Prince of Wales, HMS King George V class Royal Navy battleship featuring ten 14- inch guns, capable of a speed of 28.5 knots, and the flagship of Force Z. HMS Prince of Wales, along with the rest of Force Z, was caught off Kuantan at 11.15 a.m. on 10 December 1941 by a force of 34 Japanese high- level bombers and 51 torpedo- carrying bombers. In three waves of attacks, six ‘Long Lance’ torpedoes and one bomb hit the Prince of Wales, the first crippling its steering. The ship went down at 1.18 p.m., 327 of its crew perishing, including acting admiral Sir Tom Phillips.

The Prince of Wales was the first battleship sunk entirely by aircraft while under way. The general shock felt was compounded by the ship’s illustrious and very public past. Commissioned only in January 1941, the ship had engaged the German battleship Bismarck in May, carried Winston Churchill to Newfoundland in August for the Atlantic Conference with Franklin Roosevelt, and been shown off to foreign correspondents in Singapore in December as the very latest in battleship technology.

Photo credit: The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London