Battleships Have Had Their Day

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28234, 23 March 1957, Page 6

Battleships Have Had Their Day

[By

JACK PERCIVAL}

' j "'HE era of the battleship is over—soon no Hswe, King George V or Vanguard will pass with the other ships in majestic review before the Queen at Spithead. The First Lord of the Admiraltv, the Earl of Selkirk, said at Plymouth a fortnight ago that Britain would probably sell her battleships to friendly countries.

She will replace them with aircraft-carriers, which have better defences against aircraft, guided missiles, and nuclear weapons.

The death of battleships has been painful and lingering. Strategists 15 years ago finally predicted their end after Japanese aircraft crippled the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and sank the Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya. Later in the war American bombers sank the world’s largest battleship, the 60,000-ton Yamato, off Okinawa. After the first hit she lasted exactly 35 minutes. She took to the depths a complement of nearly 1800. I was on Okinawa during the vital stages of that bloody campaign and knew what it would have meant if the Yamato could have got through apd fulfilled the Imperial Japanese Navy’s instruction to blast the confined combat areas—Japanese and Americans—off the map with her 18in guns. At the start of World War II Britain had 15 battleships and battle-cruisers. In 1949 she had five.

Battleships were used in the Korean War. I was aboard the U.S.S. Missouri when she stood to sea and shelled the rice paddies to cover the retreat of American troops from the west coast to the Pusan defence box.

That was possibly the last time a battleship could be used as a floating gun platform. The North Koreans then had no bomber planes, and, of course, no guided missiles. The newest of the British battleships is the Vanguard. According to some naval strategists she is old-fashioned. She was armed in 1945 with weapons drawn from reserve maintained for ships of the Queen Elizabeth and Royal Sovereign class—in fact, the types of guns which were first mounted in the Courageous and Glorious in 1916. The gunboat era really ended when Britain and America had to withdraw their monitors from the

Yangtse when Japanese planes attacked them during the SinoJapanese War. Britain learned the hard way and, in 1949, sent the cruiser Jamaica to the Narrows, midway between Nanking and Shanghai, to rescue the Amethyst, bottled up by Communist shore batteries. I saw the Janfaica after she had been torn by modern anti-tank guns. She was holed like a sieve. As nostalgic as our thoughts must be, and also those of the Royal Navy’s remaining 96 admirals and 2004 captains, most of us must agree that capital ships have had a fair run during the last half-century. The Dreadnought, built in 1906, is generally conceded to be the type from which the modern battleship was evolved. She was 490 feet in length, of 17,900 tons displacement, and had 10 12-inch guns in five turrets. (Now that name is to be passed on to Britain’s first atomic submarines.)

British battleships were gradually stepped up, at colossal expense, to 42,500 tons. It must be a melancholy business for the Royal Naval experts to strike out the last of their stately veterans, some of which carry honoured names passed on since Nelson from ship to ship.— Associated Newspapers Feature Services.