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HMS General Wolfe (1915)

HMS General Wolfe in 1918
HMS General Wolfe in 1918
History
Name: HMS General Wolfe
Namesake: General James Wolfe
Ordered: 6 January 1915
Builder: Palmers, Newcastle
Laid down: January 1915
Launched: 9 September 1915
Commissioned: 27 October 1915
Out of service: 1919
Nickname(s): "Elephant and Castle"
Fate: Scrapped 1923
Notes: Made the longest-range shot in the history of the Royal Navy
General characteristics 9 November 1915
Class and type: Lord Clive-class monitor
Displacement: 5,900-long-ton (5,995 t) legend
Length: 335 ft 6 in (102.3 m)
Beam: 87 ft 2 in (26.6 m)
Draught: 9 ft 7 in (2.9 m)
Propulsion: 2×shafts, triple-expansion steam engines, 2×boilers, 2,500 ihp
Speed: 8 knots (14.8 km/h)
Complement: 194
Armament:
General characteristics 11 November 1918
Displacement: 6,850-long-ton (6,960 t)
Draught:
  • 8 ft 9 in (2.7 m) forward
  • 13 ft 2 in (4.0 m) aft
Armament:

HMS General Wolfe, also known as Wolfe, was a Lord Clive-class monitor which was built in 1915 for shore-bombardment duties in the First World War. Her class of eight ships was armed by four obsolete Majestic-class pre-dreadnoughts which had their 12-inch guns and mounts removed, modified and installed in the newly built monitors. Wolfe spent her entire war service with the Dover Patrol, bombarding the German-occupied Belgian coastline, which had been heavily fortified. In the spring of 1918 she was fitted with an 18-inch (457 mm) gun, with which she made the longest-range firing in the history of the Royal Navy - 36,000-yard (20 mi) - on a target at Snaeskerke, Belgium. After the war, she was laid up before being stripped and put up for sale in 1920. She was finally scrapped in 1923.

The outbreak of the First World War and the rapid fall of Belgium into German hands meant that for the first time in decades the North Sea between the United Kingdom and Europe would not be wholly surrounded by friendly or neutral powers. In order to harass the Germans occupying the Belgian coast, and to prevent the use of ports by Imperial German Navy warships, vessels were needed which could traverse the shallow coastal waters and bombard the enemy. At this time aircraft were still relatively primitive and therefore orders were placed for shallow-draught vessels with long-range guns, the Abercrombie-class monitors.

The speed with which the Abercrombie class of monitor had commenced construction, coupled with the prospect of large-scale shore bombardment presented by the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the First World War led to Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty and political head of the Royal Navy writing to First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher 11 December 1914;


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