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 in July 1940, one of the first major fleet actions between the Royal Navy and the Italian Regia Marina, and her aircraft were involved in strikes against Italian shipping and shore targets around Tobruk and Rhodes as British and Commonwealth forces fought to keep the central Mediterranean open.

Her aircrews also took part in preparatory operations connected to the famous raid on Taranto in November 1940, in which Fleet Air Arm biplanes crippled a significant portion of the Italian battle fleet at anchor, a demonstration of carrier striking power that reverberated well beyond the Mediterranean and was studied closely by naval planners elsewhere, including, notoriously, in Japan.

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, operations bearing names like Calendar, Picket, Style, Salient and Pinpoint (some run by HMS Eagle herself, others by fellow carriers she supported or that ran alongside her efforts), delivering 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.

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.

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.