HMS Ramillies (07): The Battleship a Midget Submarine Couldn't Sink

A Battleship Built for One War, Fighting Another

HMS Ramillies was a Revenge-class battleship, built by William Beardmore and Company at Dalmuir, laid down in November 1913 and launched in September 1916, arriving too late to take part in the First World War's largest and most famous naval clash at Jutland.

Missing Jutland was in a sense the point of her. The Revenges were the Royal Navy's answer to a question it had already answered differently once. The Queen Elizabeth class, laid down a year or two earlier, burned oil, made twenty-four knots and could work with the battlecruisers: the first fast battleships. The Revenges were deliberately the other thing. They were shorter, cheaper, originally meant to burn coal so that the fleet would not depend on imported oil, and about three knots slower. They carried the same eight 15-inch guns in the same four turrets, and everything else was traded away to save money.

It is a bargain that reads badly in hindsight and looked sensible at the time, and the class paid for it twice over. Three of her four sisters have accounts here: HMS Royal Oak (08) was torpedoed at anchor at Scapa Flow in October 1939 with over eight hundred men, HMS Resolution (09) was torpedoed at Dakar by a French submarine, and HMS Revenge (06) spent the war mostly being too slow and too valuable to risk. Ramillies is the one that got hit, mended, and went back.

She commissioned on 1 September 1917 and spent her final year of Great War service on the routine, watchful duty that occupied most of the Grand Fleet's battleships once the German High Seas Fleet had largely withdrawn from open battle, before settling into a long interwar career of exercises and fleet duty that would eventually see her called on again, over two decades later, for a war on an even larger scale.

A Deterrent Presence in the Atlantic and Mediterranean

War found her escorting convoy GC1 out to Gibraltar within its first fortnight, in September 1939, and by the following spring she was shepherding New Zealand troop convoys all the way from Wellington to Suez by way of Colombo. When Italy entered the war that June she settled into Mediterranean Fleet duties, covering Malta convoys and supporting the Fleet Air Arm's audacious night raid on the Italian fleet at Taranto on 11 and 12 November 1940, the attack later studied closely by planners on the other side of the world before Pearl Harbor.

The Taranto raid was flown from HMS Illustrious (87), whose own article sets out what twenty-one Swordfish did to the Italian battle fleet in a single night. Ramillies was part of the covering force that made the operation possible.

Back on North Atlantic convoy duty by February 1941, Ramillies had a narrower escape than most of the merchant crews she was protecting ever realised. On 8 February her convoy, HX106, was found by the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau; Scharnhorst's own captain proposed drawing the elderly, considerably slower Ramillies away so that Gneisenau could fall on the forty-odd merchant ships unopposed, a plan that would have cost the Germans almost nothing. Admiral Günther Lütjens refused, bound by Hitler's strict order not to risk his capital ships against another, and both battlecruisers withdrew, meaning a single ageing British battleship talked two much faster, much newer German ones out of a fight simply by turning up. That May she was detached from convoy HX127 to help hunt the battleship Bismarck, though she was recalled before catching up with the chase.

Torpedoed by a Midget Submarine off Madagascar

Ramillies's most extraordinary moment of the Second World War came on 30 May 1942, while she lay moored at Diego Suarez during the Allied invasion of Vichy French Madagascar.

A Japanese reconnaissance seaplane, launched from the submarine I-10, had spotted her at anchor the previous day, and that night a midget submarine launched from I-16, commanded by Lieutenant Saburo Akieda, slipped through the harbour defences. Akieda fired both his torpedoes: the first tore a roughly thirty-foot hole in Ramillies's port bulge forward of A turret, and the second, meant to finish her off, instead struck the tanker British Loyalty, which had unwittingly steamed into its path while making a break for open water and sank in Ramillies's place. Akieda and his crewman beached their midget submarine and fled inland, where they were eventually hunted down by British and South African troops combing the island.

They very nearly got away, and their story deserves finishing properly. Akieda and Takemoto ran their midget ashore and set off inland on foot, and they covered forty-eight miles before anybody caught up with them. On 2 June 1942, at Amponkarana Bay, they were intercepted by men of No. 5 Commando. Both Japanese were killed in the firefight that followed, and so was one Royal Marine.

There is a monument where they died. A makeshift one went up in 1972, and on 10 November 1976 the Japanese embassy replaced it with a plaque in French and Japanese recording that two brave Japanese sailors died there. Two men in a submarine about the length of a tennis court got inside a defended harbour, put a torpedo into a battleship and sank a tanker, walked the better part of two marathons through hostile country and died fighting on a beach. Whatever else it was, it was not a small thing.

The flooding that followed was extensive, a serious blow that would have sunk many less robustly built ships outright. Instead, Ramillies limped to Durban under her own power at a reduced nine to ten knots for temporary repairs, before returning to Britain for full restoration at Devonport, work that kept her out of action until June 1943.

When she came out of Devonport she went south again, and in August 1943 the escort that took her down the Atlantic included a brand new River-class frigate called HMS Plym. Plym went on to have the strangest career of any ship in this corpus: nine years later the Royal Navy filled her with Britain's first atomic bomb and vaporised her off the coast of Western Australia. Her story is in the article on HMS Plym (K271).

Back in Action for D-Day

Rather than being written off as too old and too damaged to matter, Ramillies returned to properly front-line duty. On 6 June 1944 she formed part of Bombardment Force D, supporting the Normandy landings from a position east of Sword Beach, opening fire at 5:30 that morning against the German coastal battery at Benerville-sur-Mer.

Over the course of the Normandy campaign she fired 1,002 shells from her main battery, one of the older battleships in the fleet proving that heavy, accurate naval gunfire support remained every bit as valuable in 1944 as it had been when she was first designed decades earlier.

One Last Fight, in the South of France

Normandy was not quite her final act. That August, Ramillies crossed to the Mediterranean to support Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, closing to within six miles of the coast to bombard German shore batteries around Toulon and, on 25 August, helping silence enemy guns at Porquerolles after firing more than sixty rounds from her main armament, a last significant action for a battleship that had already outlived most predictions made about her when she was launched in the middle of the First World War.

A Long-Serving Veteran's Final Years

Ramillies's active fighting career effectively ended with Normandy. She was reduced to reserve on 31 January 1945 and converted to a barracks ship that May, a common enough fate for an ageing battleship no longer considered worth the expense of keeping fully operational once the war's outcome was no longer in doubt.

She was finally sold for scrap in 1948, though sources disagree, sometimes considerably, on the exact date and even on where the breaking up itself happened, with Cairnryan, Troon and dates running into 1949 all cited. What is certain is that it closed out a career that had spanned both World Wars and survived one of the more remarkable submarine attacks any Allied capital ship endured.

A Battleship That Refused to Go Down

Very few battleships in naval history have been struck by a midget submarine's torpedo and lived not just to survive but to return, fully repaired, to front-line combat duty two years later.

HMS Ramillies's journey from the wounded, listing hulk towed into Durban harbour to the battleship pounding German positions off Sword Beach stands as one of the more remarkable comeback stories of the entire Royal Navy's Second World War.