RN Battleships: Revenge Class

[Brian James]

Revenge Class Battleship HMS Royal Sovereign pictured at Crikvenica,Yugoslavia (Now Croatia) in 1930.

[timlewin]

undeniable that in those days when we showed the flag, it was a big one, and really meant something. I believe Yugoslavia was in those times still a kingdom, now doubt with some distant relationship to Victoria?

[Brian James]

Revenge Class Dreadnought Battleship HMS Ramillies pictured at Queens Quay,Belfast c1924.

[Brian James]

Nevada Class Battleship USS Oklahoma pictured at Portsmouth,UK with Revenge Class Battleship HMS Royal Oak in the foreground,on June 19th 1936...Both Battleships have a very similar profile,post Oklahoma's modernisation refit.
On December 7th1941, Oklahoma was sunk by several torpedoes during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Torpedoes from torpedo bomber aircraft hit the Oklahoma's hull and the ship capsized. Survivors jumped off the ship 50 feet into burning hot water or crawled across mooring lines that connected Oklahoma and Maryland. Some sailors inside escaped when rescuers drilled holes and opened hatches to rescue them. A total of 429 crew died when she capsized and sank in Battleship Row. In 1943, Oklahoma was righted and salvaged. Unlike most of the other Battleships that were recovered following Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma was too damaged to return to duty. Her wreck was eventually stripped of her remaining armament and superstructure before being sold for scrap in 1946. The hulk sank in a storm in 1947, while being towed from Oahu, Hawaii, to a breakers yard in San Francisco Bay.
On October 14th 1939, Royal Oak was anchored at Scapa Flow in Orkney, Scotland, when she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-47. Of Royal Oak's complement of 1,234 men and boys, 833 were killed that night or died later of their wounds. The loss of the outdated ship—the first of the five Royal Navy Battleships and Battlecruisers sunk in the Second World War—did little to affect the numerical superiority enjoyed by the British navy and its Allies, but the sinking had considerable effect on wartime morale. The raid made an immediate celebrity and war hero out of the U-boat commander, Günther Prien, who became the first German Submarine officer to be awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. Before the sinking of Royal Oak, the Royal Navy had considered the naval base at Scapa Flow impregnable to submarine attack, and U-47's raid demonstrated that the German Navy was capable of bringing the war to British home waters. The shock resulted in rapid changes to dockland security and the construction of the Churchill Barriers around Scapa Flow.The wreck of Royal Oak, a designated war grave, lies almost upside down in 100 feet of water with her hull 16 feet beneath the surface. In an annual ceremony to mark the loss of the ship, Royal Navy divers place a White Ensign underwater at her stern. Unauthorised divers are prohibited from approaching the wreck at any time under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986.

[designeraccd]

Probably the most "modernized" of the 5 Rs; yet she was the only one sunk! Go figure... DFO

[Pelican]

Royal Oak & Hood
Today I was passed the attached composite image of Royal Oak created from 3 fairly recent photos taken of her. I am a little puzzled about the turrets as most photos that I have seen of big warships that have turned turtle show that they usually detach?
Being a Ganges Boy I researched the number Boys lost in the Hood and the Royal Oak. This was some time ago so perhaps recent material may show different numbers but I doubt it.

[Brian James]

Revenge Class Battleship HMS Royal Oak pictured returning the body of Norway's Queen Maud to Oslo in 1938.

[jbryce1437]

This postcard was purchased by Tony Foster, who joined the Royal Navy at HMS Ganges in 1937. His first draft was to HMS Ramillies.
This image was forwarded to me in an email by Pelican.

Jim

1937 PHILIP ANTHONY (TONY) FOSTER POST CARD HMS RAMILLIES.jpg

Tony Foster 042 a.jpg

[Brian James]

A pre-war photo of Revenge Class Battleship HMS Royal Oak conducting gunnery practice.

[Blackbat242]

Today I was passed the attached composite image of Royal Oak created from 3 fairly recent photos taken of her. I am a little puzzled about the turrets as most photos that I have seen of big warships that have turned turtle show that they usually detach?

It depends on their construction.

While most post-WW2 battleships lost their turrets when they rolled over, many pre/WWI-era battleships didn't.

Note that Oklahoma didn't, and neither did Leonardo Da Vinci, Mutsu, and Nagato... it depended on whether they had retaining clips holding the turret structure to the roller path in the barbette or not (and sometimes on the turret rotating mass weight vs clip strength ratio). Bismark & Tirpitz in particular are known to not have had such clips, relying on gravity and the weight of the turret structure to keep the turret from dislodging in heavy seas.

g410533.jpg

From an article on the salvage of LDV:

.Now that it was obvious that the hull could be floated, it was time to address another problem: upside down, the ship would draw at least 50 feet of water, and the drydock was only 40 feet deep. In addition, the water was only 40 feet deep, and it was a mile and a half from the wreck to the drydock. General Ferrati and Major Gianelli had a plan: they would cut away the funnels, superstructure, and turrets to reduce the ship's draft.
.....
All through 1918, a team of 150 men worked to remove the turret retention clips, detach the masts, and cut away the funnels and superstructure from inside the overturned ship. These items would be left in the mud when the hull re-floated, and could be recovered later.

While turret retention on those two may have been assisted by the ships rolling onto a shallow harbor bottom, these are by no means the only recorded examples (Mutsu capsized in a deeper harbor, fully sunk her hull was fully covered by 36' of water... Nagato capsized in sufficient water to cover her with 110' of water, and both ships' turrets remained in place).