The Ships of Brawling Battleships Steel: Great Britain Battleship Centuion

Laid down on January 16, 1911, launched on November 18, 1911 and commissioned on May 22, 1913, Centurion carried a main armament of ten 13.5 inch main guns mounted two per turret; two centerline superfiring forward, two centerline superfiring aft and one centerline amidships that could be fired to both sides. Centurion was part of the four-ship King George V battleship class. Because of the gun size, the King George Vs were considered to be the next class of British "super dreadnought" battleships, after the earlier Orions. They were turbine powered with the then-standard coal-fired boilers. A "Centurion" was an officer in the ancient Roman legions and the Centurion name had a long history as a ship name in the Royal Navy, including a wooden 60-gun ship of the line built in 1732 in which Captain (later Admiral) George Anson (1697–1762) sailed around the world from 1740 - 1744. Prewar, the ship was involved in a collision with the Italian freighter Derna. Her sister ship Audacious was the first British capital ship lost during World War One when she hit a mine laid by the German auxiliary cruiser Berlin on October 27, 1914. As with most British battleships, Centurion spent most of World War One with the Grand Fleet based at Scapa Flow and participated, without damage, in the Battle of Jutland on May 31, 1916. Her career after the Great War was varied and interesting. From 1919 to 1924 she served in the Mediterranean and, for a period, in the Black Sea during the Russian Civil War. After two years in reserve and after all her sister ships were gone, she was converted into a remote controlled target vessel and served in that capacity until 1940. After another conversion, she sailed as a dummy version of the new H. M. S. Anson battleship to Gibraltar (where her engines failed and she required repairs), Cape Town (where she collided with a troopship off Freetown), Suez, into the Indian Ocean (where she lost a turret in a storm), to Bombay (where the turret was replaced) and then to Port Said. In June 1942, the phony old battleship actually participated in a convoy bound for Malta and took a bomb hit during the action. After serving as a possible block ship and floating battery in Egypt until January 1944, she was ordered back to Britain, managing to run aground during the voyage. On June 9, 1944, she was scuttled as a breakwater off the Normandy beachhead.

See other battleships: Iron Duke, Queen Mary, Lion