HMS Resolution

History: HMS Resolution (pennant number: 09) was a super-dreadnought of the Revenge class built for the Royal Navy during the First World War in the mid-1910s. The five ships of the class were developments of the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships, with reductions in size and speed to offset increases in armour protection whilst retaining the same battery of eight 15-inch (381 mm) guns. She was laid down in November 1913, was launched in January 1915, and was commissioned into the fleet in December 1916, too late to see action at the Battle of Jutland earlier that year. As both British and German fleets adopted a more cautious strategy after the battle owing to the increasing threat of naval mines and submarines, Resolution saw no combat during the war.

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, the ship 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.

Class: The Revenge-class battleships (listed as Royal Sovereign class in several editions of Jane’s Fighting Ships, as with the 1919 and 1931 editions, and sometimes also known as the "R" class) were five battleships of the Royal Navy, ordered as World War I loomed, and launched in 1914–1916. 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.

The ships of the class were slower and smaller than the preceding Queen Elizabeth-class battleships. Despite sometimes being referred to as the "Royal Sovereign class", official documents from World War I clearly state that the class was known as the Revenge class; the confusion apparently even extended to the Grand Fleet‘s commander, Admiral of the Fleet Jellicoe, as they are mentioned in both fashions in his voluminous The Grand Fleet 1914–1916: Its Creation, Development and Work.

Nationality: The United Kingdom, made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, is an island nation in northwestern Europe. England – birthplace of Shakespeare and The Beatles – is home to the capital, London, a globally influential centre of finance and culture. England is also site of Neolithic Stonehenge, Bath’s Roman spa and centuries-old universities at Oxford and Cambridge.