RN:
HMS Royal Sovereign, during the Second World War
The
Revenge class, sometimes referred to as the
Royal Sovereign class or the
R class, was a group of five
superdreadnought battleships built for the
Royal Navy in the 1910s. All of the ships were completed to see service during the
First World War. There were originally to have been eight of the class, but two were later redesigned, becoming the
Renown-class battlecruisers, while the other, which was to have been named HMS
Resistance, was cancelled outright. The design was based on that of the preceding
Queen Elizabeth class, but with reductions in size and speed to make them more economical to build.
Two of the ships,
Revenge and
Royal Oak, were completed in time to see action at the
Battle of Jutland during the
First World War, where they engaged German battlecruisers. The other three ships were completed after the battle, by which time the British and German fleets had adopted more cautious strategies, and as a result, the class saw no further substantial action. During the early 1920s, the ships were involved in the
Greco-Turkish War and the
Russian Civil War as part of the
Mediterranean Fleet. They typically operated as a unit during the
interwar period, also seeing stints in the
Atlantic Fleet. All five members of the class were modernised in the 1930s, particularly to strengthen their anti-aircraft defences and
fire-control equipment.
The ships saw extensive action during the
Second World War, though they were no longer front-line units by this time and thus were frequently relegated to secondary duties such as convoy escort and
naval gunfire support.
Royal Oak was sunk at her moorings in
Scapa Flow in October 1939 by a German
U-boat, and two other ships of the class were torpedoed during the war;
Resolution, hit by a
Vichy French submarine off
Dakar in 1940 and
Ramillies, attacked by a Japanese submarine in Madagascar in 1943, both survived.
Royal Sovereign ended the war in service with the
Soviet Navy as
Arkhangelsk, but she was returned to the Royal Navy in 1949, by which time her three surviving
sister ships had been
broken up for
scrap. She, too, was dismantled that year.
