The Battle-Cruiser HMS Renown, 1916–48

Peter C. Smith

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Maritime
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781848845206
• eBook ISBN: 9781844687206
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"A successful book, giving a picture of life on a major warship, as well as a different view of some of the main naval actions of the Second World War." —HistoryOfWar.org 
This is the story of the Royal Navy battle-cruiser HMS Renown, a famous ship with a long and distinguished operational career. Originally built for the First World War she subsequently served in the post-war fleet and took royalty around the world. Modernized just in time for World War Two, she re-joined the fleet in September, 1939 and for the first two years of the war her speed and heavy gun armament made her one of the most important ships of the fleet. She escorted the famous carrier Ark Royal for most of her illustrious career as flagship of Force "H" in the Mediterranean and took part in many stirring battles and convoy actions. Later she covered Russian convoys in the Arctic before going out to the Indian Ocean where she took part in attacks on Japanese targets in the Indian Ocean. Her final duties included the meeting of King George VI and President Truman in 1945. A host of fresh detail coupled with eyewitness memoirs from former crew members make this an outstanding warship biography.
"If you like a thorough, detailed history of a famous, long lived fighting ship, this volume will give you just what you're looking for. It also provides an insightful look at some of the Royal Navy's more interesting naval leaders, including Admirals Cunningham and Somerville." —IPMS/USA

CHAPTER ONE

The Battle-Cruisers

The warships of the sailing age were both functional and beautiful creations, easy to romanticise in print and painting. However, the coming of steam marred that and produced some of the ugliest vessels ever to sail the world’s oceans. Further, in the second half of the twentieth century a similarly ugly transformation from accepted aesthetic values too place. With the standardisation of battleship types a new order of strictly stern and forbidding basics laid hold of British warships, which were, nevertheless, not without a certain grandeur. The advent of the little torpedo-boat destroyers, with their slim racing hulls, restored a little excitement to warship design, but not until the Dreadnought era did the larger vessels approach an awesome majesty to the sailor’s eye.

With the advent of the battle-cruisers the designers and builders once more produced ships that were both sleek and powerful: the most famous of these being the Lion and Tiger. The ‘Splendid Cats’ was a popular term in the press for them and this conveyed the impression they made on the eye. Not surprisingly this combination of beauty, speed and apparent power caught the public imagination and the battle-cruisers became associated with all that was best with the Royal Navy in the pre-Great War era.

It was, of course, the quest for speed that resulted in their unique lines and this reflected the will of their creator, Admiral Sir John Fisher. Speed was one of Fisher’s gods, striking power was another and he spurned compromises that detracted from both. It was inevitable that in initiating the battle-cruiser both would have priority over protection. This would not have mattered so much had these ships not represented such a colossal outlay of national wealth. It was unthinkable to the public, to Parliament, and even to many admirals, that such enormous vessels should shun the ultimate clash of arms: a major fleet action against the Kaiser’s battleships. Yet shun them they were meant to do in the nature of their duties as laid down at the time.

When Admiral Fisher, a man of towering genius, assumed the mantle of First Sea Lord, on Trafalgar Day, 1904, he was at last able to put through many of the sweeping reforms his agile brain had deemed absolutely vital, to sweep away the Victorian cobwebs after a century without battle in time to meet what he regarded as the inevitable challenge of the new German Navy.

Many of his reforms are still praised today but others were bitterly criticised at the time. Two examples are the all big-gun battleship (the Dreadnought type), which was seen as throwing away an overwhelming British lead in the number of capital ships and the abolition of the light-cruiser type; a decision that was soon found wanting. But it is for the initiation of the battle-cruiser type, the project dearest to his heart, that the most lasting criticism has come.

In the 1890s when the great ships of Sir William White ruled the oceans and formed the core of the battle fleet, the most likely challenger to Britain at sea still remained the ancient one of France, with Russia a close second, Japan and America unconsidered (they hardly merited the description naval power in the nineteenth century) and Germany, still on the threshold of greatness at sea, nominally friendly. The battleships, as always, could be relied upon to defeat any combination of these powers in a straight fight but the long and vulnerable sea-lanes of the Empire were exposed to raids by powerful cruisers.

To counter such threats the armoured cruiser was evolved, and large numbers of such vessels were built in reply to each foreign cruiser-building programme. As with the battleship itself, the type rapidly grew in size and power, but always it was designed as a hunter of the commerce raider on the distant oceans and not as an auxiliary to the main line of battle. Nonetheless the type so increased in potential during the early years of the twentieth century as to be on a par with a second-class battleship.

With the advent of the Dreadnought battleship the armoured cruiser still had the same function to perform; the equivalent to the capital ship in armoured cruisers was the Duke of Edinburgh class, with a tonnage of 12,590 tons (larger than many old battleships still in service), an armament of 9.2-inch and 6-inch guns and a speed of 23 knots. This type was also developed, step-by-step, with the increase in battleship dimensions and power, through the Warrior Class (13,200 tons, 9.2-inch and 7.5-inch guns) to the Defence class (14,600 tons, with similar speed and gunpower). But with the coming of Fisher such (to him) half-hearted compromises were to be done away with once and for all.

In simple terms, Fisher’s new concept was a vessel of battleship size, armed with the same main armaments as the latest battleships, but with the speed, or better, of the latest cruisers. Striking power and the speed to enable them to dictate the course of action was what he was striving for. This was epitomised in one of his many famous slogans:

‘Hit first, hit hard and go on hitting.’

He who got in the first telling blows would win the day, he decreed, and it was with this in mind that he presented his new idea in warship construction, which he christened HMS Uncatchable. Indeed the first battle-cruisers were known pure and simply as ‘improved armour cruisers’ thus showing their simple lineal descent. It was not until they were in service that the term battleship cruiser came to be used, later giving way to the universal term, battle-cruiser.

As in the case of the Dreadnought herself, the battle-cruiser concept was not new, nor exclusively a British idea, let alone Fisher’s sole and solitary brainchild. As the Americans had been proceeding with their own all big-gun battleships, with the Michigan class, so had the Japanese advanced an ‘improved armour cruiser’ type armed with four 12-inch guns and with a speed of 21 knots. What Fisher did was to reject the traditional British policy of allowing other nations to lead with new ideas and then outbuilding them, by producing a radical design from the outset and then using superior British shipbuilding capacity to beat them into the water. Thus when Dreadnought and the first of the new type armoured cruisers, the Invincible, appeared, all rival designs were left at the post. Indeed Germany, by now the main contender for naval supremacy, was hoodwinked, for her first ‘battle-cruiser’ the Blücher was in fact nothing more than an improved armoured cruiser, still mounting cruiser-type 8.2-inch guns when the British ships were carrying 12-inch weapons.

Although the basic task of the battle-cruisers, remained similar to that of the armoured cruiser before them, the hunting of commerce raiders in the outer oceans, their new-found power added two new duties to their role. With battleship guns on a cruiser hull they now had the capacity to act as a fast wing to the main battle fleet and thus were able, in theory, to force their way through any opposition screen and report back to the Commander-in-Chief the composition and disposition of the enemy fleet with impunity. They could also act as a reinforcing squadron to bring additional fire-power to any hard-pressed squadron once battle was joined.

However these two new functions did not mean, in Fisher’s original concept of the design, that the new battle-cruisers were supposed to slug it out with battleships, unless British battleships were also engaged with the same target and drawing the fire. Such a role was never intended; they were simply not equipped with the armour protection to follow such a suicidal policy. It was their undoing that roles two and three became their principal raison d’ etre once they had been so successful in role one as to rid the high seas of any further suitable targets.

To prepare a new type along the lines cast by Fisher, with big guns and a speed of 25 knots, the Committee of Design considered five alternatives, all of which presented the desired disposition of armament. This was for at least four main guns to command the fore or aft arcs with four to six for broadside firing. The 1905 programme included provision for three such vessels and these became the Invincible class completed in 1908.

Of 17,250 tons displacement and a length of 567 feet overall, they carried four twin 12-inch guns and a secondary armament of sixteen 4-inch guns. Their turbines rated at 41,000 hp gave them a legend speed of 25 knots and they had a complement of 784 officers and men. These three ships (Indomitable, Inflexible and Invincible) caused a furore when they first appeared; their backers proudly pointed out that they were indeed invincible, for nothing that could sink them could catch them; but their detractors pointed out that to put 12-inch guns into a hull with only cruiser type protection was to court disaster.

Fisher was elated with his brainchild and a further class was laid down, with the Empire contributing two of the ships for Imperial defence, and these became the Indefatigable class (Indefatigable, Australia and New Zealand) which were completed between 1911 and 1913.

However, these ships only intensified the controversy, for they mounted the same main armament and had the same speed but the design was stretched to give better arcs of fire and they were 590 feet overall on a displacement of 18,800 tons. Over this increased hull area the same weak 6 to 7-inch armour protection as on the Invincible class was spread, and their critics claimed that this merely increased their vulnerability as a target. Equally the claim of their invincibility was nullified by the fact that the Germans had laid down their own battle-cruisers, with equal speed but much greater protection. So now there were ships that could catch and sink them. However, the German battleships and battle-cruisers always mounted guns of smaller calibre than their British equivalents and so the argument that the Indefatigables could still outrange their opponents and ‘Hit first’ still held good.

By the time the last of these battle-cruisers had joined the fleet an even greater advance had been made with the building of the three ships of the Lion class. These were the battle-cruiser equivalents of the new Orion class battleships, which mounted the new 13.5-inch gun, and the Lions followed suit, carrying eight of these in four twin turrets but still retaining the sixteen 4-inch secondary armament of earlier classes. Speed was also increased and these magnificent ships had turbines developing 70,000 hp, or half as much again as the Invincible, to get the required two knots extra speed. Naturally dimensions increased accordingly, these ships being 700 feet overall, while the tonnage exceeded that of the battleships at 26,350 tons. These three ships, Lion, Princess Royal and Queen Mary, were completed in 1912–13 and were highly regarded. Their great size and striking power combined with their speed, again seemed to make Fisher’s battle-cruiser concept a viable proposition.

They featured all centre-line turrets for the first time, a long delayed improvement. Their armour protection, however, a 9-inch deck, still lagged far behind contemporary battleships. Their speeds were claimed to be in excess of 29 knots by the popular press and, at a cost of £2,000,000 apiece, the danger of regarding them as fast battleships increased.

By now not only Germany but also other leading powers had begun to follow the British lead, and their designs showed a different line of thought. The German Derfflinger for example carried 12-inch side armour while the Japanese Kongo (designed and built in Britain incidentally) showed further improvements in design, which at once outclassed even the Lions. Therefore, the next British battle-cruiser design was radical in concept compared with what had gone before. This was the majestic Tiger, the only ship of her class, which was completed just after the outbreak of war in 1914.

Tiger displaced a record 28,500 tons and was 704 feet overall. She carried the same main armament as the Lion but more sensibly laid out, the awkward midships ‘Q’ turret being resited aft where it fired over ‘Y’ turret. This not only made better sense from a firepower viewpoint but strengthened the hull amidships, as it was subjected to less crosswise stress, and better arcs were obtained enabling her designer to produce a hull and upperworks combination of classic beauty. Tiger in fact was an aristocrat in appearance, achieving a perfect blending of line and power. She was rushed into service and, as a result, her gunnery was poor in the early engagements, especially at Dogger Bank in 1915. (The best gunnery battle-cruiser was the famed Queen Mary at this stage of the war.) Her 108,000 hp gave her a credited speed of no less than 29 knots, but still her main armour belt remained a paltry 9-inches.

Despite grave misgivings in many quarters the battle-cruiser was a recognised and most valued part of the fleet when war came, as Fisher had predicted, in the late summer of 1914. The battle-cruisers formed their own squadron and were first commanded by Admiral Sir Lewis Bayley, but in 1913 Admiral Sir David Beatty took over from him and became the most famous of all battle-cruiser commanders. Brave, aggressive and intelligent, he was the ideal man for such a command that was bound by its very nature to be in the forefront of the coming struggle at sea.

On assuming his new command Beatty found that no formal policy had been laid down for the operations of these new warships other than in general outline. He at once set about formulating his own from intensive training and realistic tests at sea. For example, these gigantic warships, capable of speeds far in excess of anything that had gone before, had to train their great guns on an enemy fleet, and pound it at ranges of more than 15 miles, when they might be on a converging course at speeds combining to 60 miles an hour. None of his contemporaries had ever faced the attendant problems of such high-speed, long-range duelling with the major weapons of the day. When added to the prevalent bad weather conditions for which the North Sea is famed, and with the great clouds of dense black smoke emitted from up to a hundred warships steaming flat-out, it is little wondered that accuracy was so hard to achieve.

The first test of war was not a triumphant debut for the battle-cruiser: two of the British ships on station in the Mediterranean allowed the solitary German battle-cruiser Goeben to slip through their hands with catastrophic results. But this was more due to the vacillation of their commander than to the ships themselves. When ‘Jackie’ Fisher returned to triumphant harness as First Sea Lord he soon set about, with characteristic energy, obtaining some vitality and action from the Admiralty. No better vindication for the man or his battle-cruisers could be found in the events leading up to the Battle of the Falkland Islands.

The powerful Pacific squadron of the German Admiral von Spee had defeated a pair of aged armoured cruisers of Admiral Craddock off Chile with ease and dealt the Royal Navy a damaging blow to its reputation. Fisher at once despatched the Inflexible and Invincible, under the command of Admiral Sturdee, to remedy the situation. They arrived at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands the day before von Spee made his attack with the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (11,600 tons, eight 9.2-inch guns, 22 knots), armoured cruisers with an enviable gunnery record. At once Admiral Sturdee gave chase and, after a long day’s action, brought both the German vessels to battle and destroyed them.

It was the perfect example of the battle-cruisers being employed in the classic role Fisher had intended and it completely vindicated his ideas. In the support role too the battle-cruisers had achieved notable success at the Battle of the Bight, off Heligoland in August 1914. Here a British force of light cruisers and destroyers was heavily involved with superior German forces and was being badly knocked about. Beatty and his battle-cruisers were out in support and he unflinchingly accepted the risks of submarines and mines; he steamed his great ships into the Bight, destroying several German light cruisers with ease and extracting the British ships without further damage.

All the necessary ingredients had therefore come together in late 1914 that were to mix and result in the new Renown. Fisher was back in command and pressing the adoption of his long-held idea of a landing on the Baltic coast to threaten Berlin from the rear. The battle-cruiser had proved itself in two easy victories. Four new battleships had been cancelled, with the result that spare 15-inch gun mountings were readily available for new construction, and shipbuilding capacity was available. It only needed Fisher to blend all these ingredients into a new design and fire it with his own abundant energy, and this he now did.

For his long-cherished Baltic landing plan Fisher commenced the construction of a huge fleet of specialised craft. Heavy guns, high speed and a shallow draft were requirements for the main warships for this fleet and these ideas were transmitted into a series of battle-cruisers that were to stretch his belief that ‘Speed is Armour’ to the absolute...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• By The Same Author...
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword by Vice-Admiral B.C.B. Brooke, CB, CBE, RN
• Introduction
• 1 The Battle-cruisers
• 2 The Tethered Giants
• 3 Royal Yacht
• 4 The Sands Run Out - Re-birth
• 5 South Atlantic Interlude
• 6 Duel off Stromvaer
• 7 Force H
• 8 Battle off Spartivento
• 9 The Genoa Gala
• Photo Gallery
• 10 Hunting the Bismarck
• 11 'Twixt Biscay and Malta
• 12 Across Northern Seas
• 13 Churchill's Racehorse
• 14 Voyage to the Tropics
• 15 Pounding Nippon
• 16 Of Admirals, Presidents and Kings
• 17 The End, and a Beginning
• 1 Battle Honours of HMS Renown
• 2 Commanding Officers of HMS Renown 1916-1947
• 3 Renown's Predecessors
• 4 Ship's Profiles
• 5 Abbreviations Used in Text
• Index