HMS Eagle (1918): From Chilean Battleship to Malta's Lifeline

Born a Chilean Battleship

HMS Eagle began life as Almirante Cochrane, the second of two Almirante Latorre-class super-dreadnoughts ordered by Chile in 1911 and laid down at Armstrong's yard in Newcastle upon Tyne on 20 February 1913.

Construction was suspended during the First World War with the hull nearly complete as far as the forecastle, leaving Britain with a large, half-finished battleship hull and no obvious buyer once Chile's naval ambitions cooled.

The reason a Chilean battleship existed at all is one of the stranger episodes in naval history. In 1906 Brazil ordered a pair of dreadnoughts from British yards, which was an extraordinary thing for a South American republic to do and which promptly terrified its neighbours; Argentina answered by ordering the Rivadavia class from the United States, and Chile answered both of them in November 1911 by ordering Almirante Latorre and Almirante Cochrane from Armstrong Whitworth at Elswick. Three countries that were not at war with each other, and could not really afford it, spent roughly a decade buying the most expensive machines on earth in order to make a point. The race was still running when the First World War arrived and took the ships away from all of them. Eagle is what was left of Chile's half of it.

Cochrane was not the only Chilean super-dreadnought Britain got its hands on. Her sister ship, Almirante Latorre, had already been purchased outright in 1914 and served the whole First World War as HMS Canada, seeing action at Jutland, before being sold back to Chile in 1920. Cochrane, bought on broadly similar terms, was less fortunate in her original purpose but rather more fortunate in the long run, permanently converted rather than simply handed back.

The sister that got away had a career worth following. Almirante Latorre was bought outright by Britain while still building, commissioned as HMS Canada in September 1915, and fought at Jutland in the Grand Fleet's line of battle; Chile bought her back in 1920 under her original name and had her thoroughly modernised in British yards between 1929 and 1931. In September 1931 her crew mutinied over pay cuts, and most of the Chilean fleet joined them before the thing fell apart in mutual disagreement. She survived to be sold for scrap in Japan in 1959, and there the story acquires a genuinely improbable ending: because she was a British-built battleship of the right vintage, her fittings were used to help restore Mikasa, Admiral Togo's flagship at Tsushima, which had been stripped of much of its equipment during the postwar occupation. Parts of Eagle's sister are still standing in a dry berth at Yokosuka, holding up a Japanese national monument.

A Bold Conversion

Britain purchased the unfinished hull on 28 February 1918 for conversion into an aircraft carrier, with the Director of Naval Construction submitting design plans that same month for a full-length flight deck. Early designs called for two islands either side of the deck, but trials with HMS Furious led to the port island being dropped in April 1918, leaving the now-familiar single starboard island arrangement.

That decision has outlasted almost everything else about her. Every aircraft carrier since, of every navy, has the same basic arrangement Eagle settled on the Tyne in 1918: an unobstructed flight deck running the full length of the ship with the funnel, bridge and masts gathered into a single island on the starboard side. The usual explanation for the starboard side is the aeroplanes of the day. Rotary engines swung an aircraft one way rather than the other, so a pilot who had to go round again would drift to port, and it was better to have the one large solid object aboard on the opposite side to the direction he was going to drift. A choice made about Sopwith Camels in 1918 is why the island on a modern carrier is on the right-hand side.

The original battleship design had left her almost comically over-armed for a plane-carrying ship: three triple revolving 21-inch torpedo tube mounts on each side, nine torpedoes per broadside, all supported by a dedicated transmitting station below decks and two separate torpedo control towers, one forward and one perched right over the stern. Nearly all of it was quietly stripped from the plans once her real purpose was settled, a slightly absurd relic of a ship that spent her design phase unable to decide whether she was a battleship or something else entirely.

Launched on 8 June 1918, Eagle's conversion dragged on through industrial action and an abortive Chilean attempt to buy her back. She was in fact commissioned once already, in an unfinished state on the Tyne on 6 April 1920, specifically to trial the whole flight-deck concept in practice: that year she put a rotating cast of Sopwith Camels, a Parnall Panther, a Bristol Fighter and a Sopwith Cuckoo torpedo bomber through their paces, achieving her own first proper deck landing on 1 June 1920, before being paid off again that November for the complete rebuild that finally delivered the finished ship, recommissioned on 26 February 1924, by which point she was the largest aircraft carrier in the world.

It is worth appreciating how little was known when she started. In 1920 the Royal Navy did not have an agreed method for landing an aeroplane on a moving ship. There were no arrester wires as we would recognise them, no mirror landing aid, no angled deck and no batsman worth the name; there were pilots, a wooden deck and a certain amount of optimism. Eagle spent that year going to sea half-finished with a borrowed collection of aircraft to establish, by trial, what worked. Everything the fleet knew about carrier operations by 1939, and everything it did with that knowledge at Taranto and in the Mediterranean, rests on the experiments carried out on this ship's deck before she was even properly built.

Interwar Service and a Mid-Atlantic Rescue

Eagle served initially with the Mediterranean Fleet before moving to the China Station, undergoing several refits along the way. In a memorable episode in June 1929, she rescued the Spanish aviator Major Ramon Franco, who had spent roughly a week adrift in the Atlantic with his three crewmates after their flying boat, the Dornier Do J Wal Numancia, was forced down during an ambitious attempt to fly the Atlantic in both directions. Eagle found all four men alive, hoisted the seaplane aboard, and delivered everyone safely to Gibraltar, a welcome piece of good news in an otherwise routine peacetime career, and a small historical footnote of its own: Ramon Franco was the younger, considerably more rebellious brother of the man who would go on to rule Spain as a dictator for the next thirty-six years.

Two years later Eagle made an altogether different kind of South American voyage, loading the latest carrier aircraft at Portsmouth for a demonstration and sailing to Buenos Aires to deliver the Prince of Wales to open the British Empire Trade Exhibition in 1931, a neat piece of symmetry for a ship that had begun life as a South American battleship and now returned to the continent flying the Royal Standard instead.

War in the Mediterranean and Beyond

Eagle spent the opening months of the Second World War searching the Indian Ocean for German commerce raiders before transferring to the Mediterranean in May 1940, where she escorted convoys to Malta and Greece, struck at Italian shipping and took part in the Battle of Calabria. From March 1941 she hunted Axis shipping across the Indian Ocean and South Atlantic before returning home for a refit that October.

That South Atlantic hunt paid off directly. On 6 June 1941 a lone Swordfish of 824 Squadron, flying from Eagle, found and sank the German blockade-runner Elbe, her nineteen survivors later picked up by HMS Hilary. Days earlier, Eagle's own aircraft had also spotted and crippled the German tanker Lothringen, leaving her for the cruiser HMS Dunedin to finish off and capture on 15 June, a capture that turned out to be carrying a set of Enigma cipher machines of real value to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, one ship's reconnaissance quietly setting up another ship's prize.

Flying Spitfires Into Malta

Once her refit was complete in January 1942, Eagle became a vital lifeline for besieged Malta. The first of her ferry runs came on 7 March under Operation Spotter: fifteen Spitfires, fitted with long-range slipper tanks and their flaps wedged half-down with pieces of wood that pilots simply kicked away once airborne, flew off her deck escorted by the battleship HMS Malaya, the very first Spitfires to reach Malta and the first ever deployed anywhere outside Britain.

Eagle went on to run a succession of further ferry operations that spring and summer, Bowery, Style, Salient, Harpoon and Pinpoint among them, delivering desperately needed Spitfires to reinforce the island's air defences at the height of the Axis bombing campaign, unglamorous but absolutely essential work that helped keep Malta in the fight.

Lost During Operation Pedestal

By the time of Operation Pedestal that August, Eagle's own role had changed: with her ferrying days behind her for the moment, she sailed as part of the covering force alongside the fleet carriers Victorious and Indomitable, carrying a far smaller complement of Sea Hurricanes for her own defence rather than a deck full of Spitfires bound for Malta.

On 11 August 1942, while escorting the convoy, Eagle was struck by four torpedoes from the German submarine U-73, commanded by Helmut Rosenbaum. She sank within just four minutes, some seventy nautical miles south of Cape Salinas off Mallorca, a devastatingly swift loss that gave her crew little time to react. U-73's own terse radio report summed up the entire action in one line: "Vier Treffer aus 500 Meter Entfernung", four hits from five hundred metres; Rosenbaum was awarded the Knight's Cross the very next day.

The destroyers Laforey and Lookout, together with the tug Jaunty, rescued 929 of her ship's company, but 131 men were lost with her, most of them from the machinery spaces below.

Her sinking was a serious blow to Operation Pedestal at its outset, though the convoy's survivors would go on to fight through to Malta regardless, a testament to the determination of everyone involved in that gruelling operation.