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.

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.

Launched on 8 June 1918, Eagle's conversion dragged on through industrial action and an abortive Chilean attempt to buy her back, and she did not finally commission until 26 February 1924, by which point she was the largest aircraft carrier in the world.

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 1929, she rescued the Spanish aviator Major Ramon Franco and his crew after they were found adrift in the Atlantic, a welcome piece of good news in an otherwise routine peacetime career.

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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.

Flying Spitfires Into Malta

Once her refit was complete in January 1942, Eagle became a vital lifeline for besieged Malta, running a succession of aircraft ferry operations, 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

On 11 August 1942, while escorting the vital Operation Pedestal convoy to Malta, 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.

The destroyers Laforey and Lookout, together with the tug Jaunty, rescued 929 of her ship's company, but 131 men were lost with her, a heavy toll that deserves to be remembered with the seriousness it warrants. 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.

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