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Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Deadly HMS Prince Of Wales

Army and Weapons | Deadly HMS Prince Of Wales | The first Royal Navy ship named Prince of Wales bear was a French privateer captured in 1693 and renamed, as a 14-gun Sixth Rate served until 1699.

HMS Prince of Wales (pennant number 53) was a King George V class battleship of the Royal Navy, built at the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead, England. She was involved in various key actions of the Second World War, including the fight against the Denmark Strait, Bismarck, supervise activities convoys in the Mediterranean, and its last action, and sink into the Pacific Ocean in 1941.

Prince of Wales first encountered the Germans while she fitted her in dry dock, attacked and damaged by German aircraft. She was heavily involved in the initial contact with the German battleship Bismarck and the cruiser Prinz Eugen, and landed a critical hit on Bismarck, making them the ill fated decision to return to the harbor. Prince of Wales suffered heavy damage during the mission and had to return to Rosyth to be repaired. Prince of Wales carried Prime Minister Winston Churchill to the Newfoundland conference with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
On October 25, 1941 Prince of Wales went to Singapore to Force Z, a British naval detachment to join. They docked on December 2 with the rest of the force, and at 2:11 on December 10 Force Z was sent to reports of the Japanese landing forces Kuantan to investigate. Upon arrival they found the reports to be false. At 11:00 that morning the Japanese bombers and torpedo planes began their attack on Force Z In a second attack at 11:30 torpedoes hit Prince of Wales on the port side, destroying the outer shaft and causing the ship to take on a heavy list. A third torpedo attack developed against Repulse, but she managed to avoid all torpedoes aimed at her. A fourth attack by torpedo-carrying Type 1 "Betty" Repulse sank at 12:33. Six aircraft of this wave were the Prince of Wales, with four of their torpedoes hit the ship, causing flooding. Finally a 500 kg bomb hit the catapult deck, penetrated the main deck and exploded, tearing a gash in the port side of the fuselage. At 13.15 the order was given to abandon the ship and sank at 13:20 Prince of Wales, Vice Admiral Tom Phillips and Captain John Leach were among the 327 fatalities.
Prince of Wales and Repulse, the first capital ships to be sunk exclusively by air power on the open seas (albeit with land-based rather than based on carrier aircraft), a harbinger of the diminishing role of this class of ship was then to play in naval warfare. The wreck lies upside down in 223 feet (68 meters) of water, near Kuantan, the South China Sea.

The second was a 18-gun Hired Armed Ship, with a civilian crew of 120 men, under which Royal Navy officers and discipline 1756-1758. The third Prince of Wales, a Third Rate 74-gun line-of-battle ship was built in 1765 and had a crew of 600. 1770-1771, and commissioned into service in 1776, in December 1778, as British flagship, she played an important role in the successful defense of St Lucia against superior French forces.
In July 1779 HMS Prince of Wales led the British fleet against a larger French force in a battle off Grenada. Fruit in 1780, it was demolished in 1783.

The fourth ship was named was built at Portsmouth in June 1794. She was a three-class Boyne deck 98-gun Second Rate. Designed as a budget first class, the ship is treated badly, but served the Navy well, seeing a lot of action during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. She was present at the battle of the Ile de Groix in June 1795, the flagship at the capture of Trinidad in February 1797 and the flagship of force the surrender of the Dutch colony of Suriname delivered in 1799. The ship was Sir Robert Calder's flagship in July 1805, when his squadron intercepted Admiral Villeneuve's combined fleet from Ferrol, a few months before the great battle of Trafalgar.
In a confused action in poor visibility, two Spanish ships were taken, with the greatest enemy of effective support for victims more than the British. Calder also forced the combined fleet of direction away from their intended destination, ruining Napoleon's invasion plans. HMS Prince of Wales was then in action in 1807 as the flagship in the attack on Copenhagen, which ended with the surrender of the Danish fleet. Paid at the end of the year, putting them into use in 1811 for the blockade of the Scheldt. They then sailed to the Mediterranean Fleet, where she served until the end of the war in 1814 and was demolished in that year to close. The fifth Prince of Wales, established in 1848 as a first class line-of-battle ship, was completed in 1860 as a steam-propeller warship.

Never commissioned, in 1869 she became Cadet Training Ship at Dartmouth and was renamed HMS Britannia. She was hulked in 1909 and demolished in 1914. Prince of Wales, number six was a Queen class battleship built at Chatham and launched in 1902.Armed with four 12-inch guns, she served in the Mediterranean and Atlantic fleets before the Home Fleet in 1912. Assigned as flagship for the 5th Battle Squadron of the Channel Fleet on the outbreak of WW1, they enter the Dardanelles in March 1915. Italy when the Allied side was Prince of Wales was among a squadron of pre-dreadnoughts sent to the Italian fleet to strengthen against the Austrian navy. She was based at Taranto until February 1917. The redemption at the end of the war, Prince of Wales was demolished in 1920. The last Prince of Wales was a King George V class battleship built by Cammell Laird in Birkenhead and completed in March 1941. Displacing over 42,000 tons and more than 745 meters long, she had one of the main armament of ten14-inch guns and carried a complement of around 1400. When declared operational on May 21, 1941, the day the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen broke out into the Atlantic, she was suffering from faulty major weapon systems.


The Prince of Wales and the battleship Hood sailed from Scapa Flow the next day, the new battleship with the site engineers on board are still there to teething problems of the new ship. The British ships intercepted the German force in the Denmark Strait at dawn on May 24 and engaged the enemy. In the ensuing action HMS Hood inflated, with the loss of all but three of her crew. The Prince of Wales, now under the concentrated fire of both German ships and still plagued with mechanical failure of its main armament, did the action, but not before she had damaged the Bismarck oil tanks. Forced to divorce her husband and go to a French port, after a dramatic pursuit of the new German battleship was phased out and destroyed by the guns of battleships HMS Rodney and HMS King George V and torpedoes from the cruiser HMS Dorsetshire.
In August 1941 Prince of Wales carried Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Newfoundland for the Atlantic Charter meeting with President Roosevelt.


The following month the battleship arrived in Gibraltar, Force H, consisting of the battleships Rodney and Nelson, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, five cruisers and 18 destroyers, for Operation Halberd, a troop and supply convoy to Malta. In October 1941 the Prince of Wales, with the battle-cruiser Repulse, was ordered to the Far East, for Z Force, based in Singapore, as a form of deterrent to the Japanese. Force Z, the two capital ships with a light destroyer escort, sailed on December 8, 1941 a Japanese invasion force in the Gulf of Siam to intercept. On December 10 the ships were attacked by waves of Japanese bombers and torpedo bombers. Overwhelmed, both ships were sunk, while the Prince of Wales stayed afloat for about two hours, so the accompanying destroyers to nearly 1,300 people to save.


HMS Prince of Wales will be the second of the two Royal Navy Queen Elizabeth class super carriers and is expected to be extended readiness in 2023. The ship will be assembled at Rosyth Royal Dockyard using blocks built by the participating sites. Once in the service of the ship will be formally connected to the city of Liverpool, UK. Construction began in May 2011 with the first steel is cut by Dr Liam Fox on May 26


The Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers are the largest, most powerful surface ships Britain has ever built. They are unique among the carriers of the world in the positioning of the ships flight control, loose (rear), the ships main bridge.


The second Queen Elizabeth class ship named Prince of Wales at the same time as her sister ship named Queen Elizabeth received. However, controversy over the dismantling of the HMS Ark Royal under the terms of the SDSR in 2011, and subsequent loss of the name Ark Royal led to a campaign for one of the new aircraft carriers to receive. In May 2011, reports surfaced that HRH The Prince of Wales was approached by a senior Royal Navy officer on the subject of changing the name of the Prince of Wales on Ark Royal, a matter which the Prince of Wales was said to be "free relaxed 'about.