HMS Eagle (94): The Chilean Battleship That Became Malta's Lifeline

Born as a Chilean Battleship

HMS Eagle began life under a name that had nothing to do with the Royal Navy at all. She was laid down at Armstrong Whitworth's Elswick yard on the Tyne in 1913 as Almirante Cochrane, one of a pair of dreadnought battleships ordered by the Chilean government as part of a South American naval arms race that, in hindsight, everyone involved might have spent their money on something else.

The outbreak of the First World War put paid to that plan. The Admiralty requisitioned the unfinished hull in 1918, much as it had done with other foreign warship contracts caught in British yards when the guns started firing, and rather than complete her as a battleship, decided she would make a more useful aircraft carrier.

The conversion was a substantial undertaking, carried out at Armstrong Whitworth and later at Portsmouth Dockyard, and it took years rather than months. HMS Eagle was launched in her new carrier form on 8 June 1918, but was not actually commissioned until 26 February 1924, by which point naval aviation had moved on considerably from the tentative experiments of the war years.

She emerged as a particularly important vessel in the history of naval aviation, one of the earliest purpose-adapted carriers with a full-length flight deck and an island superstructure, features that would become standard on virtually every aircraft carrier built afterwards.

At just over 22,000 tons and capable of around 24 knots, she was no speed demon, but she could carry a useful complement of around 20 to 30 aircraft depending on the era and aircraft types involved, and she gave the Royal Navy invaluable early experience in operating aeroplanes at sea.

Interwar Service on the China Station

HMS Eagle spent much of the interwar period on the China Station, a long way from home and a long way from the European tensions that would eventually consume her.

She served there through the 1920s and into the 1930s, helping to refine the still-developing doctrine of carrier aviation: how to launch and recover aircraft safely, how to coordinate a carrier with escorting cruisers and destroyers, and how much punishment a flight deck could realistically take in daily operations.

This was unglamorous, patient work, the sort that rarely makes headlines but which meant that by the time war broke out again in 1939, the Royal Navy at least had some officers and ratings who had actually done this before, rather than starting entirely from scratch.

War in the Mediterranean

When the Second World War began, HMS Eagle was posted to the Mediterranean, and by the time Italy entered the war in June 1940 she found herself in the thick of it.

She took part in the Battle of Calabria on 9 July 1940, one of the first major fleet actions between the Royal Navy and the Italian Regia Marina, launching nine Swordfish at 13:15 that afternoon against the Italian fleet's heavy cruisers; every torpedo missed and three of the attacking aircraft were damaged by anti-aircraft fire for their trouble. A second strike of nine more Swordfish went in at 16:10 against the cruisers Bolzano and Trento with no better luck, though her aircraft were involved in further strikes against Italian shipping and shore targets around Tobruk and Rhodes as British and Commonwealth forces fought to keep the central Mediterranean open.

Eagle very nearly played a starring role in the far more famous raid on Taranto that November. The original plan called for a joint strike by 36 Swordfish flying from both Eagle and HMS Illustrious on the night of 21 October, and her aircrews had already taken part in the joint night-flying work-up that preceded it. A string of near-misses over the preceding months had, however, left her aviation fuel system in a dangerous state, salt water contaminating the petrol and the distribution pipes themselves leaking badly enough to risk a catastrophic explosion, and she was withdrawn from the operation shortly before it launched. She still had a hand in it, transferring two of her own Sea Gladiator fighters to bolster Illustrious's strike force, a small consolation for a ship that had helped write the manual only to be forced to watch history's most famous carrier strike from the sidelines.

It is worth putting a number on what her absence cost that night. The plan had been thirty-six Swordfish from two carriers. What actually flew off Illustrious on 11 November 1940 was twenty-one, and those twenty-one put three Italian battleships out of action and changed the balance of the Mediterranean in a single evening. Nobody knows what another fifteen aircraft would have done, and it is entirely possible the answer is nothing at all. But the most influential air strike in the history of naval warfare, the one the Japanese studied before Pearl Harbor, was flown at a little over half strength because a twenty-two-year-old carrier had salt water in her petrol lines.

Throughout this period HMS Eagle was doing exactly what an aircraft carrier of her generation was meant to do: extending the reach of the fleet, harassing enemy shipping, and providing air cover in a theatre where land-based airfields were scarce and heavily contested.

It was demanding, dangerous work, carried out against a well-equipped opponent operating close to its own home bases, and HMS Eagle's aircrew and ship's company earned every bit of the reputation the old carrier built up during these years.

Malta's Lifeline: The Spitfire Runs

It was in 1942 that HMS Eagle took on the role for which she is perhaps best remembered: ferrying desperately needed Spitfire fighters to the besieged island of Malta.

Malta's position astride the central Mediterranean made it strategically vital and, consequently, a target for relentless Axis air attack, and its garrison of fighters needed constant reinforcement simply to survive, let alone contest control of the skies.

Spitfires could not fly the distance from Gibraltar unaided, so the solution was to load them aboard a carrier, sail to within flying range, and launch them off the deck for the final leg into Malta's battered airfields.

HMS Eagle carried out a remarkable string of these missions through the spring and summer of 1942. The first, Operation Spotter on 7 March, flew off fifteen Spitfires, the very first to reach Malta and the first deployed anywhere outside Britain. Operation Picket followed on 21 March with nine more, then a further nine on 29 March, a run that damaged her own steering gear badly enough to send her into dry dock and rule her out of the next major delivery, Operation Calendar in mid-April, flown entirely by the American carrier USS Wasp in her absence.

Eagle returned to the fray for Operation Bowery on 9 May, flying off her own seventeen Spitfires in two waves alongside Wasp's much larger contingent of forty-seven, then ran two further "Club Run" missions that June: Style on 3 June, thirty-one Spitfires led by three Malta veterans, intercepted by German fighters near Pantelleria on the way, and Salient on 8 and 9 June, thirty-two more, among them the aircraft carrying the Canadian ace George "Screwball" Beurling to the island, who would go on to become Malta's most celebrated fighter pilot. Between them, these runs delivered scores of much-needed Spitfires to reinforce Malta's fighter squadrons at the point when the island's survival properly hung in the balance.

Without this steady trickle of replacement aircraft, Malta's air defence would have been ground down entirely, and the island's ability to strike at Axis convoys resupplying Rommel's forces in North Africa would have been lost with it. It was unglamorous ferry work by the standards of a fleet action, but it may well have been the single most consequential contribution HMS Eagle made to the entire Mediterranean war.

The mechanics of a Club Run, as the crews called them, deserve spelling out, because they were odder than they sound. A Spitfire was a land aeroplane. It had no arrester hook, no folding wings and no naval strengthening whatever, which meant that once it left Eagle's deck it could not come back to her under any circumstances; there was Malta, or there was the sea. The aircraft were craned aboard at Gibraltar, parked on the flight deck and in the hangar with barely room to move between them, fitted with long-range tanks, and flown off in the small hours by RAF pilots who in most cases had never taken off from a ship before and would never do it again. They then flew several hundred miles over water on a single engine to an island being bombed, and landed on an airfield that might have been cratered since they left. On one count Eagle flew off 142 Spitfires in the course of these operations and 135 of them arrived, which given everything that had to go right is a remarkable figure.

The tempo tells its own story. Fifteen aircraft on 7 March under Spotter; nine more a fortnight later on 21 March under Picket; then thirty-one on 3 June for Style and thirty-two on 9 June for Salient. The numbers climb because Malta's losses climbed. Fighters delivered in March were dead or unserviceable by May, and the island consumed replacement aircraft at a rate that only a carrier shuttling back and forth from Gibraltar could possibly match. This is what Eagle was doing in the last six months of her life: not fighting, exactly, but keeping a besieged island resupplied with the one commodity it could not manufacture, in batches of fifteen and thirty, until she ran out of time.

Operation Pedestal and the End

By August 1942, Malta's situation had become desperate enough on the supply front, not just for aircraft but for fuel, ammunition and food, that the Admiralty committed to Operation Pedestal, a large and costly convoy operation intended to get a substantial quantity of merchant shipping through to the island regardless of the price.

HMS Eagle sailed as part of the powerful escort assembled to protect the convoy, her role this time not delivering aircraft but providing fighter cover against the Axis air and submarine forces certain to contest the passage.

She did not survive to see the operation through. On 11 August 1942, while operating in the western Mediterranean south of Majorca, HMS Eagle was struck by four torpedoes fired in rapid succession by the German submarine U-73, commanded by Helmut Rosenbaum.

The damage was catastrophic and the old carrier, her hull originally laid down as a battleship nearly three decades earlier, capsized and sank in a matter of minutes, one of the fastest carrier losses of the war.

Of her crew of around 1,160, 131 officers and men were killed in the sinking. The remaining survivors, some 929 men, were pulled from the water by escorting destroyers, a rescue effort carried out with considerable speed and skill given how little time the sinking allowed.

It was a heavy loss delivered with brutal efficiency, and a sobering reminder that for all the ingenuity that had gone into keeping Malta supplied with fighters, the submarines hunting the Mediterranean's supply routes remained a lethal and ever-present threat.

The submarine that did it did not outlive her by much. That patrol was U-73's eighth and last under Rosenbaum, who was moved ashore that autumn to command the 30th U-boat Flotilla, an outfit whose boats had been taken to the Black Sea overland in pieces, by river barge and road, and reassembled at Constanta. He was killed in an aircraft crash near there on 10 May 1944. U-73 herself was caught on the surface off the North African coast on 16 December 1943 by the American destroyers USS Woolsey and USS Trippe and sunk; thirty-four of her fifty men were pulled out of the water. Sixteen months separate the sinking of a British aircraft carrier from the destruction of the boat that sank her, which is about as long as anybody stayed lucky in that war.

Pedestal's cost did not stop with Eagle: nine of the convoy's fourteen merchant ships were eventually lost, along with two more cruisers and a destroyer besides her. But the operation still achieved what it set out to do. The tanker Ohio, torpedoed on 12 August and bombed again the following day, was lashed between the destroyers Penn and Ledbury and towed into Grand Harbour barely afloat, her 11,000 tons of desperately needed fuel intact enough to matter: within days, Malta's fighter squadrons could fly virtually unlimited sorties for the first time in months. Eagle never lived to see it, but the island she had spent half a year keeping supplied held on regardless.

The date matters in Malta in a way it does not elsewhere. Ohio was towed through the breakwater on 15 August 1942, the feast of Santa Marija, which is one of the great days of the Maltese year, and the whole operation has been known on the island as the Santa Marija Convoy ever since. There are people in Valletta who will tell you about it now, eighty-odd years on, in the present tense. Fourteen merchant ships sailed and five got in. Nine merchantmen, a carrier, two cruisers, a destroyer and a great many men, Eagle and her 131 among them, are what that one tanker cost.

Legacy

HMS Eagle's career spanned an unusually complete arc of early naval aviation history: laid down as a battleship before naval air power was taken fully seriously, converted into one of the pioneering full-deck carriers that helped define what an aircraft carrier should look like, and lost while performing exactly the kind of desperate, resourceful supply mission that carrier aviation made possible in the first place.

Her Spitfire deliveries to Malta in the summer of 1942 stand as one of the more quietly decisive contributions any Royal Navy ship made to the survival of a single besieged outpost, and her loss during Operation Pedestal was part of the very heavy price paid to keep that island in the fight.

Few ships managed to be quite so thoroughly present at both the birth of an entirely new form of naval warfare and one of its most desperate applications.