HMS Nelson (28): Mined Twice, Torpedoed Once, Present at Japan's Surrender in Penang

Built to a Treaty's Limits

HMS Nelson was laid down at Armstrong-Whitworth's Low Walker shipyard on the Tyne on 28 December 1922, launched on 3 September 1925 and commissioned on 15 August 1927 at a cost of £7,504,055, the name ship of the two-vessel Nelson class, the very first British battleships designed specifically within the limitations imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, an agreement that sharply restricted the size and armament of capital ships across the world's major navies.

She displaced 33,300 tons standard and could reach speeds in excess of 23 knots, an unusual and instantly recognisable design with all three of her main 16-inch gun turrets mounted forward of the bridge.

That layout was not a stylistic decision, it was arithmetic. The Washington treaty capped a battleship at 35,000 tons, and armour is the heaviest thing on a warship. Put the turrets at both ends and you have to armour the whole length between them; put all three forward and the armoured citadel you have to protect gets very much shorter, and the weight saved can go into making it thicker. The design came straight out of the cancelled G3 battlecruiser studies, and the armour followed the all or nothing principle: either a compartment was fully protected or it was not protected at all, with none of the intermediate thicknesses that had made earlier ships heavy without making them safe.

It was an elegant solution with some very inelegant consequences. X turret sat on the forecastle deck behind B and could not fire directly forward, nor aft without wrecking the superstructure behind it. Nothing at all bore straight astern, which meant that a Nelson running away could not shoot at what was chasing her. And the ship's companies were instructed never to fire all nine 16-inch guns at once, because the blast damaged their own deck. The Navy called them the Cherry Tree class, on the grounds that they had been cut down by Washington.

Three Torpedoes, Three Duds

Barely two months into the war, on 30 October 1939, the German submarine U-56 slipped through the Home Fleet's escort screen west of the Orkneys and put three torpedoes into HMS Nelson's hull at close range. All three struck home and all three failed to explode, an outcome so wildly improbable that naval historians have long called it one of the most consequential non-events of the entire war.

Popular accounts have long placed Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, aboard Nelson at the very moment of the attack, with U-56's commander said to have been mortified for years afterwards at the thought of the man he might have killed. Naval historians treat the Churchill detail with some caution, since it may be a wartime story that grew in the telling, but the dud torpedoes themselves are beyond dispute, and Nelson sailed on entirely unscathed to fight another five years of war.

The dud torpedoes were not luck, or not only luck. German torpedoes were failing from the first weeks of the war, and failing in two different ways at once: the magnetic pistols were not firing when they should, and the torpedoes were running deeper than they had been set to. The percussion pistol, the backup, had been test-fired exactly twice, in 1928, before being pronounced indispensable and fitted to everything.

By early November 1939, a week after Nelson was hit, Donitz was reporting that at least thirty per cent of his torpedoes were duds. It got worse: during the Norwegian operation the following April the failures were so comprehensive that he pulled his boats out of the campaign altogether on the grounds that he could not fight with a blunt weapon, and only then did Raeder appoint a commission to look into it. A redesigned pistol took about another two years.

Which recasts the whole episode. A submarine commander who had done everything right, got inside a Home Fleet screen, and put three torpedoes into a battleship at close range was let down by a weapon his own service had never properly tested. Whether or not Churchill was aboard, and the Royal Navy would very much like him to have been, what saved Nelson that morning was a German procurement failure.

Mined by U-31 at Loch Ewe

HMS Nelson struck a magnetic mine laid by the German submarine U-31 at Loch Ewe in Scotland on 4 December 1939, only months into the war, an explosion that blew a hole measuring some 10 by 6 feet in her hull forward of A turret, flooding several compartments and wounding 74 of her crew.

Repairs kept her out of action until August 1940, a substantial loss of a capital ship's services at a moment when the Royal Navy could least afford it.

Torpedoed During Operation Halberd

HMS Nelson was struck again on 27 September 1941 during Operation Halberd, a Malta resupply operation, when Major Arduino Buri of the Regia Aeronautica's 36° Stormo pressed home a torpedo attack from his Savoia-Marchetti SM.84, flown up from Decimomannu in Sardinia, blowing a further hole measuring some 30 by 15 feet in her bow.

Remarkably, she remained operational despite the damage, though repairs continued until May 1942, a truly impressive display of resilience for a ship that had now absorbed two major underwater hits in less than two years of war.

Buri's skill left enough of an impression that a British officer wanted to track him down after the war simply to shake his hand and congratulate him on the attack, an unusually gracious footnote to what had, at the time, been a genuinely dangerous strike on one of the Royal Navy's most important capital ships.

Witness to Italy's Surrender

Once repaired, HMS Nelson spent much of 1942 and 1943 back in the thick of the Mediterranean war, escorting Malta convoys such as Operation Substance, supporting the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in November 1942 and providing gunfire support for the invasion of Sicily in July 1943.

She then played host to one of the war's genuinely historic moments: on 29 September 1943, anchored in Valletta's Grand Harbour, HMS Nelson became the venue for the formal signing of the Armistice of Malta, the long-form Italian surrender document, personally signed by Marshal Pietro Badoglio for Italy and General Dwight D. Eisenhower for the Allies. It made Nelson, remarkably, the setting for two separate national surrenders within the same war, a distinction almost no other ship on either side could claim once she went on to host the Japanese capitulation at Penang two years later.

Damaged Off the Normandy Beaches

HMS Nelson provided naval gunfire support during the Normandy landings in June 1944, but was badly damaged after striking two mines on 18 June, requiring temporary repairs at Portsmouth before being transferred to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in the United States on 22 June for a far more extensive reconstruction, a long and involved repair process for a battleship that had, by this point, been mined on two separate occasions during her wartime career alone.

Flagship at the Surrender in Penang

HMS Nelson returned to British waters in January 1945 following her American repairs, before deploying to the Eastern Fleet and arriving at Colombo on 9 July that year.

She served as fleet flagship and took part in Operation Livery off the Malayan Peninsula, before achieving a historic distinction: the formal ceremony marking the Japanese surrender in Malaya took place aboard HMS Nelson at George Town, Penang, on 2 September 1945, the very same day the wider Japanese surrender was being formally signed aboard the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, a fitting culmination for a ship that had survived so much to see the war through to its end.

The Penang ceremony, part of the wider Operation Jurist to liberate the island, was not without its own theatre: having signed the surrender document, the senior Japanese representative, Rear Admiral Jisaku Uzumi, reportedly fainted on the spot and had to be helped away for medical attention, while his sword was relieved from him by a British officer as a keepsake, a suitably undignified end to Japan's occupation of the island.

Bomb Target, Then the Breakers

Back in home waters after the Penang ceremony, HMS Nelson spent her last spell in active service as a training ship for the Training Squadron at Portland from mid-1946, a quiet final posting for a battleship that had spent the previous six years being mined, torpedoed and bombed. She was placed in reserve on 20 October 1947 and formally decommissioned in February 1948, before being listed for disposal that May. Rather than heading straight to the scrapyard, she was used as a bomb-test target between 4 June and 23 September 1948, a final piece of useful service helping the Royal Navy understand how modern ordnance affected a heavily armoured capital ship.

She was sold for scrap on 5 January 1949, with breaking up beginning at Inverkeithing on 15 March that year, closing out the career of a battleship that had survived mines, torpedoes and bombs across nearly the whole of the Second World War, only to finally succumb to a controlled test explosion in peacetime.