laststandonzombieisland

Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period, 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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!”

Warship Wednesday 4 February 2026: Big Guns, Shallow Waters

Above, we see the immaculate 15-inch gunned Erebus-class monitor HMS Terror (I03) leaving Malta’s Grand Harbor in October 1933 on her way to serve as the station ship in Singapore for the rest of the decade. Note the Revenge-class battlewagon HMS Resolution (09) in the background.

A Great War vet with the battle honors to prove it, Terror would return to the Med and fight her last battle some 85 years ago this month.

A 101 on British Great War monitors

A relic of the mid-19th Century, the shallow draft monitor unexpectedly popped back into service with the Royal Navy in 1914 when the Admiralty acquired a trio of 1,500-ton Brazilian ships (the future HMS Humber, Mersey and Severn) being built at Vickers which carried 6- and 4.7-inch guns while being able to float in just six feet of water, having been designed for use on the Amazon. The idea was these would be crackers for use off the coast of France and Belgium, as well as against Johnny Turk in the Dardanelles, and in steaming up African rivers to sink hiding German cruisers– all missions the Humbers accomplished.

A similar class of monitors taken up from Armstrong, intended for the Norwegians (the future HMS Gorgon and Glatton), were a bit larger, at 5,700 tons, and carried a mix of 9.2-inch and 6-inch guns while having a 16-foot draft.

Then came a flurry of new construction monitors after it was seen how useful the Humbers and Gorgons were, and the RN ordered, under the Emergency War Programme:

• Fourteen M15 class (540 ton, armed with a single surplus 9.2 inch gun)
• Eight Lord Clive-class (6,100 tons, armed with a twin 12-inch turret taken from decommissioned Majestic-class battleships).
• Four Abercrombie class (6,300 tons, armed with embargoed Bethlehem-made 14″/45s)
• Five M29 class (540 tons, armed with two 6″/45s taken from the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships’ nearly unusable rear casemate mounts)
• Two Marshal Ney class (6,900 tons, 2 x modern 15″/42s, which were surplus from lightening up the new battlecruisers Renown and Repulse).

All of which began arriving in the fleet in mid-1915. In all, some 38 new monitors of all types entered RN service between August 1914 and the end of 1915. Talk about meeting a demand!

With this scratch monitor building initiative in the rear view, the Admiralty ordered what would be the pinnacle of their Great War monitors, the twin ships of the Erebus class.

Ordered from Harland & Wolff, the renowned ocean liner builder, with one built in Govan and the other in Belfast, Erebrus and Terror were similar to the Palmers-built Marshal Ney class but larger (at 8,500 tons and 405-feet loa vs 6,900 tons, 355-feet) with better protection and speed.

What was amazing was the size of their beam, some 88 feet across, giving them a very tubby length-to-beam ratio of 5:1. Still, these cruiser-sized vessels could float in just 11 feet of water, their massive pancake anti-torpedo bulge, some 15 feet deep, subdivided into 50 watertight compartments.

Powered by four Babcock boilers, which drove two 4-cyl VTE engines on two screws, they had a 6,000shp powerplant capable of pushing them to 12 knots or greater, roughly twice the speed of the smaller Marshals, which only carried a 1,500 shp plant. On speed trials, Erebus was able to generate 7,244 hp and hit 14.1 knots, while Terror was able to generate 6,235 knots to hit a still respectable 13.1 knots. Jane’s noted later that “Their speed, considering their great beam, is remarkable.”

Like the Marshals, they were designed to carry guns large enough to outrange the 11- 12- and even 15-inchers inchers mounted by the Germans on the Belgian coast.

Their main armament for Erebus and Terror was a pair of Heavy BL 15-inch/42 cal Mark Is, a gun described by Tony DiGiulian over at 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.” Capable of firing a 1,900-pound HE or Shrapnel shell to 40,000 yards at maximum charge and elevation (as contended by Jane’s), the monitors carried 100 rounds per gun.

A tall five-level conning tower was sandwiched just behind the casemate of the main guns, topped by a large range finder, while a tripod mast and pagoda with a 360-degree view towered above both gunhouse and CT.

There were 184 such 15-inch guns manufactured by six different works across England, and they equipped the Queen Elizabeth and Royal Sovereign battleship classes, the Glorious, Repulse, and Hood (“Admiral”) battlecruiser classes, and the monitors of not only the Erebus but also the preceding Marshal Ney class, and later WWII-era Roberts class. The Brits even used them ashore, fitted as giant coastal artillery pieces at Dover and Singapore. These superb guns allowed one of the longest hits ever scored by a naval gun on an enemy ship when, in July 1940, HMS Warspite struck the Italian battleship Guilio Cesare at approximately 26,000 yards.

To keep in the fight against German coastal batteries, the Erebus class was extensively armored with up to 13 inches of plate over the main gun house, 8 inches on the barbette, 6 inches on the large conning tower, 4-inch bulkheads, a 4-inch box citadel over the magazines, and an armored deck sloping from 4 to 1.25 inches. Due to the design and low freeboard transitioning into the huge anti-torpedo blisters, there was no traditional side belt as known by period battleships and cruisers.

A varied secondary armament repurposed from old cruisers was arrayed around the main deck, including two (later four) 6″/40 QF Mark IIs, two 3″/50 12pdr 18cwt QF Mk Is, a 3″/45 20cwt QF Mk I anti-balloon gun, and four Vickers machine guns. This was later expanded to eight 4-inch/44 BL Mk IXs in place of the four 6″/40s, 2 12 pounders, two 3-inch AAA, and two 40mm 2-pounder pom-pom AAAs by the end of the war.

Erebus and Terror surely lived up to British Admiral George Alexander Ballard’s notions of monitors as being like “full-armored knights riding on donkeys, easy to avoid but bad to close with.”

Meet Terror

Our subject is the ninth such warship to carry the name in Royal Navy service, going back to a 4-gun bomb vessel launched in 1696. Most famously, a past HMS Terror, a 102-foot Vesuvius-class bomb vessel, had bombarded Fort McHenry in 1814, which resulted in the Star Spangled Banner, and then was lost with the bomb vessel HMS Erebus on Sir John Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition in 1848.

Terror was laid down as Yard No. 493 at Harland and Wolff’s Belfast site (the same yard that had just three years before completed RMS Titanic) on 12 October 1915 and launched on 18 May 1916.

She completed fitting out and entered service on 6 August 1916.

Captain (later Admiral Sir) Hugh Justin Tweedie, RN, was her first of 15 skippers. A 39-year-old regular, Tweedie had joined the Navy as a 13-year-old cadet, commanded the armored cruiser HMS Essex before the war, and the monitor Marshal Ney during the war. Nonetheless, he soon passed command to Capt. (later RADM) Charles William Bruton, late of the first-class protected cruiser HMS Edgar. Bruton would command Terror through 31 January, 1919.

Honors attached to the seven previous Terrors allowed her to commission with the two past honors, “Velez Malaga 1704” and “Copenhagen 1801”, carried forward.

War!

Joining the Dover Patrol, after a short shakedown, Erebus and Terror were soon engaged in bombarding German positions, batteries, and harbors along the Belgian coast, alternating with guard ship roles in The Downs.

Some of the more interesting sorties across the channel were a May 1917 attempt to knock out the lock gates of the Bruges Canal at Zeebrugge while acting as flag of the Dover Patrol under VADM Reginald Hugh Spencer Bacon, famous for being the first skipper of HMS Dreadnought, and two bombardments of Ostend in June and September, respectively.

Incredibly, Terror and her sister showed their construction made them almost impervious to attempts to sink them.

On 19 October 1917, Terror shrugged off three direct torpedo hits from German CTBs A59, A60, and A61,  off Dunkirk, which blew off and caved in large chunks of her anti-torpedo bulge. Bruton brought his ship into shallow water and beached her with “commendable promptness under the difficult circumstances.” She suffered no casualties and, after a yard period, was back in action by January 1918.

Sister Erebus was, on 28 October 1917, hit by German distance-controlled explosive boat FL12. which carried a massive 1,500-pound charge that, while blowing a 50-foot hole in the torpedo bulge, did very little damage to the hull itself. The monitor was back in service by 21 November of the same year.

Not all RN monitors were that lucky. The Abercrombie-class monitor HMS Raglan was sunk during the Battle of Imbros in January 1918 by the Ottoman battlecruiser Yavuz Sultan Selim (ex-SMS Goeben). The Gorgon-class monitor HMS Glatton was wrecked by an internal explosion in September 1918. Three of the M15-class coastal monitors were lost: one to a mine, one to a U-boat, and one to Yavuz at Imbros. The M29-class coastal monitor HMS M30 was sunk by an Austrian howitzer battery in the Gulf of Smyrna in May 1916.

Back in service in early 1918, Terror helped spoil a German destroyer raid on Dunkirk in March, riddled German-occupied Ostend (where said destroyers sortied from) in retribution, and provided long-range bombardment support for the April 1918 Zeebrugge raid.

Her 15-inchers were replaced in September after 340 rounds. Terror and Erebus plastered German positions around Zeebrugge and Ostend to divert Jerry’s to other fronts during the Fifth Battle of Ypres, a five-day offensive that let the British take possession of a decent chunk of liberated Belgium, at least by Western Front standards.

And with that, the war to end all wars came to an end just weeks later.

Terror’s Great War service brought her two honors of her own: “Belgian Coast 1916-18,” and “Zeebrugge 1918,” upping her tally to four.

Interbellum

While some coastal monitors saw extended post-1918 service aboard, such as on the Dvina Flotilla in Northern Russia fighting the Reds, Terror and Erebus were given more auxiliary tasks in home waters.

It was during this period that Erebus was fitted out as a cadet’s training ship, and a large extra cabin accommodation was erected on her upper deck, the roof coming just under the 15 inch guns.

Between January 1919 and the end of 1933, Terror was assigned to the RN gunnery school at Portsmouth (aka the “stone frigate” HMS Excellent), tasked with armor-piercing shell trials against the retired Jutland veteran Bellerophon-class dreadnought HMS Superb, and the trophy German Bayern-class dreadnought SMS Baden, which had been saved from scuttling at Scapa Flow.

Terror also tested new guns, and served as a general Director & Fire Control, and Turret drill ship (keep in mind that her 15″/42s were in use across the fleet) during her gunnery school days.

In early 1933, with Japan’s walkout from the League of Nations and war drums in the Pacific, Terror was made ready for war, to a degree, and sent to Singapore to add her big guns to the defense of that strategic colonial outpost and just generally serve as a station ship.

It was a slow three-month slog via the Suez and Aden, but she made it before Christmas.

In October 1938, CDR Henry John Haynes, DSC, RN, became Terror’s final skipper, a distinction that he, of course, was not aware of at the time.

A career officer, he signed up as an 11-year-old Boy in 1906 and, picking up his first stripe in 1914, earned his DSC in March 1918 during the Great War “for services in Destroyer and Torpedo Boat Flotillas.” A regular salt, he achieved his first command in 1924, the destroyer HMS Sylph, then would inhabit a series of seven further captain’s cabins prior to moving into Terror’s, most recently the minelaying destroyer HMS Walker.

War (Again)

When Hitler sent his legions into Poland in September 1939, and the world again devolved into a global war, Terror was still at rest in Singapore.

Word came to make her ready for European service and she put into dry dock for a fresh coat of paint and an update in her armament, landing her secondary battery for six 4″/45 QF Mk Vs (with a 15 rounds per minute rate of fire and 50-degree elevation allowing an AA ceiling of 21,000 feet), and two quad Vickers .50 cal mounts.

She said goodbye to Singapore in December 1939, her home for six years, and headed for the Mediterranean via the Suez, arriving at Malta on 4 April 1940 to strengthen the defences against a foreseen Italian entry into the war.

On 10 June 1940, her gunners fired at the first (of many) Axis air raid over Malta.

She spent the next several months on the periphery of several operations in the Mediterranean, including the Operation MB 8 convoy, Operation Coat (transferring of reinforcements from Gibraltar to the Eastern Mediterranean), Operation Crack (escorting carriers for an air attack on Cagliari, Sardinia), and Operation Judgment (the carrier raid on Taranto). Then, after serving in Suda Bay as a guardship, rode slow shotgun on Convoy ME-3 from Malta to Alexandria, then remained in Egypt for local defense.

Then came a very active six-week period supporting the operations of the British 8th Army across Egypt into Libya, starting with a bombardment of Italian-held Bardia on 14 December 1940, a port she would repeatedly haunt.

It was off Bardia during Operation MC 5 that, on 2 January 1940, Terror, operating in conjunction with several small Insect-class river gunboats as part of the Inshore Squadron, was attacked by Italian torpedo bombers around 1820 hours, but no damage was done to her. Another four air raids the next day were also shrugged off.

17 January to 22 January saw Terror on Operation IS 1, the nightly bombardment of Italian positions around Tobruk to support the 8th Army’s efforts to capture the port.

On 12 February, she was attached to Operation Shelford, the clearance of Benghazi harbor, arriving at the Libyan port on Valentine’s Day.

She was still there through an increasingly stout series of Axis air raids, which concluded as far as Terror is concerned, at 0630 on 22 February, when a trio of Junkers Ju-88 bombers of the III/LG.1 from Catania, along with a trio of He.111 torpedo bombers of 6/KG.26 flying out of Comiso, made runs on the harbor with our monitor sustaining flooding from three near-misses. In rough shape, she was ordered to sail for Tobruk, where the anti-aircraft defense was better, but hit two German magnetic mines on the way out of the harbor, flooding her engineering spaces.

Persevering on her way to Tobruk, Terror eventually began settling in 120 feet of water about 15 nautical miles north-west of Derna, and, abandoned at 2200 on the 22nd with the intention of scuttling, sank at 0415 on 23 February 1941, capping a career of just under 25 years.

True to form, she suffered no casualties, and her 300-strong crew was taken off in toto by the escorting minesweeper HMS Fareham and corvette HMS Salvia.

She earned two further RN honors, “Libya 1941” and “Mediterranean 1941.”

She also picked up the dubious distinction of being the largest warship, by displacement, sunk in the Med by Ju-88s during the war.

As for Erebus, she finished the war, receiving damage in covering the Husky Landings in Sicily and only narrowly avoiding being sunk by the Japanese at Trincomalee in 1942. She later clocked in as a gunfire support ship off Utah Beach for U.S. troops during the Neptune/Overlord operations on D-Day with Bombardment Force A, lending her 15-inchers to the cacophony raised by the “puny” 14-inchers on the old battlewagon USS Nevada (BB-36), and the 8-,7.25-, 6-, and 5.25-inchers of USS Tuscaloosa and Quincy, and HM’s cruisers Hawkins, Enterprise, and Black Prince.

Erebus then roamed up the French coast and, with HMS Warspite, dueled with German coastal artillery in the Le Havre area and Seine Bay in August and September 1944, supporting the British Army as it moved into the Lowlands. In November 1944, she supported Operation Infatuate, the amphibious assault on Walcheren, Netherlands.

Erebus was scrapped in 1946, but it is believed that one of her 15-inch guns was, along with surplus guns from a half-dozen battleships and battlecruisers, used to equip HMS Vanguard, the Royal Navy’s final dreadnought.

Epilogue

Terror’s final skipper, CDR Haynes, added a DSO to his DSC “For courage, skill and devotion to duty in operations off the Libyan Coast,” and went on to command, in turn, the cruisers HMS Caledon and Argonaut, then the escort carriers HMS Asbury and Khedive, then the RN Air Station Wingfield near Capetown before moving to the Retired List. Capt. Haynes passed away in 1973, aged 80.

In recognition of her role in Singapore’s pre-WWII history, the new accommodation barracks adjacent to the base became known as HMS Terror from 1945 to 1971, and today the Terror Club remains in Singapore as part of the U.S. Navy’s MWR system.

The military of Singapore borrowed the name and legacy for “Terror Camp,” a training center in the Sembawang area of the old base in the 1970s and 1980s, and today the Republic of Singapore Navy’s elite Naval Diving Unit (NDU) frogman school has graced its four-story high Hull Mock-up System dive chamber as HMS Terror.

Combrig, among others, has offered detailed scale models of the Erebus class.

As for monitors, the RN kept the WWII-era HMS Roberts around as an accommodation ship at Devonport until 1965, and one of her 15″/42 guns (formerly in HMS Resolution) is mounted outside the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, South London, together with one from the battleship Ramillies.

The 1915 Programme M29-class coastal monitor HMS M33, converted to a fueling hulk and boom defense workshop in 1939, is one of only three surviving First World War Royal Navy warships and the sole survivor of the Gallipoli Campaign. Now located at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, close to HMS Victory, she opened to the public in 2015, preserving the memory of the RN’s World War monitor era.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

If you like this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships, you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!