HMS Colossus (15): The First Light Fleet Carrier, From Formosa to French Indochina

A Carrier in Two Years

By 1941 the Royal Navy had learned the hard way that a fleet without aircraft overhead could not survive, and it had far too few carriers. The big armoured fleet carriers took four or five years to build and tied up the heavy shipyards and the armour plate needed for everything else.

In 1942 the Admiralty ordered a new type, the light fleet carrier, designed with help from Vickers-Armstrongs to be built quickly by yards used to merchant ships, to merchant ship standards, with no armour, a single hangar and machinery taken from cruiser designs, but able to operate a full air group of modern aircraft. HMS Colossus gave her name to the first ten, the Colossus Class, and the full story of the design is told in the Colossus Class guide.

She was ordered under the War Emergency programme in February 1942 from Vickers-Armstrongs at their High Walker yard on the Tyne, laid down in June 1942, launched on 30 September 1943 and completed on 16 December 1944, two and a half years from start to finish.

She was the sixth ship of the name, which went back to a 74 gun ship of 1787; her immediate predecessor was a dreadnought battleship that had fought at Jutland. With a flight deck nearly 700 feet long she could operate around forty aircraft, and her crew, with the air group, numbered over a thousand.

Working Up

She worked up in home waters in the first months of 1945, and for her first commission embarked two squadrons: 1846 Squadron with the American-built Corsair fighter, whose pilots had trained at the US Naval Air Station at Brunswick in Maine, and 827 Squadron with the Barracuda torpedo bomber.

In May she was allocated to the 11th Aircraft Carrier Squadron, formed with her sisters Glory, Venerable and Vengeance to reinforce the British Pacific Fleet for the invasion of Japan. The photograph at the top of this page shows her at anchor off Greenock in her camouflage around this time, with men at the forward edge of her flight deck.

Too Late for the War

She sailed for the Far East by way of the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal in the summer of 1945, and reached Sydney just as the war was ending. On 15 August, the day Japan surrendered, she was attached to Task Force 111 as part of a task unit with the cruisers Bermuda and Argonaut and three destroyers, and she became the flagship of the 11th Aircraft Carrier Squadron.

Her sisters went to Hong Kong and Shanghai for the reoccupation of the two cities. Colossus was given a different task, one that would occupy her for the rest of the year.

Bringing Them Home

Across the Far East there were tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees, many of them starved and sick after three and a half years in Japanese camps, who had to be found, cared for and brought home. A light fleet carrier, with a vast empty hangar once her aircraft were landed, was ideal for the work.

Colossus sailed from Leyte in the Philippines on 3 September, and on the 6th reached Kirun, the port of Keelung in Formosa, now Taiwan, where the cruisers and destroyers of her task unit were evacuating the prisoners held on the island, many of them men captured at Singapore in 1942 and worked in the Kinkaseki copper mine.

From Formosa she went on to Jinsen, the Japanese name for Inchon in Korea, where she took aboard British and Australian prisoners of war, and in early October landed her passengers at Manila. Her hangar was fitted out with rows of cots, and she called at Hong Kong before going on to work as a troop transport between Colombo, Bombay and Singapore, carrying soldiers out to the East and bringing others home.

In December she went to Java, where the Dutch East Indies were sliding into the war of independence that followed the Japanese surrender. At Batavia and Semarang she took aboard released Dutch prisoners and internees, men, women and children, about nine hundred in all, accommodated in the hangar and in the empty mess decks of her air group, and landed them at Colombo on 18 December 1945.

Paying Off

In January 1946 she went to Simonstown in South Africa for a refit, then sailed home to Portsmouth, where she was destored and paid off into reserve in July 1946. She had served the Royal Navy for just nineteen months, and had never fired a shot in anger.

Arromanches

She was not idle for long. In August 1946 she was lent to the French Navy for five years and renamed Arromanches, after the Normandy town where the British Mulberry harbour had stood in 1944.

France needed a carrier for the war in Indochina, and between 1948 and 1954 Arromanches made several deployments to the Far East, flying American-built aircraft, Hellcats, Helldivers and Corsairs, against the Viet Minh.

During the siege of Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954 her Helldivers of Flottille 3F and Hellcats of Flottille 11F flew strike after strike in support of the trapped garrison, and lost five aircraft to anti-aircraft fire between the middle of March and the end of April. The garrison surrendered in May, and with it French rule in Indochina came to an end.

She was refitted in 1950 and 1951, and at the end of the loan France bought her outright.

In November 1956 she was back in action at Suez, alongside the British carriers. On 3 November her Corsairs, with those of the French carrier La Fayette, bombed the Egyptian airfields around Cairo.

In 1957 and 1958 she was rebuilt with an angled flight deck, and in the 1960s she served as a training carrier and then, after a further refit in 1966 to 1969, as a helicopter carrier. She paid off in 1974 and was broken up at Toulon in 1978, thirty five years after her launch on the Tyne.

The Light Fleet Carriers

Colossus and her sisters were one of the great successes of British wartime shipbuilding. Built as a stopgap, they served for decades in the navies of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, Argentina and Brazil.

Their stories are told on these pages, from Ocean, which took the first jet landing on any carrier, to Warrior, which tried out a rubber flight deck, Pioneer and Perseus, completed as maintenance ships, and Venerable, which served Argentina in the Falklands War.