HMS Glorious

A wartime restriction barred construction of ships larger than light cruisers, which stopped Fisher ordering an improved Renown. His way round it was a ship with the armour of a light cruiser and the armament of a battlecruiser, justified as a fast shallow-draught vessel for his Baltic Project, a scheme to invade Germany by way of its Baltic coast. Glorious was the second of the three Courageous-class ships that resulted, and the compromise was written into her: 786 feet 9 inches long, 19,180 long tons at load, and protection that would not survive a serious engagement.

Her keel was laid on 1 May 1915 by Harland and Wolff at Belfast, she was launched on 20 April 1916 and completed on 14 October at a cost of £1,967,223. She and her sisters were the first large warships in the Royal Navy to have geared steam turbines — Parsons machinery fed by eighteen Yarrow boilers, good for 31.42 knots on her abbreviated trials and an estimated 6,000 nautical miles at 20 knots.

She carried four BL 15-inch Mark I guns in two twin turrets, one forward and one aft, with eighteen BL 4-inch Mark IX in six triple mounts. Those triple mounts were a poor idea in practice: the three breeches sat too close together and the twenty-three loaders got in one another's way, which cancelled out the high rate of fire the mounting was supposed to deliver against torpedo boats. Two submerged 21-inch torpedo tubes and a pair of 3-inch anti-aircraft guns completed her.

After most of the 1st Cruiser Squadron was destroyed at Jutland, the squadron was re-formed around Courageous and Glorious, and she spent the war patrolling the North Sea. On 17 November 1917 she went out with the 1st Cruiser Squadron against the German minesweeping forces clearing lanes through the British minefields. The Germans — four light cruisers, eight destroyers, three divisions of minesweepers and eight cork-filled sperrbrecher — were sighted at 7:30 a.m. against the rising sun and immediately made smoke, which turned the whole action into a chase through fog of their own making.

One 15-inch shell hit a gun shield on SMS Pillau without slowing her. At 8:33 the left-hand gun in Glorious's forward turret was wrecked when a shell detonated inside the barrel. At 9:30 the squadron broke off to avoid a minefield marked on the charts and took no further part. She had fired 57 fifteen-inch and 213 four-inch shells and needed five days of repairs, as much for her own muzzle blast as for the burst gun.

Flying-off platforms went onto her turrets in 1918, a Sopwith Camel aft and a 1½ Strutter forward. On 5 November that year, anchored off Burntisland in the Firth of Forth, she was struck by the seaplane tender Campania, which dragged her anchor in a Force 10 squall and collided first with the battleship Royal Oak and then with Glorious; Campania flooded and sank five hours later without loss of life. Glorious was present at the surrender of the High Seas Fleet on 21 November 1918 and went into reserve at Rosyth the following February.

The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 capped capital ship tonnage but allowed up to 66,000 long tons of existing hulls to become aircraft carriers, and the Courageous-class ships — big, fast and useless as they stood — were ideal candidates. Glorious began conversion at Rosyth in 1924 and was completed at Devonport on 24 February 1930, making 29.47 knots on her post-conversion trials. Her 15-inch turrets went into storage and were later reused for Vanguard, the last battleship ever built.

Everything above the main deck came off. A two-storey hangar, each level 16 feet high and 550 feet long, was built on the remaining hull, the upper level opening onto a short flying-off deck below and forward of the main flight deck — an arrangement that eased launch and recovery cycles until heavier fighters needing longer take-off runs made the lower deck obsolete. Two lifts were set fore and aft, and an island with bridge, flying-control station and funnel went on the starboard side, islands having been found not to add significantly to turbulence. She could carry up to 48 aircraft and, by 1939, 34,500 imperial gallons of petrol for them.

She recommissioned in February 1930 and spent nearly her whole career in the Mediterranean, flying Fairey Flycatchers, Blackburn Darts and Ripons and Fairey IIIFs at first, and by 1939 Sea Gladiators of 802 Squadron with Swordfish for reconnaissance and anti-ship work. On 1 April 1931, in fog off Gibraltar, she rammed the French liner Florida amidships at 16 knots, crumpling sixty feet of her flying-off deck and killing one of her own seamen and twenty-four passengers and crew aboard Florida. Repairs at Malta ran to September.

She went through the Suez Canal in October 1939 to join Force J, hunting Admiral Graf Spee in the Indian Ocean without success, and returned to the Mediterranean in December. In April 1940 she was recalled to the Home Fleet to cover the landings in Norway, and became for two months a ferry as much as a carrier. Eighteen Gloster Gladiators of No. 263 Squadron RAF were flown aboard for delivery to Norwegian airfields, and she worked off central Norway with Ark Royal from 24 April, her own Sea Gladiators flying cover for both carriers.

She came back on 18 May with six Supermarine Walruses of 701 Squadron and eighteen Hawker Hurricanes of No. 46 Squadron RAF, craned aboard because they could not be flown on. The Walruses went to Harstad at once, but the airfield at Skånland was not ready and the Hurricanes were still aboard when she returned to Scapa. She sailed again on 26 May for Narvik and flew them off.

The evacuation, Operation Alphabet, began in the north on the night of 3–4 June, and Glorious arrived on the 2nd carrying only nine Sea Gladiators and six Swordfish for self-defence — the intention being to save the RAF fighters if it could be done. Ten Gladiators of 263 Squadron landed on during the afternoon of 7 June, and the Hurricanes of 46 Squadron came aboard in the early evening without serious trouble, despite landing far faster than the biplanes; their pilots had found that a 7 kg sandbag in the tail let them use full brakes on touchdown. It was the first time high-performance monoplanes without tailhooks had landed on a carrier.

Her captain, Guy D'Oyly-Hughes, a former submariner who had been executive officer of Courageous, was given permission to proceed independently to Scapa Flow in the early hours of 8 June. The reasons offered since have varied. One is a court-martial he meant to hold for his Commander (Air), J. B. Heath, who had refused an order to attack shore targets on the grounds that they were ill-defined and his aircraft unsuited to the task, and who had been left at Scapa to await trial. Another is that she was short of fuel. A third is that she had been picked for Operation Paul, the mining of Luleå.

What the British did not know was that the German Navy had launched Operation Juno: Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and four destroyers, ordered to attack the base at Harstad and support the advance on Narvik. Realising on 7 June that the British were evacuating Norway, the German commander chose to hunt the evacuation convoys instead. Hipper and the destroyers were detached to Trondheim to refuel, leaving the two battleships searching the Norwegian Sea. At 15:45 a lookout on Scharnhorst's highest platform saw a dust cloud and then a mast at 46 km, and the battleships gave chase; by 16:10 the escorting destroyers Acasta and Ardent had been detected as well.

Glorious neither altered course nor increased speed. No combat air patrol was flying, no aircraft stood ready on deck for a quick take-off, and there was no lookout in her crow's nest. Ardent was sent to investigate, and Scharnhorst opened on her at 16:27 at 16,000 yards, driving her off behind torpedoes and smoke. At 16:32 the fire shifted to Glorious, and six minutes later the third salvo hit at 26,000 yards — fifteen miles. The shell went through the forward flight deck and burst in the upper hangar, destroying two Swordfish being ranged and leaving a hole that made flying off impossible.

A second hit at 16:58 struck the homing beacon above the bridge and killed or wounded the captain and most of those stationed there. Ardent's smoke spoiled German visibility for twenty minutes, but a hit in the centre engine room at 17:20 cost Glorious her speed and set her circling slowly to port. The Germans closed to 16,000 yards and fired until 17:40; she sank at 18:10. Acasta broke out through her own smoke and put a torpedo into Scharnhorst abreast her after turret at 17:34, badly damaging her, before being riddled and sinking around 18:20. Ardent had gone down at 17:25, and the dead came to 1,207 from Glorious, 160 from Acasta and 152 from Ardent.

About 900 men were thought to have got off Glorious. With Scharnhorst hit, the German force withdrew without stopping for survivors, and the Royal Navy knew nothing until German radio announced the sinking. The Norwegian ship Borgund reached the scene late on 10 June; across all three ships forty men lived. The absence of a sighting report was raised in the Commons, and it emerged that the cruiser Devonshire had passed within 30 to 50 miles under orders to keep radio silence. The chief memorial to the three crews stands on Southsea Common at Portsmouth; a plaque in English and Norwegian was unveiled at Harstad, the destroyers' last port of call, in 2010.