Three sister ships were laid down in October and November 1916, but in the spring of the following year intelligence sources revealed Germany had given up constructing capital ships. Cancellation of Hood’s sisters was confirmed shortly before the war ended in November 1918.
After concluding post-Jutland repair work and trials on the Firth of Forth, the Warspite had returned to Scapa Flow at the end of July 1916.
In mid-August the Grand Fleet put to sea in pursuit of the High Sea Fleet. It had been spotted by a British submarine which managed to torpedo the German battleship Westfalen and send an accurate sighting report. However, the Germans eluded the rapidly closing British trap because of an error by their scouting Zeppelins which mistook Royal Navy cruisers and destroyers speeding north from Harwich as part of the Grand Fleet. The German battleships and battlecruisers hared off southwards hoping to have a portion of the Grand Fleet at their mercy. Subsequent signals from the scouting Zeppelins informed Admiral Scheer that the bulk of the Grand Fleet was in fact closing from the north. Fearing a trap, he decided to head for home without further delay.
HMS Hood, a speedier version of the Queen Elizabeth Class super dreadnoughts. Goodman Collection
HMS Warspite digs her bows in during a vain attempt to run down the High Sea Fleet. Franklin Collection.
The battleship’s restored upper works. Franklin Collection.
During the voyage back to Scapa from this frustrated dash south, Warspite’s steering curse struck again and she had to pull out of line in considerable difficulty. The reason for this was a mystery for the problem soon righted itself.
Misfortune struck again when Warspite managed to ram HMS Valiant amidships on returning from some night shooting. Warspite’s bows were stoved in again while Valiant’s oil tanks were cracked open. Warspite was out of action for more than a month.
An inquiry into the accident apportioned blame equally – Warspite should have kept a sharper look out, but so should Valiant. Captain Phillpotts and the Commanding Officer of Valiant were declared equally guilty by an inquiry but the Spite’s Commanding Officer escaped a reprimand.
In November 1916, Jellicoe was promoted to First Sea Lord and command of the Grand Fleet passed to David Beatty who was not given the most enthusiastic reception when he arrived at Scapa Flow. The resentment over Jutland was still keenly felt. Aboard Warspite and the other battleships the sailors greeted him with silence until ordered to start cheering.
The 5th Battle Squadron soon lost a member, for in early 1917 Beatty chose HMS Queen Elizabeth as his flagship. Captain Phillpotts had already said farewell to the Warspite, leaving her in December 1916 to become First Sea Lord’s Naval Assistant to Jellicoe.
Ever the astute politician, Beatty implemented a decision which found favour with the government by bringing the Grand Fleet’s main base to the Firth of Forth. The Forth was not, however, a comfortable place to base so many large vessels, so battlewagons were often sent north on extended detachment to Scapa where they had plenty of room for intensive gunnery practice.
It was after just such a gunnery practice session in the summer of 1917 that HMS Warspite was rocked at her Scapa Flow anchorage by a cataclysmic explosion which completely destroyed HMS Vanguard. Forlorn boats plyed back and forth in a hopeless search for the living, under a vast towering column of smoke, but there were only two survivors from the 700 or so people aboard the St Vincent Class battleship at the time. All Grand Fleet warships including Warspite, made urgent checks of their magazines to ensure they wouldn’t suffer the same fate at the hands of faulty cordite.
Eight months later Warspite suffered a severe fire in her port wing engine room. An oil pipe had split and the blaze started when fuel dripped onto a hot steam pipe. Attempts were made to douse the fire with water hoses but it didn’t go out until a brave sailor switched off the oil supply at source. Hit by this latest episode of bad luck, Warspite faced another four months of repairs.
As the German army was trying, and failing, to achieve a decisive breakthrough during the Kaiser Offensive of Spring 1918, the High Sea Fleet made an ill-starred foray into the North Sea. The German intention was to savage a convoy off the coast of Norway and lay waste to the Royal Navy escort. The German force was emphatically not looking for an encounter of any description with the Grand Fleet. However, not only did the target convoy evade them, but the battlecruiser Moltke lost one of her props, a turbine exploded and an engine room was flooded. Under tow from the battleship Oldenburg, the Moltke was also torpedoed by a British submarine. Warspite and the rest of the Grand Fleet put to sea and made speed to the south-east but, as usual, it was a chase in vain, for the entire High Sea Fleet escaped to Wilhelmshaven not long after the Moltke.
The 5th Battle Squadron lost one of its members, when Admiral Beatty chose HMS Queen Elizabeth to be his Grand Fleet flagship. The official German naval surrender took place aboard her in November 1918. Goodman Collection.
HMS Warspite at Scapa Flow. US Naval Historical Center.
The Warspite was rocked at her moorings when the battleship HMS Vanguard, pictured, blew up due to faulty ammunition. Goodman Collection.
Even as hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were deserting their trenches to walk home, and the U-boats were being called in to avoid provoking the Allies, the high command of the High Sea Fleet decided to make a suicidal gesture. Orders were given in late October 1918 to prepare for a final showdown with the Royal Navy. The Germans were going to strike out for the Thames estuary, sinking whatever merchant vessels could be found. Hopefully, this would draw the Grand Fleet into battle. The aim was to inflict such losses on the Royal Navy that Germany’s position in looming peace talks would be strengthened.
However, this mad scheme never came to anything as the sailors of the High Sea Fleet mutinied and the Kaiser’s once proud battleships and battlecruisers came under the red flag of communism instead of the Imperial Ensign.
Ten days after celebrating the 11 November Armistice, Warspite and the rest of the Grand Fleet put to sea for a rendezvous with the enemy. The High Sea Fleet had been ordered to surrender and, as at Jutland, it was the German battlecruisers which the Grand Fleet encountered first – the Seydlitz, Moltke, Hindenburg, Derfflinger and von der Tann. The Grand Fleet formed two lines either side of the Germans, battle flags flying, guns loaded and ready to fire. Commander Randolph Pears gives a very vivid description of the event:
The crews at battle stations, gas masks and asbestos suits were issued, the ships cleared for action. The Grand Fleet’s last appearance at sea was an unforgettable occasion, a show of strength never to be again approached.
The crews of 221 Royal Navy warships, six American battleships and three French ships felt no sense of triumph. The fight had gone out of the Germans and their ten battleships and five battlecruisers looked bedraggled. They were also toothless, their guns having been disabled in Germany before sailing. The British cruiser Cardiff led the ‘dirty uncared-for ships’ between the two parallel lines of Allied naval power.1
A young officer aboard the American battleship USS New York looked on in pity:
The low sun glances from their shabby sides. Their huge guns, motionless, are trained fore and aft. It is the sight of our dreams – a sight for kings! Strangely enough, the German surrender lacked the thrill of victory. There was the gaping wonder of it, the inconceivable that was happening before our very eyes – the great German fleet steaming helplessly there at our side – conquered... The one prevalent emotion so far as I could ascertain, was pity.2
The German fleet was ordered to drop anchor outside the anti-torpedo nets in the Firth of Forth while the full scope of British and Allied naval might slid by in complete silence. Then the defining moment came for Beatty, as his flagship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, passed between the lines of Allied ships at anchor, a wave of cheering following her majestic victory passage.
Just over a week after the German fleet sailed into captivity, the US Navy’s 6th Battle Squadron s
aid farewell to the Grand Fleet and, more particularly, Warspite and the 5th Battle Squadron which it considered its sister formation.
The German battlecruiser Moltke, was one of the first German ships to be encountered by the Grand Fleet on the day of the surrender. K. Smith Collection.
Germany’s answer to Warspite and her sisters was the battleship Bayern, carrying 15-inch guns. Entering service too late to see a fleet v fleet action, the Bayern is pictured here interned at Scapa Flow after the First World War. M. Welsford Collection.
The German battlecruiser Derfflinger traded shots with the 5th Battle Squadron at Jutland and sank the battlecruiser Queen Mary. She is pictured here interned at Scapa Flow after the surrender of the High Sea Fleet. M. Welsford Collection.
The Americans had sent more than 350 vessels to European waters including the battleships USS Texas, USS Nevada, USS Arkansas, USS Florida, USS Wyoming and USS New York which had been America’s chief representatives when the High Sea Fleet sailed to captivity. The USS Delaware had already gone home. Now, it was the remainder’s turn to proceed between long lines of warships at anchor on the Forth, the decks of the British vessels packed with wildly cheering sailors sending the Americans off in good style. They received a guard of honour for the first twenty miles home from the 5th Battle Squadron, with the Valiant and Warspite to port and Barham and Malaya to starboard. The ships cheered each other all the way out to May Island, culminating in a huge roar as Warspite and other Queen Elizabeth Class battleships peeled away on either side.
Seven months later, after sailing to Scapa Flow, which was to be its permanent prison because no neutral country would provide a harbour for it, the High Sea Fleet scuttled itself. This act of suicide was prompted by a breakdown in the peace negotiations at Versailles which made the German sailors fear a renewal of hostilities might mean a massacre in the confines of Scapa. With the German fleet lying on the seabed, the Royal Navy was once again the ruler without peer of the Seven Seas. Having in excess of 1,300 warships of all types, Britain’s fleet was as big as the world’s other navies put together.
Surviving the Culling of the Fleet
Warspite was created as the ultimate offensive weapon of the battleship era. After the First World War, during which submarines and aircraft had emerged as effective deliverers of destruction, she would be reshaped to improve her defences against them. The perfect balance of Warspite’s design meant she survived difficult post-war years when many of her contemporaries in the Grand Fleet were cleaved from the Royal Navy’s pennant list with alarming speed.
Britain had been drained of her riches by the war and this relative poverty coincided with the introduction of measures designed to preserve world peace by preventing naval arms races. Only Warspite and her sisters of the Queen Elizabeth Class, plus the five Royal Sovereigns, would survive the culling of the Grand Fleet’s main striking force. The rest of the Royal Navy’s capital ship inventory was composed of three battlecruisers built at the end of the war – HMS Hood, HMS Repulse and HMS Renown.
Between 1920, when Hood was completed, and the late 1930s, when Britain finally responded to a renewed German threat by ordering the King George V Class vessels, the only battleships built were HMS Rodney and HMS Nelson. These ships were constructed to bring the Royal Navy’s much depleted tonnage up to a limit agreed at the 1921-22 Washington Conference on naval arms. At this summit, attended by representatives of the British, American, Japanese, French and Italian fleets, it was agreed limits should be imposed on all the leading naval powers.
The Warspite celebrates the end of the war. Franklin Collection.
In the summer of 1918, sailors line the Warspite’s rails and say farewell to a US battleship which served with the Grand Fleet. After the Armistice of November 1918, the rest of the US Navy’s battleships went home after a big send off from the 5th Battle Squadron. US Naval Historical Center.
Victory had therefore ushered in crushing reality for the Royal Navy – it could not live beyond its means and so had to divest itself of most of its power. That was also the reality for Britain as a whole, and the 1920s was a period of social upheaval which sometimes found HMS Warspite embroiled in unconventional roles. The Grand Fleet had been replaced with the Atlantic Fleet and, from 1919 until May 1921, Warspite was a member of its 2nd Battle Squadron.
In May of 1920 Warspite loitered off Ireland during the death throes of British rule in the South, standing by to send parties of armed sailors ashore to support the Army. She later ferried Royal Marines from Plymouth to Ireland.
Making regular spring cruises to the Mediterranean while part of the Atlantic Fleet, Warspite first entered Valetta Harbour, Malta, in the spring of 1924.
That summer she paid off for her first major refit, after duty as Cowes Week Guardship and taking part in a massive Royal Review of the fleet off Spithead. The two year refit saw Warspite’s displacement rise to 31,300 tons, with the addition of torpedo bulges and a quartet of new 4-inch anti-aircraft guns (replacing the 3-inch high angle guns and boat deck 6-inchers). A couple of 2-pounders were also added plus armour protection increased but half her torpedo armament was taken away. Warspite’s funnels were also trunked into one and her bridge platforms modified.
As she approached the end of her refit in 1926, Warspite was earmarked to become flagship of the Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Fleet.
Bertie Packer, had left the Spite in January 1918 but rejoined her in February 1926, while she was still in dry dock at Portsmouth. Glad to be back on his old ship, he decided to show her off to his new wife. She later wrote of her husband’s guided tour:
The big battleship looked grotesque to me, out of her natural element, cluttered with wire hawsers and tangled ropes, and stained with red lead as if she were bleeding from innumerable wounds... . The dockyard mateys at work on the huge disabled hull looked like lilliputians scrambling over the tethered body of some mighty beached leviathan.3
On 31 March 1926, HMS Warspite took on ammunition but it was almost a month before she left Portsmouth bound for sea trials off Scotland. As Warspite curved around the south-west peninsula the weather was fine, but storm clouds lay ahead. She was off Rothesay by 26 April 1926, and then headed for the Clyde, carrying out speed trials on the way and managing twenty-four knots.
On Saturday 1 May a national coal strike was called, followed on 3 May by a General Strike. Warspite was ordered to get ready to quell trouble. She arrived at Greenock early on 3 May and was immediately asked to send landing parties ashore. They were split between oil tanks, pipe lines and torpedo factories along the Clyde and Bertie Packer headed a detachment tasked with guarding docks in Glasgow itself. The sailors patrolled twelve hours out of twenty-four which was a hard routine but the battle lines between dock workers and the authorities remained fairly placid. A week went by and the Warspite heard HMS Hood would take over guard duties so she could finally go to the Mediterranean. At this point things started to turn sinister, with Warspite’s sailors intercepting several groups armed with petrol cans trying to sneak in to burn down warehouses. Bertie Packer described this as ‘a bit of fun’ and told his wife: ‘We stalked them but they ran like the devil leaving full petrol tins behind.’4
By 1926 the battleships HMS Orion (above) and HMS Erin (below) had been sent for scrap, as part of the massive culling of the Royal Navy’s frontline warships under the Washington Treaty. HMS Orion: Franklin Collection, HMS Erin: Goodman Collection.
Four days later the Spite handed over to the Hood and headed south.
In December 1927 Captain James Somerville was made the Spite’s Commanding Officer, his first association with a vessel which fifteen years later would be his flagship while shadow boxing the Imperial Japanese Navy. But, even under the stewardship of this lucky officer, misfortune returned to haunt Warspite. After nearly two mishap free years she struck an uncharted rock in the Aegean while acting as flagship of Vice Admiral J.D. Kelly, Second-in-Command of the Mediterranean Fleet. Ordered home for repairs in
dry dock at Portsmouth, Warspite was back in the Mediterranean as fleet flagship by the beginning of 1929, her crew now including young Midshipman Richard Raikes. He joined ‘a very very happy ship’. However, life for midshipmen aboard Warspite in the late 1920s was still about learning the hard way.
You were lower than the low as far as the Navy was concerned. You were at everyone’s beck and call. The sailors knew that you knew nothing. The officers knew that you knew nothing. You were kicked around but you were supported in the most remarkable way by the lower deck. They were on your side.
To Midshipman Raikes the Royal Navy’s capital ships looked fantastic, rather than obsolete. It was a very exciting life for a teenager.
Warspite Page 9
