VANGUARD HMS 1910

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aukepalmhof
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VANGUARD HMS 1910

Post by aukepalmhof » Tue Jan 17, 2012 3:22 am

The eighth HMS VANGUARD of the British Royal Navy was a St Vincent-class battleship, an enhancement of the "Dreadnought" design built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness. She was designed and built during the Anglo-German naval race and spent her life in the British Home Fleet.
Following her commissioning she remained with the Grand fleet, taking part in periodic exercises. She was present at the Coronation Fleet review on 24 June 1910. She underwent a refit in 1911-12, leading otherwise an uneventful existence .
On 29 July, in common with much of the grand fleet, she moved to Scapa Flow, at that time the main base of the battle fleet in time of war. On 1 September 1914 at about 18.00 she opened fire on a target which was believed to be a submarine but which proved not to be.
In April 1916 she was transferred to the Fourth Battle Squadron (4BS), a move which affected her position in the chain of command but not her geographical location. On 31 May she sailed with the Grand Fleet, and was present at the Battle of Jutland. After the deployment of the battle fleet she lay in sixteenth place in the line. She took part in the action against the head of the German High Seas Fleet and against the German battle cruisers; it is not known if she scored any hits, and she herself received no hits at all. She returned with the fleet to Scapa Flow.
On the afternoon of 9 July 1917 the ship's crew had been exercising, practising the routine for abandoning ship. She anchored in the northern part of Scapa Flow at about 18.30. There is no record of anyone detecting anything amiss until the moment of the explosion at 23.20.
A court of inquiry heard accounts from many witnesses on nearby ships. They accepted the consensus that there had been a small explosion with a white glare between the foremast and "A" turret, followed after a brief interval by two much larger explosions. The Court decided, on the balance of the available evidence, that the main detonations were in either "P" magazine, or "Q" magazine, or both. A great deal of debris thrown out by the explosion landed on nearby ships; a section of plating measuring some five feet by six feet landed on board HMS Bellerophon. It was found possible to match it with a sister ship, and it was found to be from the central dynamo room, which reinforced the evidence suggesting that the explosion took place in the central part of the ship.
Although it was obviously an explosion of the cordite charges in a main magazine, the reason for it was much less obvious. There were a number of theories. The inquiry found that some of the cordite on board, which had been temporarily offloaded in December 1916 and catalogued at that time, was past its stated safe life. The possibility of spontaneous detonation was raised, but could not be proved. It was also noted that a number of ship's boilers were still in use, and a number of the watertight doors which should have been closed in war-time, were open as the ship was in port. It was suggested that this might contribute to there being a dangerously high temperature in the magazines. The final conclusion of the board was that a fire started in a 4-inch magazine, perhaps when a raised temperature caused spontaneous ignition of cordite, spreading to one or the other main magazines which then exploded.
Eight hundred and four men lost their lives. Two survived, One of them being Captain Kyōsuke Eto, a military observer from the Imperial Japanese Navy, which was allied with the Royal Navy at the time through the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.
The site is now designated as a controlled site under the Protection of Military Remains Act.
In terms of loss of life, the destruction of the Vanguard remains the most catastrophic accidental explosion in the history of the UK, and one of the worst accidental losses of the Royal Navy.
Name: HMS VANGUARD
Ordered: 1907
Builder: Vickers Barrow-in-Furness
Laid down: 2 April 1908
Launched: 22 February 1909
Commissioned: 1 March 1910
Fate: Sunk by internal explosion, 9 July 1917
Class and type: St. Vincent class
Type: Dreadnought battleship
Displacement: 19,560 t
Length: 152.4 m (500 ft)
Beam: 25.6 m (84 ft)
Draught: 8.7 m (28.5 ft)
Propulsion: 4 shaft Parsons turbines, coal-fired boilers, 24,500 shp
Speed: 21.7 knots (40.2 km/h)
Range: 6,900 nautical miles (12,780 km) at 10 knots (19 km/h)
Complement: 758
Armament: 10 × BL 12-inch (304.8 mm) Mk XI guns (5×2)
12 × BL 4-inch (101.6 mm) Mk VII guns
1 × 4 inch AA gun
1 × 3 inch AA gun
3 × 18 inch torpedo tubes (submerged)
Delandre Chinderella/label

Source: Wikipedia

Peter Crichton
Attachments
HMS_Vanguard_%281909%29.jpg
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