Victory at Sea

The Yorktown-class of aircraft carrier were built in a series of three. Of those, only the USS Enterprise survived the war, with the USS Yorktown sunk during the Battle of Midway, and the USS Hornet during the Battle of Santa...

The German capital ship Scharnhorst was the lead of her two ship class, launching in October 1936. She was armed with a main battery of nine 28cm C/34 guns in three triple turrets. Though plans were drawn up to 38cm...

The third of the Admiral-Hipper-class of heavy cruisers, Prinz Eugen was named for Prince Eugene of Savoy, and 18th century Austrian general. She saw action during the German operation Rheinübung of 1941, in which, along with Bismarck, she attempted to...

The lead ship of her class, Königsberg had a similar operational history to that of her sister ships like Köln (see above), operating as a training vessel until the outset of World War Two. She spent the early part of...

Blücher was named for Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, who lead the Prussians to victory at Waterloo. She was the second of the Admiral Hipper-class of heavy cruisers, completed shortly after the outbreak of World War II. She was assigned to...

Köln was the third of the Königsberg-class of light cruiser, operating between 1929 and 1945, initially under the Reichsmarine and subsequently the Kriegsmarine. In the 1930s she served as a training vessel for cadets, but the outbreak of World War...

Admiral Franz von Hipper was commander of the German battlecruiser squadron of the Battle of Jutland in 1916 and subsequently became commander-in-chief of the German high seas fleet. It was for him that Admiral Hipper was named, the lead ship...

The Type 1936 was a large and very powerful design mounting 5.9-inch guns, based on the general layout of the Type 1934. The intended twin turrets were not available in time, so planned armament was reduced to single mounts in...

An early aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy, HMS Eagle was originally a super-dreadnought of the Chilean Navy (named Almirante Cochrane), laid down in 1913, but was purchased by the Royal Navy for conversion to a carrier in 1918. This...

Laid down in 1937 and commissioned in 1941, HMS Duke of York was a King George V-class of battleship. She had the distinction of transporting Winston Churchill across the Atlantic to meet Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Winter of 1941....

Neptune operated during her World War II service with a crew predominantly composed from the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy, but also a large proportion of South African personnel. In late 1939 she was in pursuit of the...

Launched on St Patricks Day 1938, HMS Belfast was one of ten Town-class vessels and the first vessel of the Royal Navy to be named for a Northern Ireland town. She initially operated as part of the British Naval blockade...

The first WWII mission of Dido was the escort the carrier, Furious to West Africa in November 1940, before spending four months on convoy escort duty in the Atlantic. She then joined operations in the Mediterranean in 1941, assisting in...

Often called the Afridi-class, this destroyer began the tradition of gunnery over torpedoes. However, the class had a frightening lack of anti-aircraft defences, especially against dive-bombers. The Tribal destroyers were the Royal Navy’s most advanced escorts of the time and...

While serving as commerce raiders, the Scharnhorst-class Battleships (or battlecruisers), Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were responsible for sinking over 105,000 tons of allied shipping in a single cruise. The two ships operated together for much of the early portion of the...

Though laid down and launched before the start of the war, the Graf Zeppelin was never completed or commissioned, and it never saw action. Whilst four aircraft of the class had originally been planned, constant in-fighting between the Kriegsmarine and...

One of the most famous carriers of the war, the HMS Ark Royal received many battle honours in its service. The first enemy aircraft shot down by the Fleet Air Arm was with one of her Blackburn Skuas, while her...

The British air raid on the Italian port of Taranto demonstrated to the world the vulnerability of ships against attacks from the air. The planes of the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy proved a scourge to Axis forces...

Sister ship to the Bismarck, the Tirpitz was 2,000 tons heavier and thus the heaviest warship to have ever been produced by a European navy. She served in Norway and the Baltic Fleet acting as a potent deterrent. The Tirpitz...

With carriers planned but not built, Germany’s airpower was limited to launching from airfields far from open water. As such, they were mainly deployed against ships close to mainland Europe. Despite this, the Luftwaffe dive-bombers proved devastatingly effective against Allied...