HMS Belfast - A Town that served a Country

[Music] ladies and gentlemen welcome aboard the imperial war museum's single largest asset and the single largest preserved military museum ship in the united kingdom we are of course on the bow of the one and only hms belfast let's tell you a bit about her hms belfast is a town-class cruiser the royal navy's version of a full-scale treaty compliant light cruiser whilst the leander and arithusa class that preceded them were also treaty compliant they were significantly lighter than the treaty allowed for in terms of overall displacement and they weren't especially intended for the heavy duty front line roles against bigger cruisers such as the pensacola northampton or mayoko glasses which were the likely opposition at the time since these were all armed with eight-inch guns and substantially larger that of course was what the county class was for nonetheless the advent of the limit on 8-inch gun cruiser numbers in the london naval treaty had led the japanese to lay down the supposedly treaty-compliant megamis somewhat well-protected vessels with a heavy torpedo battery capable of high speed and armed with an unprecedented guns in five triple turrets their 155 millimeter or 6.1 inch caliber made them on paper treaty compliant like cruisers but between these in the advent of still more eight inch arm chips in the form of the takaos it was clear that a response would be needed this is what would eventually become the town class the admiralty laying down a series of fairly tough requirements the new ships would need a long range allowing for extended operations both with the fleet and for the protection of shipping against all of these new foreign large cruisers alternatively the subtext read if the opportunity arose this range would also help in operations against enemy shipping next was strong protection the ships might run into six inch or eight inch armed ships and so the armor would need to protect it against either option which obviously meant eight inch fire at the expected battle ranges next the ships would need to be heavily armed as eight-inch cruisers had whole number of restrictions and due to the multiple roles that the ship's main battery would need to fulfill fighting everything from merchantmen to destroyers to cruisers to aircraft the new rapid-firing 6-inch gun would be used instead since the individual shells carried less punch than the 8-inch shells of the county class which already carried 8 guns the new class would have to carry 12. additionally a dedicated anti-aircraft battery as well as torpedoes would need to be carried in order to fulfill the full scope of the town class's projected roles and finally the ability to carry seaplanes was another major element of the admiralty's requirements as in the early 1930s radar was a nice dream at best and a wild theory about a potential death ray at worst and so long-range scouting as well as minor anti-submarine warfare work as well as the spotting of the fall of shot in a gunfight would need to be carried out by a ship launched aircraft or two the first town class were duly laid down it being hoped that slightly better guns with their shells larger explosive payloads and the ship's superior armor would compensate for the presence of an additional three guns on the megamis or more tangentially the us navy's response to that particular class the brooklyns a slightly improved variant of the first generation town class followed but with these first iterations coming in at just over 9000 tonnes standard displacement there was a little bit of spare displacement left in the treaty compliant category and with word getting out about just how fast some of these foreign guns could fire the admiralty was getting a little bit nervous about the ability of the 12 guns of the towns to match the 15 guns on their potential opposition of course what the royal navy didn't know was that these 15 gun vessels had achieved their firepower by a number of ways that simply wouldn't work for the admiralty the japanese had just flat out lied about how much their ships displaced and instead built them considerably larger and considerably heavier as a result they could indeed accommodate the various systems that they needed the brooklyns on the other hand were just about treaty compliant but had dropped torpedoes completely in compliance with us navy doctrine for cruisers and as mentioned were much closer to the 10 000 ton standard displacement limit than the first two batches of the town class wishing to retain torpedoes which had a useful strike capability for a six-inch armed cruiser against a large capital ship as well as evening the fight somewhat with an eight-inch gunship it wasn't possible to add another triple turret to the design without going overweight if all the other features such as the torpedoes themselves as well as in the anti-aircraft battery were retained due to the need to provide more hull space to accommodate a fifth turret the ships would also become somewhat oversized even if there wasn't any improvement in the anti-aircraft battery and the torpedoes were indeed dropped the oversize issue being especially important for cruisers as they would need to use a variety of overseas docks to resupply refit and potentially repair and a hull that was particularly longer than the existing town class hull wouldn't be able to use a number that were in fairly strategic locations nonetheless a fair amount of work was done in order to establish these particulars with both nelson-a style as well as dido type layouts being considered for the five triple turret ship instead it was decided to go with four quadruple six-inch turrets simply in place of the triples of the earlier ships whilst this would bring the ships up to 16 guns and thus technically allow them to win the who has the most guns competition it turned out that a reliable rapid-firing quad six-inch turret within the necessary size and weight constraints couldn't be developed with the technology of the time it would require either a drop in speed through smaller machinery or a lessening of armor if they wanted to stay inside the 10 000 ton limit and there was also some uncertainty over just how much the hull would have to be modified and expanded to accommodate the larger base ring of the quad turrets and so instead and the existing triple six-inch turret would have to be retained but would be upgraded to provide superior capabilities over the previous generations with the spare weight on the 10 000 ton displacement instead going into additional protection in the form of more armor and more anti-aircraft weaponry two ships would be built to this revised design hms edinburgh and hms belfast fittingly the belfast would be ordered from harland and wolf a famous shipyard in the city of belfast with her keel laid down in december 1936 her launch taking place less than a year and a half later in march 1938 and commissioning occurring the following year in august 1939. just in time as it turned out since germany invaded poland less than a month later which kicked off world war ii but with a long career ahead of her let's have a look at some of the systems that she would have to rely on during her many voyages she was equipped with a set of steam turbines that drove four propellers which took her up to something between 32 and 33 knots on average depending on the exact loading of the ship and so here we are in the engine room one of the things that you'll notice if you ever visit the ship or dc photos of the belfast is that the funnels seem to be oddly far back most ships usually have a funnel immediately after the bridge superstructure and in the case of ships with a midship's aircraft catapults these are usually placed further back whereas on belfast the space for the aircraft catapults is in fact right behind the bridge with the funnel significantly further back still this is because the admiralty was concerned about the effect that long propeller shafts could have if the ship was to take damage particularly under water damage from mines torpedoes or the newly invented so-called bee bomb which was a type of bomb designed to be dropped ahead of the ship a bit like a depth charge but unlike a depth charge which would continue to sink the b bomb was buoyant hence b and would pop back up again underneath the ship detonating underwater and causing significant damage to the underwater sections of the hull long propeller shafts could get bent or broken and would present huge flooding risks and so the machinery rooms including the engines and the boilers were all moved further back thus shortening the prop shafts and leaving the ship much less vulnerable to this kind of damage as it turned out this significantly greater resistance to underwater shock waves would come to help belfast out very quickly in its operational career but for the minute as you can see we're inside the engine room and there's plenty of interesting technology to be seen everything from the auxiliary control station there that we've just passed through one of the main turbine units flat screens were not a thing back in the 1940s but they are there so that visitors can get some more information here's all the various gauges and dials you need to monitor at least in this engine room and yet more dials just next to it you can begin to understand why the engineering crew on a ship like this was one of the largest elements of the ship's complement you'd need about four or five people just to read all these dials i would imagine at times there's also helpful instructions on many brass plates that tell the crew what they need to do just in case they've forgotten which to be fair they might well be forgiven for if they're in the middle of a heated engagement as well as the direct control units that allow them to follow the bridge's instructions there's also a complete manual steering position down here which is obviously very useful in the event that the bridge is taken out and all the other upper works have been similarly demolished as to be perfectly honest if somebody manages to get an explosive projectile or torpedo into here the ship's probably lost anyway whereas the same isn't quite true for the superstructure above one slightly negative side effect of all of this machinery being relocated aft was that the four inch magazine which was traditionally just forward of the aft main magazines couldn't be accommodated and so this had to be moved forward and so once you've used your ready use four-inch ammunition the rest of the ammunition that was coming up from the four-inch magazine which was now somewhere underneath the aircraft launching facilities would have to be trucked back along rails along the length of the ship if you wanted to supply the four-inch anti-aircraft guns to be honest though this wasn't the world's greatest imposition as if you were under such a prolonged air attack that you'd used up every single piece of ready use four inch ammunition without a chance for a break the fact that a few dozen crew were running laps supplying you with more shells was probably amongst the least of your concerns but with all these wonderful dials and levers there has to be something for them to control and indeed those things in this room at least are what the ship's main turbines at least for the port side unlike ships of the 1900s and 1910s this ship did not use direct drive turbines instead it used geared steam turbines you can see one of the turbines coming up here on the right now in operational circumstances of course you wouldn't be able to see these turbine blades or if you could see something like this it would also be accompanied by a jet of extremely high pressure steam at which one you wouldn't be seeing much of anything thereafter the casing has been cut away for visitors to see how the ship operates you can see just how many blades there are but you can also now see some of the gears they are absolutely monstrous things here for example are the two main gear wheels that take the final output from the turbine itself represented here by the two smaller gears and turn it into revolutions on the propeller that's quite the reduction ratio they've got going on there but this allowed the turbines to operate at very high speed which was their natural operating environment without over rotating the propeller shafts and causing cavitation which would just cause damage to the propellers and inefficiencies in propulsion this here is the prop shaft linked directly to those two massive gears and it runs down and out through this gland you can see above us at the top when white which runs out into the water eventually much like a manual transmission car there are multiple gears for multiple selections of speed as well as of course the inevitable reverse gear and yes there is a clutch system in place as well although as you can imagine with gears this size and with that kind of reduction ratio you want to make sure you've got the rpm exactly right before you try lifting one and dropping in a new set of gearing for visitors the engine room is accessed via these narrow cat walks so you better keep a close hold on your phones or cameras because guy i can assure you if you happen to drop something over the edge one they're not going down there to get it back for you and two there's enough heavy metal around there to probably make it not worth it in the first place because it's going to be in bits by the time it hits the hull the various turbine blades are absolutely fascinating from an engineering perspective looking at all these tiny blades that eventually work together to turn the high pressure steam from the boilers into kinetic energy which could then be used to move the ship forward via rotating the propellers is quite the interesting thing some idea of just how dangerous it would have been if all that steam had gotten out can be envisaged from just how thick that block of metal was in order to keep it all contained and bear in mind that whilst this was very high pressure steam it wasn't anything close to the kind of pressure that was generated by some boilers in world war ii particularly those in service in the u.s navy and the creeks marina with the royal navy preferring to go for reliability and endurance over the slight power density advantage offered by the other two systems but just in case something broke there was a fully equipped machine shop just outside of the engine room which contains quite a lot of industrial grade machinery which allowed the ship's crew to fabricate almost anything they needed to replace or repair a system as long as they had the raw material and the tools were big enough and believe me some of these tools are pretty big coming out of the engine room and machine shop you also find another auxiliary control station this one's slightly more obvious and you can see it's even got the red and green pinnacles there which allow the person who's obviously now down below the waterline to remember which way he's actually facing relative to the ship itself and as you can see there's a full range of communication alarm and notification systems so he's got at least some idea of what the rest of the ship is doing but that's not all you find down in the wonderful depths of the belfast this for example is the underside of the system that eventually leads up to b turret so yes we have arrived in the magazines these of course kept all the ammunition safe and dry for away from incoming fire until the ammunition was of course needed to make enemy ships go away very helpfully each magazine shell room contains one of these handy boards that tells you exactly how much ammunition is on board and what kinds of ammunition are stored as well always thorough it also lists the amount of thermometers that are present just so you can work out what the internal temperature of the shell room is along with a fire extinguisher and a portable stool plus a couple of safety belts presumably in case the ship is being rocked around or you're operating somewhere high in the shell room and apparently they're out of whips which is probably just as well i'm not sure i'm very well suited to a cat of nine tails each shell room also contains a couple of these valves these are very important and it's also quite useful to remember which is which the one on the right here activates a spray of water this is useful if there's a minor fire in the shell room or you need to cool it down for some other reason say there's a fire elsewhere that might be warming up the bulkheads but you still need to use the ammunition whilst the green and red item to the left is the valve that will flood the shell room obviously this is a much more dramatic measure and so you better remember which color is which notice that they are right next to an internal telephone system so that if the order comes down from on high the officer or man who is responding to that call doesn't need to go anywhere in order to enact that particular order a large number of the ship shells were stored on this rather fetching carousel system which is directly underneath each turret in each respective shell room you can see lots and lots of the standard semi-armor piercing shells as well as some of those blue shells on storage racks in the background and there in the right is the z bulkhead door which goes through into b shell room this is a shell room so this is under a turret right up at the front and you can also see in the middle the hoist system which allows the shells to pass up into the turrets themselves and we'll see a little bit more about the other end of that system when we eventually get to the turrets there's a ladder there to allow for inspections but unfortunately we're not allowed to go up that high at the moment other shells would be stored here in the cupboards next to the carousel if there were too many on board and to be honest it's a cruiser you can never have quite too many shells in my opinion of course the hoist system is calibrated for the six inch shell specifically and so if the cruisers had at any point been under consideration for re-gunning with bigger shells and bigger guns this system would have been replaced in its entirety which gives you some idea of the costs involved and there's a voice tube there which connects directly to the gun turret the carousel system rotates on this little motor which you can see just there which allows a man to stand next to his specific hoist and feed shells into it without having to chase the carousel round and round which would be a bit annoying and to be honest somewhat dizzying in the event of combat there's me inelegantly trying to get out of the way of the cameraman i apologize you can also see there in the background in red some more of those water mains that would open up in order to flood the shell room if necessary there's a small control plate there to make get the carousel going and to stop it as well if you've happened to run out of shelves and you need to restock from any of the lockers and cupboards that line the edges of the shell room this is in somewhat contrast to the shell rooms on large battleships where a carousel of this nature holding say 14 15 or 16 inch shells would be both thoroughly impractical in terms of overall size but also thoroughly impractical in terms of loading because one of the wonderful features about a six inch shell is that you can hand load it just about into the hoist system which of course you can't do with a battleship shell that weighs significantly more than a ton the blue rounds on the side there are the practice rounds and there's me and our wonderful guide attempting to hide in the corner again you'll notice there isn't actually a lot of space in the shell rooms this is because the more compact they are the thicker the armor can be put over them to protect them this is about halfway up the shellway system one deck above the shell rooms which shows some of the mechanism as the shells head on all the way up to the turrets themselves this is just under the floor of the barbette which we saw in the photo earlier you can see how much space it occupies within the ship as a whole and this is just one of course the four shell rooms all lead up to the turrets which through the magic of editing we've managed to teleport to you'll notice a distinctive feature of the town classes turrets here that center gun being set back slightly bit compared to the two on either side this was to reduce interference between the shells as they flew which was a problem in some earlier triple turrets most notably some of the triple 14 inch turrets on the american standard class battleships the eagle eyed amongst you will have spotted that we are now looking at y turret and now x turret instead of a and b turrets whose shell rooms we were in earlier that's because these turrets are slightly more easily accessible at the moment but they're identical pretty much for and aft you can see just how little space there actually is between the two turrets in each super firing pair you can also see the stops there designed to stop the guns of the super firing turret coming down and accidentally clattering the turret below which would be something of an inconvenience so why don't we go inside this is why turret or at least the interior of it you can see the screens which are there for the public's protection nowadays which wouldn't have been there in the past but here are the breaches of the guns and here again you can see the breach of the center gun much further back than the breach of the other two guns you can also see the other end of the hoist system we saw down in the shell rooms these sort of gutter pipe installations either side of the center gun that allow the shells to be received by the gun crews before being loaded into the breeches of the guns and then sent on their merry way each gun would of course have its own gun crew and you can imagine with these three guns all being served with shells rattling in from the hoist system in what is effectively not a very large space at all it would be very cramped very noisy and very hot very quickly especially considering the rate of fire that would be expected of these six-inch guns bearing in mind of course that the town class with the 12 guns as we mentioned earlier is supposed to be fighting potentially ships with 15 guns or if the 8 inch shells are coming your way from a heavy cruiser you're going to be wanting to get as many six inch shells back in return in order to make up for the individual lack of punch you'll have noticed several voice tubes in this turret because of course redundancy is key even if the turret does take a hit that partially but not fully disables it you want to be able to keep talking to other vital parts of the ship such as the shell room even if it's to tell them to stop sending shells or to ask them to send shells significantly faster each of these guns also has a gun pit underneath it you can see just there this allows for the guns to recoil even at high elevations without obviously slamming into the floor of the turret the alternative would be to make the turret significantly higher and then the gun pit would no longer be necessary but of course this would mean that the turret being taller and thus needing more armor would be heavier the alternative of course being to thin the armor out for the same weight which isn't particularly brilliant and so the gun pit provides an elegant solution meaning that the face walls and roof of the turret can be as thick as they can be whilst still remaining habitable by humans because of course if you drop the height down all that much more everyone in the gun turret is going to be bent over double which is going to impair your firing efficiency somewhat at the back of the turret there is the turret hatches the telephones for talking to other parts of the ship that aren't the shell room so for example the command and control section whether that be on the bridge or in one of the secondary command and control areas elsewhere and back here where the turret commander would be standing or sitting as the case may be there's additional phones allowing him to talk to other parts of the ship similar to the rest of the turret crew and some indicators coming from the central fire director system further down in the ship and they say what the turret is supposed to be doing whether it's on bearing whether it's loaded etc etc and you can also see there two indicators for the af turrets which show the turret crew because bear in mind there are no windows in this turret where exactly it is they're pointing which can be somewhat useful as being inside this thing while it moves around could be somewhat disorienting to say the least there's already use shell right there i don't think i'd want to fire that one i think it's in better days some of those phones lead back down below decks to this place this is the fire control room this is where using this wonderful fire control computer in the middle you would calculate where to fire the guns in terms of range elevation bearing etc taking of course information initially from optical rangefinders and then later on from radar units which of course mounted further up in the ship so you can imagine just how much wiring is inside the ship to allow all these various parts of the ship to communicate securely with each other and the severing of these can often impair the combat capability of a ship even if the turrets or the radar itself is not hit which explains why ships can often become combat ineffective very rapidly even though on paper some of their more major systems appear to be intact almost everything of any importance on the ship is marked and stamped you can see here this center gun is the breech loading six inch mark 23 weapon just in case you'd forgotten or in case the turret crew were bored and needed something to read whilst they were waiting to go into action guns had of course been breach loaded for quite a while at this point but it never hurts to remind everyone this one as you can see at the top saying a right hand position is somewhat more nicely engraved than the center gun presumably because it was manufactured at a different time when they had a little bit more time to take care of the fine details but the six-inch guns aren't the only guns on the ship the secondary battery designed primarily for anti-aircraft work but also capable of using an anti-surface roll consisted of 12 four inch high angle guns in six twin mountings with three to a side four of these mountings survive on the belfast in its current iteration as the aft tube were removed in its last refit and modernization this is the starboard rear mount which was formerly the starboard center mount and here's a close-up of the rear of the gun you can see it's a quick firing mark 16 variant which all of the guns on the ship are and once again there are plenty of instructions inscribed on the back of various parts of the gun block to tell people what to do in the event that they need to fire it they need to know what kind of gun it is or in the event that they need to dismantle it for maintenance over there in the front right you can see there's a seating position for some of the gunners and this particular mount would have quite a few men serving it because you'd have one person up there on the front right you'd have one person here who'd be loading the shelves themselves you see lots and lots of detail when you actually look close enough just how much text there is and then if we come over to the left hand side gun which you'll see is pretty much identical except the fact obviously it's the other way around there's even more fine detail instructions just in case you want to dismantle the entire breech block for care maintenance or repair and then over there on the left there's another seating position for another member of the gun crew and then over here on the far left inside the gun shield in white and brass is this device which is used to help set and assemble the ammunition where necessary as these guns could fire quite a wide range of ammunition and were also the ship's primary star shell firing illumination weapons in a surface engagement you can see here some of the machinery underneath the gun itself required to keep it tracked and elevated much more complex than previous guns of this type and then now one deck higher we can see the view off of the starboard side of the ship and there's the gunman we were just in with the next one just beyond it you can see they do have two slightly different gun shields accounting for their two slightly different positions and above them now covered in this fetching black hemispherical top ball and you can just about see the fire control radar systems that were installed mid-war to help direct the weapons which obviously vastly improved their accuracy and efficiency when it came to taking down enemy aircraft the top on the nearest one you can see has slipped very slightly giving a nice view of at least half of the radar dish for that particular unit so you can see ship-mounted anti-aircraft firepower had come a long way from the immediate pre-war stance of simply just having a gun bolt to the deck this also affords a good view of what i was talking about earlier there's the forward funnel but you can see it's quite far behind the foremast and we're here we are at the main mast the aft mast yet another fire control radar then the rear funnel and you can see hovering in the background there one of the twin 40 millimeter bofors mounts it was a very nice day for filming and we were quite lucky to get the quality of light level that we actually did we're now in the forward starboard four inch twin mount but there's something interesting to note look at the rear of the breech blocks on each of these two guns you'll notice one was manufactured much later than the other they kind of straddle the two guns in the rear mount which were both manufactured at the same time this shows how much the ship has been worked on and improved over the years as all but one of those guns post dates the ship's launch just behind each mount is one of these things you might wondering what on earth is this is this a red used locker no you'll see it has four different settings including the first one well number four but the first one we saw which is for star shell this is actually a control box whose settings will govern the behavior of the gun mount and the specific ranges that certain elevations will show on the instrumentation and just in case the gunner is new there is a handy instruction panel bolted to the front of it which tells you what changes would be enacted on the gun's behavior by the selection of the different settings this control box was quite important as it allowed the four-inch guns to be used in both long-range and short-range anti-aircraft work as well as shore bombardment work and of course as we said before star shell illumination during surface actions the shore bombardment setting would obviously also allow for use against enemy shipping if necessary and there's the relay box that powers it all along with an alarm bell to tell the crew that it's time to start shooting at things and so you can get some idea of just how complex even a ship's secondary battery actually is when it comes to full-on operations and the number of men needed to man it on launch belfast carried two octuple 40 millimeter pom poms and two quad 50 caliber machine guns for closer range air defense but these were first complemented by more pom-poms than 20-millimeter oerlikons as well as 40-millimeter bofors before all the light anti-aircraft weaponry was removed during later refits and replaced solely by twin 40 millimeter bofors mounts which remain for and aft on the ship this is one of the ones on the bridge wing you can see here on the sides the racks for the ammunition and the seating positions for the main gun operators unlike the twin 4-inch mounts these gunners only had a forward-facing shield the rest of the mount being open by the time of her last refit these guns could also be directed by radar if that was necessary but they did not have their own individual radars the way that the twin four inch mounts did because the 40 millimeter twin mount is significantly lighter than the four-inch twin mount they can be mounted higher in the ship thus giving them a better field of fire without compromising the ship's stability all that much and of course as an open mount they're much more vulnerable to sea conditions so being higher up and away from the waves helps in that respect as well the last major element of the ship's armament were two triple torpedo tubes these were also victims of the post-war refits and no longer exist although this torpedo can still be found in the superstructure notionally the ship didn't carry reloads but if a captain was determined enough and wanted to accept the risk as you can see here you could in fact store some spares elsewhere in the ship although the crew may not thank you for having to lug this weapon all over the place by hand when the tubes needed some spare shots there was also the facility to launch depth charges over the stern which allowed for a limited amount of direct anti-submarine work without the use of the aircraft but this was very much a last-ditch self-defense tool and not the vast numbers of depth charges that could be found on dedicated anti-submarine destroyers the ship's armor belt was four and a half inches thick at the maximum with a three inch thick deck aircraft carried consisted of two supermarine walruses in a hangar that was built into the main ford superstructure with a cross-deck catapult for launching this facility too would vanish in later refits replaced by radar but the remnants of both the catapult and aircraft moving rails along with the shapes of the hangar doors do still exist amid ships this is where we are now you can see the port forward four-inch twin and down here on the deck you can see the remnants of the rail system that was used for moving the aircraft around this area was then used for other facilities these various bits and pieces poking up out of the deck obviously were not in place at the time that the walrus was active as they would have presented something of an impediment to the biplane float plane as it was wheeled out you can see the hangar rails track right back to the forward superstructure which is of course where the walruses would be stored whilst they were not in use as since they were covered with fabric they were vulnerable to damage if you left them outside unattended for long periods of time looking back out at what was the launch deck you can see that the big heavy crane that was used to both handle and recover the aircraft is still in place although it's no longer in the position that it was when the ship was first launched as in that position it would actually obscure the starboard hangar exit for the aircraft which of course is not a good thing so that's some of her key systems let's have a look at more of her operational history as it would turn out her first round of operational history was quite short after an immediate pre-war exercise in which she actually managed to evade the entire home fleet which was hunting her in her stand-in role as an enemy commerce raider she launched into wartime duties with service alongside other cruisers in the blockade efforts against germany aiming to catch german vessels that were trying to get home or german warships that were trying to get out on their own commerce raiding missions something which her recent experience made her relatively well qualified for between this and inspecting suspicious foreign ships which did occasionally turn out to be german ships sailing under a false flag she was in and out of scapa flow quite regularly in late 1939 by november the initial rush of merchant shipping had died down and as one of the royal navy's newest and most powerful cruisers she was reallocated to a force designed as a rapid strike group unfortunately for her less than a fortnight into this duty she managed to sail over a magnetic mine on the one hand the explosion didn't cause many casualties only one person died and four dozen were left with various states of injury and there was only a small amount of flooding but on the other hand the underwater effect of the deep detonation broke the ship's keel warped the hull and the decks and wrecked a bunch of the machinery some think which would be the end of most chips even if they managed to make it back to port however because she was so new and the bulk of the ship was still intact the decision was made to repair her or more accurately rebuild most of the part of the ship that had been damaged it would be a long project and so the ship was decommissioned with the crew dispatched to serve on other active ships as the work continued the work would turn out to be even more extensive than anticipated as both thinking from the last few pre-war years when she'd already been largely completed plus lessons from the early part of the second world war were incorporated into the refit as the decks were flattened the hull was straightened out and the various broken bits were rebuilt one of the most obvious signs of this was an extensive blister bulge that was added to both strength and the hull and provide additional stability for all the new weight that was being added up top the belt arm was extended and thickened as well as now being placed where applicable outside of the blister this accounts for the various odd-stepped contours you can see on the outside of her hull the anti-aircraft battery would also receive its first upgrades with numerous 20 millimeter oerlikons added to the original pom pom and 50 caliber mix and a raft of new radar sets added including types 282 283 284 and 285 which were used for the various guns on the ship along with a type 273 surface search radar two different iff systems two different air search radars and an improved azdex system or what we now call sonar all in all 15 separate individual radars were installed as some of them had multiple sets especially the gun director radars you can therefore see why all that extra stability was needed almost three years after she suffered the mine damage belfast was ready to sail again and was almost immediately tasked with leading a cruiser squadron allocated to arctic convoy escort duty with her many radars and the rather unpleasant weather of the arctic it was unlikely that her aircraft would see any use and so they were removed about six months into this duty in order to save weight something that was vital for ships on these voyages as even for a ship as stable as belfast the build-up of ice was a permanent danger whilst on route especially since it had a very annoying habit of forming in large amounts high up on ships where its effect on stability would be the most noticed also as part of her assignment was occasional blockade duty and support for operations against german positions in norway since she was in the area anyway and occupied norway was now the preferred route for what few german ships were still at sea in 1943 and trying to get past allied lines the end of the year would see some especially high drama as belfast sailed with her half-sister hms sheffield and the heavy cruiser hms norfolk both of which had served in the hunt for the bismarck amongst other accolades as one half of a force designed to protect convoy jw 55b against attack from the german battleship scharnhorst as the normal convoy escort group was capable of seeing off most threats would not be able to stand up to kriegsmarina capital ship and its escorts the three cruisers were to provide a heavy screen directly between the convoy and the german ships whilst the other half of the force the battleship duke of york the cruiser hms jamaica which was a slightly smaller crown colony class derivative of the town class design and a number of destroyers waited further away to close it and catch the scharnhorst in a pencil movement should it appear the day after christmas scharnhorst did appear and was duly engaged in what became known as the battle of the north cape with the three cruisers forcing sean horst to withdraw with norfolk knocking out scharnhorst forward radar and doing a good impression of a full-scale battleship this is somewhat understandable as the county class is actually slightly longer albeit not as wide as a revenge class battleship and shared the same four twin turret layout this illusion was enhanced by the fact that the cruiser's outlines were being partially obscured by the weather and belfast and sheffield were both using reduced flash charges which in turn made norfolk's eight inch guns appear considerably more powerful than they actually were as she was not using reduced flash charges and so the difference in the flash was a lot more visible and thus appeared proportionally greater than it actually was using her multiple radars belfast was then able to track the german battleship through the snow and ice keeping duke of york informed as to her progress which in turn enabled the british battleship to launch a short-range ambush from which the scharnhorst proved unable to escape as of course duke of york was able to keep its own radars off until the last minute which gave the scharnhorst no warning with belfast joining in the general gunfire once duke of york had admiral bay's full attention after all the excitement the rest of her arctic escort missions would probably have seemed relatively routine but they were still quite dangerous one of belfast's former crew john harrison recounted how he stepped out of this hatch here just to the left of the ladder on his way to his action station in a turret during a particularly nasty arctic storm it was of course freezing as well as heavy storm weather and as he walked across the deck to the aft hatch of a turret a huge wave crested over the bow of the ship and swept down over the breaker which did very little to impede its progress and would have swept him off to a very quick icy death in the arctic ocean this was a fate that would have been almost certain as it would have been almost impossible for anyone to notice that he'd been swept overboard in any reasonable length of time and the survival time in the cold waters of the arctic is measured in minutes if not less the only reason he managed to survive was because of that handrail on the left-hand side of a turret's hatch he just about reached it and grabbed it rather foolishly not wearing gloves and it turned out that the metal of the handrail was so cold that it effectively instantly froze his hand to it this meant that he had a pretty much unbreakable hold on the rail as the water poured over him which kept him aboard the ship and once the water had subsided some of his friends within a turret were able to one and stick him and to haul him in for a well-needed drying off in later life he would come to visit belfast many times and would always touch that handrail for good luck you'll notice the forward turrets of the ship are now positioned slightly to starboard and at almost maximum elevation this actually ranges out on a service station on the north western part of the m25 orbital motorway that surrounds london which gives you some idea of their range since belfast is of course pretty much in the heart of the uk's capital city although it must be said that having visited that service station both i and many others kind of wish that maybe belfast guns were still active and the ammunition was still working as a good bombardment of six-inch guns for a few minutes would probably cause several million pounds of improvement to said service station but unfortunately we can't all get what we wish for belfast would continue in this vein in the arctic apart from a brief diversion to escort amassed carrier strike against the tirpitz now the sole remaining german battleship belfast would remain on the moments run until may 1944 when she was assigned with much of the rest of the home fleet to support the d-day landings with shore bombardment serving as an intermediate between the close support provided by the destroyers and the heavier support of the more distant battleships as one of the larger cruisers present she also served as an excellent flagship for her section of the bombardment force coordinating various ships efforts though an additional claim to fame that of taking winston churchill to watch the invasion was thwarted when literally everyone up to and including king george vi himself told churchill that this was not perhaps the wisest course of action over the following month belfast would suppress enemy guns and more directly support troop advances in a number of sectors using both her six-inch main battery and her four-inch as we said technically anti-aircraft battery since land targets tend to be a bit squishier when they aren't massively fortified bunkers as compared to seaborne targets and so the four-inch guns were perfectly adequate as with many ships involved in this operation there was a certain amount of shuttling back and forth to the uk south coast to restock as the onboard ammunition supply was exhausted several times but with allied forces ashore it was time for belfast to head for new seas in the indian and pacific oceans and so she was given a brief refit to prepare her for the new environment this upgraded the four inch battery's individual capabilities at the cost of losing two of the twin mountings receiving in exchange more medium and light anti-aircraft guns with a total of just over a dozen oerlikon and three dozen pom-pom barrels in a variety of mountings once all the numbers were added up an additional radar was fitted and three others were upgraded to new systems after which the ship was sent off on its new mission the refit had actually taken most of the intervening time that the european theater took to wrap up and upon arrival in australia she would be given her first 40 millimeter bofus guns in preparation for the clouds of kamikazes that were expected during the invasion and subsequent occupation of japan only to have the entire thing called off due to the japanese surrender in the middle of august 1945 following the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki since she was still pretty much fresh out of the dockyard belfast was retained in the pacific which allowed a number of older and more worn out ships to head home and as a result she wouldn't actually see home waters for another two years when she would continue her gradual replacement of pom-poms with 40 millimeter bofors in a short refit before being sent back to the pacific via a short visit to belfast the city with the city gifting the ship with a rather large and fetching silver bell arriving back in the pacific belfast would receive a near front row seat to the amethyst incident or at least as close as it was possible without being actively involved on the river as she was coordinating the signals and the overall british response as hms amethyst tried to fight its way to safety past the chinese communist forces she would therefore still be in the far east when the korean war broke out and thus became one of the first ships on scene as it were whereupon she undertook a mixture of patrol and escort duty for the larger allied ships as well as shore bombardment both in support of the troops and in a direct strike role against enemy targets receiving a single hit and a single fatality in the course of these actions aside from a brief trip back to the uk for a short refit she would remain on station until the end of september 1952 when she was recalled back home upon the arrival of two replacement cruisers with the 1950s seeing a general drawdown of the uk's armed forces the ship went into reserve almost immediately upon arrival and for a while there was a strong possibility she might go to the scrapyard however she not only survived but indeed thrived thanks directly to that german magnetic mine back in 1939. the blister bulge she'd received during the repairs made her the most stable of all of the town class and the one with the most reserved displacement and reserved stability to take upgrades additionally the three years needed to bring her back online had spared her the hard wear and tear that many of her half-sisters had taken indeed her only full sister hms edinburgh had been sunk during that time period thus in 1956 work began that rendered the ship into roughly her final form as we see it today the anti-aircraft suite was completely reworked to consist of only four inch and 40 millimeter anti-aircraft guns all of which were in new or upgraded forms and with a cold war on the need for key elements of the ship to be nbc or nuclear biological and chemical proof was realized since the various tests of atomic weapons such as operation crossroads had shown remarkably that a warship that was not at ground zero actually had a half decent chance of remaining afloat even if caught in the other blast effects of a nuclear war up until this point she'd had a typical town class bridge which meant a rounded bridge tower with prominent wings this refit would change that to something somewhat reminiscent of the queen anne's mansion bridge towers on later british battleships which meant much more internal space as well as moving the entire bridge down a level so it was now inside placing a gunnery direction platform in the open where the bridge had formerly been where the ship's firepower could be best directed when the position was available with auxiliary gunnery positions elsewhere inside 14 new updated radars now made up her electronic suite alongside a new sonar the old tripod masks were also replaced with new lattice masts in order to support the new electronics better and to compensate for some of the extra weight the torpedo launchers were removed leaving the ship with only the main battery and the heavy and medium anti-aircraft guns as her offensive loadout this work would be completed by 1959 and she headed back out for the far east and there was some thought given in subsequent years to converting her into a hybrid helicopter cruiser like the tiger class would later become but as she just came out of one long refit it was deemed wasteful to put her back into another so quickly and so she stayed out in the far east conducting a world tour that would eventually bring her home the long way round before popping into belfast the city again at the end of 1962 and then briefly entering the reserves in 1963 before embarking on her final active mission a cruise manned mainly by the royal navy reserve for an exercise at the end of 1963 she was put into reserve for the final time joining a number of her half-sisters and derivatives such as hms gambia and her erstwhile companion at the north cape hms sheffield despite some interest in preserving her by the end of the decade she was scheduled for scrapping but luckily she had friends in high places including a former crewman who'd gone on to become a member of parliament she also had the luck of again not being quite as worn out as some of the other town and crown colony class cruisers which would make her cheaper to maintain between these efforts and those of the belfast trust a privately run trust that was set up specifically with the aim of keeping her around she was first granted a reprieve from scrapping and then finally passed into private hands for preservation as a museum ship heading up the thames to a permanent home in the so-called london pool the last relatively deep anchorage on the thames as you head up into london proper there she would open on trafalgar day 1971 and towards the end of the decade would pass into the hands of the imperial war museum since then she's undergone a dry dock and repair roughly once every two decades and she can normally be visited in london within easy reach of london bridge station with the docking space ahead of and next to her often playing host to other visitors to the city both private and military under the current circumstances as of the time of release of this video she's closed but it's hoped she will reopen again in spring of 2021 with the crew taking the opportunity to do a nice bit of restoration work that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 276,062

Keywords: wows, world of warships, HMS Belfast, WW2, megnetic mine, Korean War, Imperial War Museum, Town class cruiser

Id: OhAZSmEwOZI

Length: 53min 54sec (3234 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020