Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse by Dr Martin Stephen

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