Revenge class

2023-02-01 -

HMS REVENGE

Revenge gave her name to a new class of warship intended as a smaller and slower variant of the Queen Elizabeth class, but featuring heavier protective armour and retaining the 15in guns of the preceding ships. Commissioned in May 1915, she had completed sea trials and was at full battle readiness when the Grand Fleet faced Germany’s High Seas Fleet at Jutland the following year. During the fighting, Revenge fired over 100 shells at enemy ships but registered no hits and did not sustain any damage. On 21 November 1918 as part of the Grand Fleet, Revenge sailed out to meet the surrendering ships of the German High Seas Fleet and escort them into internment at Scapa Flow.

The inter war period was divided between service in the Atlantic and Mediterranean Fleets. Revenge was despatched to the Black Sea to provide a British presence during the simultaneous Turkish-Greco and Russian Civil Wars and supported Greek amphibious landings at Sultankoy and Eregli. In 1928 an extensive refit began which saw a modernisation of much of the ship’s superstructure and upgraded secondary armament and fire control systems.

A month after the outbreak of WWII, Revenge was ordered to proceed to the South Atlantic to contain the threat of the German pocket battleship Graf Spee which was engaged in commerce raiding, however, four days later on 5 October, she was diverted to join the North Atlantic Escort Force based in Nova Scotia,

Canada. During this period Revenge and her sister ship Resolution were tasked with transporting millions in gold bullion to Canada as payment for lend-lease war material provided by the United States. On completion of a brief refit the ship transferred to Western Approaches Command in anticipation of the German invasion of Britain. Although postponed in September 1940, the German force of invasion ships and barges remained concentrated in the French port of Cherbourg. Four weeks later Revenge, in company with destroyers and gun boats, bombarded the vessels with all the British ships returning safely to Plymouth. In October 1941 the Revenge class (with the exception of Royal Oak which had been sunk two years previously) were deployed to the Far East, joining the 3rd Battle Squadron at Colombo, Ceylon. Obsolete and considered inadequate for battle with the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific, they were relegated to convoy escort duties in the Indian Ocean and eventually withdrawn to Mombasa on the Kenyan coast to protect the east African sea lanes. By mid-1943, the Admiralty considered Revenge no longer capable of front line duties and she was recalled to Britain and placed in reserve. Other than bearing

Winston Churchill to the Tehran Conference at the end of 1943, Revenge played no further part in wartime operations and was employed as Portsmouth training ship, her armament removed and distributed to Warspite and Ramillies. The ship was earmarked for disposal at the end of the war and was broken up in September

1948. Her rack and pinion gearing survived to be integrated into the Mark I Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank in 1951.

HMS RESOLUTION

Built and launched from Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company at Jarrow, Resolution joined the Grand Fleet at Rosyth naval base outside Edinburgh in December 1916 and was assigned to the 1st Battle Squadron in company with her sister ships. Too late for the decisive action at Jutland, Resolution experienced a relatively uneventful war, the majority of which was consumed by patrols and convoy escort duties to Norway.

During the post war period, the

Revenge class ships were detached to the Mediterranean Fleet in response to the

HMS Revenge / HMS Resolution

Class: Revenge

Displacement: 32,820 tonnes

Length: 620ft 7in

Beam: 88ft 6in

Draught: 33ft 7in

Speed: 22 knots

Range: 8,055 miles

Crew: 940 men

Armament: 4 x twin 15in guns • 14 x 6in guns

2 x 3in AA guns • 4 x 3pdr guns • 4 x 21in torpedo tubes

Armour: Deck – 1in-4in, Waterline belt - 13in

HMS ROYAL OAK

Royal Oak, the third of her class to be commissioned, was built at Devonport Dockyard and entered service in May 1916 in time to see action at Jutland, scoring hits on the battlecruiser SMS Seydlitz. With both the Grand Fleet and Germany’s High Seas Fleet resorting to positional warfare after Jutland, due to fears of sub-surface attack and mines, Royal Oak was confined to patrolling and providing escort to Norwegian convoys for the remainder of the war.

In 1922 Royal Oak underwent a two year refit which saw considerable modernisation and in 1926 was deployed to the Mediterranean Fleet, during which the incident christened 'The Royal Oak Mutiny' by the press occurred. The incident stemmed from a petty disagreement between senior officers while alongside in Malta, resulting in the dismissal of the Captain and 1st Lieutenant.

Royal Oak was then assigned to nonintervention patrols off the Iberian Peninsula during the Spanish Civil War and in 1937 was featured in the British film drama Our Fighting Navy. In November 1938 the ship conveyed the body of the recently deceased Queen Maud of Norway to Oslo after she had passed away during a visit to London. The ship then commenced preparations to join the Mediterranean

Fleet and with war looming, Royal Oak’s orders changed and she joined the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow.

After taking part in the unsuccessful hunt for Gneisenau in the North Sea during early October, she returned to her Orkney base where she was employed as an anti-aircraft vessel, being considered obsolete. Just after midnight on 14 October 1939, the German submarine U-47 commanded by Kapitanleutnant Gunther Prien, penetrated the harbour sub-surface defences at Scapa Flow and fired a spread of three torpedoes at Royal Oak, one of which struck her bows. At 1.16am Prien fired a further three torpedoes all of which hit Royal Oak and 13 minutes later the Revenge class ship rolled over and sank with the loss of 835 lives, including the 2nd Battle Squadron commander, Rear Admiral Henry Blagrove and 134 boy sailors under the age of 18.

HMS ROYAL SOVEREIGN

Launched in April 1915, Royal Sovereign was not commissioned until May the following year and was not ready for the Battle of Jutland, seeing little action during the remainder of the conflict. During the 1920s Royal Sovereign accompanied her sister ship Resolution to the Mediterranean as a British naval presence in response to unrest in the region between Greece and Turkey and the ongoing Russian Civil War. Having transported White Russian emigres from Constantinople to Britain, the ship joined the Atlantic Fleet before commencing a full refit between 1927 and 1929.

The 1930s were taken up with fleet exercises in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and Royal Sovereign attended the jubilee fleet review of King George V in 1935. At the commencement of hostilities with Germany in September 1939, the ship was assigned to patrol the Icelandic Gap followed by a brief transfer to convoy protection with the North Atlantic Escort Force based in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

In May 1940 Royal Sovereign was deployed to the Mediterranean Fleet, based in the port of Alexandria in Egypt. After escaping an attack by the Italian submarine Galileo Ferraris the ship briefly rejoined the Atlantic Fleet for convoy escort duties before deploying with the Eastern Fleet under Admiral James Somerville. As with her sister ships, Royal Sovereign was deemed incapable of confronting units of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Revenge-class ships were sent to Mombasa in Kenya to patrol the East African coast. During 1943 Royal Sovereign underwent two refit periods in the Navy Yard in Philadelphia before resuming patrols in the Indian Ocean. In the following January she returned to Britain before being loaned to the Soviet Navy in May in lieu of war reparations following the fall of Italy. Renamed Arkhangelsk, she was the largest ship in the Soviet fleet and was employed as convoy escort from mid-Atlantic based at the port of Murmansk on the

Kola Peninsula. The ship was eventually returned to the Royal Navy in 1949, however on inspection, Royal Sovereign was found to be in such poor condition that she was sold and scrapped at Inverkeithing.

HMS RAMILLIES

The last of the Revenge class battleships to be built, Ramillies was commissioned in September 1917 too late to take an active part in World War I. In the intervening years between the wars, the