List of Battlecruisers of The Royal Navy - Invincible Class

Invincible Class

The Invincible-class ships were the first battlecruisers in the world. The design resembled that of HMS Dreadnought, but sacrificed armour protection and one gun turret from the main battery for a 4-knot (7.4 km/h; 4.6 mph) speed advantage. During the war Inflexible and Indomitable participated in the unsuccessful pursuit of the German ships Goeben and Breslau in the Mediterranean. Inflexible was recalled home shortly afterwards, but Indomitable remained off the Dardanelles to bottle up the German ships for the rest of 1914 before returning to the UK. Invincible and Inflexible were sent to the South Atlantic in late 1914 to hunt down the German East Asia Squadron and destroyed it at the Battle of the Falkland Islands. Indomitable participated in the Battle of Dogger Bank in the North Sea in early 1915 while Inflexible was badly damaged during the opening stages of the Dardanelles Campaign. The ships formed the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron at Jutland where Invincible was destroyed by the explosion of an artillery magazine. The two surviving ships spent the rest of the war conducting patrols of the North Sea, as the High Seas Fleet was forbidden by the Kaiser to risk any more losses. They were put into reserve in early 1919 and sold for scrap on 1 December 1921.