Great Britain. Portsmouth. The National Museum of the Royal Navy.
Some 50 meters from each other, two ships are berthed.
One of them is the famous flagship of Admiral Nelson—
HMS Victory, a 104-gun first-rate ship of the line,
where each plank is saturated with the essence of British naval glory.
The other is an oddly painted plain steel box
with only two guns on her deck to differentiate her from a tugboat.
This vessel might look like a poor beggar compared to the magnificent tall ship,
but her rivets and steel sheets were home to as much valor and heroism
as her famous neighbor.
You’re looking at M33 which is called a monitor.
And a monitor is a simple and specialized kind of ship.
She’s really designed to do one role—
she’s designed to be a gun platform to carry heavy guns,
to get close to shore and be a coastal bombardment ship.
They designed these ships around the size of guns they had which were spare,
rather than design a ship first and then mount the guns.
The Monitor ship type emerged during the Civil War in the USA.
Did Great Britain—a great naval power—need ships like these?
Of course not.
Since the 17th century, the main mission of the British Navy
was to ensure supremacy in the naval theater of war.
And the tactic concerning the enemy shore
was not to get close to the coastal line,
but rather to destroy the enemy fleet first and then do everything they wanted.
With an approach like this,
there was no place for this type of ship in Great Britain.
As usual, chance decided everything.
In 1913, the Brazilian government placed an order with Vickers
for a range of river monitors.
However, Brazil failed to finance this order
and these monitors became the property of Great Britain.
And this happened on the eve of war;
the war that entered history as World War I.
It gave the monitors an opportunity to demonstrate their excellent qualities.
Sitting low in the water, they were able to get close to the shore
and carry out effective bombardment.
This is really what the ship design is all about.
This is one of two six-inch guns on the ship.
Her whole design is based around a platform for firing these guns.
And she is only built because the Navy had 10 spare six-inch guns.
They weren’t used on the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships,
so they were available here.
And the 10 guns, with two guns per ship,
means you can have five monitors of this class, six-inch gun monitors.
And this is what it’s all about. These are…
You see a lot of fake guns around—these are unique First World War survivors.
A series of monitors, including M33,
was designed to accommodate guns from Queen Elizabeth-class ships.
The project was developed hastily,
that's why the resulting ships had a range of shortcomings.
For example, a deeper draft, caused by errors in calculations
of the ammunition and fuel weight, led to worse sea-going capabilities.
The monitors were overflowed by waves even in a relatively calm sea.
This ship that you see was built in seven weeks,
an incredibly quick construction time.
And that tells you how basic she is, and how little effort went into her.
Specifications of the monitor HMS M33
Length: 54 meters
Beam: 9.4 meters
Draft: almost 2 meters
Displacement: 580 tons
Armament: two Mark XII guns, caliber 152 m
One 57-mm Hotchkiss gun
Two Maxim machine guns, caliber 7.62 mm
If we think about her protection, she has a very thin hull,
there is no armored section around her to protect her from
the kind of 15-inch shell or a 14-inch German shell coming in.
So any shells that hit her would pierce that deck
and would have a pretty devastating effect.
Power plant. Triple-expansion steam engine, power 4,000 hp.
They are very slow. Her top speed was under 10 knots.
If you think about a dreadnaught, you’re looking at 21-22 knots,
if you’re looking at battle cruisers, it’s 27.5 knots.
You’re looking at a light cruiser, it’s nearly 30 knots.
So she is not fast enough to run away.
Maximum speed: 9.6 knots.
Cruising range: 1,440 miles at 8 knots.
The first campaign that she was involved in is the Gallipoli campaign
which is running through 1915.
So that’s out the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey
and a route through to the Turkish capital.
This was a British attempt to knock Turkey,
which was Germany’s ally, out of the war.
Since the beginning of the operation in 1915,
Britain lost quite a few ships trying to traverse the Dardanelles
through minefields and past the line of coastal defenses.
In the summer, multiple troop landings
were carried out at the Gallipoli peninsula,
but the soldiers still needed fire support from powerful naval artillery.
Britain didn't want to risk cruisers and dreadnaughts
attempting to get close to the shore.
As a result, M33 together with other monitors were urgently sent to this region.
Only a week after arriving, she began bombarding Turkish coastal defenses.
Now it’s actually quite difficult on a ship like this
to fire a gun of this size.
You know, you’ll get a light cruiser—of 4,000 tons,
which might be 8-9 times this size,
and that would only have a 6-inch gun on it.
So this is a very big gun for a small ship.
It’s also a ship with a very flat bottom, with no keel.
So when you fire this gun, the recoil and the power coming through the ship
will cause the ship to rock, and there’s nothing to stop it rocking.
So it was quite a difficult job on a ship like this.
One can ask the question—
How efficient were these monitors when they fired at the shore?
The ships were rather small
and they weren't equipped with the latest targeting devices.
They compensated for these shortcomings by getting very close to the shore,
so they could fire directly at the enemy.
Basically, they fired at a point blank range, straddling a target with two guns.
And it provided very powerful psychological support
to all the allied soldiers fighting on land—
English, Australian, New Zealand, French, and others.
If you can imagine standing close to this gun
with a 100-pound shell firing from it,
at about 1,500 meters per second leaving the gun barrel, you get a huge recoil
and you get incredible noise reverberating through the ship.
We know that the seams of the ships, some of the rivets, opened up;
and on all of these monitors, the whole class, underneath these forward guns,
they had to be strengthened to take those forces more.
We’re actually standing on top of the mess deck,
so all of the men’s hammocks, tables, everything is down below.
So you would not want to be below when the gun was firing.
We’re standing on the forward mess deck.
It’s actually the one mess deck on the ship for the crew.
So it’s a very tight, low-ceiling box effectively.
This is a space that 46 men would’ve slept in.
So over in the night time watches the hammocks would be up.
In the daytime, they have to take them down, roll them up, stow them away.
They also ate here on the mess deck,
so they were sleeping and eating all in the same space.
I don’t know if you saw up on deck, there’s no wooden decking,
there’s no insulation, it’s just a bare metal deck.
It was so hot and uncomfortable in here,
often the men would not sleep down here.
They would set canopies up on the upper deck,
an awning—just to create some shade.
And at nighttime, they would sleep on the open decks,
just to get a bit of a breeze
and a bit of a lowering of temperature when they were there.
No privacy; so being able to get on with people and not fall out
would be at a premium in a place like this.
Officers had separate cabins with a bed, desk, and other facilities.
The ship's captain had two cabins at once—
one for working during the daytime, the other for sleeping at night.
Of course, they're not what you'd call luxurious.
But from the point of view of the crew huddled together on the mess deck,
the officers’ quarters located on the upper deck in the aft
were as close to luxury as possible.
There was a distance between the men down here and the officers aft,
there was a lot of effort put into actually giving the men good time off,
appropriate leave, activities, chances to go swimming,
chances to do boxing, play football when they got ashore, and so on.
One point about a small ship like this:
people often say “a small ship is a happy ship,”
because you have closer contact,
less strict discipline just to make that ship work day to day.
And we’ve got to remember these men were on board for over three years.
They go out to Gallipoli in 1915—
they don’t come home until the end of the war.
So it’s… You know, they are away from home for about 3.5 years.
Once World War I was over, monitor M33 set a course for Russia.
At that time, Britain was providing support
to the White Forces in the Civil War against the Bolsheviks.
An international contingent of troops acted in northern Russia
and a squadron of monitors, which included M33, was to reinforce them.
The ship undertook a long cruise around Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula
and, in May 1919, she arrived in the basin of the Northern Dvina river.
Although these ships didn't have much importance near Gallipoli or Belgium,
here, on rivers, they became the main ship type.
The peculiarity of combat in river theaters of war
lies in the fact that a river is like a street of sorts.
It's impossible to pass clear of each other. If you tried to do this,
it would end either in a head-on collision or a boarding attack—
and no one wanted that.
It’s in exactly these conditions that the British monitors
proved their supremacy in terms of maneuverability, artillery, and so on.
And the battles were very fierce there,
they fought basically at point blank range.
From May, 1919, to September, so about four months,
she’s actually hit, damaged five times in that action.
She takes five hits to her hull.
So, the wardroom, where the officers eat, a shell goes in through that,
a shell goes through the side of the ship (you can still see the hole internally),
breaks through and goes down into the engine room,
it doesn’t explode (if it’d exploded, the ship would’ve sunk).
For her final passage down the river to get back to the sea,
they’ve got to get over some rapids,
they actually had to lighten the ship to lessen her draft,
so she could go into less and less water.
So, they take both of her guns off, they take the 6-inch guns off.
Those were carried overland, because that’s where a lot of the weight is.
They make up some dummy guns using tree trunks and barrels,
and packing crates, and they paint them up.
They were actually going down defenseless, really.
Other than these little machine-guns,
just to get themselves back over the rapids.
And on the passage over the rapids, one of the other monitors, M25,
runs aground, they can’t get her off, and she’s scuttled,
she is deliberately sunk by the Royal Navy before they get back,
and we know that she ran aground and was scraping on the bottom.
And if they hadn’t taken her guns off,
she probably wouldn’t be here today to look at.
After World War I, HMS M33 was transferred to the reserve;
her guns were removed, the engine dismantled—
in essence, the monitor was turned into a barge.
So she is moored in the harbor here for many, many years until 1984.
So 32 years ago, when the Navy finally decided they are going to sell her again.
That’s the point at which people say,
“Hang on. We don’t have many ships, which had a First World War
or Russian Civil War service.
We should think about saving and restoring her.”
The restoration efforts took about 30 years to complete.
Thanks to laborious work, a community of enthusiasts
managed to preserve a unique ship from the World War I era
and an entire chapter of naval history together with her.