Sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse
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Template:Battlebox The Sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse was a World War II naval engagement which illustrated the effectiveness of aerial attacks against naval forces that were not proctected by air cover and the importance of including an aircraft carrier in any major fleet action. It took place east of Singapore where HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse were attacked by Japanese torpedo bombers. Both ships had arrived in Singapore in December 1941, to serve as a deterrent to Japanese aggression. The original plan had been for a larger fleet which included the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious.
The Japanese invaded Malaya on 7 December 1941 and the British land forces were hard pressed. A naval force was quickly assembled to intercept and destroy Japanese convoys in the South China Sea. Force Z, consisting of the modern battleship Prince of Wales, the World War I battlecruiser Repulse and the four destroyers Electra, Express, Vampire and Tenedos, sailed from Singapore on 8 December 1941.
The commander of the fleet, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, knew the local Royal Air Force unit could not guarantee air cover for his ships as they were equipped with limited numebrs of ageing fighters and their airfields were threatened by the Japanese land attacks. He elected to proceed anyway because he thought that Japanese forces could not operate so far from land. He also thought that his ships were relatively immune from fatal damage via air attack, since up to that point, no capital ship at sea had ever been sunk by air attack. The largest unit which had done so was a heavy cruiser.
Force Z was spotted by Japanese submarine I-65 at 14:00 on 9 December, which shadowed the British ships for five hours, radioing their positions.
On 10 December 1941 at 10:20, Japanese aircraft spotted the ships, after Force Z failed to find any Japanese invasion forces, and was heading back south. At 11:15, the fleet was attacked by the first of three waves of Japanese planes, mostly torpedo bombers. Repulse was hit by five torpedoes and sank at 12:23. Prince of Wales was bombed and torpedoed and sank at 13:18 after being slowed by a strike on a propellor shaft which caused flooding. Admiral Philips was among the 840 sailors killed. The survivors were rescued by British destroyers. Three Japanese planes were shot down.
The two ships were the first capital ships to be sunk solely by airpower on the open sea. This defeat drove home to the Allies that necessity of aircraft carriers to protect naval forces from aerial attack which made the new ship class the predominant one in naval warfare.
Winston Churchill later said of this event, “In all of the war I have never received a more direct shock."
References
- Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Volume III, "The Rising Sun in the Pacific".
External links
- Order of battle (http://www.navweaps.com/index_oob/OOB_WWII_Pacific/OOB_WWII_Force-Z.htm)
- Force Z Survivors Association (http://www.forcez-survivors.org.uk/)