HMS Audacious (1912)

Rescuing sailors from the sinking Audacious
Career
Ordered:	1910
Laid down:	March 1911
Launched:	September 14, 1912
Commissioned:	August 1913
Decommissioned:
Fate:	Mined October 27, 1914
Struck:
General Characteristics
Displacement:	23,400 tons
Length:	598 feet
Beam:	89 feet
Draught:	28 feet
Propulsion:	Turbine (Parsons) producing 31,000 shp, driving 4 screws
Speed:	21 knots
Range:
Complement:	900 men
Armament:	10 13.5-inch guns 12 6-inch guns Three 21-inch torpedo tubes
Aircraft:
Motto:

HMS Audacious was a King_George_V_class battleship of the Royal Navy. The vessel did not survive its first conflict, being sunk by a mine off Northern Ireland.

At the beginning of World_War_I Audacious was part of the Second Battle Squadron of the British Grand Fleet. On 27 October 1914 the Second Battle Squadron consisting of the 'super-dreadnoughts' King George V, Ajax, Centurion, Audacious, Monarch, Thunderer and Orion left port to conduct gunnery-exercises.

At around 08:45 Audacious ran upon a mine laid by the German auxiliary mine-layer Berlin, resulting in the flooding of several compartments. The ship tried to return to port, but an hour later water leaking through the bulkheads flooded the engine rooms, forcing them to be abandoned. This left Audacious without power of its own and lead to the evacuation of all non-essential crewmembers to the escorts and the nearby White Star Liner S.S. Olympic. Throughout the afternoon Olympic and the cruiser HMS Liverpool attempted to take Audacious into tow, but the lines snapped time and again.

At 18:00 the ship was finally abandoned by the remaining crew and capsized at 20:45, becoming the first British battleship to be lost in World War I and the only one lost without the loss of a single life.

The Royal Navy tried to keep the loss a secret, officially listing the ship as in service during the entire war, but this proved to be a futile attempt, due to the fact that many american passengers on the Olympic had witnessed and photographed the sinking.

See HMS Audacious for other ships of the same name.