HMS Prince of Wales

The Vessel

HMS Prince of Wales was a King George V-class battleship of the Royal Navy, the second of her class, laid down at Cammell Laird's Birkenhead yard on 1 January 1937 and commissioned on 19 January 1941. She was 227 metres long, 43,786 tons deep-load displacement, armed with ten 14-inch guns in three turrets, and equipped with the first operational radar fire-control system in the British fleet. She was the most technologically advanced battleship Britain had ever built; she was also rushed into service.

Her working-up period at Scapa Flow in early 1941 was truncated to six weeks because the Royal Navy needed her urgently. Her 14-inch guns, a new design, were producing recurrent mechanical failures; her quadruple A-turret had been a particular and ongoing source of trouble. Vickers engineers and civilian contractors were still aboard her, still making adjustments to her main battery, when she was ordered to sea in May 1941 in company with the battlecruiser HMS Hood to intercept the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen breaking out into the Atlantic.

The Denmark Strait engagement of 24 May 1941 was her baptism of fire. She fired 55 14-inch shells at Bismarck and scored three hits that would ultimately contribute to the German ship's destruction three days later; she was hit by seven 15-inch and 8-inch shells in return. Her A-turret malfunctioned after three rounds and could not be returned to action during the engagement. She suffered 13 dead and 11 wounded. Her captain, John Leach, had the moral authority to have disengaged earlier than he did, but Admiral Holland's flagship Hood had been lost before Leach could break off, and Prince of Wales herself sustained sufficient damage that Admiral Lancelot Holland's decision for her to retire from the engagement was retrospectively justified.

The Voyage

Following her refit after the Denmark Strait action, Prince of Wales was assigned to Force Z, the new Royal Navy Eastern Fleet being assembled under Admiral Tom Phillips in response to Japanese pressure in Southeast Asia. Phillips, Vice-Admiral of the British fleet, was 53 years old and had spent the previous twenty years mostly ashore in Admiralty staff positions; he had not commanded a fleet at sea in wartime conditions.

Prince of Wales departed Britain on 25 October 1941 in company with her escort, the battlecruiser HMS Repulse. She called at Freetown, Cape Town, and Colombo before reaching Singapore on 2 December 1941. Her mission, as publicly announced by Churchill in the House of Commons, was to deter Japan from aggression in Southeast Asia by the visible presence of a modern British capital-ship force in the region.

On 8 December 1941, nine hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces began landing on the Malay Peninsula at Kota Bharu. Admiral Phillips decided to sortie Force Z from Singapore to attack the landing force. He departed Singapore at 17:10 on 8 December 1941 with Prince of Wales, Repulse, and four destroyer escorts. He had no air cover; the RAF Far East Command had no fighters available for escort duty in the sortie area, and Phillips declined to request further air support from the Netherlands East Indies forces.

Force Z proceeded north toward the Gulf of Thailand through 9 December. Phillips was sighted in the afternoon by Japanese reconnaissance aircraft; he turned Force Z south toward Singapore that evening but continued to approach the Malay coast throughout the next morning. On the morning of 10 December 1941, Force Z was approximately 70 nautical miles east-southeast of Kuantan, Malaya, when 85 Japanese naval aircraft of the 22nd Air Flotilla, Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service, reached the position and began their attack.

The Disaster

The first Japanese strike, 25 Nell bombers carrying torpedoes, attacked from the south at 11:15 on 10 December 1941. Prince of Wales maneuvered hard to port to present her broadside to the incoming aircraft; a single torpedo struck her starboard quarter at 11:44, near the propeller shaft, and jammed her port rudder at 15 degrees. She could no longer steer a straight course. The subsequent waves of Japanese attack aircraft, six groups of Nells and Bettys over the following hour, found her increasingly unable to maneuver.

Between 12:45 and 13:00 she was struck by four more torpedoes on her port side, all at or below the waterline. The flooding could not be contained; her list to port grew progressively through the early afternoon. Captain Leach made the decision to order the evacuation at 13:15. The surviving destroyers Express and Electra came alongside to take off her crew under the standing gunfire of the Japanese attack.

At 13:20 the Japanese delivered the final strike against Prince of Wales. A 500-kilogram bomb struck her armoured upper deck near X-turret and detonated below. The ship rolled onto her port side at 13:18 and capsized. She sank at 13:20 on 10 December 1941, bow-first, 25 nautical miles east of Kuantan, Malaya. Admiral Phillips, Captain Leach, 24 officers, and 303 ratings went down with her. 1,196 of her crew of 1,523 survived.

HMS Repulse was struck by four torpedoes in the same attack sequence and sank at 12:33 on the same afternoon, 40 minutes before Prince of Wales went down. Of her 1,309 crew, 796 survived. The combined casualty toll of Force Z on 10 December 1941 was 840 dead, the worst Royal Navy single-day loss since Jutland in 1916. The two British capital ships had been destroyed by 85 Japanese aircraft at a cost of four aircraft shot down.

The Legacy

The immediate strategic consequence of Force Z's destruction was the collapse of British naval deterrence in Southeast Asia. The subsequent six-week campaign of the Malaya invasion proceeded without meaningful British naval opposition; Singapore fell on 15 February 1942 to a Japanese army that had crossed the Johore Straits against no effective sea denial. Prince of Wales's loss is cited by every modern historian of the Pacific War as the moment at which British imperial power in East Asia ceased to be credible.

The tactical lesson was more general. Prince of Wales was the first modern battleship in history sunk at sea by aircraft alone, unaided by surface gunnery or by submarine torpedo. The sinking was conducted by medium bombers operating from land bases, carrying air-delivered torpedoes, against a battleship equipped with the full battery of 1941 anti-aircraft armament. The lesson was unambiguous: the battleship, as the core unit of naval force structure, had been superseded by the aircraft. The corresponding shift in American and British naval construction priorities away from battleships and toward aircraft carriers was largely complete by 1943.

The wreck of HMS Prince of Wales lies at 68 metres in the South China Sea, upside down, on sand, 3 kilometres from HMS Repulse. Her hull is largely intact. She was surveyed by the British Parliament's Ministry of Defence in 2007 and found to be in the condition reported in the 1941 loss: upside down, her four propellers still in place, her armament intact below the silt line. The site is a protected war grave under the UK Protection of Military Remains Act 1986; diving is prohibited without Ministry of Defence authorisation.

In 2014, 2015, and 2016 an illegal scrap-metal salvage operation systematically stripped HMS Prince of Wales of approximately 40 per cent of her recoverable scrap. The salvage, conducted by Chinese and Indonesian operators working with surface-supplied divers, targeted her pre-war low-background steel, which is valuable for use in scientific instruments that require non-radioactive steel. The salvage was photographed by British researchers in 2016 and publicised by The Guardian newspaper in October 2017. The British Ministry of Defence has filed official protests with the Indonesian and Malaysian governments and has sought international cooperation to prevent further salvage. The damage to the ship's hull is, in 2025, extensive.

The 840 dead of Force Z are commemorated at the Singapore Memorial at Kranji War Cemetery and on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial in the United Kingdom. The annual memorial service at Kranji is attended by the Singapore Armed Forces and the British High Commission and is held on 10 December each year. The Force Z disaster was the event at which the British Empire lost command of the sea it had held for 250 years; the two ships lie where they fell.