HMS Repulse

She was laid down as an improved Revenge-class battleship and suspended at the outbreak of war because she could not be finished in time. Fisher, on becoming First Sea Lord, got approval to restart her as a battlecruiser that could be built fast. He put his requirements to the Director of Naval Construction, Eustace Tennyson-d'Eyncourt, on 18 December 1914, before the ships had even been approved: a long flared bow, 15-inch guns, a heavy anti-torpedo-boat battery mounted high, 32 knots on oil, and armour on the scale of Indefatigable. A preliminary design was done by 30 December, and the builders promised delivery in fifteen months.

Material already gathered for the abandoned battleships was picked over and passed on, and John Brown at Clydebank laid her keel on 25 January 1915, weeks before the altered contracts were even completed. She ran 794 feet 2.5 inches overall and displaced 26,854 long tons at normal load. Brown-Curtis direct-drive turbines designed for 112,000 shaft horsepower gave 118,913 shp on trials in 1916 and 31.73 knots — she and her sister Renown were the fastest capital ships in the world when they completed.

Six 42-calibre BL 15-inch Mk I guns sat in three twin hydraulic turrets, with seventeen 4-inch in five triple and two single mounts. The price of the speed was protection: a Krupp cemented belt of only 6 inches amidships and decks of three-quarters to one and a half inches. Jutland, fought while she was still completing, brought an extra inch of high-tensile steel over the magazines, and she was taken into Rosyth that winter for roughly 504 tons more horizontal armour over magazines and steering gear. She was delivered on 18 August 1916, a few months after the battle, at a cost of £2,829,087.

She served with the Grand Fleet in the North Sea for the war's last two years, relieving Lion as flagship of the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron. Her only combat came on 17 November 1917, when the Admiralty moved against German minesweepers clearing paths through the British minefields. Four German light cruisers, eight destroyers, three divisions of minesweepers and eight cork-filled Sperrbrechers were spotted at 7:30 a.m., silhouetted against the rising sun, and laid an effective smoke screen as soon as fire opened.

Repulse was detached and ran up at full speed, opening fire around 9:00. She hit the light cruiser Königsberg once, briefly cutting her speed. When the German battleships Kaiser and Kaiserin appeared at about 9:50 the British broke off, and Repulse covered their withdrawal until fog closed in around 10:40. She had fired 54 fifteen-inch shells for that one hit.

She was the first capital ship fitted with a flying-off platform, an experimental one built on 'B' turret in the autumn of 1917. Squadron Leader Frederick Rutland flew a Sopwith Pup off it on 1 October, and a second platform was then built on 'Y' turret, from which Rutland flew on 8 October. Thereafter she normally carried one fighter and one reconnaissance aircraft. She was damaged in a collision with the battlecruiser HMAS Australia on 12 December 1917, and was present when the High Seas Fleet surrendered at Scapa Flow on 21 November 1918.

Her thin belt was addressed almost at once. From December 1918 she was refitted at Portsmouth with 9-inch plates made surplus by the conversion of the battleship Almirante Cochrane into the carrier Eagle, her old 6-inch armour moved up between main and upper decks. Her anti-torpedo bulge was deepened along the lines of Ramillies, adding twelve feet eight inches to her beam, and the refit put about 4,500 tons on her displacement for £860,684. Recommissioned in January 1921, she joined the Battlecruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet, and in November 1923 sailed with Hood on a ten-month world cruise.

The 1930s reconstruction, begun in April 1933, went deeper. Most of the high-tensile steel that made up her horizontal protection was replaced with non-cemented plate 2.5 to 3.5 inches thick. A fixed catapult replaced a midships 4-inch mount, hangars went up either side of the rear funnel for her Fairey III aircraft with electric cranes above them, and prototype QF 4-inch Mark XV dual-purpose guns, octuple 2-pounder pom-poms and quadruple Vickers .50 mountings were worked in, with High-Angle Control System directors fore and aft.

Recommissioned in April 1936 for the Mediterranean Fleet, she lifted 500 refugees out of Valencia and Palma de Mallorca to Marseille late that year after the Spanish Civil War began, and was sent to Haifa in July 1938 during the Arab Revolt. She was at the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead in May 1937 and was refitted to convey the King and Queen to Canada in 1939, though in the end they crossed in the liner Empress of Australia and she escorted them only for the first half.

War took her back to blockade and raider-hunting: patrols off Norway and in the North Sea, then Halifax with the carrier Furious to cover convoys. She sortied on 23 November 1939 to hunt Scharnhorst after the loss of the armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi, but heavy seas drove her back to port. She escorted the convoy carrying most of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division to Britain that December, supported the Norwegian campaign in April–June 1940, and was diverted from convoy WS8B on 22 May 1941 to join the search for Bismarck, breaking off three days later on fuel.

In late 1941 Churchill sent a small force of fast capital ships east to deter Japan. The carrier Indomitable, meant to join them, ran aground in the Caribbean. Repulse and the new battleship Prince of Wales, with their destroyers, made up Force Z, which reached Singapore on 2 December 1941. On the evening of 8 December they sailed to break up Japanese landings in Malaya. The submarine I-65 found them on the 9th, cruiser floatplanes shadowed them until dark, and Admiral Sir Tom Phillips turned back — then altered course again after midnight on a report of landings at Kuantan.

Eighty-six bombers of the 22nd Air Flotilla flew from Saigon. The first attack came at 11:13 on 10 December, eight G3Ms bombing from 11,500 feet; one bomb went through the hangar and burst on the armoured deck. What followed was a long defence by her captain, Bill Tennant, who dodged nineteen torpedoes and the rest of the bombs while her gunners shot down two aircraft and damaged eight. A synchronised pincer attack by seventeen G4M torpedo bombers ended it: four or five hits in quick succession. At 12:23 she listed hard to port, capsized and went down by the stern, taking 508 of her 1,309 officers and men. The destroyers Electra and Vampire picked up the rest, Tennant among them.

She lies at 183 feet, almost upside down, starboard side raised and port side buried in the seabed. Survivors described five torpedo hits, four to port and one to starboard, but a 2007 diving expedition could confirm only two by examination: the port hit near the propellers and the starboard hit amidships. The port midships section was buried in the sea floor and could not be checked, while the area abreast the port after turret, where survivors placed a hit, was accessible and showed no sign of one.

The site was designated a Protected Place in 2002 under the Protection of Military Remains Act, sixty years after the sinking, but protection on paper has not been protection in fact. In October 2014 both Repulse and Prince of Wales were reported to be suffering extensive explosive damage from scrap metal dealers, and in May 2023 a Chinese vessel, Chuan Hong 68, was reported illegally scavenging the wreck for low-background steel. The same ship was back in the region in July 2024, suspected of looting other Second World War wrecks in Asian waters, and was detained by the Malaysian authorities.

In December 2023 a memorial to both ships was raised at Teluk Cempedak beach and unveiled by King Abdullah of Pahang — the two commemorated together, as they were lost together, on the stretch of Malayan coast they had been steaming towards when the bombers found them. Repulse herself lies off it at 3°37′N 104°20′E, in 183 feet of water, and 508 of the 1,309 officers and men aboard her went down when she capsized.