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Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies from 1833 to 1954, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger 

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Warship Wednesday 8 July 2026: Bringer of Evil to the Evil

Above we see the patched-up Queen Elizabeth-class 15-inch “super-dreadnought” HMS Malaya (01) sailing past New York City after a much-needed refit at Brooklyn Navy Yard on the U.S. dime, on 9 July 1941, some 85 years ago this week. Note the Empire State Building in the distance

The Jutland veteran was a child of WWI and had already seen much hard WWII service in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, but more work would be required of the aging battlewagon before she could rest.

The QEs

Entire books have been written about the Queen Elizabeth class battleships, and by much better historians than I, so we’ll just give the kind of 10,000-foot view here before moving on to Malaya, who is about the most often forgotten of her breed.

The 1912 Naval Programme planned for three new battleships, originally intended to be improved HMS Iron Duke type (25,000 tons light, 623 feet oal, 21.5kts on a 29,000shp coal-fired plant, ten 13.5″/45 guns in five twin turrets, and up to 12 inches of armor).

The problem was, with word that both the Americans and Japanese were planning battleships with larger guns (USS New York with ten 14″/45s and Kongo with eight 14″/45 Vickers), gears shifted to design new ships around a battery of 15-inch guns, while adding a bit more speed.

The resulting Queen Elizabeth class ships were a bit bigger, of course, (27,500 tons light and 645 feet oal) were fast for their day (23 knots on a 56,000shp oil-fired plant), well-armored with as much as 13-inches of good Krupp Cemented armor in their belt, tower, and turrets; and packed a punch from eight massive new BL 15 inch (381mm) Mk I naval guns in four twin turrets.

The 15″/42 Mk I, described by Navweaps as “quite possibly the best large-caliber naval gun ever developed by Britain and it was certainly one of the longest-lived of any nation, with the first shipboard firing taking place in 1915 and the last in 1954,” was a bruiser capable of firing a 1-ton shell out to 19,700 (later 32,000) yards, enabling them to outrange most German naval guns of the era. Plus, they proved even more accurate than the 13.5-inch Mk. V guns on Iron Duke.

Some 184 of these 15-inchers were made by Armstrong Whitworth, W Beardmore, Vickers, Royal Gun Factory, and Coventry Ordnance Works, serving on numerous subsequent British battleship (Royal Sovereign and Vanguard classes), battlecruiser (Glorious, Repulse, and Hood/Admiral classes), and monitor (Marshal Soult, Erebus, and Roberts classes) designs.

The guns were rotated between the 58 turrets built to accept them across ships of six classes, having a life of about 200 rounds before requiring relining, with the example that one gun which served on HMS Valiant during Jutland later wound up being captured by the Japanese at Singapore where it was serving as shore-mounted coastal artillery.

Each QE-class battleship had space for 800 15-inch shells, 100 per gun.

When it came to fire control, they were built with five 15-foot Barr & Stroud FT type tripod-mounted rangefinders (one in each turret and one in the Gunnery Control Tower), along with three 9-foot RFs in the foretop and Turret Control Tower. While all of this was linked by phone, there were also Evershed bearing indicators which could transmit to each main turret from the GCT along with Barr & Stroud Mark III single range transmitters and receivers. Each ship carried a central Mark IV Dreyer Table while each turret had a Dreyer Turret Control Table. This was not your father’s dreadnought, and most of this gear was installed for the first time on a battleship with the QEs.

The secondary battery was made up of 16 (later 14) 6″/45 Mk XIIs in casemates, while a handful of smaller guns (two 3″/45 QF Mk I, and four 47mm Hotchkiss 3-pounders) gave a thin veneer of theoretical defense against zeppelins and torpedo boats. Four 21-inch torpedo tubes were mounted on the beam, with a magazine able to carry 20 fish, typically Mark IVs during the Great War.

Designed to take damage and keep fighting, they had 26 watertight bulkheads with up to 6 inches of armor, a 13-inch lower belt, 11 inches on the gunhouses and conning tower, and even armored funnel tops to help prevent light aerial bombs from dropping down the stacks into the fire room. Jane’s noted in 1921, “Internal protection on these ships is very fine.”

The first British battlewagons with an “All-Oil” suite, these ships had a lot of power under the hood, nearly twice as much as the Iron Dukes that preceded them by just a couple of years. While Iron Duke had 18 boilers and four Parsons steam turbines using a mix of both coal and oil to generate 29,000 shp for 21 knots, Queen Elizabeth and her class added a third more boilers (24), efficiently burning all-oil, and four turbines to produce 56,000 shp for 23 knots. With forced draft and the boilers overloaded, they could hit 24-25 knots for brief periods of time. For example, on her two-hour full power speed trials in late 1915, Malaya clocked 25 knots but had to generate 76,074shp to do it! Further, the high speed could be maintained longer than on coal-burning ships due to the fact they didn’t have to fight against ash accumulation and stoker fatigue, something that later became an issue with the Germans at Jutland as the battle wore on.

Another big advantage the class had over every coal-burner was that the lack of heavy coal smoke, especially in high speed operations, made them a better gunnery platform simply because the spotters and fire control setters could actually see what was going on around them.

Jane’s 1914 entry for the Queen Elizabeth class battleships, featuring a very clean line drawing:

While it was envisioned from the start that the ships of this class would form their own dedicated “fast division” in the battleline, in the interest of peacetime detached service, all were set up to accommodate an admiral and staff, with QE, Barham, and Warspite later having a stern walk/smoking deck installed, accessed from the admiral’s cabin.

All in all, especally in Britain, these 25-knot/15-inch gunned vessels were considered quite commanding when built and would maintain their “Rex Montis” status even after other RN battleship classes followed on, with the later Royal Sovereign/Revenge class being basically a slower (21 knots on 18 boilers) and cheaper version of the QEs, the 1920s Nelson “Treaty” class twins likewise still being slower (23 knots) although arguably better armed with nine all-forward 16″/45s, and even the much faster (28 knot) King George V class ships of the late 1930s only carrying 14″/45s, albeit with the latter having a markedly better armor scheme.

Jane’s noted in their 1921 edition:

“In appearance and general design, these five ships are the finest in the British Navy. Their decks are remarkably clear, and internal arrangements are very spacious. Taken all around, they present the most successful type of capital ship yet designed.”

Each vessel was constructed at a different yard, with class leader Queen Elizabeth built at Portsmouth Dockyard, Warspite at Devon Dockyard, Barham at John Brown (Clydebank), Valiant at Fairfield (Govan) and Malaya at Armstrong. This allowed them to be built more or less simultaneously, laid down within 364 days between October 1912 and October 1913, and all commissioned between January 1915 and February 1916, a remarkable achievement for any era. Could you imagine designing, ordering, building, and delivering five of the best capital ships in the world at the time in just under five years?

The first four were paid for under the 1912 Estimates while the fifth, Malaya, was a gift. In all, the Admiralty put down just over £15 million for the class, or £1.4 billion in today’s equivalent, which is still a bit of a bargain.

A sixth unit, Agincourt, was ordered under the 1914 Programme but as she had not been laid down the order was cancelled shortly after the outbreak of war.

Meet HMS Malaya

Our subject was the first of HM’s warships named after the Malay states of Selangor, Perak, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang, which had been first colonized by the British in 1826 and were British protectorates, organized as the Federated Malay States in 1895.

She was fully funded at significant cost (£2,945,709) by the FMS Council and flew the states’ distinctive white-red-yellow-and black striped tiger flag in a four-triangle naval ensign, sans cat, from her bow on special occasions.

The Jack was basically a British P&O Lines House Flag with blue and red swapped and the former replaced with black.

The ship received a set of silk flags presented by the European Ladies of the Federated States; a 30-foot White Ensign, a 15-foot Union Jack, a 15-foot Malayan Jack, and two miniature Malayan Jacks for the ship’s chapel.

The tiger, however, was carried over to the ship’s crest, complete with a fearsome Malay Keris Sundang (kris) sword.

In a similar vein, there had been a short-lived plan for Canada by its Prime Minister Borden (in consultation with First Sea Lord Winston Churchill) to pay some $35 million for three additional Queen Elizabeth-class vessels, to be named HMCS Acadia, Ontario, and Quebec, but that didn’t materialize, and Canada never did get a proper battleship of its own.

Malaya was the only member of her five-ship class constructed at Armstrong Whitworth, South Tyneside, laid down as Yard No. 867 on 20 October 1913. She hit the water, eight months after the Great War began, on 18 March 1915. Outfitted and delivered, she commissioned on 1 February 1916, the last member of her class to enter service.

When she entered the fleet, she carried pennant No. 3A (her sisters were all wildly different, in RN fashion, carrying 10, 57, 97, and 34, respectively).

Malaya’s first skipper was 45-year-old Capt. Algernon D.E.H. Boyle, RN, a regular with a reputation for being a naval marksman who earned the Goodenough Medal in 1891 for his top gunnery marks as a cadet and 21 years later became the Captain of the Devonport Gunnery School. Before moving into the unfinished captain’s cabin of Malaya in November 1915, Boyle had a full career, shipping out on HMS Royal Sovereign, Indefatigable, and Dreadnought, then commanding the old battlewagon HMS Hibernia and the cruisers HMS Edgar, Cumberland, and Bacchante.

Jutland

Commissioned just 120 days before the great naval clash at Jutland/Skagerrak, our subject was one of the youngest capital ships of either side, only beaten by the ill-fated German battlecruiser SMS Lutzow, which had only commissioned on 20 March 1916.

Of the 29 British battlewagons at the engagement, Malaya and three of her four sisters (Queen Elizabeth was undergoing maintenance in dry dock) were clustered together in the 5th Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet under the command of RADM Hugh Evan-Thomas, whose flag was on Barham.

The 5th took part in the initial “Run to the South,” coming up just behind VADM David Beatty’s battlecruisers. Sailing into the maelstrom that Beatty found himself in, they punished the advancing High Sea Fleet’s own battlecruisers of Von Hipper’s Scouting Group, being sandwiched between two German battle lines as they provided cover for Beatty’s “Turn to the North.”

In all, 5BS came into action against the German battlecruisers at 16.08 and fired their last shots at 19.30.

The four sisters delivered an estimated 24 hits on the German battlecruisers SMS Lutzow and Seydlitz. Lutzow, already damaged from hits from HMS Lion and Princess Royal, eventually sank, a bit of quick payback for the punishment she helped deliver to the battlecruiser HMS Invincible and armored cruiser HMS Defence at the start of the battle. Seydlitz, a famous “shell magnet,” somehow limped back home with 5,300 tons of seawater onboard and her topside wrecked.

Of the 1,355 shells fired by 5BS at Jutland, Malaya fired the most (421), with flagship Barham firing 335, Warspite 311, and Valiant 288. In fact, Malaya was only bested by the battlecruiser HMS New Zealand, which fired 430 shells. Of note, the 1,355 rounds fired by the 5BS are nearly a third of the 4,354 shells fired by the entire Grand Fleet, while its four battleships made up only about an eighth of the capital ships in the British line.

The four sisters also showed they could take massive punishment and keep fighting, with Warspite suffering 30 casualties from 15 direct hits from German 11- and 12-inch shells, with one jamming her steering gear and leaving her in a “death circle” long enough for a struggling cruiser, HMS Warrior, to escape. Barham took six large caliber hits which caused over 70 casualties. Our Malaya, the last ship in 5BS’s battle line, suffered eight 12-inch hits, which left her with a 4-degree list from a waterline hit, along with 65 killed and 68 wounded–  the worst butcher’s bill of any surviving British battleship in the battle.

The fact that Malaya wasn’t hit more during the escape from the High Seas Fleet is likely due to a subterfuge by quick-thinking Captain Boyle, who ordered his starboard secondary battery of 6-inch guns to fire deliberately well short into the sea to throw up a wall of waterspouts to confuse the German spotters as to their shot fall and range. The battery, however, had 104 of its 121 men killed or wounded when the final German 15-inch shell hit it square, causing fierce cordite fire.

The rest of Malaya’s Great War

Immediately after the battle, the 5BS was in bad shape, with Warspite sent for repairs in No. 1 dry dock at Rosyth, Barham sent for repairs at Devonport, and Malaya repaired in the floating dock at Invergordon.

Only Valiant did not require any extensive repairs and, in fact, emerged remarkably unscathed, a lucky ship indeed!

Malaya would remain in Invergordon for eight weeks to patch up her damage.

Rejoining the Grand Fleet, the freshly-repaired Malaya sortied again on 18 August to meet the Germans and intercept the High Seas Fleet on the way to raid the port of Sunderland, courtesy of Room 40 signals intelligence. However, Scheer had the benefit of a U-boat screen and two zeppelins, so the two battle lines never got to within 50 miles of each other before he turned back home on the 20th. The guns remained quiet, with the only blows delivered between the two fleets being from submarine torpedoes.

With that, our battleship spent the next two years in a cycle of limited patrol work as the High Seas Fleet became stationary. Malaya had some modernizations during this period, as did her sisters, to include the addition of another inch of plating over magazines on their lower and middle deck levels, removing two of the 6″/45 open mounts, and adding two additional 3″/46 Mk 1 guns to increase anti-air defense.

Speaking of aircraft, it was at about this time that the class was fitted with short (20-30 foot) flying-off platforms constructed atop turrets “B” & “X” to be used for little Sopwith Scout (Pup) single-seaters or two-seat Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutters.

These aircraft were micro-sized scout fighters, running just 19 (Pup) to 25 (Strutter) feet long and had a max take-off weight of 2,100 pounds (just 1,200 for the Pup), making them basically a step up from powered kites. They had teeth in the form of .303 caliber machine guns, and vetted the flying-off theory, with a Pup flown from a platform on the cruiser HMS Yarmouth downing the German Zeppelin L 23 off the Danish coast in 1917.

 

She met the Germans one more time in the war: when the Grand Fleet stood by to escort the 74 ships of the HSF to internment at Scapa Flow in late November 1918.  By that time, she was carrying pennant 06, after briefly carrying 84 for the first three months of the year. She would shift to her final pennant, 01, in November 1919.

By then, it was a totally different world.

Interbellum

In February 1920, Malaya carried the Allied Peace Commission from England to Germany to enforce the peace treaty, part of a series of ancillary tasks performed over the next two decades by the battleship, punctuated by refits and rebuilds.

Jane’s for the class, circa 1921:

In November 1922, she was tapped to carry the disgraced last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed VI, from Istanbul into exile on Malta after the 600-year Sultanate was abolished by the new Turkish republic.

Mehmed only remained on Malta a few months, living in an apartment in the Pini Barracks, before leaving for Arabia as a guest of King Hussein (yes, the same guy who led the revolt against the Sultan in 1916) and finally dying in Italy in 1926.

Between September 1927 and February 1929, Malaya was in the shipyard as part of an 18-month modernization. This saw massive anti-torpedo bulges fitted bulges were fitted which increased her beam from 90 feet to 104. These added 815 tons to the ship but were thought to be able to resist a direct hit from a 700-pound warhead.

Her engineering suite was rebuilt with her two funnels trunked into one. Gone were her flying off platforms, two torpedo tubes, and her 3″/45s, replaced by four newer 4″/45 QF Mk Vs. By this time, her displacement had increased to 30,000 tons but, with the upgraded plant, was still capable of 23.5 knots. Her four sisters received similar conversions between 1924 and 1934, for £1 million per hull.

Jane’s on the class, circa 1929:

Placed in ordinary once again from October 1934 to December 1936, Malaya’s second major reconstruction saw her receive extra main deck armor over her engine rooms (3.25 inches) and magazines (5 inches) to help protect against more modern bombs. Her old conning tower was replaced with a lighter one with just 5 inches of armor (down from 11) to help trim topside weight. She landed her 4″/45s that were mounted in the 1920s as well as her final two torpedo tubes. She then picked up four new 4″/45 QF Mk XVIs, two octuple 40mm 2-pounder Vickers pom-pom mounts, and four .50 cal Vickers Mk III quads.

Meanwhile, an athwartship D-II-H catapult was fitted before the main mast with hangar space established for up to four seaplanes, putting her back in the aviation business for the first time in more than a decade. She carried Fairey IIIFs for a minute then switched to Fairey Swordfish I “Stringbag” floatplanes operated by 700 Squadron, Fleet Air Arm. Such “Catapult Flight” detachments, depending on how many aircraft they had, would typically have 2-4 flying officers/observers and 8-12 maintenance ratings.

With a 75,000 shp plant due to a new six-pack of Admiralty 3-drum boilers and new turbines, she was rated for 25 knots even though her displacement had swelled to 35,100 tons, full.

By the late 1930s, Malaya and sister Barham had lagged behind sisters Queen Elizabeth, Warspite, and Valiant in terms of upgrades. While the latter three sported a new profile from a more extensive 1930s £2.1 million rebuild (as opposed to Malaya and Barham’s more miserly £976,000 refit), the others still looked mostly the same.

Importantly, the ships which got the more expensive refit saw their gun houses tweaked to be able to elevate their barrels to 30 degrees (from the old 20), which, when combined with a new streamlined ballistic cap (6crh) on their shells, pushed the range of their 15″/42s out to an amazing 32,000 yards. Malaya and Barham never got that elevation upgrade, though they did get a slight range boost to 23,700 yards when using the new 6crh capped shells.

Jane’s even considered the two as separate from the rest of the class, as noted by their entry.

The U.S. Navy did the same, as shown in ONI 202.

As the Arab revolt engulfed British-controlled Palestine, Malaya was sent to Haifa in August–September 1938 to wave the flag and try to impress the locals.

She also clocked in on the Spanish Civil War Neutrality Patrol, policing the coastlines controlled by Franco’s Nationalists, which included the peripheries of Gibraltar.

Another War

When the Germans marched into Poland in September 1939, Malaya was deployed with the Mediterranean Fleet at Alexandria as part of the 1st Battle Squadron with her sisters Warspite and Barham.

Joining with the carrier HMS Glorious, the squadron, along with a cruiser-destroyer screen, sailed through the Suez to conduct anti-raider sweeps of the Indian Ocean throughout October and November, with the group later designated Force J.

It was in this period roaming from Aden to Durban and back that Malaya and company was on the fruitless prowl for the pocket battleship Graf Spee in mid-November when the raider sank the small British tanker Africa Shell (706 GRT) off the eastern coastline of Mozambique and stopped the Dutch merchant Mapia.

With Graf Spee confirmed in the South Atlantic (and duly run to ground in mid-December), Malaya got orders to head to the North Atlantic for convoy duty.

By 24 December 1939 she was in Gibraltar and arrived at Halifax on 2 January 1940. Two weeks later, Malaya sailed with her first of three nearly back-to-back trans-Atlantic convoys, HX 016, later covering HX 026 and HX 032 by mid-April. Notably, while on HX 026, Malaya had to sink one of her merchantmen, the British steamer Rossington Court (6922 GRT), after the latter suffered a crippling collision and had to be abandoned.

One of those return trips from the Clyde to Halifax saw Malaya secretly carrying a load of gold bullion for transfer to Canada for safekeeping, part of Operation Fish.

Separated from HX 032 at Plymouth on 14 April 1940, Malaya got orders to rejoin the unit she had started the war with, the 1BS, reinforcing the Med for the expected entry of Italy into the war. She duly arrived in Alexandria on 3 May.

By early July, she was part of Force C, centered around the carrier HMS Eagle, joined by the battleship HMS Royal Sovereign, and a squadron of destroyers.

Sailing on Operation MA 5, the escort of Convoy MS 1, they met the Italian fleet at sea on the 9th in what is remembered as the Battle of Calabria (Punta Stilo). The swirling surface gun battle was conducted at long range with few hits on either side, with Malaya’s 15 inchers maxing out and falling 2,700 yards short of the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare while sister Warspite, steaming alongside Malaya and carrying improved 30 degree elevation gun houses giving her longer range, was straddled at 26,000 yards by the Italians and in turn made a hit on Cesare from that distance– one of the longest documented gun hits on record in naval combat.

Malaya then helped provide escort for the Aegean convoys AN 2 and AS 2, the bombardment of Italian positions around the fortress of Bardia on 17 August, and Operation Hats (convoys MF 2 from Alexandria to Malta and AS 3 from Piraeus to Port Said).

Then came more convoy support and Operation BN (the first British landings on Crete), with Malaya at the time the 1BS flagship of RADM Rawlings.

Malaya started 1941 in Gibraltar, then sailed on 7 January part of Force H with the battlecruiser HMS Renown and the carrier HMS Ark Royal to cover the passage of additional convoys to Malta and Piraeus. Encountering fierce attacks from Italian SM79s, Force H had to return to The Rock four days later.

Plastering Genoa

On 9 February 1941, Malaya was part of Force H during Operations Picket, Result, and Grog, and bombarded Genoa. The Brits lost a single aircraft that day (one of Ark Royal’s Swords) but sank four cargo ships and damaged 18 more. During the engagement, Malaya fired 148 rounds of 15-inch CPC, besting HMS Renown’s 125 rounds. The cruiser HMS Sheffield fired 782 rounds of 6-inch HE. As for Ark Royal, her 13 Swords were busy, loaded to the gills with 250-pound bombs and incendiaries.

A salvo from Malaya landed just 50 yards short of the Italian battleship Duilio, at the time undergoing repairs in dry dock north of Molo Giano (Giano Pier). Another of her 15-inch AP shells hit the historic Cathedral of San Lorenzo (Duomo di Genova) but failed to detonate, miraculously coming to rest in the sanctuary between the confessional booths.

Scaring off Scharnhorst and Gneisenau

On 17 February 1941, Malaya left Gibraltar headed to Freetown as part of the escort for Convoy WS6A, arriving 2,000 miles away in Sierra Leone at the end of the month without much delay.

While escorting the 54 merchant ships of Convoy SL 67 from Freetown to Liverpool in March 1941, Malaya was the big-gunned escort flagship and only assisted by the destroyers HMS Faulknor and Forester, the armed merchant cruiser HMS Cilicia, corvette Asphodel, the armed trawlers HMS Kelt, Spaniard, and Turcoman.

On the afternoon of 8 March, Malaya’s embarked Swordfish floatplanes briefly sighted the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau steaming towards the convoy– tough work for a slow battleship and a couple of tin cans. Commanded by RADM Gunther Lütjens, the two were six weeks into their Operation Berlin anti-shipping sortie.

Following the report of the sighting, Malaya and the two destroyers left the convoy to chase and engage the enemy. After three hours of closing to gun range, the German battlecruisers turned away and applied their greater speed, apparently not wanting to duke it out with Malaya’s 15-inch guns although their own 11″/54 SK C/34s were capable of 40,000 yards, outranging the lone English capital ship which was able to come to within 26,000 yards of Scharnhorst before they turned.

Pity, as it surely would have been a good fight pitting speed vs muscle with Faulknor and Forester as wild cards.

Lutjens then sent in his supporting submarines, U-105 and U-124, to zap Malaya that night so he could revisit SL 67 but, while the two boats sank five merchantmen in the darkness, they somehow failed to locate the giant British battleship in their midst. Lutjens turned back out into the Atlantic in search of easier prey.

As a sidenote, Swordfish P4073 of 700 squadron from Malaya ran out of fuel whilst shadowing Scharnhorst on 8 March 1941. The floating aircraft and crew were recovered by the Spanish liner Cabo de Buena Esperanza off the Canary Islands and interned, with P4073 entering service with the Spanish as HR6-1 of 54 Escuadrilla out of Tenerife for the rest of the war. The crew was later repatriated to Britain in 1942, and the Spanish bought P4073 for 1,200,000 pesetas.

Headed to the Big Apple

Although she managed to escape Lutjens’ two U-boats, Malaya’s luck ran out two weeks later when, while escorting SL-68 some 250 miles west-northwest of the Cape Verde Islands on the night of 20 March 1941, the battleship was hit by a torpedo fired at long range by U-106 (Jürgen Oesten). Suffering no casualties but developing a 7-degree list and shedding speed, Malaya was still afloat and functional but was forced to leave her convoy behind and make for the closest friendly port in Trinidad, making Port of Spain three days later.

From there, she left Trinidad after temporary repairs and made it to the Brooklyn Navy Yard on 6 April, where she became the first British ship repaired in a U.S. yard during the war (keep in mind America was still eight months out from Pearl Harbor and officially neutral.

It was while in Brooklyn that her skipper at the time, Capt. (later ADM Sir) Arthur F.E. Palliser, accepted the transfer of four decommissioned 250-foot Lake class cutters (ex-USCGC Saranac, Mendota, Tahoe, and Pontchartrain) on 30 April 1941 as part of the “Destroyers for Bases” deal. These would become the sloops HMS Banff, Culver, Fishguard, and Hartland, with their new crews provided from among Malaya’s complement. Two of these four cutters-turned-sloops would be sunk by the end of 1942.

An incredible series of RN images were snapped as the repaired Malaya sortied out of the Big Apple, headed back to war in July.

From New York, she sailed for Halifax to join Convoy TC 12 as an escort for four large 20,000-ton troopships (Duchess of York, Empress of Canada, Orion, and Strathmore).

Arriving back in the Home Isles for the first time since April 1940, Malaya arrived in the Clyde on 28 July 1941. Once back home, she received a whole array of new sensors including Type 281 air warning radar and Types 282, 284, and 285 fire control radars along with another 11 20mm Oerlikon singles in place of her four quad .50 cal Vickers.

Back to the Med

On 27 October 1941, Malaya arrived at Gibraltar to join Force H where she became VADM Somerville’s flagship.

Within two weeks, she was sailing East as part of Operation Perpetual, carrying aircraft through the Axis gauntlet to Malta aboard the carriers Ark Royal and Argus. While they were able to get close enough to Malta to launch 37 Hurricanes to reinforce the island, on the return voyage, Ark Royal was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sank, a costly trade.

On 19 December, Malaya became the only operational Allied battleship in the Mediterranean as sisters Queen Elizabeth and Valiant were knocked out by Italian frogmen in Alexandria. Valiant was knocked out of action for about 6 months (until August 1942), while Queen Elizabeth was off-line for over two years, returning to service in January 1944. Warspite, damaged by German bombs, had left the theater in June 1941, headed to the U.S. for repairs at Bremerton, then would spend 1942 in the Indian Ocean. Tragically, sister Barham had been torpedoed and sunk by U-331 off the Egyptian coast in November 1941.

Nonetheless, Malaya wasn’t kept preserved in a bottle. There was work to be done, including escorting vital troopship convoys (WS 16 and WS 17A) past Gibraltar, getting Spitfires to Malta (Operation Spotter in February 1942, Operations Spotter II, Picket I and Picket II in March), and the epic Harpoon (MW4) Convoy in June during which only two of the six supply ships made it to Malta. Harpoon saw repeated attacks by 175 land-based Italian aircraft, augmented by German Ju-88s, but still managed to get 15,000 tons of desperately needed supplies to the besieged island.

Light duty

Given a break and temporarily leaving no British battleships in the Med for the first time in over 40 years, Malaya was sent from Gibraltar on 24 June to join the escort for slow Capetown/Durban-bound Convoy WS 20. She then escorted Convoy RT 1 from South Africa to Freetown on the return leg.

Arriving at Rosyth on 8 October, Malaya, showing her age and mechanical deficiencies, entered refit which lasted until late November. Her catapult and seaplane equipment were removed, and she received two twin 4″/50 Mark XVIs, two more 40mm octuple Vickers pom poms, and  Type 273 radar.

She also sported a Western Approaches style camo scheme by this time in her career.

Then came work ups, trials, and exercises in the Firth of Forth and off Scapa Flow that continued for the next year with a few noted breaks to include clocking in briefly on a series of passing convoys (WS 27 and KMF 10A) and sailing with mixed RN/USN task groups in the Atlantic (including the battleships USS Alabama and South Dakota in May 1943 followed by the carrier USS Ranger and cruiser Tuscaloosa that August 1943).

Testbed

While at Plymouth on 15 October 1943, the battleships Malaya and Valiant exchanged crews, with the latter battleship headed to join the Eastern Fleet in Ceylon to fight against the Japanese. Meanwhile, Malaya was paid off to reserve at Faslane because of her overall poor machinery state.

She was just worn out.

They made some improvements, landing all 12 of her old 6″/45s, which included removing her casemate armor and plating over the empty ports with two-inch plates. Also gone were her Type 273 and 281 radars, replaced with newer Type 277SQ and 281Bs, along with a Type 650 countermeasures suite.

By this stage in the war, she still had her 15″/42s, which, with new maximum load Super Charges that traded gun life for range, were able to fire out to 28,800 yards when using 6crh shells, even with just a 20-degree elevation. She also had 12 4″/45 Mk XIXs, four octuple 40mm Vickers pom poms, and 47 Oerlikons along with Type 281B, 282, 284, and 285 fire controls. In this final form, she had a full load displacement of 37,710 tons but struggled to break 20 knots.

Between 15 and 17 May 1944, Malaya was used as a testbed for a device intended to kill the dreaded German battleship Tirpitz as she hid in her Norwegian fjord.

A 10-minute video exists in the IWM of Malaya acting as a target ship at Loch Striven and Reculver, Scotland, for RAF De Havilland Mosquitos, Vickers Wellingtons, and SBD testing inert experimental Highball “Bouncing Bomb” cases designed by Barnes Wallis. She was swathed in splinter nets and hydrosphere booms so as to prevent damage, although at least two punched a hole in the ship’s side.

While Barnes developed a production 1,200-pound Highball war-shot bomb for Tirpitz with data from the tests on Malaya, they weren’t needed as the German had been capsized by dozens of his 12,000-pound Tallboy earthquake bombs in three raids (Paravane, Obviate, and Catechism) between September and November 1944.

By that time, the abused Malaya was already back in action.

Last Hurrah

For Overlord/Neptune, a total of seven British and American battleships delivered naval gunfire support at Normandy. Of these, five directly participated in the bombardment on D-Day, while the other two remained in reserve and would join the bombardment force later in June. Three were American (USS Arkansas, Texas, and Nevada), while four, including the two that joined later, were British (HMS Ramillies, Warspite, and the sister ships Nelson and Rodney). Additionally, the decommissioned old French Courbet and British HMS Centurion were towed in just after the landings and used as immobile breakwaters/AAA batteries.

Malaya missed out on the first few weeks of the Normandy landings but, in the event the primary battlewagons were forced to retire due to issues or damage, our very worn-out Malaya was recommissioned on 22 June (D+16) and took passage to Portsmouth to make ready to join the gunline, just in case, as a reserve for the reserve. As it happened, with Warspite developing machinery defects and Nelson hitting two sea mines in the campaign, Malaya got the call.

It was in this effort that she fired her final shots in anger,  delivering some 120 15-inch rounds between 30 August and 2 September 1944 against the heavily fortified German garrison on the island of Cezembre near Saint-Malo. Malaya reported having obtained hits on both battery positions and on the barracks. The 12,000 surviving Germans on the island, a mix of “ear and stomach” men and turncoat Russians stiffened by a couple of battalions of Fallschirmjägers, surrendered to troops of the U.S. 83rd Infantry Division on 2 September.

In October 1944, with the campaign moving inland for the final act of the European Theatre and her usefulness in the Pacific in doubt, Malaya was once more paid off into Reserve at Faslane, where she would remain until after VE Day, when she was converted to an unarmed accommodation and training ship for continued use at Portsmouth for Torpedo School duties.

By the end of the war, she carried six battle honors: Jutland 1916 – Atlantic 1940-41 – Calabria 1940 – Mediterranean 1940-41 – Malta Convoys 1941-42 – English Channel 1944.

Between 28 November 1915 and May 1945, she had 29 captains. Of these, six would become full admirals, another seven would be vice admirals, and five would be rear admirals. Among these would be her first skipper and Jutland commander, the future Admiral Sir Algernon Douglas Edward Harry Boyle, K.C.B., C.M.G., M.V.O., who retired in 1924 after a stint as Fourth Sea Lord.

Her motto was Malem Fero Malis (“I bring evil to the evil”).

The old girl was placed on the Disposal List in 1947 and sold to BISCO the next year for breaking at Faslane. None of her remaining sisters remained out of the scrap yard past 1950.

Epilogue

Our subject was the only ship to carry the name of the British territory, with Malaysia gaining its independence in 1957. It is still a Commonwealth nation, and HMS Malaya’s contributions are well remembered, with several relics of the battleship held in reverence.

Her main ship’s bell is in the elite East India Club in London, while her Second Watch bell was given to the Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur to replace the school’s original bell, which was lost during the Japanese occupation.

In 2007, the school presented this bell to the Royal Malaysian Navy, and it is on display at the National Hydrography Centre, Pulau Indah Naval Base, in Selangor.

Several preserved 15-inch Mark I naval guns survive, leaving a chance that at least one of them may have cycled through Malaya’s gun houses over her career.

A replica of her unexploded 15-inch shell that hit the Cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa during Operation Grog in 1941 is maintained in the church’s sanctuary.

Her last surviving crewmember was likely Alec King, who gave an interview in 2019 at age 96.

She also lives on in maritime art.

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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