The Last resting Place. The Loss of HMS Hood and other British Capital Ships 1939-45. By Martin Lawrence. Seaforth Publishing, an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd, Yorkshire – Philadelphia. ISBN 978 1 03613 331 3 (Hardback) ISBN 978 1 03613 333 7 (Epub)
Reviewed by David Hobbs
Martin Lawrence is described on the back cover as having a professional background in a variety of technology industries that combined mathematics, physics and engineering. Whilst doing so he also pursued a lifelong interest in the work of the armed forces in general and more specifically the Royal Navy.
The book itself is described as an examination of the loss of each of the ten capital ships of the Royal Navy sunk during the Second World War; the term capital ship being defined by the author as including battleships, battlecruisers and fleet aircraft carriers. The small carrier Hermes is included under this heading. The description ends with the statement that the author ‘dissects what happened to these fine ships’ and ‘looks in detail at the theories, causes and conclusions surrounding the sinkings’.
To begin this review on a positive note, the 50 small black and white photographs are largely well chosen with the exception of the photograph of a British Aircraft Corporation TSR 2 on page 27 which seems to lack any contextual relevance. Maps and diagrams support the text, the main part of which is divided into three sections. The first covers Glorious and Hood sunk by gunfire. The second covers Courageous, Royal Oak, Ark Royal, Barham and Eagle sunk by torpedoes and the third Prince of Wales, Repulse and Hermes sunk by air attack. The largest element fills 50 pages devoted to Hood compared with 18 pages for Ark Royal and 19 pages for Prince of Wales and Repulse.
This is a subject in which I take great interest and I began reading with high expectations but they quickly evaporated. Each ship has a summary of its service prior to loss but these merely repeat existing material and, unfortunately, contain errors. On page 99, for example, it is erroneously stated that Ark Royal was fitted with a steam catapult; she actually had two BH 3 hydraulic units. The statements on pages 100 and 101 that Ark Royal was ‘lightly armoured’ and that the Illustrious design ‘reverted to a more traditional design of more armour’ shows a lack of understanding of the differences between the two. The Illustrious armoured hangar ‘box’ high in the hull was anything but conventional.
There are no source notes in Last Resting Place. Readers therefore have no means of identifying the author’s sources and nor can his statements be easily examined in greater depth subsequently. Half the section covering the loss of Hood is given over to his theory that the initial fire and explosion aft might have been caused by the failure of one or more of the Plummer blocks that supported the propeller shafts due to unnoticed rust or metal fatigue as the ship’s material state deteriorated. He cites the number of small refits carried out on Hood at frequent intervals before her loss but fails to compare them with the normal periodicity of such refits or what work was carried out and left undone in them. He makes no mention of a similar Plummer block failure to enhance the credibility of his theory and so the reader has to deduce that he was unable to find one. John Roberts in The Battlecruiser Hood, Conway 1982, lists the ship’s refit work packages and from this it can be seen that, whilst restorative work would also have been carried out, the 1940 refit concentrated on the removal of the 5.5-inch guns, their magazine arrangements and the substitution of better anti-aircraft armament. The 1941refit included the fitting of Type 284 gunnery radar, fire control for the anti-aircraft guns, changes to the masts replacement of some boats. To be accepted, Lawrence’s theory would need proof that would convince experts and he fails to provide it. The discovery of the wreck by David Mearns’ expedition in 2001 is mentioned briefly on page 71 but its discovery that a second magazine explosion had destroyed the part of the ship immediately forward of the bridge and blown the armoured conning tower several hundred yards clear of other parts the devastated hull is not described. Nor is its relevance to his theory discussed. There is no reference to Mearns’ book Hood and Bismarck, Channel 4 Books/Pan Macmillan, 2001 and it does not appear in the small bibliography.
The loss of Ark Royal led the Admiralty to accept, for the first time, the fundamental importance of damage control training and doctrine and her unexpected sinking is, therefore, worthy of detailed description. The changes introduced after her loss in 1941 were so effective that my own Sub Lieutenant’s courses in the late 1960s still included a damage control course that used a large, floating model of Ark Royal made of perspex and complete with pumps and flooding arrangements to show how it was thought she could have been saved. Flooding the port and centre boiler rooms would, it was demonstrated, have brought her upright and allowed her to be towed in Gibraltar. D K Brown made the same point in Nelson to Vanguard, Chatham, 2000. The discovery of her wreck by an expedition carried out by C & C Technologies in 2002 changed that perception and we now know that as it went under the hull planed to the north after breaking up near the surface and continued to roll as it sank to the bottom 3,000 feet below. The island and a large part of the flight deck tore away like the lid of a sardine tin and at the same time a 200 feet long section of the bow broke away from the main hull and spiralled, separately, to the seabed, scattering debris as it did so. The break aligned exactly with the bulkhead that separated the hangars from the accommodation areas forward of them. The main hull righted itself before impacting the seabed, still heading in a northerly direction. These facts must raise questions about the integrity of the hull since she was the first major warship to have a hull largely of welded rather than rivetted construction. Of interest, when the wreck of Bismarck was located, the rear section of its hull was found to have broken off as it sank due, it was found, to poor quality welding. Would Ark, therefore, have broken up under tow? This material is all in the public domain but none of it is addressed by Lawrence. Nor does he seem to realise the importance of the Ark’s funnel uptake trunking which led to starboard under the lower hangar. Once her roll placed its starboard extremity under water the port boilers could no longer be steamed as there was nowhere for their exhaust to go and there were no back-up diesel generators.
The description of the loss of Prince of Wales and Repulse is another missed opportunity, again with summaries of service that contain both misunderstandings and errors but there is almost no mention of the specific damage that led to their loss. This is particularly frustrating in the case of Prince of Wales because an enquiry into her loss under Mr Justice Bucknill was set up by the UK Government in March 1942. As D K Brown points out in Nelson to Vanguard, however, when the wreck was first examined by RN divers after the war the actual damage was found to be very different from that deduced by Bucknill. The last 34 pages are devoted to an audit of capital ships, the author’s counterfactual opinion of what might have happened if Glorious had flown a Swordfish patrol that sighted Scharnhorstand Gneisenau before they saw the carrier and the track followed by the cruiser Devonshire when she sailed from Norway in June 1940. The lengthy ‘what might have been’ is fanciful and makes no practical contribution to this book’s subject.
Overall, this book proved to be a disappointingly lightweight description of a subject that deserves to be handled in much greater depth. The text contains errors of fact compounded in some instances by misunderstandings. The lack of source notes and the limited bibliography make it worse. I do not recommend it to my fellow ANI members.
