The Ships of Battlegroup: Great Britain Revenge (BB)

Displacement	28,000 tons	Belt Armor	13 inches
Overall Length	624 feet	Deck Armor	2.5 inches
Beam	102.5 feet	Main Turret Armor	13 inches
Speed	21 knots	Main Guns	8 × 15″

Laid down on December 22, 1913, launched on May 29, 1915 and commissioned in March 1916, the ship carried a main armament of eight 15 inch main guns mounted two per turret; two centerline superfiring forward and two aft. Revenge was part of the five-ship class (the others were Ramillies, Resolution, Royal Oak and Royal Sovereign) known in the Admiralty papers as the Revenge class but popularly known as the Royal Sovereign class after the sister ship. Many naval historians split the difference and just call them "R" class battleships. The "Revenge" name has a long history in the British Royal Navy, starting with the race-built galleon (1577–1591) that was Francis Drake’s (1540–1596) flagship in the battle against the Spanish Armada in 1588 and Richard Grenville’s (1540–1591) last command in the storied "last fight of the Revenge", where the ship fought off a Spanish fleet for an entire night.

Designed after the Queen Elizabeth class before that class’ experimentation with oil-fired turbines even had the chance to prove itself, this design reverted to a mixed oil- and coal-fired power plant. The design was changed after the Queen Elizabeth class hit the water and proved to be a great success and the coal boilers were replaced by oil ones. Similarly armed to the Queen Elizabeth class but initially better protected (they incorporated antitorpedo bulges from the start) and slower (smaller engines), the ships were useful but unspectacular. Never as popular as the Queen Elizabeth class, the "R" class ships were not modified as much between the wars. Their slower speed kept them assigned to minor roles and the limited elevation of their main guns (15 degrees and never updated) kept their maximum range well below that of other World War II battleships. She was serving a role as a convoy escort when the Bismarck made is one and only sortie, and was in the area of the final gunfight between the Rodney, King George V, and the Bismarck, but she didn't make it in time.  One sister ship, the Royal Oak, was sunk by the German U-boat U-47 while in the Scapa Flow anchorage. Another, Royal Sovereign , was loaned to the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1949.

The entire class was scrapped in the late 1940s.

For contemporary foreign battleships of the same vintage, see: Bretagne, Fuso, Texas and Yamashiro. Warspite was a Queen Elizabeth class battleship.

For a further discussion of what happened to the battleships of World War One, see the Introduction to these articles.