british futute carriers special

When the confirmation of an order for the two British super-carriers was revealed in late July, the Royal Naval Historical Branch published revised histories for the illustrious names given to the new ships. Dennis Andrews has scrutinised the documents and culled thumbnail sketches of the CVFs’ forebears.

HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH
The two new aircraft carriers need impressive names that will match their physical presence. CVF 01 and CVF 02 will become, respectively, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, two very famous warship names. Only one ship with the name Queen Elizabeth has previously served with the Royal Navy, while there were more than 20 ships named Elizabeth in the British naval service between 1514 and 1918, including five line-of-battle ships. The Queen Elizabeth was lead ship in a revolutionary class of battleships, which served with distinction in both world wars. They were oil-fired, at a time when coal was the common fuel, and carried 15-inch guns. Nearly 640 feet long and weighing 32,950 tons, the Queen Elizabeth was built at Portsmouth Dockyard, and launched in 1913. The class was the result of efforts by the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to introduce fast battleships with the biggest guns ever. Switching from coal to oil was a major gamble. Although the benefits of oil-burners were many - quicker for ships to raise steam, increased speed, greater range, and doing away with the filthy and laborious method of ‘coaling ship’ - a regular and reliable supply of oil from the Middle East had to be guaranteed. After completion in 1915 HMS Queen Elizabeth sailed for the Dardanelles, where she provided Naval Gunfire Support for allied operations in the Gallipoli Peninsula. She was eventually withdrawn due to the increased threat from U-boats and mines and joined the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. The following May, Queen Elizabeth was in refit at Rosyth when the great clash between the Grand Fleet and the High Sea Fleet took place off Jutland. HMS Queen Elizabeth became flagship of the Grand Fleet in 1916.

Admiral Beatty took the surrender of the German Navy aboard Queen Elizabeth in November 1918. She was flagship of the Atlantic Fleet from 1919 to 1924. The whole Queen Elizabeth Class transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet in 1924, with Queen Elizabeth becoming flagship. Following modernisation at Portsmouth, from May 1926 to the end of 1927, she resumed her role as flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet. With storm clouds of war looming, a major reconstruction began on the ship at Portsmouth Dockyard in August 1937. It was finished, due to the outbreak of war and the threat of German air raids, at Rosyth Dockyard in February 1941.
Joining the Mediterranean Fleet on completion of the rebuild, Queen Elizabeth took part in convoy escort work and operations in support of the evacuation of troops from Crete. On September 1 she became flagship for Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, C-in-C Mediterranean. Severely damaged in an attack by Italian ‘human torpedo’ frogmen on December 19 1941, while at anchor in Alexandria harbour, Queen Elizabeth underwent repairs at Norfolk, Virginia.

The battleship Valiant was also severely damaged in the attack. Returned to service mid-1943, that December Queen Elizabeth sailed to join the Eastern Fleet accompanied by Renown and Valiant. As flagship of Admiral Sir James Somerville, Commander-in-Chief Eastern Fleet, Queen Elizabeth was engaged in operations throughout 1944 up to July 1945. She provided escort for carriers launching air strikes on enemy shipping, undertook bombardments and intercepted Japanese vessels in the Malacca Strait. Significantly, she participated in the operations that led to the sinking of the cruiser Haguro, the last major surface action by the Royal Navy in WW2. Arriving back at Rosyth in August 1945, Queen Elizabeth was placed in reserve in March 1946 and taken to the Clyde for demolition in July 1948.

HMS PRINCE OF WALES
The first Royal Navy ship to bear the name Prince of Wales was a French privateer captured in 1693 and renamed, which served as a 14-gun Sixth Rate until 1699.

The second was an 18-gun Hired Armed Ship, with a civilian crew of 120 men, serving under Royal Navy officers and discipline from 1756 to 1758. The third Prince of Wales, a Third Rate 74-gun, line-of-battle ship was built in 1765 and had a crew of 600. Commissioned 1770-71 and recommissioned in 1776, in December 1778, as British flagship, she played a major role in the successful defence of St Lucia against superior French forces.
In July 1779 HMS Prince of Wales led the British fleet against a larger French force, in a battle off Grenada. Paying off in 1780, she was broken up in 1783.

The fourth ship given the name was built at Portsmouth and launched in June 1794. She was a Boyne Class three-deck, 98-gun Second Rate. Designed as a budget First Rate, the ship handled badly, but served the Royal Navy well, seeing a lot of action during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. She was present at the battle off the île de Groix in June 1795, flagship at the capture of Trinidad in February 1797 and flagship of the force that delivered the surrender of the Dutch colony of Surinam in 1799. The ship was also Sir Robert Calder’s flagship in July 1805, when his squadron intercepted Admiral Villeneuve’s Combined Fleet off Ferrol, a few months before the great battle of Trafalgar.

In a confused action in poor visibility, two Spanish ships were taken, with the larger enemy force sustaining heavier casualties than the British. Calder also forced the Combined Fleet to divert course from their intended destination, ruining Napoleon’s invasion plans. HMS Prince of Wales was next in action in 1807, as flagship in the attack on Copenhagen, which ended with the surrender of the Danish fleet. Paid off at the end of the year, she recommissioned in 1811 for the blockade of the Scheldt. She then sailed to join the Mediterranean Fleet, where she served until the end of the war in 1814 and was broken up that year. The fifth Prince of Wales, laid down in 1848 as a First Rate line-of-battle ship, was completed in 1860 as a steam screw warship.
Never commissioned, in 1869 she became Cadet Training Ship at Dartmouth and was renamed HMS Britannia. She was hulked in 1909 and scrapped in 1914. Prince of Wales number six was a Queen Class battleship built at Chatham and launched in 1902.
Armed with four 12-inch guns, she served in the Mediterranean and Atlantic fleets before joining the Home Fleet in 1912. Assigned as flagship to the 5th Battle Squadron of the Channel Fleet on the outbreak of WW1, she sailed for the Dardanelles in March 1915. When Italy joined the allied side Prince of Wales was among a squadron of pre-dreadnoughts sent to reinforce the Italian fleet against Austrian naval forces. She was based at Taranto until February 1917. Paying off at the end of the war, Prince of Wales was scrapped in 1920. The last Prince of Wales was a King George V Class battleship built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead and completed in March 1941. Displacing over 42,000 tons and more than 745 feet long, she had a main armament of ten
14-inch guns and carried a complement of around 1,400. When declared operational on May 21 1941, the day the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen broke out into the Atlantic, she was suffering from faulty main armament systems. The Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Hood sailed from Scapa Flow the next day, the new battleship with dockyard engineers aboard still attending to the new ship’s teething problems. The British ships intercepted the German force in the Denmark Strait at dawn on May 24 and engaged the enemy. In the ensuing action HMS Hood blew up, with the loss of all but three of her crew. The Prince of Wales, now under the concentrated fire of both German ships and still plagued with mechanical failure of her main armament, broke off the action, but not before she had damaged the Bismarck’s oil tanks. Forced to separate from her consort and head for a French port, after a dramatic chase the new German battleship was run down and destroyed by the guns of battleships HMS Rodney and HMS King George V and torpedoes from the cruiser HMS Dorsetshire.
In August 1941 Prince of Wales carried Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Newfoundland for the Atlantic Charter meeting with President Roosevelt.

The next month the battleship joined Force H at Gibraltar, consisting of the battleships Rodney and Nelson, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, five cruisers and 18 destroyers, for Operation Halberd, a troop and supply convoy to Malta. In October 1941 the Prince of Wales, with the battle-cruiser Repulse, was ordered to the Far East, to form Force Z, based on Singapore, as a deterrent to the Japanese. Force Z, the two capital ships with a light destroyer escort, sailed on December 8 1941 to intercept a Japanese invasion force in the Gulf of Siam.  On December 10 the ships were attacked by waves of Japanese bombers and torpedo-bombers. Overwhelmed, both ships were sunk, although the Prince of Wales stayed afloat for about two hours, which allowed the escorting destroyers to rescue nearly 1,300 men.

CVF NOTES
Each CVF will carry over 8,600 tonnes of fuel to support the ship and her embarked aircraft - enough for the average family car to travel to the moon and back 12 times. The flight-deck area of the design covers nearly 13,000 square metres, the equivalent of three football pitches or 49 tennis courts. The hangar occupies 29,000 cubic metres, space for 12 Olympic-size swimming pools. CVF will have two bronze propellers, each 6.7 metres in diameter and weighing 33 tonnes - nearly two-and-a-half times as heavy as a double-decker bus and one-and-a-half times as high. The anchors will be 3.1 metres high and each will weigh 13 tonnes, almost as much as the aforementioned bus. CVF will carry 1,000 tonnes of food, which is enough to feed the crew of around 1,400 for six weeks, while over 150 tonnes of fresh water will be produced daily. Total crew numbers on the new carriers will be just 40 per cent more than on the Invincible Class, despite being four times the size. Four galleys will serve four large dining areas, the largest serving 950 personnel in an hour. The entire crew can be served in 90 minutes; half that time when at Action Stations. Sailors lived 100 men to a mess-deck aboard the Royal Navy’s last big carrier, the Ark Royal. In CVF they will be accommodated in six-berth cabins featuring large, comfortable bunks with adjacent toilet and shower facilities. An eight-bed medical suite, operating theatre and dental surgery, run by a team of 11, will be available for both crew needs and mission requirements such as humanitarian operations. Diesel generators that provide electricity and propulsion to CVF, weighing up to 220 tonnes each, will produce a total power output of 108MW, enough to run a town the size of Swindon. Designing and building the ships is expected to create and sustain around 10,000 jobs across the UK. At the peak of the manufacturing and assembly process, over 1,000 personnel will be engaged on the project at each of the yards at Govan, Barrow, Rosyth and Portsmouth.

• CVF States compiled from material provided by the UK MoD.

OLD & NEW AT A GLANCE

WW2 Battleships
HMS Queen Elizabeth
Class: Queen Elizabeth
(1944 stats)
Displacement: 38,450 tons
Dimensions: 645 feet 9 inches
 x 104 feet x 34 feet 6 inches
Armament: 8 x 15-inch guns;
20 x 4.5-inch QF Mk1 guns;
32 x 2pdr AA pompoms;
54 x 20mm Oerlikons
Propulsion: 4-shaft Parsons geared turbines, 8 Admiralty boilers generating 80,000 shp
Top speed: 23.5 knots
Complement: 950

HMS Prince of Wales
Class: King George V
Displacement: 36,727 tons
Dimensions: 745 feet x 103 feet x 29 feet
Armament: 10 x 14-inch guns;
16 x 5.25-inch QF Mk1 guns; 32 x 2pdr AA pompoms; 10 x 20mm Oerlikons
Propulsion: 4-shaft Parsons geared turbines, 8 Admiralty boilers generating 110,000 shp
Top speed: 28 knots
Complement: 1,422

21st Century Carriers
CVF 01 and 02
Class: Queen Elizabeth
Displacement: 65,000 tonnes
Dimensions: 284 metres x 73 metres (39 metres waterline)  x 11 metres
Air Group: 40 including F-35B Lightning II STOVL strike fighters; Merlin helicopters; Maritime Airborne Surveillance and Control (MASC) aircraft
Propulsion: 2 x Rolls Royce MT30 gas turbines; 4 x diesel generators powering electric motors on 2 propeller shafts, generating 100,000 shp
Complement: 1,400 (including air group)

• CVF Stats provided by UK MoD and Combat Fleets (Naval Institute Press).

Pictured:

HMS Queen Elizabeth during WW2.
Photo: Goodman Collection.

HMS Prince of Wales in 1941.
Photo: Goodman Collection.

An artist’s impression of a CVF at sea (right) along with the French variant of the same ship, the PA2.
Image: BAE Systems.