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CHAPTER 7
Coast Defence Ships in the
First World War
A
N EASY ASSUMPTION ABOUT
the state of the forces specifi-
cally assigned to coastal defence in 1914 is that this was a
role beneath the dignity of the major blue-water fleets. But
during the First World War this discipline was by no means
the exclusive province of the pure coast defence fleets of
Scandinavia and the other lesser powers which managed to
stay out of the conflict.
Moreover the practice of transferring older and slower
tonnage to the guardship role of coastal or harbour defence
to extend their usefulness was by now well established.
Some older coast defence ships had also been retained,
either in their original role or to perform much more
humble, but nonetheless useful tasks, several for example
serving as depot ships.
The fleet lists of the major powers involved in the conflict
still included a fair sprinkling of survivors of the great coast
defence shipbuilding boom of the quarter century preced-
ing
Dreadnought's
completion. That most were discarded
and no more were built by these countries after
Dreadnought
was merely a recognition of reality. With so many pre-
dreadnought battleships suddenly relegated to technical ob-
solescence, despite their age, there was no shortage of rela-
tively modern, powerfully armed vessels, in some cases less
than 10 years old, which could be assigned to coast defence
as required. But, as the First World War also demonstrated,
the pre-dreadnoughts could still be very useful in an offen-
sive role, as the Allies demonstrated in the Dardanelles
Campaign.
The borrowing of coast defence ship design concepts,
and ships, to provide offensive vessels for use against
enemy coasts - for instance the construction of monitors by
Britain and Italy - provided a neat turn of fortune for the
idea of putting big guns on relatively small ships.
Many of these vessels, to say nothing of pre-
dreadnoughts and purpose-designed coast defence ships,
were armed with 12in (305mm) guns or smaller. Yet the
seeming invincibility of the more heavily armed super-
dreadnoughts was such that the 1919 edition of Brassey's
Naval Annual confidently stated that 12in guns had no place
in naval warfare,
1
a statement which eliminated many ves-
sels built only a few years before. The actions of numerous
battleships, coast defence ships and monitors with arma-
ment of this and smaller calibres surely places at least a
question mark against so sweeping a statement, especially
since some smaller calibres, modified to fire at higher eleva-
tions, could reach farther than the 20,000 yards (18,288m) oi
12in.
Britain
The Royal Navy's use of monitors in an offensive role
against both the Central Powers after 1914 and the Axis
after 1939 has been excellently described by Ian Buxton,
although his statement that it was 'strategically unsound for
a major power to build coast defence vessels' is, at the very
least, debatable, given the German attacks on British east
coast ports in 1914.
2
These mortified the Admiralty - and
public opinion - and required the very public despatch of
vessels to defend England's exposed shoreline. Thus
Beatty's battlecruisers were moved from Scapa Flow to
Rosyth, incidentally allowing them to be swiftly committed
to the action at the Dogger Bank in 1915.
Several aspects of the coast
offence
monitors are relevant
to the story of coast defence ships. Most of these monitors
were fitted with big guns taken from redundant or obsolete
battleships, calibres including 15in, 14in and 12in, although
some had 9.2in and 6in, the latter including weapons
mounted on ex-Brazilian river monitors, taken over when
their customer could not pay for them. (This was because of
a collapse in rubber prices which badly damaged Brazil's
economy, ironically because of competition from Britain's
Malayan colony.)
All these vessels shared certain basic characteristics: they
were cheap and easy and fast to build. They generally had
very good stability, necessary for vessels fitted with arma-
ment far heavier than might usually be fitted to craft of
these displacements, and they were capable of absorbing
considerable punishment from shore batteries. Their drau-
ghts were shallow -just 10ft for the 14in-armed monitors to
allow them to operate close inshore - yet their seagoing
ability had to be good enough to transit quite long distances
in the open ocean. Underwater protection against mines
and torpedoes was rightly deemed essential, explaining why
the ex-Norwegian coast defence ships were so dramatically
modified to meet this requirement. Finally, they were sim-
ple: generally just consisting of the hull, a basic tripod mast
with a control top, one funnel and an absolute minimum of
As the main guns and the secondary battery of four 5.9in
(150mm) 50cal were not RN standard, these were all relined
to 9.2in (234mm) and 6in (152mm) respectively, allowing
existing shells to be used. The main guns' elevation was
increased to 40 degrees, allowing them to achieve what
Buxton notes was the 'remarkable' range of 39,000 yards
(35,660m) using special ammunition. The designed tertiary
battery of six 3.9in (100mm) mounted in the superstructure
were replaced by more accommodation and both sub-
merged 17.7in (450mm) torpedo tubes were also discarded,
to be replaced by large anti-torpedo bulges. High angle AA
armament comprising two 3in (76mm), four 3pdr Vickers on
Glatton
and four
(Glatton)
and two
(Gorgon)
2pdrs was also
added. A dozen double bottom tanks were altered to carry
other impedimenta, although some vessels were later fitted
with secondary armament and high angle AA guns as well.
In all, no less than forty-two monitors of various types
served with the RN between 1914 and 1965, including two
coast defence ships which were being built for the Royal
Norwegian Navy in 1914.
3
Originally named
Ntdaros
and
Bjorgvin,
these had been ordered from Armstrong-
Whitworth in 1913 and were basically improvements on the
Norge
and
Eidsvoll
ordered from Armstrong's in 1899, but
with a more powerful 9.45in 50cal (240mm) armament. Re-
named
Gorgon
and
Glatton
respectively on their purchase
from the Norwegians (for £370,000 each), Armstrong's was
tasked in January 1915 to finish them quickly, but to a
modified design.
fuel oil to increase the range of these coastal combatants.
Side armour protection ranged from 7in to 3in (179-76mm),
deck armour from lin to 2.5in (25-64mm), while the turrets
had 8in (203mm) protection for their fronts and 6in
(152mm) for their sides respectively, the barbettes having
8in for the 9.2in guns and 6in for the 6in guns. The conning
towers had 8in side armour.
Construction of these vessels was delayed by the re-
assignment of shipyard personnel to other more pressing
duties and as a result neither were ready before 1918 - and
at a substantially greater cost than expected by their original
Norwegian customer. Displacement had also risen from the
designed 4,807 tons to some 5,705 tons
(Gorgon),
deep dis-
placement for
Glatton
being 5,746 tons. Twin shaft triple
expansion 4,000ihp engines gave these ships a top speed, as
designed, of 15kts, although neither ever achieved that,
Gorgon
making 13kts on trials (and 14kts in action), while
Glatton
made 12.5kts. Preston records the endurance of the
class as about 2,500 miles at lOkts.
Gorgon
had a short, but busy, war service between 26 July
and 15 October 1918, hurling the last shells of the war fired
by monitors against the Belgian coast, escaping German
shore fire on 14 October at an unexpected, and unprece-
dented, 14kts.
Glattori'%
career was somewhat shorter. She
finally left her builders on 9 September 1918, and was in
service for just a week before she was lost in tragic circum-
stances on 16 September in Dover harbour, when a maga-
zine of 6in shells overheated and ignited. Buxton records
that the combustible material which caused this disaster
was probably newspaper stuffed in an insulation space - not
cork as stated by the Court of Enquiry.
Glatton
was tor-
pedoed on Admiral Keyes' instructions in order to prevent
an explosion in her after magazine causing unacceptable
damage to Dover.
The RN had no use for
Gorgon
after the war, although she
was first employed to try to discover the cause of
Glatton's
fate. Thereafter she was offered back to the Norwegians,
who could not take her because the anti-torpedo bulges
added by the British had increased her breadth, which
meant she could no longer be docked at the Norwegian
naval dockyard at Horten. Argentina and Peru made enqu-
iries about a purchase, and Romania came closer to one -
apparently for the asking price of £60,000 - but in the event
Gorgon
was never sold, instead being used for various ex-
periments and trials until broken up in 1928.
Most of the monitors built by the British were put to
offensive use for much of the time against targets on the
occupied Belgian shoreline, or in the Dardanelles, or in the
Adriatic, or elsewhere, but some were used for coastal de-
fence. Just as these vessels were designed to be expendable
in the last analysis, so they were also useful for coastal
defence against more formidable adversaries.
Havelock
was a monitor armed with 14in American guns
which had been made available to the British at the out-
break of war when they were no longer allowed to the
Greek battleship
Salamis.
First sent to the Dardanelles,
Havelock
returned to Britain in April 1916 and was assigned
to the defence of Lowestoft after the German Navy's raids
on England's east coast. Other monitors used in defensive
roles included four smaller 6in armed vessels -
M.22, M.29,
M.31
and
M.33 —
all converted into minelayers after the war.
Also used for coastal defence were several of the nine old
Majestic
class battleships, armed with 12in 32cal guns.
4
In
the
cases of
Hannibal, Magnificent, Mars
and
Victorious
the
guns
were later transferred to new coast offence monitors.
Hannibal
served as a guardship at the Humber and Scapa
Flow in 1914, as did
Illustrious
between 1914 and 1916 at
Loch Ewe, Lough Swilly, the Tyne and the Humber.
Jupi-
ter
was another Humber and then Tyne guardship in 1914;
Magnificent
did the same at Scapa Flow and so did
Mars
and
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