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.

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 25 September 1941 during Operation Halberd, a Malta resupply operation, this time by an Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.84 torpedo bomber, which blew 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 genuinely impressive display of resilience for a ship that had now absorbed two major underwater hits in less than two years of war.

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 genuinely 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 genuinely 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.

Bomb Target, Then the Breakers

HMS Nelson 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.