HMS Queen Mary

1916

Jutland, the Derfflinger salvo, ninety seconds Location: North Sea, off Jutland, Denmark · Coordinates: 56.80°N 5.85°E · Casualties: 1,266 · Survivors: 9 · Depth: 60 m · Cause: naval gunfire · magazine explosion — Engaged by SMS Derfflinger and SMS Seydlitz at the Battle of Jutland on the afternoon of 31 May 1916. Two rapid German salvoes found her forward and after magazines almost simultaneously. She blew apart in ninety seconds. · Fate: war grave · protected · Type: battlecruiser · Lion class · Tonnage: 26,770 tons · Crew: 1275 · Flag: United Kingdom · Launched: 1912 Royal Navy battlecruiser at the Battle of Jutland. Struck by two quick German salvoes on the afternoon of 31 May 1916; her forward and after magazines went up together and she blew apart in ninety seconds. 1,266 dead, nine survivors. Vice-Admiral Beatty, watching from HMS Lion, said to his flag captain, 'There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.' Three British battlecruisers died the same way that afternoon. The Vessel HMS Queen Mary was a Lion-class battlecruiser of the Royal Navy, the third ship of her class (after Lion and Princess Royal), commissioned at Palmers Hebburn yard on 4 September 1913. She was 214 metres long, 27,200 tons, armed with eight 13.5-inch guns in four twin turrets, and designed for 28 knots. Her designer, Sir Philip Watts, had intended the Lion-class to be the answer to the German Moltke-class battlecruisers; at her commissioning, Queen Mary was the fastest and most heavily armed battlecruiser in the world. She was the most modern of the Royal Navy's pre-war battlecruisers at the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. She was assigned to the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron under the command of Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty at Rosyth. Beatty's battlecruiser force had been established under Admiral Fisher's late-Victorian doctrine as the "eyes of the fleet": fast ships intended to scout ahead of the main battle line, engage enemy scouting forces, and lead the fleet onto the enemy's main body. The battlecruiser concept had several known weaknesses by 1914. The Lion-class ships had been built with main belt armour of 9 inches and deck armour of 1 inch, substantially thinner than contemporary battleships; the design philosophy traded armour for speed and firepower. Queen Mary's captain at Jutland, Captain Cecil Prowse, had expressed concern through 1915 about the inadequate deck armour against plunging fire at long range; Prowse's concerns had been formally logged wi The Disaster At 16:26, approximately 50 minutes into the battlecruiser action, the German battlecruiser SMS Derfflinger opened fire on Queen Mary from a range of 14,500 yards. Derfflinger's third salvo of 12-inch shells straddled Queen Mary. Her fourth salvo, fired at 16:26, landed two hits at the base of Queen Mary's Q turret. The two shells penetrated the lightly-armoured turret roof and detonated in the 13.5-inch cordite handling room adjacent to the turret. The cordite ignited. The resulting flash explosion propagated downward through the loading trunk into the main magazine below. Queen Mary detonated in a single catastrophic explosion at approximately 16:27 on 31 May 1916. The explosion vented upward through her boat deck and superstructure, producing a column of flame and smoke estimated by observers on nearby ships at 120 metres in height. Her hull broke at the point of Q turret; her bow and stern rose momentarily in the air and then sank in opposite directions. She was gone inside 90 seconds of the fatal salvo. 1,266 of her 1,275 crew died. Beatty, on the bridge of HMS Lion 2,000 yards ahead, watched Queen Mary explode. His remark to his flag captain Alfred Chatfield, preserved in Chatfield's 1942 memoirs, was: "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today." The remark was understated even by the standards of the Royal Navy: in the same 40 minutes of Beatty's battlecruiser action, HMS Indefatigable had also been destroyed by an identical magazine explosion (1,019