HMS King George V (41): From the Bismarck to a Piano Maker's Propeller Plant

A Second Ship for the Same King

HMS King George V was ordered on 29 July 1936 under that year's building programme, from Vickers Armstrong at Newcastle upon Tyne, and laid down on 1 January 1937.

She was launched on 21 February 1939 as the lead ship of five King George V-class battleships, the first British capital ships laid down since the Nelsons of the early 1920s and the ones that had to carry the Royal Navy through the war that everybody could by then see coming.

The name was not the Admiralty's idea. The reigning King asked that the ship be named in honour of his late father, after whom a class of battleships had already been named in 1911.

That makes her the second major warship to carry it, and it is why her battle honours board opens with JUTLAND 1916, an action fought twenty-three years before she was launched by a completely different ship of the same name, which had led the entire British battle line into it. Very few warships inherit a battle honour from a predecessor they never met.

She carried ten 14-inch guns in two quadruple turrets and one twin, which is a strange number in a strange arrangement and was nobody's first choice. The full story of how a treaty Japan refused to sign left Britain building the only 14-inch battleships of the war is told in our article on her sister HMS Howe, so it will not be repeated here.

What matters for this ship is the practical consequence, which arrived at the worst possible moment and is dealt with below.

In November 1941 a Warship Week National Savings campaign saw her adopted by the civil community of the city of Birmingham, a link between a battleship and a landlocked industrial city that says a good deal about how the war was actually paid for.

Her Escort Ran Aground Getting Her to Sea

She commissioned on 1 October 1940 under Captain W. R. Patterson while still unfinished, the intention being to take her round to Rosyth to have the rest of her built.

Given what she was, the passage out of the Tyne on 17 October was treated as an operation in its own right: two anti-aircraft cruisers and seven destroyers were laid on to meet her, the destroyers ordered to run in at twenty-three knots specifically to set off any acoustic mines in the channel.

It went wrong before she had properly started. The buoy the destroyers were steering for had drifted out of position, the next one south was mistaken for it in heavy drizzle and poor visibility, and the senior officer turned his division out of the swept war channel at high speed.

Fame and Ashanti went hard aground at the top of high water springs and were seriously damaged, Maori was damaged more lightly, and the other three destroyers missed the same fate by very little. The most valuable ship in the country got safely to Rosyth. Her escort did not.

Churchill came aboard on 23 October, the First Lord and the Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet on 30 November, and on 4 December she fired her main armament for the first time west of the Orkneys. Those trials, the record notes without drama, exposed various defects in the operation of the loading mechanisms.

She officially joined the Home Fleet on 11 December 1940, with that observation sitting in a file and rather less than six months to run before it mattered.

An Ambassador Out, a Cipher Machine Back

Her first real job was diplomatic. On 15 January 1941, at Scapa, a destroyer came alongside carrying the Prime Minister and Lord Halifax, the new ambassador to the United States.

They had lunch aboard, Churchill went off to inspect the canteen at Flotta, and at half past four that afternoon she sailed for America on Operation Parcel.

She reached Chesapeake Bay on 24 January, where President Roosevelt came out in the presidential yacht Potomac to welcome the new ambassador in person, a piece of theatre aimed squarely at American public opinion at a moment when Britain badly needed it. Halifax landed at Annapolis.

American naval officers and cadets came out to look over the newest battleship in the world.

What she took home was worth more than what she brought. On the morning of 25 January she sailed with an American army and navy delegation of cipher specialists embarked, and with them a working analogue of PURPLE, the machine the United States had built to read the Japanese diplomatic cipher.

This was the Sinkov mission: four men, Abraham Sinkov and Leo Rosen of the Army's Signal Intelligence Service and Lieutenants Robert Weeks and Prescott Currier of OP-20-G, and it was the beginning of the Anglo-American codebreaking partnership.

They had a fortnight of filthy weather on the way over, which at least proved she was a good sea boat, and on 6 February they went ashore at Scapa and straight on to Bletchley Park. A battleship's most consequential single voyage turned out to be a courier run.

The Bismarck, From the Flagship's Own Bridge

On 22 May 1941 she sailed from Scapa flying the flag of Admiral Sir John Tovey, Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet, with the carrier HMS Victorious and four light cruisers in company. What happened over the following five days involved a great many ships and is told elsewhere in these pages from their several points of view: the loss of HMS Hood, the shadowing by HMS Norfolk, Victorious's Swordfish strike, Rodney's gunnery and the torpedoes that finished her. This is what it was like on the flagship.

At 0848 on 27 May she opened fire at about 25,500 yards. It was not a promising start: Bismarck was coming head-on, the weather was squally, and her gunnery officers could not get a range. At 0853 the operator of her Type 284 fire control radar finally produced an accurate 20,500 yards and she straddled.

At 0859, down to 16,000 yards, she turned to starboard to open her A arcs and bring everything to bear. At 0910 Bismarck put a salvo 400 yards over her, which was the only time in the entire action that a German shell came near her.

Then her own ship began to work against her. At 0913 the blast of her own guns knocked out the Type 284 radar that had just found the range. At 0922 the loading mechanism of A turret jammed, putting all four guns out of action for ten minutes, and Y turret did the same for seven.

For seven minutes of the action she was firing at eighty per cent of her capacity and for twenty-three minutes at forty per cent. Only B turret, the small twin nobody had wanted, worked faultlessly from beginning to end.

Her low freeboard forward, the other famous complaint about the class, was meanwhile letting water into her shell rooms in the heavy sea.

At 1015 Tovey signalled the Admiralty that Bismarck was a wreck, without a gun firing, on fire fore and aft and wallowing more heavily every moment. At 1021 Y turret fired her last salvoes, doing further damage to the enemy and a certain amount to her own flagship.

Two minutes later a Swordfish came up to ask her to check fire so that it could put in another torpedo attack, and was promptly shot at by her own anti-aircraft gunners. She had fired 339 fourteen-inch shells and 660 rounds of 5.25-inch, and she and HMS Rodney were both dangerously short of fuel.

The last word belongs to London. At 1137, with Bismarck already an hour on the bottom, the Admiralty signalled that she must be sunk at all costs and that King George V should remain on the scene to do it even if it subsequently meant towing King George V home. The signal had been sent at Churchill's insistence.

Tovey's private opinion was that it was the stupidest and most ill-considered signal ever made, and it is difficult to argue with a man who had just spent ninety minutes conducting a battle from a bridge whose radar his own guns had destroyed.

She Cut a Destroyer in Half

On 1 May 1942 she was north-east of Iceland with the Home Fleet and the American battleship USS Washington, covering the Russian convoys PQ 15 and QP 11. At a quarter to four in the afternoon the battle fleet ran into a thick fog bank while zigzagging, and King George V immediately signalled everyone to stop zigzagging.

The destroyer Punjabi did not receive it, carried on zigzagging, and crossed under the flagship's bows.

At twenty-five knots a battleship of nearly forty thousand tons does not stop, swerve or notice. King George V cut Punjabi clean in half.

The destroyer's stern section went down almost at once and her ready-use depth charges detonated as it sank, directly under the keel of Washington, the next ship astern, damaging the American battleship as well. Punjabi's forward section stayed up long enough for most of her people to get off, and the destroyers Marne and Martin picked up 201 survivors.

Forty-nine men were lost, almost all of them from the stern.

The flagship came out of it with a forty-foot gash in her bow, underwater damage from the depth charges, and most of her radar out. The damage ran from the stem back to number sixteen station below the main deck, with both sides of the ship open to the sea.

Two days later, at Seydisfjord, Punjabi's survivors were transferred aboard King George V for passage back to Scapa, which is a detail that takes a moment to absorb: the men were carried home by the ship that had run them down, and the pictures taken of her wrecked bow that week were taken partly from the deck of the destroyer that had rescued them.

Tovey shifted his flag to HMS Duke of York on 8 May and she went to Gladstone Dock at Liverpool, where she stayed under repair until the end of June. She came out with the new Type 273Q surface warning radar and Type 285 for her secondary armament, so the collision at least bought her the best radar fit in the fleet.

Arctic Cover and an Italian Fleet

The winter of 1942 into 1943 was spent on Arctic convoy work, providing distant cover for JW 51A, RA 51, JW 53 and RA 53.

It is the least glamorous duty a battleship can be given and it consists almost entirely of steaming in circles in the dark, in the cold, waiting for German heavy ships that mostly stayed where they were, which was rather the point. Our article on HMS Howe sets out what distant cover actually involved, and there is no sense in writing it twice.

In 1943 she went to the Mediterranean for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, where on the night of 11 July she and Howe shelled the port of Trapani and the islands of Favignana and Levanzo together, a feint intended to suggest landings on the west coast of Sicily, and afterwards took part in escorting the surrendered Italian battle fleet, an errand that must have felt like a reward after the Denmark Strait and the Barents Sea.

She then went home for the long refit that would fit her for a different ocean entirely.

The Only British Battleship to Shell Japan

By the summer of 1945 she was in the Pacific as flagship of Vice-Admiral Sir Bernard Rawlings, commanding the British carrier task force operating alongside the Americans off Japan.

On 16 August, at a conference aboard USS Missouri, Admiral Halsey offered Rawlings three ways of working: as a component of the American fleet under American orders, as a semi-independent force sixty or seventy miles away, or entirely on his own. Halsey recorded that Rawlings did not hesitate for a moment before choosing the first.

It was the right answer and it made him a great many American friends.

Before that, though, there was shooting to do, and she is the only British battleship that ever bombarded the Japanese home islands. On 17 July she detached from the British force and joined an American task unit under Rear Admiral Oscar Badger, flying his flag in USS Iowa, to shell the industrial area around Mito and Hitachi on Honshu.

Visibility was three miles in overcast and rain, so the whole shoot was conducted by radar. The bombardment opened at 2310 and ran until ten past one in the morning.

The battleships put 1,797 shells into the target area, of which 267 fourteen-inch rounds were hers, and the works of the Hitachi Manufacturing Company were duly damaged. Nobody shot back.

Twelve days later came the coda that nobody could have written. On 29 July she detached again, with three destroyers, to join an American bombardment group off Hamamatsu.

Her assigned target was Plant Number 2 of the Japan Musical Instrument Company, a piano and organ maker whose factory was turning out aircraft propellers. She opened fire at 2319 from 20,075 yards and put 265 fourteen-inch shells into it in twenty-seven minutes, of which about seven actually hit.

The physical damage was slight. The plant stopped producing anyway, because after being shelled by a battleship the workforce stopped turning up, which is a result of a kind.

That was the last time HMS King George V fired her main armament in action, and since no British battleship has fired hers in action since, it was the last time any of them did. Three centuries of the line of battle ended at a few minutes before midnight, off Hamamatsu, aimed at a piano factory.

Anchored in Tokyo Bay

On 30 August 1945 she put four platoons ashore as part of the British landing force that took over the Yokosuka naval base.

On 2 September, at anchor in Tokyo Bay, she was present while Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser signed the instrument of surrender for the United Kingdom aboard Missouri at fourteen minutes past nine in the morning, twelve minutes after the ceremony began and eleven minutes before it ended. HMS Nelson was doing the same job at Penang.

The moment worth keeping came the following afternoon. The escort carrier Speaker sailed down Tokyo Bay carrying 477 British and Commonwealth prisoners of war, the first ship out with liberated men aboard, and every ship she passed cleared lower deck to cheer her.

At two o'clock she passed King George V and got, in the words of the record, a tremendous round of cheering. On 8 September the battleship provided a Royal Marine detachment to mount guard at the British Embassy in Tokyo, and held it until relieved nine days later.

Cocooned, Then Cut Up

She stayed east for a few months, took a rest and recreation period at Melbourne, sailed from Hobart in January 1946 and reached Portsmouth on 6 March by way of Cape Town. From there she was flagship of the Home Fleet until 1950, which is a distinguished way to spend five years and involved firing at nothing whatsoever.

Then came the interesting part of her retirement. Laid up in the Gareloch, she became the first large warship preserved by what would now be called cocooning: armament sealed, dehumidifiers installed throughout, the whole ship kept dry against the day she might be needed. She never was.

She was never recommissioned, went onto the disposal list in 1957, and was towed to Dalmuir on the Clyde on 20 January 1958 to be stripped by Arnott Young. What was left of her arrived at Troon on 19 May 1959, breaking up began five days later, and the job was finished on 5 February 1960.

Her sisters went much the same way within a few years: Duke of York, whose story is here, Howe and Anson, who never fired her guns at an enemy at all. The fifth, Prince of Wales, had not lasted long enough to need scrapping, having been sunk by Japanese aircraft off Malaya in December 1941. Not one of the five survives.

Britain had five modern battleships in 1945 and none by 1960, which is either a national disgrace or an entirely rational reading of what aircraft and missiles had done to the type, depending on who you ask and how close to a scrapyard they happen to live.

She is, on any honest reckoning, a slightly awkward ship: undergunned by treaty, wet forward, with turrets that jammed on the one afternoon when everything depended on them.

She also carried an ambassador to Washington and a cipher machine to Bletchley, stood at the head of the fleet that destroyed the Bismarck, put a landing party into a Japanese naval base, and fired the last rounds a British battleship has ever fired in anger. Awkward ships can have remarkable lives.