The Royal Navy of Great Britain was the world’s greatest navy at the outbreak of the Second World War. However, Britain went to war with mainly First World War-vintage vessels. Since the Royal Navy already possessed many powerful units, construction of the most modern designs was limited. This meant that at the outbreak of World War Two Britain had far...
Victory at Sea: Royal Navy Submarines & MTB sections Submarines: Designed for use in North European and Mediterranean waters, the S-class was manoeuvrable with a noted ability to crash dive extremely quickly. Combined with a large salvo of torpedoes, this was a successful design of pre-war years that was soon updated and put back into production. MTBs: The...
Victory at Sea: Tokyo Express Solo Play Supplement This solo play supplement for Victory at Sea puts you in command of a US Navy squadron, tasked with interdicting the titular Tokyo Express. The Tokyo Express With their isolated garrisons in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands under sustained attack by US forces, Imperial Japanese Navy planners needed a way...
Although the United States of America contains a vast area of land, almost all of its allies and trading partners are overseas, and those interests require a powerful navy to support them. The US Navy possessed some of the largest and most modern battleships in the world at the outbreak of World War Two, and despite losses during the Japanese attack on...
Submarines: The Gato-class of submarine was the first mass production US submarine class of the Second World War, forming the majority of the United States Navy’s submarine fleet of the war. It was the Gato-class, and the successors of her design that were largely responsible for the disruption of the Japanese merchant fleet. Individual Gato-class vessels...
A Northampton-class vessel, Chicago served in the Pacific during the early years of World War Two. Though surviving attacks by midget submarines in Sydney Harbour and serving in the battle of the Coral Sea and Savo Island in 1942, it was at the Battle of Rennell Island that she was sunk on 30 January 1943, when she was struck by Japanese aerial torpedoes...
USS Idaho, the third of three ships of the New Mexico-class of Battleship, was the fourth vessel to bear the name. She was launched in June 1917 and commissioned in March 1919. She was armed with a battery of twelve 14” guns in four turrets and was protected with heavy armour plate (13.5” thick in the main belt). During the 20s and 30s, Idaho spent the...
A Portland-class heavy cruiser, Indianapolis served as flagship for Admiral Raymond Spruance in 1943 and 1944 as he commanded the actions of the fifth fleet in the central pacific. She was ever-present in supporting the Island Hopping Campaigns of the Marianas and later supported the invasion of Okinawa. It was Indianapolis in July 1945 which secretly...
Only the mighty Yamato displaced more than the massive, yet very fast, Iowa-class battleships. The last battleship to be commissioned by the USA, USS Missouri known as the ‘Mighty Mo’ acted as venue for the Japanese surrender in WWII. Iowa-class ships saw service far beyond the Second World War and were upgraded with modern electronics, weapons systems and...
The lead of her class, the USS Northampton was initially classified as a light cruiser because for relatively thin armour but was later reclassified to a heavy cruiser owing to her 8-inch guns. She served in the Pacific theatre as part of USS Enterprises task force, screening the carrier at the Battle of Midway. She later participated in the operations of...
Yamato (大和, "Great Harmony") and her sister ship, Musashi, were constructed shortly before the outbreak of World War II. They were the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleships ever constructed; armed with nine 18.1” Type 94 main guns – the largest guns ever mounted on a warship. The battleship’s design was an answer to the numerically dominant US...