Photos Navies Of All Nations

[BravoZulu]

Italy:
Ammiragli class submarine Cagni at the works dock of the Monfalcone shipyard. Note the accumulators of the batteries lined up on the dock to be embarked

Battleship Vittorio Veneto leading the Italian fleet to Alexandria for internment, 14th Sept 1943

 

[BravoZulu]

RN:
L class destroyer HMS Lightning at anchor.

During late February and March 1943 Lightning was escorting troop and supply ships between Algiers and Bône in the day and attacking enemy convoys at night. When in harbour she was attacked every day by enemy aircraft and acted as an anti-aircraft ship. On her last voyage, Lightning left Bône alone at 1745 hours on the evening of Friday 12 March 1943 and after joining Loyal provided flanking screening cover to the cruisers Aurora and Sirius. The plan was to attack a German convoy out of Sicily bound for Tunisia. But when the convoy heard Lightning had left port, they returned to harbour. At 1851 hours Lightning was attacked by twelve German torpedo bombers. Lightning shot down one of the bombers and the attack itself failed to do any damage.

At about 2200 hours interpreters on board Lightning intercepted a radio message in German, stating that they were about to attack Lightning. At about 2215 hours the German motor torpedo boat (Schnellboot) S-158 of the 7th S-Boat Flotilla (First Lieutenant at Sea Schultze-Jena) fired the first torpedo, disabling Lightning. The ship's company had no time to return fire: they were not operating RDF, ASDIC or HF-DF and were not at full fighting condition due to heavy fighting that had been almost continuous during the past few days. The captain turned the ship hard to port to comb the track of the torpedo, but Lightning was too slow and was hit on the port bow, blowing it clean off. Then a second E-boat, S-55 of the 3rd S-boat flotilla (Kommandant Horst Weber), circled the ship and moved round to the starboard side. The German torpedo boat fired a second torpedo that hit beneath the funnel, destroying both boiler rooms, the pom pom and forward torpedo tubes on the upper deck. Moments later Lightning was abandoned – she had begun sinking almost immediately after the second torpedo hit. One survivor was picked up by S-158 and the remaining 180 survivors (including the captain, Commander Hugh Greaves Walters DSC) were picked up some hours later by sister ship Loyal, arriving Bone 0500 13 March. Survivors transferred to Sirius. The ship's company disbanded, transferred to other ships and shore base HMS Hannibal in Algiers. Lightning was replaced in Force Q by the Polish destroyer ORP Blyskawica. The ship's name is Polish for lightning.

 

[BravoZulu]

RN:
HMS Hood in American waters, June-July 1924. Note Vice-Admiral's flag flying from her foremast.

 

[BravoZulu]

France:
FS Courbet, the first La Fayette class frigate to undergo the mid-life refit which installed a bow mounted sonar, torpedo countermeasures, Exocet SSM of the latest Block 3C configuration, 2 Sadral launchers each with 6 Mistral Mk3 SAM/SSM, replacing the obsolete Crotale launcher. June 2021

Tripartite class minehunter l'Aigle being pulled out of the water after coming back from deployment, July 2021

 

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Norway:
Super-Hauks class fast attack craft Terne operating as a patrol ship for the UN. 2003-2006

 

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Imperial Japan:
Aircraft carrier Hiryu launching her aircraft to attack USS Yorktown (CV-5) at Battle of Midway, 4 June 1942

Qualified by the Allies as a warship, 47 years old anti-aircraft battery (former armoured cruiser) Asama waits for demolition. August 1946, Innoshima, Japan.

 

[BravoZulu]

Imperial Germany:
Hamburg, December 1916. Battlecruiser Ersatz Victoria Louise is pictured here on the 23d month of her construction. She will be launched in April 1917 under the name Mackensen but never completed due to the priority of U-boat construction.

 

[BravoZulu]

USN:
Freedom class LCS USS Freedom (LCS-1) on builders trials, 2006-2007

PACIFIC OCEAN (Nov. 19, 2016) Four F-35B Lightning II aircraft perform a flyover above the amphibious assault ship USS America (LHA 6) during the Lightning Carrier Proof of Concept Demonstration.

 

[BravoZulu]

USN:
Salvage of USS West Virginia (BB-48), in Drydock Number One at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, 17 June 1942.

Aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6) underway on 24 November 1943, while supporting the Gilberts Operation.

USS Missouri (BB-63) in the Miraflores Locks, Panama Canal, 13 October 1945

 

[BravoZulu]

USN & RN:
USS Kearsarge (BB-5) at right, steams past Majestic class battleships HMS Jupiter and HMS Magnificent, during a visit to an English port in 1903. Crewmen are manning the rails and superstructures of all three ships. Photographed by West & Son, Southsea, England. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph.

 

[BravoZulu]

Imperial Italy:
Battleship 'Conte di Cavour' firing its 305 mm guns in the Adriatic, 1915.

 

[BravoZulu]

Italy:
Capitani Romani class light cruiser/destroyer leader San Marco (D563) (ex Giulio Germanico) in 1961 after the reconstruction that took place in 1948 which saw the replacement of the 8x135mm guns with 6x127mm guns. The 37mm and 20mm anti-aircraft guns were also replaced with 20x40mm guns. Sonar and radar were also added.

 

[BravoZulu]

USN:
July 2021. USS Kidd (DDG 100). The gold anchor is for the highest retention (re-enlistments/extensions.)

 

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Japan:
JS Kumano (FFM 2) fitting out, July 2021

 

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Imperial Germany:
SMS Dresden at Juan Fernandez Island, Chile, 14 March 1915. The white flag is flying from the foremast.

In March 1915 the German cruiser Dresden steamed into the harbor of Robinson Crusoe Island, in the Juan Fernández archipelago, and cast anchor. The islands, lying in the Pacific some four hundred miles west of the South American mainland, belong to Chile, which was neutral in the world war that had broken out in Europe.

The Dresden had taken part in two reverberating naval battles. It was on the winning side at Coronel, off the Chilean coast, in November 1914, when Admiral Maximilian von Spee and the German Pacific squadron sank two British cruisers, and on the losing side a month later when a vengeful British fleet caught up with Spee at the Battle of the Falklands and sent him and most of his ships to the bottom of the sea. The Dresden had escaped and was being hunted by the Royal Navy. It was running out of fuel and sending desperate radio appeals for coal when its captain, Fritz von Lüdecke, decided to seek sanctuary in a neutral port, even at the risk of being interned. But the radio signals were picked up by the British. At 8:40 on the morning of March 14, a Royal Navy squadron entered the harbor and opened fire on the ship.

Von Lüdecke tried to negotiate. He sent over to HMS Glasgow a young lieutenant, Wilhelm Canaris. (Years later Admiral Canaris would become head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence, and finally a leading conspirator against Adolf Hitler, who hanged him in 1945.) Canaris met a British naval officer who merely said that “his orders were to sink Dresden, and leave the rest to the diplomats.” The British squadron resumed fire at point-blank range. Von Lüdecke ordered the crew to abandon ship, and at 10:45 a scuttling charge exploded in the Dresden’s bow. Another went off in the engine room as it sank. From the shore, the surviving German seamen cheered.

What exactly had happened, however, became a matter of ugly dispute. The British version was that the cruiser “put up a half-hearted fight” for five minutes or so and then ran up a white flag of surrender before being sunk by its crew. But London’s initial accusations that the Dresden was plotting to violate Chilean neutrality by using the island as a base for attacking British shipping soon went rather quiet; on reflection, bursting into the harbor and firing without asking Chile’s permission didn’t show much respect for neutrality either. The British apologized to the Chilean government but said that the action had taken place twelve miles out to sea, not in port. The Times of London professed to believe this. The New York Times, by contrast, reported that the Dresden had been anchored close offshore all through the engagement, with British shells hitting other ships in the anchorage and killing a civilian woman and child. A later, equally unconvincing British version of what happened claimed that the three Royal Navy warships had never entered the harbor but had bombarded the anchorage from the open sea.

Nearly a century later, in 2002, a Canadian-Chilean team went out to Juan Fernández to research the wreck of the Dresden. With them traveled Delgado. It’s fair to say that—along with Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the wrecks of the Titanic and the Bismarck—Delgado is one of the most experienced and best-known underwater archaeologists in the world. About the Dresden he writes:

"What we found, at 70 meters, was that the German accounts seemed right. Indeed, while the victors write the history, in this case they did so to gloss over their violation of the law, and unfairly maligned their opponents."

Examination of the wreckage on the seafloor showed clearly that the Dresden had been riddled with shells fired at extremely close range; its attackers had even sailed slowly around the cruiser—already abandoned by its crew—firing into it as it burned.

There was one final discovery. Delgado and his comrades found that part of the stern had been blown off, which no one had recorded at the time. It emerged that a few months before the sinking, Admiral von Spee had gone to the old German treaty port of Tsingtao, in China, and removed a large stock of gold coins held in the banks there. The gold had then been transferred to the Dresden and stored in the captain’s quarters in the stern, with the intention of bringing it back to Germany. Years passed, the war ended, and in Germany Hitler came to power. The new regime made contact with the enthusiastic Nazi element in Chile’s German community, and at some point in the 1930s a discreet Chilean-German team dived down to the Dresden wreck and blew open the captain’s quarters. There the trail apparently breaks off, but it leads plainly toward the Reichsbank in Berlin.

Neal Ascherson, New York Review of Books, July 22, 2021

 

[BravoZulu]

RN & Canada:
The White Ensign is lowered on HMS Vanguard (23) as a period of national mourning follows the death of King George VI. His Majesty intended to take a cruise aboard the ship in the immediate future. 06 February 1952.

HMS Ocean and HMCS Nootka refuelling from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Wave Prince after a raid on Pyongyang in July, 1952. © IWM (A 32264).

 

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Canada:
Gun crew sunbathing on Y gun of the infantry landing ship HMCS Prince David, off the Italian coast, July 1944. Credit: Donovan J. Thorndick.

 

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Russia:

 

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USN:
Battleship USS IOWA (BB 61) arriving at Norfolk, Virginia, with its crew manning the rails. June 1, 1984

Escorted by a group of pleasure boats, the battleship is passing a section of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. A CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter is in flight off the ship's port bow

Battleship USS Wisconsin (BB-64) is recommissioned for the 3rd time in her career before 12,000 spectators with Captain Jerry M. Blesch in command. Pascagoula, MS, 22 October 1988.

USS Iowa at anchor outside the Port of Los Angeles, May 2012

 

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RN & Singapore:
HMS Queen Elizabeth with Endurance class LPD RSS Resolution, Formidable class frigate RSS Intrepid and Independence class corvette RSS Unity, July 2021