The Ships of Brawling Battleships Steel: Great Britain Battleship Royal Oak

Laid down on January 15, 1914, launched on November 17, 1914 and commissioned in May 1916, Royal Oak carried a main armament of eight 15 inch main guns mounted two per turret; two centerline superfiring forward and two centerline superfiring aft. Royal Oak was part of the five-ship Revenge battleship class. Superficially similar to the previous Queen Elizabeth class, at the insistence of the Admiralty, who had doubts that oil would be available in wartime, it was originally planned to install mostly coal-fired boilers. When Lord Fisher (1861–1920) returned to the Admiralty in 1914 - 1915, he had this modified to mostly oil-fired boilers but the ships were still significantly slower than the previous class, although somewhat better protected. Two ships of this class were also the first British battleships with a torpedo bulge or blister designed to protect against underwater hits and the rest, including Royal Oak, had this feature installed between the World Wars and this is what gave the class such wide beams. The Royal Oak name had a long history in the Royal Navy, dating back to the Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century. Like most British battleships, she spent World War One with the Grand Fleet based at Scapa Flow and participated in the Battle of Jutland on May 31, 1916. From 1919, she served in the Atlantic and Mediterranean Fleets with overhauls, refits and conversions to modernize her performed from 1924 to 1926 and from 1934 to 1935 that, on the whole, accomplished only minor changes to the class. Six weeks after war started again, based at Scapa Flow, and with her watertight doors open, and despite her torpedo blister, Royal Oak was surprisingly sunk at anchor in only thirteen minutes by the German U-47 submarine under daring Kapitan-leutnant Gunther Prien with a loss of 786 (some sources say 833) killed. She was the first British capital ship lost in World War II. Never raised, two of her turrets were salvaged for later use in the monitors Abercrombie and Roberts .

See other battleships: Iron Duke, Introduction, Bibliography