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, ceremonial appearances at the Silver Jubilee and Coronation reviews, and a genuinely unfortunate accident in January 1924, when she rammed and sank the British submarine HMS L24 in the English Channel, a sobering reminder that a battleship's sheer size made her dangerous to friendly vessels even without a shot being fired. 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.

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 Force H 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.

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 in late September 1940, as British and Free French forces attempted to bring the West African port over to the Allied cause, Resolution engaged the Vichy French battleship Richelieu. On 25 September, the French submarine Beveziers launched a spread of torpedoes that struck Resolution amidships on her port side, causing severe flooding and reducing her to just twelve knots. She was towed to Freetown for six months of repairs before sailing on to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard for a further, more extensive modernisation under Lend-Lease arrangements, not returning to service until September 1941, a costly reminder of how fluid and dangerous the loyalties of the former French fleet had become.

Convoy Duty in the Indian Ocean

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, helping convey the 9th Australian Division home from Egypt to Australia as part of Operation Pamphlet. 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 returned home in September 1943 and was reduced to reserve that October, spending her final active years attached to the training establishment HMS Imperieuse with her main guns removed for use aboard other active warships. She was paid off in February 1948 and broken up at Faslane that May. One of her 15-inch guns found a fitting afterlife mounted on the monitor HMS Roberts, and today survives on public display at the Imperial War Museum in London, a lasting physical reminder of a battleship whose war took her from an accidental friendly-fire sinking to a genuinely dramatic torpedoing by the navy of a country Britain had, until recently, called an ally.