HMS Warspite was one of five Queen Elizabeth-class battleships built for the Royal Navy during the early 1910s. Completed during the First World War in 1915, she was assigned to the Grand Fleet and participated in the Battle of Jutland. https://ift.tt/GR9XAUB

HMS Warspite was one of five Queen Elizabeth-class battleships built for the Royal Navy during the early 1910s.

HMS Warspite and Malaya seen from HMS Valiant at 14:00 hrs on 31 May 1916 during the battle of Jutland.

Battleship Warspite (1913) at Rosyth This negative was taken by Commander Curzon on the 2nd or 3rd June 1916 and it is one of a series of 27 negatives taken of the battleship Warspite (1913) in No. 1 dry dock, Rosyth Dockyard, showing damage received on 31st May 1916 at the Battle of Jutland. It shows blast damage caused to the starboard hull plating by a 28 cm (12 inch) shell which penetrated the port side of the upper deck, passed through the captain’s accommodation and burst in the Captain of the Fleet’s day cabin on the starboard side of the main deck under ‘Y’ 15 inch gun turret. The Warspite (1913) was serving as a unit of the 5th Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet. Battleship Warspite (1913) at Rosyth

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HMS WARSPITE of the Eastern Fleet and Flagship of Admiral Sir James Sommerville, underway in the Indian Ocean.

IWM FL 22685. HMS Warspite, Prussia Cove, Cornwall, 1947

Other than that battle, and the inconclusive Action of 19 August, her service during the war generally consisted of routine patrols and training in the North Sea. During the interwar period the ship was deployed in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, often serving as flagship, and was thoroughly modernised in the mid-1930s.

During the Second World War, Warspite was involved in the Norwegian Campaign in early 1940 and was transferred to the Mediterranean later that year where the ship participated in fleet actions against the Royal Italian Navy (Regia Marina) while also escorting convoys and bombarding Italian troops ashore. She was damaged by German aircraft during the Battle of Crete in mid-1941 and required six months of repairs in the United States. They were completed after the start of the Pacific War in December and the ship sailed across the Pacific to join the Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean in early 1942. Warspite returned home in mid-1943 to conduct naval gunfire support as part of Force H during the Italian campaign. She was badly damaged by German radio-controlled glider bombs during the landings at Salerno and spent most of the next year under repair. The ship bombarded German positions during the Normandy landings and on Walcheren Island in 1944, despite not being fully repaired. These actions earned her the most battle honours ever awarded to an individual ship in the Royal Navy. For this and other reasons, Warspite gained the nickname the “Grand Old Lady” after a comment made by Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham in 1943 while she was his flagship.

When she was launched in 1913 the use of oil as fuel and untried 15-inch guns were revolutionary concepts in the naval arms race between Britain and Germany, a considerable risk for Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and Admiral of the Fleet Sir Jackie Fisher, who had advocated the design. However, the new “fast battleships” proved to be an outstanding success during the First World War. Decommissioned in 1945, Warspite ran aground under tow to be scrapped in 1947 on rocks near Prussia Cove, Cornwall, and was eventually broken up nearby.

Warspite was the sixth Royal Navy ship to bear the name. It likely originated from an archaic word for woodpecker, ‘speight’; with the implication that, during the age of sail the war-speight would peck holes in her enemies’ wooden hulls
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All Royal Navy, RN Battleships

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