Victory at Sea is the game of naval combat during the Second World War. Throughout 1939–45, the nations of the world duelled across the oceans across the globe, only to discover the fundamental nat...
The F4U Corsair was an American fighter, of which, was designed and operated as a carrier-based aircraft. It quickly emplaced itself as one of the more capable fighter-bombers of the second world w...
The Fairey Swordfish, by some accounts, was one of the finest warplanes of all World War II. It was highly reliable, capable of launching from carriers in most weather conditions. This was in spit...
The Mitsubishi A6M Zero was a fast, modern fighter, but had no armour for the pilot. When the Zero was in the hands of aggressive and well-trained pilots this weakness was rarely apparent. The A6-M...
A naval dive bomber with many similarities to the German Ju 87 Stuka, the Val was armed with two fixed forward machineguns and two rear trainable ones. It carried a crew of two and a light bomb lo...
In 1923 it was decided to convert an incomplete Normandie-class battleship to a carrier. Despite a refit in 1935, she was far too slow for fleet operations in World War Two and was demilitarised in...
Two Bismarck-class battleships were built for the Kriegsmarine. Bismarck was the first, named for the Chancellor (Otto von Bismarck). The battleship was laid down in July 1936 and launched February...
Blücher was named for Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, who lead the Prussians to victory at Waterloo. She was the second of the Admiral Hipper-class of heavy cruisers, completed shortly after the ou...
Also known as the Jaguar-class, Chacal (Jackal)-class destroyers were designed to fulfil a scouting role for fleet battle lines and to attack enemy shipping in the Mediterranean. As a result, they...
The Clemson-class was a redesign of the Wickes-class and was the last pre- World War Two class of flush-decker destroyers to be built for the United States. In all, 156 of these destroyers served w...
Relatively easy to handle for a well-trained pilot, the Hellcat was built specifically to defeat the Japanese Zero, a role it excelled at. Its nickname of ‘Ace Maker’ was well earned, and the Hell...
The four vessels of the Suffren-class were based on the Duquesene-class, though each was built to slightly different standards as lessons were learned from the preceding ship. Their hull form was ...
Continuing the Bf 109’s legacy, the Fw 190 soon gained the attention of Allied pilots in Europe as it cut a swathe across the sky. A big, radial-engine fighter, the Fw 190 was capable of using bru...
The Gloster Gladiator represented the final generation of biplane fighters before being made obsolete by the appearance of the Hurricane, Spitfire and Bf 109. In 1937, the Fleet Air Arm decided th...
While serving as commerce raiders, the Scharnhorst-class Battleships (or battlecruisers), Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were responsible for sinking over 105,000 tons of allied shipping in a single cr...
Though laid down and launched before the start of the war, the Graf Zeppelin was never completed or commissioned, and it never saw action.
Whilst four aircraft of the class had originally been pla...
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 th...
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...
Laid down in 1937 and commissioned in 1941, HMS Duke of York was a King George V-class of battleship. She had the distinction of transporting Winston Churchill across the Atlantic to meet Franklin...
An early aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy, HMS Eagle was originally a super-dreadnought of the Chilean Navy (named Almirante Cochrane), laid down in 1913, but was purchased by the Royal Nav for ...
At one time, the HMS Hood was the largest and possibly most famous ship in the world, representing the supremacy of British sea power. Though attached to Home Fleet, the Hood took part in the sink...
HMS Warspite was a Queen Elizabeth-class battleship of the Royal Navy. Built during the early 1910s, she served in the First World War, including at the Battle of Jutland. Modernized in the 1930s, ...
Submarines: The Kaidai-7-class, or KD-7, was developed in the late 1930s, following on from the preceding KD-6 class. With a surface range of 8,000nm at 16kts, and a submerged endurance of 50nm at...
For centuries, Japan's policy of seclusion (sakoku) saw it concentrate on coastal defences in order to repel foreign vessels. However, with the advances other maritime nations were making, it event...
Built as a training cruiser for the French Marine Nationale the Jeanne d'Arc was both floating school and combat capable warship. During WWII she formed part of a flotilla taking French gold to Ca...
Essentially an enlarged Fubuki-class, the Kagerō-class hull design was scaled up to overcome earlier design deficiencies. As a result, the Kagerō-class was the equal of any of its contemporaries i...
Köln was the third of the Königsberg-class of light cruiser, operating between 1929 and 1945, initially under the Reichsmarine and subsequently the Kriegsmarine. In the 1930s she served as a train...
Kongō (金剛, “Indestructible Diamond”), named for the mountain, was the first battleship of her class, serving in both the first and second world wars. At the time of construction in the early 1910s...
The Kriegsmarine had to be virtually rebuilt after the First World War. Forbidden to own capital ships and submarines, Germany nibbled away at first one clause of the Treaty of Versailles, then ano...
Submarines: A long-ranged submersible, the Type IX was the most successful U-boat of the war, with each vessel averaging over 100,000 tons of shipping sunk. One Type IX, U-107, made the most succe...
At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Marine Nationale of France was a powerful force with modern battleships, which should have been a major asset to the Allied cause. The rapid fall of Fr...
Preventing attacks on defenceless merchant ships is the other main role of the navy, and it was her that the war was fought, day in and day out, by the humble corvette, frigate and destroyer escor...
