By January 1945 the Second World War had long turned in favour of the Allies. Germany was on the retreat across Europe, and Japan had been pushed back to a shrinking perimeter around the Home Islands. The idea of a U-boat turning up off the New Zealand coast that...
Why were so many warships never built ? Naval history is littered with warships that were planned or designed but never built, especially in the past century or so. There were many reasons why proposed ships never saw the light of day. Some designs were abandoned at...
It is easy to declare that the Battle of Jutland – to the Germans, the battle of the Skagerrak[1] – fought over a hectic afternoon and night on 31 May-1 June 1916, was a tactical German victory and a strategic British one. The idea has become a trope in...
The Battle of the River Plate is one of the best known encounters of the Second World War. It was the first major sea battle of that conflict, and it came on 13 December 1939, a time when the so-called ‘phony war’ was in full swing – the brief period when the Second...
Over a century ago, Admiral Sir John Fisher (1841-1920) – one of the main forces behind both the dreadnought and the battlecruiser – declared that both were obsolete. The ideal warship of the future, he insisted, was the submarine – the perfect stealth warship that...
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