HMS Argus (I49): The Converted Italian Liner That Invented the Modern Aircraft Carrier

From Italian Liner to British Innovation

HMS Argus began life not as a warship at all, but as the Italian ocean liner Conte Rosso, laid down in 1914 by William Beardmore and Company at their Dalmuir shipyard.

With the liner still incomplete, the Admiralty purchased the hull on 20 September 1916 and set about converting it into something notably new: an aircraft carrier with a full-length flush flight deck, unobstructed by the funnels and superstructure that had caused dangerous turbulence problems on earlier carrier conversions such as HMS Furious.

The turbulence problem on Furious was not an abstraction, and the way it was discovered is worth telling. On 2 August 1917 Squadron Commander Edwin Dunning flew a Sopwith Pup alongside Furious as she steamed into wind, sideslipped in over the flying-off deck forward of her superstructure, and was grabbed by hand by men on the deck as he came over it. It was the first landing ever made on a moving ship. Five days later he tried it again, waved the deck party off, was caught by the eddies coming round the funnel and superstructure, and went over the side. He drowned in the cockpit. Every design decision taken on Argus follows from that.

So Argus was given nothing on her deck at all. The boiler uptakes were led aft and the smoke discharged over the stern, the navigating position was a small pilot house on the centreline of the flight deck that could be lowered flush when aircraft were operating, and the working bridge was tucked underneath the deck itself. The result was the better part of five hundred and fifty feet of unobstructed deck with a pointed bow under it, which is why the fleet immediately christened her the Flat Iron. It is not a flattering name and she did not deserve it. She was the first ship in the world on which an aeroplane with wheels could take off and land as a matter of routine.

She was renamed Argus, after the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek mythology, launched on 2 December 1917, and finally commissioned on 16 September 1918, her construction slowed considerably by wartime labour shortages.

As completed she displaced some 14,000 tons standard, measured 565 feet long, and could make 20.5 knots from four Parsons steam turbines fed by twelve Scotch boilers, with a crew of around 495 and, unusually for a warship of her size, no armour and only a handful of anti-aircraft guns for defence.

That delay meant Argus arrived just two months before the Armistice, too late to see any active service in the war she had been built for.

What she had achieved, however, was to become the first aircraft carrier in the world with a full-length flight deck capable of both launching and recovering wheeled aircraft, a particularly foundational moment in naval aviation, with her first deck landings carried out on 24 September 1918, when two Sopwith 1½ Strutters flew out from the Grand Fleet's air station at Turnhouse and put down safely on her deck, the first of 36 successful landings she recorded before the year was out.

And then she settled the other half of the question, in the most gloriously improvised way imaginable. Nobody knew whether a carrier could carry an island superstructure on one side of the deck without ruining the airflow, and the only way to find out was to build one and see. In September 1918 a dummy island was erected on Argus out of canvas and timber, complete with a smoke box to imitate funnel gases, and aircraft were flown on and off past it. It worked. Every aircraft carrier built since, in any navy, has an island on the starboard side of a flight deck, and the reason is a canvas mock-up on a converted Italian liner in the last weeks of the First World War.

A winter refit completed in March 1919 fitted permanent arresting gear, using wires that lifted to engage hooks fitted to the aircraft's undercarriage, a basic principle still recognisable in carrier landings today.

The arresting gear took rather longer to get right, and Argus is where the arguing was done. The early system used fore-and-aft wires that engaged hooks on the aircraft's undercarriage, designed to stop a light aeroplane blowing sideways off the deck rather than to slow it down. It worked well enough for a Sopwith and progressively less well as aircraft got heavier and faster, and the Royal Navy eventually abandoned it altogether in the 1920s before coming back to transverse wires and a hook under the tail, which is what everybody uses now. Two decades of that experimenting was done on this one ship, much of it in home waters, at the cost of a good many wrecked aeroplanes and a certain number of pilots.

Two Decades of Trial and Error

The interwar years saw Argus used extensively for deck-landing trials and the development of arresting gear, essentially working out, through trial and error, many of the techniques that would become standard practice for naval aviation worldwide.

She suffered from stability problems owing to a low metacentric height, just 1.6 feet light and 3.8 feet at deep load, requiring a girdling modification in the mid-1920s that added 600 tons of ballast to widen her hull and improve her seaworthiness, and typically operated around 15 aircraft through that decade in a mix of fighter, spotter and reconnaissance roles.

She deployed briefly to the China Station between September 1927 and March 1928, before budgetary pressures saw her placed in reserve.

Plans to refit her as a tender for the radio-controlled Queen Bee target drone, a pilotless biplane used fleet-wide to give anti-aircraft gunners something realistic to shoot at, were approved in February 1936, and with war looming again she completed the work, was reclassified as a target aeroplane carrier, and recommissioned on 11 August 1938.

The Fleet's Delivery Van

Argus was recommissioned for war service on 7 October 1939 under Captain Henry Bovell and began the Second World War as a training carrier, running deck-landing practice and convoy escort duty until June 1940, but soon took on a role that would define the rest of her war: aircraft ferrying.

The ferrying work she spent the Second World War doing sounds like a demotion and was nothing of the kind. A fighter cannot fly from Britain to Malta, or to Murmansk, or to the Gold Coast. Either it goes in a crate, is unloaded at a port, assembled, tested and then flown on, which takes weeks and requires a port that is not under siege, or a carrier takes it most of the way and flies it off within range of its destination. In 1940 and 1941 there were almost no British carriers to spare for that, and there was no other way to keep Malta supplied with aircraft at all. An elderly, slow, unarmoured ship that could fly aeroplanes off her deck was therefore worth a great deal more than her fighting value suggested, and she was used until she was very nearly worn out.

Ageing and limited though she was, she proved invaluable for delivering desperately needed fighters to distant and hard-pressed theatres.

She carried Hurricanes and Skuas to Malta during Operation Hurry between 31 July and 4 August 1940, flying them off near Galita Island as part of a Force H operation, made repeated runs to Gibraltar with Spitfires and Swordfish, transported 24 Hurricanes all the way to Murmansk in Russia in late August and early September 1941, delivered aircraft to the West African staging post at Takoradi, and ferried Supermarine Walrus amphibians to Reykjavik.

In amongst all that ferrying came a close call of a different kind. Sailing in December 1940 as part of the 40,000-strong troop convoy WS 5A, with crated aircraft stowed alongside sister carrier HMS Furious, she was in company on Christmas Day that year when the German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper attacked.

The escorting cruiser HMS Berwick took the brunt of the fighting, exchanging fire with Hipper at close range and absorbing four hits before reinforcements arrived and drove the German raider off, sparing the convoy, and Argus with it, from what could have been a very one-sided encounter.

By 1942, with British aircraft carriers in properly short supply, even a ship as elderly and limited as Argus found herself pressed into front-line service, providing air cover for the Malta-bound convoy during Operation Harpoon in June that year.

During Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa, she carried 18 Supermarine Seafires of 880 Squadron in support of the Eastern Naval Task Force's landings at Algiers, and was hit by a bomb on 10 November 1942 that killed four of her crew, a sobering reminder that ferrying and covering duties carried real danger even for a ship long past her prime.

A Long Farewell

After repairs between February and May 1943, Argus was reclassified as an escort carrier and relegated once again to deck-landing training, the role she had pioneered a quarter of a century earlier, before being reduced to reserve in late 1943.

Her final aircraft operation came on 27 September 1944, when a Fairey Swordfish made the last ever take-off from her deck, and by December that year she had become an accommodation ship at Chatham.

She was approved for scrapping on 6 May 1946 and sold to Thos. W. Ward that December, arriving at Inverkeithing for breaking up shortly after.

Her ship's bell survives today in Bristol Cathedral, a memorial to her last chaplain, Canon Percival Gay, a quiet, dignified relic of a ship that had, in a properly unglamorous and roundabout way, invented the modern aircraft carrier.