HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse, Singapore, 1941
HMS Prince of Wales was a new British battleship, which during its brief career had fought the German battleship Bismarck, carried Winston Churchill to the Argentia conference, and fought Italian forces in the Mediterranean. Its consort, HMS Repulse, was a battlecruiser which had fought in the First World War, been modernized between the wars, and had seen extensive convoy duty in the Atlantic. In 1941, the ships were detached to the Far East to bolster British defense of Singapore against Japanese aggression. Both ships had had their anti-aircraft batteries strengthened before their deployment to the Far East, and both ships were crewed by veterans.
On December 8, 1941, Japanese aircraft raided Singapore and other points on the Malay Peninsula, and the Admiral in command of the British flotilla, Tom Phillips, ordered the ships to sea that evening. Phillips may have believed that the Royal Air Force was able to provide air cover for the ships, but the Japanese, as they had at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines, had destroyed the Allied air forces effectiveness. The two ships were attacked in several waves of torpedo planes and bombers, and both were sunk with heavy loss of life, including Admiral Phillips. Ordering surface ships into possible attack by ground based aircraft was a mistake which made Prince of Wales and Repulse the first capital ships sunk solely by aircraft on the open sea.