HMS Rodney

She was never a beautiful ship. Conceived to fit within the tonnage limits of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, HMS Rodney and her sister Nelson were a naval architect's compromise: three triple turrets of 16-inch guns placed forward of the bridge, the machinery aft, the silhouette unlike any battleship before or since. The sailors called them the Cherry Trees — “cut down by Washington.”

She was, however, very heavily armed. Nine 16-inch guns in triple turrets delivered a broadside of 16,150 lb — more than any other ship in the Royal Navy. What she lacked was speed; at 23 knots she could not keep pace with the fast battleships of the Second World War, and her frequent mechanical problems were a perennial frustration. And yet, on one morning in May 1941, it was she who decided the fate of a battle that had begun with the loss of HMS Hood.

The Pursuit of the Bismarck

When Hood was lost on 24 May 1941, Rodney was escorting the troopship RMS Britannic across the Atlantic. Ordered north, she joined the flagship HMS King George V under Admiral Tovey. On the morning of 27 May, with Bismarck crippled by a torpedo hit to her steering from a Swordfish of 818 Naval Air Squadron, Rodney closed to point-blank range.

She fired her first salvo at 0847. Over the ninety minutes that followed she closed to within three miles and unloaded more than three hundred and seventy 16-inch shells into the German battleship. Her guns, at that range, could not miss. Bismarck was set afire from end to end, her turrets silenced, her superstructure reduced to wreckage. Around 1040 the order was given to cease fire; cruisers closed with torpedoes, and Bismarck rolled over and sank at 1039.

D-Day and After

For the rest of the war Rodney served on convoy escort, at Torch in November 1942, and in the bombardment of the Normandy beaches on and after 6 June 1944, where she fired her guns at targets fifteen miles inshore in support of the British Second Army at Caen. By the end of the war her engines were so worn that she could barely steam. She was paid off in late 1945, listed for disposal, and broken up at Inverkeithing in 1948. Of her generation, only the bell, a 16-inch shell, and fragments of her armour survive in museum collections.