As part of Operation Dukedom in May 1945, a force of five RN destroyers, the 26th Destroyer Flotilla, managed to sink the heavy cruiser Haguro and the destroyer Kamikaze in the Malacca Strait. The IJN ships were operating on a armed evacuation of Japanese forces in the Andaman Islands and the RN tasked the destroyer group to find and destroy the Japanese force. Prior to the battle, the Haguro was slightly damaged by aircraft from the RN's heavy force, Force 61, forcing the Japanese to retreat while the destroyers closed in. The resulting night battle sunk both Japanese ships with little damage to the RN destroyers.

Although Operation Dukedom was a relatively small affair compared to the larger naval battles in the Philippines and Central Pacific, it was the last major surface action of the war and one in which the RN managed to decisively defeat a Japanese force at night, albeit one that whose capabilities was significantly degraded from being cut off from reequipment from the Home Islands. The performance of the 26th Destroyer Flotilla indicates that the RN was capable of acting as a strong force that could more than meet the IJN by the latter half of the war. Naval support for the invasion of Burma was able to destroy any Japanese attempts to either reinforce or evacuate their forces in the theater by sea. Throughout 1943 and 1944, RN submarine, surface, and RAF air units had managed to extract an increasingly heavy price upon both Japanese and German (the Monsun group of U-boats operating out of Penang) forces attempting to attack British shipping in the Indian Ocean.

The problem for the British was one both of timing and geography. Although the surrender of Italy and the turning of the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943 promised to free up British naval units for the Pacific, the few remaining German heavy units and the need to cover the Allied invasions of Europe still managed to tie up RN heavy units. The geographic distances involved in sending a fleet to the Indian Ocean also precluded sending heavy units to attack the Japanese. By the time that the British were able to funnel major forces into the Pacific theater in mid-1944, there was little left of the Japanese fleet for it to meet. The USN and RN conducted air strikes joint carrier airstrike on Java in April and May 1944. The RN conducted followed these attacks up with a series of air strikes on Indonesia in June-September 1944, but these efforts did not prompt the remains of the IJN fleet to attack the British. Later in 1945, the British Pacific Fleet operated against the Home Islands along with the USN. Although the British Pacific Fleet did not manage to rack up the same combat record as its American ally, this was not really a reflection of its combat capabilities.