The Grand Fleet was the main battlefleet of the Royal Navy during the First World War. It was established in August 1914 and disbanded in April 1919. Its main base was Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.
The Grand Fleet was the main battlefleet of the Royal Navy during the First World War. It was established in August 1914 and disbanded in April 1919. Its main base was Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.
The Battle of Jutland (German: Skagerrakschlacht, lit. 'Battle of the Skagerrak') was a naval battle between Britain's Royal Navy Grand Fleet, under Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, and the Imperial German Navy's High Seas Fleet, under Vice-Admiral Reinhard Scheer, during the First World War. The battle unfolded in extensive manoeuvring and three main engagements from 31 May to 1 June 1916, off the North Sea coast of Denmark's Jutland Peninsula. It was the largest naval battle and only full-scale clash of battleships of the war, and the outcome ensured that the Royal Navy denied the German surface fleet access to the North Sea and the Atlantic for the remainder of the war. Germany avoided all fleet-to-fleet contact thereafter. Jutland was also the last major naval battle, in any war, fought primarily by battleships.
Germany's High Seas Fleet intended to lure out, trap, and destroy a portion of the British Grand Fleet. The German naval force was insufficient to openly engage the British fleet. This was part of a larger strategy to break the British blockade of Germany and allow German naval vessels access to the Atlantic. Britain's Royal Navy pursued a strategy of engaging and destroying the High Seas Fleet, thereby keeping German naval forces contained and away from Britain and her shipping lanes. The Germans planned to use Vice-Admiral Franz Hipper's fast scouting group of five modern battlecruisers to lure Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty's battlecruiser squadrons into the path of the main German fleet. They stationed submarines across the likely routes of the British ships. However, the British learned from signal intercepts that a major fleet operation was likely, so on 30 May, Jellicoe sailed with the Grand Fleet to rendezvous with Beatty, passing over the German submarine picket lines while they were unprepared. The German plan had been delayed, causing further problems for their submarines, which had reached the limit of their endurance at sea.
The Kiel mutiny (German: Kieler Matrosenaufstand) was a revolt by sailors of the German High Seas Fleet against the maritime military command in Kiel. The mutiny broke out on 3 November 1918 when some of the ships' crews refused to sail out from Wilhelmshaven for the final battle against the British Grand Fleet that the Admiralty had ordered without the knowledge or approval of the German government. The mutineers, who saw the planned battle as a futile "death voyage", took over Kiel with workers' and soldiers' councils and then helped spread them across Germany. The German Revolution that was triggered by the councils swept aside the Hohenzollern monarchy within a few days, brought about the end of the German Empire and led to the establishment of the Weimar Republic.
HMS Malaya was one of five Queen Elizabeth-class super-dreadnought battleships built for the Royal Navy during the 1910s. Shortly after commissioning in early 1916, she participated in the Battle of Jutland of the First World War as part of the Grand Fleet.
Malaya spent the interwar period between the Mediterranean Fleet, Atlantic Fleet, and Home Fleet. She transported Ottoman Sultan Mehmed VI into exile and served during the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. Apart from this, her interwar career was uneventful.
Admiral of the Fleet Sir Somerset Arthur Gough-Calthorpe GCB, GCMG, CVO, DL (23 December 1864 – 27 July 1937), sometimes known as Sir Somerset Calthorpe, was a Royal Navy officer and a member of the Gough-Calthorpe family. After serving as a junior officer during the Fourth Anglo-Ashanti War, he became naval attaché observing the actions of the Imperial Russian Navy during the Russo-Japanese War and then went on to command an armoured cruiser and then a battleship during the early years of the 20th century.
During the First World War Gough-Calthorpe initially served as commander of the 2nd Cruiser Squadron of the Grand Fleet, then became Second Sea Lord and after that became Admiral commanding the Coastguard and Reserves. In the closing years of the War he served as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, in which capacity he signed the Armistice of Mudros on behalf of all the Allies, by which the Ottoman Empire accepted defeat and ceased hostilities. The Occupation of Constantinople began with the Allied fleet entering Constantinople in November 1918 and it was Gough-Calthorpe's flagship, HMS Superb, that led the way.
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. 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.
The Atlantic U-boat campaign of World War I (sometimes called the "First Battle of the Atlantic", in reference to the World War II campaign of that name) was the prolonged naval conflict between German submarines and the Allied navies in Atlantic waters –the North Sea, the seas around the British Isles, and the coast of France.
Initially the U-boat campaign was directed against the warships of the British Grand Fleet. Later U-boat fleet action was extended to include action against the trade routes of the Allied powers. This campaign was highly destructive, and resulted in the loss of nearly half of Britain's initial merchant marine fleet during the course of the war. To counter the German submarines, the Allies moved shipping into convoys guarded by destroyers, blockades such as the Dover Barrage and minefields such as the North Sea Mine Barrage were laid, and aircraft patrols monitored the U-boat bases. Increased ship construction meant the amount of Allied shipping available remained fairly stable.