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...
Originally laid down as an Amagi-class battlecruiser, the stipulations of the Washington Treaty resulted in her conversion to an aircraft carrier. As a result, Akagi (赤城, "Red Castle") was one of Japan’s first large aircraft carriers. Akagi and her near-sister Kaga straddled the line between carrier and dreadnought. To keep both options open, the ships...
Launched on St Patricks Day 1938, HMS Belfast was one of ten Town-class vessels and the first vessel of the Royal Navy to be named for a Northern Ireland town. She initially operated as part of the British Naval blockade against Germany in 1939. In November of that year, she struck a German mine and spent the next two years undergoing extensive repairs. In...
The first WWII mission of Dido was the escort the carrier, Furious to West Africa in November 1940, before spending four months on convoy escort duty in the Atlantic. She then joined operations in the Mediterranean in 1941, assisting in the evacuation of British forces from Crete in May. Badly damaged in these efforts she spent the latter half of that year...
Neptune operated during her World War II service with a crew predominantly composed from the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy, but also a large proportion of South African personnel. In late 1939 she was in pursuit of the German pocket battleship, Admiral Graf Spee. In the aftermath of the Battle of the River Plate she was sent to Uruguay, however...