HMS King George V

The King George V class was born of compromise. Designed in the mid-1930s when the major naval powers were still bound by the disarmament treaties, the new British battleships were shaped less by what the Royal Navy wanted than by what the rules — and Britain's faith in international arms limitation — would allow. Britain had championed a reduction in the maximum permitted gun calibre, and to honour the Second London Naval Treaty she armed her own ships with a 14-inch (356mm) gun at a time when rival navies were fitting 15- and 16-inch weapons.

It was a decision that would draw lasting criticism, leaving the class somewhat under-gunned against its foreign contemporaries. But the urgency of rearmament as war loomed allowed no time to redesign, and Britain pressed ahead. HMS King George V, the name ship, was built by Vickers-Armstrongs on the Tyne and commissioned in December 1940, becoming the first modern battleship to join the Royal Navy in two decades and the flagship of the Home Fleet.

To partly offset the lighter calibre, the designers gave the class a heavy battery of ten 14-inch guns in an unusual arrangement — two four-gun turrets and one twin turret — more main guns than most contemporaries, backed by a powerful dual-purpose secondary armament and one of the best armour schemes of any treaty battleship, optimised against the very 15-inch shells she might face.

She was a tough, well-protected and steady ship capable of around 28 knots. Her greatest weakness lay in the complex quadruple turrets, which suffered persistent mechanical teething troubles early in the war — a flaw that would embarrass her at the most critical moment of her career.

Where the class truly excelled was in survivability and gunnery control. Good radar fire-control, fitted and improved through the war, made the King George Vs deadly accurate, and their robust protection let them stand in the line of battle and trade blows with the most powerful enemy ships afloat.

Five sisters were built: King George V, Prince of Wales, Duke of York, Anson and Howe, and between them they fought in nearly every theatre of the naval war. Prince of Wales was rushed into service so quickly that civilian workmen were still aboard when she dueled the Bismarck in the Denmark Strait; months later she was sunk by Japanese aircraft off Malaya, a grim proof of the battleship's vulnerability to air power.

Duke of York won one of the Royal Navy's last great gun actions, hunting down and sinking the German battleship Scharnhorst at the Battle of the North Cape in December 1943. Anson and Howe served in the Arctic and later with the British Pacific Fleet, the class soldiering on against both Axis powers from the Norwegian Sea to the waters off Japan.

King George V's defining moment came in May 1941. As flagship of Admiral Sir John Tovey, she led the climax of the great hunt for the Bismarck. On the morning of 27 May 1941, after a Swordfish torpedo had crippled the German battleship's steering, King George V and HMS Rodney closed in and subjected Bismarck to a devastating bombardment, pounding her into a blazing, unmanageable wreck before torpedoes and scuttling finished her off. It was a defining victory — though King George V's quad turrets, plagued by jams, did not perform flawlessly even then.

That morning off France, King George V and Rodney poured over 300 heavy shells into the crippled Bismarck, reducing her upper works to a shambles — yet the German ship, her guns long silenced, refused to sink until torpedoes and scuttling charges sent her under. It was a grim, one-sided execution rather than a duel, and it settled the account for HMS Hood, lost only three days before.

Beyond the Bismarck action she spent years on the hard, unglamorous duty of covering the Arctic convoys to Russia and guarding against German surface raids in northern waters. She later moved to the Mediterranean, supporting the invasions of Sicily and Italy with her guns.

In the war's final phase she sailed east to join the British Pacific Fleet, bombarding the Japanese home islands in 1945 and present in Tokyo Bay at the war's end. Few battleships saw such varied service across so many seas.

HMS King George V was the embodiment of Britain's wartime battleship force: not the most powerfully armed ship afloat, hampered by a treaty-imposed gun calibre and troublesome turrets, but tough, well-protected, superbly directed and, above all, there — present in every theatre, doing the Royal Navy's hardest work from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Her part in the destruction of the Bismarck alone secured her a place in history, but her true value lay in her steady, relentless service across five years of war. If the Bismarck and Yamato are remembered for their drama and their doom, the King George V class is remembered for something less spectacular but ultimately more decisive: dependable, war-long command of the sea.

• V. E. Tarrant, King George V Class Battleships (Arms & Armour).
• William H. Garzke & Robert O. Dulin, British, Soviet, French and Dutch Battleships of World War II (Naval Institute Press).
• Angus Konstam, British Battleships 1939–45 (2): Nelson and King George V Classes (Osprey).