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

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
    Added to these were the problems of a navy having to cope with a vast influx of ‘hostilities only’ ratings. There has been much debate over the morale and efficiency of the crew: all that can be said with any certainty is that Tom Phillips’s flagship was not manned to a peak of efficiency that best fitted it to sail into extreme hostilities. Of crucial significance was the inability to give proper training in anti-aircraft gunnery, if only through the lack of trial targets. Captain Tennant of Repulse wrote in his official report:
    ‘ Prince of Wales and Repulse had both been without serious anti-aircraft practice for some months and I am afraid the shooting was not good – torpedoes were mostly fired outside pom-pom range at about 2,500 yards.’ 9
    Yet a much more alarming episode that could have played a major part in her sinking took place before she was finished. On 31 August 1940, while in the fitting-out basin at Cammell Lairds, a low-level German attack dropped a bomb that landed between the basin wall and the hull. Quite serious damage was caused. It has been suggested that whilst obvious damage was repaired, the impact of the bomb may have sheared off or weakened bolts and rivets beyond the area of obvious damage that appeared whole, but which subsequently contributed to the opening up of the hull under Japanese bomb attack. There is no record of remedial work being undertaken or examinations carried out beyond the area of immediate damage, which was towards the stern. Examination of the USS Pennsylvania, which suffered a similar torpedo hit to Prince of Wales but survived to be examined, suggested