Talk:HMS Prince of Wales (1939)

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Shipwreck-related priority open tasks: Contents 1 To Do 2 Done 3 = Name? 4 Different Tonnage 5 Mostly correct 6 No time to train? [edit] To Do Shipwrecks Clean up typos Improve Grammer Add any additions if needed Discuss disired additions Cattewater Wreck Needs expansion [edit] Done Shipwrecks Re-wrote the first paragraph Cleaned up Types of Shipwrecks it felt a bit jumbled Cattewater Wreck Started the article

Guys, the tables etc are important, but please don't ignore the POV text. There are far too many opinionated comments here.

If you're going to add comments, could you sign them please? Just put four tildes after your comment --Andy Wade 20:30, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] = Name?

Need an interpretation here: Is it Prince of Wales or Prince Of Wales?

Definitely Prince of Wales. Lower case o in of. A historical name after the title 'Prince of Wales' which refers to the first son of the King/Queen of England, who would also be first in line to the throne. Wales is know as a Principality because of this. Some of them even learned Welsh as a language. Prince Charles speaks it very well. I met him once, but I bet he doesn't remember me ;-) --Andy Wade 18:24, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Different Tonnage

There is a reported difference in tonnage:

Prince of Wales Statistics: 35,000 tons, ten 15-inch guns, crew of 110 officers and 1,502 ratings, last Captain is Captain John C. Leach.

Military Heritage did a feature on the Prince Of Wales and its sinking (Joseph M. Horodyski, Military Heritage, Volume 3, No. 3, pp.69 to 77).

The tonnage quoted in the article is the ship's deep displacement. Wiki-Ed 14:52, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Mostly correct

The tonnage and captain's name are correct. The ship had 14 inch guns, not 15 inch. 147.240.236.9 21:58, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] No time to train?

They skipped pre-operation 'work up' to get her into combat faster, leaving the crew inadequately trained - note in edit summary left by User:Hrimfaxi. Hrimfaxi is saying that is the reason the ship's AA gunners failed to shoot down the Japanese planes that sank her.

She fought the Bismarck in May. She was in Singapore in December. Just what the heck did the crew do for seven months, go on holiday? Drogo Underburrow 10:42, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Hey, the British Admiralty said that, not me. You might notice by reading the article:

• She was in for repairs after fighting Bismarck. Time, 6 weeks.
• In August, she was used to carry Churchill across the Atlantic for a secret meeting with Roosevelt.
• She was then assigned to convoy escort duty in the Mediterranean, ending 25th October when she left for Singapore.
• She arrived just in time for the Japanese to attack, and was sunk.

Notice in any of that any long periods of downtime when she could have paused to do live AA gunnery exercises? No, me neither.Hrimfaxi 11:09, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi Guys, If you'd like, I'm pretty sure that they did several gunnery exercises in the time between Bismarck and the sinking, but I can confirm this with some of the crew I know who are still alive if you'd like. Would this be an acceptable verification though? Please let me know what you think. --Andy Wade 18:14, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Although it sounds like you have a fantastic resource, I suspect Wikipedia would not view it as verifiable unless it was put on paper and made accessible (i.e. published). It might be pushing it, but I wonder what would happen if you asked one of these veterans to write down his experiences and sign the paper and then scanned it in and displayed it here?

However, in this case Hrimfaxi's contention is not verifiable either so a simple indication of what they say should be enough. In fact, if I recall correctly from reading the board of enquiry report made after the sinking (it's in the National Archives, possibly ADM/1/11043), the naval architect responsible thought the torpedo that sunk the ship was a "one in a million" chance. Given the number of attackers the AA gunners on the ship could hardly be blamed, regardless of how much training they had. Wiki-Ed 20:09, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, even we are talking about a RN warship here, and I know they would have had plenty of gunnery practice in the time of the Malta convoys, and on the way to South Africa, and Singapore. But I can't 'verify' this. Never mind anyway... However, here's a ref: Page 206/207 of 'Battleship' (MiddleBrook & Mahoney), states that after the port outer shaft hit, the resulting vibration caused huge damage, and four of the eight dynamo compartments had been flooded. So the four aft 5.25 turrets P3, P4, S3, S4 had lost all electrical power, and the Pom Poms had faulty ammunition belts, and then shortly afterwards because of the 11.5 degree list, the forward four 5.25 turrets could not traverse, although they could elevate. So they had very little AA defence left to speak of at this time. Even if they'd had a good amount of practice, they couldn't have used their guns anyway That port outer hit was indeed a 'one in a million' chance. I forgot to say... I think that the story about gunners not being worked up has been confused with the inexperienced main gun crews before the Denmark Strait battle, and not the AA gun crews at Singapore. --Andy Wade 21:31, 20 September 2006 (UTC)