Te volume on the shelf in the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library looked unimpressive. The binding showed tears, and the book was faded and marred by long-ago ink stains. Dirt on the tops and bottoms of pages testified to its age and many reshelvings. The spine identified the book as King George Was My Shipmate (Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd., 1940). Validating the adage about not judging a book by its cover, the contents were filled with exciting descriptions.
Return-date stamps indicated that a number of individuals, perhaps midshipmen, had checked out the book in the spring of 1941, when the Royal Navy was chasing and sinking the German super battleship Bismarck. The first date stamped in the book was 30 May 1941, the eve of the 25th anniversary of the titanic sea struggle later known as the Battle of Jutland. A century after that 1916 confrontation between the British and German navies, the account remains of interest.
The author of the memoir was James Moffatt, a petty officer who served in the same turret with Britain’s Prince Albert during the battle. Twenty years later, in 1936, Prince Albert reluctantly became King George VI when his older brother, King Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry American divorcée Wallis Warfield Simpson. This was a dramatic change for the second son in the royal family. Because his older brother was on track to become king, Albert had planned on a naval career, in which he was strongly encouraged by their father, King George V.
In 1913, 17-year-old Prince Albert, who was known unofficially as “Mr. Johnson” in an attempt to shield his identity, reported aboard HMS Collingwood. The 19,250-ton dreadnought battleship was named for Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, second in command to Horatio Lord Nelson during the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar. Moffatt’s account provides a good deal of atmosphere about life on board the Collingwood.
When World War I began in 1914, the men of the Royal Navy were eager to engage in a big-gun slugging match with their German counterparts. Sadly for the prince, his time on board the ship was intermittent because abdominal problems took him ashore, first for an appendectomy and later for an operation to repair a duodenal ulcer. To a degree, he was treated the same as others of his rank. He served as boat officer and even took part in the coaling-ship routine that left him un-royally blackened. There were, however, exceptions when “Mr. Johnson” was called away for royal duties.
By May 1916, when he was a 20-year-old sub-lieutenant, Albert’s ship was at her base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, a dreary place that led Moffat to say that “prison would have been more exciting.” On 30 May, the dreadnoughts sortied from Scapa. Battlecruisers and other Grand Fleet ships came out through Scotland’s Firth of Forth and headed for their North Sea rendezvous with history. Albert was assigned to the Collingwood’s forward-most 12-inch-gun turret, designated A in the British system.
The next day, the Collingwood’s crew went to battle stations in the late afternoon. At the outset of the action, Albert was sitting on top of A turret and had a good view of the scene around him. Then, as the prince recounted in his postbattle description, a German warship began firing at the Collingwood, and her projectiles straddled the British ship. He reported, “I was distinctly startled and jumped down the hole in the top of the turret like a shot rabbit!!”
From that point he followed events by looking through one of the turret’s periscopes. Among other things, he saw Vice Admiral David Beatty’s flagship, the battlecruiser Lion, afire amidships and the battlecruiser Invincible sinking. During the battle, the Collingwood fired her big guns at a light cruiser and a battlecruiser. In the process, she also managed to avoid German torpedoes that came close aboard. When the German retreat ended the battle, the Collingwood was undamaged.
After the battle, her guns were still loaded in anticipation of an encounter on 1 June. But the German ships did not reappear—neither that day nor for the rest of the war—and the Collingwood steamed back toward Scapa Flow. The crew then had to remove the powder and projectiles from the barrels, and restow the projectiles belowdecks. In his memoir Moffatt confessed to violating regulations that called for the unused powder bags to be thrown over the side intact. Instead, he slit open a bag, dropped the contents into the sea, and kept the bag as a clandestine souvenir.
In a letter he wrote after the battle, the king expressed pride in Albert for being in action, but a naval career was not to be for the young prince. His medical troubles led him to leave shipboard duty for brief service in naval aviation before a return to civilian life. His eventual job as monarch was a role that he neither wanted nor for which he had received the preparation accorded his older brother.
For many who fought at Jutland, there would be no future after that day in May. The prince watched solemnly when his ship steamed past the dreadnought Malaya. Her crew members dropped into the sea the canvas-shrouded remains of their dead shipmates. Petty Officer Moffatt recounted the scene: “So we left those who had died, to rest where no bugle would ever again rouse them to the defence of the country they had loved in life.”