Featured Video: Sinking of H.M.S. Barham In Vintage Pathé Newsreel Footage of an Explosive Ending And a Moody Tribute to Ship and Crew
Shocking in its intensity, this film of a magazine blast may be as close to an actual magazine explosion as you want to get. Click play and watch a 36,500-ton battheship be blown to smithereens in a matter of seconds.
The Barham was a Queen Elizabeth class warship -- Britain's most advanced heavy battleship generation in World War I. Oil-fired, robustly armored, reliably driven, and armed with 15"/42 artillery that set the standard for 20 years, the five Queen Elizabeths were audacious -- if not visionary -- for their time. The were proven in battle: at Jutland, four of the five, as the Fifth Battleship Squadron, were attached to Beatty's battlecruiser squadron which saw some of the hottest combat of the entire battle. Sister ship HMS Warspite had her steering temporarily frozen and steamed in predictable circles for some 30 minutes while the entire High Seas Fleet took target practice on her. Though pierced by more than thirteen 11" and 12" hits, when her steering had been jury-rigged, the Warspite made port under her own power, emerging by summer's end ready to fight again.
All five of the Queen Elizabeths fought in World War II as well (above - Barham after refit post-1938). They had proven themselves highly survivable against mid-range 11-and-12" artillery fire at Jutland. Large-calibre artillery fire was only one of the many dangers that assailed them after 1939, however. All five were rebuilt in the Thirties. Anti-torpedo blisters were added to the hulls, and their bridgeworks were rebuilt in several different designs; Barham and Malaya emerged with masts and superstructure closely resembling original fit, while the other three ships got a squared-off, blocky bridgeworks resembling the Nelsons, and a massive pole foremast. The original 2 stacks were consolidated into one huge, oblong funnel. But refit or no, these big ships -- these "castles of steel," as Churchill called them -- proved unnervingly vulnerable to submarines and aircraft, weapons that had been mere infants when these big ships were laid down in 1913. Although all the Queen Elizabeths had episodes of Second War combat, only Barham came to such irretrievable grief. A wily U-boat penetrated her protective screen in the Mediterranean and delivered the coup-de-grace, a perfectly aimed salvo of four torpedoes, three of which struck the Barham's underwater hull. The ship's own explosives did the rest. 844 died in the incident.
For the remaining Queen Elizabeths, after winning a hard-fought victory, they were tired. In the trying times after 1945, Britain was going socialist and it was fashionable to abandon the trappings of empire to focus on repairing war's ravages and ensuring economic justice at home. After some years of idleness, the torch awaited the old castles by decade's end. Rearmament of a sort would come, but the battleship's day was done. With the exception of a few museum pieces, the naval fleets of two world wars went into the melting pot. For a musical tribute to the Barham with lots of vintage stills, consider the presentation below.
