While destroyers and armed landing craft bombarded the defensive positions immediately on the beaches, the heavier guns of cruisers and, especially, battleships were required to engage and neutralise the German heavy gun batteries that could have fired on the transports, escorts and landing craft. Their role here was not simply a case of ‘make work’, of finding something for them to do. HMS Warspite and HMS Ramillies supported Sword Beach, USS Texas and USS Arkansas supported Omaha Beach and USS Nevada Utah Beach, with HMS Nelson and HMS Rodney in reserve. Unlike carriers, which supported Operation Neptune extensively but from a distance, battleships were very much present on D-Day – accounts from sailors and soldiers of the noise and smoke caused by their heavy bombardment represent one of the frequent strands of eyewitness testimony. In the event, several of the German ships were unserviceable and their response to Operation Neptune (the naval contribution to the D-Day landings) was more passive than anticipated. Such an engagement would have blown out of the water any remaining scepticism about the value of capital ships. The Home Fleet operating out of Scapa Flow (with two of the five fleet carriers, Formidable and Victorious, and three of the four most modern battleships, Duke of York, Anson and Howe) knocked out Tirpitz in April 1944 and then provided cover to block any German sortie into the North Atlantic, aiming at Allied shipping.Īlternatively, an attack towards the landings in the Channel would have been countered by Operation Hermetic, which would have involved the Admiral commanding the British task force taking command of all seven battleships off Normandy and in reserve in Portsmouth, with cruisers and destroyers in support, and engaging the enemy fleet. Yet there was still the possibility that the German Navy could send out a force which could theoretically include two pocket battleships, two heavy cruisers, four light cruisers and escorting destroyers. The defeat of the German surface fleet was largely achieved by D-Day (otherwise the operation could not have gone ahead). This ‘victory’ was a key pre-requisite for winning the Battle of the Atlantic (itself a pre-requisite for Overlord) – ensuring that destroyers, corvettes and escort carriers would not have to face heavy warships and hence freeing them to focus on defeating the U-boats. The principal contribution to Overlord of the Royal Navy carriers and battleships (working as a partnership in which both were essential, the latter particularly at night or in the bad weather) lay in defeating the German surface navy – either by sinking it or, more likely, by posing such a threat that it was kept in port where it could not threaten Allied use of the sea. Once again, the ‘bigger map, longer timeline’ theme struck a chord. This has now been published in War in History (and is available on open access). The summer before last, when I inadvertently offered to present a second paper at a conference, it provided an opportunity to look at the role of battleships in support of D-Day (Operation Overlord), and hence their wider role in naval strategy. It drew on a theme that I often mention in lectures at the UK Defence Academy – that to understand the role of naval power in campaigns and national strategy more broadly, you need a bigger map and a longer timeline. A few years ago, I wrote an article (naturally with an associated blog on Defence in Depth) that explored the role of aircraft carriers in supporting the Normandy landings. There has long been a tendency to understate and misunderstand the role of the Royal Navy’s capital ships in the Second World War. Dr Tim Benbow, Defence Studies Department