HMS Renown (1916): The Battlecruiser That Chased a Pocket Battleship, Traded Blows with Scharnhorst, and Carried Churchill to Cairo

From Cancelled Battleship to Rushed Battlecruiser

HMS Renown began life as an improved Revenge-class battleship, one of three ordered under the 1914 naval programme, only for the whole order to be suspended at the outbreak of the First World War before a keel had been laid.

When Admiral Lord Fisher became First Sea Lord, he had the whole design recast as a fast battlecruiser instead, to be built at Fairfield's Govan yard, with Director of Naval Construction Eustace Tennyson-d'Eyncourt drawing up plans that the builders promised, and very nearly delivered, in just fifteen months.

She was launched on 4 March 1916 and completed that September at a cost of over three million pounds, emerging as one of the fastest capital ships afloat, 794 feet overall, mounting six 15-inch guns in three twin turrets, and capable of 32 knots with a crew of 953, a battlecruiser born from a battleship that never was.

The timetable is the part worth pausing on. Both yards had enough out of the Director of Naval Construction's department to put keels down on 25 January 1915, working to a design that had not existed three months earlier, and Renown was in the water fourteen months later and in service twenty months after that keel was laid. There was supposed to have been a third of them, Resistance, and she was never built at all. What made the speed possible was the bargain at the heart of the design: six 15-inch guns and thirty-two knots on a hull armoured more like a large cruiser than a battleship. It was Fisher's bargain, he had made it before, and it is the reason this ship and her sister ended their lives forty years and half a world apart.

A Quiet War, a Grand Surrender

Renown joined the Grand Fleet's 1st Battlecruiser Squadron in the North Sea, and despite extensive patrolling, never fired a shot in anger during the First World War. She did witness one of the war's great anticlimactic spectacles, the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet in the Firth of Forth on 21 November 1918, a fleet that had spent the war largely avoiding exactly this kind of decisive confrontation.

That surrender is worth describing, because there has never been anything like it before or since. On 21 November 1918, under the codename Operation ZZ, Beatty took the Grand Fleet out into the Firth of Forth in two enormous columns and met the Germans coming the other way: 191 Allied warships and 70 German ones in the same stretch of water at the same time, the largest concentration of warships ever assembled. The German ships were checked to confirm they had been disarmed and were then escorted north between 25 and 27 November to be interned at Scapa Flow, seventy-four of them, under Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter. On 21 June 1919 von Reuter gave the order and they went to the bottom of the anchorage, where a good many of them still are.

A Royal Yacht in Everything but Name

The interwar years gave Renown an unusually glamorous secondary career, refitted with a squash court and cinema to carry the Prince of Wales on extended tours of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, the Philippines and Japan through the early 1920s, and later conveying the Duke and Duchess of York to Australia in 1927, a voyage marred by a boiler room fire on the return leg.

Between these royal engagements she underwent two major reconstructions, a thorough modernisation completed in 1926 and an even more extensive rebuild finished in 1939, closely modelled on sister-ship-in-spirit HMS Warspite's own transformation, which rebuilt her superstructure, replaced her machinery and re-armed her secondary battery entirely.

The Rebuild That Decided Which Sister Lived

The second reconstruction deserves rather more than a clause, because it is the single most consequential thing that ever happened to her. She went into Portsmouth in September 1936 and did not come out until August 1939. The bill was £3,088,008, which is more than she had cost to build in 1916. Her machinery came out entirely and was replaced with Parsons geared turbines and eight Admiralty three-drum boilers, a swap that saved something like 2,800 tons, and every ton of that saving was spent again: on armour, and on a new secondary battery of twenty 4.5-inch dual-purpose guns that could be pointed at aircraft. She was given a new superstructure and new funnels and came out looking like a different ship, which in most of the ways that mattered she was.

Her sister got none of it. HMS Repulse had her keel laid on the same day, to the same drawings, and her interwar refits were comparatively superficial: she kept her old machinery, her old superstructure and an anti-aircraft armament that belonged to another decade. On 10 December 1941 Japanese naval aircraft found her and the new battleship Prince of Wales off the east coast of Malaya, without air cover, and sank them both before lunch.

It would be too neat to say the refit is the whole difference. Repulse was lost above all because there were no fighters over her, and no amount of 4.5-inch guns would have changed that by itself. But the modern dual-purpose battery, the modern fire control and the modern armour that Renown was given in those three years at Portsmouth are precisely the things Repulse did not have when the aircraft arrived. One of them finished the war as a fleet flagship in the Indian Ocean and went to the breakers in 1948. The other has been on the bottom of the South China Sea since 1941, and is a designated war grave.

Hunting the Graf Spee

Recommissioned just before the Second World War began, Renown joined Force H at the Cape of Good Hope in November 1939 with the specific job of preventing the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee from breaking back into the South Atlantic after her depredations against British shipping.

On 2 December 1939, after a South African Air Force reconnaissance aircraft spotted the German liner Watussi trying to slip through the blockade off Cape Agulhas, HMS Sussex closed in and took off her crew as they scuttled their own ship rather than be captured, and Renown finished the job with her own guns to hasten the wreck's sinking. She remained on watch in the South Atlantic even after Graf Spee's scuttling off Montevideo that same month, a reminder that hunting one raider still meant guarding against others.

Trading Fire With Scharnhorst and Gneisenau

Renown's most direct combat came during the Norwegian Campaign, in what became known as the Action off Lofoten. As flagship of Admiral Sir William Whitworth's squadron of battlecruiser and destroyers, she encountered the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau on 9 April 1940. She spotted the German ships and opened fire first, only to be struck first herself by two 28-centimetre shells that caused relatively minor damage.

Renown gave better than she got, striking Gneisenau with one 15-inch and two secondary shells that knocked out the German ship's main fire-control director, before the two faster German ships used the heavy weather to break off the action after ninety minutes, a rare instance of a British capital ship trading direct broadsides with German heavy units early in the war.

Force H, Bismarck, and the Mediterranean

From August 1940, Renown served with Force H out of Gibraltar, taking part in the inconclusive Battle of Cape Spartivento, bombarding Genoa in February 1941, and covering carrier operations flying Hurricane fighters into besieged Malta.

Force H: An Enquiry, a Cathedral and a Signal

Cape Spartivento, on 27 November 1940, was inconclusive in the way that most naval actions are, and what followed it was not. Somerville had his flag in Renown, covering a convoy through to Malta, when he ran into an Italian squadron with two battleships in it. There was a short exchange, the Italians turned away, and Somerville broke off the chase and went back to his convoy, which was the thing he had been sent to protect. When he reached Malta he discovered that the Admiralty, pushed by Churchill, had sent out a board of enquiry under Admiral Lord Cork to examine his conduct. It vindicated him on every point. Cork had already sent Somerville a signal congratulating him on a successful action, which rather told you how it was going to end. HMS Ark Royal (91), HMS Sheffield (C24) and HMS Manchester (15) were all there that day and all have accounts here.

The Genoa raid was called Operation Grog, which tells you something about the mood. Force H sailed from Gibraltar on 31 January 1941 and on the morning of 9 February Renown, the battleship Malaya, Ark Royal and Sheffield, screened by ten destroyers, arrived off the Italian coast and shelled the harbour while the carrier's aircraft went for Livorno and laid mines off La Spezia. Four merchant ships were sunk in Genoa and eighteen damaged. One of Malaya's salvoes fell within fifty yards of the Italian battleship Caio Duilio, sitting in a dry dock under repair, and did not touch her. The Italian fleet came out to intercept, failed to find anybody, and Force H was back in Gibraltar on the 11th.

Two other things happened that morning. A targeting error aboard Malaya put a 15-inch armour-piercing shell into Genoa Cathedral. It did not explode. It is still there, on display inside the building it failed to bring down, which is either a miracle or a comment on fuse design depending on your temperament. And on the ground in Genoa, 144 civilians were killed and 272 injured. Bombarding a port from the sea in 1941 meant shelling a city, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than letting the phrase bombarding Genoa do the work.

In May and June 1941 she joined the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck, and went on to escort Mediterranean convoys and support Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, in October 1942, before transferring to the Home Fleet to help cover the perilous Arctic convoy routes to the Soviet Union.

Her part in the Bismarck chase was defined by an order not to fight. Force H was sent north from Gibraltar, Somerville flying his flag in Renown, and at 11:45 the Admiralty signalled that Renown was not to become engaged with Bismarck unless the German ship was already heavily engaged by King George V or by Rodney. The reason was three days old and entirely fresh: HMS Hood (51) had blown up in the Denmark Strait in a few minutes with 1,415 men aboard, and nobody was going to put another lightly armoured battlecruiser in front of Bismarck's guns to find out whether it happened twice. So the only capital ship in Force H spent the most famous chase in naval history escorting a carrier, and it was that carrier's Swordfish that jammed Bismarck's rudder and finished the argument.

Carrying Churchill Across the World

In 1943, freshly refitted, Renown took on transport duties of a very different kind, carrying Winston Churchill and his staff from the Quebec Conference in September and on to the Cairo Conference that November, adding wartime statesmen to a passenger list that already included two future kings.

In 1944 she joined the Eastern Fleet as flagship of the 1st Battle Squadron, taking part in the carrier strike on Sabang and bombardments of Japanese-held positions on Car Nicobar and Port Blair, before a final Atlantic recall in early 1945 in case German heavy ships attempted one last desperate sortie.

Those bombardments were bigger affairs than the sentence suggests. On 25 July 1944 she was one of the heavy ships in Operation Crimson off Sabang, in company with the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, the French Richelieu, the Dutch Tromp and six cruisers, the whole force closing the coast and shelling it in daylight after the carrier aircraft had finished. In October she was covering Operation Millet against the Nicobars, which was a deliberate piece of misdirection timed to make the Japanese look west while the Americans went ashore at Leyte. One of the destroyers screening her on both occasions was HMS Relentless (H85/F185), whose own account picks the story up from the small end of the fleet.

A Meeting of Great Powers, and a Quiet End

Renown's war ended with one more historic moment, hosting a meeting between King George VI and President Harry Truman aboard on 2 August 1945, shortly after she had been placed in reserve.

The scene at Plymouth was a good deal odder than the sentence allows. Truman had flown out of Potsdam to rejoin the cruiser USS Augusta for the passage home, and it was arranged that the King would come out to meet him. So on 2 August 1945 George VI received the President of the United States aboard Renown in Plymouth Sound, with the Commander-in-Chief Plymouth, Admiral Sir Ralph Leatham, and the American Secretary of State, James Byrnes, in attendance, and afterwards the King went across to Augusta. It was Truman's first visit to Britain. In the President's luggage was the decision to use the atomic bomb, which nobody in the world had yet seen used, and which Admiral Leahy of his own party had been briskly describing as a professor's dream that would never go off. Hiroshima was four days away.

Her disposal was announced in January 1948 and she was towed to Faslane for scrapping that August, going down in the history books as the last British battlecruiser ever to be broken up, closing out the entire type she had represented since her hurried wartime construction three decades earlier.

The phrase the last British battlecruiser to be broken up is doing a lot of quiet work, so it is worth unpacking. The battlecruiser was Fisher's idea and it lasted about forty years, and the bargain it rested on, armour traded away for speed, was tested repeatedly and failed almost every time it was. Three of them blew up at Jutland in an afternoon: Indefatigable, Queen Mary and Invincible. Hood went the same way in 1941. Repulse was sunk from the air the same year. Renown is the one that got away with it, and she got away with it largely because somebody in 1936 was persuaded to spend more on rebuilding her than she had cost in the first place. When she went up the Gareloch in August 1948 the idea went with her, and nobody has built one since.