HMS Prince of Wales (53)

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• HMS Prince of Wales was a King George V-class battleship of the Royal Navy, built at the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead, England. She had an extensive battle history, first seeing action in August 1940 while still being outfitted in her drydock when she was attacked and damaged by German aircraft. In her brief but storied career, she was involved in several key actions of the Second World War, including the May 1941 Battle of the Denmark Strait against the German battleship Bismarck, escorting one of the Malta convoys in the Mediterranean, and then attempting to intercept Japanese troop convoys off the coast of Malaya when she was lost on 10 December 1941. In her final battle which was three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, she was sunk alongside the battlecruiser HMS Repulse by Japanese bombers when they became the first capital ships to be sunk solely by air power on the open sea, a harbinger of the diminishing role this class of ships was subsequently to play in naval warfare. The wreck of Prince of Wales lies upside down in 223 feet (68 m) of water, near Kuantan, in the South China Sea. (info from Wikipedia).