31st January 1918: Battle of May Island damages and sinks Royal Navy vessels during accidental collisions in thick fog

The Battle of May Island was not an actual battle but rather a peacetime disaster caused by miscommunication and navigational errors near the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth in Scotland during World War I.

13th December 1939: The Battle of the River Plate takes place off the coast of Uruguay and Argentina as the first major naval battle of WW2

Although the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee inflicted significant damage on the British HMS Exeter, the combined efforts of three British cruisers successfully crippled the Graf Spee’s fuel system and she was later scuttled.

14th June 1900: Anglo-German naval arms race triggered by the Second German Naval Law to double the size of the fleet

The enactment of the Second Naval Law represented an ambitious plan to double the size of the German fleet, but with the British Royal Navy having long been the world’s dominant maritime force Germany’s naval expansion was perceived as a direct challenge to British supremacy.

30th October 1942: German Enigma machine ciphers retrieved from submarine U-559 by British sailors

A British party of Lieutenant Francis Fasson, Able Seaman Colin Grazier, and canteen assistant Tommy Brown, boarded the slowly-sinking submarine after it had been damaged by depth charges and retrieved the Enigma codebooks and all the current settings for the U-boat network.