Two Great Naval Battles of WWII: Hunt the Bismarck and Battle of the Coral Sea (Elite Attack Forces)

Two epic naval battles early in World War II―fought in different oceans thousands of miles apart―could be said to have halted the aggressors in their triumphal tracks and showed that the Allies were fighting back. This highly detailed analysis describes how Britain’s Royal Navy hunted down and destroyed the German battleship Bismarck, and how the US Navy gave the Imperial Japanese Navy its first bloody nose at the Battle of the Coral Sea. The breakout of the German battleship Bismarck into the North Atlantic in May 1941 is one of the most dramatic naval episodes of World War II. For nine days she became the most sought-after ship in the world, as virtually the entire British Home Fleet tried to track her down and bring her to bay. Soon after dawn on 24 May 1941, the Bismarck and her consort Prinz Eugen encountered the brand-new battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Hood in the freezing waters of the Denmark Strait. Within thirty minutes the Hood, the pride of the Royal Navy, was destroyed and the Prince of Wales was heavily damaged―the Bismarck had broken out into the waters of the North Atlantic. Dozens of warships struggled to intercept her. An airborne attack damaged her rudder, and a second attack slowed her down enough for the British fleet to catch up with her. On the night of 26-27 May, they surrounded Bismarck and sank her. By May 1942, the Japanese carriers had swept all before them, decimating the American surface fleet at Pearl Harbour, supporting a succession of amphibious attacks on the Philippines and Indonesian archipelago, and even penetrating into the Indian Ocean. Their next step was to be the occupation of Port Moresby on Papua New Guinea, a stone’s throw from the Australian coast. The Battle of the Coral Sea was the first check in this triumphal progress, even more than Midway a month later. Strategically, it caused the invasion fleet to withdraw: the high-water mark of Japanese success had been reached. Tactically, it demonstrated that Japanese pilots were not invincible, that they could be stopped by an aggressive use of naval airpower, and that the US Navy had the wherewithal to accomplish this. This book analyses these two battles and their impact on naval warfare in great detail.