HMS Bulwark (R08): Nine Years Building, Then a Carrier for Suez, Rescue and Commando Assault

A Very Long Build

HMS Bulwark was built by Harland and Wolff at Belfast, her keel laid on 10 May 1945, just days before the war in Europe ended, launched on 22 June 1948, but not commissioned until 4 November 1954, a build spanning nearly a decade as postwar defence priorities and budgets repeatedly slowed her construction, much as happened with several of her Centaur-class contemporaries.

A light fleet aircraft carrier displacing 22,000 tons standard and up to 27,000 tons at full load, HMS Bulwark carried a complement of 850 crew, capable of embarking 200 naval air squadron personnel or, in her later commando carrier configuration, up to 800 Royal Marines.

Six Hundred Sorties Over Suez

HMS Bulwark saw her first combat action in November 1956, during the Suez Crisis, launching approximately 600 sorties as part of Operation Musketeer, the Anglo-French intervention following Egypt's nationalisation of the Suez Canal, a substantial operational tempo for a carrier still relatively new to frontline service and a genuine baptism of fire for her air group.

Her embarked 804 and 810 Naval Air Squadrons flew Sea Hawk jets against airfields, troop concentrations, vehicles and oil facilities, often through heavy anti-aircraft fire, destroying some forty Egyptian aircraft on the ground. Lieutenant G. B. Hoddinott of 810 Squadron was credited with an attack on an Egyptian E-boat during the campaign.

Something else happened at Port Said that week which mattered a great deal more to Bulwark's own future than anything her Sea Hawks did. On 6 November 1956, after 40 and 42 Commando had gone in over the beaches in tracked landing vehicles, 45 Commando was flown ashore by helicopter: 650 men and 23 tons of equipment, carried in ten Westland Whirlwinds of 845 Naval Air Squadron flying from HMS Theseus and a mixed handful of Whirlwinds and Bristol Sycamores of the Joint Experimental Helicopter Unit flying from HMS Ocean. It was the first helicopter-borne assault landing in the history of warfare, and it was improvised, in the middle of an operation, using two elderly light fleet carriers that had been emptied of their aircraft to make room.

The Royal Navy took the lesson immediately. Within four years Bulwark had been stripped of her fixed-wing role and rebuilt as a commando carrier, the first ship converted for the purpose rather than improvised into it, and the squadron that came aboard her for the Gulf tanker rescue in 1958 and stayed with her through the Malta withdrawal in 1972 was 845, the same squadron that had flown 45 Commando into Port Said. Every British amphibious operation since, down to the Bulwark that carries the name now, descends from an afternoon of improvisation off Egypt.

A Daring Rescue in the Gulf

On 13 September 1958, while exercising with the frigate HMS Loch Killisport in the Gulf of Oman, HMS Bulwark, affectionately nicknamed "Rusty B" by her own ship's company, responded to a maritime disaster in the Persian Gulf, when the tankers Melika and Fernand Gilabe collided and caught fire.

Her Whirlwind helicopters from 845 Naval Air Squadron flew rescue missions to save those aboard, landing firefighting parties directly onto the burning tankers' decks, and HMS Bulwark, working with the frigate HMS Puma, towed the stricken Melika to safety at Muscat, a particularly impressive piece of seamanship and humanitarian effort.

In recognition of the squadron's role in the rescue, 845 Naval Air Squadron was awarded the Boyd Trophy, one of the Fleet Air Arm's most prestigious honours.

A New Role, and Confrontation With Indonesia

HMS Bulwark was converted to a commando carrier from November 1958 and recommissioned on 23 January 1960 at Portsmouth, with 42 Commando Royal Marines and 848 Naval Air Squadron, flying Whirlwind helicopters, embarked, transforming her from a conventional fixed-wing carrier into a dedicated amphibious assault platform built around helicopters rather than jets.

In 1961, she deployed to Kuwait as part of Operation Vantage, a rapid British military response to Iraqi threats against the newly independent state. That October, she recommissioned at Singapore, becoming the first Royal Navy warship commissioned outside the United Kingdom since the Second World War, and went on to serve as one of only two commando carriers committed throughout the Indonesian Confrontation, ferrying troops, helicopters and equipment between Singapore and Borneo and deploying her embarked Royal Marines commandos in the dense jungle and coastal terrain there.

She also took part in Exercise Common Assault 3 off Hong Kong and further commando landings in Malaysia, part of a decade spent almost permanently deployed East of Suez with the Far East Fleet, before returning home in 1966 to take part in the Kestrel and Harrier jump jet trials, helping to prove the aircraft that would go on to define British naval aviation for decades.

Those trials deserve rather more than a clause, because they are one of the more instructive wrong calls the Admiralty ever made. The aircraft was the Hawker Kestrel, the development machine between the P.1127 prototype and the Harrier proper, and it was being evaluated by an unusual outfit: the Tripartite Evaluation Squadron, formed at RAF West Raynham on 15 October 1964 with British, American and West German test pilots flying together. Nine Kestrels flew from West Raynham between April and September 1965, working off grass, roads and improvised strips to prove that a jet did not need a runway. In 1966 they came to Bulwark to find out whether it needed a proper carrier either.

It did not. The trials showed the aircraft could operate from a ship perfectly well, and turned up one specific fault worth fixing, which was that there was too much magnesium in the airframe for a life at sea and it would have to be replaced with something less enthusiastic about salt water. Both findings went straight into the production design. What the Royal Navy concluded, however, was that V/STOL had not yet developed to the point of offering any significant advantage over conventional carrier aircraft, and it did not pursue the thing.

The RAF took a different view and ordered six pre-production machines in late 1965; the first flew on 31 August 1966 and sixty production aircraft were ordered in early 1967 as the Harrier GR.1. It took the Navy another decade, the cancellation of its big carriers and the invention of the ski-jump to arrive back where those trials had left it, and when it did, the result was HMS Invincible (R05) and the Sea Harrier, and an air war over the Falklands fought entirely by aircraft descended from the ones that landed on Bulwark's deck in 1966 and were judged not to offer a significant advantage. There is a certain justice in the fact that Bulwark was hauled out of reserve in 1979 specifically because Invincible was late.

Headquarters for the Withdrawal from Malta

HMS Bulwark suffered a boiler room fire while anchored off Trieste in September 1971, and repairs were still being completed by her own ship's company when, in January 1972, she sailed for Malta to serve as headquarters ship for Operation Exit, the British military's emotionally fraught final withdrawal from the island. She remained at anchor in Valletta Harbour for eleven weeks, during which her own 845 Naval Air Squadron carried out more than 1,000 helicopter landings supporting the pull-out.

The departure proved short-lived. Barely three months after the final withdrawal, amid a diplomatic crisis between the British and Maltese governments, HMS Bulwark returned to Malta in July 1972 carrying 41 Commando Royal Marines, the first British troops to set foot back on the island, a striking coda to an already dramatic chapter in Anglo-Maltese relations.

The diplomatic crisis behind that has a shape worth knowing. Dom Mintoff had won the Maltese election in June 1971 and immediately demanded the dismantling of the British base; the negotiations that followed were bad-tempered enough that British forces began packing up, which is what Operation Exit was, and a deal was only struck in March 1972 after Bulwark had already run her eleven weeks of helicopter sorties out of Valletta. That is why 41 Commando went back three months later: not because anything had been resolved for good, but because the argument had been settled for seven years at a time. The full account of that quarrel, and of the base finally closing on 31 March 1979, is in the article on HMS Ashanti (F117), who was lying at Malta through the worst of it.

There is a gap in the story after that, and it is worth filling in. Bulwark was withdrawn from service in March 1976 and put into reserve, and by any reasonable reading that should have been the end of her. It was not, because HMS Invincible was running late and the Royal Navy suddenly found it had no anti-submarine carrier available. So Bulwark was refitted at Portsmouth through 1978 and recommissioned on 23 February 1979, at nearly thirty-four years from the laying of her keel, with Sea Kings of 820 Squadron aboard instead of Whirlwinds. In June that year she was at sea again on Exercise Whiskey Venture with 45 Commando embarked, which was the same commando she had helped invent the job for.

Fires, and a Final Stopgap

Further fires struck HMS Bulwark in March 1980 at Philadelphia, destroying one boiler, and again in November 1980, when a major fire damaged her forward hangar and some of her messdecks.

Rather than undertake full repairs, only minimal restoration work was carried out, sufficient to keep HMS Bulwark in service until HMS Invincible commissioned in the spring of 1981, a deliberate stopgap decision that reflected just how close to the end of her useful life HMS Bulwark had come.

Decommissioned, and Left to Deteriorate

HMS Bulwark was finally decommissioned on 27 March 1981 and placed into unmaintained reserve, with no further repairs attempted, and a subsequent survey found her condition had deteriorated too far to justify preservation.

She was scrapped at Cairnryan in April 1984, bringing to a close a career that had spanned Suez, a dramatic Gulf tanker rescue, the Indonesian Confrontation and the early trials of the Harrier jump jet, a notably full and varied service life for a ship that had taken almost a decade simply to be built.

It is also worth noticing what she was at the end. A ship laid down eight days before the war in Europe finished, taking nine years to build and then converted twice, was still being dragged out of reserve in 1979 because the fleet had nothing else that could do the job. The Royal Navy has always been rather good at getting the last useful year out of a ship, and rather less good at ordering the replacement in time.