HMS Warspite (03): The Grand Old Lady Who Refused to Go Quietly to the Scrapyard

Constructed at Devonport

HMS Warspite was laid down at Devonport Royal Dockyard on 21 October 1912, launched on 26 November 1913 and completed in April 1915, a Queen Elizabeth-class battleship built around revolutionary oil-fired propulsion and formidable 15-inch guns, joining the 2nd Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet just as the First World War reached its height.

The Most Decorated Ship in the Royal Navy

There is a fact about HMS Warspite that ought to be the first thing anybody is told about her, and it is oddly seldom said. She has more battle honours than any other ship in the history of the Royal Navy.

This hull earned fifteen of them: Jutland 1916, Atlantic 1939, Norway 1940, Narvik 1940, Calabria 1940, Mediterranean 1940 to 1943, Malta Convoys 1941, Matapan 1941, Crete 1941, Sicily 1943, Salerno 1943, Biscay 1944, English Channel 1944, Normandy 1944 and Walcheren 1944. Add the twenty carried forward from the six earlier ships of the name and the total attached to the name comes to thirty-five. No other British warship comes close.

The name itself goes back to 1596 and a ship in which Sir Walter Raleigh sailed against Cadiz. The spelling has wandered, the meaning is argued about, and the Navy has kept using it for four hundred years, which is the only recommendation a name really needs.

Circling Under Fire at Jutland

At the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, Warspite suffered steering damage that sent her circling uncontrollably within range of the German fleet, inadvertently drawing enemy fire away from other British ships. Struck fifteen times, she nonetheless made it back to port, and the episode, however accidental, helped cement her enduring reputation for extraordinary resilience under fire.

Two Circles, and the Best Story in the Fleet

What happened at eighteen minutes past six on the evening of 31 May 1916 is worth the detail, because the version everybody knows is not quite what happened and is somehow better for it.

Warspite was turning to avoid the armoured cruiser HMS Warrior, which had blundered into the middle of the German battle line, been shot to pieces at close range and was lying stopped and burning. As Warspite put her helm over, the steering gear jammed hard. She could not straighten up. She went round in a complete circle, at speed, in full view of the German fleet, and then she went round again.

A twenty-seven-thousand-ton battleship steaming in circles at eight or nine thousand yards from a line of German dreadnoughts is a gunnery officer's dream, and they hit her repeatedly: at least thirteen heavy shells and a number of six-inch. She kept steaming, got her helm back, and was sent home under her own power.

And while all that was happening, every German gun that was firing at Warspite was not firing at Warrior. The cruiser was towed clear and sank the following morning, but her people got off, and they were entirely convinced that the battleship had deliberately put herself between them and the German fleet to save them. Officers from Warrior said so publicly and went on saying so for years.

It was not deliberate. It was a broken steering engine. But the effect was exactly what they thought it was, and there are worse ways for a ship to acquire a reputation than by accidentally saving a few hundred men and then declining, ever afterwards, to correct the record with any great enthusiasm.

A Virtually New Warship

Between March 1934 and March 1937, Warspite underwent a major reconstruction that fitted new propulsion machinery, thicker armour, modernised guns and improved fire control, effectively producing a virtually new warship built around her original hull, and setting her up for an extraordinarily active Second World War.

The reconstruction of 1934 to 1937 was the first of the Queen Elizabeth rebuilds and the template for the rest. Everything below the upper deck came out: new boilers and geared turbines in a fraction of the space, which freed volume for magazines and fuel; deck armour thickened against plunging fire and bombs; the elevation of the fifteen-inch guns increased so that they could reach out to thirty-two thousand yards; a new bridge tower; aircraft and a catapult. What she did not get, and HMS Valiant (02) and HMS Queen Elizabeth did, was a wholly new secondary armament; she kept her old six-inch guns in casemates. It is the one respect in which she was the least modernised of the three, and it made no difference whatever to what she went on to do.

Narvik and the First U-Boat Kill by Aircraft

In April 1940, Warspite led the Second Naval Battle of Narvik, destroying already-damaged German destroyers, while one of her own Fairey Swordfish aircraft sank the submarine U-64, the first U-boat kill by aircraft of the entire war, a notable first for naval aviation.

Ofotfjord, 13 April 1940

Led the Second Naval Battle of Narvik understates a genuinely audacious operation. On 13 April 1940 Warspite took nine destroyers thirty miles up Ofotfjord, a steep-sided Norwegian inlet a mile or two wide with mountains on both sides, to find and destroy the German destroyer force that had taken Narvik and was trapped there without fuel.

Taking a battleship up a fjord is the sort of thing that gets people court-martialled when it goes wrong. There is no room to manoeuvre, no room to turn, torpedo boats can come out of any side inlet, and a shore battery at close range can do real damage. What made it work was her Swordfish. Catapulted off and flying ahead of the force, it found the German ships in the side fjords and reported them before they could be a surprise, spotted the fall of her shot for her, and then found the submarine U-64 lying in Herjangsfjord and sank her with bombs: the first U-boat destroyed by a British aircraft in the war.

Eight German destroyers were sunk or scuttled that afternoon. Half the operational destroyer strength of the German navy was destroyed in Ofotfjord over those two engagements, a loss it never made good, and it is a large part of the reason there was no German invasion fleet available for England later that year.

One of History's Longest Naval Gunnery Hits

At the Battle of Calabria in July 1940, Warspite struck the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare at approximately 26,000 yards, one of the longest-range hits ever achieved in naval gunnery history, before going on to help destroy Italian cruisers at close range during the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941.

Crippled by Bombs, Twice

Warspite was badly damaged by German aircraft during the Battle of Crete in May 1941, requiring extensive repairs at Bremerton in Washington State, after which she joined the Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean.

Returning to Europe in 1943, she was struck off Salerno on 16 September by a German Fritz X guided bomb that tore a twenty-foot hole in her hull, killing nine of her company and wounding fourteen.

The Fritz X that hit her off Salerno is worth understanding as a weapon rather than a bomb: a fourteen-hundred-kilogram armour-piercing round with fins and a radio receiver, steered onto her from a Dornier at twenty thousand feet. Two more near-missed. She lost all steam, went dead in the water, took in five thousand tons of water and had to be towed to Malta by tugs, stern first, through the Strait of Messina. What the same weapon did to another ship in the same fortnight is described in HMS Uganda (66). She never had full power again, and one of her turrets was never repaired. She went to Normandy like that.

The First Ship to Fire at D-Day

Despite incomplete repairs, Warspite took part in the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944, becoming the first ship to open fire at 0500 hours that morning, and went on to bombard German positions at Normandy, Brest, Le Havre and Walcheren Island, firing her guns for the very last time on 1 November 1944, a fitting final combat action for a ship that had now fought in two world wars.

Running Herself Aground Rather Than Going Quietly

The Admiralty approved Warspite's scrapping in July 1946, but on 19 April 1947, while under tow to the Faslane breakers, she broke free of her tow lines in a severe storm and drove aground on Mount Mopus Ledge near Cudden Point, refloating herself before grounding again just yards away in Prussia Cove, as though the Grand Old Lady simply refused to be quietly towed to her end.

Five Years on a Cornish Beach

The salvage is worth setting out, because it took longer than her First World War service. She went aground in April 1947 in Prussia Cove, half a mile from the shore, on rock, with her back broken. Nobody could tow her off in one piece; nobody could break her up where she lay, because there was no way to get the material away from an exposed cove.

The answer took three years. The salvors patched her, pumped her out and refloated the hull in 1950, then moved her the short distance round to Marazion, in the shelter of St Michael's Mount, and deliberately beached her where the tide would uncover her twice a day. From 1951 to 1955 she was cut up on that beach, at low water, piece by piece, by men walking out to her across the sand. It remains the largest salvage operation ever carried out in British waters.

She did not entirely go. Parts of her lower hull are still in the sand at Marazion, and divers find them; her bell, her name plate and a good deal else survive in museums and in Portsmouth. And there is a small, entirely characteristic detail in the way it ended. The Grand Old Lady, having fought at Jutland, Narvik, Calabria, Matapan, Crete, Sicily, Salerno and Normandy, and having been ordered to Faslane to be scrapped, got out of her tow in a gale and put herself ashore in Cornwall instead.

What followed was the largest salvage operation ever carried out in British waters, with her hull gradually broken up in situ on Marazion beach between 1951 and 1955, until she finally disappeared from view that summer, a fittingly dramatic final chapter for one of the most celebrated battleships in Royal Navy history.