page_title: Revenge-class battleship
section_title: Second World War
hierarchical_section_title: Revenge-class battleship / Service history / Second World War
caption_attribution_description: English: The Royal Navy during the Second World War HMS RESOLUTION and HMS FORMIDABLE of the eastern fleet sailing in the Indian Ocean.
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: With the start of war in August 1939, Revenge and Resolution were assigned to the Channel Force, based in Portland, while Royal Sovereign served with the Home Fleet. Ramillies was by this time at Alexandria, Egypt, where she remained until early October, when she was sent to search for the German heavy cruiser Admiral Graf Spee in the Indian Ocean. At the same time, Resolution and Revenge were sent to the South Atlantic Command to participate in the hunt for Admiral Graf Spee, but before they arrived they were sent to the North Atlantic Escort Force to cover convoys from Canada to Britain. They carried gold bullion to Canada to safeguard it during the war during this period. Royal Oak remained in Scapa Flow during this period, and on 14 October, the U-boat U-47 broke through the harbour defences and torpedoed Royal Oak, sinking her at her mooring and killing 833. Ramillies covered troop convoys from Australia to Egypt, including those that carried the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force and the Second Australian Imperial Force in late 1939 and early 1940.
  Resolution took part in the Norwegian Campaign, seeing action at the Battles of Narvik in April 1940. The following month she was struck by a German bomb, but was not seriously damaged. Also in May, Ramillies was assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet in anticipation of Italy's entry into the war. The following month, Resolution had joined Force H, and on 3 July she participated in the destruction of the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir. Following the Italian declaration of war, Ramillies bombarded Italian positions in Italian Libya in mid-August. In September, Resolution steamed south to Dakar with Force H to neutralise French warships there, but during the Battle of Dakar, she was torpedoed and badly damaged by a French submarine. In October, Revenge bombarded the port of Cherbourg in occupied France to destroy German supplies being assembled for the planned invasion of Britain, Operation Sealion. Ramillies was present with the convoy that was attacked by Italian warships during the Battle of Cape Spartivento in late November but she was not involved in the battle.
  Wartime changes to the battleships were generally limited to augmenting their deck armour, their anti-aircraft suites and the addition of radars. Each ship received a pair of quadruple two-pounder mounts and anywhere from 10 (Revenge and Resolution) to 42 (Royal Sovereign) 20-millimetre (0.8 in) Oerlikon guns. Radars were added beginning in 1941, including early-warning, search and fire-control systems. Armour plates 2 inches (51 mm) thick were added over the magazines on Resolution, Royal Sovereign and, partially, in Ramillies in 1941–1942. To increase the accommodations available for the greatly-enlarged wartime crew, the four forward six-inch guns were removed from each ship in 1943, except for Resolution, which only lost two guns.
  In late 1940, Revenge and Royal Sovereign returned to convoy escort duties in the North Atlantic, and Ramillies joined them in January 1941 after completing a refit. During this period, Ramillies discouraged the two German Scharnhorst-class battleships from attacking a convoy she escorted. Revenge and Ramillies were at sea during Operation Rheinübung, the sortie of the German battleship Bismarck in May and they joined the hunt for the ship, but did not locate her. Resolution spent much of 1941 under repair, first in Freetown, South Africa and then the United States. Late in the year, the Admiralty decided to deploy the four Revenge-class ships to the Far East as the 3rd Battle Squadron in anticipation of war with Japan. They arrived in early 1942, by which time the Japanese had already declared war and inflicted a string of defeats on the Allied countries in the region. The ships fled in advance of the Japanese Indian Ocean raid, as they were no match for the aircraft carriers of the powerful 1st Air Fleet. The battleships thereafter primarily operated off the coast of Africa, escorting troop convoys. Ramillies was present during the Battle of Madagascar in May, where she was torped
caption: Resolution and the aircraft carrier Formidable sailing in the Indian Ocean in 1942–1943
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