HMS Leviathan (1901): Named for a Sea Monster, Survived a U-boat

Constructed at Clydebank

HMS Leviathan was laid down on 30 November 1899 by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, launched on 3 July 1901 when Lady Inverclyde christened the ship, and completed on 16 June 1903, one of four Drake-class armoured cruisers built for the Royal Navy around the turn of the century.

She took her name, rather fittingly for a warship of considerable size, from the biblical sea monster, and displaced 14,150 tons, armed with two 9.2-inch guns and sixteen 6-inch guns arranged in casemates along her sides, a formidable broadside for a cruiser of her era, crewed by some 900 officers and men.

The other three are worth accounting for, because the class did not fare well. Drake, the name ship, was torpedoed by U-79 near Rathlin Sound off the north Irish coast on 2 October 1917 and capsized. King Alfred came through the war and was sold in the same wave of disposals that took Leviathan.

The fourth is the one everybody has heard of. Good Hope was Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock's flagship when he took an outclassed squadron of old cruisers against von Spee off the Chilean coast on the evening of 1 November 1914. She was hit repeatedly, blew up and went down in the dark with Cradock and every man aboard her. Nobody saw her sink and nobody survived to describe it. What Britain did about it five weeks later is set out in the article on HMS Inflexible (1907). Of four sisters built to the same drawings, two were destroyed and two were sold for scrap, which was the ordinary arithmetic of the armoured cruiser.

Two Decades of Peacetime Postings

HMS Leviathan was assigned to the China Station on completion, before serving with the Mediterranean Fleet in 1905 and 1906 and later joining the 5th Cruiser Squadron on her return home.

She was placed in reserve in 1908, recommissioned in 1909 for service with the 4th Cruiser Squadron, and returned to reserve once again in 1913, the familiar rhythm of a well-built but increasingly outdated cruiser cycling between active service and reserve as the Royal Navy's priorities shifted towards the new generation of dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers.

Dodging a U-boat En Route to Rosyth

HMS Leviathan was recommissioned on 15 July 1914 under Captain Marcus R. Hill, joining the 6th Cruiser Squadron the day after and taking part in the Fleet Review at Spithead, one of the last great peacetime displays of British naval power before war broke out that August. She spent the opening months of the war hunting German commerce raiders and escorting convoys, including troop transports sailing from the Cape to Gibraltar that September and October, briefly serving as flagship of the 1st Cruiser Squadron before transferring to the 5th Cruiser Squadron that December.

On 9 March 1915, while en route to Rosyth to collect Vice Admiral George Patey, the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the North America and West Indies Station and, only months earlier, the officer who had commanded HMAS Australia during the hunt for Admiral von Spee's East Asia Squadron, she was unsuccessfully attacked by the German submarine U-12, a close call that failed to inflict any damage and allowed her to complete her mission, arriving in Bermuda a little over two weeks later on 26 March.

U-12 deserves rather more than a passing mention, because she had already made history and had one day left to live. Two months before she met Leviathan, on 6 January 1915, she left Zeebrugge with a Friedrichshafen FF.29 seaplane strapped to her casing. Her captain, Walther Forstmann, and a naval airman named Friedrich von Arnauld de la Periere had worked out that a submarine could carry a seaplane out to sea, flood down until the aircraft floated off, and effectively double its reach.

It worked. The aeroplane took off from the water, flew along the English coast without being spotted and got back to Zeebrugge. That was the first time any submarine anywhere in the world operated an aircraft, and it was done by a boat of 1910 with an aeroplane balanced on her deck.

On 9 March 1915 the same boat fired at Leviathan and missed. On 10 March, the very next day, she was found off the east coast by the destroyers Ariel, Acheron and Attack. She tried to dive, Ariel rammed her, she came back up, and Acheron and Attack shelled her until she sank. Nineteen of her men died and ten were pulled out of the water. So the boat that missed Leviathan had less than twenty-four hours left when she fired, which makes the luck of that morning rather more evenly shared than it looks.

Flagship at Bermuda

HMS Leviathan went on to serve as flagship of the North America and West Indies Station, based at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda, a posting she held for three years until being relieved in early 1918. She subsequently turned to convoy escort duty between North America and Britain, shepherding vital transatlantic shipping to Liverpool and Devonport during the last, U-boat-dominated stretch of the war.

A Quiet Retirement

HMS Leviathan was placed in reserve in 1919 once the fighting had ended, and was sold for scrap on 3 March 1920 to Hughes Bolckow of Blyth in Northumberland, closing out the career of a cruiser whose most dramatic moment came not in any grand fleet action but in a single, unsuccessful torpedo attack on a routine voyage to collect an admiral, a particularly fitting reminder that even a ship named for a legendary sea monster could owe her survival, in the end, to nothing more than a German torpedo simply missing its mark.