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. She commissioned in late 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routine, watchful duty that occupied most of the Grand Fleet's battleships once the German High Seas Fleet had largely withdrawn from open battle, before settling into a long interwar career of exercises and fleet duty that would eventually see her called on again, over two decades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.

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. Japanese midget submarines, launched from the larger submarines I-16 and I-20 which had shadowed the fleet across the Indian Ocean in a genuinely audacious long-range operation, penetrated the harbour defences and struck Ramillies with a torpedo just forward of her A turret on the port side. The explosion tore a large hole in her hull and caused extensive flooding, 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.

Back in Action for D-Day

Rather than being written off as too old and too damaged to matter, Ramillies returned to genuinely 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.

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 on 2 February 1948 and broken up at Cairnryan that April, closing 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.