Retirement

Viscount Hall, First Lord of the Admiralty, had a sad announcement to make before the House of Lords. Five of His Majesty's oldest and most revered men-o'-war, once the symbols of Britain's might, had been ticketed for the scrap yards. Said Hall: "The First Sea Lord and I feel like two padres conducting the funeral service of a number of old friends."

Almost every Briton carried in his heart a bit of proud nostalgia for the Navy's giants; almost every British family had shared in some way the triumphs and the dark hours of the condemned battleships.

The 32-year-old Queen Elizabeth had been the Grand Fleet's flagship in World War I. Aboard her, the Germans surrendered their Navy in 1918. During World War II, she almost met an ignominious end. In 1942, as she lay moored in the shallows of Alexandria harbor, Italian "human torpedoes" got in under her, attached time charges, blew great holes in her hull. Patched in the U.S., she finished out the war in the East Indies.

The Queen Elizabeth's sister battleship Valiant fought at Jutland in World War I; through the good & bad days of World War II she did heavy duty helping to protect the Empire's precarious lifeline in the Mediterranean.

The speedy, 31-year-old battle cruiser Renown was always remembered as the ship which had carried the Prince of Wales (now the Duke of Windsor) on his tours around a world which the Prince then still charmed and the British Navy still awed. In 1941 she won Royal Navy renown by braving air attacks and boldly steaming close inshore to bombard Genoa.

The other retiring veterans, Rodney and Nelson, wore scars from the Mediterranean and Normandy invasions. In 1941 the Rodney had come in close under the Germans' guns to be in at the kill of the "unsinkable" Bismarck. The Nelson caught torpedo hell off Malta, came back for an hour of triumph: on Sept. 29, 1943, the Italians went aboard her to sign their surrender to General Dwight Eisenhower. The "Nellie's" captain, A. H. Maxwell-Hyslop, likes to tell a yarn about an engagement off Normandy. "I had gone to bed one night after two or three nights without sleep," he relates. "There was a frightful crash and I ran on deck, thinking of a robot bomb. But a landing craft, filled with newspaper reporters and, I think, steered by one of them, had smashed into us. They dented us."

To Royal Navymen, the 20-year-old Nelson and Rodney were something special. They were unlike all other battleships; all their big guns were massed on long, sweeping bows, and could not be trained astern. Navymen liked to believe that they were designed on the proud premise that a British battleship would never turn tail. Now that they were obsolete, economy dictated the ships' retirement. The five veterans, said Viscount Hall, "would be of very little value in any future war."

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