HMS Resolution (09): Torpedoed by the French Navy She Had Just Been Fighting

A Battleship Too Late for Jutland

HMS Resolution was a Revenge-class battleship laid down at Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company in Jarrow in November 1913, launched in January 1915 and commissioned in December 1916, joining the Grand Fleet at Rosyth just after the Battle of Jutland had already been fought.

With both British and German fleets grown wary of mines and submarines in the war's later stages, Resolution's First World War amounted to little more than a single failed convoy escort operation in April 1918, her considerable firepower never put to the test in the conflict she had been built for.

An Accidental Sinking of Her Own Side

The interwar years brought Resolution a mixture of routine fleet duty and ceremonial appearances at the Silver Jubilee and Coronation reviews, interrupted on 10 January 1924 by tragedy off Portland Bill. The submarine HMS L24 had just finished a mock torpedo attack and was coming up to periscope depth, unaware that Resolution lay directly in her path. A lookout on the battleship reported a disturbance in the water, then felt only "a slight bump" as twenty-nine thousand tons of steel sliced into the submarine's hull; L24's hydroplanes were later found jammed hard to dive, her crew's last and failed attempt to get clear. All 43 men aboard, aged between 21 and 47, went down with her, and the search was called off within two days once worsening weather made further hope pointless.

What could be pieced together afterwards is thin and awful. L24 had been taking part in Exercise GA, which was about improving submarine tactics against aircraft, and she had just carried out a mock attack on another ship. She appears to have had no idea where Resolution was. Somebody aboard saw the battleship at the last moment, because her hydroplanes were found set hard to dive: a crash dive begun with nowhere near enough time or water. On Resolution's side there was almost nothing to find. The ship was examined and her anchor chain was discovered to have fractured at the very bottom, and that was the physical proof that a collision had happened at all.

A week later, on 17 January 1924, Major Leslie Hore-Belisha asked in the Commons whether the Admiralty was working on any means by which a disabled submarine might signal her position to ships on the surface. The First Lord, Leo Amery, replied that several such devices already existed, and then added the thing everybody actually wanted to know: that in L24's case there was no reasonable doubt that the flooding of the vessel and the death of the crew had followed immediately upon the collision. It was intended as a mercy and it is the only one available. Nobody in L24 spent any time waiting.

She also saw limited duty responding to the Greco-Turkish War and the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922, and brief involvement off the Russian Black Sea coast during the Russian Civil War in 1920.

Guarding the Bank of England, Then Bombed at Narvik

The Second World War found Resolution recommissioned as flagship of the 3rd Battle Squadron at Portland on 3 September 1939, the very day war was declared, and her first job had nothing to do with guns: that October she loaded 148 boxes of gold bullion, worth some £2 million, and carried it across the Atlantic to Halifax alongside the cruisers Emerald and Enterprise and the carrier HMS Hermes, part of Britain's quiet effort to keep its reserves out of reach of invasion. She spent the following months on more conventional business, escorting troop convoys packed with Canadian soldiers, among them over 7,000 men aboard convoy TC1 that December.

That gold run was one small part of a very large operation. Britain spent 1939 and 1940 shipping the contents of the Bank of England's vaults across the Atlantic ahead of an invasion that never came, in warships because warships were the only things fast enough and armed enough to be trusted with it. Two of Resolution's companions on that traffic have accounts here: HMS Emerald (D66) and HMS Enterprise (D52), and so does her own sister HMS Revenge (06). Not a single ounce of it was lost.

By April 1940 she was needed rather more urgently. Refitted and sent north to relieve the battleship HMS Warspite off Narvik during the Norwegian campaign, Resolution spent May bombarding German positions ashore at Ankenes and Bjerkvik in support of the Allied landings. The Luftwaffe found her in return: anchored in Tjeldsund on 16 May, she was struck by a 1,000kg bomb dropped from a Junkers Ju 88 that punched through three decks before it exploded, killing one man and wounding around two dozen more. She stayed afloat and operational, covered the evacuation convoys out of Narvik, and was back at Scapa Flow inside the week.

Helping Destroy the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir

With France's sudden collapse in 1940 leaving her powerful navy in uncertain hands, Resolution joined Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville's newly formed Force H, alongside the battlecruiser HMS Hood, the carrier HMS Ark Royal and the battleship HMS Valiant, for one of the war's most controversial actions: the attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir on 3 July 1940, launched to prevent French warships falling into German hands.

Resolution's shells helped destroy the French battleship Bretagne, a bitter action against a recent ally that killed around 1,300 French sailors and remains one of the more painful episodes of the entire war for both nations involved.

One of Resolution's own thirty-six broadsides that afternoon found Bretagne's magazine directly; she blew apart and rolled over within minutes. Resolution then joined the pursuit of the fleeing battlecruiser Strasbourg, but the old battleship, designed for an entirely different kind of war two decades earlier, had no hope of catching her, and Strasbourg reached Toulon safely. Within a month, Resolution's war took a rather gentler turn: escorting the carrier Argus on Operation Hurry, she helped deliver twelve Hurricane fighters within flying range of a beleaguered Malta.

Everything that happened at Mers-el-Kebir happened in about ten minutes, and the rest of Force H is here as well. HMS Hood (51) was Somerville's flagship that afternoon, eleven months from being blown up herself in the Denmark Strait, and HMS Ark Royal (91) flew the spotting and strike aircraft. The Malta run that followed a month later was flown off HMS Argus (I49), a converted Italian liner hull that was by then the oldest carrier in the world and was still flying aeroplanes off in 1944.

Torpedoed by the Navy She Had Just Fought

Barely three months later, Resolution found herself on the receiving end of French firepower. During the Battle of Dakar, part of the ill-fated Operation Menace of September 1940, British and Free French forces tried to bring the West African port over to the Allied cause; Resolution and her sister HMS Barham bombarded Vichy shore batteries on the Île de Gorée and at Cap Manuel, and traded fire with the powerful Vichy French battleship Richelieu, still unfinished but very much able to shoot back.

On 25 September, at ten past nine in the morning, the Vichy submarine Bévéziers fired a spread of four torpedoes from 2,500 yards; three missed, but the fourth struck Resolution amidships on her port side, tearing a hole some 20 feet by 12 feet in her hull. She took on a 12-degree list and her main armament jammed solid, and one man was killed, but her crew fought the flooding hard enough to bring her limping along under her own power before HMS Barham took her under tow for Freetown at a crawl of six knots.

At Freetown, divers confirmed the damage and patched the hole with concrete, just enough to allow her north again, escorted by the repair ship Vindictive, for sturdier repairs at Gibraltar. She still was not fighting fit: an air raid caught her in Portsmouth in early 1941 shortly after she arrived from Gibraltar, so the Admiralty sent her across the Atlantic instead, to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, for a proper wartime modernisation under Lend-Lease. American yard workers re-elevated her forward turrets from 20 to 30 degrees, adding some 10,000 yards to her maximum range, fitted radar and a thicket of new anti-aircraft guns, swapped her elderly Swordfish spotter plane for a Walrus, and removed her now-obsolete torpedo tubes altogether. Resolution did not rejoin the fleet at Scapa Flow until the end of November 1941, fourteen months after Bévéziers had first found her, a costly reminder of how fluid and dangerous the loyalties of the former French fleet had become.

It is worth saying what Operation Menace actually cost, because the article of faith at the time was that Dakar would come over without much of a fight. It did not. Over three days the Vichy garrison held, Resolution was torpedoed, HMS Barham (04) was hit by shellfire from Richelieu and the shore batteries, a destroyer was damaged and the whole thing was called off on 25 September with nothing achieved. The damage was not only to ships. Menace did lasting harm to de Gaulle's standing in Washington, where it was taken as evidence that the Free French could neither keep a secret nor deliver a colony, and Churchill, who had pushed hard for it, spent a good deal of political capital explaining it afterwards.

The submarine that did it did not have long. Beveziers was commanded that morning by Capitaine de corvette Lancelot, and she went on serving Vichy in African waters. On 5 May 1942, in the opening hours of Operation Ironclad, the British landings at Diego Suarez in Madagascar, she was caught by Swordfish and Albacore torpedo bombers flown off HMS Illustrious (87) and sunk. She was raised the following year, laid up, and broken up in 1946. Twenty months separated the torpedo that nearly finished Resolution from the aircraft that finished Beveziers, and both were fired by people who had been allies in 1939.

Convoy Duty in the Indian Ocean

Ordered out to the Eastern Fleet in January 1942 just as Singapore fell to Japan, Resolution's passage south was eventful enough on its own: escorting troop convoy WS 15 through a Force 10 gale, she was still in company when a U-boat torpedoed the liner Llangibby Castle nearby. Two months later, based at the secret fleet anchorage of Addu Atoll in the Maldives, Resolution and her sister battleships HMS Ramillies, Revenge and Royal Sovereign formed Force B, the Eastern Fleet's slow, elderly rearguard; when a sighting report of Admiral Nagumo's carrier force, the same one that had struck Pearl Harbor four months before, reached Somerville's flagship, the whole fleet scattered back to Addu Atoll rather than risk a fight none of the old R-class ships could have survived.

Force B needs explaining, because on paper it looks like a battle squadron and it was really a liability with guns on it. Addu Atoll, at the southern end of the Maldives, was a secret anchorage the Royal Navy called Port T, and in April 1942 Somerville divided his Eastern Fleet into a fast Force A and a slow Force B. Force B was Resolution and her three surviving sisters, HMS Ramillies (07), Revenge and Royal Sovereign. All four had been completed in 1916 and all four still had their original machinery. They could manage about twenty knots on a good day, their armour had been designed against the sort of shellfire seen at Jutland, and their anti-aircraft outfits were an afterthought.

Against them was Nagumo's carrier force, the same ships and largely the same aircrew that had flattened Pearl Harbor four months earlier, five fleet carriers with something like three hundred aircraft between them, moving at thirty knots. Somerville understood the arithmetic perfectly well. When the sighting report came in, the entire Eastern Fleet withdrew to Addu Atoll rather than offer battle, which was the correct decision and cannot have been a comfortable one to make. Four elderly battleships caught in the open by that force would have produced a casualty list to rival anything in the war, and no Japanese ship would have been in any danger at all.

Resolution spent much of the rest of her war with the Eastern Fleet, escorting convoys off East Africa alongside her Revenge-class sisters and, in February 1943, providing distant cover as part of Operation Pamphlet, helping see the 9th Australian Division safely home from Egypt to Australia.

By this stage of the war she was considered too old and too slow for fleet action against the Imperial Japanese Navy, and her role settled firmly into the valuable but unglamorous business of convoy protection.

Training Ship, and a Gun That Outlived Her

Resolution came home to the Clyde on 9 September 1943 and was paid off from front-line service, spending her final years attached first to the stoker-training establishment HMS Shrapnel at Southampton and then, from May 1944, to HMS Imperieuse at Gareloch alongside her sister Revenge, her main guns stripped out to help arm the naval bombardment force being assembled for D-Day. She moved with the training establishment to Devonport that December and stayed there training new-entry sailors, rather than fighting battles, until she was sold to Metal Industries for scrap on 5 May 1948 and arrived at Faslane eight days later to be broken up.

One of her original 15-inch guns had already had a life of its own by then. Fitted to Resolution back in 1915, it fired its first shots in anger against targets in the Sea of Marmora in 1920, came ashore during a 1938 refit, and sat in storage for six years before the Admiralty found it fresh work in 1944, mounted aboard the monitor HMS Roberts in time for D-Day, where it helped bombard the Houlgate battery east of Sword Beach and shelled German positions inland near Caen through that summer, before Roberts and her gun went on to support the Allied assault on Walcheren that November. It survives today, mounted outside the Imperial War Museum in London beside a sister gun from HMS Ramillies, a fitting physical afterword to a battleship whose own war ran from an accidental friendly-fire sinking to a properly dramatic torpedoing by the navy of a country Britain had, until recently, called an ally.

That gun is not alone. Its neighbour outside the Imperial War Museum came out of HMS Ramillies (07), who was at Normandy herself and fired 1,002 rounds from her main battery over the course of that campaign. Between the pair of them they cover most of what the Revenge class ever actually did: two barrels, made before the Somme, still standing in a London park well over a century later, while the ships that carried them went for scrap within four years of the war ending.