The Abercrombie Class—An Anglo-American Hybrid

What do you do if you find yourself with four twin-14-inch battleship turret assemblies and no place to use them? Call on Winston Churchill, of course.

That was the position in which the president of Bethlehem Steel, Charles M. Schwab (no relation to the famous brokerage house), found himself in fall 1914. He was under contract to furnish armor plate and the guns to complete the Greek battlecruiser Salamis that was being built by the AG Vulcan Works of Hamburg, Germany. Unfortunately, World War I was in progress, and the British had no intention of allowing eight state-of-the-art naval guns to pass through its blockade of Germany. Luckily for Schwab, he found a ready buyer in the British Admiralty.

First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and First Sea Lord Admiral Jackie Fisher wanted to involve the Royal Navy in the land fight by conducting amphibious operations in the Baltic or providing bombardment support for ground forces along the coast of Belgium where the Western Front met the English Channel. To provide effective artillery support for land operations, guns would need to be large and powerful.

Pre-Dreadnought battleships might have provided the necessary range and destructive power, but Churchill and Fisher wanted ships capable of operating in the shallow littoral. An additional problem was that large naval guns took a year to build, and those already in production were reserved for the Grand Fleet. Something new was needed.

Schwab met with Churchill and Fisher on 3 November 1914 to discuss the sale of munitions. When he mentioned the surplus naval guns, the fertile imaginations of Churchill and Fisher immediately conceived of using them to build a squadron of large-gun monitors to be used in support of amphibious operations overseas.

Schwab’s guns were already built, tested, and ready for delivery as four complete turret assemblies, including the armored barbettes, gun mounts, ammunition lifts, and gun houses—all nearly identical to those Bethlehem Steel had just built for the U.S. Navy’s New York–class dreadnoughts. Also included would be the high-explosive shells and powder outfits. Schwab received a sales contract a week later.

Design of the first four monitors began immediately, taking less than a month, with the keels laid in early December. Despite the astonishingly quick process, the ships would incorporate features never before seen in a warship, including provision for two Short Type 166 seaplanes, high-angle antiaircraft guns, and, most important, a 15-foot-wide antitorpedo bulge along the entire length of the hull. The ships were designed with flat bottoms and a mere 10-foot draft, giving them a most unusual appearance—something like a seagoing bumper car—but they would be difficult to sink with torpedoes or floating mines.

The monitors had a flush-deck design, without any real superstructure. The uncluttered forecastle deck extended far astern, covering 80 percent of the upper deck, which was mostly open at the sides. Exactly amidship was a tripod mainmast with the charthouse and compass platform near the base and the spotting top and fire-control director above.

The design called for a displacement of 6,150 tons and an overall length of 334.5 feet. The upper hull was 60 feet wide, but below the waterline the overall width was 90 feet. To facilitate rapid construction, the engines, boilers, and most of the machinery were obtained from readily available commercial sources. The boilers were coal-fired, providing steam for two 2,000-hp quadruple-expansion engines driving two propellers. The bow was blunt, tapering from the stem to the full 90-foot width of the hull in just 50 feet. Hydrodynamic modeling suggested the monitors would be severely underpowered, but Fisher would not tolerate any delays. When the four ships were launched in May 1915, they could make just 6½ knots in a calm sea. For all practical purposes, they would have to be towed wherever they went.

The single turret just forward of the mainmast would be familiar to anyone who has toured the museum ship Texas. The gun house had a 10-inch armored sloped glacis in front, with 7-inch-thick armor on the sides, and was set in an 8-inch barbette. The turret had a 300-degree arc of fire and the 14-inch Mk 1 guns could elevate 15 degrees, giving a range of just under 20,000 yards. The projectiles were fired with U.S. Navy–standard nitro-cellulose propellent. The 120 common shells were stowed and handled with the cap pointing down. They came up the single-stage projectile hoist base end-first to be rolled on to the loading tray. Powder bags came up from the handling room through a flashproof door to a platform below the floor of the turret.

The gun elevation screw and the turret training gears were powered by the same oil hydraulic Waterbury variable-speed gear (see “The Waterbury Pump,” October 2023, pp. 13–14) used on U.S. Navy ships, a departure from the Royal Navy’s typical high-pressure water hydraulics. A sloped belt of 4-inch-thick armor below the upper deck was deemed sufficient to protect the machinery and magazines from a 6-inch shell.

The four monitors were commissioned in rapid succession in late May and early June 1915. As a nod to the U.S. origin of their firepower, they were to be named for Admiral David G. Farragut, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. The U.S. government, as a neutral power, objected to the idea that ships named for famous Americans would be used to bombard Germans, and, as a result, the four became Abercrombie, Havelock, Roberts, and Raglan after famous British generals.

By the time of their commissioning, the missions envisioned for the monitors in Northern Europe had given way to another endeavor, Churchill’s Gallipoli campaign. After multiple Royal Navy and Allied ships had been lost trying to force their way into the Black Sea through the Dardanelles, British troops landed on the Gallipoli peninsula in April 1915 but soon found themselves hemmed in by Turkish forces.

The Abercrombie and her sisters left England under tow, arriving in late July. They provided much-needed firepower, but—owing to the limited ammunition supply—their bombardment was kept to high-value targets. Their best service may have come when they provided critical artillery support for the British Army’s withdrawal from the peninsula in early January 1916, which was accomplished without casualties.

The Roberts and Havelock were then recalled to Britain to guard the English coast, while the Abercrombie and Raglan remained in the Mediterranean.

The latter two provided support for the British Army’s Gaza campaign in Palestine in late 1917. The Turks were sufficiently perturbed by this that they sent the German-crewed battlecruiser Yavus Sultan Selim and the light cruiser Midilli, warships formerly known as SMS Goeben and Breslau, through the Dardanelles to attack the monitors.

Early on the morning of 20 January 1918, they surprised the Raglan and the smaller 9.2-inch monitor M28 at anchor in Kusu Bay at the northeast tip of Imbros Island. The British ships had just enough warning to come to action stations but not enough to raise steam.

After an exchange of shots, the Midilli’s 15-cm Krupp guns hit the Raglan on the fourth salvo, destroying the spotting top and killing the gunnery officer. The Raglan’s turret was now under local control, but without a rangefinder the turret captain could only guess at the range of the fast-approaching cruisers. The Midilli, however, did have the range and peppered the Raglan, setting her ablaze. A hit from the Yavus’s 28-cm main gun penetrated the Raglan’s barbette just below the gun house on the port side, setting off the powder and killing most of the turret crew, but—thanks to flash precautions—the blast did not spread to the magazines. The first lieutenant escaped from the hatch under the turret overhang, and assuming the captain had been killed, ordered the crew to abandon ship.

The cruisers continued to work over the Raglan and the M28, sinking both in short order. As they made their escape to the safety of the Dardanelles, the cruisers entered a British minefield, where the Midilli hit four mines and sank. The Yavus also hit several mines but managed to ground herself under the protection of some Turkish batteries. Her war was over. The Admiralty considered the loss of the two monitors more than compensation for the elimination of this pesky pair.

The Abercrombie and Havelock were scrapped in 1927, while the Roberts was used in experimental testing of her underwater protection, the results of which were used in the design of the Ark Royal and King George V. She was finally scrapped in 1936. The Abercrombie big-gun monitors were considered to have been enough of a success that even larger, more heavily armed namesakes would be built for similar service in World War II.