When you find yourself trying to remember a show (or any works) that's on the tip of your tongue but just out of reach, come here - the collective brain of the TVTropes community can probably help. Post all the details you can remember (examples help). If you're looking for a trope, head over to Trope Finder. Have general questions about tropes? Visit Ask The Tropers!
Have you any idea which war and which nation the ship was from?
If it's the Yamato, Sinking the Supership
may be the one.
From the incidental detail about the ship's aircraft being unable to be launched, dashing the hopes of their crews that trhey'd get out alive, this can be identified as the German battleship Bismarck (sunk in 1941 several hundred miles west of France). Damage from attacks by Royal Navy aircraft had immobilsed the catapult launcher mechanisms, apparently. It may have been a human-interest point dramatised in the British postwar movie Sink the Bismarck!!
Elderly curmudgeon and awkward person. Professional old fart.Well the only other candidate then XD thanks, though I know that it was a documentary, the one talking was one of the crew members, but thanks, at least I can now search a bit better (granted 99.9999% of all documentaries about warships I know are either about the Bismarck (occasionally the Tirpitz) or Yamato but still), at least that halves the possibilities. Guess I need to search in some Database from the channels most likely to have aired it.
EDIT: Problem here is, 99% of the documentaries about the Bismarck are just copy-paste ones where the biggest difference is the logo of the channel it runs on, and maybe the narrator.
Edited by Sergey_Smirnov "One may feel fear in the face of danger so long as one banishes fear when danger actually arrives"

Ugh that will be a though one: I remember watching a documentary about a warship about a few years back, and would like to watch it again because I remember it as a good one, problem being I can only remember one scene.
One of the survivors explains the last hours before their ship was sunk, saying that they all wrote letters to their families back home to tell them of their fate, and that the pilot of the ship-plane already had his safe return before his eyes... only for the catapult to be stuck, meaning he couldn't take off and was probably killed when the ship sunk, as far as I remember it was quite the Tear Jerker for me back then, but it is the ONLY scene I remember, does somebody know:
A: Which ship that was? (I'm leaning towards the Yamato, but I'm in no way sure)
B: What documentary it was? (I probably should note that the documentary was in German (although probably not German-made))
Edited by Sergey_Smirnov