HMS Queen Elizabeth: The Battleship That Gambled on Guns Nobody Had Fired

Built at Portsmouth on a Genuine Gamble

HMS Queen Elizabeth was built at HM Dockyard, Portsmouth, laid down on 21 October 1912, launched on 16 October 1913 and completed on 22 December 1914 as the lead ship of the Queen Elizabeth class, one of the most significant battleship designs the Royal Navy ever produced.

Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, personally pushed the design through against considerable Admiralty caution by committing to eight 15-inch guns in four twin turrets, a jump up from the 13.5-inch guns of preceding classes, before those guns had even been test-fired, a truly bold piece of Edwardian procurement swagger that could easily have ended in expensive embarrassment.

She was also the first Royal Navy capital ship class built to burn oil exclusively rather than coal, a decision significant enough that it drove Churchill's 1914 Anglo-Persian Oil Convention, and the combination of oil-fired speed with battleship-grade armour and firepower created something notably new, the fast battleship, fast enough to operate with the battlecruiser squadrons yet armoured and armed well enough to stand in the main battle line.

That oil decision has a longer shadow than the ship. Britain took a controlling stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1914, weeks before the war, specifically to guarantee fuel for a fleet that had just committed itself to burning it. The company became BP, and the consequences of a government owning it ran on through Iranian politics for the next forty years. The line from these boiler rooms to a great deal of twentieth-century history is set out in the article on HMS Barham (04), one of her own sisters.

How the Gamble Turned Out

It is worth finishing that thought, because the gamble is the whole point of this ship and it came off more completely than anybody in 1912 could have hoped. Vickers drew the 15-inch Mark I as a scaled-up version of the 13.5-inch that had armed the previous generation, and because there was no time to do it properly the usual prototype and proof stages were simply skipped. The gun was ordered off the drawing board, for five ships at once. Had it turned out badly, the Royal Navy would have owned five useless battleships and had no time to build replacements.

It did not fail. A hundred and eighty-six of them were built between 1912 and 1918 and they went into twenty-two ships: eleven battleships, five battlecruisers and six monitors. At Jutland in 1916 they scored hits at nineteen and a half thousand yards, which was a world record for naval gunnery at the time. On 9 July 1940, at the Battle of Calabria, HMS Warspite (03) hit the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare with her first salvo at twenty-six thousand four hundred yards, which is fifteen miles, from one moving ship to another. It remains the longest-range gunnery hit any battleship has ever scored on another battleship, and nobody is going to beat it.

The last of them fired in 1954 and the design was not retired until 1960, when HMS Vanguard (23) went to the breakers. Vanguard, completed in 1946 as the last British battleship ever built, carried four turrets that had been made during the First World War, so the gun Churchill bought untested in 1912 was still the heaviest weapon in the Royal Navy forty-eight years later. It is generally reckoned the most successful heavy gun Britain ever produced and the longest-serving of any nation's.

The Only Modern Dreadnought at the Dardanelles

Sent to the Mediterranean, Queen Elizabeth took part in the bombardment of Ottoman forts during the Dardanelles campaign between February and May 1915, and served as flagship for General Sir Ian Hamilton during the Gallipoli landings on 25 April 1915, a remarkable role given that she was, at the time, the only modern dreadnought battleship present in a campaign otherwise fought by older pre-dreadnoughts and smaller craft, a genuine celebrity ship of 1915.

She was struck by Ottoman shore fire during the campaign without serious damage to her armour, before withdrawing on 12 May 1915.

The Battle She Missed

Queen Elizabeth joined the Grand Fleet's 5th Battle Squadron in May 1916, but famously missed the Battle of Jutland that same month, not through any fault of her own but simply because she was undergoing overhaul at Rosyth from 22 May to 4 June 1916, a stretch of scheduled maintenance that happened to bracket the largest clash of battleships in history and kept her, and her crew, out of the one battle every dreadnought of the era might have expected to fight.

Reconstruction, and a Second Battle She Missed

Between the wars Queen Elizabeth underwent a series of refits culminating in a comprehensive reconstruction at Portsmouth from 1937 to January 1941, which gave her a new tower bridge, modern dual-purpose secondary guns, radar and improved armour, transforming her into a considerably more modern fighting ship than her 1915 self.

She recommissioned for trials in December 1940 but was still working up and completing gunnery trials at Scapa Flow into the spring of 1941, which meant she was not present when her sister ships Warspite, Valiant and Barham fought at the Battle of Cape Matapan that March, a second major fleet action she missed purely on account of timing rather than misfortune in battle.

All three of those sisters have accounts of their own here, and between them they had a considerably rougher war than she did. HMS Valiant (02) was the other target at Alexandria that night and later sat down on the bottom of a collapsed floating dock as well. Barham was torpedoed off Sollum in November 1941 and blew up in front of a newsreel camera, the only battleship sinking anybody ever filmed. Warspite fought from Jutland to Normandy, was hit by a glider bomb at Salerno, and finally ran herself aground in Cornwall rather than be towed to the breakers.

She finally rejoined the Mediterranean Fleet via Operation Tiger, reaching Alexandria on 12 May 1941.

The Alexandria Raid

In the early hours of 19 December 1941, Queen Elizabeth was struck by one of the most audacious special operations of the naval war, an attack by Italian frogmen of the Decima Flottiglia MAS riding manned torpedoes known as maiali.

The team that reached her, Captain Antonio Marceglia and Lance Corporal Spartaco Schergat, placed a charge beneath her keel, while a separate team under the more famous Luigi Durand de la Penne struck her sister ship HMS Valiant nearby, an attack widely and understandably associated with Queen Elizabeth in popular memory but which was, strictly speaking, aimed at Valiant rather than at her.

The explosion tore a hole roughly 190 by 60 feet in her double bottom and torpedo bulge, flooding her boiler rooms and settling her on the harbour bottom on an even keel in shallow water.

Remarkably, she remained visibly afloat and continued flying her ensign and firing her anti-aircraft guns as though nothing had happened, which fooled Axis reconnaissance and much of the press for weeks into believing she had escaped serious harm.

The raid is generally understood as Italian payback for the British attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto the previous November, and casualties were recorded on both stricken battleships that night, a sober reminder that even a technically brilliant special operation exacts a real human cost on the ships it strikes.

After the war, Luigi Durand de la Penne was awarded Italy's Gold Medal for Military Valour in a ceremony presided over by Admiral Charles Morgan, Valiant's former captain, a striking and well-documented example of former enemies extending mutual respect once the fighting was over.

Repaired in Virginia, and On to the Eastern Fleet

Following temporary repairs at Alexandria, Queen Elizabeth sailed via Port Sudan in May 1942 to the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia for full repairs, which lasted from September 1942 to June 1943.

She then joined the Eastern Fleet, departing for Trincomalee in December 1943 and taking part in Indian Ocean and Burma theatre operations against Japanese-held positions, including raids on Sumatra, through into 1945, a long way from the waters off Gallipoli where her career had begun three decades earlier.

Decommissioning and a Curious Legacy

Queen Elizabeth returned to the United Kingdom in August 1945, was placed in reserve at Portsmouth, and was formally decommissioned on 15 May 1948 before being sold for scrap and broken up, sources giving Troon and Dalmuir slightly differently as the yard involved, likely reflecting a single scrapping contract carried out across more than one Arnott Young site.

It is worth noting, for anyone browsing prints of Royal Navy ships today, that the modern aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth is often assumed to be named for the present or late Queen, when in fact she carries the name onward in the line of this very battleship, both ships ultimately honouring Elizabeth I.

The carrier in question is HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08), and there is a pleasing symmetry in it. This ship was the first British capital ship built to burn oil alone, and the change of fuel is what made the fast battleship possible. The carrier that took her name a century later exists because of a different technical bet entirely, on a jet that takes off up a ramp, and she nearly did not exist at all.

It is a fitting little footnote for a ship whose own career began with a gamble on guns nobody had fired and ended, thirty-odd years later, still afloat and still defiant at the bottom of Alexandria harbour.