RN Battleships: Revenge Class

[jbryce1437]

According to My trusty Admiralty Seamanship Manual she is moored with both Anchors down this is to reduce the sea room required for the ship to swing a mooring swivel is used to prevent both anchor cables from fouling each other .Simples
Townes

Ok thanks, she had three anchors, two on the starboard side and the one on the port side.

Jim

[Pelican]

Evidently it is called an anchor bridle.

Following from an American in N.Y.:

Here is a photo of HMS TEMERAIRE at anchor at Rosyth, 25 August 1917 using an anchor bridle.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item ... /205188081

Thank you everyone - we got there in the end.

[Pelican]

Naval divers ‘raise’ the White Ensign to mark Royal Oak tragedy


A fresh White Ensign today ‘flies’ on the Royal Oak after Navy divers completed their sacred duty in Scapa Flow.
Clearance Divers from the Northern Diving Group in Faslane returned to the wreck of the battleship to survey the sunken leviathan – and replace the White Ensign attached to the upturned hull.

Some 835 sailors – many of them boys – were killed when the dreadnought was sunk at anchor one Saturday night in October 1939 after a German submarine evaded the defences and slipped into the Royal Navy’s most important wartime base.

Continues, including photos, at - https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-l ... -royal-oak

Also the attached.

[Pelican]

Internationales Maritimes Museum Hamburg


The 8th ship of the British Royal Navy named HMS Royal Oak was a dreadnought battleship of the Revenge-class. This ships were smaller, slower but cheaper to produce than the previous Queen-Elizabeth-class. The construction of the Royal Oak started in January 1914 at the Devonport Royal Dockyard. She was launched in November of that same year and commissioned on May the 1st 1916, at time to participate in the Battle of Jutland.

Between May the 31st and June the 1st 1916 the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet clashed in the North Sea during the largest naval battle of World War I, and the last in history to be fought mainly by battleships. Almost 10.000 died and almost 175.000 tons of ships were sunk in a battle that did not change the status quo of the war. HMS Royal Oak was in the heat of the battle, but remained undamaged. She survived the war and underwent a thorough modernization in the early 1920s. In 1926 she was the showplace of „The Royal Oak Mutiny“. This was actually a personal discussion among officers that got out of hand, ended in front of a court martial, and was heavily ridiculed by the international press.
She participated in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, when she escorted ships transporting refugees. A new modernization of the ship took place in the late 1930s, but this could not solve her main problem: with a top speed of less than 20 knots, she had become truly obsolete.

The 25 years old ship remained anchored at the naval base of Scapa Flow. The base had been deemed impenetrable by submarines, which was terribly wrong. On the 14th of October 1939, Royal Oak was torpedoed by the German submarine U 47 an sank in 13 minutes. A total of 835 men died in that action and her wreck is a officially designated war grave. This has complicated the removal of the fuel and dangerous materials contained in the wreck, that have been an ecological hazard for decades.

This model, built by Helmut Schwarzer in a scale of 1:100, is part of our exhibit on the Battle of Jutland on deck 5 of the museum.

[Brian James]

Torpedoes are pictured being loaded into HMS Royal Oak after her commissioning in 1916. The Revenge-Class Battleships as built carried twenty-one 21” torpedoes fired through four submerged torpedo tubes, two on each side..During a refit in 1929, two of Royal Oaks’ torpedo tubes were removed, during her final refit between 1934-1936, the last two torpedo tubes were removed and four experimental 21” torpedo tubes were added above the water line forward of 'A' turret

[Brian James]

Revenge Class Dreadnought Battleship HMS Royal Sovereign pictured off Philadelphia Navy Yard post her major refit there, September 14th 1943.

[Brian James]

Revenge Class Dreadnought Battleship HMS Ramillies pictured off Molde, Norway in 1937.

[designeraccd]

Here is the RESOLUTION being towed by Barham, 26 Sept., 1940 (?). A French sub had torpedoed her off Dakar during the aborted invasion attempt by the Free French and British.

Also, a photo of her in better days.

Info about the attack from internet:

The attack on Dakar was code named “Operation Menace.” Free French troops led by Gen. de Gaulle were carried on ships escorted and supported by units of the Home Fleet and Force H under the command of Vice-Adm. John Cunningham. They included the battleships HMS Barham and HMS Resolution, the carrier HMS Ark Royal, three heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and 10 destroyers and other ships that carried the British landing force of 4,300 and 3,600 Free French troops.

The Vichy naval forces at Dakar were commanded by Pierre François Boisson. These forces included the unfinished battleship Richelieu, the Montcalm and George-Leygues, four destroyers and several submarines. There were also air units that included American-made Glenn Martin bombers and Curtiss Hawk 75A fighters.

The attack on Dakar began on Monday, Sept. 23, 1940. French aircraft flew off from the carrier HMS Ark Royal and landed at Ouakam aerodrome within Dakar. Propaganda leaflets were dropped over the town by Fleet Air Arm aircraft.

De Gaulle’s representatives entered Dakar Harbor in a motor boat flying the French flag, and a white flag of peace — but were fired upon — and nothing further was heard from them. The next step was a landing of British and the 2,400 Free French troops, which was repulsed after a short, but sharp, action, by French troops loyal to the Vichy Government. This led de Gaulle to declare that he did not want to shed the blood of Frenchmen for Frenchmen. The action now settled into a duel between the Royal Navy battleships and heavy cruisers, and the French battleship Richelieu, French cruisers, destroyers and submarines.

The guns of the French fort at Dakar were also involved in bombarding Royal Navy warships. As a result, a French submarine was sunk, a large destroyer disabled and the heavy cruiser HMS Cumberland heavily damaged.

On Sept. 24, there was a duel between the French battleship Richelieu and the British battleship HMS Barham. The Barham was hit twice by the shore batteries manned by ratings from the Richelieu. In the engagement the Richelieu was struck by two 15-inch shells from Barham, but the damage was not serious. During these engagements, the French made use of an ingenious device to distinguish the spotting of their shell bursts. Each salvo was marked by a certain color, Richelieu used yellow, the forts white, and the cruisers green and red.

The action continued on Sept. 25. As the Royal Navy force began to withdraw, the battleship HMS Resolution was struck by a French submarine torpedo, and took on a heavy list to port. In the meantime, Vichy French Martin bombers attacked the stricken ship and dropped large bombs. French fighters were also busy, one Curtiss Hawk fighter shot down a Royal Navy observation plane. The attacking force now left the Dakar area, with the battleship HMS Barham taking HMS Resolution under tow with the heavy cruiser HMAS Australia supporting them as they withdrew at a slow speed.

The attack on Dakar was a debacle for the Royal Navy. Two battleships were damaged, one of them seriously, two heavy cruisers were heavily damaged and two destroyers also seriously damaged. Aircraft were also destroyed and the landing force was repulsed.

OOPZ...........DFO

[Brian James]

Revenge Class Dreadnought Battleship HMS Resolution pictured in September 1933...Built at Palmers Shipbuilding & Iron Company Shipyards, Jarrow on Tyneside and commissioned in 1916.. Resolution saw no combat during the war as both the British and German fleets adopted a more cautious strategy after the Battle of Jutland in May owing to the increasing threat of naval mines and submarines..Resolution spent the 1920s and 1930s alternating between the Atlantic Fleet and the Mediterranean Fleet. Whilst serving in the Mediterranean in the early 1920s, the ship went to Turkey twice in response to crises arising from the Greco-Turkish War, including the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922. She also saw limited involvement during the Franco-British intervention in the Russian Civil War in the Black Sea in 1920. The ship's interwar career was otherwise uneventful. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Resolution was assigned to the Channel Force before being transferred to convoy escort duties in the North Atlantic. In May 1940, she participated in the Battles of Narvik until German air attacks drove her off. In June 1940, she was transferred to Force H, where she took part in the destruction of the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in July after the French surrender to Germany. She was also involved in the Battle of Dakar, an attempt to neutralise the French Battleship Richelieu that ended with Resolution's torpedoing by the French Submarine Bévéziers. Badly damaged, Resolution was repaired first in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and then the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard under Lend-Lease. Thereafter assigned to the Eastern Fleet, her age kept her from seeing action against the Japanese fleet, and she instead escorted convoys off the eastern coast of Africa. She returned to Britain in September 1943 and was decommissioned, thereafter seeing service with the training establishment HMS Imperieuse, a role she filled until February 1948, when she was paid off, sold for scrap, and broken up at Faslane.

[Brian James]

Sailors on Dreadnought Battleship HMS Revenge pictured falling in, in preparation for field exercises in 1940.