ship built for exactly this kind of confrontation. 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

The Battle of North Cape actually began the day before Duke of York even joined it. On Boxing Day 1943, Vice Admiral Robert Burnett was at Murmansk aboard the cruiser HMS Belfast, having just escorted one Arctic convoy in, when intelligence reached him that the German battleship Scharnhorst and five destroyers had put to sea from Altenfjord in Norway. Germany's own commanders on the spot thought the weather far too foul to risk the operation, but Berlin overruled them: Scharnhorst, the last of Hitler's operational capital ships after Bismarck's loss in 1941 and Tirpitz's crippling the previous September, was ordered out regardless to intercept the convoys crossing paths in the Arctic darkness.

Belfast's radar picked up Scharnhorst at around 8.40 that morning, and Burnett's three cruisers, Belfast, Norfolk and Sheffield, closed to engage. Norfolk landed an early hit that knocked out Scharnhorst's main gunnery radar, blinding her, and the German ship turned north, hoping to loop round the cruisers and approach the convoy from a different direction. Burnett faced an agonising choice: give chase, or hold back and guard the convoy instead. He chose to wait, a gamble bold enough that he reportedly turned to Belfast's captain, Frederick Parham, and asked whether he was doing the right thing; Parham told him to trust his own judgement. The wait paid off. Scharnhorst reappeared on radar shortly after noon, the cruisers reopened fire, and the badly mauled German ship turned south, straight toward the waiting Duke of York.

By four o'clock, Norfolk and Sheffield had both dropped out of the chase with damage of their own, leaving Belfast alone to shadow a ship that could have destroyed her outright had she turned to fight. Belowdecks, Leading Stoker Arthur "Larry" Fursland spent the action holding a generator together by hand, rigging a fire hose to its cooling system after Belfast's own opening broadside had knocked out the proper pumps, a feat of improvisation that later earned him a decoration.

It was at this point that HMS Duke of York, under the direct command of Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, arrived on the scene as planned. Contact was established at 16:32 at a range of 29,700 yards, and Duke of York opened fire at 16:50 from 12,000 yards, closing to as near as 10,400 yards, with Belfast firing star shells to light up the target for her heavier guns.

Over the course of the engagement, 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 slowed the German ship enough for accompanying destroyers to close in and finish her with torpedoes, and Scharnhorst sank shortly after half past seven that evening. Of a wartime complement of 1,968, only 36 survived. IWM historian Nigel Steel has noted there was little celebration aboard the British ships that night, only relief and a shared, sober awareness of how easily the outcome could have gone the other way; it was also, by most accounts, the last purely gun-and-torpedo battleship action ever fought in European waters.

Two details decide that engagement, and neither of them appears in the headline. The first is that Duke of York's main armament spent much of the battle out of action. Her quadruple 14-inch turrets jammed, stuck and misbehaved to the point where, by later analysis, she could only fire with her full battery about seventy per cent of the time. She won a gunnery duel against the best-drilled capital ship in the German navy while roughly a third of her own guns were unavailable at any given moment. The second is a single shell at 18:20, which went through Scharnhorst's armoured belt and burst in her number one boiler room. German damage control was superb and had her back up to 22 knots quickly, but 22 knots was not enough. Scharnhorst had been the faster ship all afternoon and speed had been the whole of her defence; the moment she lost it, the British destroyers could get round her, and the torpedoes did the rest. One shell out of fifty-two broadsides, fired in the dark by radar at twenty thousand yards, was the difference between a German battleship escaping to Norway and a German battleship on the bottom.

What Admiral Fraser said to his officers afterwards has outlasted the battle. Standing on the ship that had just sunk her, he told them: gentlemen, the battle against Scharnhorst has ended in victory for us; I hope that if any of you are ever called upon to lead a ship into action against an opponent many times superior, you will command your ship as gallantly as Scharnhorst was commanded today. It is a remarkable thing for a victorious admiral to say on the night of a victory, and it explains the mood the historians describe rather better than any account of the shooting does. Thirty-six men came out of the water. Nineteen hundred and thirty-two did not, and everyone aboard Duke of York knew the arithmetic could have run the other way.

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 remarkably 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.