The Ships of Battlegroup: Great Britain Warspite (BB)

Displacement	32,500 tons	Belt Armor	13 inches
Overall Length	646 feet	Deck Armor	4 inches
Beam	104 feet	Main Turret Armor	13 inches
Speed	23 knots	Main Guns	8 × 15″

Laid down on October 31, 1912, launched on November 26, 1913 and commissioned in March 1915, the ship carried a main armament of eight 15 inch main guns mounted two per turret; two centerline superfiring forward and two centerline superfiring aft. Warspite was part of the five-ship Queen Elizabeth class (the others were Barham, Malaya and Valiant ) and they were among the first battleships to be classed as “super dreadnoughts”. The name “Warspite” in the British Royal Navy goes back to a galleon built in 1596, through a number of ships of the line and an armored cruiser to this distinguished veteran of two World Wars.

The Royal Navy, under the leadership of the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, took a gamble and designed the ships to operate solely on oil-fired turbines and to mount the newly-designed 15 inch guns. The gamble succeeded brilliantly and the Queen Elizabeth class served at the forefront of British operations through both World Wars. Designed to form the Fifth or Fast Battleship Squadron (the speed as originally built was 24 knots, quite fast for a battleship at the time) of the Grand Fleet, the squadron (minus Queen Elizabeth herself, in a dockyard at the time) was on loan to Admiral Beatty’s Battlecruiser Fleet for the Battle of Jutland. Their presence at Jutland enabled Beatty to drive off the German battlecruisers even though there was “something wrong with our Bloody ships” that day, as one British battlecruiser after another blew up. Later the Fifth Battle Squadron came under a terrific concentration of fire that few battleships of the day could have withstood. Warspite was the most severely damaged, suffering at least fifteen major caliber hits, the most of any British battleship at Jutland. Extensively rebuilt during the years between the wars, Warspite emerged with a rearranged armor plan, torpedo bulges that increased her beam from 90.5 feet, modified 15 inch gun mounts allowing greater range, and a completely revamped secondary battery. Bearing the nickname, “The Old Lady”, she served with great distinction in the Second World War. In 1940, in a Norwegian fjord, she served as a base of fire in the destruction of a trapped German destroyer flotilla. After action in the Mediterranean that included mine damage, the Battle of Cape Matapan, where she helped sink Italian cruisers Fiume and Zara, and a hit from a German guided bomb (the same type that sank the Italian battleship Roma ), she soldiered through the longest day off Normandy in the shore bombardment role.

"The Old Lady" finally succumbed to the scrappers in the late 1940s. Warspite also stands in a virtual dead heat tie with the German battleship Scharnhorst for the record of the longest naval gunfire hit on a moving target. On the 9th of July 1940, during the Battle of Calabria, she tagged Italan battlehip Giulio Cesare at the range of 26,000 yards. The proud name of Warspite was resurrected for a British nuclear submarine in the 1960s.

For contemporary foreign battleships of similar vintage, see: Bretagne, Revenge and Texas .

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