Queen Elizabeth-class battleship
The Queen Elizabeth-class battleships were a group of five super-dreadnoughts built for the Royal Navy during the 1910s. The lead ship was named after Elizabeth I of England. These battleships were superior in firepower, protection and speed to their Royal Navy predecessors of the as well as preceding German classes such as the. The corresponding ships were generally considered competitive, although the Queen Elizabeth class were faster and outnumbered the German class 5:2. The Queen Elizabeths are generally considered the first fast battleships in their day.
The Queen Elizabeths were the first battleships to be armed with guns, and were described in the 1919 edition of Jane's Fighting Ships as "the most successful type of capital ship yet designed." They saw much service in both world wars. Barham was lost to U-boat attack in 1941, but the others survived the wars and were scrapped in the late 1940s.
Background and design
The early design history of the Queen Elizabeth class is not well known because not many records have survived in the files of the Board of Admiralty. When Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1911, the ships of the 1911–1912 Naval Programme, the four s and the battlecruiser were being ordered and preliminary design work had begun on the new class of battleships scheduled for the 1912–1913 Naval Programme. Each class received its own alphabetical designation with the Iron Dukes being MIV, the fourth major iteration of Design M. Presumably the improved 1912–1913 ships were Design N, but no details of it have been found in Admiralty records. The letter O was not used during this time. Naval historian Norman Friedman believes that Design P was a slow ship armed with ten guns based on a passing reference in the official history of naval construction during the First World War that such a ship was a precursor to the Queen Elizabeths.Churchill and the retired First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Jackie Fisher corresponded at length during this time with Fisher advocating for a fast ship armed with eight guns and nearly as well armoured as a battleship, something that he sometimes called a "super-Lion", referring to the battlecruiser. Friedman believes that the Director of Naval Construction, Sir Philip Watts, designated Fisher's concept as Design Q with a slower version being the Queen Elizabeth class as Design R. "The destruction of papers may thus have concealed the reality that instead of being a spectacular advance on previous battleships, the Queen Elizabeths were a slow version of a ship which Fisher and probably Churchill badly wanted. Much of the fragmentary evidence for the fast ship is to be found in Fisher's letters to Churchill."
The tactical mission of these ships is portrayed as being fast enough to manoeuvre to catch the head of the enemy's battleline and concentrate fire against it, but they were actually intended to prevent the German battlecruisers, which were more heavily armoured than their British equivalents, from doing the same to the British fleet. A memo from Churchill to Rear-Admiral Gordon Moore, Third Sea Lord, on 27 October 1912, stated "the speed and power of the Queen Elizabeths...is sufficient to protect the battle fleet against any turning movement by German battlecruisers.
Influenced by Fisher, Churchill ordered development of the 42-calibre BL 15-inch Mk I gun using the codename "14inch Experimental" in January 1912. This was a risky decision as development of new heavy guns and their turrets was normally a multi-year project, and a failure would seriously delay the completion of the ships. The first gun turret was successfully tested on 6 May 1914, likely much to the relief of the Admiralty.
The Admiralty decided on the design of the Queen Elizabeths on 15 June 1912, with the decision on whether they would solely use fuel oil deferred to a subsequent meeting. That meeting must have happened very shortly afterwards because the design that received the Board's stamp the following day was oil-fueled. The design had not been optimised to burn oil instead of coal and the fuel tanks had different requirements than the coal bunkers previously planned. Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt, the DNC who followed Watts, estimated that the change so late in the design process cost some that could have been put to better use. To guarantee a supply of oil in wartime, Churchill negotiated the Anglo-Persian Oil Convention.
Fisher also believed that the 1912–1913 ships should all be battlecruisers instead of the usual mix of three battleships and a battlecruiser. Churchill initially agreed with him, but was persuaded to go back to the original plan, much to Fisher's fury. Given the speed of the new ships, envisaged as, it was decided that the battlecruiser would not be needed and a fourth battleship would be built instead. When the Federation of Malay States offered to fund a further capital ship, the Admiralty decided to add a fifth unit to the class,.
In some respects, the ships did not quite fulfil their extremely demanding requirement. They were seriously overweight, as a result of which the draught was excessive and they were unable to reach the planned top speed of 25 knots. In the event, the combination of oil fuel and more boilers provided for a service speed of about, still a useful improvement on the traditional battle line speed of and just fast enough to be thought of as the first fast battleships. After Jutland Admiral John Jellicoe was persuaded that the slowest ship of this class was good only for about, he concluded that, since this should be considered as the speed of the squadron, it would not be safe to risk them in operations away from the main battlefleet.
Description
The ships of the Queen Elizabeth class were long between perpendiculars, long at the waterline, and had a length overall of, excluding the sternwalk fitted on several ships. They had a beam of and a draught of at deep load. They had a normal displacement of approximately and at deep load. The ships had a metacentric height of at deep load. Their crew numbered between 923 and 951 officers and ratings as completed; by 1920, the number of crew had grown to 1,016 to 1,025. Service as a flagship increased these numbers to 1,249 to 1,262 that same year.They were powered by two sets of direct-drive steam turbines, Parsons units were fitted in, and Malaya while and had Brown-Curtis turbines. The latter pair were not equipped with the cruising turbines to improve fuel economy at slow speeds used in the first three ships. Each turbine set drove two shafts with, three-bladed propellers, using steam provided by 24 Babcock & Wilcox boilers at a working pressure of in all but Warspite and 'Barham', which received boilers manufactured by Yarrow. The boilers were ducted into a pair of funnels. The turbines were divided into three watertight compartments arranged side by side; the low-pressure turbines driving the inner pair of shafts were in the centre engine room together, while the high-pressure outboard turbines were in the rooms on either side.
The turbines were rated at at overload and were intended to give the ships a maximum speed of, although they fell short of that. Due to the war only Barham ran her sea trials on a measured course; in August 1916 she reached a top speed of from at deep load. Fuel storage amounted to of fuel oil which enabled the ships to steam for at a cruising speed of, which fell to at full speed.
Armament and fire control
The Queen Elizabeth class was equipped with eight breech-loading 15-inch Mk I guns in four twin-gun turrets, in two superfiring pairs fore and aft of the superstructure, designated 'A', 'B', 'X', and 'Y' from front to rear. The guns were initially supplied with 80 shells per gun, but the magazines were later modified to allow for up to one hundred shells per gun. The ships carried the guns in Mk I turrets that allowed for elevation to 20 degrees and depression to -5 degrees. The guns could be loaded at any angle, but the crews typically returned to +5 degrees, since the guns could be cleared faster that way. They fired projectiles at a muzzle velocity of to a range of. Their designed rate of fire was one shot every 36 seconds.The gun even remained competitive in the Second World War after receiving further shell upgrades and mountings with greater elevation, and HMS Warspite would eventually record a hit during the Battle of Calabria which to this day is one of the longest-range naval gunnery hits in history - 24,000 metres.
The guns could elevate to 20° and depress to −5°, but the turret sights could only elevate 15°, effectively limiting the range that could be achieved unless firing under director control. The sights were equipped to permit the guns to fire at full charge or with charge.
deck gun as added to all ships in 1915–1916, here seen on after Jutland
The ships' secondary battery consisted of sixteen 45-calibre BL Mk XII guns. The guns had a muzzle velocity of from their projectiles. At their maximum elevation of 15 degrees, they had a range of. As designed twelve of these were mounted in casemates on the upper deck, six of each on the broadside of the vessel amidships; the remaining four guns were on the main deck aft abreast 'Y' turret. In an effort to ameliorate the problems that the flooding problems that the casemated guns in the Iron Duke-class ships had in heavy seas, the guns in the Queen Elizabeths were moved back from abreast 'A' turret to 'B' turret, but this made little difference in service. The aft guns were more prone to flood and were virtually useless even in moderate seas. Only Queen Elizabeth was completed with them; one pair was removed and the other was repositioned on the forecastle and protected by gun shields in May 1915. The casemates were plated over to improve their seaworthiness. The other ships were similarly modified while fitting-out.
Each gun was provided with 130 rounds. Stowage was provided for 30 rounds at each gun as the only ammunition hoists for them were located at the forward end of the battery. Captain Morgan Singer, commander of the RN's gunnery school HMS Excellent, criticized this arrangement, saying that it had been proven inefficient in the pre-dreadnought battleships and he recommended using dredger hoists as they were much faster. His comments were rejected as the Admiralty believed that the guns would only intermittently be in use as destroyers attempted to close to torpedo range and they desired to maintain a break in the cordite supply between the magazines and the battery. In service this led to the gun crews keeping additional rounds immediately available at the guns in case they were needed. This resulted in an ammunition fire aboard Malaya during the Battle of Jutland that nearly resulted in the loss of the ship.
The ships also mounted four 3-pounder . Their anti-aircraft armament consisted of two quick-firing 20 cwt Mk I guns. They were fitted with four submerged torpedo tubes, two on each broadside. Each ship was supplied with a total of 20 Mk II or Mk IV torpedoes.
The Queen Elizabeth-class ships were completed with two fire-control directors. The one was mounted above the conning tower was protected by an armoured hood and was fitted with a rangefinder. The other director was on top of the tripod mast and was equipped with a. The main armament could be controlled by 'X' turret as well and each turret was fitted with a 15-foot rangefinder. A torpedo-control director with a 9-foot rangefinder was mounted at the aft end of the superstructure. The secondary armament was primarily controlled by directors mounted on each side of the compass platform on the foremast once they began to be fitted in March 1917. The rangefinders in 'B' and 'X' turrets were replaced by models between 1919 and 1922.
Flying-off platforms were fitted on all the ships on the roofs of 'B' and 'X' turrets in 1918. Between them the ships carried three fighters and seven reconnaissance aircraft.
Armour
Armour protection was modified from the previous, with a thicker belt and improved underwater protection. The scale of deck armour was less generous, though typical of contemporary practice.Ships
A further ship was authorised in 1914 and would have been named Agincourt. Although most sources and several official papers in the class's Ships Cover describe her as a further repeat of the Queen Elizabeth design, one historian has suggested that Agincourt would have been built on battlecruiser lines. This design would have kept the Queen Elizabeth armament, but substituted thinner armour down to instead of, for example] in order to gain a top speed. Whatever the case, Agincourt was cancelled at the outbreak of war in 1914.Service
First World War
In the First World War, Queen Elizabeth was detached from the squadron and took part in the Dardanelles Campaign, but missed Jutland as she was undergoing dock maintenance.At the Battle of Jutland, four of the ships formed Admiral Hugh Evan-Thomas's 5th Battle Squadron, and in the clash with the German 1st Scouting Group under Admiral Franz von Hipper they "fired with extraordinary rapidity and accuracy", damaging and and a number of other German warships. These battleships were able to engage German battlecruisers at a range of 19,000 yards, which was beyond the maximum range of the Germans' guns. Three of the Queen Elizabeths received hits from German warships during the engagement, yet they all returned home. Warspite was the most heavily damaged, with her rudder jammed and taking fifteen hits, coming close to foundering.
Between the wars
Between the wars, the ships received considerable upgrades, including new machinery, small-tube boilers, deck armour upgrades, torpedo belt armour, trunked funnels, new secondary armament and anti-aircraft armament, and many improvements in gunlaying and electronics. Queen Elizabeth, Valiant, and Warspite were the most modernised, with all three receiving the new "Queen Anne's Mansions" block superstructure for the bridge, whilst twenty 4.5" dual-purpose guns in 10 turret mountings replaced the 6" casemate secondary weapons on Queen Elizabeth and Valiant. Warspite kept her 6" secondary guns, now reduced to just four per battery.Second World War
By the Second World War, the class were showing their age. Barham and Malaya, the least-modernized of the class, were at a disadvantage compared to modern battleships. In spite of this, Malaya prevented an attack on a transatlantic convoy by the modern German battlecruisers and by her presence. Queen Elizabeth, Warspite, and Valiant, the more modernised of the class, fared better. With her modern fire control equipment, Warspite scored a hit on an Italian battleship during the Battle of Calabria at a range of more than 26,000 yards, one of the longest range naval artillery hits in history.Modern torpedoes outclassed their torpedo belt protection: in November 1941, Barham was torpedoed by a U-boat and sank in five minutes, with the loss of over 800 of her crew, when her magazines detonated. Warspite survived a direct hit and two near-misses by German glider bombs, while Queen Elizabeth and Valiant were repaired and returned to service after being badly damaged by limpet mines placed by Italian frogmen during a raid at Alexandria Harbour in 1941.