HMS Rodney

The Rodney is a treaty ship in the most literal sense: she exists in the shape she does because of a document. Britain had designed the enormous G3 battlecruisers in the early 1920s, and the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 made them illegal before they could be built, capping new capital ships at 35,000 tons.

What followed was an exercise in subtraction. The Admiralty took the G3 design and cut it down to fit the limit, keeping the 16-inch guns and the armour and sacrificing almost everything else — above all speed. The two ships that resulted, Nelson and Rodney, were promptly nicknamed the Cherry Tree class: cut down by Washington. The lower deck had a second name for them, Nelsol, because their silhouette — bridge amidships, nothing forward of the guns — looked like the fleet oilers whose names all ended in the same syllable.

The result looked like no other battleship afloat. All nine 16-inch guns were mounted in three triple turrets forward of the bridge, with the machinery pushed aft — an arrangement adopted for one reason: armour is heavy, and concentrating the magazines and turrets into a single short stretch of hull meant a shorter armoured citadel to protect. Within a fixed tonnage, that bought thicker armour.

The costs were real and permanent. She could not fire directly astern with the forward turrets, the blast of her own guns damaged her decks and superstructure, and the machinery arrangement left her slow: about 23 knots, against the 28 to 30 of the fast battleships that came later. A ship that cannot choose the range is a ship that fights when the enemy allows it — a limitation that would come very close to mattering on the one morning she was needed.

Her 16-inch/45 Mark I guns were themselves a departure. British practice had favoured heavy shells at moderate velocity; these fired a comparatively light shell at high velocity, a choice that gave excellent range on paper and, in service, disappointing accuracy and rapid barrel wear. The Nelsons were never regarded as good gunnery ships in peacetime exercises.

They were, however, carrying the heaviest broadside in the Royal Navy — some 8,360 kg of shell in a single salvo — against a navy whose other battleships mounted 15-inch guns at best. Whatever the dispersion figures said, a 16-inch shell that arrived did damage on a scale nothing else in British service could match.

On the morning of 27 May 1941 the Bismarck, her steering wrecked the night before by a Swordfish torpedo, was steaming in a slow circle unable to steer away from anything. Rodney and King George V came up from the north-west and opened fire at 08:47. Within about half an hour the German ship’s main armament had been silenced — her fire control gone, her forward turrets out — and what followed was not a battle but a demolition carried out at ranges that fell steadily as the British ships closed.

Rodney closed to point-blank range and fired full broadsides on an almost flat trajectory — so close that her shells were arriving before the German crew could react to the muzzle flashes. She expended roughly 380 sixteen-inch and 706 six-inch shells that morning, and fired three torpedoes at about 3,000 yards, one of which is credited with hitting: as far as the records go, the only occasion in history on which one battleship torpedoed another. The blast of her own guns, fired at that depression, tore up her decks and wrecked her own fittings. Bismarck sank shortly after 10:30.

A decade earlier the same ship had been at the centre of something entirely different. In September 1931, at Invergordon, sailors of the Atlantic Fleet refused to put to sea in protest at pay cuts imposed on the lower deck — and Rodney’s crew were among those who took part in what became the last mutiny in the modern Royal Navy.

It was a strike rather than a rising: no violence, no officers harmed, ships simply not sailing. The government reduced the cuts within days, but the shock ran through the City of London and contributed to Britain leaving the gold standard that same month. It is an unusual line in a battleship’s record — the ship that sank the Bismarck had already helped, without firing anything, to move the British economy.

The rest of her war was the unglamorous use of heavy guns. She escorted the Malta convoys, including Operation Pedestal in August 1942, when the survival of the island depended on getting a handful of merchant ships through sustained air attack. She covered the Torch landings in North Africa in November 1942 and the invasion of Sicily in 1943, shelling the shore.

On D-Day and in the weeks after, her 406 mm shells reached German assembly areas well inland of the beaches — artillery no army could match, delivered from the sea. By then she was worn out: never given the full modernisation her sisters’ contemporaries received, she finished the war mechanically tired, and was scrapped in 1948.

By the ordinary measures the Nelsons were compromised ships: slow, ugly, awkward to handle, with guns that never quite matched their reputation, and obsolete as fleet units almost as soon as the fast battleships appeared. They are usually written up as an interesting failure of treaty design.

But warships are not judged only on averages. On one morning in the North Atlantic the Royal Navy needed a ship that could close to two miles and destroy a modern battleship with gunfire, and the compromise design with all its guns forward and thick armour over a short citadel was exactly the tool for it. Rodney fired more heavy shells in ninety minutes than most battleships fired in the entire war, and the ship she was firing at is the most famous warship Germany ever built.

• Iain Ballantyne, HMS Rodney (Warships of the Royal Navy, Pen & Sword).
• William H. Garzke & Robert O. Dulin, British, Soviet, French and Dutch Battleships of World War II (Naval Institute Press).
• S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea 1939–1945 (HMSO) — the official history.