Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse (12 page)

It is less of a puzzle if one believes that it had the secret support of the President of the United States.

If this is what happened, it shows Tom Phillips in a different light. For a man who had to transform himself overnight from ambassador and diplomat to frontline fighter, he showed remarkable courage and got more things right that he did wrong in the battle which followed. For Churchill, it suggests that he made two mistakes in his assessment of the situation in the Far East. We know he underestimated Japanese strength and capability. Did he also exaggerate and place too much faith in the power of the United States?

There is a modern point to all this, if one believes that history can contain warnings for the future. The warnings are not to trust too much to a special relationship, not to overestimate the power and reach of American military might and not to place responsibility for one’s own defence in the hands of the United States.

Chapter 6

The Ships:
Prince of Wales

‘… the weakest battleships completed by any nation during the Second World War era…’
¹

P
rince of Wales
was a new King George V class battleship, of which five were to be completed. It was the second unit to be commissioned in 1941,
King George V
having completed on 1 October 1940. From the outset they were seen as being outclassed by the bigger German
Bismarck
and
Tirpitz.
Churchill complained that the fact of three KGVs being needed to offset
Tirpitz
was, ‘… a serious reflection upon the design of our latest ships, which through being undergunned and weakened by hangars in the middle of their citadels, are evidently judged unfit to fight their opposite number in a single ship action.’
²

This was slightly unfair – only by having three ships available could two be guaranteed to be available to fight at any one time because of the requirement for refit and repair – but not by much.
Tirpitz
had more weight of armour, better watertight subdivision, a heavier main armament that could out-range the King George Vs by 3,000 yards, a faster rate of fire, a two-knot speed advantage and a vastly superior endurance and range. The reason, of course, was that
Prince of Wales
was built to conform to treaty limitations of the 1920s and 1930s, which Germany ignored. Churchill was right to complain: ‘Once again we alone are injured by treaties.’
³

The existing accounts of the sinking of
Prince of Wales
make little or no mention of the fact that Tom Phillips’s state of the art or even ‘unsinkable’ flagship was a disaster waiting to happen, and a vessel with serious design flaws. There are a number of reasons why this element of the disaster has featured so little in writing about it. Ship design is a highly technical area and few historians are technically qualified in it. It is also a highly specialist area, restricted largely to books intended to appeal to a very small number of people and, dare I say it, terminally boring to those outside this narrow circle. Information about weaknesses in the design of any weapon of war tends to have ‘Top Secret’ slapped on it at the time, for the very good reason that one does not want the enemy to know one’s weaknesses; such labels tend to stick long after the actual need for the information to be kept secret has lapsed from a mixture of pressure from those responsible to cover their backs, obsessive secrecy and institutional lethargy. It is also easy to sell the equivalent of a pup in warship design to the general public, particularly if it is a beautiful ship: HMS
Hood
is an example.

However,
Prince of Wales
also illustrates a cycle in the design of warships which has been active over the past hundred years. In time of war the absolute priority is to win. In time of peace that priority has to compete with others, most often the need to save money or adhere to political rather than fighting imperatives. As an example, in 1982 the Royal Navy found itself in a shooting war for the first time in many years. HMS
Sheffield
, at the time a thoroughly modern vessel, was first put out of action with tragic loss of life and subsequently sank as the result of being hit by an Exocet missile whose warhead in all probability did not explode. Bad ventilation helped sink
Sheffield
, as did the failure of electrical systems. The requirements of protection against nuclear, chemical and biological warfare meant a priority in keeping a sealed atmosphere within the hull, whereas when large quantities of rocket fuel are burning off in a ship’s guts, survival can depend on the ability to vent smoke and fumes to the outside world. There were far too few breathing masks on board and issue clothing whose artificial fibres melted in to the flesh of wounded men.
Sheffield
was a classic example of a warship designed to the priorities of peacetime and without due attention to the likelihood of it being hit. Forty-one years earlier, the designers of
Prince of Wales
had been forced to design Britain’s new generation of capital ships to what was essentially a political agenda. As with
Sheffield
, lessons were learnt. The tragedy in both cases is that so many men had to die to re-learn lessons that should never have been forgotten. It would also be far too easy to blame those who actually designed the ships. They merely try to make sense out of the brief they have been given or limited to, by others.

Also in time of war ships are hit and damaged, and lessons learnt in how to keep them afloat and moving. These lessons seem the first to be forgotten in time of peace. Damage control is rarely a fashionable specialization in peacetime, but it is crucial to a ship’s survival. Poor damage control was a factor in the sinking of
Ark Royal
in 1941, as it was in the sinking of
Prince of Wales
. It is thought to have been a weakness of the Imperial Japanese Navy as well.

The Sinking

Much more is known now about the body-blow torpedo hits that sank
Prince of Wales
as the result of informed dives on the wreck. Before discussing the design weaknesses of the class, there is one feature of the sinking that has to be recognized above all. In the first torpedo attack, a Japanese torpedo struck the ship under the stern at a point where the hull was almost concave. A few feet to one side and the torpedo would have missed. The resultant blast was so concentrated under the hull that survivors saw no great plume of water as they did with other hits. The ship was lifted bodily out of the water, the upward thrust of the explosion being countered at this point by the massive weight of the aft quadruple 14-inch gun turret. The impact snapped off the ‘A’ bracket that secured the propeller shaft to the hull, and what happened then is graphically described in one of the earlier accounts of the sinking:

‘A massive hole had been torn in the hull but, much more seriously, the 240-foot shaft of the port outer propeller had been distorted and, still churning viciously, had fractured bulkheads, riveting and fuel-piping along its entire length before it could be stopped. Within minutes flooding had disabled several engine-, boiler- and machine rooms. Diesel and turbo dynamos failed, depriving salvage pumps of electrical power. Lighting, communications and ventilation failed, the steering-motors were dead and four of the eight AA turrets were inoperative.
Prince of Wales
… was crippled, with a 10° degree list, wallowing at 15 knots and with her quarterdeck only two feet above sea-level.’
⁴

This one hit effectively killed
Prince of Wales,
its catastrophic effect not sinking it, but leaving it totally vulnerable to the subsequent attacks that did. Was it, as has sometimes been said, a ‘lucky’ hit? It was not luck that trained the crack Japanese pilots, or saw Japan invest so heavily in aircraft and torpedoes that significantly out-matched those of the Allies. It was rather the fortunes of war, and illustration that in war protagonists sometimes get the luck they work for.

Human Error

It was at one stage fashionable to blame the loss on poor damage control, and in particular on failure to switch off power to the damaged shaft fast enough. Defence against this claim has been helped by the fact that one of
Prince of Wales
’s leading damage control officers survived the sinking. In fact it seems unlikely that failure to withdraw power from the shaft was a significant factor. The vast port outer-shaft was revolving at 204 revolutions a minute, and once forced out of alignment it took only seconds for the shaft to destroy far more than had been destroyed by the actual explosion.

There were damage control issues that did not help. Too much time was taken trying to lay power-lines to affected areas instead of using the ship’s other ring main to remedy the problems, the same issue which had been a factor in the sinking of
Ark Royal
. Some watertight doors were left open by crewmen rushing to escape the flooding. Perhaps more crucially, a Commissioned Warrant Officer lost his head and flooded the after magazines, being stopped only when he was in the process of repeating the action for the forward magazines.
⁵
No one likes to record these incidents, which do not typify a crew who showed great bravery and devotion to duty. Perhaps all that can be said about the inevitable, understandable and occasional human failures shown after the ship was hit was that they did not sink
Prince of Wales
, but they certainly did not help keep her afloat.

Origins of the King George V Class Battleships

When the Department of Naval Construction was asked in 1935 to submit draft proposals for a new class of battleship it was seventeen years and a world economic depression away from the last war, nineteen years away from Jutland and the last time British battleships had faced sustained enemy fire. More importantly, it was working to almost impossible restrictions placed on it by the Washington Naval Treaty, and in particular a limitation of 35,000 tons and a main armament of no more than 14-inch guns, subsequently ignored by all other navies. The first two ships (
King George V
and
Prince of Wales
) were ordered on 29 July 1936.

The most authoritative guide to British battleship design states that these vessels were, ‘probably the best 35,000-tonne limited displacement battleship ever produced.’
⁶
The American ‘South Dakota’ class appear to prove this wrong, and were superior to the KGVs in nearly every regard. The sacrifices made to meet Treaty restrictions, and other weaknesses, were to contribute significantly to the relative ease with which
Prince of Wales
was sunk by the Japanese. Mere size in a battleship did not guarantee survivability, as the 18-inch-gunned Japanese
Yamato
proved, but the most effective battleships of the Second World War, from
Bismarck
to the USS
New Jersey
, were significantly larger than
Prince of Wales
.

General Design Features

There were some notable good features in the KGV design, particularly as regards armour protection, and they scored a number of creditable firsts in having a dual-purpose secondary armament, being completed with radar and designed to carry aircraft. It is difficult to see how the designers could have done better working under the treaty limitations, but what to a designer appears as a necessary compromise can be a death sentence to those who have to fight the ship.

Among many weaknesses, there were design faults that had no bearing on the action in which
Prince of Wales
was lost.
Prince of Wales
was never called on to fire her ten 14-inch guns in her final action. It was probably a good thing. By the time the ships had been ordered, other nations had refused to ratify the 14-inch limitation on main armament. It was decided that the year needed for a new design was too long to wait, and the existing 15-inch turrets were too heavy for the new design. As it was, the proposal for three quadruple turrets proved too heavy, and a twin turret was mounted in place of one of the quadruple turrets, to further design furore – not, as is often supposed, because of the weight of the turret but rather because of the weight of the extra magazine protection it was now deemed the two additional guns would require. There were major problems operating the new quadruple turrets, which had nearly 3,000 working parts, and which suffered badly from problems with a complex series of safety interlocks and insufficient clearances. In the
Bismarck
action the main armament on both
Prince of Wales
and
King George V
was at times only twenty to fifty per cent effective. It is often claimed that these teething troubles were solved, with the destruction of the German battle-cruiser
Scharnhorst
in 1943 by
Duke of York
cited as the example.
Duke of York
’s radar-directed fire was extraordinarily accurate, but this has cloaked the fact that
Duke of York
should have fired around 800 14-inch shells during the engagement, but managed only 446. However, when
Prince of Wales
was sunk there were no heavy seas, no large surface opponents and her main armament was not called into action.

The class had a flush deck, in answer to an Admiralty demand for ‘A’ turret to fire directly forward at zero elevation. This helped make
Prince of Wales
a very wet ship in a heavy sea, and in the action against
Bismarck
heavy spray coming over the low forecastle seriously affected the rangefinders for ‘A’ and ‘B’ turrets, greatly reducing the effectiveness of the main armament. It has been suggested that this problem was solved in later vessels by fairing, a streamlined refuse chute and breakwaters.
⁷
Perhaps it was so, but when in the 1980s I talked to men who had served on board both
Duke of York
and
Howe
many repeated the story that in a heavy sea the cry went round, ‘Seals in the shell room!’

The KGVs were also fuel-hungry, consuming twice the fuel at twenty knots of comparable American battleships, with a serious effect on their range and capacity to stay at seas, something that nearly stopped
King George V
from engaging
Bismarck,
and was instrumental in
Prince of Wales
ceasing to trail her.

However, other weaknesses were to impact on the loss.

Superstition and Bomb Damage

Prince of Wales
was seen by the rest of the Navy as a jinxed or ‘Jonah’ ship. There was a bomb near-miss while she was building. Fleeing from the threat of further German bombs in Liverpool, she ran aground on her way to Rosyth while under tow. An accidental discharge of a pom-pom injured a dockyard worker, and she suffered from three small fires, as well as injuries when men suffered bad falls. However, it was the
Bismarck
action that did the most damage to her reputation.
Prince of Wales
actually did rather well in this action. She was far from fully worked-up and her machinery was malfunctioning, and particularly her main armament. She correctly identified
Bismarck,
took seven hits which killed thirteen people and wiped out most of the bridge personnel and landed two hits on
Bismarck,
one of which left her down by the head and was to force her to end her sorties as a result of disruption to her fuel supply. Interestingly, she managed this even though her gunnery radar was inoperative, malfunctioning radar being a persistent problem that was still around when she left Singapore on her last voyage. She was ordered to break off the action by the senior officer left after
Hood
blew up, largely because the problems with her main armament meant she was like a man fighting with at least one hand tied behind his back, and because Britain could not afford to lose two battleships on the same day. As regards her crew, one author sums the situation up admirably: ‘… there is some evidence that the morale of her crew was not all it might be. The lack of time allowed to work up the ship peacefully, the trauma of seeing the
Hood
blown to pieces, the recurring mechanical defects for which time for proper rectification was never allowed, few opportunities for leave – all these had impaired the settling down of the crew.’
⁸