Okinawa and Japan

In their final actions of the war, substantial British naval forces took part in Operation Iceberg, the invasion of Okinawa, and the final naval strikes on Japan. The British Pacific Fleet operated as a separate unit from the American task forces in the Okinawa operation. Its job was to strike airfields on the chain of islands between Formosa and Okinawa, to prevent the Japanese reinforcing the defences of Okinawa from that direction. British forces made a significant contribution to the success of the invasion.

During the final strikes against Japan, British forces operated as an integral part of the American task force.

Only a small British naval force was present for Japan's surrender. Most British forces had been withdrawing to base to prepare for Operation Olympic, the first part of the massive invasion of Japan.

Source

Originally posted by fritz
This was a major blunder for the Axis and involved a country who they could never hope to defeat, either militarily or on an industrial level.

Originally posted by fritz
We Brits nicked the Enigma Machine and it was we Brits who decoded it's secrets at Bletchley Park; It was we Brits who took on the mighty Luftwaffe in 1940 and gave it a damned good spanking;

Originally posted by fritz
We also hunted down and sank the Bismark, we wasted the Tirpitz with miniature submarines (another brit invention) 617 Squadron bombed all the dams in the Ruhr whilst 615/619 [?] Squadron beat hell out of the German heavy water plant in Norway - the story being told in the film, 633 Squadron.

In October, as Tirpitz was no longer considered to be a major warship, she was moved further south to Tromsø, to act as a floating gun battery against the expected Allied invasion of Norway. She was now within range of air operations from Scotland. The smokescreen was not active on the third attempt - "Operation Catechism". Tirpitz was finally sunk immediately to the west of Tromsø, in the bay of Håkøybotn, on 12 November 1944 by 617 and 9 Squadron Lancasters with Tallboys on their third attempt. The ship was struck by three Tallboys. One glanced off turret armour, but the other two bombs pierced the ship's armour and blew a 200 foot hole in her port side. Soon after, internal fires set off a magazine and blew off "C" turret. The Tirpitz capsized within minutes of the attack, and close to 1,000 German sailors, out of 1,700 aboard, died.

Originally posted by fritz
The mighty Desert Rats took on Rommel and sent him back to Berlin in disgrace with his tail between his legs; the Special Air Service roamed Egypt and Lybia at will, blowing everything up in it's path, then transferred it's activities to France before the invasion, tying down hundreds of thousands of Axis troops in the process.

Originally posted by stumason
Here is an interesting snippet about UK Pacific roles, mind you:

Originally posted by stumason
Also, Dan, your comments that the Royal Navy was defunct, or even worse, been taking losses from U-boats is ill-informed.

The belief that Asdic had solved the submarine problem, the acute budgetary pressures of the 1930s depression and the pressing demands for many other types of re-armament meant that little was spent on anti-submarine ships or weapons. Most British naval spending, and many of the best officers, went into the battlefleet. As a result, the Royal Navy entered the Second World War in 1939 without enough escorts to protect shipping or enough officers and men with experience of anti-submarine warfare. The situation in the Royal Air Force’s Coastal Command was even more dire.

But some British naval officers, and particularly the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, sought a more ‘offensive’ strategy. The Royal Navy formed anti-submarine hunting groups based on aircraft carriers to patrol the shipping lanes in the Western Approaches and hunt for German U-boats. But this strategy was deeply flawed because a U-boat, with its tiny silhouette, was always likely to spot the surface warships and submerge long before it was itself sighted by them. The carrier aircraft were little help. Although they could spot submarines on the surface, at this stage of the war they had no adequate weapons to attack them. Any submarine found by an aircraft was long gone by the time surface warships arrived. The hunting group strategy proved a disaster within days. On September 14, 1939, Britain’s most modern carrier, the Ark Royal, narrowly avoided being sunk when three torpedoes from U-39 exploded prematurely. The unlucky U-39 was promptly sunk by the escorting destroyers, becoming the first U-boat loss of the war. Failing to learn the lesson, another carrier, the Courageous, was sunk three days later by U-29.

German success in sinking the Courageous was surpassed a month later when Günther Prien in U-47 penetrated the British base at Scapa Flow and sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak. Prien immediately became a war hero in Germany.

Originally posted by stumason
We requested the Destroyers not as replacements, but as cover for our own, advanced ships so they could be released from convoy duty. We had the largest fleet on the planet with the most advanced warships of the time. We just needed the ships.....guess where.... the Far East and North Africa, not babysitting convoys waiting for U-boats.

The Royal Navy’s main anti submarine weapon was the convoy escort, typically a destroyer, armed with asdic and depth charges. The British Royal Navy, like most navies, had neglected anti-submarine warfare during the 1920s and 1930s. Unrestricted submarine warfare had been outlawed by the Treaty of Versailles; anti-submarine warfare was seen as ‘defensive’; and many naval officers believed that the development of an early form of sonar, known as ‘Asdic’ (from the initials of the Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee), had solved the submarine problem. Asdic was an early form of sonar, housed in a dome beneath the ship that sent out a narrow beam of sound in a series of pulses that would reflect back from a submerged object within a maximum range of about 3,000 yards. The echo produced an accurate range and bearing to the target. But differences in the temperatures at different depths could create false echoes, as could currents, eddies and schools of fish, so Asdic needed experienced operators to be effective. Asdic was only effective at low speeds. Above 15 knots or so, the noise of the ship going through the water drowned out the echoes. When an enemy submarine was located, the destroyer or other escort would run over the target, dropping depth charges that were set to explode at particular depths. To sink a submarine a depth charge had to detonate within about 20 feet of the submerged hull. The navy had failed to test its anti-submarine weapons and tactics in realistic conditions. Exercises in anti submarine warfare had been restricted to one or two destroyers hunting a single submarine whose starting position was known in daylight and calm weather. Worse, German U-boats could dive far deeper than British or American submarines, to well below the deepest setting on the British depth charges.

Originally posted by stumason
U-boats had an almost insignificant impact on the operations of the Grand Fleet and the Royal Navy, when out and about, could operate with releative impunity, only fearing air attack from land based planes.

Originally posted by stumason
The merchant marine, on the other hand, did take in alot of those Liberty Ships you mass produced...

Quantity has a quality all its own

Originally posted by stumason
As for the comment about the Army being ill-equipped and being mainly provided with American Equipment. This may have been true only in Overlord, when he had a huge amount of the god-awful Shermans. We actually had huge numbers of our own indiginously produced tanks such as the Crusader, for example, which were much more apt at facing off against the superior German tanks than the paper-armoured, pea-shooter equipped Shermans. We fought much of the North Africa campaign without US support at all.