1) The propellant charge was in four bags.

2) For Treaty compliance purposes, these ships were listed as carrying 80 rounds per gun but they actually had space for 100.

3) The original outfit was 100 rounds of APC per gun, but by mid-1943 five of these had been replaced by time-fuzed HE.

4) APC was 6/12crh.

5) From late 1942 to early 1943, "K" shell was introduced which contained dyes for coloring shell splashes.  These shells also had a small fuze and burster to disperse the dye.  I do not have the weight of these projectiles, but I would estimate that they would have added about 5 - 6 lbs. (2.3 - 2.7 kg) to the APC weight listed above.  The following colors are listed in a 20 June 1946 Fleet Order:

   King George V:  Yellow
   Duke of York:  Green
   Anson:  White (this almost certainly means "no dye")
   Howe:  Red

Four-gun Turret
   King George V (2):  Mark III

1) For the first time in a British capital ship, these mountings had the magazines located below the shell rooms.

2) Training was by one of two swashplate engines, 160 bhp in the quads and 70 bhp in the twin, which drove the turrets via a worm gear.  Elevation was by hydraulic cylinder and piston connected to the rear of the cradle and run out was via compressed air.  RPC equipment was never fitted to any of these ships, they used "follow the pointer" style control throughout their careers.

3) These mountings had very elaborate flash precautions, perhaps overly so given the problems encountered during World War II.

4) "The Big Gun" states that the quadruple mounting had over 3,000 working parts.

5) These turrets had a vertical roller race similar to the ones added to the Nelson and Rodney in the 1930s.

6) The gun axes were 96 in (244 cm) apart in both the twin and the quad mountings.

7) Rangefinders in A and X turrets had a baselength of 41 feet (12.5m) while the rangefinder in B turret had a baselength of 30 feet (9.10 m).

8) Some details of the problems found in action with these mountings:  Prince of Wales fired only 55 out of a possible 74 shells during her action with Bismarck.  Her problems included jammed shell rings and associated fittings.  King George V fired 339 shells during her engagement with Bismarck compared to 380 fired by Rodney.  Mechanical problems suffered by Duke of York during the Battle of the North Cape included failures of the bridge flash tubes in the working chambers to close completely and the collapse of shell arresters in the lower hoist.

9) The following description of the problems encountered by King George V is taken from "The Final Action:  The Sinking of Bismarck, 27 May 1941" by John Roberts: 

"Initially she did well achieving 1.7 salvoes per minute while employing radar control but she began to suffer severe problems from 0920 onward [Note:  KGV had opened fire at 0850 - TD].  'A' turret was completely out of action for 30 minutes, after firing about 23 rounds per gun, due to a jam between the fixed and revolving structure in the shell room and Y turret was out of action for 7 minutes due to drill errors. . . Both guns in B turret, guns 2 and 4 in A turret and gun 2 in Y turret were put out of action by jams and remained so until after the action - 5 guns out of 10!  There were a multitude of other problems with mechanical failures and drill errors that caused delays and missed salvoes.  There were also some misfires - one gun (3 of A turret) misfired twice and was out of action for 30 minutes before it was considered safe to open the breech."

[Editor's Note:  The ellipsis in this paragraph is to omit what I believe is actually a reference to the performance of Rodney's 16" (40.6 cm) guns which was mistakenly included in this description - TD]

Admiral Sir John C. Tovey, C-in-C Home Fleet, commented upon some of these problems in his after action report PRO Adm 234/509:

"Comparatively little experience had previously been gained of the reliability of the turrets.  The prolonged practice firing for the King George V had been carried out only in one turret.  If was fortunate that the action [against Bismarck - TD] was not prolonged, because the 25 rounds per gun practice previously planned would not have shown up so many of the defects."

10) During the early part of her action against Scharnhorst, HMS Duke of York scored 31 straddles out of 52 broadsides fired.

11) Some comments from William Jurens regarding the vertical face plates of these turrets.

"The reason for sloped turret faces is primarily geometric.  For normal trunnion locations, if the turret face is not sloped back, then for large angles of [gun] elevation, as in post-1930 ships, the gunports get very large and start to eat away at the turret roof.  If the angle of elevation is small as on older ships, [then the] angles of fall [of shells fired by enemy ships] would be equally small, so a slanted faceplate which would deflect rounds upward makes sense.  If the angle of elevation is large and a vertical front plate is seen to be desirable, as in KGV etc., then one answer to avoiding cutting long slots in the roofplates is to move the trunnions far forward.  This makes the overall rotating structure and the guns themselves harder to balance and complicates gun elevation mechanisms.  On KGV a compromise was made; the trunnions were moved as far forward as possible, and the front plate was moved BACK as far as was feasible.  Even so, the maximum angle of elevation was limited to 40 degrees.  There is little saving in weight in moving to a vertical faceplate, in some cases less than none.

. . . moving from a sloped to a vertical faceplate is usually nearly weight-neutral, although some savings can be achieved by thinning the vertical face somewhat as it is now much more oblique to incoming (long-range only) fire than a sloped face is.  Several problems remain.  On KGV, moving the face back left an inconvenient "D" shaped portion of the top of the barbette uncovered forward of the faceplate, a situation aggravated by the probability that long range fire, even if deflected, would be channeled downwards into the "D".  On KGV, this "D" underneath the gun chases was about 115 ft² (10.7 m²) in area, which needed to be protected at least as well as the turret roof.  This added protection would weigh about 13 additional tons.  A final problem lies in the construction of the face plate itself.  Such a plate is much stronger if it can be made in one piece with two, three, or four (as required) vertical slots cut into it for gunports.  This in turn requires at least a thin band of material above and below the port openings to hold the whole thing together.  Because the slots are quite problematical in a vertical plate to begin with, there is a tendency to revert to installing a number of smaller plates joined together, which is not as strong, though arguably cheaper to manufacture.

Overall, I suspect that vertical faceplates create more problems than they solve, and their advantages (if any) are marginal, which is likely why so few ships ever adopted them."