HMS Howe (32): From Arctic Convoys to Bombarding Okinawa

The Last of Her Class

HMS Howe was laid down on 1 June 1937 by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Glasgow, the fifth and final King George V-class battleship, originally intended to be named HMS Beatty after Admiral David Beatty before being renamed to honour the eighteenth century admiral Richard Howe instead.

Richard Howe is worth knowing about, not least because he is the rare admiral whose reputation rests as much on talking as on shooting. He went to sea in 1740, fought at Quiberon Bay, and in 1776 was given the North American station, where he spent as much effort trying to negotiate with the American colonists as fighting them; the Staten Island peace conference was his idea and it failed, but the attempt tells you what sort of man he was. He commanded the Channel Fleet at the Glorious First of June in 1794, twenty-two ships against twenty-five French escorting a grain convoy, and took seven of them, which was the first outright British fleet victory of the French wars. And then in May 1797, when the entire Channel Fleet mutinied at Spithead over pay, food and the treatment of the sick, it was Howe, then seventy-one and crippled with gout, who was sent down to sort it out. He spent twelve hours being rowed from ship to ship talking to the men, agreed to almost everything they asked for, and ended the mutiny. Naming a battleship after him instead of Beatty was, on the whole, a good decision.

She was launched on 9 April 1940, though her completion was significantly delayed as wartime shipyard priorities shifted heavily toward merchant and escort vessel construction, and she did not finally enter service until 29 August 1942, displacing 39,150 long tons as built and armed with ten 14-inch guns alongside sixteen 5.25-inch secondary guns and an extensive anti-aircraft battery.

The armament is the class's great oddity and it needs explaining, because ten 14-inch guns is a strange number in a strange arrangement and it was not what anybody wanted. Britain went into the Second London Naval Conference in 1935 arguing for a 14-inch limit on battleship guns, on the reasonable grounds that smaller guns meant smaller and cheaper ships all round, and the limit was written in conditional on Japan agreeing to it. Japan did not agree, walked out, and Britain, having already committed to the design, went ahead and built the only battleships of the war carrying 14-inch guns while everybody else fitted fifteens and sixteens. Worse, the weight had to go somewhere: the original plan for three quadruple turrets was cut to two quads and a twin so that the armour could be kept thick, which is why she has ten guns rather than twelve. The quadruple mountings were then trouble in service, jamming under sustained fire because of wartime haste in building, too little clearance between the rotating and fixed structures, too few full-calibre practice shoots and a genuinely obsessive set of anti-flash arrangements. Prince of Wales finished the Denmark Strait action with five of her ten guns out. It got better with experience and drill, and the KGVs were in most other respects excellent ships, but nobody in the Royal Navy ever entirely stopped wishing they had fifteens.

Arctic Convoys and the Invasion of Sicily

HMS Howe joined the Home Fleet on 30 August 1942, and her early operational service saw her covering Arctic convoys to Russia alongside her sister ship HMS Anson, remarkably demanding and dangerous duty in some of the most hostile waters of the entire war.

The work was not glamorous, but it was relentless: she sailed from Scapa Flow to provide distant cover for convoy RA51 over the New Year of 1942 into 1943, and did the same for the outbound JW53 and the returning RA53 that February and March, standing off in the background, ready to intervene against the German heavy units lurking in Norwegian waters, while the merchantmen and their close escorts fought the weather and the U-boats in the foreground.

Distant cover is a phrase that hides an enormous amount of tedium and a fair amount of risk. The idea was simple: Tirpitz, Scharnhorst and their consorts were lying in Norwegian fjords, and if any of them came out, the convoy's destroyers and corvettes could do nothing whatever about it. So a battleship squadron sat over the horizon, out of range of the German airfields if possible, ready to come down and fight. It meant weeks of steaming in circles in the Arctic in winter, with the crew closed up at short notice, in weather that iced the upper deck faster than it could be cleared, waiting for something that almost never happened. Howe did that repeatedly through the winter of 1942 and the spring of 1943 and never once saw a German heavy ship. That is not a failure; it is the entire point. A fleet in being is deterred by a fleet in being, and the convoys that got through unmolested did so partly because she was up there in the dark being cold.

In 1943 she took part in Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, shelling the naval base at Trapani and the island of Favignana. The Trapani bombardment itself, codenamed Operation Fracture, opened with starshell illumination in the small hours of 12 July 1943 before Howe put seventeen salvoes from her 14-inch guns into the port. She went on to escort the surrendered Italian battle fleet to Alexandria following Italy's armistice, a properly striking role reversal for a ship that had spent the earlier part of the war fighting against Axis forces in the Mediterranean.

The Italian surrender is one of the great scenes of the naval war and it deserves its detail. Under the armistice terms the Italian fleet was to sail for Malta and place itself under Allied control, which it did, having been bombed on the way by its former allies: the brand-new battleship Roma was hit by a Fritz X radio-guided bomb off Sardinia on 9 September 1943, blew up and sank with over 1,300 men including the fleet commander. The rest came on. When they anchored, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham sent the Admiralty a signal that has been quoted ever since: be pleased to inform their Lordships that the Italian battle fleet now lies at anchor under the guns of the fortress of Malta. Howe was among the ships that then took a portion of the surrendered fleet on to Alexandria. The Malta side of it, from the deck of a corvette that was there, is in the article on HMS Bergamot (K189).

Halfway Round the World to Okinawa

HMS Howe underwent an extensive refit at Devonport before deploying east, arriving at Trincomalee in Ceylon in August 1944 to join what would become the British Pacific Fleet, as part of Task Force 113, later redesignated TF.57. From there she helped screen the fleet carriers as they struck Japanese-held airfields on Sumatra, keeping the pressure on Japan's western flank while the main event further east was still being assembled.

Getting the British Pacific Fleet into the Pacific at all was a political fight, and it is a better story than most of the operations it eventually carried out. Britain offered a balanced fleet to the Americans at the Quebec conference in September 1944. The United States Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest King, did not want it: he thought the Royal Navy should stay in the Indian Ocean cutting Japanese oil, and he argued, not unreasonably, that the US Navy's logistics could not support another fleet in the Pacific. Roosevelt cut across him with the observation that the British fleet was no sooner offered than accepted, and King, having lost, imposed the condition that it must be entirely self-sufficient: its own provisions, its own ammunition, its own spares, its own repair ships, with fuel shared only on the basis that the British put in as much as they drew out. That is why the Royal Navy had to invent an entire supporting organisation from nothing, the Fleet Train, described in the article on HMS Berry Head (A191). In practice American officers on the spot cheerfully ignored the whole policy, one of them telling the British Fleet Train commander that he could have anything at all that could be given without Admiral King finding out about it.

By early 1945 Howe had become flagship of the newly formed British Pacific Fleet under Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, and on 5 February that year she arrived at Auckland, New Zealand, alongside the cruiser HMNZS Achilles and four destroyers, a deliberate show-the-flag visit intended to lift morale and remind the Dominions that the Royal Navy had not forgotten the Pacific war. She moved on to Sydney later that month, and when the fleet finally sailed for action on 28 February 1945 as Task Force 113, four carriers, five cruisers and fifteen destroyers strong, she had already handed over the flagship role, her part in the diplomatic opening act complete.

She provided naval bombardment support for the Allied landings at Okinawa on 1 April 1945, one of the largest and bloodiest amphibious operations of the entire Pacific War, and during Operation Iceberg her anti-aircraft gun crews successfully engaged Japanese aircraft attempting to strike the fleet, a particularly demanding campaign fought under constant threat of kamikaze attack.

When the task force returned to the Sakishima Islands in early May for the follow-up operation, Iceberg Two, Howe and her sister HMS King George V turned their 14-inch guns directly on the Japanese airfield at Miyako-jima on 4 and 5 May, old-fashioned battleship gunfire standing in for once alongside the carrier strikes. On 9 May a coordinated kamikaze attack sent four Japanese fighters at the task force in barely six minutes: two struck HMS Victorious and a third hit HMS Formidable, but the fourth, breaking away to target Howe herself, was caught in the combined anti-aircraft fire of all three ships and went down in flames well short of her, a very close call indeed for a battleship that had come a very long way from the Arctic convoys to get there.

The 9 May attack is also a small advertisement for a British design decision that the Americans had thought unnecessary. Victorious and Formidable were both hit that morning and both were operating aircraft again within hours, because British fleet carriers were built with armoured flight decks at the cost of carrying fewer aeroplanes, and a kamikaze arriving on three inches of armour makes a dent rather than a hole. Formidable's own account of that week, in which she was struck twice, is in the article on HMS Formidable (67). Howe's part in the day was more prosaic and just as important: a battleship in a carrier screen in 1945 was there almost entirely as a floating anti-aircraft battery, and the sixteen 5.25-inch guns and the forest of Bofors and Oerlikons that had been added to her over three years of refits were the reason a fourth aircraft did not get through.

Her war ended in an anticlimax, which was true of a good many ships in 1945. She went back to Sydney in June and then on to Durban, arriving on 27 June for a refit in which her anti-aircraft armament was improved for the last time. The work was finished on 10 September. By then Japan had surrendered, the fleet she had been part of was already dispersing, and the most modern battleship in the Royal Navy was sitting in a South African dry dock with nothing left to do. She came home to Portsmouth in January 1946.

A Quiet Postwar Career and the End

HMS Howe served as flagship of the Training Squadron at Portland after the war, until 1950, a considerably quieter role than her wartime service across two oceans. She was towed to Inverkeithing on 27 May 1958 to be broken up by Thos W. Ward, closing out the career of a battleship whose active service had notably spanned the globe, from the icy waters of the Arctic convoys to the fierce fighting off Okinawa.

Her ship's bell was presented to St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, and components from her gun turrets reportedly went on to find further use as equipment at the Dounreay nuclear laboratory, an unusual final destination for parts of a Second World War battleship.

What happened to her afterwards happened to all of them, and quickly. Britain finished the war with five brand-new battleships, the most modern in the world outside the United States, and inside fifteen years every one of them had gone for scrap without firing another shot. The reasons were not sentimental: a King George V needed a crew of around fifteen hundred at a time when the Navy could not recruit them, cost a fortune to run, and had been comprehensively overtaken as the fleet's striking arm first by the aircraft carrier and then by the nuclear deterrent. Howe was flagship of the Training Squadron at Portland for four years, went into reserve in 1951, was marked for disposal in 1957 and towed to Inverkeithing in May 1958. She was fifteen years old and had steamed from the Barents Sea to the Sakishima Islands. Her bell went to St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh and pieces of her turret machinery reportedly went to Dounreay, which means that parts of a 1940 battleship spent the 1960s helping to handle nuclear fuel. It is not the ending anybody would have written for her, but it is a strangely appropriate one for a ship whose whole career consisted of being sent wherever the next problem was.