In 2001, I was invited on a Tri-Services exped to film the wrecks of the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, both sunk in a mass attack by 85 Japanese high-level and torpedo NELL and BETTY bombers on 10 December 1941 in the South China Sea, just shy of 200 miles north of Singapore.

The loss in action of the virtually brand new battleship Prince of Wales (fresh from taking on the Bismarck in the Battle of the Denmark Strait), was the first time a modern battleship had been sunk by air attack in the open sea in action – and her loss is seen as defining the end of the era of the battleship.

We had a film crew aboard – and the resulting 1-hr Timewatch documentary, The Death of the Battleship, aired on BBC in 2002, and featured many survivors. In 2013I published my book Force Z Shipwrecks of the South China Sea: HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse.

I managed to return a few times in the coming years – before sadly, despite being war graves, these wrecks, along with Dutch, Japanese, U.S. and other British naval vessels in the area, became the focus of intensive illegal salvage work. It is an awful tragedy – and all for the precious pre-Hiroshima steel and valuable non-ferrous metals.

To make my contribution to posterity, to preserve the memory of what happened and the sacrifice made, I am now putting out a 3-part series of videos about the wrecks as they were before the salvage work started – in the hope that it might be useful to naval historians in the future.

I have just published Part 1, which deals with the build up to the deployment of Force Z, the fateful sortie from Singapore and the final battle that saw both ships end up on the bottom of the South China Sea. A further video will b published in time on each of the two wrecks. Here’s the link to Pt 1: