Great Britain

The Royal Navy of Great Britain was the world’s greatest navy at the outbreak of the Second World War. However, Britain went to war with mainly First World War-vintage vessels. Since the Royal Navy already possessed many…

The Fairey Swordfish, by some accounts, was one of the finest warplanes of all World War II. It was highly reliable, capable of launching from carriers in most weather conditions. This was in spite of its anachronistic biplane…

The Gloster Gladiator represented the final generation of biplane fighters before being made obsolete by the appearance of the Hurricane, Spitfire and Bf 109. In 1937, the Fleet Air Arm decided there was a need for single seat…

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 against…

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,…

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…

At one time, the HMS Hood was the largest and possibly most famous ship in the world, representing the supremacy of British sea power. Though attached to Home Fleet, the Hood took part in the sinking of the French fleet at Oran.…

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…

HMS Warspite was a Queen Elizabeth-class battleship of the Royal Navy. Built during the early 1910s, she served in the First World War, including at the Battle of Jutland. Modernized in the 1930s, she went on to serve in the…

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 Nav for conversion to a carrier in 1918.…

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…

Submarines: Designed for use in North European and Mediterranean waters, the S-class was manoeuvrable with a noted ability to crash dive extremely quickly. Combined with a large salvo of torpedoes, this was a successful design of…