IN WAR AND PEACE
HMS Renown joined the Grand Fleet three months after the Battle of Jutland, by which time there was never any real likelihood of the German battlefleet ever putting to sea in force again. Consequently, her service during WWI was hardly noteworthy; many believed that to be fortunate, reckoning her badly underprotected. In 1918 it was decided to give her sister-ship the 9in (229mm) armour belt from the ex-Chilean battleship Almirante Cochrane, (then in the process of being completed as the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle), and to manufacture another, similar belt for the Renown. This would be a lengthy process, and in the meantime, she received a refit to improve her accommodation (including the removal of a triple 4in (102mm) gun turret and its replacement by a squash court). She then carried the Prince of Wales on a protracted tour of the USA and Australasia before spending a year in the Far East.
The delayed major refit was carried out at Portsmouth between May 1923 and August 1926; the 9in (229mm) belt was applied, but where Repulses original 6in (152mm) belt had been moved up and re-affixed, Renowns was simply discarded. The effect of this was to increase her deep-load displacement by 6500 tons, but that had no effect on her top speed, which remained at slightly over 30 knots (55.5km/h).
She was taken in hand again in September 1936 for a further modernisation, which this time concentrated on her weapons suite, aimed at fitting her for the role of fast carrier escort. Her seventeen-gun 4in (102mm) battery which was widely held to have been deficient from the very start was removed, and replaced by twenty 4.5in (114mm) AA guns in twin mountings, and she received three octuple 2pdr pom-poms and eight 21 in (533mm) torpedo tubes. Her protection was further improved, and her worn-out Brown-Curtis turbines were exchanged for new, lighter Parsons machinery producing 8000 extra horsepower, which gave her an additional half-knot.
A NEW LEASE OF LIFE
She emerged from her modernisation on 2 September 1 939, just as World War Two was breaking out, and briefly joined the Battle Cruiser Squadron. She first saw action in April 1940, when she engaged Scharnhorst and Admiral Hipper oil Narvik at 18,000 yards in heavy weather, hitting both of them and taking hits in return without suffering serious damage. In August she joined Force H at Gibraltar, to escort convoys to Malta and Egypt, and bombarded Genoa in February 1941 before returning briefly to the UK. She joined Force H again in time to cover the Torch landings in North Africa, remaining in Gibraltar until February 1943, and then returned to Rosyth for a five-month refit. On her return to the fleet, she was twice employed to give passage to Winston Churchill, returning him to Scotland from Nova Scotia, and then taking him to Alexandria. At the end of the year she was despatched to the Far East, taking part in the bombardments of Surabaya and Sebang. Hastily recalled to the UK to meet the threat of a sortie by Tirpifz from the Norwegian fjord where she lay (she steamed 7640 miles in 306 hours), she arrived at Scapa Flow on 14 April, by which time the threat had passed. She proceeded to Portsmouth and was reduced to two-thirds complement, and thence to Devonport, where she remained until being sold for breaking up in 1948.
