HMS General Wolfe
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 HMS General Wolfe |
|
| Career (United Kingdom) |  |
|---|---|
| Name: | HMS General Wolfe |
| Builder: | Palmers, Newcastle |
| Laid down: | January 1915 |
| Launched: | September 9, 1915 |
| Decommissioned: | 1921 |
| Fate: | Scrapped 1921 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | Lord Clive class |
| Displacement: | 6,150 tons |
| Length: | 335 feet (102.1 m) |
| Beam: | 87 feet (26.5 m) |
| Draught: | 9.7 feet (3.0 m) |
| Propulsion: | 2 shafts, reciprocating steam engines, 2 boilers, 2,310 hp |
| Speed: | 6.5 knots (12.0 km/h) |
| Complement: | 187 |
| Armament: | 2×12-inch (305 mm) guns in a single turret, two 3-inch (76 mm) guns. A conversion to a single 18-inch (457 mm) gun was made in the summer of 1918. |
HMS General Wolfe was a First World War Royal Navy Lord Clive class monitor.
HMS General Wolfe was named for James Wolfe, a British general of the Seven Years' War in North America who was killed at the conclusion of the successful battle of Quebec in 1759. Her original 12" main battery was taken from an obsolete Majestic class battleship.
The Lord Clive class monitors were built in 1915 to engage German shore artillery in occupied Belgium during the First World War. General Wolfe, with her sisters was regularly engaged in this service in the Dover Monitor Squadron throughout the war.
In the summer of 1918, General Wolfe was taken in for a refit in which her two 12" guns were to be replaced by a single 18" gun which would have been used on HMS Furious but proved to be too much for the structure and she had been converted to an aircraft carrier. Unlike a revolving turret that would have been used on Furious the gun was mounted in a fixed transverse direction. The refit was completed and General Wolfe subsequently used her single gun on bombardment operations on the Belgian coast. During these operations she fired at a railway bridge four miles south of Ostend at a range of 36,000 yards (33 km), the longest range a Royal Navy warship had ever fired on an enemy position. The armistice in November 1918 saw General Wolfe and her sisters being put into reserve pending scrapping, as the reason for her existence ended with the liberation of Belgium. In 1921 General Wolfe was scrapped.
[edit] References
- Dittmar, F. J. & Colledge, J. J., "British Warships 1914-1919", (Ian Allen, London, 1972), ISBN 0-7110-0380-7
- Gray, Randal (ed), "Conway's All The Worlds Fighting Ships, 1906-1921", (Conway Maritime Press, London, 1985), ISBN 0-85177-245-5
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