HMS Vanguard was a British fast battleship built during the Second World War and commissioned after the war ended. She was the largest and fastest of the Royal Navy's battleships, and the only ship of her class. Vanguard was the last battleship in history to be built.
The Royal Navy anticipated being outnumbered by the combined German and Japanese battleships in the early 1940s, and had therefore started building the s. However, the time-consuming construction of the triple- turrets for the Lion class would delay their completion until 1943 at the earliest. The British had enough guns and turrets in storage to allow one ship of a modified Lion-class design with four twin-15-inch turrets to be completed faster than the Lion-class vessels that had already been laid down. Work on Vanguard was started and stopped several times during the war, and her design was revised several times during her construction to reflect war experience. These stoppages and changes prevented her from being completed before the end of the war.
Vanguards first task after completing her sea trial at the end of 1946 was, early the next year, to convey King George VI and his family on the first Royal Tour of South Africa by a reigning monarch. While refitting after her return, she was selected for another Royal Tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1948. This was cancelled due to King George's declining health and Vanguard briefly became flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet in early 1949. After her return home in mid-1949, she became flagship of the Home Fleet Training Squadron. Throughout her career, the battleship usually served as the flagship of any unit to which she was assigned. During the early 1950s, Vanguard was involved in a number of training exercises with NATO forces. In 1953 she participated in Queen Elizabeth II's Coronation Review.
Through the mid-1950s she was kept active, along with four older battleships in reserve, largely as a counter to the Soviet Sverdlov-class cruiser fleet, which she easily outperformed. As the Blackburn Buccaneer attack aircraft entered service, the need for large-gun ships to counter the Sverdlovs ended since the Buccaneer could attack the Sverdlovs with relative ease. While Vanguard was refitting in 1955, the Admiralty announced that the ship was going to be put into reserve upon completion of the work. She was sold for scrap and was broken up beginning in 1960.
Design and description By early 1939 it was clear that the first two s could not be delivered before 1943 at the earliest and that further battleship construction would be necessary to match the German and Japanese battleships already under construction. The main constraint on the construction of any new battleships was the limited available capacity and the time required to build large-calibre guns and their gun turrets. Using four existing twin 15-inch mountings offered the possibility of bypassing this bottleneck and allowed the construction of a single fast battleship more quickly than building more Lion-class ships. The turrets were originally built for the battlecruisers and during the First World War, and were removed during the conversions of these ships to aircraft carriers in the 1920s. To save time, the Lion design was modified to accommodate the four turrets, and preliminary design work began in July 1939. The square or transom stern was retained as it was estimated to improve speed at full power by . This made Vanguard the only British battleship built with a transom stern, as the Lions were never finished.
Design work was suspended on 11 September 1939, after the start of the Second World War, but resumed in February 1940 after the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, expressed an interest in the ship. The design was modified to increase protection against shell splinters on the unprotected sides of the ship's hull, the armour of the secondary armament was increased to resist semi-armour-piercing bombs, and the splinter belt's thickness fore and aft of the main armour belt was reduced by in compensation. A small conning tower was added aft, and four Unrotated Projectile mounts were added to supplement the six octuple-barrel 2-pounder anti-aircraft mounts already planned.
More pressing commitments forced the preliminary design work to be suspended again in June; when it resumed in October the design was modified again in light of recent war experience. Greater fuel capacity was added and the armour protection improved, but these changes deepened the design's draught to beyond the limit of the Suez Canal. The thickness of the main belt was reduced by to save weight, but the primary method chosen to reduce the draught was to increase the beam by . This exceeded the width of the docks at Rosyth and Plymouth, which severely limited the number of docks that could handle the ship, but the changes were approved by the Board of Admiralty on 17 April 1941. The ship had already been ordered on 14 March under the 1940 Emergency War Programme, although the drawings were not turned over to John Brown & Company until ten days later.
Vanguards design was revised again, while the ship was under construction in 1942, to reflect lessons learned from the loss of the battleship and operations with the other battleships. The longitudinal distance between the inboard and outboard propellers was increased from to reduce the chance of a single torpedo wrecking both propeller shafts on one side and watertight access trunks were added to all spaces below the deep waterline to prevent the progressive flooding through open watertight doors and hatches that had happened to Prince of Wales. This change and the relocation of some of the ammunition handling rooms from the lower deck to the middle deck seriously delayed the ship's completion. The design requirement that the guns of 'A' turret be capable of firing straight ahead at 0° of elevation was sacrificed to allow her freeboard forward to be increased, and her bow was reshaped to make it less prone to shipping water and throwing sea spray in head seas. The ship's fuel supply was increased from to to prevent the fuel shortage problems suffered by and during their pursuit of the . The Unrotated Projectile mounts were deleted from the design and the light anti-aircraft armament was increased to a total of 76 two-pounders in one quadruple, and nine octuple mounts and 24 Oerlikon 20 mm cannon were also added in 12 twin mounts. Space for these was made available by removing the two floatplanes, the catapult and their associated facilities.
A proposal was made in 1942 to convert Vanguard to an aircraft carrier. The Director of Naval Construction stated that doing so along the lines of the would present no major difficulties but would require six months to redesign the ship. The proposal was formally rejected on 17 July.
General characteristics
Vanguard had an overall length of , a beam of and a draught of at deep load. She displaced at standard load and at deep load. The ship was significantly larger than her predecessors of the class, almost longer and displacing about more than the older ships at deep load. Vanguard was overweight by some , which magnified the difference. The ship had a complete double bottom deep and she was divided into 27 main compartments by watertight bulkheads.
The King George V-class ships had been built with almost no sheer to the main deck forwards to allow 'A' turret to fire straight forward at zero elevation, resulting in those ships being wet forward. Vanguard was redesigned as a result of this experience, significant sheer and flare being added to the bow. The ship's seaworthiness was well regarded, and the ship was able to keep an even keel in rough seas. At full load Vanguard had a metacentric height of .
As a fleet flagship, her complement was 115 officers and 1,860 men in 1947. Air conditioning was provided for many of the ship's control spaces, and asbestos insulation was provided on exposed areas of the ship's sides, decks and bulkheads. Steam heating was provided for her armament, instruments, look-out positions and other equipment to make Vanguard suitable for operations in the Arctic. An Action Information Centre was fitted below the main armour deck with facilities to track aircraft and ships around Vanguard.
Propulsion To save design time, the four-shaft unit machinery from the Lion-class battleship was duplicated with alternating boiler and engine rooms. Vanguard had four sets of single-reduction geared Parsons steam turbines housed in separate engine rooms. Each set consisted of one high-pressure and one low-pressure turbine, driving a propeller in diameter. The turbines were powered by eight Admiralty 3-drum boilers in four boiler rooms at a working pressure of and temperature of . The engines were designed to produce a total of and a speed of , but achieved more than during the ship's sea trials in July 1946, when she reached a speed of . After trials, the three-bladed propellers on the inboard shafts were replaced by five-bladed propellers to reduce vibrations of the inboard propeller shafts, but this was a failure.
Vanguard was designed to carry 4,850 long tons of fuel oil and of diesel fuel. With a clean bottom she could steam at a speed of for . The ship had four turbogenerators and four diesel generators that supplied electricity via the common ring main at 220 volts. Their total output of was the largest of any British battleship.
Armament The ship's main armament consisted of eight 42-calibre BL 15-inch Mk I guns in four twin hydraulically powered gun turrets, 'A', 'B', 'X' and 'Y' from bow to stern. The guns were loaded at +5°; when the turrets were modernised to the Mk I(N) RP12 design, their maximum elevation was increased from 20° to +30°. They fired projectiles at a muzzle velocity of , for a maximum normal range of . The guns could use supercharges, which gave a maximum range of with the same shells. Their rate of fire was two rounds per minute. Vanguard carried 100 shells per gun.
The old 15-inch turrets had been designed when the customary practice was to place the magazine above the shell room, and it was not cost-effective to modify the ammunition hoists to accommodate the opposite arrangement, which had been adopted after the Battle of Jutland demonstrated the dangers of exposing the magazines to long-range gunfire. The ship was provided with a powder-handling room above the shell room to mimic the arrangement that the turrets' hoists were designed to handle, and another set of hoists moved the propellant charges from the magazines to the powder-handling room. The charges were stowed in cases to reduce their exposure to fire.
The secondary armament consisted of sixteen 50-calibre QF 5.25-inch Mk I* dual-purpose guns in eight twin gun mounts. They had a maximum depression of −5° and a maximum elevation of 70°. They fired an high-explosive shell at a muzzle velocity of . The improved RP10 spec 5.25 turrets on Vanguard were claimed to be fully automatic, with a power-rammed breech and automatic tracking and elevation under radar control enabling a rate of fire of about 18 rounds per minute. At maximum elevation, the guns had a maximum range of . 391 rounds were provided for each gun.