This is extremely rare colour footage of the battle-cruiser HMS Hood and its crew at sea in 1939. Two years later, the ship and some of the men in this footage were at the bottom of the Denmark Strait after a fateful encounter with Hitler's flagship, Bismarck. Eighty years ago today, the mighty Hood was sunk with the loss of 1,415 lives - just three men survived - as she and brand-new battleship HMS Prince of Wales attempted to stop the Bismarck and cruiser Prinz Eugen raiding Britain's supply l

HMS Ark Royal (R09) was an Audacious-class aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy and, when she was decommissioned in 1979, was the Royal Navy's last remaining conventional catapult and arrested-landing aircraft carrier. She was the first aircraft carrier to be equipped with an angled flight deck at its commissioning; her sister ship, HMS Eagle, was the Royal Navy's first angle-decked aircraft carrier after modification in 1954. Ark Royal was the only non-United States vessel to operate the McDonnel