Royal Navy monitor HMS Erebus (1916) 4:1 Scale

 



The History

HMS Erebus and her sister ship HMS Terror were monitors built for the Royal Navy during the First World War.

But what was a monitor? The name stems from USS Monitor of 1862. She was the US Navy’s first ironclad, and was a rather unusual design for the time. In those early days of ironclads, most were effectively the same as sailing warships but with added iron armour and steam engines; high-sided ships with broadside guns and a full sailing rig.

USS Monitor, by contrast, was a shallow-draught, low-hulled coastal ship with no masts (and therefore totally reliant on steam power), and her armament consisted of just two large guns in the world’s first gun turret. She was so different that she gave her name to the entire type of warship. Several classes of monitors were built in the 1860s and 1870s. Gradually as ironclads developed towards pre-dreadnought battleships, they adopted full steam power and gun turrets, rendering the monitor style fairly well obsolete, and they started to disappear.

However, in the early 20^th century, the Royal Navy started using the ‘monitor’ name for its coastal bombardment ships. These ships shared some characteristics with the original monitors – a shallow draught (to get in close to shore), and just a handful of disproportionately large guns.

Britain embarked somewhat of a monitor building programme following the failure of the Dardanelles Campaign in 1915. The Dardanelles campaign was a naval operation by Britain and France to force the passage of the Dardanelles strait and land soldiers to capture the Ottoman capital of Constantinople – with the aim that capturing the capital would cause the Ottoman Empire to disintegrate and drop out of the war. The straits were narrow and guarded by artillery forts, which the naval force needed to bombard and destroy. Since the modern British dreadnoughts were needed in the North Sea to face off against the German fleet, the operation went ahead with a large force of old pre-dreadnoughts. The allies had total naval superiority, but several of their ships were sunk or damaged by mines before they abandoned the attack.

The Royal Navy decided that they needed better-suited ships for the bombardment role – the monitors. They were designed to be effectively an artillery platform for the largest guns that the navy could get their hands on. The ships were designed with a shallow draught, to get close to shore, and a short, fat hull for stability and because speed was unimportant. They were generally designed along mercantile lines and with mercantile engines, so that they could be easily and cheaply constructed by any shipyard, and since they were not expected to fight against enemy ships they were only lightly armoured. To combat their main threat of mines and submarines, they tended to be fitted with enormous anti-torpedo bulges.

The guns were the most difficult part. Heavy naval guns were expensive and took a long time to build. Several monitors were fitted with 12” gun turrets from decommissioned pre-dreadnoughts (e.g. the Lord Clive class), while others received guns that had been intended for cancelled battleships. Generally whenever a battleship was ordered the guns were the first thing that was ordered for it – and if the battleship was subsequently cancelled, the guns were usually either already built or well on the way. One such battleship, the Greek dreadnought Salamis, was under construction in Germany and couldn’t be delivered to Greece because of the British blockade of Germany. The guns for Salamis were on order with Bethlehem Steel in the USA. When construction was cancelled, Bethlehem Steel had four twin 14” gun turrets spare. They sold them to the British Admiralty, who used them to arm the Abercrombie class monitors.

The Admiralty also soon found themselves with 12 spare twin turrets of the excellent BL 15” Mark I gun, which had been ordered for the 6^th, 7^th and 8^th battleships in the Revenge class. These ships were cancelled on the outbreak of war, since it was expected that the war would be over before they were ready. The Admiralty was of the opinion that neither Britain nor Germany would be able to complete many capital ships during the war – and the Royal Navy’s advantage in numbers was great enough that they would soon destroy the German Fleet anyway, so the extra battleships would be redundant. When Lord Fisher returned to the Admiralty, he soon managed to account for 10 of those turrets for his new Renown-class battlecruisers and Courageous-class “large light cruisers”, but two turrets were spare for use on monitors.

These became the Marshal Ney class, named HMS Marshal Ney and HMS Marshal Soult after French generals who served under Napoleon. These ships experimented with diesel engines rather than the standard steam engines. Although monitors were generally slow anyway, these engines proved to be incredibly slow and unreliable and as a result the Erebus class was soon laid down with traditional reciprocating steam engines. HMS Marshal Ney’s turret was quickly removed to arm one of the Erebus-class ships, and the other received a turret that had been constructed for HMS Furious, ordered as a spare in case the brand new 18” guns designed for Furious weren’t suitable.

HMS Erebus was commissioned in September 1916. She was used to bombard German naval forces based at the Belgian ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge, and while doing so was damaged by a German FL-boat – a small remote-controlled boat packed with explosives designed specifically to be used against monitors. The explosion took out a large section of her anti-torpedo bulge, but the ship survived.

After the First World War, she took part in the allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and was then used in gunnery trials against the former German battleship SMS Baden. Following this, she acted as a gunnery training ship before receiving a refit just before the start of the Second World War. She served with the Eastern Fleet and Mediterranean Fleet, where she was damaged while providing gunfire support to the Allied invasion of Sicily. Later, she bombarded German defences on Omaha beach on D-Day, where one of her guns was destroyed when one of its rounds detonated prematurely. For the rest of the war she provided gunfire support to allied operations near the French/Belgian/Dutch northern coast.




She was scrapped in 1946. It is believed that one of her 15” guns was removed and fitted to the last British battleship, HMS Vanguard, which was completed shortly afterwards.

 

The Build

 Like all my ship builds, there’s no interior. The Erebus class was 123m long, so at 4:1 scale that translates to 492 blocks.

And yes - the image with the guns elevated and firing is the result of some editing and manipulation - I took two identical renders, one with the guns in place and one with them deleted, then cut the guns off the first one, pasted them onto the second and elevated them to 15 degrees, then added a tasty explosion cut from another image. I was quite pleased with the result!



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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.