Free Scapegoat: The Death of Prince of Wales and Repulse by Dr Martin Stephen Page A

having three ships available could two be guaranteed to be available to fight at any one time because of the requirement for refit and repair – but not by much. Tirpitz had more weight of armour, better watertight subdivision, a heavier main armament that could out-range the King George Vs by 3,000 yards, a faster rate of fire, a two-knot speed advantage and a vastly superior endurance and range. The reason, of course, was that Prince of Wales was built to conform to treaty limitations of the 1920s and 1930s, which Germany ignored. Churchill was right to complain: ‘Once again we alone are injured by treaties.’ 3
    The existing accounts of the sinking of Prince of Wales make little or no mention of the fact that Tom Phillips’s state of the art or even ‘unsinkable’ flagship was a disaster waiting to happen, and a vessel with serious design flaws. There are a number of reasons why this element of the disaster has featured so little in writing about it. Ship design is a highly technical area and few historians are technically qualified in it. It is also a highly specialist area, restricted largely to books intended to appeal to a very small number of people and, dare I say it, terminally boring to those outside this narrow circle. Information about weaknesses in the design of any weapon of war tends to have ‘Top Secret’ slapped on it at the time, for the very good reason that one does not want the enemy to know one’s weaknesses; such labels tend to stick long after the actual need for the information to be kept secret has lapsed from a mixture of pressure from those responsible to cover their backs, obsessive secrecy and institutional lethargy. It is also easy to sell the equivalent of a pup in warship design to the general public, particularly if it is a beautiful ship: HMS Hood is an example.
    However, Prince of Wales also illustrates a cycle in the design of warships which has been active over the past hundred years. In time of war the absolute priority is to win. In time of peace that priority has to compete with others, most often the need to save money or adhere to political rather than fighting imperatives. As an example, in 1982 the Royal Navy found itself in a shooting war for the first time in many years. HMS Sheffield , at the time a thoroughly modern vessel, was first put out of action with tragic loss of life and subsequently sank as the result of being hit by an Exocet missile whose warhead in all probability did not explode. Bad ventilation helped sink Sheffield , as did the failure of electrical systems. The requirements of protection against nuclear, chemical and biological warfare meant a priority in keeping a sealed atmosphere within the hull, whereas when large quantities of rocket fuel are burning off in a ship’s guts, survival can depend on the ability to vent smoke and fumes to the outside world. There were far too few breathing masks on board and issue clothing whose artificial fibres melted in to the flesh of wounded men. Sheffield was a classic example of a warship designed to the priorities of peacetime and without due attention to the likelihood of it being hit. Forty-one years earlier, the designers of Prince of Wales had been forced to design Britain’s new generation of capital ships to what was essentially a political agenda. As with Sheffield , lessons were learnt. The tragedy in both cases is that so many men had to die to re-learn lessons that should never have been forgotten. It would also be far too easy to blame those who actually designed the ships. They merely try to make sense out of the brief they have been given or limited to, by others.
    Also in time of war ships are hit and damaged, and lessons learnt in how to keep them afloat and moving. These lessons seem the first to be forgotten in time of peace. Damage control is rarely a fashionable specialization in peacetime, but it is crucial to a ship’s survival. Poor damage control was a factor in the sinking of Ark