HMS Belfast (C35)
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 HMS Belfast at her London berth, painted in dazzle camouflage |
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| Career (UK) |  |
|---|---|
| Class and type: | Town-class light cruiser |
| Name: | HMS Belfast |
| Builder: | Harland and Wolff shipyard, Belfast |
| Laid down: | 10 December 1936 |
| Launched: | 17 March 1938 |
| Commissioned: | 5 August 1939 |
| Decommissioned: | 24 August 1963 |
| Status: | Museum ship since 21 October 1971 |
| General characteristics | |
| Displacement: | 11,553 tons |
| Length: | 613 ft 6 in (187.0 m) overall |
| Beam: | 69 ft (21 m) |
| Draught: | 19 ft 9 in (6.0 m) |
| Propulsion: | Four Admiralty oil-fired 3-drum boilers four Parsons single reduction geared steam turbines driving four shafts at 80,000 shaft horsepower |
| Speed: | 32 knots (59 km/h) |
| Complement: | 750 - 850 (as flagship) |
| Armament: |
(1939) Twelve (4 × 3) 6 inch Mk XXIII (1959) Twelve (4 × 3) 6 inch Mk XXIII Eight (4 × 2) QF 4-inch (101.6 mm) Mk XVI HA/LA Twelve (6 × 2) QF 40mmBofors AA |
| Armour: | 4.5 inches (114 mm) deck 3 inches (76 mm) |
| Aircraft carried: | Two Supermarine Walrus aircraft (Removed in the latter part of WWII) |
| Motto: | Pro Tanto Quid Retribuamas (Latin: For so much, how shall we repay?) |
| Honours and awards: | Arctic 1943 North Cape 1943 Normandy 1944 Korea 1950-52 |
| Notes: | Pennant number C35 |
HMS Belfast is one of the two ships forming the final sub-class of the Royal Navy's Town-class cruisers, the other being HMS Edinburgh. Commissioned shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Belfast spent much of the early war years undergoing extensive repairs after being heavily damaged by a German mine. Returning to action in late 1942, she saw action escorting Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union during 1943 and participated in the Battle of North Cape. In 1944 Belfast supported the D-Day landings of Operation Overlord. She saw further action during the Korean War.
Decommissioned in 1963 following a number of overseas tours Belfast was initially expected to be disposed of as scrap. After a campaign by a private trust, she was preserved as a museum ship in the Pool of London. Opened to the public in 1971 Belfast has been maintained as a branch of the Imperial War Museum since 1978.
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[edit] Early history
The Town class cruisers were constrained to less than 10,000 tons by the Washington Naval Treaty. The original design included quadruple 6-inch gun mountings, but, due to problems with construction, improved versions of the triple mountings fitted to the earlier ships of the class were fitted instead. These were lighter than those planned, and the weight saved was used to improve the ship's armour and anti-aircraft defences.
Belfast was launched on St Patrick's Day in 1938 at Harland and Wolff Shipyard in Belfast by Anne Chamberlain, the wife of the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. The budgeted overall cost of the ship was £2,141,514, of which £75,000 was for the guns and £66,500 for aircraft. She was commissioned in August 1939 under the command of Captain G A Scott DSO and assigned to the 18th Cruiser Squadron.
[edit] Second World War
At the start of the Second World War the 18th Cruiser Squadron was part of the British effort to impose a naval blockade on Germany. As part of this squadron, Belfast intercepted the German liner Cap Norte on 9 October 1939 as the liner was trying to return to Germany disguised as a neutral ship.
At around 1:00 a.m. on 21 November 1939 she was seriously damaged as she left the Firth of Forth, with twenty-one men injured, by a magnetic mine laid on 4 November by the German submarine U-21 under the command of Kapitänleutnant Fritz Frauenheim[2]. The mine broke the keel and wrecked the hull and machinery to such an extent that repairs at Devonport took nearly three years.
She returned to service in the Home Fleet in November 1942 under the command of Captain Frederick Parham. Improvements had been made to the ship during repairs, notably bulged amidships to improve her longitudinal strength and stability, and fitting the latest radar and fire control; her displacement had risen from 11,175 to 11,553 tons, making her Britain's heaviest cruiser.
She was made flagship of the 10th Cruiser Squadron, under Rear-Admiral Robert Burnett, in which capacity she provided cover for Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union. On 26 December 1943, in what became the Battle of North Cape, the cruiser squadron, consisting of Norfolk, Belfast and Sheffield, encountered the German Gneisenau class battlecruiser Scharnhorst, and, with the battleship HMS Duke of York, sank her.
Belfast was part of the escort force in Operation Tungsten in March 1944, a large carrier-launched airstrike against the Tirpitz, at that stage the last surviving German heavy warship, moored at Altafjord in northern Norway. Tirpitz was hit by fifteen bombs and severely damaged, but not destroyed.
In June 1944, under the command of Rear-Admiral Frederick Dalrymple-Hamilton, she took part in the bombardment of enemy positions at the beginning of Operation Neptune, the landing phase of the D-Day landings, as flagship of bombardment Force E. Part of the Eastern Naval Task Force, with responsibility for supporting the British and Canadian assaults on Gold and Juno beaches, Belfast was one of the first ships to fire on German positions at 5:30 a.m. on 6 June 1944.
Belfast was almost continuously in action for the next five weeks, firing thousands of rounds from her 6– and 4–inch batteries in support of troops until the battlefront moved out of range inland. Her final salvo in the European war was fired on 8 July during Operation Charnwood, the battle to capture Caen, when she engaged German positions together with the battleship HMS Rodney and the monitor HMS Roberts.
Two days later she returned to Devonport for a short refit for service in the Far East, and joined Operation Zipper, which was intended to expel the Japanese from Malaya but turned into a relief operation following the Japanese surrender.
During the last days of the war in Europe she was spotted in the North Sea by a German submarine without noticing the enemy vessel. The German commander decided not to fire, as the war was almost over.[citation needed]
[edit] Post-war service
Belfast served in the Korean War, supporting United Nations land forces by naval bombardment. In July 1952 she was hit by a Communist battery, killing one man and wounding four.
Belfast was modernized between January 1956 and May 1959. During this refit all the AA guns (4 inch and 40 mm) were removed and replaced by more modern weapons of the same calibre. All the gunnery control equipment and radars fitted during wartime were also replaced. Finally the original bridge was rebuilt and enclosed to face the new constraints of NBC warfare and the original raked tripod masts were replaced by lattice masts. These alterations were very similar to the bridge structure and masting fitted on the new Tiger class cruisers.
Between 1959-62 the ship operated in the Far East on exercises and "showed the flag". In December 1961 she provided the British guard of honour at Dar-es-Salaam during the Tanganyika independence ceremony.
The ship left Singapore on 26 March 1962 for the UK where she made a final visit to Belfast and after an exercise in the Mediterranean was paid off on 24 August 1963.
[edit] As a museum ship
| HMS Belfast | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Established | 1971 | ||
| Location | Morgan's Lane, Tooley Street, London SE1 | ||
| Visitor figures | 258,941[3] | ||
| Director | Brad King | ||
| Nearest tube station(s) | London Bridge, Tower Hill | ||
| Website | hmsbelfast.iwm.org.uk | ||
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In 1967, the Imperial War Museum began to look into the possibility of preserving a 6-inch turret to complement the pair of 15-inch naval guns it had already succeeded in preserving. After a visit to HMS Gambia on 14 April 1967 the possibility was raised of preserving an entire ship. Gambia had already deteriorated too much to be preserved, and so attention turned to the possibility of saving Belfast. A joint committee was established by the Imperial War Museum, the National Maritime Museum and the Ministry of Defence, which reported in June 1968 that the scheme was practical. However, in early 1971 the government decided against preservation.[4]
Despite this, a private trust was formed in order to continue efforts to preserve the ship. The HMS Belfast Trust was established with Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles DSO OBE CM, a former captain of the ship and Member of Parliament, as chairman. Following their efforts the government agreed to hand over the ship to the Trust and she was opened to the public on Trafalgar Day, 21 October 1971. Though no longer part of the Royal Navy, HMS Belfast was granted a special dispensation to allow it to continue to fly the White Ensign.[5]. By the late 1970s, however, the financial position of the Trust was marginal and the Imperial War Museum sought permission to merge the Trust into the museum. On 19 January 1978 the then Secretary of State for Education and Science, Miss Shirley Williams, accepted the proposal stating that 'HMS Belfast is a unique demonstration of an important phase of our history and technology' .[6] The ship was transferred to the museum on 1 March 1978.[7]
Listed as part of the National Historic Fleet, Core Collection, since being brought to London Belfast has twice been drydocked as part of the ship’s long-term preservation. In 1982 she was drydocked at Tilbury and in June 1999 Belfast was towed to Portsmouth. Whilst in dock, her entire hull was cleaned and blasted, her hull blanking plates inspected and an ultrasonic survey carried out.[8] While under tow to Portsmouth she was delayed by bad weather and arrived a day late. She was intended to have arrived on 6 June 1999, the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Normandy landings.[9]
Following the maintenance work, Belfast was repainted in a camouflage scheme officially known as Admiralty Disruptive Camouflage Type 25, which she had worn from November 1942 to July 1944. This was objected to by some, due to the anachronistic conflict between her camouflage, which reflects the majority of her active Second World War service, and her present configuration, which was the result of Belfast's extended refit from January 1956 to May 1959.[10]
The forward guns are targeted on the London Gateway service area, some 11½ miles away, on the M1 motorway, north of London. This has been done to bring home to visitors the range of these weapons.[11]
[edit] Appearances in popular culture
- HMS Belfast is used in Neil Gaiman's fantasy novel Neverwhere as the temporary location of "the market" for London Below, an underground community of magical and unique people and creatures.
- Sebastian Foucan leapt from the bridge to the gun turret of the ship while free running for the 2003 documentary Jump London.
- Belfast has appeared briefly in several films. Harry Potter and his friends fly past her in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and she can be seen in an aerial shot of the Thames in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
- A video clip for Depeche Mode's song "People Are People" shows video footage of HMS Belfast in war scenes [12], the band members also appear aboard the ship itself [13].
- The Pogues' album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash was launched on HMS Belfast in August 1985.
- Belfast was featured on The History Channel's Heavy Metal series in 2003. She was also described and seen in Chris Barrie's Massive Engines documentary series.
- HMS Belfast was the scene of a performance by Spandau Ballet in 1980. On 25 March 2009 the band returned to HMS Belfast for a press conference to announce their reunion.
[edit] Image gallery
 The bridge of HMS Belfast |
 HMS Belfast and City Hall seen from the top of The Monument |
 Belfast coming alongside USS Bataan off the coast of Korea on 27 May 1952 |
 HMS Belfast in a night setting with Tower Bridge (2007) |
[edit] References
- ^ Wingate, John (2004). In Trust for the Nation: HMS Belfast 1939-1972. London: Imperial War Museum. p. 11. ISBN 1-901623-72-6.
- ^ Uboat.net
- ^ "Monthly museum and gallery visitor figures (2007/08)" (PDF). Department of Culture, Media and Sport. http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/Visitor_Figures_Website_spreadsheet.pdf. Retrieved on 10 December 2008.
- ^ Wingate, John (2004). In Trust for the Nation: HMS Belfast 1939-1972. London: Imperial War Museum. p. 101. ISBN 1-901623-72-6.
- ^ Howard, Philip (16 October 1971). "Navy waives the rules for last big gun ship". The Times: p. 3 column A. issue 58300.
- ^ Hansard, HC Deb 19 January 1978 vol 942 c301W Hansard 1803-2005Accessed 13 April 2009.
- ^ Wingate, John (2004). In Trust for the Nation: HMS Belfast 1939-1972. London: Imperial War Museum. p. Postscript. ISBN 1-901623-72-6.
- ^ Jon Wenzel, then Director of HMS Belfast, speaking about her forthcoming drydocking at the Third International Conference on the Technical Aspects of the Preservation of Historic Vessels, April 1997 in San Francisco, California. Diminishing Shipyard Resources Accessed 20 April 2009.
- ^ "War veteran battles weather". BBC News. 7 June 1999. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/363318.stm. Retrieved on 20 April 2009.
- ^ Wingate, John (2004). In Trust for the Nation: HMS Belfast 1939-1972. London: Imperial War Museum. p. Postscript. ISBN 1-901623-72-6.
- ^ HMS Belfast visitor information, Imperial War Museum
- ^ It's Called A Heart Interview
- ^ People Are People
- Watton, Ross (2003) Anatomy of the Ship: The Cruiser HMS Belfast (London: Conway Maritime Press) ISBN 0851779565
The Ballad of HMS Belfast by Ciaran Carson
[edit] External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: HMS Belfast (C35) |
- HMS Belfast on the Imperial War Museum website
- HNSA Web Page: HMS Belfast
- Royal Naval Amateur Radio Society (RNARS) — operates the radio rooms and amateur radio station on board
- Aerial view of HMS Belfast from Google Local
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Coordinates: 51°30′23.98″N 0°04′52.50″W / 51.5066611°N 0.08125°W
