The loss of Prince of Wales and Repulse off the Malayan coast on 10 December 1941 – described in the previous two articles – set alarm bells going in Britain. It marked the first time heavy ships had been lost to air attack, while fully operational and...
At 5.35 pm on 8 December 1941 the battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse, with supporting destroyers, left Singapore to attack a Japanese seaborne invasion force that was landing in Malaya. By the early afternoon of 10 December, both ships had been sunk,...
The loss of Prince of Wales and Repulse to Japanese air attack off the Malayan (Malaysian) coast, on 10 December 1941,[1] was a human tragedy, although the precise death toll has been variously given. The official figure is 840: however numbers given in various...
As war clouds loomed over Europe in the late 1930s, Britain’s last generation of battleships were well in hand. By 1938 the five King George V class were under construction and the first two examples of their successors, the Lions, were due to be laid down in 1939.[1]...
One of the common misconceptions in naval history is the idea that the so-called ‘escalator clause’ of the Second London Naval Treaty – which allowed main gun calibre to automatically revert to 16-inch if any signatory failed to ratify the treaty...
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