RN Battleships: Nelson Class

[designeraccd]

NELSON in 1945 and 1947............. DFO

[designeraccd]

My what BIG 16" guns you have!!! RODNEY.......... DFO

[Brian James]

Ammunitioning ship aboard Battleship HMS Nelson, July 1941.

[Brian James]

Dockyard workers at Cammell Laird Shipyards, Birkenhead, Merseyside pictured changing the worn BL 16 inch barrels on Nelson Class Battleship HMS Rodney on February 2nd 1942.

[Brian James]

Nelson Class Battleship HMS Rodney pictured in company with sister-ship HMS Nelson and Illustrious Class Carrier HMS Formidable...Western Mediterranean, 1943.

[Brian James]

Ammunitioning Ship on HMS Nelson at Scapa Flow in mid July 1941.

[Pelican]

HMS Rodney off Iceland during an official visit prior to World War II.

This was at the anchorage outside Reykjavik harbour. Photo taken in the last week of June 1930. Nicknamed Rodnol because the sailors thought her and her sister looked like fleet oilers.

[Brian James]

Nelson Class Battleship HMS Rodney..1940.

[Pelican]

Internationales Maritimes Museum Hamburg.

The end of World War I saw the rise of geopolitical tensions surrounding the Pacific Ocean. An arms race between Japan and the USA was starting and other nations, notably the UK, were to join in. In this context a new battlecruiser class was approved by the British Admiralty in August 1921: the G3. But by November of that year the USA hosted the Washington Naval Conference, a successful example of disarmament. There, the Washington Treaty of 1922 was signed, imposing limitations to the naval construction programs of the participating countries. The British project for the G3 battlecruisers was then downgraded to fit the treaty. The result were the battleships of the Nelson-class. The most peculiar aspect of their design was the fact that the whole of her main armament, three triple turrets with 16-inch guns, was placed in front of their superstructure. This distribution was made to give the area of the turrets an armour thick enough, without surpassing the displacement accepted by the treaty.
HMS Nelson, was for most of her career the Flagship of either the Home Fleet of the Atlantic Fleet. Her construction at the Armstrong-Whitworth shipyard in Newcastle upon Tyne lasted from late 1922 to 1925. She was commissioned in 1927. Her duty during World War II, seeing action in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Except for the repairs that had to be done after hitting mines in 1939 and 1944 (while giving support to the allied Normandy Landings) and torpedoed in 1941, she stayed continuously on duty. In 1945 she joined the Eastern Fleet until after the surrender of Japan. In 1946 she was assigned as a training ship before being decommissioned in 1948 and used as an experimental target ship for new armour-piercing bombs. She was finally scrapped. In early 1949.
This masterfully weathered 1:200 scale model is one of the works by our friend Wolfgang Wurm that can currently be admired on deck 5 of the museum.

[Brian James]

Lead Ship,Battleship HMS Nelson pictured from Dreadnought Battleship USS Texas in the Panama Canal Zone in February 1931.