All language subtitles for [English] How One Engineer Turned an Old Battleship Into Britain’s Most Feared Weapon [DownSub.com]

On a gray afternoon in March 1934, a

50-year-old man in a wool suit walked

down into a dry dock in Portsouth,

England. He looked up at the rusted hull

of a battleship that had been left for

dead 18 years earlier at the Battle of

Jutland, and he made a decision that

would change the outcome of the Second

World War. His name was Stanley Vernon

Goodall. This is his story, but to

understand what he saw that morning, you

have to go back. The North Sea. 31st of

May 1916. 6:30 in the evening. The

battleship HMS Warspite is dying. Her

steering has jammed hard to starboard.

She is turning in slow, helpless circles

between the fleets, and every German gun

within range has found her. 15 heavy

shells strike her hull.

150 smaller holes punch through her

plates and superructure. Steel buckles.

Fires bloom in her decks. 14 men are

killed.

16 more are wounded. Smoke rolls off her

superructure in Black Rivers. She is 21

months old. Her captain, Edward

Montgomery Philpot, wrestles the wheel

back. Somehow the tortured steering gear

responds. Somehow the ship lives. She

limps north through the night, listing,

leaking, her crew hurling bodies over

the fa because there is nowhere else to

put them. When dawn breaks over Rosith,

the engineers who come aboard say the

same thing very quietly to one another.

She should be at the bottom of the North

Sea. The men who repair her that summer

of 1916 do the best they can. They cut

out the broken plates.

They weld in new ones. They patch the

bulkheads. They test the steering gear

until it turns without seizing. But

there are places inside her they cannot

reach. There are fractures in her deep

framing that would take a full

reconstruction to fix. And there is no

time and no money for that in the middle

of a world war. So they seal those

spaces up. They leave the wounds where

they are. And they send her back to sea.

She sails on for nearly two decades that

way. Through the last two years of the

First World War, through the mutinies

and the mothball fleets of the 1920s.

Through the long peace time cruises

around the Mediterranean, showing the

[snorts] flag in Malta and Gibralta and

Alexandria. While inside her hull, the

old scars ache and grow, and nobody who

walks her decks knows they are there.

Then in the winter of 1933, an order

comes down from Whiteall. War spite is

to be reconstructed. She is old. She is

tired. Her machinery burns coal in an

age of oil. Her fire control has not

been touched since Jutland. She is one

of five battleships of the Queen

Elizabeth class. All of them veterans of

that same terrible day in 1916.

If Britain is going to fight another

war, she will have to fight it with

these ships because Britain in 1933 is

not allowed to build any others. 18

years pass. March 1934, Portsouth

dockyard, a gray English morning. Gulls

crying over the water, the smell of cold

smoke and salt. In dry dock number 15,

that same ship HMS Warp Spite sits

emptied of fuel and stripped of colors.

Her paint is faded. Her rivets weep

rust. She looks like what she is, an old

woman in a hospital bed. The men walking

around her keel this morning are not

sailors. They are naval architects. And

one of them is Stanley Vernon Goodall,

tall, careful in his movements, a face

that gives nothing away. He was born on

the 18th of April 1883 above a fire

station on West India Road in Popppler

in the east end of London. His father

Samuel Goodall was a fireman, working

men, no breeding, no connections. In the

England of Queen Victoria, that was

supposed to be the end of the story. It

was not. The boy was quiet. He read

constantly. At Owen's school in

Islington, his teachers noticed

something strange in the way he handled

numbers. The way he could look at a

diagram and see the forces moving inside

it. He wanted to be a naval engineer. In

July of 1901, at the age of 18, he

transferred into the Royal Corps of

Naval Constructors.

Six years later, he graduated from the

Royal Naval College at Greenwich with

one of the highest examination marks

ever recorded there. A workingclass boy

from Popla, top of the list, he was sent

to Hler to the ship model testing tank

to study under Edmund Fruit. This was

the priesthood. This was where the Royal

Navy learned how metal moves through

water. Small brass models of warships,

handcrafted, hand polished, sent gliding

down long channels of dark water, while

men in white coats measured wave

resistance with instruments the size of

pocket watches. It was patient work. It

suited him. Then the first world war

came. Goodall did not fight at Jutland.

Goodall studied it. He was part of the

team that examined every hit, every

buckled plate, every dead compartment on

the ships that came home. Wars fight was

on his list. He walked her decks in the

dry dock at Rosith in June of 1916, 28

days after the battle. He counted the

holes. He measured the defamation of the

armor plates. He climbed down into her

engine spaces and looked at where a

shell had punched clean through a

bulkhead and out the other side. He

wrote a report about what he found. The

report was suppressed. The Admiral T did

not want the public to know how close

their battleships had come to breaking

apart.

There was a war to win. There were

sailors to encourage. So the report went

into a locked cabinet in Whiteall and

stayed there. But Goodall knew. Goodall

remembered. And when 17 years later he

stood again in dry dock 15 and looked up

at that same hull, he was the one man in

England who understood exactly what was

wrong with her. His superior in March of

1934, Sir Arthur William Johns, the

director of naval construction. Goodall

was assistant DNC. Between them lay a

problem that no one in the Royal Navy

could see a clean way around. The

problem was called the Washington Naval

Treaty. In 1922, the great powers had

agreed to stop building battleships.

Britain, America, Japan, France, Italy.

The treaty was renewed in London in

1930.

No new capital ships could be laid down

until 1937. It was meant to keep the

peace. It also meant that Britain, the

country whose empire ran on sea power,

was frozen in place while the world

changed around her. And the world was

changing. In Rome, Mussolini was pouring

money into his fleet. The Italian

battleships Conte de Cavor and Julio

Chazair were being torn apart and

rebuilt faster, harder, longer ranged.

In Berlin, Hitler had just taken power.

Everyone in Whiteall knew what he would

do next. He would break the Treaty of

Versailles. He would build ships.

Somewhere in a design office in Keel,

engineers were already sketching the

outlines of what would become the

Bismar.

In Tokyo, the Imperial Japanese Navy was

quietly withdrawing from the treaty

system altogether. It would formally

leave in 1936.

When it did, it would begin building the

largest battleships the world had ever

seen, the Yamato, the Mousashi, 70,000

tons a piece, guns 18 in across. Britain

could not answer with new hulls. The

treaty forbade it. Britain could not

answer with money. The Great Depression

had gutted the naval budget. The

unemployed queued outside the dockyards.

Every pound was fought over in

Parliament.

The men who ran the country were not

thinking about battleships. They were

thinking about hunger marches and rent

riots and the miners of South Wales. So

Britain had one option, a cold,

unromantic option. Rebuild what she

already had. Take the old ships, the

Jutland veterans. The battle scarred

Queen Elizabeth's and find a way to make

them modern again. Wars fight would be

the first. The initial plan approved in

early 1934 was modest. A limited refit.

Update the boilers, improve the

anti-aircraft guns, perhaps add a

spotting aircraft. Cost a few

hundred,000.

Timeline 18 months. That was the plan on

paper. Then they began to strip her.

Here is the first twist in the story.

When the yard workers at Portsmouth cut

into Warspeed's superructure in the

spring of 1934, they found something no

one had accounted for. Deep in her

internal framing, hidden behind

bulkheads that had been sealed since the

summer of 1916, the damage from Jutland

was still there. Buckled beams, stress

fractures, weakened seams that had been

patched during the war and quietly

forgotten. For 18 years, HMS Warspite

had been sailing the world's oceans on a

skeleton that was in places only

pretending to be whole. Goodall was

called into Dry Dock 15 to see it

himself. He climbed down into her belly.

He carried a notebook. He carried a

small electric torch. He walked past the

exposed frames, running his gloved hand

along the corroded steel, and every 10

paces he stopped, and he wrote a number

in his notebook. He looked at the

twisted beams where the German shells

had exploded 18 years before. He said

very little. Then he went back to his

office in Whiteall and did the

mathematics.

The limited refit was dead. It would

have to be a total reconstruction. New

machinery, new armor, new superructure,

everything above the main deck stripped

and replaced. The final cost, when the

Treasury reluctantly approved it, would

be £2,363,000,

almost the price of building a new

battleship from scratch. The Admiral T

exploded. Here is the second twist.

Inside the board of Admiral T, senior

officers turned on Goodall. Their

argument was blunt. If War spite was

going to cost as much as a new ship,

they should scrap her and build a new

one. There were designs already being

sketched for what would become the King

George Vass. Modern ships, fast ships,

not patched up survivors from a war

their grandfathers had fought. Goodall

stood in the meeting rooms of Whiteall

and made his case quietly without

raising his voice. He did not raise his

voice often. He pointed at the calendar.

The treaty forbade new construction

until 1937,

3 years away. 3 years in which Italy was

already rebuilding, in which Germany was

already rearming.

Waiting was not a choice. Rebuilding War

Spite would cost 40% of a new

battleship, he said, and it would

deliver her to the fleet in 3 years

instead of six. He won the argument. He

also made enemies, men in gold braid,

who did not forget being lectured by an

architect from Popla. Goodall wrote in

his private diary, in his neat,

controlled hand, that he was tired of

admirals who thought a ship was a

symbol. To him, a ship was mathematics.

It was tonnage and shell weight and the

angle of a gun barrel, nothing more and

nothing less. Through the summer of

1934, Warp Spade came apart in dry dock

15. The workers of Portsmouth stripped

her down until she was nothing but her

hull and her keel. Her 24 old Babcock

and Wilcock spoilers were lifted out one

by one, each one the weight of a large

lorry, hoisted through openings cut in

her upper deck. Her superructure was cut

away with torches section section in the

rain, in the sun, in the dawn light, and

the yellow glow of ark lamps. Her

conning tower, 200 tons of hardened

steel, was severed from her deck and

hoisted into the air. Photographs from

those months show her looking less like

a warship than a corpse.

A skeleton ribs of gray metal open to

the sky. Gulls perching on the stripped

decks. Rain pooling in the empty holes.

She should have looked finished. Done.

Ready for the breaker's yard. And here

is the third twist. By March of 1937,

when the reconstruction was complete and

Warspeed slid back into the water, one

thing was missing from her. One critical

thing. Radar. The technology existed.

British scientists at Boursey Mana on

the coast of Suffukk were experimenting

with it. Robert Watson Watt had

demonstrated the principle to the Air

Ministry back in February of 1935.

Prototype sets were being tested against

Hayford bombers. But it was too new,

too, unreliable to install on a

frontline battleship. The Admiral made

the decision to leave it out. Goodall

accepted it. He had no other option. But

he understood even then that Warsite was

going back to see half blind. He was

sending her into the future with one

foot still planted in the past. When she

recommissioned in June of 1937, she was

on paper the most modernized ship in the

Royal Navy. Faster, longer ranged,

better armored against the bombs of a

new war that everyone could feel coming.

And when that war came 2 years and 3

months later, she would carry Stanley

Vernon Goodall's work into every ocean

where the Royal Navy fought. She would

carry his mistakes with her, too.

Portsouth Dockyard. The summer of 1934.

6,000 men more or less worked on her.

Riveters, welders, boiler makers,

electricians, draftsmen bent over tables

in cold offices, coats still button,

breath fogging the paper, fitters

crawling into spaces so narrow they had

to be smeared with grease before they

could squeeze through. Old men who had

built her the first time back in 1913,

walking her decks again in 1934 with

hands that remembered every rivet. You

have to picture the noise. The scream of

steel being cut. The rhythmic hammer of

pneumatic guns. The shout of foremen

over the roar of the yard. Cranes

swinging turret barrels longer than a

city bus through the air. Chains

creaking under 70 tons of hardened

metal. Fires burning in brazier on the

dock walls. Men eating bread and

dripping out of tin lunch pales.

Watching their ship come apart and go

back together day after day for 3 years.

24 boilers came out. Old Babcock and

Wilcock spoilers worn out from 20 years

of service. In their place went six new

Admiral T3 drum boilers. Smaller,

lighter, more powerful. When they were

finished, Warsite's engines could

produce 72,000 shaft horsepower. On her

trials in the spring of 1937, she made

almost 24 knots, faster than the day she

was launched. Her eight 15-in guns were

pulled from their turrets and reored.

The turrets themselves were rebuilt so

the barrels could elevate to 30° instead

of 20. That single change, a matter of

10° of arc, extended her range from

23,000 yd to 32,000 y.

16 mi, she could now hit a target so far

away that from her deck, that target was

below the horizon. A spotting aircraft

in the sky above would have to tell her

where the shells were falling. Her armor

was thickened. 5 in of steel over the

magazines, 3 and 1/2 in over the engine

rooms. Her beam was widened to 104 ft

with anti- torpedo bulges, blisters of

steel and empty space built onto her

flanks to absorb a hit that in 1916

would have gutted her. The bulges were

an idea that had first been tested in

the First World War. Goodall had helped

refine them. They gave her a hanger

behind her funnel, a metal shed for two

free swordfish or walrus sea planes with

a catapult that could throw them into

the sky and a crane to lift them out of

the water when they came home. Wspite

would now carry her own eyes. They gave

her new anti-aircraft guns because

everyone in Whiteall knew by 1934 that

the next war would come from above. four

twin 4-in mountings. 48 barreled

two-pounder pom poms, the guns her crew

would soon nickname the Chicago Pianos

for the way they hammered. A new fire

control system, the Hack Mark III, to

track enemy aircraft, and an Admiral

fire control table Mark 7 for the 15-in

guns. 3 years of work, 2,363,000,

enough money to have built an entire

small cruiser from scratch. In March of

1937, they let the water back into dry

dock 15. Wars fight floated. She was at

that moment arguably the most modernized

battleship in the world. And in a small

office in Whiteall, Stanley Vernon

Goodall closed a folder, straightened

his tie, and moved on to the next

problem. Then in the summer of 1936,

midway through the warp spike job, he

was promoted. Sir Arthur William Johns

retired. Goodall took his place,

director of naval construction, the man

who signed off on every warship the

Royal Navy built. He would hold that job

for the next seven years. Seven years

that would break most men. In May of

1937, a chief petty officer named Fred

Jones reported aboard HMS Warsite. He

was a gunner's mate. He was made captain

of B turret, the second of her four

15-in turrets, forward on her main deck.

He would serve on her for most of the

war. He would leave a memoir later

published by his son. Because of Fred

Jones, we know what it smelled like

inside a 15-in turret in 1941. Cordite,

sweat, oil, fear, the smell of hot brass

casings clattering onto steel deck

plates. The smell of a man beside you

praying to himself under his breath.

Warsite went south to the Mediterranean

in June of 1937 as flagship of the fleet

under Admiral Sir Dudley Pound. Almost

the moment she arrived, one of her brand

new pompom guns misfired during a salute

and put shells into the city of Valleta

on Malta. No one was killed, the Admiral

T apologized. Goodall, in his private

diary, wrote something short and bitter

about crews who did not understand the

weapons they were given. The truth was

harder than embarrassment. The guns

worked. The men did not yet know how to

use them. War spite had been built for a

war that had not started. And let's

start now. Not not the admirals, not the

crews, not goodall himself would know if

the work of those three years had been

worth the money. They would not have to

wait long. Here is the fourth twist. The

reconstruction had been planned in two

phases. Phase one was the hull, the

machinery, the guns, the armor. Phase

two, scheduled for the early 1940s, was

to include the newest fire control

equipment and eventually radar. Phase

two was never completed. On the 3rd of

September 1939, Neville Chamberlain went

on the wireless from Downing Street.

Britain was at war with Germany. Goodall

was still director of naval

construction. He was 56 years old. The

war had arrived on his desk 3 years

earlier than the timetable. From that

morning forward, everything he did,

every drawing, every specification,

every meeting in a bomb shelter

conference room would be a race against

time. Admiral Pound was gone, promoted

to first seaord in the summer of 1939.

In his place at the Mediterranean,

another man took command. His name was

Andrew Brown Cunningham, 56 years old,

small, watchful, a face like weathered

wood. He would command warp spite for

the next 3 years. He would take her into

the fights that made her a legend. The

first of those fights came in April of

1940.

Norway. The Germans had invaded on the

9th. Their destroyers, 10 of them, had

raced up a long fjord called a fot fjord

in the mountains above the Arctic Circle

to seize the iron or port of Narvik. A

first British attack on on the 10th of

April went in with five destroyers and

came out with two. Captain Bernard

Walbert and Lee, who had led that first

attack, was killed on the bridge of his

flagship. He would be awarded the

Victoria Cross postumously. On the 13th

of April, the Royal Navy tried again.

This time they sent Warspite. Here is

the fifth twist. Vice Admiral William

Jock Witwit flew his flagon war spite as

she pushed into fjord that afternoon,

escorted by nine destroyers.

Try to see this in your mind. A fjord.

Sheer black cliffs rising 2,000 ft on

either side. Snow on the slopes. Ice in

the water and into that narrow channel,

a battleship 33,000 tons of gray steel

so wide her superructure almost seemed

to scrape the walls of the mountains.

Below decks, Fred Jones and his gun

crews sat in their turrets in darkness,

waiting for the order, listening to the

eerie echoing sound of the great ship's

engines bouncing off the mountains

outside. The German destroyers were

waiting. They fought. They fought hard.

But War Spide's 15-in guns at ranges of

only a few thousand yards tore them

apart. One salvo, one destroyer in a

15-in turret. At that range, the gunners

were not really aiming. They were

pointing. And then over the deck of war

spite, her fairy swordfish sea plane

launched. The men in that biplane, a

slow open cockpit machine that looked

like something out of the previous war,

climbed above the fjord and spotted a

shape below the water. A German

submarine U64 sheltering in Hyang's

fjord. They dropped their bombs. U64

broke apart and sank in shallow water.

It was the first Uboat in history sunk

by an aircraft of the Royal Navy. It

happened because Warsite, thanks to a

hanger Goodall had built into her three

years earlier, was carrying her own

aircraft. By nightfall, all eight

remaining German destroyers were

destroyed or scuttled by their own

crews. 2,000 German sailors were dead or

captured. Witworth's report to the

Admiral T was short. The Grand Old Lady,

he wrote, had done well. The name stuck.

It would follow her for the rest of her

life. 3 months later on the 9th of July

1940, Warsite was in the central

Mediterranean with Cunningham on her

bridge. The Italian battle fleet was at

sea. Two Italian battleships, six heavy

cruisers, 17 destroyers. Cunningham had

three battleships. He engaged. At 1600

hours, Warsite opened fire on Julio

Chiser. At a range so long the Italian

ship was a smudge on the horizon. 24 km,

roughly 26,000 yards, 15 mi. She hit one

shell. A 15-in shell fired from a moving

battleship at another moving battleship

15 mi away in the middle of the

Mediterranean.

It landed on Julio Chesire's after

superructure and exploded. Fires broke

out, speed dropped, the Italian fleet

turned and ran for home. To this day,

that hit remains one of the longest

range gunry strikes on a moving ship in

the history of naval warfare.

It happened because of an angle because

Stanley Vernon Goodall had insisted back

in 1934 on raising the elevation of the

15-in guns from 20° to 30. 10° of steel

angle, argued for in a conference room

in Whiteall, had put a shell on target

across 15 mi of open sea. Cunningham

said very little about it in his

memoirs. He was that kind of man. He was

a small, quiet Scot from Edinburgh, born

in 1883, the same year as Goodall

himself. His men were terrified of him.

His enemies had learned to be. But his

gunnery officers understood what Warsite

had just done. And Fred Jones, sitting

inside B Turret during the battle, would

tell his son years later that the deck

under his feet had shaken like a train

hitting a bridge. 9 months later came

the sixth twist. The night of the 28th

of March, 1941. Cape Matapan, the

southern tip of Greece. The Italian

fleet was at sea again, hunting for

British convoys, running supplies to the

army in North Africa. Cunningham was

hunting the Italians.

And now, for the first time in her

career, the British squadron had

something the Italians did not. HMS

Valiant, sailing beside Warsite, carried

a working radar set. Warpite herself

would not receive her full radar suite

until later that year in an American

shipyard. But that afternoon, Valiant's

radar was enough. That evening, radar

found the Italian ships in the dark.

Wasput, Valiant, and Barum closed on

them at 15 knots. The Italians had no

radar. They did not know they were being

hunted. They did not know that three of

the Royal Navy's largest battleships

were at that moment 3 and a half

thousand yards off their beam and

pointed straight at them. On the bridge

of War Spite, Cunningham gave the order,

not a shout, a quiet word, open fire. At

2227 hours, a British destroyer switched

on a search light. It fell across the

flank of the Italian heavy cruiser fume.

Walspite fired. Six 15-in shells. Five

hits. Every man on Walspid's bridge felt

the ship shudder in recoil. The enormous

concussion traveling through steel and

up through their boots. The Italian

cruiser fume at 10,000 tons of steel was

on fire from stem to stern within 20

seconds. Wars fight shifted target. Zara

six more shells. Zara burned. Polar

already crippled by a torpedo hit

earlier that day was finished off by

British destroyers.

Three Italian heavy cruisers and two

destroyers were destroyed in under 3

minutes. 2,300 Italian sailors died in

the black water off Cape Matapan. In the

morning, British sailors would find

survivors clinging to floating debris,

oil soaked and shivering, and they would

pull them aboard. There were not many.

Cunningham, in his memoirs, called it

the most decisive action fought by the

Mediterranean fleet in the entire war.

Inside B Turret, Fred Jones felt the

barrels of his guns burning hot to the

touch. The paint on the deck of B turret

had blistered. Below him, his ammunition

handlers were on their knees. The air

inside the turret smelled of burnt

cordite and sweat and something like

scorched metal, and every man in there

was half deaf from the concussion. In

his diary that summer, Good wrote a

single line about Matapan. Wars fight,

he noted, had performed as designed.

That was as much emotion as he ever

allowed himself. Two months later came

the seventh twist. The 22nd of May 1941,

the battle for Cree. Warp Spite was

operating close to the coast of Cree,

hunting German invasion convoys. The

Luftvafer was overhead. The Royal Navy

was losing ships every day now. Cruisers

and destroyers picked off one after

another by Stookas and Mesishmmits

flying from captured Greek airfields.

There was no British air cover. HMS

Formidable, the fleet carrier, had

almost no serviceable fighters left. The

men on war fights decks knew they were

exposed. They watched the sky. They

fired their 4-in guns and their pompoms

and their machine guns until the barrels

were too hot to touch. At 1:32 in the

afternoon, three Messes fighter bombers

came out of the sun and released their

bombs. Two missed. One did not. A 500lb

bomb struck the exact spot where Chief

Pay officer Fred Jones had been standing

60 seconds earlier, repairing a jammed

anti-aircraft mount on the starboard

side. He had just walked away. The men

who had taken his place did not. The

bomb tore through the deck, exploded in

the 4-in anti-aircraft battery, and set

fire to her superructure.

43 men were killed. 69 were wounded.

Some of the wounded burned to death in

the compartments below the battery

before rescue parties could reach them.

It was for the first time since her

reconstruction, a bad wound. Her boilers

took damage. She could barely make 15

knots. She limped back to Alexandria.

Fred Jones went back to his turret. He

did not talk about the men who had died

in his place. Not for years. She could

not be repaired in Britain. The

Mediterranean was closed. The Suez route

was too dangerous. Every mile of the

direct route home was under the guns of

the Luftvafa or the Yubot.

And so on the 25th of June 1941, Warsite

sailed east down the Red Sea across the

Indian Ocean to son onto Manila in the

American held Philippines, then to Pearl

Harbor, 6 weeks at sea in a battleship

whose boilers were half broken and whose

depates was were still scorched from the

creep bomb. She reached the Puget Sound

Navy Yard at Breton in Washington State

on the 11th of August, 1941. Read that

sentence again. A British battleship

damaged by German bombs in Greek waters

was repaired in an American Navyyard 4

months before Pearl Harbor before the

United States was even in the war. It

happened under the terms of the Lend

Lease Act and with the quiet approval of

President Roosevelt. It was one of the

first signs, still hidden from most of

the American public in the summer of

1941, that the two English-speaking

navies had already, in effect, begun to

fight the same war. For anyone watching

in Berlin or Tokyo, who understood what

was happening in that Breton dry dock,

the war's ending was already visible.

The American workers of Pujet Sound

treated her like their own. They

reboarded her 15-in guns. They added

anti-aircraft arament. They rebuilt her

bridge and they gave her what Goodall

had wanted for her four years earlier. A

full suite of radar. Type 271 for

surface search. Type 281 for air

warning. Type 284 for Mangali. Type 28

Wi-Fi for anti-aircraft fire. On the 7th

of December 1941, while she was still at

Breton, the Japanese struck Pearl

Harbor. Warfight went on alert. If the

enemy had turned east, she was one of

the few ships on the American West Coast

with the guns to answer them. She was

recommissioned on the 28th of December

1941, no longer half blind, she sailed

down the west coast of America, crossed

the equator, and arrived in Sydney,

Australia in February of 1942.

For the next 15 months, she fought a

different war in the Indian Ocean under

a new admiral, Sir James Somerville

against the Japanese fleet that had

crushed everything in front of it that

had sunk the Prince of Wales and the

Repulse in a single afternoon.

Warpite never fired her main guns

against the Japanese. She was too old

and too slow to chase Nagumo's carriers.

She was held in reserve at Trinkamaly, a

floating threat that kept the enemy

cautious until she was called home in

1943 to fight in the Mediterranean

again. Here is the eighth twist, the

last one, perhaps the strangest. On the

16th of September 1943, Wars fight was

off Salerno in southern Italy,

supporting the Allied landings on the

beaches south of Naples. The Italian

government had already surrendered. Only

a week before, the surviving ships of

the Italian fleet had steamed out of

their ports and given themselves up to

Cunningham at Malta, and Warp Spite had

been there to escort them in. The great

Italian battleship Roma had tried to

make that same journey and had been sunk

on the way by German aircraft using a

new weapon. Nobody in the Royal Navy

quite understood what that weapon was.

Then, high above War Spite, an

unfamiliar aircraft appeared. A German

Dornia DU 217.

Three shapes fell from beneath its

wings. They did not fall straight. They

fell and then they corrected. They were

being steered. They were called Fritz X

1,400 kg armorpiercing bombs guided by

radio from the aircraft above. Some of

the first guided weapons in the history

of warfare.

One struck war spider midship. It

punched through six decks. It exploded

in her boiler room. As a second exploded

in the water beside her, buckling her

hull plating from the outside. She lost

all power. She lost all steering. She

began to flood. She had to be towed to

Malta on the end of a cable, drifting

like a corpse at four knots. Her crew

worked in flooded compartments in

complete darkness, sealing bulkheads by

touch, keeping her afloat. Goodall in

London designed the emergency repairs.

X-T turret, one of her main gun turrets,

would never fire again. The world had

changed while Warp Spite was being

rebuilt. The world had changed even more

since. She had begun her career at

Jutland in a jewel of iron ships firing

solid shot at each other across open

sea. She was ending it under a sky

filled with radio guider bombs. She was

the bridge between two eras of war. And

she was almost finished. She should not

have been at Normandy. By the spring of

1944, HMS Warspite was a wounded animal.

Her ex-turret was dead, welded silent

after the Fritz Xbomb tore through her

hull off Salerno. Her top speed had

dropped. Her boiler rooms carried scars

that could not be repaired in a working

Navyyard, only patched, only braced,

only made just good enough. She sat at

Rosith in Scotland through the last

months of the winter, and every officer

who came aboard came away with the same

thought.

She belongs in a scrapyard, but the

Royal Navy had run out of battleships.

The men planning Operation Neptune, the

naval side of D-Day, needed heavy guns

to break the German coastal defenses.

Every 15-in barrel in the fleet was

accounted for. War Spite still had six

of them that could shoot. She was

ordered south. On the morning of the 6th

of June, 1944, she stood off Sword Beach

in the English Channel, and she opened

fire on the coast of France. Fred Jones,

still captain of B turret, still at his

post after seven years, still alive

after the near miss at Cree and the guns

of Matapan, felt the deck jump beneath

his feet the way it had jumped at Cape

Matapan 3 years earlier. Different sea,

different enemy, same guns. The muzzle

blast of a 15-in salvo at 3,000 yd was a

physical wave of pressure that a man

could feel in his chest through steel

and concrete and cordite. She fired all

day. She fired the next day and the

next. Over the course of the Normandy

campaign, Warsite would put 314 15-in

shells into German positions along the

French coast. She fired at Sword Beach

on the 6th of June. She fired in support

of American troops at Utah Beach on the

9th. She fired for the British 69th

Infantry Brigade at Gold Beach on the

11th. So close to shore that the men in

the trenches could hear her salvos

coming in overhead like freight trains.

The soldiers ashore said that when war

spite fired the German schling stopped

for hours. Then on the 13th of June

1944, 7 days after D-Day, she was

ordered back to Rosith to have her gun

barrels replaced. They had been fired so

many times, so hot, so long that the

rifling was worn out, she never made it.

Here is the ninth twist. 28 mi off

Haritch in the gray water of the North

Sea, she struck a German magnetic mine.

The explosion opened her hull below the

water line. She flooded. She limped into

port on three shafts, one of her

propeller shafts torn from its bearings.

The Admiral T made its decision quietly.

War spite would not be fully repaired.

It was not worth it. The war had a year

left, perhaps less, and there were newer

ships now and easier ships. But she was

not finished yet. They sent her back

out. In November of 1944, patched

together with steel plates welded over

her wounds, unable to make more than 15

knots, with only three of her four main

turret working, she took part in the

bomber mut of Vulturin in the

Netherlands. Her 15-in shells smashed

German fortifications on the mouth of

the Shelt, helping to open the port of

Antwerk for Allied supplies.

It would be her last action. When the

guns fell silent that autumn, she had

earned 14 battle honors, more than any

other ship in the history of the Royal

Navy. Sir Andrew Cunningham had by then

risen to be first seaord in London. Vice

Admiral Witworth had retired. Fred Jones

was still aboard, still at B turret,

still doing his job. And Stanley Vernon

Goodall was already gone. Here is the

10th twist. In January of 1944, in the

middle of the greatest war in human

history, at the moment when his

knowledge and experience were most

desperately needed, the Civil Service

forced Sir Stanley Vernon Goodall into

retirement. He had turned 60. That was

the rule. It did not matter that he had

spent 30 years building the ships that

were now winning the war. It did not

matter that War Spite at that very

moment was preparing for D-Day. It did

not matter that the escort carriers

pouring out of American and British

shipyards to fight the Ubot had been

designed to his specifications.

The rule was the rule. He wrote about it

in his diary. He tried in his quiet

controlled pros not to be bitter. He did

not succeed. He wrote about admirals who

did not understand the machines they

used. He wrote about bureaucrats who

could not see past the calendar. He

wrote about the loneliness of a man who

had spent his life doing work no one

would ever thank him for. He was allowed

to keep a smaller job, assistant

controller for warship production. He

held it until October of 1945 until the

war was over and Japan had surrendered

and then he was let go from that too. He

walked out of the Admiral T for the last

time an old man kned, decorated,

respected, but finished. The world moved

on. Two years passed, the war ended,

peace came, rationing continued, harsher

in some ways than it had been during the

war. And in the summer of 1946, the

Admiral T made a decision about HMS Wars

fight. There had been proposals to save

her, to preserve her as a museum ship

morowed somewhere in the tempames or at

Portsmouth, a monument to two world wars

and to the men who had fought them. Fred

Jones was among those who quietly hoped

she would be saved. He had written to

his family from the Mediterranean during

the war that war spite felt to him like

a living thing. He did not want to see

her cut apart. The proposals were

rejected. Britain was broke. Britain was

rationed. Britain could not afford to

feed her children, let alone maintain a

rusting battleship as a memorial. Wspite

was condemned to the breaker's yard. On

the 19th of April 1947, she left

Portsmouth for the last time. She was

undertoe. She had no crew aboard save

for a small skeleton party to manage the

cables. She was headed for fast lane on

the river Clyde in Scotland where the

shipbreakers were waiting. She never got

there. Here is the 11th twist, the one

nobody in the Royal Navy expected. Off

the coast of Cornwall in the channel

that had watched her sail out for a 100

battles, a storm rose up. The wind hit

50 knots. The toe cables tightened,

screamed against the bllards, and

snapped. Wars by drifted free for a few

hours in the darkness. No one knew where

she had gone. She was a ship without a

crew, without engines, without steering.

30,000 tons of gray steel aer drift in a

storm at night off a rocky coast. At

dawn on the 23rd of April, 1947, she was

found. She had run herself a ground in a

small cove called Prussia Cove near the

village of Morazon in Cornwall. Her bow

was jammed against the rocks. Her stern

was in deep water. She was healed over

to one side, listing, motionless, still

flying no flag. Local fishermen, who saw

her at first light, thought at first she

was a mirage. Nothing that big had any

business being in that little cove. The

Penley lifeboat came out through the

surf to rescue the small towing crew.

They came off. She stayed. The salvage

attempts began within days. They failed.

She was too big. She was too wellb

built. She had been designed in 1913 to

withstand shellfire. And now the rocks

of Cornwall could not break her open.

Local men said, half in wonder, half in

jest, that the grand old lady had chosen

where she wanted to die. The salvage

company, Metal Industries Limited,

brought in tugs. The tugs failed. They

brought in explosives. The hull

resisted. In the end, they had to build

a temporary jetty out to her, cut her

apart, piece by piece in the seabed, and

haul the pieces ashore in barges. It

took the salvage crews 8 years to cut

her apart. Piece by piece, plate by

plate, through winter storms and summer

tides, they took her down. The last of

her hull was finally lifted from the

seabed of Prussia Cove in 1955. Stanley

Vernon Goodore lived to see it. He lived

on in London through the 50s, then into

the 60s. An old man in an old suit

walking to the Royal Institution of

Naval Architects where his portrait

painted by James Baraklo in 1938 hung on

the wall. In that portrait, he looked

straight out at the viewer, jaw set,

[music] eyes tired. It is the face of a

man who has argued too many times in too

many rooms. He gave occasional lectures.

He wrote occasional articles for the

naval architecture journals, younger

engineers at his home to ask about the

great battleships of the war. And he

answered their questions patiently, and

he never told them the full story of

what those seven years as DNC had cost

him. He died on the 24th of February

1965. He was 81 years old. His obituary

in the Times was short. Most of the men

who read it did not know who he had

been. His diaries, the private ones, the

honest ones, sat in a box for decades

before the historian Ian Bookton edited

them and put them out for the public to

read. In those diaries, Goodall never

claimed Warspite as his own. He wrote

about Sir Arthur William Johns, his

predecessor, the man who had started the

project. Wrote about the draftsman in

Whiteall, who had worked 18-hour days.

He wrote about the workmen of Portsouth

Dockyard, most of them dead by 1965, who

had cut the steel and driven the rivets

and built the ship, one plate at a time,

through three years of cold English

mornings. He said the work was theirs.

He was not the engineer who turned a

primitive battleship into Britain's most

feared weapon. He was one of thousands.

That is the real story. Not a genius

alone in a room. Not a lightning bolt of

inspiration.

A treaty in Washington. A depression in

London. A political calendar counting

down to 1937. Thousands of men in a

shipyard. 10° of gun elevation argued

for in a conference room. 24 boilers

pulled out and six put in. a hanger

built to a deck so that one afternoon

over a Norwegian fjord a canvas biplane

could kill a submarine. War spite was

not the work of one hand. She was the

work of a country that could not afford

new battleships. So it rebuilt the old

ones. A country that made the correct

cold unromantic choice and lived to see

it win a war. At Jutland in 1916, 15

heavy German shells struck her and she

survived. At Narvik, at Calabria, at

Matapan, at Cree, at Saleno, at

Normandy, she survived at Prussia Cove

in a storm in 1947. She came ashore and

would not be moved. And she survived

even that for eight more years until

there was nothing left of her to

salvage. 14 battle honors, more than any

ship in the history of the Royal Navy.

Fred Jones survived the war and went

home to England. He died in 1974.

Tissan later gathered his memoirs and

published them. And it is because of

those memoirs that we know what a 15-in

turret sounded like when it fired and

what the deck of war spite smelled like

the morning after Matapan.

Andrew Cunningham, who had commanded her

at Matapan and Calabria, died in 1963,

still a Vic count, still remembered by

his men as the finest admiral of the

Second World War.

William Jock Witworth, who had taken her

into the fjord at Narvik, retired

quietly and died in 1973, largely

forgotten by the public. And Walswite

herself lies still in her way on the

seabed off Cornwall. If you go today to

the coast of Cornwall, and walked the

cliff path above Prussia Cove at low

tide, on a clear day, you can still see

her. A darker patch on the seabed, a

shadow in the water, rust in the shape

of a ship. That is all that is left of

the grand old lady. and of Stanley

Vernon Goodall.