The Revenge class , sometimes referred to as the Royal Sovereign class or the R class , consisted of five Dreadnought battleships built for the Royal Navy in the s. All of the ships were completed to see service during the First World War. There were originally to have been eight of the class, but two were later redesigned, becoming the Renown -class battlecruisers , while the other, which was to have been named HMS Resistance , was cancelled outright.
The design was based on that of the preceding Queen Elizabeth class , but with reductions in size and speed to make them more economical to build. Two of the ships, Revenge and Royal Oak , were completed in time to see action at the Battle of Jutland during the First World War , where they engaged German battlecruisers. The other three ships were completed after the battle, by which time the British and German fleets had adopted more cautious strategies, and as a result, the class saw no further substantial action.
They typically operated as a unit during the interwar period , including stints in the Atlantic Fleet. All five members of the class were modernised in the s, particularly to strengthen their anti-aircraft defences and fire-control equipment. The ships saw extensive action during the Second World War , though they were no longer front-line units by this time and thus were frequently relegated to secondary duties such as convoy escort and naval gunfire support.
Royal Oak was sunk at her moorings in Scapa Flow in October by a German U-boat , and two other ships of the class were torpedoed during the war; Resolution , hit by a Vichy French submarine off Dakar in and Ramillies , attacked by a Japanese submarine in Madagascar in ; both survived.
Royal Sovereign ended the war in service with the Soviet Navy as Arkhangelsk , but she was returned in , by which time her three surviving sister ships had been broken up for scrap. She, too, was dismantled that year. In the early s, Germany challenged Britain in a naval arms race under the direction of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz that was exacerbated by the dreadnought revolution.
