HMS Valiant (02): The Only Ship Undamaged at Jutland, Later Sunk at Her Own Mooring

Built by Fairfield

HMS Valiant was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, laid down on 31 January 1913, launched on 4 November 1914 and commissioned on 19 February 1916, a Queen Elizabeth-class battleship that joined the 5th Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet just in time for the war's greatest naval clash.

The Only Ship Untouched at Jutland

At the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, Valiant opened fire on the German battlecruiser SMS Moltke and engaged enemy battleships through the afternoon action, and in a particularly remarkable feat came through the entire battle as the only British ship present to sustain no damage whatsoever, a distinction few other capital ships in either fleet could claim.

The distinction is real and it is worth understanding what produced it, because it was not that nobody shot at her. Valiant was the third ship of the 5th Battle Squadron, the four fast Queen Elizabeths attached to Beatty's battlecruisers, and that squadron spent the afternoon of 31 May 1916 covering the run to the north under fire from the whole German battle line. Barham was hit six times, Malaya eight, and Warspite fifteen, the last of them while her jammed helm was carrying her in a full circle towards the German fleet. Valiant was hit nothing at all.

The reason is prosaic: she was third in a line of four, and German gunnery concentrated on the leading and rearmost ships. Position in a line is not a skill. It is, however, the difference between coming home and not, and thirty-odd heavy shells fell on her sisters that afternoon while she fired a hundred and two rounds of fifteen-inch and lost nobody.

Mutiny at Invergordon

Between the wars, Valiant served with various fleet squadrons and was present during the Invergordon Mutiny of 1931, when sailors across the fleet went on strike in protest at proposed pay cuts, a rare and striking episode of industrial unrest within the Royal Navy's ranks.

Invergordon deserves a sentence of context. It was not really a mutiny in the sense of officers being defied; it was a strike, in September 1931, by the lower deck of the Atlantic Fleet against pay cuts that fell hardest on the men who could least afford them, and it was conducted with a discipline that unsettled the Admiralty considerably more than violence would have. It also helped set off a run on sterling that drove Britain off the gold standard within the week, which is a remarkable thing for a few thousand sailors in a Scottish firth to have set in motion. The fuller account is in HMS Rodney (29).

The Rebuild That Made Her Worth Fighting

Between the wars is doing a great deal of quiet work, because the most important thing that ever happened to this ship happens inside that phrase. In March 1937 Valiant went into Devonport and effectively stopped being a 1916 battleship. She was there for two years and eight months.

What came out was very nearly a new ship on an old hull. Her boilers and turbines were taken out entirely and replaced with eight Admiralty three-drum boilers and four Parsons geared turbines producing eighty thousand shaft horsepower, in a fraction of the space, which freed room for everything else. Her deck armour was thickened to five inches over the magazines and two and a half over the machinery, because by the 1930s the threat was plunging shellfire and bombs rather than the flat trajectories of 1916. Her old casemate six-inch guns went and twenty 4.5-inch dual-purpose guns went in, able to engage aircraft and ships alike. She got modern fire control, an aircraft hangar and catapult, and, before long, radar.

She recommissioned on 30 November 1939, three months into a war. That is the whole reason she has a Second World War career worth writing about: of the five Queen Elizabeths only she and Queen Elizabeth were rebuilt to that standard. Warspite had an earlier and less complete reconstruction and kept her old six-inch secondary guns; Barham and Malaya were never re-engined at all, and spent the war being useful rather than formidable. That undersells Malaya slightly: she was given a substantial modernisation at Devonport between 1934 and 1936, with deck armour, a hangar, a catapult and a great deal of new anti-aircraft gunnery, but she kept her original machinery and that is what finished her seagoing career in 1943.

Mers-el-Kebir and Cape Matapan

Valiant saw extensive Mediterranean service in the Second World War, opening fire alongside HMS Hood and HMS Resolution during the attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940. At the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941, a young Prince Philip, later Duke of Edinburgh, served aboard as a midshipman, controlling the battleship's searchlights during the night action against the Italian fleet.

Crippled by Italian Frogmen

In December 1941, Italian frogmen of the Decima Flottiglia MAS penetrated Alexandria harbour and severely damaged Valiant with limpet mines while she lay at her own mooring, one of the more remarkable special operations of the naval war.

Two Charges Under the Hull

The night of 18 and 19 December 1941 is one of the most successful special operations in naval history and it is worth being exact about what happened to this ship. Three two-man crews of the Decima Flottiglia MAS rode manned torpedoes into Alexandria harbour behind ships entering through the boom gate. One pair attached their charge under a tanker. One pair got under Queen Elizabeth. The third, Luigi Durand de la Penne and Emilio Bianchi, got their charge under Valiant and were captured before it went off.

What happened next has entered legend, and unlike most such stories it is well documented. De la Penne, held aboard the ship he had just mined, refused to say anything until a few minutes before the charge was due, then asked to see the captain and told him to get his men up from below. Valiant's people were moved off the lower decks. The charge tore a large hole in her bottom forward and she settled onto the harbour bed by the head.

Both battleships were sitting on the mud in about forty feet of water, which meant they were still upright, still had their upperworks and quarterdecks above the surface, and could be photographed from the air looking entirely normal. Admiral Cunningham deliberately kept up the appearance, and for some time the Italian navy did not know it had just removed the entire British Mediterranean battle line in a single night. HMS Queen Elizabeth has the other half of that night.

After repairs at Durban, Valiant eventually joined the Eastern Fleet for operations against Japanese bases.

Valiant was patched up at Alexandria, sent round to Durban for proper repair, and was back in service by the summer of 1943 in time for Salerno. De la Penne was decorated for the operation after the war by an Italy that had changed sides, and by the story that has always been told about it the officer who presented the medal was Charles Morgan, who had been Valiant's captain on the night in question.

A Dockyard Accident and Retirement

A drydock accident in Ceylon in August 1944 damaged Valiant's propulsion and effectively ended her active career; she returned to the United Kingdom, was decommissioned in July 1945, and spent her final months in a training capacity before being sold for scrap on 19 March 1948 and broken up later that year, closing out the career of one of the Royal Navy's most consistently active battleships of both world wars.

The Dock That Broke Under Her

A drydock accident in Ceylon is nine words for one of the worst self-inflicted disasters the Royal Navy had in the whole war, and it is worth setting out.

On 8 August 1944 Valiant was lifted in Admiralty Floating Dock 23 at Trincomalee. A floating dock works by pumping out its buoyancy tanks in a sequence matched to the weight distribution of the ship it is lifting, and the sequence used that day did not suit a battleship carrying a full outfit of ammunition. The ends of the dock took loads they were never designed for. The dock broke its back, buckled, and sank underneath her.

She survived it because she had been kept in steam, which meant she had power, pumps and steering the moment things started to go wrong; a cold ship in that dock would very probably have been lost. As it was, two of her four propeller shafts were jammed solid and one rudder was damaged. There was no facility east of Suez capable of putting that right, the affair was kept extremely quiet, and a modernised battleship that had fought at Jutland, Mers-el-Kebir, Matapan and Salerno was finished, not by the Germans, the Italians or the Japanese, but by a docking accident.

She got herself home, paid off in July 1945, and spent her last years as part of a shore training establishment at Devonport before going to the breakers in 1948. Of the ships that fought at Jutland, very few had a second war at all, and fewer still had one like hers.