It's December 26, 1943,
and the Battle of the North Cape is reaching its final conclusion.
It would be the last capital ship engagement
between Britain and Germany.
For two days, a large force
of british-led ships have been in hot pursuit of the massive
German Battlecruiser 'Scharnhorst,'
after decoding her plans to attack a convoy
on its way to Murmansk.
Leading Force 1 against the Scharnhorst
is the Admiral's flagship HMS Belfast,
a Town Class Light Cruiser.
At the time, she is the largest
and most powerful light cruiser in the history of the British fleet.
She has twelve 6-inch Mark 23 guns,
six 21 inch torpedo tubes,
and a main armor belt of 4.5 inches.
Their prey is a beast of a Battlecruiser.
The Scharnhorst is 150 feet longer than HMS Belfast,
with 3 times the displacement,
guns almost twice as big,
and armor almost 3x as thick.
Naval warfare has changed.
She is one of the last of a dying breed.
... and HMS Belfast and her allies intend to render
this endangered species extinct.
Here we are on HMS Belfast,
one of the last surviving world war II light cruisers
And what a beautiful evening here
on the Thames in London
Quite a change
from what it would've been like in the Battle of the North Cape
Ah, could you imagine: Up there, edge of the world,
all of the decks covered in ice,
making them deadly ice skating rinks.
Over the side, absolutley no change of being rescued.
no, you couldn't do what I'm doing here, for example:
touch bare metal with an ungloved hand,
and well you've lost some skin if not half a digit.
In fact it was so bad, people would come out
and they'd hammer the ice off of the gun turrets to free them up.
However, if you WERE up here
on the decks during the final hours of that battle,
I mean what a sight that must have been to behold.
Imagine you've been chasing this ship through the dark for so long.
All you could see were the muzzle flashes from Scharnhorst's guns,
and all of a sudden a starburst round is fired,
and it illuminates the entire ship in all its glory.
That must have been quite a spectacle.
The belfast and her force eventually cripple
the swift Battlecruiser
and manage to catch up to her
Belfast is running on 4 boilers
and 4 parsons turbines engines,
providing 80,000 horse power
and a top speed of 32 knots
Wow!... Look at the size of this boiler room!
And this is just a quarter of the propulsion system
aboard HMS Belfast
Now, of course, action stations, all of the water-tight
hatches were sealed so that if any of the compartments
were compromised, it wouldn't have the impact
of sinking the entire ship.
...which came in handy in 1941 when Belfast
struck a mine and broke her keel.
But that's of course the engineering side of it.
What about the HUMAN aspect?
I mean if you WERE down here and it WAS compromised,
surely there was absolutley no chance of escape.
Add to that the heat,
and the noise, and if the power went out,
then you were in complete darkness,
and all you get is the vague sounds
of battle being transmitted through the hull.
No... of course there's nothing like the sound of a torpedo
scraping the hull to spur you into action.
HMS Belfast's advantage over the Scharnhorst
is not simply that she has a fully functioning
propulsion system...
Early in the battle, the Scharnhorst's radar
was knocked out as well.
She's now blinded as WELL as hobbled.
Most importantly,
this means that her massive 11-inch guns
have no radar-assisted targetting...
The Scharnhorst is effectively
reduced to firing at muzzle flashes.
Meanwhile, the Belfast's fully functional 6 inch gun director
passes the Scharnhorst's position and bearing to the
transmission station computer,
which feeds necessary gun barrel elevation and training angle
each of the 4 turrets.
This is now truly a battle of David and Goliath
HMS Belfast's turrets are
complex instruments that required
around 50 men to operate
3 of the major components of each turret are the
powder handing room,
the shell room and the gun house
We're now in the powder handing room,
the bottom of Turret B, and this area usually out of bounds
to the general public
As we take one of these powder charges
from the flash-tight doors,
and place them into the hoist.
This is all part of a strict fire containment process
designed to reduce the chance
of a single incoming round
vaporizing the entire ship.
Of course, a valuable lesson of the Battle of Jutland.
Now, as well as Belfast having this upgraded armor,
there's also the flash doors,
which on the other side of there is the Magazine...
to separate the Magazine from this particular room.
Well, as you can see,
the powder charge is now on its way up to the gun house.
We're now one level up in the Shell Room.
Of course this is where the projectiles get placed
into their own hoists, as we're demonstrating now.
And you can see, surrounding us,
we're actually sat in the middle now of a ring of 50 of these 6-inch shells.
That's one heck of a bandolier!
And indeed, there's an additional
550 rounds in this one shell room alone.
And we can see now the round going up....
...each of these individual hoists
at a rate of around about 8 per minute.
The final destination, of course:
the gun house.
We're here now at the final destination,
up in the gun house.
And here we would have found the crew freezing,
dressed in full flash kit,
for the full two days of the battle,
grabbing sleep, of course, when and if they could.
The rum ration probably would have come in handy.
Anyway, the round is delivered
from the hoist down to the loading trays.
That's quite a heavy round,
and because we've got to get it out again, we're moving
to this lighter dummy.
The gun is in the horizontal position for loading.
So what I'm going to do now is open the breach...
And I put the round in tray,
lock it in position.
... i'm then going to push the projectile, or the round,
as far up the barrel as I possibly can with my hand...
... while the bag charge is retrieved from the charge hoist...
and we're then going to do the same with the bag charge
then you ram it... of course this would have
ordinarily been done in 7 seconds
But you did have a much bigger crew than just the two of us.
pull the loading tray out of the way
I'm now going to close the breach,
and make sure it's fully closed, and locked in position
And the final thing, just like in tank gunnery,
Nick, we take our vent tube, introduce it into the
vent tube chamber,
make sure it's fully closed...
...elevate the gun back to firing position, and...
FIRE!
After receiving a final volley
of shells and torpedos,
the flaming Battlecruiser Scharnhorst
brightly lights the frigid northern night sea.
She capsizes,
her propellers still turning in the air,
as she takes almost all of her compliment of 1,960 sailors
down with her.
From HMS Belfast,
Admiral Burnet calls in the final confirmation of kill:
"Satisfied. Scharnhorst Sunk."
Naval combat would never be the same again.
Though the shifting tide of warfare
would carry her through an accomplished career,
her vital role in the Battle of the North Cape
would forever immortalize HMS Belfast
in the annals of naval history.