The 'Borrowed' British Battleship That Pulverised Hitler's Atlantic Wall For Three Weeks Straight

In June 1944, Britain's oldest battleship pulverised Hitler's Atlantic Wall on the eastern flank of Sword Beach, firing 1,002 fifteen-inch shells in a fortnight, the heaviest single-ship bombardment in naval history to that date. HMS Ramillies was a 27-year-old Revenge-class dreadnought, denied the modernisation given to her sister Warspite, considered too slow and too thinly armoured for fleet action by 1944, and recalled from the Indian Ocean specifically because she was old enough to be risked within range of Mont Canisy and the German coastal batteries between the Orne estuary and Le Havre. This documentary tells the full story of how an obsolete First World War battleship, sailing with so reduced a crew that only half her main armament could be manned at any one time, silenced Battery Benerville on D-Day, broke up a Wehrmacht concentration of two hundred tanks miles inland, took two direct hits from German mobile guns, and held the eastern bombardment line for thirteen consecutive days while her sister ships came and went. Captain Gervase Boswell Middleton's worn-out battleship did the unglamorous, day-after-day work of suppression that everyone else's record depended on, alongside HMS Warspite, HMS Rodney, HMS Nelson, the monitors HMS Roberts and HMS Erebus, and the cruisers of Bombarding Force D under Rear Admiral Wilfrid Patterson. The video covers the technical state of the Revenge class by 1944, the recall from Eastern Fleet trade defence to home waters, the duel with the Mont Canisy casemates that cancelled the planned Commando assaults Operation Frog and Operation Deer, the German Fifth Torpedo Boat Flotilla attack that sank HNoMS Svenner, Rodney's destruction of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend at Authie, Nelson's twenty separate bombardments before being mined on 18 June, Warspite's first Allied battleship shell of D-Day at Battery Villerville, and Ramillies' subsequent silencing of shore batteries at Saint Tropez, Port Cros, Porquerolles and the Saint Mandrier Peninsula at Toulon during Operation Dragoon in August 1944. Her surviving 15-inch gun stands today outside the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, paired with one from HMS Roberts, a Mark One 1915 weapon that fired its way from Bardia to the Atlantic Wall. TOPICS COVERED The Revenge class and why they were obsolete by 1944 HMS Ramillies technical specifications, armour, armament, and 1944 fire control fit The recall from Ceylon and the Eastern Fleet Bombarding Force D and the eastern flank of Sword Beach Battery Benerville at Mont Canisy and the German Atlantic Wall casemates The 6 June 1944 duel and the Svenner sinking The thirteen-day bombardment record from 6 to 18 June The 11 June engagement against 200 German tanks Comparative work by HMS Warspite, HMS Rodney, HMS Nelson, HMS Roberts and HMS Erebus Operation Dragoon and the silencing of Saint Mandrier Final fate, scrapping at Cairnryan, and the surviving gun at the Imperial War Museum MAJOR RESEARCH SOURCES Ian Johnston and Mick French, Battleship Ramillies: A Final Salvo, Seaforth Publishing, 2014 Stephen Roskill, The War at Sea, Volume Three, HMSO Official History David Brown editor, Invasion Europe: Battle Summary No. 39, Operation Neptune, HMSO 1994 Norman Friedman, The British Battleship 1906 to 1946 R. A. Burt, British Battleships 1919 to 1945, Seaforth Publishing Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey B. Mason, HMS Ramillies service history at naval-history.net Imperial War Museum, Private Papers of Admiral G B Middleton, reference 1030009880 United States Naval History and Heritage Command, H-Gram 031-1 on Operation Neptune FURTHER READING Tim Benbow, Battleships, D-Day, and Naval Strategy, in War in History journal, 2022 Alan Raven and John Roberts, British Battleships of World War Two Peter C. Smith, Naval Warfare in the English Channel 1939 to 1945 Steve Zaloga, Operation Neptune, the Normandy Landings, Osprey Publishing Craig L. Symonds, Neptune, the Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings Andrew Williams, D-Day to Berlin The Mont Canisy battery preservation project at Benerville-sur-Mer The Longues-sur-Mer battery, the only Normandy battery with original guns surviving in situ For more deep-dive documentaries on Royal Navy excellence, from Dreadnought to Astute, subscribe to British Naval History. #HMSRamillies #Normandy #RoyalNavy