HMS Renown

The Story of HMS Renown

Fast, elegant and seemingly everywhere at once, HMS Renown was a battlecruiser that spent the Second World War racing from one crisis to the next — and, unlike so many of her kind, survived them all. Built during the First World War and heavily rebuilt between the wars, she combined six 15-inch guns with the speed to chase down almost any enemy and the range to fight across the world's oceans. Where the Royal Navy needed a powerful ship in a hurry, Renown always seemed to be the one sent. Her Second World War began with a storm and a battle. In April 1940, off the coast of Norway in a howling gale, Renown intercepted the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. In heaving seas that hid and revealed the ships by turns, she opened fire and traded blows with both German raiders at once, scoring hits on Gneisenau and driving the faster enemy away into the murk. It was a bold action against two-to-one odds, and it set the tone for an aggressive, far-ranging career. From there Renown became a mainstay of Force H, the famous squadron based at Gibraltar that guarded the western Mediterranean. She escorted the desperate convoys fighting their way through to besieged Malta, hunted enemy raiders, covered carrier strikes against the Italian fleet and Vichy targets, and took part in the great pursuit of the Bismarck in 1941, though the German ship was sunk before Renown's guns could reach her. Her speed and her 15-inch guns made her invaluable in waters where the enemy might appear from any direction. Later the war carried her east. Renown joined the Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean, screening aircraft carriers and supporting operations against Japanese-held territory across that vast theatre, from the approaches to India to the strikes against Sumatra. She even served, at times, as a stately and well-protected transport for Winston Churchill on some of his wartime voyages, carrying the Prime Minister across dangerous seas. Across nearly six years of war she had fought in the frozen waters off Norway, the contested Mediterranean, the Atlantic chase for the Bismarck, and the tropical Indian Ocean — a span of service few ships could match. And she came home. When peace finally came, Renown had sailed and fought across nearly every theatre of the naval war and survived intact, one of the Royal Navy's great old veterans. A ship that had begun her life in one world war and fought through the whole of another, she was finally paid off and scrapped in 1948, her work long done. To reconstruct HMS Renown is to capture a grand survivor — the fast battlecruiser that dueled two German battleships in an Arctic gale, guarded the Malta convoys, joined the hunt for the Bismarck, and carried the war to the Japanese in the Indian Ocean, all without being lost. In a war that consumed so many famous ships, Renown's quiet triumph was simply this: she fought everywhere, she fought hard, and she came back.