The HMS Prince Eugene was a monitor of Lord Clive class of the British Royal Navy during the First World War . Of the eight ships in this class, four were built at Harland & Wolff's main yard in Belfast and the Prince Eugene at the Govan branch . The newbuildings turned out to be very slow and difficult to maneuver seagoing vessels; however, they turned out to be excellent gun platforms.
History of the ship
The keel of the monitor was laid on February 1, 1915 at Harland and Wolff 's shipyard in Govan and it was launched on July 14. The ship was named after Field Marshal Prince Eugene of Savoy , who, along with the Duke of Marlborough, was in command of the anti-French coalition in the War of the Spanish Succession . She was the first and so far only ship of the Royal Navy with this name. The heavy 12-inch guns in the new building came from the old Hannibal ship of the line . The turret and the built-in guns were heavily modified for use on a monitor by increasing the angle of elevation of the cannons from 13.5 ° to 30 ° and by using new projectiles with increased propellant charges. This made a maximum shooting range of 23,000 meters possible. The ship was assigned to the Dover Patrol and served to bombard the positions of the Marine Corps Flanders since 1915 . It took part in the attack on Ostend in the spring of 1918 .
The monitor was to be completely overhauled in the summer of 1918. The previous 305 mm twin turret was to be replaced by a single turret with a 457 mm gun ( BL 18 inch Mk I naval gun ) of the Furious converted into an aircraft carrier . However, this was not done by the end of the war and the overhaul of the monitor was canceled. In 1921 the Prince Eugene was sold for demolition, which began that same year.
Ian Buxton: Big Gun Monitors. Design, Construction and Operations 1914–1945. 2nd, revised and extended edition. Seaforth Publishing, Barnsley 2008, ISBN 978-1-84415-719-8 .
Mark D. Karau: The Naval Flank of the Western Front. The German MarineKorps Flanders 1914–1918. Seaforth Publishing, Barnsley 2014, ISBN 978-1-84832-231-8 .
Anthony Preston, Randal Gray (eds.): Conway's All the World Fighting Ships 1906-1921. Conway Maritime Press Ltd, London 1985, ISBN 0-85177-245-5 .
