| The last surviving big gun World War Two armoured warship in Europe, HMS Belfast was saved from the scrapheap and opened to the public on Trafalgar Day (21st October) 1971. She provides a compelling insight into the nature of war at sea. An ‘Edinburgh’ class large light cruiser, she was designed during the mid-1930s in response to the threat posed by Japanese ‘Mogami’ class cruisers. Built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast, the vessel was launched by Mrs Neville Chamberlain on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, 1938.
On the outbreak of war in September of the following year, HMS Belfast formed part of the maritime blockade of Germany operating out of the Home Fleet’s main base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. Badly damaged by a magnetic mine, she was completely refitted, eventually rejoining active service in 1943 on Arctic convoy duty. As the flagship of the Tenth Cruiser Squadron, she successfully provided close-range heavy cover for several convoys of the kind that supplied the Soviet Union with some four million tons of supplies during the course of the war, including 5,000 tanks and 7,000 aircraft. In the Battle of North Cape in December 1943, she engaged and contributed to the sinking of the German battle cruiser Scharnhorst. Only 36 men survived from that ship’s complement of almost 2,000. On 6 June 1944, HMS Belfast was one of the first ships to open fire on German positions in Normandy in support of the D-Day landings, a role that she continued to play until 8 July, amid heavy fighting for the city of Caen.
After 1945, the ship was occupied in peace-keeping duties in the Far East, helping to evacuate survivors of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and Chinese civilian internment centres. From 1950–52, HMS Belfast spent at least 404 days on active patrol in support of UN forces during the Korean War. In August 1963, after circumnavigating the globe via the Pacific Ocean and Panama Canal, she returned to Portsmouth to be reclassified as a Harbour Accommodation Ship. ‘Reduced to Disposal’ in 1971, she was rescued from the ship-breakers by an independent trust chaired by one of her former captains, Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles, and opened to visitors ‘not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as an act of faith for the youth of the future’. The ship was purchased for one pound by the Imperial War Museum in 1978.
Appropriately enough, the ship is now anchored to the Thames riverbed at the former ‘breakfast wharf’, where tons of tea were once unloaded into Frederick J. Horniman’s warehouses: it was this type of trade that cruisers were originally designed to protect. Visitors board at the Quarterdeck, the ‘Officer Country’ towards the stern of Royal Naval vessels. The ship has been divided into eight different ‘zones’ in an attempt to facilitate orientation around a confusion of different decks, hatchways, ladders and rooms. Above decks, highlights include scoping Tower Bridge and the Tower of London through the gun direction sights; the 6-inch Mark XXIII Triple Gun Turrets, now trained on Scratchwood Services on the M1; the 40mm Bofors guns; Admiral’s Bridge and Compass Platform, with the Operations Room behind enhanced by sound effects, ‘state boards’ and uniformed mannequins recreating the scene during the Battle of North Cape. Below decks, visitors can explore the ship’s living quarters, mess-decks, galley, chapel, magazine, communications room and—perhaps most impressive of all—the bewildering, claustrophobic array of gleaming pipes, valves and passageways in the boiler and engine rooms (zone eight). Exhibitions in zone five tell the story of HMS Belfast in war and peace, and describe life at sea for officers and men. |
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