HMS Prince of Wales (1941)

Specifications

She displaced roughly 36,727 long tons as built and up to 43,786 long tons fully loaded, with an overall length of about 745 feet (227.1 m), a beam of 103 feet (31.4 m), and a draught around 29–34 feet depending on load. Main armament was ten 14-inch guns in two quadruple and one twin turret, backed by sixteen 5.25-inch dual-purpose secondary guns in eight twin mounts; she could make roughly 28 knots on Parsons geared turbines fed by eight Admiralty boilers.

Service history

Completed in March 1941, she fought in the Battle of the Denmark Strait that May, scoring hits on Bismarck before mechanical gun trouble forced her to break off. She later carried Winston Churchill across the Atlantic for the Atlantic Charter conference with Franklin Roosevelt, escorted a Malta-bound convoy (Operation Halberd) against Italian air attack, and was finally sent to Singapore as flagship of Force Z, where she was sunk by Japanese torpedo and level bombers on 10 December 1941 alongside the battlecruiser HMS Repulse.

Notable facts

Originally intended to be named King Edward VIII, she was renamed Prince of Wales after the abdication of Edward VIII. Her loss, together with Repulse, was historically significant as the first time capital ships actively maneuvering and defending themselves at sea were sunk solely by air power, a result later analyzed in detail by naval architects studying the wreck.