THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE ROYAL NAVY SALUTES THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER Nick Hewitt, head of exhibitions and collections at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, celebrates the museum’s 10th anniversary with a rundown of some of the Royal Navy’s most historic warships.
he arrival and commissioning of HMS Prince of Wales, the Royal Navy’s (RN’s) second 65,000-tonne, state-of-the-art carrier, cements Portsmouth’s centuries-old status as the home of cutting-edge naval technology. Indeed, the RN’s first submarines were based here from 1902, and the first, Holland 1, is on display at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, part of The National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN). What’s more, in 1906, Portsmouth Royal Dockyard built the revolutionary battleship HMS Dreadnought, in less than a year. Curiously, 1906 was also almost the last time an RN ship named Prince of Wales entered the Naval Base, when the pre-dreadnought battleship, which was the fifth ship to bear the name, came in for refit. Her successor, the celebrated World War II (WW II) battleship, in many ways the pinnacle of the superdreadnought, never came to Portsmouth during her short but eventful service life. This sixth Prince of Wales, pennant number 53, was commissioned in January 1941, with WW II at its height. She, too, represented cuttingedge technology for her day, being a magnificent compromise of armour, gun power and speed designed to keep within the stringent limitations of the Washington and London Naval Treaties, unlike her ‘treaty-busting’ rivals being constructed in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
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HMS Prince of Wales
However, Prince of Wales did not enjoy the luxury of a lengthy acceptance process. She was bombed whilst still being fitted out, many key machinery tests were rushed or postponed, and in May 1941 she found herself in action against the German battleship Bismarck with a team of Vickers-Armstrong technicians on board to nurse her experimental quadruple 14-inch gun turrets. Hapless Force Z After acquitting herself admirably against Bismarck, in August Prince of Wales went on to carry Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, where he met US President Franklin Roosevelt and the two leaders proclaimed the Atlantic Charter. Ominously, at the end of the year she was sent out to Singapore with the battlecruiser HMS Repulse as flagship of ‘Force Z’, an ill-fated ‘fleet in being’ intended to deter Japanese aggression. On Dec. 10, 1941, whilst searching for a Japanese invasion force making for Malaya, the two ships were attacked and sunk by Japanese aircraft with the loss of 840 lives. The incontrovertible fact was that by 1941 even the most modern battleships, whilst still useful, had been superseded by aircraft carriers as the pre-eminent capital ships for any modern navy. In fact, one of the RN’s new armoured carriers,
ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE ROYAL NAVY
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