King George V-Class Battleship

The King George V class comprised five British battleships, HMS King George V, Prince of Wales, Duke of York, Anson and Howe, built for the Royal Navy and commissioned between 1940 and 1942 as the most modern British battleships to serve in the Second World War. Armed with an unusual main battery of ten 14-inch guns split between two quadruple turrets and one twin turret, and capable of about 28 knots, ships of the class fought in the action that led to the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941, escorted Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union, and HMS Duke of York sank the German battleship Scharnhorst at the Battle of North Cape in December 1943. HMS Prince of Wales was sunk by Japanese aircraft off Malaya in December 1941, while the remaining four ships served into the Pacific war and were present at the formal Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay before all five were scrapped by 1958.