A sailboat passes under the bow of the dreadnought HMS Ajax on Loch Ewe off the west coast of Scotland. At first sight, the warship appears to be travelling at speed, but the sea conditions, position of the cutter, and proximity of the coast indicate the white wave at her bow to be fake. In fact, this painted bow-wave is not the only phony feature of this warship; so too are the guns and one of the funnels, while the curious shadow on the port side indicates a superstructure that is incongruously broader than the hull. This dummy battleship and thirteen others constituted a phantom battlefleet that was an ephemeral presence in the early months of the Great War.
The phantom battlefleet was the brainchild of Winston Churchill. The First Lord of the Admiralty reasoned that for little cost a group of merchant ships could be fitted out to resemble units of the Grand Fleet closely enough to fool both German aerial and submarine reconnaissance. Thus fooled, the enemy would have greater difficulty reading the movements, distribution, and intentions of the Grand Fleet. As the First Lord surmised:
“Even when the enemy knows that we have such a fleet, its presence will tend to mystify and confuse his plans, and baffle and distract the enterprise of his submarines. He will always be in doubt as to which is the real and which is the dummy fleet.”
The Admiralty had started requisitioning merchant shipping to function as auxiliaries in the Royal Navy even before war had been declared. Churchill’s plan called for at least a dozen of these vessels to be disguised as key units of Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet. To ensure his plan was carried out with minimum interference from dissenters, Churchill appointed his good friend the recently retired Admiral Percy Scott to oversee the project. A moderniser with a flair for innovation and improvisation, Scott had been a gunnery specialist, and he shared Churchill’s fear that developments in submarine warfare and naval aviation would soon make the battleship obsolete.
The fourteen merchant vessels ultimately selected for conversion were by no means of a standard type, some having served as passenger liners, others as cargo carriers. Several had delivered mules and other army supplies during the Boer War. Five had been in service with the Canadian Pacific Steam Company. The conversions took place between October 1914 and March 1915. The shipyard chosen to carry out the work was merchant marine specialist Harland & Wolff, where several of the ships had in fact been built. The Belfast shipyard was deemed sufficiently peripheral to the primary theatres of war to ensure the undertaking had a measure of secrecy. The work involved up to 2,000 shipwrights, and the total cost was estimated to be £1 million, roughly the price of the original Dreadnought.
The units of the Grand Fleet chosen to be facsimiled ranged from 1st generation dreadnoughts to recently commissioned ‘super-dreadnoughts’ of the King George V and Iron Duke classes, and from the earliest to the latest design of battle-cruiser. It is unclear how identities were assigned to each vessel but naturally hull size would have been considered. City of Oxford (4,000t/400ft) and Michigan (5,000/400ft), which assumed the appearances of the stubbier Edwardian dreadnoughts HMS St. Vincent and Collingwood respectively, were considerably smaller than the likes of Cevic (8,300t/520ft) and Merion (11,600t/530ft), which were converted to resemble the 600ft battle-cruisers HMS Queen Mary and Tiger.
In fact, all of the chosen merchant vessels were significantly undersized compared to their dreadnought counterparts, and had a significantly higher freeboard. To increase the draught, the ships had to be ballasted with up to 9,000 tons of concrete and stone. In addition, their mercantile deck profiles had to be substantially altered. The main armament was crudely fashioned from canvas and wood, but the false funnels were reputedly given greater authenticity with the insertion of smoke-generating apparatus. The ‘structural chicanery’ going on at Harland & Wolff was let out of the bag by the New York Times; one dockyard witness quoted as having seen a worker carrying a 10t anchor over his shoulder, and another having fallen clean through a gun turret while painting aloft!
The vessel selected to represent HMS Ajax had the most interesting provenance. She was formerly the German passenger liner Kronprinzessin Cecilie, which had been built for the Hamburg-America Line in 1905. The Kronprinzessin Cecilie had the misfortune to be moored in Falmouth harbour on the day Britain declared war on Germany, and fearing capture at sea, her captain had refused a British order to leave. She was formally seized in March of 1915 and soon after commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMS Princess. At 8,500 tons the former Kronprinzessin Cecilie was a relatively large vessel, but still barely a third of the displacement of the dreadnought she was chosen to impersonate, more than 100ft shorter, and with a beam of only 55ft, more than 30ft narrower. Disguising her required considerable alterations to her superstructure including the addition of a second funnel and the repositioning of masts.
From the outset, the Admiralty struggled to find a role for its new battlefleet. The primary disadvantage, as remarked on by Admiral Jellicoe, was their low speeds, which ranged downwards from 15 to 7 knots; all vastly below the 21 knots that would allow them to keep pace with a real Royal Navy dreadnought. Several ships were sent to the Dardanelles in early 1915 and two, the Michigan (HMS Collingwood) and Oruba (HMS Orion) were later scuttled as blockships at Mudros to improve protection of the strategic port.
The island of Lemnos was also the vicinity in which the Merion (HMS Tiger) was sunk, the only unit of the phantom battlefleet to be lost while in disguise. A former American Line passenger operating between Queenstown and New York, the Merion was hit by a single torpedo by the German submarine UB-8 on 29th May, sinking two days later for the loss of four men. It’s not clear whether the U-boat captain was entirely fooled by her disguise. Had he the luxury of watching her sink through his periscope, he would surely have noticed the way supposedly 100t gun turrets floated on the surface as she slipped under the waves. Merion’s loss capped a bad week for Royal Navy operations in the Dardenelles, two bona fide battleships having been torpedoed and sunk days earlier.
The remainder of the dummy battlefleet were for the most part left moored at Loch Ewe on the west coast of Scotland until July, when it was formally disbanded. Thereafter, the ships were relieved of their camouflage and reassigned to roles they were more naturally suited for. Eight were purchased for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary and refitted as oilers, having cylindrical tanks inserted in their holds. It was in this capacity that HMS Oakleaf, formerly a doppelganger for the Grand Fleet flagship HMS Iron Duke, was sunk without warning by a German U-boat in 1917, thankfully without fatalities. After her stint mimicking HMS St. Vincent, City of London was converted to carry kite balloons; manned devices which could be winched aloft to provide reconnaissance or direct shellfire. After impersonating HMS Indomitable off Gallipoli, the Manipur became a destroyer depot ship. The ersatz Ajax became an AMC equipped with eight 6-inch guns.
The Tyne-built Montcalm had had the distinction of mimicking a battleship already sunk; HMS Audacious had been lost to a mine in the Firth of Forth in October 1914. Returning to service as the oiler RFA Crenella in 1917, she was torpedoed by U-101 while on route from Queenstown to Montreal, but was able with the assistance of an American destroyer to reach port in Ireland. She later served as a whaling depot ship in the Falklands, finally being scrapped in Scotland in 1953 after a career lasting 55 years.
However, it was the Ruthenia, after her brief masquerade as ‘HMS King George V’, which arguably went on to have the most eventful career. She’d been launched as the ‘Lake Champlain’ in Glasgow in 1900, and had previously serviced the transatlantic route from Liverpool to Quebec. After her refit as an oiler, she was sent permanently to the Far East. Laid up in Singapore as an oil fuel jetty and pumping station from 1927 onwards, she was scuttled before the city fell to the Japanese in 1941. Refloated, the Japanese commissioned her as the ‘Choran Maru’ to ferry oil to and from Sumatra. War’s end saw her recaptured at Singapore by the British, who utilised the ship to repatriate thousands of Japanese POWs. She was finally scrapped in 1949 on the Clyde, close to where she’d been launched.
The practice of constructing dummy battleships was briefly revived during World War II. Ironically, it was the old dreadnought HMS Centurion, whose appearance had for a time been copied by the Canadian Pacific steamer Tyrolia, that was refigured to resemble the new battleship HMS Anson. In this disguise, she was due to take part in ‘Operation Vigorous’, a convoy from Haifa to Port Said due to sail in June 1942 but ultimately aborted.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 