The battleship HMS King George V wasn’t just built to take on enemy fleets , she had to battle the sea itself, and this shot from 18 February 1943 proves it.
More Than a Match for the Sea: HMS King George V’s Battle with Nature, 18 February 1943
There are moments in naval history when the drama is not forged in the gunfire of battle, but in the titanic struggle between steel and the raw power of the open sea. One of the most unforgettable images of the Second World War’s Royal Navy came not from a clash with an enemy fleet, but from a tempest—the mighty battleship HMS King George V pitted against the full elemental fury of the North Atlantic on 18 February 1943.
In the photograph that would later become legendary, the 35,000-ton flagship, pride of the British fleet, is plunged nose-first into a mountainous wave. Cascades of sea water tumbling over her bow, she looks momentarily buried and defiant—a steel leviathan refusing to be tamed by nature’s wrath. HMS King George V wasn’t just built for war. She was built to conquer the very sea itself.
A Warship Forged for World War
Commissioned in late 1940, HMS King George V gave her name to a new class of battleships designed to bring the Royal Navy back to the forefront of naval power. War was already raging across Europe, and the threat from Germany’s fast and powerful surface raiders—most notably the Bismarck—loomed large.
Her design was a hybrid of tradition and innovation: heavily armored to resist the hammer blows of enemy shells, but, due to the constraints of international naval treaties, equipped with 10 14-inch guns instead of the larger calibers her designers would have preferred. She boasted triple gun turrets, antiaircraft cannons bristling along her superstructure, and the latest radar technology. King George V symbolized British resolve in steel and steam.
But the men who built her, and the sailors who sailed her, knew that surviving in the unforgiving expanse of the North Atlantic demanded as much toughness as did facing the enemy.
The Atlantic at Its Worst
The year 1943 saw some of the most brutal weather of the entire war. HMS King George V, like so many Royal Navy ships, was tasked with protecting the vulnerable Arctic convoys—the vital lifelines delivering supplies to the Soviet Union, threading a dangerous route past Nazi-occupied Norway and through the teeth of Europe’s harshest seas.
Winter storms on the Atlantic were infamous. Waves like walls, frigid winds so fierce they could strip paint from metal, and ice that formed on decks and superstructures until a ship could be capsized under its weight. Each crossing was a test not just of the sailors’ courage, but of the ship’s design.
On 18 February, King George V was underway in company with her sisters-in-arms. The sky was an unbroken dome of steel-gray, the horizon lost in sleet. Winds howled at gale force. Crewmen lashed themselves to railings lest a wayward wave hurl them overboard. Visibility was near zero, except for the brief moments when flashes of foam and spray cleared into ghostly scenes of grey hull and white-capped sea.
The Photograph That Says It All
No one is quite certain who pulled the trigger on the camera at exactly that moment—a testament to the gritty stoicism of Royal Navy sailors, for whom terror and awe ran side by side in these storms. But the image survives: water towering above the battleship’s bow as if to swallow her whole, the deck awash, every line and rivet emphasizing human defiance against a force so much greater.
Below the tumultuous waterline, over 1,500 men stood at their stations: stokers sweating in the engine rooms, gunners wary and watchful, lookouts hunched in icy crow’s nests. Every man felt the shuddering reverberations as King George V met the sea wave for wave. Each assault by the ocean was a trial by ordeal, testing the hull plates, watertight doors, and the ship’s very soul. Leaks were patched, pumps worked ceaselessly, ice was chipped from guns, and the ship carried onward, stubborn and proud.
Built as much for the Sea as the Enemy
It’s easy to see warships as mere weapons—tools to engage the foe. But this photograph, and the story behind it, is a reminder that these vessels were also lifeboats, homes, and fortresses against the even more relentless adversary: nature. Naval architects in the 1930s and ‘40s gave King George V more than armor and firepower; they designed her hull to ride over the great swells of the Atlantic, her superstructure to deflect wind and green water, her pumps to keep the sea at bay.
The Royal Navy’s long tradition of facing the sea influenced every plate and rivet. The battleship’s ability to recover from being slammed by green water, to shed waves, to keep her men safe even when the enemy was the ocean itself, helped explain why so many British ships survived not just combat, but countless storms from the Arctic to the Cape.
The Human Element
For the crew, each mission in winter was a battle against exhaustion and fear. Ordinary Seaman John Mills described crossing the Atlantic that year: “The cold blew through your bones, and the sea never seemed to let up. You feared being washed overboard—or worse, being trapped below if we took on water. But the King George V, she felt solid underfoot. She took what the sea gave and kept charging forward.”
The sailors found a strange pride in their ship’s ability to survive the worst weather, a pride that bound them together perhaps even more tightly than their shared encounters with enemy aircraft and U-boats. “Any ship can fight a battle,” Mills later reflected, “but only a true warship can take a storm like that and keep moving.”
Enduring Legacy
HMS King George V would go on to earn battle honours in nearly every theatre of the war—from the chase of the Bismarck to the final days in the Pacific, bombarding the Japanese home islands. Yet for many of her veterans, the memory of February 18, 1943, stands as a testament not only to her martial prowess, but to her endurance.
Today, the photograph endures as a symbol of resilience. It speaks silently but powerfully to every mariner’s truth: That sometimes the mightiest enemy is not another ship, or the thunder of guns, but the unpredictable, untameable ocean itself. HMS King George V faced both, and in doing so, became a legend not easily forgotten.
