Second World War

The aircraft carrier replaced the battleship as the capital ship, and radar and codebreaking decided battles fought at night and over the horizon. So far this covers the North Sea, Norway and the Baltic, the Atlantic convoys and the German raiders, the hunt for Bismarck, the Arctic and the long campaign against Tirpitz, the Channel and the Bay of Biscay to the Normandy landings, the fighting between the Allies and Vichy France, and between Vichy France and Thailand, the Mediterranean, and the war against Japan from Pearl Harbor and Guadalcanal through the Solomons, the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf to the last sortie of Yamato. Alongside the British and Americans fought the smaller Allied navies: Dutch, Polish and Norwegian ships that escaped in 1939 and 1940, the Free French who fought on after France's surrender while most of the French fleet served Vichy, and the Australian and Canadian navies, which grew from a handful of ships into large fleets. The first shots were fired by the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, at the Polish depot on the Westerplatte in Danzig, and within weeks a U-boat had sunk Royal Oak inside Scapa Flow. In April 1940 Germany invaded Norway, losing the cruiser Blücher to the guns of a Norwegian fortress and half its destroyers at Narvik, and in June Scharnhorst and Gneisenau caught and sank the carrier Glorious. In December 1939 three British cruisers drove Graf Spee into Montevideo, where she was scuttled, and disguised raiders roamed every ocean; one of them, Kormoran, sank HMAS Sydney with all hands. In May 1941 Bismarck broke out into the Atlantic and blew up Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy, and three days later was hunted down and sunk; the next February her consorts slipped home up the English Channel. In the Arctic the convoys to Russia fought through to Murmansk, the failure at the Barents Sea turned Hitler against his big ships, Scharnhorst was sunk off the North Cape, and Tirpitz, attacked by midget submarines, carrier aircraft and bombers, was finally capsized at Tromsø in November 1944. In the Baltic the Soviet fleet lost dozens of ships to mines fighting its way out of Tallinn in 1941, and in 1945 Soviet submarines sank the ships carrying Germans west from East Prussia, Wilhelm Gustloff among them: no single sinking has ever cost more lives. In the Mediterranean, Britain fought Italy for three years over the supply routes to North Africa and the island of Malta between them. The British struck first and hardest, at Taranto, Matapan and Cape Bon, but German aircraft and U-boats made the waters around Crete and Malta deadly, and Italian human torpedoes crippled two battleships in Alexandria harbour. Malta held out on a few convoys fought through at heavy cost, the last great one, Pedestal, in August 1942, and in September 1943 the Italian fleet sailed to surrender at Malta, losing the battleship Roma to German glide bombs on the way. In the Pacific, in its first six months Japan sank the American battle line at its moorings, sank Prince of Wales and Repulse from the air, and destroyed the Allied fleets in the East Indies, while its carriers raided as far as Ceylon. The Coral Sea checked it, and at Midway in June 1942 American dive bombers sank four Japanese carriers in a day. Two months later the Americans landed on Guadalcanal, and a six-month struggle began for the airfield they called Henderson Field. Japan ran troops and supplies down "the Slot" by night in the "Tokyo Express"; the US Navy tried to stop it. In six months the two navies fought seven major surface and carrier battles, and so many ships were sunk off Guadalcanal that the water became known as Ironbottom Sound. The Japanese won most of the night actions with their Long Lance torpedoes and their training, but could not win back control of the air, and in February 1943 they quietly took their last troops off the island. The loss of their aircrews and ships here was one Japan could not make good.