HMS Rodney (29): The Only Battleship Ever to Torpedo Another Battleship

Built to Fit Inside a Treaty

HMS Rodney was laid down at Cammell Laird's Birkenhead yard in December 1922, launched in December 1925 and commissioned in December 1927, one of two Nelson-class battleships designed as a scaled-down version of the cancelled G3 battlecruiser to squeeze within the 35,000-ton displacement limit imposed by the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty.

That relentless weight-saving gave her a distinctive silhouette, with all nine of her 16-inch guns mounted forward of the bridge in three triple turrets, but it also left her chronically troubled by propulsion and steering problems that would dog her for her entire career. Her own crews were not always kind about the results, nicknaming Rodney and her sister Nelson "Rodnol" and "Nelsol" after the tankers they vaguely resembled, or simply "the ugly sisters".

It is worth knowing what was given up, because the whole ship is an argument about weight. What Britain actually wanted after the First World War were the G3 battlecruisers, nine 16-inch guns apiece on 48,000 tons, and the N3 battleships behind them carrying 18-inch. Four G3s were ordered in late 1921 after months of Cabinet resistance and suspended within days, and a few months later the Washington Treaty capped capital ships at 35,000 tons standard and their guns at 16 inches, and they were cancelled outright. Rather than start again, the Admiralty took the G3 drawings and cut them down until they fitted. Rodney and Nelson are what was left.

The compromise everybody notices is the turrets, and the reason for it is not aesthetic. Armour is the heaviest thing on a battleship, and the length of the armoured box round the magazines and machinery is what drives the total. Put every gun at one end and the box gets shorter and the armour gets thicker for the same tonnage. So all nine 16-inch went forward: A on the forecastle, B superfiring over it, and X behind B on the forecastle deck, unable to fire directly ahead past the two turrets in front of it or directly astern past her own bridge. A ship with more heavy guns than any other British battleship could not, in a good many situations, use all of them.

The rest of the weight came out of the machinery, which is why she made about twenty-three knots when the fleet she had to work with was getting faster every year, and out of a good deal else besides. She and Nelson were the only British battleships ever built with 16-inch guns, and the only capital ships Britain completed between 1922 and 1937: fifteen years of naval treaty in which two awkward, slow, heavily armed ships were the entire British battleship programme. Her sister has an account here: HMS Nelson (28).

Mutiny at Invergordon

Rodney's interwar years mixed royal ceremony, serving as guardship for Cowes Week and taking part in King George V's Silver Jubilee Fleet Review in 1935, with a serious episode of unrest.

On 15 and 16 September 1931, her crew took part in the Invergordon Mutiny, refusing orders in protest at pay cuts that would have hit junior ratings hardest, a proposed 25 per cent reduction against a more modest 10 per cent for everyone else. Rodney's own contribution to the unrest was notably restrained, her crew simply working to rule and reportedly passing the time with a piano sing-song rather than anything more confrontational, but it remained part of one of the most significant breakdowns of discipline in the modern Royal Navy's history, resolved within days once the government settled on the flatter, universal 10 per cent cut.

Invergordon was a great deal larger than Rodney's part in it, and it is set out properly elsewhere in these pages. HMS Norfolk (78) carries the full account of what happened in the Cromarty Firth over those two days, how it started, how the Admiralty lost control of it, and what it did to the men involved afterwards. Rodney's own contribution, a work-to-rule and a sing-song round the piano, is the version of a mutiny most people would settle for.

Chasing the Ship That Sank the Hood

Rodney's defining moment came in May 1941, under the command of Captain Frederick Dalrymple-Hamilton. While escorting the liner Britannic toward Halifax, she was ordered to join the desperate hunt for the German battleship Bismarck, which had just sunk HMS Hood with catastrophic loss of life.

After days of pursuit and coordination difficulties across the Atlantic, Rodney finally caught up with the crippled German battleship on 27 May 1941, spotting her at 08:44 and opening fire three minutes later at over 23,000 yards.

The Only Battleship to Torpedo Another

Rodney's fourth salvo struck home at 09:02, disabling Bismarck's forward turret and bridge, and she then closed to point-blank range, pouring in full broadsides and, remarkably, launching torpedoes at the stricken German ship. According to naval historian Ludovic Kennedy, if the claim is accurate, it stands as the only instance in history of one battleship torpedoing another, though later underwater surveys of the wreck found no breach in Bismarck's torpedo bulkheads, leaving the exact fate of Rodney's torpedoes an open question even today.

Rodney fired 378 sixteen-inch shells and 706 six-inch shells before ceasing fire, with HMS Dorsetshire delivering the final torpedo blows that sent Bismarck to the bottom. The action's violent recoil left Rodney herself with cracked structural members, broken piping and loosened rivets, damage severe enough to require months of repair at the Boston Navy Yard.

What the range figures do not convey is how the action finished. Rodney did not stay at 23,000 yards. She closed, and closed again, and by the end she was firing nine 16-inch guns into Bismarck at around 2,700 yards, which for a weapon designed to hit things over the horizon is close enough to see the results with the naked eye. Bismarck did not hit her once. Every bit of the damage that took her to the Boston Navy Yard afterwards was self-inflicted: firing full nine-gun broadsides across her own forecastle proved more punishing to Rodney than anything the German ship managed. She shot herself half to pieces killing the Bismarck.

The two cruisers that made it possible are worth a word. Norfolk had shadowed Bismarck through the Denmark Strait and was still with her at the end, and HMS Dorsetshire (40) put in the torpedoes that finished her. And the ship whose loss set the whole thing in motion is here too: HMS Hood (51), who went down with all but three of her 1,418 men.

Malta Convoys and the Mediterranean

Once repaired, Rodney returned to active service escorting Malta convoys during Operation Halberd in September 1941 and, more dramatically, Operation Pedestal in August 1942, the desperate operation to resupply besieged Malta, during which she weathered repeated air attacks and near misses despite her persistent steering troubles.

She went on to support Operation Torch in North Africa that November, bombarding Fort du Santon at Mers-el-Kebir, before covering the invasions of Sicily and Italy through 1943.

Guns Ashore at Normandy

Rodney provided crucial naval gunfire support during the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944, engaging German coast-defence guns near Le Havre and supporting operations off Sword and Juno beaches, firing 99 sixteen-inch and 132 six-inch shells on the first day alone.

Her Normandy campaign was not without tragedy or mishap, however: on 7 June, the day after the landings, she accidentally rammed and sank Landing Craft Tank 427, returning from Gold Beach, killing thirteen crewmen, and was then rammed in turn by another landing craft. LCT 427 went unreported as simply missing for two months before the truth emerged, and her wreck was not found and identified until 2011.

Through Operations Epsom, Windsor and Charnwood, she went on to provide sustained indirect fire support inland, including one thirty-hour bombardment reaching targets twenty-two miles from the coast, before finally being withdrawn in mid-July having expended over 500 rounds of her main sixteen-inch ammunition.

Those Normandy figures are worth converting into something the reader can picture. A thirty-hour bombardment onto targets twenty-two miles from the coast means a battleship acting as very long-range artillery for the army, firing at grid references she cannot see, corrected by an aircraft or a forward observer on a radio, hour after hour, at a rate of fire slow enough to keep the guns from cooking. Twenty-two miles inland from the Normandy coast in June 1944 is well beyond Caen. There was nothing else in the Allied inventory that could reach that far with a shell of that weight.

The cost of doing it shows up in the ammunition figure. A heavy naval gun barrel is good for a few hundred full charges before the rifling is worn out and it has to come out and be relined, which is a dockyard job measured in months. Rodney fired more than five hundred 16-inch rounds off Normandy in six weeks. She was not merely being used hard, she was being used up, and the judgement at the end of 1944 that she was unfit for further front-line service was the arithmetic catching up.

Worn Out by the War She Won

By 1943, naval officials had already concluded that Rodney required a complete modernisation that the demands of war never allowed the time to carry out, and by the end of 1944 she was judged effectively unfit for further front-line service, worn down by years of extremely heavy use without proper refit.

She escorted one further Arctic convoy to Murmansk in September 1944 and briefly served as Home Fleet flagship, receiving a royal visit from King George VI in September 1945, before being decommissioned in August 1946 and finally sold for scrap to Thos. W. Ward, broken up at Inverkeithing from 1948.

A Flawed Ship That Delivered the Decisive Blow

HMS Rodney was never an easy ship to maintain, hampered from birth by the treaty limits that shaped her design and dogged throughout her career by mechanical trouble. But when it mattered most, standing toe to toe with Bismarck and pouring shells and, extraordinarily, torpedoes into her at point-blank range, Rodney delivered one of the most decisive single actions any British battleship fought in the entire war.

There is a full stop after her that is easy to miss. Rodney was broken up at Inverkeithing from 1948 and Nelson, having been used for bombing trials, followed her to the breakers. Vanguard, the last British battleship, was completed in 1946 and never fired her main armament at an enemy at all before going for scrap in 1960. Which means the sixteen-inch guns that Rodney put into Bismarck at 2,700 yards, and the shells she dropped twenty-two miles inland from Normandy, were very nearly the last serious work any British battleship ever did. It is a strange distinction for a ship her own crew called one of the ugly sisters.