HMS Prince of Wales (53): Eleven Months That Changed the Whole Idea of a Battleship

Bombed Before She Was Finished

HMS Prince of Wales was laid down at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead on 1 January 1937 and launched on 3 May 1939, four months before the war began. She was the second of the King George V class, five battleships built to a treaty limit that everyone else had by then quietly stopped observing, which is why they carried fourteen-inch guns when the Germans, Americans and Japanese were all going to fifteen and sixteen.

In August 1940, while she was still fitting out in the basin, the Luftwaffe found her. A 250kg bomb went into the water alongside and buckled about twenty-five feet of her shell plating, and she flooded badly enough to need pumping out and putting right before the work could go on.

It is an odd thing to say of a battleship, but she had taken enemy damage before she had a crew.

She commissioned on 19 January 1941 under Captain Louis Hamilton, and she commissioned incomplete. She was not officially finished until the end of March, and even then a number of the trials a new capital ship is normally put through were waived, because the Admiralty wanted her at sea.

The reason was three hundred miles away in a German shipyard, and its name was Bismarck.

The Workmen Were Still Aboard

On 22 May 1941 she sailed from Scapa Flow in company with the battlecruiser HMS Hood (51), and she went with Vickers-Armstrong technicians still living aboard her. They were there because her main armament did not work properly.

The King George V class carried their fourteen-inch guns in an awkward arrangement of two four-gun turrets and one twin, and the four-gun mountings were new, complicated and full of interlocks designed to stop the crew doing something fatal. What the interlocks did in practice was jam.

Her turrets had never had the months of firing and fault-finding that would normally have shaken the problems out, because there had not been months to spare.

So a battleship went to meet the most powerful ship in the German navy with civilian contractors below decks trying to keep her guns working while she fired them. It is worth holding on to that, because everything that is said afterwards about how she performed has to be read against it.

Six Minutes in the Denmark Strait

At about half past five on the morning of 24 May 1941 the two German ships were sighted, and at 0552 Hood and Prince of Wales opened fire at roughly 25,000 yards. What happened to Hood in the next few minutes is told in her own article and is not retold here.

Prince of Wales was close enough that she had to put her helm over hard to avoid running through the wreckage.

That turn put her exactly where every German gun could reach her, alone, and the next few minutes were the worst of her life. She was hit seven times, by a mixture of fifteen-inch shells from Bismarck and eight-inch from Prinz Eugen.

At 0602 one of them came through the compass platform, the open bridge from which the ship was being fought, and killed almost everybody standing on it. Captain John Leach and one other man survived. He was still in command of a ship whose bridge had just been swept clear around him.

Just after six he broke off, turned away and made smoke. She had fired fifty-five fourteen-inch shells and had thirteen men dead and nine wounded, and her guns had been failing throughout. By the end of it she could work only about half her main armament.

The cruisers HMS Suffolk (55) and HMS Norfolk (78), who had found and shadowed the Germans in the first place, kept the contact. She fell in astern with them, and that evening, between about ten to seven and seven o'clock, she fired another twelve salvos at long range and hit nothing at all.

The Shell That Decided Everything

Three of the shells she fired that morning did hit, and one of them mattered more than anything else either side did that day.

It went into Bismarck forward, below the waterline, and holed her fuel tanks. From that moment the German ship was leaving a trail of oil on the surface, was down by the bow, was taking water, and could not get at a large part of her own fuel. She was, in the most literal sense, a marked ship.

That is why Admiral Lütjens turned for the French coast instead of going on into the Atlantic to hunt convoys, and turning for France is what put him inside the reach of everything the Royal Navy could throw across his path.

The rest of that pursuit belongs to other ships and is told in their articles: HMS Victorious (R38) and HMS Ark Royal (91) for the air strikes, HMS Sheffield (C24) for the shadowing and the torpedoes fired at the wrong ship, and HMS King George V (41), HMS Rodney (29) and HMS Dorsetshire (40) for the end of it three days later.

A ship that had been in commission for four months, with her builders still aboard and half her guns out of action, fired one shell that determined the outcome of the most famous chase in naval history. It is not a bad morning's work for a vessel that was, by any reasonable standard, not ready.

Very Nearly Court-Martialled for It

Turning away was not popular in London. Churchill took the view that Prince of Wales and the cruisers should have pressed the action, and there was serious talk of court-martialling both Captain Leach and Rear-Admiral Wake-Walker, who commanded the cruiser squadron.

What stopped it was Admiral Sir John Tovey, the Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet, who took the view that both men had behaved entirely correctly and said that if they were tried he would strike his flag and appear as the accused's friend. The idea was dropped.

It is worth noting that some historians are not certain a court martial was ever formally proposed, and that the story rests substantially on Tovey's own account given long afterwards, so it is given here as what it is.

The judgement itself looks obvious now. A brand new battleship with a wrecked bridge, half her guns jammed and the shipyard aboard, alone against Bismarck in open water, had precisely nothing to gain by staying.

The Quarterdeck at Placentia Bay

She was repaired, and ten weeks later she was doing something no battleship had done before.

On 4 August 1941 she sailed from Scapa Flow carrying the Prime Minister. Winston Churchill crossed the Atlantic in her to Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, where President Roosevelt was waiting in the American cruiser Augusta, and the two men met for the first time as war leaders. The United States was still neutral.

The escort on the way out is described from the destroyers' side in the article on HMS Escapade (H17), and Churchill made a later Atlantic crossing in her sister HMS Duke of York (17).

On Sunday 10 August a joint church service was held on her quarterdeck, with hundreds of British and American sailors packed in together under the after turret and the two leaders sitting side by side. Churchill arranged the whole thing himself, down to choosing the hymns, and he was quite open about why: he wanted the photographs and he wanted the symbolism, and he got both.

He wrote afterwards about British and American sailors sharing the same hymn books.

What came out of those few days was a joint declaration of eight principles, published on 14 August, which became known as the Atlantic Charter. There was never a signed copy; it was a press release.

It set out self-determination, free trade, freedom of the seas and disarmament of aggressor nations as shared war aims of one country that was fighting and one that was not, and the United Nations grew directly out of it.

She called at Iceland on the way home, and Churchill went ashore at Reykjavik on 16 August before she took him back to Scapa Flow on the 18th.

Three Aircraft, One of Them Ours

In late September 1941 she went to the Mediterranean for Operation Halberd, running a nine-ship convoy through to Malta with Force H. The convoy fought its way past repeated Italian air attacks, and on the 27th the battleship HMS Nelson (28) took an aerial torpedo and was reduced to eighteen knots.

Prince of Wales was not hit, and what she demonstrated on that operation was quietly important. Her anti-aircraft fire was directed by radar, which was new, and she shot down three aircraft. Two were Italian. The third was a Fleet Air Arm Fulmar from the carrier, shot down by her own side.

That is not a comfortable sentence and it is not meant to be. Radar-directed gunnery was better than anything that had gone before, and it was still perfectly capable of killing a friendly aircraft that came in from an unhelpful angle.

Both halves of that were true at once, and the second half is the part that usually gets left out.

Sent East to Frighten Somebody

By the autumn of 1941 the government wanted something done about Japan, and what it decided to do was send two capital ships to Singapore in the hope that their presence would be enough. Churchill called it a vague menace.

Prince of Wales sailed from Britain in October, came round the Cape, left Cape Town on 18 November, reached Colombo on the 28th and sailed the next day with the battlecruiser HMS Repulse (1916) and four destroyers. They arrived at Singapore on 2 December 1941, five days before Pearl Harbor.

They were supposed to have a carrier. HMS Indomitable (92) had been assigned to them and ran aground working up in the West Indies, and her article tells that story. Nobody found a replacement.

So the deterrent that arrived at Singapore consisted of one modern battleship, one twenty-five-year-old battlecruiser and no aircraft of their own. On 8 December, the day the Japanese landed in northern Malaya, she sailed at twenty-five to six in the evening to find the invasion convoys, with Admiral Sir Tom Phillips flying his flag in her.

That photograph, taken as she left, is one of the last of her ever made.

One Torpedo, In Exactly the Wrong Place

What happened on 10 December is usually summarised as two capital ships sunk by aircraft. That is true, and it misses the thing that actually killed her.

The first torpedo attack came in on her port side late in the morning. One torpedo struck right aft, at the point where the port outer propeller shaft leaves the hull. It was, in engineering terms, the worst place on the ship to be hit, and it was luck rather than skill.

The shaft was turning at full revolutions. The explosion distorted it and destroyed the gland that seals it where it passes out through the hull, and the shaft went on turning, whipping inside a ship that was now open to the sea along its length. It tore its own way through bulkhead after bulkhead.

Something in the region of two and a half thousand tons of water came in very quickly, she took a list to port of eleven and a half degrees, and her speed fell away from over twenty knots to about fifteen.

Worse than the flooding was what went with it. The after part of the ship lost electrical power, which meant losing the pumps that might have contained the flooding, the ventilation that made the machinery spaces habitable, and the power to train and elevate most of her anti-aircraft guns. Her steering went.

By ten past twelve she was flying the signal that she was not under command, which is a battleship telling the world she can no longer steer.

Everything after that was arithmetic. Further torpedo and bombing attacks came in on a ship that could not manoeuvre and could barely shoot back.

Two Hours Off Kuantan

The destroyer HMS Express, in a piece of seamanship worth remembering, came alongside a listing battleship and took men straight off her deck. She sank at about twenty past one in the afternoon, rolling over to port, roughly two hours after the first torpedo hit.

Three hundred and twenty-seven of her men died. Among them were Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, the most senior Allied officer killed in the entire war, and Captain John Leach, who had survived his own bridge being destroyed in the Denmark Strait seven months earlier.

Repulse had gone down about an hour before her, and the morning as a whole, along with what has happened to the two wrecks since, is told in Repulse's article.

The lesson was learned instantly and everywhere. These were the first capital ships ever sunk at sea by aircraft alone while under way, free to manoeuvre and fully alert.

Everything about naval warfare after that morning proceeds from the assumption that a fleet without air cover over it is a target, and the reason a modern carrier never sails anywhere without its own aircraft was settled off Kuantan in about two hours.

A Swim and a Gin Sling

There is one more thing about Captain Leach.

His son Henry was eighteen years old and a midshipman, and in December 1941 he was ashore at Singapore working as a plotting officer in the war room. Two nights before Force Z sailed, father and son had a swim together and a gin sling.

Then Henry Leach stood in the plotting room and watched his father's ship go out, and followed on the plot what happened to her. Survivors afterwards remembered a young midshipman going along their ranks looking for a father who was not there.

He stayed in the Navy.

In 1979 he became First Sea Lord, and on 31 March 1982, when Argentina was about to take the Falkland Islands and a good deal of Whitehall was explaining why nothing could be done, Henry Leach went and found the Defence Secretary in the House of Commons and told him the islands could be retaken and that Britain should do it, because if it did not, the country would very soon be one whose word counted for little. The task force sailed within days.

Forty-one years separate the two events, and the same family is in both of them.

Eleven Months

She was in commission for less than eleven months from the day she was finished.

In that time she fought the most powerful ship in the German navy while her builders were still aboard and landed the shell that sealed its fate, she carried the Prime Minister to the meeting that produced the founding document of the post-war order, she took a convoy through to Malta, and she was sunk in a way that ended the battleship as the measure of naval power.

Her three sisters that survived the war, HMS Anson (79), HMS Howe (32) and Duke of York, all served longer and none of them did anything remotely as consequential. Neither did most ships that lasted thirty years.

She lies upside down off the Malaysian coast, a protected war grave. The name is at sea again on the carrier HMS Prince of Wales (R09), and the whole reason that ship has a ski jump and a squadron of its own is the morning her predecessor spent off Kuantan without one. HMS Exeter (68), who was in those same waters weeks later, learned the identical lesson the identical way.

Eleven months. Not many ships get a century and matter half as much.